The Time Traveler's Almanac (161 page)

The citizens know no other life. Loob was born to it, and so was his mother, and his grandmother came to it before her adolescence. These are people who do not know want, but have never known prosperity. They do not know ambition or thrift; neither do they know toil or hunger. Their possessions are cheap and gaudy and soiled, their diet deficient in nourishment and abundant in sugar, their music a commercial debasement of the folk music of their fathers. They drink fiercely and are given to casual incest and sometimes slice each other with knives. Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows. These are the descendants of the stern mountaineers who were Henry Dappling’s people. Down the years each generation has been more misshapen than its predecessor. Loob is their ultimate fruit.

And so a circle is completed. Because Loob is what he is, he shattered the mind of Sam Dappling and so damned the town. Because the town was damned, Loob is what he is.

There is no point of entry into this circle: Loob created the events that created Loob. And since that cannot be, it is necessary to consider the possibility that these things did not happen at all. It may be that someday, as Loob sits in the window, his censor may not operate, he may see the scene through to its end; and now, with the loss of his toy no longer a fresh wound, and indeed probably no longer even a scar, he may let Sam come through the door and enter the room unchanged. If that should come about, then none of this happened; if Sam comes unscathed across the threshold, the past has once more been changed. Or left unchanged. The entry into the room of a sane Sam Dappling will mean that the horrors of that evening never occurred, that through the years ahead events will take place with Sam and Emily and Olivia alive, with Henry Dappling a fulfilled and happy man. It will mean that at the moment Loob fails to loose his bolt, he will never have existed.

One would perhaps then find in the bay of the window not a pale gross cretin crouched on a box, but an old lady in a Sheraton chair, who contemplates with eyes that are still merry and blue the long slope of lawn outside the window. The old piano is still in the room, its top covered with photographs, among them those of her great-grandchildren. Her great-grandfather’s portrait as a general hangs on the wall and under it his saber, unblooded since Bull Run. The woodwork of the room glows with the deep luster of fervent polishings, the metal is bright, the glass sparkles. It is an old room and a happy one, sunny and filled with good things well cared for, an appropriate setting for this patrician lady.

She is waiting for someone, perhaps her grandson, almost certainly her grandson. He will no doubt arrive in the Ferrari, sending up a spray of white gravel when he brakes in front of the house. A manservant will hurry down to get his luggage, but he is already halfway up the steps, a trim athletic young man in flannels and tweed jacket. He has been in the East for a month of polo, but now he is home again, home where he is heir to the town and the big house. The townspeople had smiled and waved as the Ferrari growled up steep Main Street past the busy mill and the gleaming row houses, around the square with its sleek shops and smug shopkeepers, and up to where Dappling Road curled around the hill to the monumental gates of the estate.

Grandmother has laid on champagne for the occasion, chilled in a monogrammed silver bucket. She raises her glass in a toast to the happy homecoming, and the happy homecomer responds. We make a pretty picture there in that elegant room, beaming at each other: she slim, erect, and proud, wearing her years with grace; I the golden youth, handsome, cultured, immensely rich, at play for a while before settling down to my responsibilities. This is who I am. I am not the man they call Tom Perkins, the crazy sweeper of a sleazy bar in a decayed simulacrum of my town. This –
this
is the real world, this world with the champagne and the Ferrari, not the shoddy horror where the Perkins creature lives, where I am standing now.

And the real world is so very close. If once, only once, Loob permits Sam to enter the room, Loob never existed, and the town’s history followed the main, the real thoroughfare, and I am safely where I belong, and none of this vile scenario ever took place. I think I will not be aware of the transition – indeed, there will not be a transition: all this simply will not have been, and there will nowhere be the faintest memory or even dream of this grim place. I will be sipping my champagne in my grandmother’s drawing room, and all will be as it always was.

That is what I believe as I stand here among the cold weeds watching Loob in the window, as I wait for the instant that I am real again. And that is going to happen. I have no doubt that it will happen, none at all. None at all. Because I have positive proof that Loob can undo his interference with the past.

