The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  “Take this thing and go. We’re through.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you. I don’t care if you think that or not about me. I came here to help you.”

  “Yeah, because you know things still aren’t looking good for you. You know what I think? I think you should just be a man and accept what’s in store for you. It’s your own fault for getting in with all of this, for finding out truths for things you didn’t need to—or shouldn’t—know. Ever hear of a spoiler? Well, you’re the king of the spoilers, and you spoiled your own ending. And you know what happens to people like that? They have to wait out the whole rest of the time between now and when the end comes knowing what’ll happen. Which, if you ask me, is exactly what you deserve.” If he wouldn’t take the rifle, neither would I. It fell back onto the floor, splashing both of us when it hit. “I die here, you give yourself up, and our versh can be saved—what’s left of it. Us doing what we’re doing now is selfish, but all of us are being selfish.”

  A beat of silence passed between us. I could hear my own pulse.

  Thadius shrugged. “What can I say? Can you really blame me for tryin’? I get burned alive, Cass.”

  “Shut up. Go.” I turned back around, put my hands out at the cistern. “Clearly if you haven’t developed a conscience by now, you’re not going to.” My sockets opened.

  “You’re really gonna do it?”

  “Yes, I am really going to do it.”

  “It won’t stop them. They’re all over the place, Cass. All kinds of vershes. Countless of them. This is just one zit on the giant’s ass. Lancing this one isn’t going to do a thing. They’ll just see it as one less territory they’ll have to keep an eye on. You’ll be doing them a favor.”

  “Then fuck it. Let another Cassetera figure it out. Maybe the next one will do a better job than me.”

  “The Siren House e-book isn’t here,” he said. “I looked all over for it online, and it hasn’t made it to this versh. Which means there’s plenty of other Casseteras in other vershes who still need it. You need to write it.”

  “Let another Cassetera write it. If it were up to me, I’d probably just fill every page with Whatever you do, if your name is Cassetera Robuck, do not trust a man named Clifford Thadius Cohen.”

  “Clifford turned out to be a rat, didn’t he?” I could tell he was wincing. “He screwed us over. Right?”

  “That he did. Trying to save his own ass.”

  “What’d they do? Is he part of the Smocks again?”

  I nodded ahead at the cistern. “He’s in there. What they plan on doing with him, I have no idea.” The catalog apparently thought I wanted to peruse people, so it showed me people, like frozen angels somberly floating with eyes closed, waiting for life to be breathed back into them. Countless others. All of them had names, lives; some of them were duplicates, versh twins plucked and grouped together here. The catalog could issue suggestions on reconstructing, since it seemed to gravitate toward the idea of using these people as fixins to duplicate a high-ranking Smock, not to bring them back as they once were. It suggested, soft as a whisper, that since two versh twins were genetically identical, mixing and matching parts would be easier on the processors and therefore a preferred method as far as the Regolatore doctrine was concerned. If a Smock had a versh twin in the cistern who wasn’t a Smock, it’d suggest using them as fixins.

  Clifford was a Smock. And Thadius and Clifford were genetically identical, save for the matter of a few advanced years on Thadius’s part. I could jazz just by thinking about what I wanted to construct. I’d made that monster rat back at the theater. I could give the Smocks Thadius; it just wouldn’t be the Thadius they knew.

  Was this what Cassetera had thought up? Was this what was really going on in The Siren House’s opening chapter?

  “This isn’t you,” Thadius was saying. “This isn’t the Cass I know. Giving up like this? Throwing in the towel? Bullshit. If you do this, then you’re not that same girl who walked into the Siren House that day unable to remember how the asparagus thing was supposed to go, who’d never—”

  “Shut up,” I said, turning around. “I know what we can do.”

  “Here,” someone at the doorway shouted. “They’re in here.”

  I leaped forward just as the Smocks stormed in, Suzanne at the lead. I grabbed the versh jumper and Thadius, who grabbed Mosaic Face.

