“A what?” Hermit Titus asked.
“Nothing,” Lisen replied. “Just a phrase that apparently means nothing here.” Lisen felt hope disintegrating. She tried to convince herself that she was home and that that should be all that mattered.
“And it’s seventeen years out,” Titus explained. “Nearly eighteen actually. But you’ll understand in a moment. Eloise? Are you ready?”
Eloise the Sooth moved towards Lisen, a small cup in her hands.
“Wait a minute,” Lisen protested, standing up and moving down the cot away from her. “Who are you and what the hell are you going to do to me?” She was two distinct beings, and one of them still didn’t trust these people. The other? Well, that Lisen just sat back, content to watch and see what happened.
Hermit Titus reached up and touched Lisen to reassure her, but the Lisen of discontent felt anything but reassured—more like confused and stunned. “We are hermits,” Titus said, “members of a contemplative order. We live here, at Solsta Haven.”
“Oh, like monks. But you live here coed?” Lisen knew she’d made no sense, what with the mixture of this language she knew from the past and the English words lacking equivalents here.
“It will truly be much simpler,” Hermit Titus said, his tone growing impatient, “if you allow Eloise to finish stripping you of the enchantment.”
That was the thing, wasn’t it. Once “stripped of the enchantment,” what would Lisen remember of Woodland Hills, of Daisy and Simon Holt? Of Lisen Holt, for that matter?
“No,” she said. “Not until you tell me more. Why am I here? Was I here before I was there? Was this my home? Or is that?”
“So many questions,” Hermit Titus replied with a sigh. “If by ‘home’ you mean the place where you originated, this is your home.”
“And what will I remember after she’s done with me? I’m assuming I’ll remember my time here from before, but what about there? Will I still remember what happened there?” Lisen’s throat began to constrict, and she bit her lip to keep from crying.
“I hope so,” Eloise the Sooth replied. “But since I’ve never done this before, I can’t be sure what you’ll remember.”
“Forget it then. I’ll relearn what I knew before.”
“There’s no time for you to relearn,” Eloise said. “We’ve already waited too long to bring you back. The time has come for you to confront your destiny.”
“That sounds intense. And pathetically cliché,” Lisen replied, unable to squelch a shiver despite her skepticism. The contented Lisen was fading. “My destiny versus my memory of the last seven years of my life. I need time to think about that.”
Eloise turned from Lisen with a frustrated sigh. “You reason with her, Titus. Explain to her that there is no time for her to think about it.” She set her cup of potion down on the table and waited.
“Sit down, Lisen. Please,” Hermit Titus said.
Lisen, her entire body feeling odd, complied and settled back onto the cot. “Is Lisen my real name?” she asked.
“It is the name you went by here,” Titus replied.
“Then answer one question, and I’ll take her damn potion.” Lisen glanced at the table where the cup remained, awaiting her.
“What do you want to know?” the old man asked. Lisen liked him. She wasn’t quite so sure about that sooth person, but this one she liked.
“What’s happened to my body?”
Titus cleared his throat. “Uh….”
“Well?” Lisen urged.
“Eloise?” Titus said, deferring to the other hermit.
The sooth threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, Titus,” she said with a great sigh. “Go. Just go. I’ll explain it all.”
Hermit Titus bounded up from his chair. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.” And before Lisen could blink, he was gone from the room.
“He’s so shy,” Hermit Eloise commented as she stepped over to stand in front of Lisen. “Get up.” Lisen rose with slow apprehension. “Now take off your robe while I take off mine.”
Lisen hesitated, but as the hermit pulled her robe off over her head and then slipped out of her undergarment, Lisen did the same, save for the undergarment part since she wasn’t wearing one. The hermit then picked up the candle and held it between them. Lisen gasped at what she saw, frightened and fascinated all at once. It wasn’t the lack of breasts, the lack of nipples even, that surprised her—she already knew about that—but the woman either had the largest bellybutton Lisen had ever seen or it was something completely different. Lisen looked down at her own belly and saw what appeared to be an opening a few inches above where her bellybutton used to be. Her opening was larger than the hermit’s, perhaps two to three inches wide and one inch tall, and her abdomen below that was completely covered in soft, reddish hair, all the way down to her pubic region.
