License to Ensorcell (36 page)

Sean cocked his head to one side and smiled at me. “You have the worst damn taste in men of anyone I know,” he said. “And I know some guys who are really weird that way.”

“I just bet you do. No, I don’t want the details.”

We shared a laugh.

“But look, about Michael.” Sean began trembling again. “He’s not dead, is he? I tried to see if I could find him, but I can’t.”

“He’s not dead, no. He’s in some other part of the multiverse. I’m working along that hypothesis, anyway. His talent just developed, and I think he’s what the Agency calls a world-walker. That means he can access deviant levels at places where the level meets ours. At a gate, that is, between the two.”

Sean tried to digest this pronouncement for a moment, then shrugged in the mental equivalent of a burp. “Whatever,” he said. “What do you need me to find?”

“A way he can get back here. I’m betting there’s one in this house. Do you remember the voices you used to hear?”

“The ghostwalk, yeah. And then in the other upstairs.”

“The other upstairs?”

“Where Nanny Houlihan’s rooms were. Nothing mystical.”

“Right. I remember now.”

The south end of the Houlihan house, two stories high, contains the kitchen, four bedrooms, and the master suite. The middle of the house, the living room section, is only a single story, but on the north side, there are two more stories’ worth of rooms, all of them mostly rectangular though not precisely so. At the very northern end, three square little rooms sit one on top of the other like a tower. At one time Jim’s mother lived in them.

“Let’s look at the ghostwalk first,” Sean said. “It used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid.”

We returned to the house and headed for the kitchen. When we turned into the hallway, I saw the blue meerkat-lizard thing. Just where the hall veered into its peculiar angle, the Chaos creature sat on its scaly little haunches and wagged its tail at me.

“What are you up to?” I said. “Spying for someone? Johnson’s dead, you know.”

At the name it squealed in terror. It jumped up, swung its head around, and ran toward the wall. Just before it rammed into the paneling, it vanished. I took that reaction as answering my question with a no.

“What did you see?” Sean said.

“Just a harmless critter.”

“Okay. You still see those, huh?”

“Just now and then.”

I squatted down and looked at the section of the wall that had been its apparent destination. To me it looked perfectly ordinary and perfectly solid. Sean knelt down beside me.

“That’s spooky,” he said.

“Yeah? Why?”

“I feel like I could put my hand through the wall right here.”

He reached out, but I caught his wrist and held him back.

“Let’s not take any chances,” I said. “For all I know, your hand could stay over there while the rest of you stayed here.”

He winced and flinched.

“How big is the spot?” I continued. “The spot that makes you feel you could go through it, I mean.”

“Not very.” With his hands he gestured out an area that was just about a foot on a side.

I muttered something unladylike and stood up. Michael was a skinny kid, but not that skinny. Sean followed my example.

“That’s depressing,” I said. “I was counting on a gate being here.”

“There’s still the other upstairs. I hated going in there when I was a kid. Nanny Houlihan used to dare me to spend a night there, but I never could.”

I had always remembered Nanny as a sadistic martinet of a woman. Apparently my memory was accurate.

“Well, it’s daytime now,” I said. “Let’s take a look.”

At the end of the north-running hallway stood a narrow staircase leading up into gloom. Some of the steps had a small pile of things on them—a stack of old books, some children’s clothes, an ancient Mixmaster—things, I guessed, that Aunt Eileen had placed there to wait till the next time she had reason to go up. Sean and I each took a pile and climbed to the top. I pushed open the door and saw what appeared to be a well-organized, dust-free antique store. I flipped on the light switch.

“Eileen even cleans in here,” Sean said. “Wow.”

We placed our little heaps of once and future junk down by the door, then walked in. Sean stood with one hand on a treadle sewing machine and went into Find mode. His eyes narrowed and appeared to be focusing on some far distant place or time. His mouth went slack. I got a tissue out of my jeans pocket in case he drooled. He does, on occasion.

“I see a lot of comic books,” he said eventually, “in plastic bags.” He paused. “Baseball cards.” He shook himself like a wet dog and came back to the moment. “I’ll bet she saved everything Jimmy ever collected.”