  Suzanne stood at the arched opening to the cistern room, her underlings rushing forward, all of their hands flying up to take aim, dozens of sockets snapping open. She was back in her mask, refreshed, purged of everything she and I had shared just minutes before. We looked at each other for a moment, and I hoped that with just one look I could’ve make her hear, somewhere inside that masked head of hers, the lyrics to her and Dad’s song.

  I couldn’t read her face. Barely could tell it was her. But I knew it was. I could feel it. Don’t ask me how. I just could. As the Smocks loosed a barrage of harvesting blasts, I turned the knob on the jumper—pop—and the room disappeared, Suzanne vanished, and it was just open, sprawling nothingness. The dead landscape of a Smock-ruined versh.

  With no floor beneath us anymore either, Mosaic Face, Thadius, and I fell. But for a second there, it was like gravity forgot about us. We hovered there, clinging to each other for a fraction of a moment, orange whispers of the rainbow pop dissipating around us.

  The cold Minnesota River accepted us.

  Track 39

  BROKEN

  Mosaic Face refused to come with us. He said he was going to have elevated blood pressure for years now after what Thadius had subjected him to. Once we were out of the fortress—popping out and dropping into the river below, popping back and swimming to the banks—Mosaic Face hailed a cab, sputtering, “Have a great life, you psychos,” and was gone.

  We let him go. We knew he wouldn’t say anything, and we left it at that. Maybe we’d inspired something in him. Who knew? Maybe he’d go on to do something with versh jumping. Matthew Dellacroix.

  Remember that name. Maybe he’s somebody in your versh now; someone important. I hope so; he was too smart a guy to have wasted his time making viral videos.

  An alarm started up in downtown, and the sidewalks of Minneapolis cleared. The general murmur was that the Regolatore were on the hunt for someone.

  Thadius and I wasted no time in cramming ourselves into a TeleHop station. Back to Duluth.

  We gave the booth a specific address this time, and we were dropped a block up from Clifford’s place, what would’ve been the Spider Den one day. We got off the street at once, the alarm catching up to us there within minutes. We dodged a couple of hurriedly patrolling Smockmobiles, ducked into alleys, and managed to elude them.

  We went into the theater through the back. In this versh’s iteration of the alley, I’d pulled the canisters out from behind those bricks.

  “Go ahead,” Thadius said, holding the door open for me, looking up toward where the alley intersected with the street. “We need to get out of sight.”

  There was evidence of a struggle, blood smears on the walls, and plenty of harvested holes ripped out of the walls. The same walls Clifford had been putting so much work into, replacing the sections eaten away by mold. The scaffolding had toppled, and a bucket of white paint had busted open. A big milky splatter had dappled dozens of the reupholstered theater chairs, their new lush red fabric now spoiled.

  “He told them everything?” Thadius said.

  I nodded, crumpling into a seat in the front row. I was exhausted. “I think he was in their back pocket the entire time.”

  “The entire time?”

  “He was getting money from somewhere.” I pointed here and there at Clifford’s various half-completed projects. The auditorium had been partially restored to its original luxury in fits and starts. “He was a bartender before joining the Regolatore. I don’t think that kind of wage could’ve ever financed all this.”

  Thadius studied the curtains framing the movie scre
en. “Well, for a traitorous son of a bitch, he was doing some good work on this place. I’ll give him that.” He pointed out the molding around the balcony. “Never would’ve thought to plaster along there.”

  I looked over my shoulder. The doors separating the auditorium from the lobby were propped open with paint cans. The front doors, out at the box office, still had plastic up, but shadows could be glimpsed when people went by. No one was casually strolling; they were all rushing. The alarm droned, and the hushed rumble of the Smockmobiles passed more than once. “I think we should hop soon. They’ll probably think to check here.”

  Thadius sat next to me, slumped much like Clifford had earlier today, even crossing his legs at the ankle. “Run?” he said flatly.

  “Yeah. I mean, that’s all we can do, really.” I pulled the versh jumper from my hoodie’s pouch pocket. “Keep going back and forth until they lose us. We could try the other vershes too if you wanted.”

