Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

“Brisbane! We’re leaving!” She whistled to fetch him back. Hopefully he hadn’t wandered too far from the truck, as the porcupine never moved faster than a waddle.

  * * *

  It took her five minutes just to find the bloody neighborhood on her map. Fairywood was a postage stamp of nothingness even before the first Startup, which was why she didn’t recognize the name. She only found it because of the mention of Windgap and the Rocks, meaning McKees Rocks. Windgap had fared no better than Fairywood after Pittsburgh shifted to Elfhome; it had lost three of its bridges in and out of the neighborhood. Far as she knew, both neighborhoods were now uninhabited. There were businesses in McKees Rocks with people clustered around them.

  The bad news was it was in the wrong direction for her deliveries, but the good news was there were only a handful of streets officially part of Fairywood. It wouldn’t take her long to drive up and down them and see if any white doors popped out at her.

  Brisbane came waddling out of the brush. Elfhome porcupines were twice the size of Earth ones and a rich red color. Nothing short of Black Willows and saurus tangled with them, not even pony-sized wargs and steel spinner spiders. As a result, they had one speed. Trying to get them to go faster usually resulted in a couple hundred quills to the face. A porcupine for a pet was the test of true friendship: love me, love my porcupine (and not as a main course for dinner).

  “Come on, Brizzy, get your spiky butt into the truck!” She opened the passenger door so he could climb in. A carrot on the seat just out of his reach was incentive to do just that. “We have some kind of damsel to save.”

  She wheeled the last cooler of waewaeli up into the back of her pickup with the help of the winch, strapped it down, and covered it with reflective cloth to help keep it cool. By the time she finished, Brisbane had climbed up into the cab and was chomping down his carrot, squealing with glee. Porcupines were noisy as well as slow and stubborn. She closed the passenger door and climbed in the other side.

  There was a time, according to her grandfather, when all the roads and bridges in Pittsburgh had been well maintained. The roads into Fairywood were now a maze of missing bridges and broken pavement. Some of them were only passable because her Dodge had six wheels and massive ground clearance. She wasn’t even sure how anyone would get out this far, unless they took a wrong turn off the misnamed Interstates onto Route 60 and then got majorly lost.

  “I bet it’s a goat. Crazy Lady said ‘goat.’ Goats are white like snow. Or an indi, they kind of look like goats, only a hundred times cuter. They’re like cotton balls with horns.”

  They crossed into Fairywood and the roads got rougher. Because of the Chartiers Creek and the steep hillsides, there were only three streets that led into the heart of the neighborhood to do the little housing plans circling loop things. With the exception of someone’s little yap dogs barking up a storm in the distance, the neighborhood seemed utterly lifeless. The houses looked like they’d been abandoned years before the first Startup. Unlike most of the places in Pittsburgh, they’d been boarded shut instead of left open to the elements. Weather had blasted all the paint from surfaces, leaving graying wood. It nearly seemed like life had been bleached out of the world by time.

  Then on the most remote corner of the neighborhood, on a street that ended in a cul-de-sac—there was a house with a stark, freshly painted white door.

  Law pulled to a stop and stared at it. “I guess it isn’t a goat.”

  She had a variety of weapons in her pickup. She spent too much time out in the middle of nowhere not to go armed. She had everything from an easily annoyed porcupine to a Barrett .50 caliber rifle. The question was which was appropriate for the situation. Crazy Lady said that someone was willing to use deadly force, but Law only had the mystery woman’s assurances. She was going to look like the crazy one if she went in waving a gun and there was just some scared female inside.

  “Come on, Brisbane, we’ve got a house to check out.” She tugged on her Pirates baseball cap. “And maybe a game of ball to play.”

  She got out a turnip and her bat and off they went.

  * * *

  No one answered her polite knock. The door wasn’t locked. She swung it cautiously open.

  The house had never been finished before the first Startup. Rough-framed stairs led upward without any nod towards safety. The ceilings were just joists. The walls were unpainted drywall. With the windows boarded over, the building was a dark cave, the sunlight from the doorway the only light.