“So do I, but I’ll also bet they’re worth bucks by now. Next time Jimmy’s in town, you might tell him they’re here.”

We searched the top room but found no stash of valuable paper products. None lurked in the next room down, either. Finally, at the bottom, where saner people than us would have started looking, we found them. A row of archival cardboard cartons, stacked four high, lined one wall. In Eileen’s clear round hand they were labeled by content and year: comics, all right, and sports cards, football as well as baseball, plus Christmas cards, reusable Christmas wrap, and all the holiday decorations Eileen put out year after year, Easter, Fourth of July, and Halloween as well as Christmas.

We moved two stacks of cartons out into the middle of the room and contemplated the wall, papered in a delicate pattern of violets on a cream background, marred with a big oval stain about five feet off the floor. Ancient water damage, I assumed. The older Houlihans had had a very cavalier attitude to things like roof maintenance.

“This was Nanny’s sitting room.” Sean walked over to the window and pulled up the shade to let in a shaft of sunlight. “Toward the end Uncle Jim put a single bed in here, too, so she wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs.”

“She used to talk about hearing voices,” I said. “I thought she was nuts, frankly.”

“I heard them, too, but then, I
am
nuts.” Sean grinned at me. “So that might not count.”

We fell silent to listen. I heard nothing, but at one point Sean frowned and tilted his head to one side.

“I thought I heard someone calling a dog,” he said. “Did you?”

“No, not a thing.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged and spread his hands. “If there’s a gate in this house, it’s here. I’m not real sure, though, if there is or not. In the hallway I was sure, but not here.”

I found solace in bad language. Sean agreed.

We returned to the kitchen, where as usual everyone had gathered. At the counter by the sink, Aunt Eileen and Al were chopping various kinds of food on matching cutting boards. She’d changed into turquoise capris with a white sleeveless snap-front blouse on top and the pink fuzzy slippers on the bottom. Al looked his usual normal self in jeans and a Giants T-shirt.

“It’s good to have you back,” Al said to me. “I’ll have to hug you later, though. I’m chopping garlic.”

“Later will be fine,” I said. “It’s good to see you, too.”

Ari was sitting at the round maple table and drinking coffee out of a mug glazed with a view of Candlestick Park, one of the family mugs, not the porcelain ones with the flowers that my aunt saves for important company. I sat down next to him and snagged it for a sip. Sean took a chair across from us, but he turned Aunt Eileen down when she offered him coffee. He could get shaky on the natch.

Eileen took a plate of cookies from the top of the refrigerator, where she’d put them out of garlic and onion range, and placed them on the table. I picked up a wave of feeling from her. Her SPP confirmed a trace of fear but above all, apprehension.

“We’ll get Mike back,” I said. “Don’t worry. Have you had any significant dreams?”

“Just a rerun of that one about him trying to call and his phone not working,” Eileen said.

“Here’s the crux of the problem. Suppose that there is a gate somewhere in this house, and suppose he could get through it. We’ve got no way to tell him that.”

“The dreams told me he couldn’t reach us, not that we couldn’t reach him.” Aunt Eileen frowned at the floor. “That doesn’t sound helpful now that I say it aloud.”

The angel appeared beside her. “Think!” It waggled its wings at me. “Messengers can go where angels fear to tread.” It vanished.

“Actually, it’s very helpful.” I stood up. “These cookies are oatmeal-raisin, huh? Can I have one?”

“What? Of course!” She turned to Ari. “Any time that I can make her eat is a triumph. She won’t, usually.”

“I’ve noticed that,” he said. “I’ve been coaxing her, but she’s stubborn.”

Sean and Al both laughed. I reminded myself that I could kick Ari later and merely smiled. By her phone Aunt Eileen had a pad and pencil for messages. I took a piece of paper and wrote “Mike, go to the Houlihans’. Nola.”

When Eileen handed me a cookie, I started to leave the kitchen. She hurried after me.

“Nola,” she said, “you can eat in front of other people.”

“Huh?”

Aunt Eileen frowned. “You don’t have to hide when you eat something.”