“From the way your guardians described it, the people of their world breed more like four-foots,” Eloise said.
“Four-foots?” Lisen asked.
“Animals that walk on four feet. The female carries the baby, and it stays with her until it’s ready for the world.”
“Okay. So what are we? Two-foots?” Lisen laughed, but Eloise’s response sobered her.
“Exactly.”
“Oh.” After a brief silence, Lisen asked, “So what exactly do we two-foots do? Because I’m starting to feel like a kangaroo, and the female does all the carrying there, too.”
“Kanga…?”
“Kangaroo. She carries her young in a pouch.”
“Precisely. Save for one thing.” And, after brusquely ordering Lisen to “get dressed,” Hermit Eloise pulled up her undergarment and then slipped her robe back on over her head.
Before redressing, Lisen paused to explore this pouch, poking her fingers around inside it, stroking its soft fur lining, finding that it stretched with just a little pressure so she could see inside. “So, what did you…oh, there they are!”
“There what are?” the hermit asked as she returned to the table and her concoction.
“My breasts. They’re tiny, just nipples really, and very close together.” She had found them just an inch or so below the pouch’s opening.
“Ah, you mean the teats.”
Lisen pulled her robe back on. “What were you about to say? ‘Save for one thing.’ What is that?”
“Save for this. Here, two-foot males have pouches, too, and they carry babies, nearly as often as females do.”
“Is there anything else I should know?” Lisen asked, wishing she could like this blunt, no-nonsense woman, but she didn’t think she ever would. And her doubts about this world doubled with each new revelation. People with pouches? Men getting pregnant? Dad would call them Homo marsupialis, Lisen thought, recalling what her father had taught her about the naming of species. “Anything else I should know before I take this potion?”
“It will restore the rest,” Hermit Eloise replied over her shoulder. “Then this will all start to make sense.”
“It better.”
“It will.”
Lisen looked up to see that Hermit Titus had reentered the room. He must have been listening right outside, waiting until the facts of life had been explained before returning.
“And my destiny?” Lisen asked.
“I can only restore what you knew when I took you over,” Eloise replied.
“So I didn’t know anything about my destiny then?”
“No,” the sooth replied. “You didn’t. Only that you had one.”
“Give me the potion.” And if it’s a dream, she thought to herself, I’ll be waking up soon enough.
“Sit down,” Titus said softly as he stepped to his chair, and Eloise brought the bowl of potion over. Lisen settled onto the cot.
“Titus, if you would sit beside her, hold her hand.”
Hermit Titus sat down and took Lisen’s left hand in one graceful movement, and the sooth took her place in front of Lisen and offered her the bowl. “It’s bitter, but m
ost truth is. Drink it all down as quickly as you can.”
Lisen smiled wanly and took the bowl from the sooth with her free right hand. She took a deep breath, wishing she could hold her nose but didn’t dare ask Hermit Titus to let go of her other hand. Then she put the bowl to her lips and began to suck the thick soupy stuff into her mouth. At first her throat fought it, gagging, but then it surrendered. She swallowed once, twice and finally a third time, only what stuck to the sides of the bowl left. She shook her head against the awful flavor assaulting her taste buds and returned the bowl to Eloise. “That had better be enough,” Lisen pronounced, and after inspecting the bowl, Eloise nodded.
“It is enough,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
STRANGERS ARRIVE
Lisen waited. Nothing. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but nothing wasn’t it. She waited and still nothing. “It’s not working,” she declared.
“It is,” the sooth replied. “It’s opening you up to receive your memories from Titus and myself.” Eloise reached out and took Lisen’s right hand with her left and Titus’ left hand with her right.
Lisen’s eyes closed, a thing she had not set in motion, and then a voice, a voice of genderless description, intruded on her mind.