  Brisbane trundled in.

  “Brizzy!” Law whispered.

  The problem with a fearless pet was that he went where he wanted to go, which wasn’t always the same place she wanted to be. He didn’t come back when she called, which meant he probably could smell something he wanted to eat.

  Law hissed a curse. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the house. “Hello?” And then considering she was sent after someone with an elf sounding name, she added in, “Sekia?”

  She should have brought a flashlight. After a morning of sun reflecting off water, she felt blind in the cave-like dark. She took out her phone and shone it into the darkness. “Sekia?” And then in English. “Is anyone here?”

  Brisbane muttered from somewhere deep in the house. He’d found something to eat but couldn’t get to it. There would be no calling him back.

  Sighing, she crept forward, panning her phone’s light left to right. The house was one of these “open floor plans” that equated into three big rooms downstairs, connected together via large archways. There seemed to be some light shining in the back of the house. “Seriously, Law, why do you keep getting mixed up in shit like this? You don’t know even if there’s a girl…”

  A shadow crossing through the slant of light from the door made her spin around. She couldn’t tell what had cast the shadow. She couldn’t see anyone. She hadn’t heard any footsteps.

  “Hello?” She called louder in Elvish, “Snow? This place is not safe.” Her high school Elvish classes never covered situations like this. She used Elvish when selling to the enclaves at the Rim but usually the conversations were limited to food, time, money and the weather. Can you get me fish tomorrow? No, you cannot eat my porcupine.

  There was a whisper in the darkness to the right of the doorway. As Law stared into the darkness, her eyes slowly adjusted until she could see someone standing there. Somehow she hadn’t seen the person tucked into the shadows.

  “Hello? Nicadae!” Law tried for cheerful while tightening her hold on the baseball bat. “Sekia?”

  “Sekia.” A soft, confused female voice echoed and continued in Elvish, “Who are you?”

  “Law.” She patted her chest. She hated her full name but elves complained that her name was way too short. “Lawry Munroe. Who are you?”

  The figure moved forward into the light. The female was smaller than Law expected. Her baby-doll dress of white fairy silk managed to be very demure for how stunningly short it was. Black curls spilled down her back, nothing like the impossibly straight controlled hair that Law associated with elves. Bare feet. The female pressed a hand to her chest and spilled out High Elvish in a flood.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Law cried in English. “Naekanain.” The one Elvish phrase that was useful for all occasions: I don’t understand. Law was fairly fluent in Low Elvish; she had to be to trade with the elves. High Elvish, though, was a whole different language. “Are you Snow?” She pretended to shiver. “Snow? You?”

  That got a long, uncertain look.

  “Okay.” Law scratched at her back with the baseball bat. She reasoned out the logic of her problem in English. “Crazy Lady got: Fairywood, white door, female. Let’s say it’s a given that someone is coming to kill any female behind the white door, regardless if you’re actually Snow or not.”

  “Naekanain.” Snow said slowly, assuming this was actually Snow.

  Law simplified—“We have to go”—then realized she’d said it in English. She repeated it in Elvish and used the
“come here” hand wave that elves used.

  “We have to go,” the female echoed the English, but she turned and headed deeper into the house.

  Law threw up her hands in frustration and chased after the elf.

  Off the unfinished kitchen was an area that probably would have been the mudroom. A spell light illuminated the small rough area. Brisbane was rooting through a pile of travel sacks, grumbling at the fact that he couldn’t get to whatever attracted him.

  “Brizzy!” Law whistled and held out the turnip. “Come on. We have to go.”

  The elf gathered up her travel sacks. The look she gave the cave-like kitchen was clear enough: whatever the reason she was there, she didn’t like the place. She was perfectly willing to pack up and abandon it, even if the ride came with a porcupine.

  * * *

  The elf’s hair was blue-black.