“Oh. This isn’t really for me. There’s this creature—”

I would have said more, but her frown disappeared. “I suppose,” Aunt Eileen said, “you really do know what you’re doing. After all, the government trusts you.”

With a sigh she returned to the kitchen. As I continued down the hallway, I was thinking of Ari’s smartass crack about my having an eating disorder. I shoved the thought away. I had something more important to attend to.

At the ghostwalk angle I crouched down and made the chirruping noise that Kathleen uses to call her cats at feeding time. With an answering chirp the lizard-meerkat thing walked out of the wall. Its long scaly nose twitched as it sat up to beg. I wrapped the cookie in the note and handed both over. With a snap of yellow claws it grabbed the bundle, then nibbled them together. When it finished, it licked its lips with a long green tongue, then dropped to all fours.

“Michael,” I told it. “Find Michael. He looks like me.” I pointed to my face. “Michael, my brother. Find him.”

It trotted for the wall and vanished. I could only hope that the Agency’s FAQ sheet on Chaos creatures was accurate. I’d followed the stated procedure for transferring information via lizard mail. Whether my ugly little friend could find Michael was another question entirely. I stood up and realized that Ari was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at me.

“What happened to that biscuit?” he said. “I saw you place it in midair, and then it disappeared bit by bit.”

“I was feeding an invisible creature,” I said, “just like the ones you didn’t see that day you went to the office without me.”

“I suppose you were talking to it, too.”

“Yeah. You should be used to that by now.”

“I’m trying.”

He looked so woebegone that I walked over and reached up to kiss him, a very modest in-the-family-house kiss, and patted his arm. “You’re heroic,” I said and decided not to kick him later.

Back in the kitchen, Al was shredding grilled steak for the lasagna—no fatty hamburger meat for him—while Aunt Eileen had joined Sean at the table. When Ari and I sat down, she made her usual offer of getting out the photo albums. My first thought was to change the subject fast, but luckily the Collective Data Stream came to my aid. I had a second thought.

“Do you have any pictures of Nanny Houlihan?” I said. “Like in her sitting room?”

“I probably do,” Aunt Eileen said. “I wonder where they are? I haven’t thought about her in years.”

“How nice for you,” Sean said. “A blessing!”

We all laughed, except Ari, whom the Fates had spared from knowing her. While Eileen hunted for the pictures in her collection of albums, I explained about Nanny. She’d been a schoolteacher in her youth, and old habits die hard. She would suddenly turn to the nearest child and point while snarling out questions like “twice nine!” God help you if you got the wrong answer!

“She liked to rap small children on the head with one finger,” I finished up, “a finger wearing a steel thimble, that is.”

“The heavy china one with roses was worse,” Sean put in.

“Oh, now, honestly!” Aunt Eileen returned, carrying an old-fashioned leather photo album. “When people get old, they lose their patience easily. Well, not that she ever had a lot to lose.”

More laughter, and Aunt Eileen opened the album with a flourish. When she set it down in front of me, Ari turned a little in his chair to look. One photo, a faded black-and-white, showed Nanny in her sitting room, a thin, sour-faced woman with her hair done up in a messy bun on top of her head. She sat rigidly straight on an uncushioned chair, her hands folded tightly in her lap, and glared out at the camera. Behind her I could pick out the violets on the wallpaper, a fair bit darker than they currently were. A good-sized crucifix hung on the wall, the only other decoration, if you could call it that.

“That!” Sean pointed at the crucifix. “I remember that. The pope blessed it or something. She always said she wanted to be buried with it.”

“She wasn’t, though,” Aunt Eileen said. “When she passed away, I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it, not anywhere in the house.”

“You should have called Sean.” Al turned from his cooking and smiled at Sean.

“He was away at school, dear,” Eileen said, “or I would have.”

Sean returned the smile, then let it fade. He got up and stood looking out into space, his soft mouth slack.

“That’s it,” he said. “Come on, Nola. Aunt Eileen, can I borrow a good strong knife?”

“What are you going to do with it?” Eileen stood up and glanced at the counter.

“Make a cut on the wall of her old sitting room. I think the crucifix is in there. What do you bet she put it between the studs or something to scare the ghosts off?”