by Anthology
The eternal gates were unbarred and the prisoner freed!
Dawn had come to the world, the wind blew; tides rolled, flowed out, came in. At noon it was cold and grey and the roaring waters dressed the sea with sombre foliage. At eve the tides lapsed and withdrew from ridges of pebbles across floors of wrinkled sand. No eye had seen, no eye could see, that ancient filament blown against a half-buried anchor—for who has ever seen the soul? But the miracle had happened, it was there upon the earth again after centuries of voyaging beyond unknown offings and was lodged upon a rusty anchor. Still unaware, and ignorant of its fortune, it was shaken free and bumbled like a pappus across continent and sea until, faring one day over the flats of Huntingdon it came to rest indeed, to life again, sensation and awareness again, for it clung to a human body, warm and receptive.
There in an orchard again, a body hung from a tree again, a noose about its neck again. Some other piteous soul had just launched in the selfsame way upon the selfsame journey, and at that very moment the long-wandering one drifted into the vacant breast, there to cling with mad unity, aware at once of human being, of noise, sight, touch, smell, danger, joy, but noise most of all of men shouting and thrusting as they severed the rope and tumbled the half-choked body to the grass. They slapped the face, they chafed the hands and limbs.
“Hey, man, hey!” several voices were crying “What a to-do! Are ye living? Whatever made ye ‘tempt to hang yourself! Who are ye? Where from?”
The noise their tongues made was like the babble of evening birds. He was dazed, he could not understand them. It was not the world he had known. Strange beings surrounded him, uncouth admonishing faces peered against his, he was in terrible fear. When he opened his mouth and spoke they could not make head or tail of the mysterious sounds that issued from his lips; the gushes of meaningless intonation awed them and they drew themselves away to glance and nod wamingly together. Then one bolder than the others advanced, took him by the hand, shook him and sat him up:
“What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you speak proper?”
The poor alien, altogether without understanding, gazed one by one at the half-dozen countrymen jabbering around him.
“Mad, stark and staring!” they were exclaiming. “Just in time it were, but he’s mad right enough. As yet he is however. It’s true insanity.”
Such was their opinion, and when the authorities came and took him away to enquire into the matter it was their verdict also—that he was quite mad and unaccountable. He could neither ask nor answer, he could not use or understand their slow plain speech, could utter no sounds save the queer incomprehensible syllables that rippled from his lips, so to the madhouse he must go. He was a stranger, nobody owned him, nothing was known of his antecedents, and his senseless gibble-gabble was testimony of a mind collapsed in ruins, while his mad act—as it was taken to be—gave proof of dangerous qualities; to be capable of killing one’s self was surely to be capable of murder. To the madhouse he must go, there to stay until sense and civility returned to him.
Whether mad or not, he gave no trouble but settled down in the madhouse with the creatures of strange behaviour for good and all, submissive, humble and well-behaved. Long friendless years rolled by and gradually the circumstance of his coming was forgotten. In time he made some acquaintance with their language and could use it, but all remembrance was gone and he could tell nothing of himself, his history, friends, home, or his flight from the world. Despite his placability and meekness he was shunned by all except the one-eyed cobbler who, from having been a wayside preacher, was devout to mania, with large gaping holes in his intellect. Yet it was from this derelict that our lost soul gained some knowledge of the world and life and behaviour, in particular the doom and disaster that were to befall, the pit of wrath awaiting sinners, and that heavenly shield of the wise, the Saviour of mankind. With a slap of the hand upon his tattered bible the cobbler would growl:
“There be three in this book that shall not escape our vengeance. Not three only, believe you me! but three among many, and these three above all. Clearly you may perceive this. Listen! Firstly there is Eve, that tremendous trollop, source of our downfall, the original, the everlasting one! She has broken the world, but it can be mended and it will be mended. I will learn you about her.”
And he taught him the story of the Fall.
“Secondly: that high and haughty Salome, whore of Herod and slayer of John Baptist. I will learn you about her.”
And he told him the story of the dancer and the tetrarch and the wild prophet.
“Thirdly and lastily, I come to that cursed Judas, who betrayed the Son of Man with a villain’s kiss. And all for thirty shillings! He hung himself to death on a tree, he was so cursed.”
“What tree?” asked his friend.
“I heard it was an apple, but it might be walnut, or pear; it was in an orchard. All’s one in the hands of the Lord.”
“Do you mean God?”
“I mean Jesus, the holy and innocent Saviour,” the cobbler answered. “He betrayed him.”
“Who did?”