“Your parents in that other world did love you, but your parents here loved you even more. To keep you safe, they brought you here to Solsta Haven, left you here with us.”
“More keeping safe?” she asks in her mind.
“Much keeping safe.”
“Why?”
“You’ll know soon. Not yet, but soon.”
It is as though Hermit Titus is passing folded clothes to Lisen and encouraging her to unfold them and know them. Lisen remembers running around the haven as a child. She recalls the vastness of the place, its oneness with the island mountain’s slope which explains the rocky wall she felt coming up the stairs. She sees adults in robes who love her, both Titus and Eloise prominent among them.
“Then what happened?” Lisen asks.
“The sooth had a revelation that showed you in danger even here.”
In a dark room, just like this one—maybe even this one—ten-year-out Lisen sits waiting for Eloise the Sooth to begin the enchantment. She’s been told very little, only that harm approaches Solsta, and it must not find her. Hermit Eloise has a plan, she’s told. It will be as though Lisen of Solsta is sleeping for a long time. Hermit Titus is there, too, looking sad, shaking his head slowly as Eloise speaks. It seems he disagrees with the plan but has surrendered to the sooth’s prescience. Then Eloise gives Lisen a potion, not as distasteful as the one that has restored her memories now, and all goes blank…
…until Lisen of Woodland Hills returns to consciousness in her bed, her mother sitting beside her, holding a cool cloth on Lisen’s head. Lisen is a little hazy on where she is, who she is, why she is. She’s told she took a hit to the head while playing soccer with her friends, and her mother tells her it may be a little while before her memory returns completely. It is June 29, 2001, and school is out for summer. Although she never regains much clarity, Lisen settles into life in the only world she believes she knows, a life still vibrant in the present’s present.
“No!” With that, Lisen surfaced with a gasp, pulling her hands away from the two hermits, appalled, and shot up off the cot. “Jesus Christ. What did you do to me? And why? I can’t believe I bought that ‘harm must not find you’ crap. You have to tell me the real reason. Now.”
“Not yet,” Eloise replied, and Lisen glared at her.
“And what about…back there?” Lisen demanded, pointing behind her, breathing hard, filled with the buzzing anger of a disturbed wasps’ nest. She felt tears shooting from her eyes. “My friends, my parents, my music, my cell phone, my car, my computer. The internet.” She paused, then continued in a rush of realization. “God, how do you people communicate?”
They braided her long hair in two plaits like their own, and then Hermit Eloise handed her a thin gold band. “It’s for your left middle finger.” Lisen looked down at her hands and realized that she hadn’t even thought until this very moment about the possibility of a different number or configuration of fingers. But, no, an opposable thumb and four fingers, just like the hand she’d left behind. She studied the ring for a moment.
“It’s too small,” she said.
“It won’t be,” the sooth replied.
Lisen liked Hermit Titus, but Eloise the Sooth—or Eloise the Elusive, as she had begun to think of her—was another matter. She slipped the ring over her middle finger. It changed size, adjusting to her finger.
“How did it do that?” she asked.
“It’s a hermit ring,” Eloise explained. “When your memories return, you will recall how much you looked forward to your novitiate.”
“I wanted to be a hermit? No way. I’ve had a whole life away from here. I was supposed to go to Europe this summer, see cathedrals and castles. Things happen. Goals change. Didn’t it occur to either of you that I might not want to come back?” Lisen had never considered the contemplative life. She’d worn the black of a Goth, not a nun. She had a tattoo on her back to prove it. She stared at the two hermits, but it seemed her ramblings had left them speechless.
“So, let me get this straight,” Lisen continued, filling the vacant air, wondering about the change of clothes and if Eloise had noticed the small black pentagram and its central red rose just above her tailbone. “You hid me in this entirely different dimension for a reason you won’t tell me, a reason that I will know eventually but not yet, and then you bring me back from a place where I had friends, an iPod, a life, and you tell me I’m going to be stuck in this stupid place forever? Oh, this is rich. This is really rich.”
“Rich?” Titus asked. “It is like having a lot of money?”