The proof is this: they are here, the Goster County dogs. They are here, gravely patrolling the streets of the town and the country round about, alert, watchful, and intimidating, as much a part of the landscape as the ridge above the town.
And they have always been here.
That is the point, that is the proof. Never since about the time of the Mexican War has the town been without these dogs. Think about that. It is quite obvious that a day came when there was a repetition of the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the old ancestor dog, with Loob in the same location when that same segment of the past unreeled itself. This time, though, Loob’s vacant stare was directed elsewhere when the dog attacked. There was thus no instinctive reaction to the attacks; the dog lived on to beget his progeny. There is no fact in the universe more certain than the existence of these dogs. One of them is watching me now.

If Loob can do that, he can put right his other, greater, his infinitely tragic interference. And when he does, he and the wretched Tom Perkins will never have been. The world will be back on its true path, the path where there is love and comfort and safety.

It will.

THE HOUSE THAT MADE THE SIXTEEN LOOPS OF TIME

Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir is a New Zealand writer based in Auckland, where she divides her time between writing, her dogs, and teaching high school English. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop 2010, her work has previously appeared in
Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales,
and
Nightmare Magazine.
Her stories have also been selected for
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013
and
Best Horror of the Year.
This story first appeared in
Fantasy Magazine
in 2011.

14 Arden Lane suffered from bad plumbing and magical build-up. There Dr. Rosamund Tilly had raised two children, bred sixteen chinchillas and written her thesis, and because her name was on the deed had become the medium of all the house’s whims and wishes. She liked it, most of the time, but her best friend in all the world liked it less: “Your house is a spoiled brat,” said Danny Tsai, “and I feel inane saying that.”

The house was an old, old two-storey lump, very square and not graceful, made of red brick that had to peep through thick trellises of ivy creeper and a roof that liked shedding tiles. Dr. Tilly knew it was horribly untidy and ran risk of being burnt down by vigilantes from the Neighbourhood Association – only that it was at the end of the road, and hidden by a thick yew hedge. Even then the hedge was never even at the top, and it was her neighbours’ hobby to send letters seeing if they could get her to cut it down.

But Rosamund loved 14 Arden Lane; it had been willed to her by her grandmother, who died conveniently when she was twenty and had needed a house. She had admired it for its slippery wooden floors, its wide stairs and weird chimney, the poky bathrooms and the wheezing refrigerator in the kitchen. She had carefully and thoroughly checked for ants’ nests and termites, following guides. Satisfied, she recklessly painted the walls in unlikely colours like lipstick red, and moved all her coats into the closets that would shelter her coats and later the coats of her daughters. When the house turned out to be magical Rosamund Tilly just accepted this as fact.

Magic built up like a breath waiting to be exhaled. On a bad day, she could touch a coffee mug and have it erupt in delicate little spikes of ceramic, a fretwork of stalactites extending outward as she pulled her hand back. Tap water might avoid her fingers when she turned on the tap. And that was just the house when it was in a
good
mood, because when it was upset or in a fit of bad behaviour it could make her life a misery. A spoiled brat, like Daniel said.

Once Dr. Tilly had grown welts under her arms that burst and released dozens of tiny, transparent crabs, which made Danny nauseated and her daughters shriek. She had finally swept the crabs into a dustpan and let them go outside, where they crept into the bushes. Rosamund had been more disturbed than afraid, and good at choking down things that made her disturbed: her daughters Snowdrop and Sparrow were disturbed, afraid and disquieted, but in rebellion from being named Snowdrop and Sparrow they were creatures of logic who’d always despaired of the house and dreamt of air-conditioned flats. At that point she hadn’t really blamed them.

Daniel, though, had bore up well. He’d only once really lost his temper, when her kitchen parsley bit his fingers: “Why can’t you have a normal house instead of— this stupid, temperamental Disney
shack,
” he’d snapped. “And the water pressure is terrible.” For five weeks neither of his cellphones got reception there and Danny banged all the doors.