“That Judas fiend, Judas Iscariot, the curse of the world. But there is no escape for him.” The cobbler lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively about. “Do you know, he never died! No, it is not easy for him. He goes wandering forever, lost, lost, and rejected, but we shall smell him out, mark it you, we shall find him. Mark my words, O mark them!”
A ghost has no memory, only the ghost of a memory, yet the mind of the shunned wanderer began to swarm with fearful tremors.
“Was it me?” he quavered in anguish; “Was it me? Ah, dear Christ of Heaven, forgiveness! Holy and innocent Saviour, forgive me, aye, but this once—and no more. Amen.”
THE HOUSE THAT MADE THE SIXTEEN LOOPS OF TIME
Tamsyn Muir
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.
“Well?” Danny said. “Did worlds collide?”
“You already said that, you broken record,” she said. A third little stab. The room shifted again, and her fingers fretted at her eyes.
“Well?” he said. “Did worlds collide?”
The little flurries of sensation were making her palms prickle with sweat. Danny wasn’t reacting. He had barely moved an inch—hadn’t even moved—same expression, the same tonal quality, the same lift to the I in collide and slight Yorkshire slur to the s. When looked at, the room wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting: the wallpaper wasn’t turning into sugar and the armchairs weren’t growing feet.
“I’m admitting defeat,” she said.
“Well?” Danny said. “Did worlds collide?”
For long moments Rosamund just breathed. She pinched the bridge of her nose to make that nearly-a-headache sensation go away, suddenly horribly certain that she had turned her best friend into a space mannequin and that at forty-two she would never be able to get another half as good, but the man opposite reached out and took her hand to keep her steady. Rosamund was stupidly relieved at that. “Ease up,” he said. “What’s happened?”
Now they were both looking around. She was having no apparent effect. The rug was not bleeding, the air tasted of nothing but air, and they both had their fingerprints. Once when she was younger and pregnant she’d made soap bubbles every time she blinked, which had distracted her from being younger and pregnant and thinking listlessly about marrying the father. Danny got worried and jogged her elbow: “Earth to Rosamund Tilly. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“You’re not holding up any fingers, you egg.”
The room blurred again. Right before her Danny-on-the-sofa unzipped and re-zipped back to where he’d been sitting, so fast that it was like he hadn’t moved at all. Lamplight caught all the worn patches on his suit. His expression was vague and somehow familiar—
“Well?” Danny said. “Did worlds collide?”
Even then she didn’t get frightened, she told herself. Three cheers for Dr. Tilly.
Time for a test. She was a doctor, after all, and though she was a doctor of Medieval Literature she still retained a duty to Science. She launched herself off the sofa like a shell firing and went to the clock, took down the time, wrote it on the back of a grocery bill—8:14—and put it on the coffee table. Dr. Tilly stood beside it like a guard, scrunching up her hands in her daffodil-coloured skirt and feeling ridiculous as the clock marched on to 8:15. Nothing happened.
Danny was leaning over to read. “8:14?”
Oh, well, what the hell. Dr. Tilly tensed up before she said, “Testing?”
Another big blur, another jerk of dislocation as she found herself back on the sofa, totally discombobulated. Once more Danny wore t
hat pensive, waiting expression and she couldn’t even look at it as his mouth started to round out the words, as her grocery list sat next to the clock pristine and un-written-on. The clock read: 8:14.
“Well?” said Danny. “Did worlds collide?”
Time travel! The house had never mixed up time before. Dr. Tilly thought that she must have done something really rotten to have it drop something like this in her lap. She would have been excited if she hadn’t been so horrified: the house was probably destroying the space-time continuum right now and forming a thousand glittering paradoxes all because she hadn’t really cleaned the kitchen. Once she’d forgotten to weed the window boxes and the house had dissolved her feet right up to the ankle.
She knew three scientific things: 1. she was caught in a time loop, set off by 2. speaking, and 3. all of this was incredibly unscientific. So Dr. Tilly got her grocery bill again and scribbled on the back, worried that perhaps this too would send her careening back to the start:
CAUSED TIME LOOP, D
—but nothing happened. Whew.
Danny Number Six looked at her, then looked at the grocery list, then looked at her, and had the reaction that she’d guessed he had; he was completely delighted. He took his ballpoint pen out of his pocket and clicked it on and off, a sure sign of ecstasy in a stockbroker. “Are you sure?” She nodded again. “Good God. Why no verbal?”
Her writing was getting increasingly cramped. SPEAKING = SWITCH. SOUND???
“All right. Don’t worry, I’m a licensed professional,” he said, leaning forward and putting the laptop away. “A time loop means you’ve already gone back. How many iterations of the loop so far, Rose?” She raised her fingers. “Six? This is insane.”