  Thadius nodded, took the jumper from me, and turned it in his hands. Three circuit boards, a mess of wires, some tape, and a knob. He snorted, shook his head. “Imagine if we were to hop right now into another versh and we were suddenly in the front row of this theater, except there was a movie playing and people all around us were eating popcorn and cuddling up, just trying to get away from it all for an hour and a half.

  “Imagine if we jumped vershes and there was another you and me in the same pickle we’re in now, trying to figure out what to do. Imagine if I were to take your hand right now and turn this knob to some random versh and we—”

  Pop.

  Ahead of us, between the front row and the screen, a rainbow popper flashed. I put out my hand, opened my socket, and was thinking up something metal and sharp when I saw who had just hopped in here with us. It wasn’t Suzanne and her droogs.

  It was Thadius.

  And Cassetera.

  The four of us stared at one another for a moment.

  “Uh, sorry to interrupt. Clearly this one’s occupied.” The other Cassetera reached over to her Thadius, wide eyes staring at me. She took hold of the knob of their versh jumper and twisted. Pop.

  “Well, that was weird.”

  “Good to know we’re not the only ones going through this, at least. Am I really that fat?”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I think I know what we have to do.”

  Pop.

  * * *

  We were still in the theater, except now, back in our versh, we stood in a space cluttered with debris, bricks strewn everywhere, and evidence that the Siren House was still very much a wreck. The sky was open above us, and the space we’d popped into was occupied with a dead, mostly decomposed Scary Thing and the radio derrick.

  Thadius sighed, seeing where we were.

  “We need a place to hide,” I said, “and access to the Internet.”

  In disguises of rags and whatever we could pull out of the various trash heaps around town, Thadius and I continued on. Every once in a while, during my and Thadius’s hiding out in Duluth, I’d check the catalog to make sure I was still connected to it. All the Smocks who’d seen me tap into it back in the fortress temple had gone through refreshes, so my remaining connection to it had, thus far, gone unnoticed.

  We kept to the alleys again. Our versh’s Duluth now had more Smocks on patrol, in and out of their vehicles, than I’d ever seen before. Thadius and I moved along like so many of the people who occupied the waterfront, huddled around trash fires, or looking to get picked up for day labor at the farms. Every chance I got, I checked the catalog, scared they’d somehow find I was still connected to the cistern and cut me off. Every spare second I had, I’d check to see if Clifford was still there, in his cistern limbo, accessible to me.

  We found an empty shack in the shantytown on the north end of the boardwalk. It was just three sheets of corrugated steel standing over an inflatable camping mattress, but it’d suffice for a place to lie low for a while. It was the middle of the day, and there was no way for us to get to the rig and not get spotted.

  More than once while waiting out the daylight, we saw Smockmobiles rumble past the fringes of the tent village, running a spotlight up and down the rows of shacks. Thadius would go out and get supplies or barter for food sometimes. Always in costume, with his face covered and his voice—the same that’d been broadcasted God-knew-how-far—drawling and slurry like a recovering stroke victim’s. I have to admit, after he perfected a slight hitch in his giddy-up, it was like watching another person. He truly was an escaped ghost of the theater.

  He came back with a set of crutches, said I should consider using them. My knee was getting worse, and whenever I was forced to walk, I would occasionally trip on nothing or the knee would give out if I put too much sudden pressure on it.

  He pulled his scarf down, wincing, and asked how I was coming along with that idea.

  “You mean . . . ?” I gestured at my legs and walked my fingers in the air. I was afraid to say it, honestly. The words walk and legs were anathema, even in my own head. I’d been dodging thoughts for days, batting them away like bees that were only curious, but I knew, for certain, would immediately sting if they ever managed to land.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. If it’s not any worse than it was before, then I suppose I’ll be okay with it. It’ll be me again, for better or worse.”

  “Won’t you miss being able to walk?”

  I shrugged. “Isn’t there a saying about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?”

  “Yeah, but that’s love. Being mobile is different.”

  I nodded at the crutches he’d found. “I’ll still be mobile.”

  He sat down next to me. Sighed.