But with Daniel, any annoyance he demonstrated was usually awkwardness, and under the staid curtness of his day-to-day chartered stockbroker face he liked chinchillas as well as laptops. They were two people who understood each other completely: she understood his irritability, his privacy, his inability to be serious with her when he was serious all day with everyone else. He understood just about everything with her, including a lot of things she wished he didn’t. They were as devoted to each other as two people could be, and every lunchtime when he was at his office desk and she was marking university papers they would ring up to ask what the other was eating. Accepting her magical house was a small issue.

Anyway, anything 14 Arden Lane did never lasted; when the house felt it had made its point, it stopped. Usually. One of the chinchillas had been purple forever.

Now that she was forty-two Rosamund Tilly could tell when the build-ups were reaching explosion point. The ivy trellises around the house would be taut and trembling, the pretty crazy-paved path curling inward trying to claw the long grass verge. Even the dust would smell like firework smoke as she dragged a cloth haphazardly over her collections of glass cats. Years ago a build-up had made her accidentally wipe off her youngest daughter’s eyebrows, and Snowdrop had gone around with her fringe brushed down and full of bitter complaints. Her tweenage feelings had been further hurt by her mother finding it hilarious, but the point was underscored: Rosamund Tilly really couldn’t control what happened or when.

Thursday week the house made her hiccup a butterfly, and at that point she knew there was going to be a problem. 14 Arden Lane was of late empty and lonely now that it had lost the children and most of the chinchillas, and the house would sullenly take it out on her in sometimes vicious ways. Just a month ago great snakelike twists of wormy mud slithered out of the kitchen sink, coiling over her dishes and bending her forks, and that had made Dr. Tilly remember the crabs.

That night Danny came over from the office after a long day of chartered stockbrokering and surfed pictures of cats on his laptop as she fidgeted. “A watched pot never boils,” he said.

“Don’t give the house ideas with ‘boil’, you animal.”

“Remember how aggressive it got when you put down new carpet, with the chimney and the goats?” He was clicking through pictures of disapproving rabbits, sitting next to her on the sofa. “I’m waiting for the day when you form a new plane of existence and your evil self replaces you, and I’ll be able to tell her by the moustache.”

“You are so flip,” said Rosamund. “Why do you have to be so
flip.
”

“I’m just here to look after you, Rose,” he said, and that was pretty adorable so she put her feet into his lap and prodded his computer with her socks. Daniel Tsai had longsufferingly helped her raise two children, sixteen chinchillas and read her thesis, but he’d been obliged to: in primary school they had exchanged teal and fuschia friendship bracelets, a lifelong commitment if ever there was one. “Well? Go on and tell the house to hurry up, as the suspense is killing me.”

Rosamund Tilly folded herself into a lotus pose instead, which always gently bemused him and disgusted her two daughters. Being able to fold oneself into a lotus was a payoff from having done yoga when it wasn’t popular and being a hippie when it wasn’t fun any more, when she’d prided herself on having the widest bellbottoms in all Hartford and fifty-six recipes involving carob. When she had moved into 14 Arden Lane she’d had carrot-coloured hair so long she could sit on it and towered three inches over Danny, who wasn’t short, so she supposed the house had liked her out of pure shock.

Her ears popped, like they did on a descending airplane. “I think something’s coming,” she said.

Danny was looking at cats again. “So’s Christmas.”

Not a lot happened, at first. There was a little tingly smell like ozone, and a sense that she’d just breathed in a lungful of water and had to spit it out. Needle-sharp shivers started at her ankles and worked their way up. She closed her eyes very tightly, and when she opened them again there was Danny, waiting, eyes crinkling a little quizzically.

“Well?” he said. “Did worlds collide?”

“Not for me,” she said, and the sensation flared briefly again: more like the shadow of a feeling than the first sharp injection of it. Her vision blurred a little, but she wasn’t sure as they hadn’t turned on all the lights in the sitting-room. The house liked it when they thought conscientiously about the environment. Dr. Tilly worried that something dreadful was about to happen.