  Out in the sun, it was really beautiful. Glossy, loose waves fell down to her hips, coal-black but with subtle dark blue highlights. Human women would either pay hundreds of dollars or sign a pact with a devil for such hair. Her skin was the flawless pale, pale white of elves, even her bare feet. She had long athletic legs. The fruffy baby-doll dress of white silk covered all the naughty bits—barely. Her eyes weren’t the vivid blue almost every elf Law ever met had, but a deep stormy gray, the color of thunderclouds.

  That said, she looked like she hadn’t slept for days, and her beautiful eyes were red as if from crying. But far from being despondent, she explored the Dodge with great interest. She pushed all the buttons, cranked the window up and down and up and down and turned the radio on and off. When she found the maps in Law’s glovebox, she gave a happy cry.

  Brisbane wanted into the elf’s travel sacks and wouldn’t leave them alone for the turnip. Once Law explained the porcupine’s stubbornness, Snow produced a saenori out of the packs. The peach-like fruit wouldn’t be ripe in Pittsburgh for another month. It meant Snow had probably recently come from the Easternlands, where Elvish settlements were farther south than those in the Westernlands.

  Law’s phone rang with Crazy Lady’s number again. Law accepted the call and said, “I found her. I think. I found a female elf. I’m not sure what her name…”

  Crazy Lady cut her off with “Did you get the door?”

  “The door?” Law echoed in confusion.

  “The white door,” Crazy Lady said. “Get it and take it with you.”

  “Really?” Law was running late and running out of patience.

  “People will die if you don’t get this right,” Crazy Lady stated calmly. “Probably starting with you.”

  “I’m getting the door.”

  * * *

  A quart of white exterior paint was just inside the door still with Wollerton’s price tag and an uncleaned paintbrush dried to a solid slab of white. Both looked brand new. The door, though, obviously had hung in place for years. Luckily she had a cordless screwdriver. Doctor Who would approve. After she stowed the door in the back of her pickup, she nabbed the paint can, too.

  She wanted to shortcut through Windgap and McKees Rock to get to downtown. It turned out harder than she expected it to be. After the third “fallen” tree, it was obvious that someone had recently used magic to block the streets. Anyone entering the area would be funneled straight to the house where Snow had been. But why?

  She was trying to decide whether to backtrack or go cross-country, when her phone rang again. This time it was her mom. Her monkeys. Her circus.

  Sighing, Law answered the call. “Hello, Mother.”

  “Twenty-four years I’ve been telling you to call me Flo.”

  “You’re my mother—or at least, that’s what my birth certificate claims.”

  “You’ve checked?”

  “Multiple times.” She kept hoping it was some kind of mistake. Since her mother had saddled her with a boy’s name, she’d gone as far as getting a copy of her birth certificate off of the city. The paperwork ruled out adoption but not switched at birth. The mirror, however, said that was impossible. The older she got, the more she looked like her paternal grandfather; a fact that made neither one of them happy since he had never approved of her mother. “What is it, mother? I’m busy.”

  “People with real jobs are busy. People that play around and call it work are not.”

  “Mother, we are not having this discussion again.”

  “We will continue having this conversation until you realize that you are wasting your life. But that’s not why I called.”

  “It’s not?” Law held out the phone to eye it with suspicion. Her mother rarely passed up the opportunity to beat the job thing into the ground in hopes of getting Law to agree just to shut her mother up.

  “You will never guess what just showed up at the Scheidemantles’ this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “The Scheidemantles. They live down the road, just across of Ginny Czernowski.”

  “I thought she got married.”

  “If I said Virginia Mary Elizabeth Frankenwald, you wouldn’t know who I was talking about.” And people said elves had long complicated names. “She married an accountant that she met in college. They moved into the Donaldsons’ old place. They had a little girl last week. They named her Mercy.”

  With every life accomplishment that her mother listed for her classmate, Law knew that what she really was ticking off were things that Law was lacking in her life. A college education on Earth. A job as a dental hygienist. An accountant husband. Home ownership. Children.