  “This . . . This feels like you’re skirtin’ it, Cass. Like you’re tryin’ to protect yourself.”

  “You mean lie to myself.”

  “Okay, sure. What if I am sayin’ that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have a job to do. And I don’t need legs to do it. I don’t need to be mobile to write. Actually, it kind of helps not being able to walk so well. I have no excuse, then.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. I don’t know if that answer satisfied him or if he was abandoning trying to understand. “It’ll be okay.” Somehow, it seemed like he would’ve preferred it if I’d broken down, cried on his shoulder. “Been working on the boat,” he said, bluntly changing subjects while staring out the open door of our shack. “Decent shape. Doesn’t run still. Might soon . . . with some work. Couple more panels on her and leaving her out to change for a few more days might do it.”

  “Is it for just you or . . .?”

  He turned and smiled at me. “Both of us. After all this is said and done, gettin’ out of Duluth might be a good idea. Fresh start elsewhere. Rumor goes there’s hardly any Smock occupation in Canada. Take the trip up around Michigan, down and over. Maybe just go straight north and start walkin’.

  “When I said start walkin’, I didn’t mean to imply it’d be just me. Of course you can come, girlie. I want you to come. I . . . I just wish you’d let me in on this plan of yours. So I could know, you know, when I needed to have the boat ready to head out.”

  “Soon,” I said, gesturing at my table, the word processor still open. The Siren House, on the screen, the cursor forever blinking at the end of the sentence I was at when Thadius had returned. “Soon.”

  * * *

  I didn’t walk around for a lot of that time. When not assisting Thadius with cooking or bartering, I worked on the book. I tried to write as cleanly as I could in one draft. Really, I just had to get this story out there. I had to detail all the important parts, provide guidance where I could. I hope if you’re reading this now, you’ve managed to get some decent pointers out of it.

  Living on the lam hadn’t been good to Thadius. He looked haggard, his clothes were filthy, and his neatly manicured goatee had grown wild. I was smiling when he came in with his plastic shopping bag repur
posed as his catch bucket, his homemade fishing rod hooked onto his back. “Traded six carps for a carb. Carps for carbs,” he said in singsong. “Few more hoses and our fish will be able to swim.”

  He dropped his catch to the earthen floor. “What’s with the smirk?”

  “It’s done,” I said, holding the tablet out to him. On the screen was The Siren House, my version of it.

  “That’s great. I’m glad you finished, kiddo, but would you mind lettin’ me in on this plan of yours? I’m kind of sick of sleepin’ on the ground.” He knuckled his lower back.

  “Now we go out to the rig.”

  He grimaced. “The rig? Why there? I’m sure they make a stop out there daily to check for us. Hell, I know they do. I was just on the beach, saw a fishing boat going out that way, running their searchlight up and down it.”

  “Just trust me.” I tried getting to my feet. My knee hurt like hell. I sat back down.

  Thadius bent to help me. “I thought this was a permanent fix.”

  “It wasn’t.” I grunted as I struggled up. I got my crutches under my armpits, and even though they weren’t mine—the pair I’d had since I was a kid—they fit snugly to me, like an old pair of shoes. “But I guess after a while, something happens and my body will start to work out what isn’t me, what shouldn’t be there.”

  Here we were, back on this topic again. What a lovely couple of days we’d had, too, not talking about me slowly reverting to my old self. Even my nose had begun to painlessly reshape.

  “Christ, Cass. I’m sorry. Here you’re able to be . . . better, only to have it taken away from you.”

  “It’s fine. I’m me. I don’t want to be anyone else.”

  “But what about the things in your hands?”

  I let one crutch handle go, tugged off my glove. It’d been a few days since I’d used my sockets. The cleft where my palm opened used to be clearly defined, a perfectly straight black line running from between my two middle fingers to where my hand connected to my wrist, but the line was now faded. Snapping open the socket took conscious effort now, and when it did open, there was a slight ripping sound. It hurt, to open them. I turned my hand toward the lantern we’d found. Inside the socket, the interior prongs looked like a fence being absorbed into a tree, almost hidden by slowly reverting flesh.