“Titus,” Eloise said, “leave her to me for now.” Titus nodded and left the room. “He’s a brilliant healer,” Eloise commented after he was gone, “but there are some things he will never understand.”
“He seems nice,” Lisen whispered. She was tired and wished she hadn’t been left alone with this woman of palpable power.
Eloise leaned in closer to Lisen. “He is,” she whispered back, then rose and offered Lisen a hand. “You need rest. Tomorrow I will show you the haven. That should awaken more memories.”
Lisen stood up with Eloise’s assistance, movement reminding her again of how different her body was now. “I’m never going to get used to this,” she said.
“You will. You grew accustomed to the other.”
“Because when I arrived there, my breasts hadn’t begun to develop yet, and when they did develop, they did so slowly. To suddenly be without them again….”
“Come,” Eloise said, and Lisen followed the hermit down the stairs cut from the rock face of the mountain.
“That was the visitors’ garret, wasn’t it,” Lisen realized, gazing back up the stairs.
“You remember.” Lisen nodded, and Eloise continued. “By morning, you’ll be back to normal.”
Whatever normal is, Lisen thought.
Later, lying on the cot in the cell where Eloise had brought her, Lisen explored “normal”—her body from head to toes. Aside from the lack of breasts and the presence of the pouch, her hips were narrower, and every muscle had thickened, if only a little. On Earth it would have taken months for her to build up muscle mass, but here it was hers and she wondered why. She even checked her pubic region and found that everything there seemed the same though she suspected her internal plumbing had changed somehow. Finally, tentatively, she slipped her hand deep into the pouch. It was like sucking her thumb; it felt so secure, so warm, so safe. And when her fingers brushed past the teats, a little thrill fluttered at her stomach.
She shook her head. This can’t be faked. She felt her tummy, the strange pouch, its actual opening. She wanted to go home, but along with a great many other things she no longer knew, she didn’t know where home was anymore.
“Mom!” she whined loudly enough to be heard downstairs. “Not fair. It’s Sunday!” She rolled over…and fell off the cot. “Ow.” She’d landed hard on the stone floor of her cell. My cell.
She sat up. A hint of light, from a torch far down the hall, illuminated the four walls of her small cell, and she pulled her knees up close. “Hard and cold,” she whispered miserably. She felt down her chest, just to be sure, and found no breasts beneath the nightshift and farther down the outline of something larger than a bellybutton.
She remembered that the day at Solsta began early, only one of a great many things emerging from her memory. Bewitched, enchanted, whatever, she tried to accept that this was…home.
But Woodland Hills is home. Daisy and Simon Holt raised me. “Oh, piss and vinegar.”
She began to cry. Had Eloise the Elusive really meant it when she’d said the route back was sealed? That she could never go back? There had to be a way back. And even though her parents would know, they’d be sad. And Betsy…Betsy didn’t know. Betsy—with her blond hair and blue eyes, her enthusiasm always pushing Lisen into adventures she never would have attempted on her own—Betsy would never know. They’d been BFFs. Not anymore.
Light opened up the darkness, and Lisen wiped her nose with the sleeve of her nightshift, then looked up to see Hermit Eloise standing in the doorless doorway, a lit candle in a holder in the hermit’s hand. “Good morning,” the hermit said. “Get dressed. I am going to reacquaint you with Solsta.” Leaving the candle behind on the desk in the room, the hermit stepped out to wait in the hall.
Lisen rose and surveyed the room. Along with the cot and the desk, a small wardrobe with a single drawer rested against one wall. The night before she’d found a simple, long-sleeved nightshift of some homespun material and an undergarment just like Hermit Eloise’s laid out on the cot for her. She’d managed to figure out that the undergarment could be pulled up just like a one-piece bathing suit, which it resembled except for the small slit right over her pouch. In the candle’s light, she pulled the robe she’d worn last night from the wardrobe. A low-maintenance life, she thought. No makeup, hair still neat in braids, slip-on sandals and who knows when I’ll get a shower.
Fractured (Lisen of Solsta Book 1) Page 2