  Law had no interest in any of that; especially the whole dental hygienist thing. If you were going to school for something, why pick something that required you sticking your hands in other people’s mouths all day?

  “Mother, why are you calling me?”

  Her mother huffed. “A moving van showed up at the Scheidemantles’ this morning. They are moving back to Earth!”

  Law almost asked “Who are the Scheidemantles?” but then remembered that they lived down the street from her mother. Had lived. Apparently weren’t going to live there anymore. “And?”

  “They have that lovely Cape Cod. It’s a four bed…”

  “No.”

  “You can’t keep living in that drafty old barn.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “You’re going to freeze to death one of these winters.”

  Law knew from experience that her mother wouldn’t listen to any of the sane logical reasons why she picked the barn, starting with its being as far as possible from her mother as she could live in Pittsburgh. There was no way she would choose a house just down the street from her. “I have a Tarzan swing in my living room.”

  And her mother hung up on her.

  * * *

  “Let me get this straight.” Ellen McMicking was a customer and good friend. She shared many of Law’s views on how to live one’s life. She owned two gypsy caravans. One was home to her and her three-legged bobcat, Rigel. (Cool, unusual home: check. Odd pet: check.) The other was set up as a food truck. (Own boss: check.) Normally she parked at the Library light-rail station’s vast parking lot. The day before Shutdown, though, she’d moved them into an empty lot in the Strip District. “You stole an elf and a door?”

  “I did not steal her!” Law set up her scales while Ellen lined up her coolers. Said elf was in Ellen’s little house, eating a second round of breakfast as if she hadn’t had food for a week. The hot steel-cut oatmeal with warm berry compote was simply delicious, but Law couldn’t imagine having a second big bowl. (By now, though, Snow probably was getting the impression that all humans had very odd pets.) “You don’t steal people! You steal things like…”

  “Doors?”

  “Yes.” Law was unrepentant about stealing the door; the house obviously had been abandoned years ago. A quick coat of paint did not establish ownership in her book.

  “So you kidnapped her?”

  “No! She came with me willingly enough.” Still, the female seemed slightly leery, defle
cting direct questions with a continuous barrage of questions of her own. The thirty-minute ride into town had been one “What’s this?” after another. Still, she hadn’t asked for help or to be taken anyplace or to anyone.

  Ellen giggled, having entirely too much fun with the situation. “Only you, Lawry, would get yourself into this kind of mess.”

  “You didn’t find it so funny when it was you that I was bailing out of trouble.”

  Ellen pressed both hands to her chest. “And I’m eternally grateful to you. Oh, those look lovely.” She cooed at the waewaeli. “I’m going to honey-fry them.”

  “Fish and chips?”

  Ellen sighed. “No chips. My potato supplier from stateside let me down last Shutdown and even if he gets me some this one, I won’t have time to prep them. I’ve spent the last three days making bread. I’m going with sandwiches. I will have parmesan zucchini fries for the adventurous.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Yes, but you’re adventurous.”

  “Most Pittsburghers will eat anything that doesn’t try to eat them first.”

  “Yes, but it’s the truck drivers from Earth whose rigs are being unloaded that have the time and cash to blow. Please tell me that I can have this whole cooler.”

  “It’s yours.” Law was glad she caught the last fish.

  They weighed out the fish, transferring them to Ellen’s ice chests. Ellen was buying a dozen of the waewaeli that weighed in at two hundred and thirty-two pounds. At two dollars a pound, it came out to a little under five hundred dollars. A very good morning’s work once she expensed out the cost of gasoline. If she could do it every day of the year, she’d be rich. Ellen, however, could only afford to buy this much once a month for Shutdown. Any other day, she only bought one or two fish. Nor could Law hope for safe fishing in the winter when the streams ran deep enough for the man-eating bigger fish to navigate.

  “You don’t know who it was that called you?” Ellen asked.

  “I just have a number.”

  “You didn’t think to ask?”

  “I asked, she didn’t say.”

  Ellen plunged her hands into ice water and then wiped them clean. She took out her phone. “What’s the number?”