The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘Not Cloud-haired mama,’ she said with conviction. ‘Not Papa. Then who?’ Some friend from college? Making some kind of obscure joke? Someone from the office here? Making some equally obscure joke? ‘Stay there until I find out,’ she directed the thing as she pulled on her jacket. Her bracelet caught on the lining and she cursed, briefly, telling herself it was silly to wear Makr Avehl’s gift all the time, even though he had begged her to do so.

  ‘It really is silly to wear that all the time,’ a voice said in an insinuating whisper. ‘You don’t need it. You’re not in any danger.’

  The large clock in the lower hall began to bang away the quarter hour. Marianne stopped her effort to unlatch the bracelet and ran for the door. If she didn’t leave that moment, she’d be late for work. Behind her on the mantel the carving brooded, its face toward the wall.

  While fixing her breakfast the next morning, she stumbled over a featureless chunk of wood on the kitchen floor, fist sized, obviously gnawed by something with sharp, determined teeth. It was dark, almost grainless wood. She was only then reminded of the strange carving and looked for it on the mantel. It wasn’t there. She had not seen it there the night before. While she was at work, someone or—or something had moved it. She stood in her kitchen with the lump of gnawed wood in her hand and shivered, very slightly, as though she had felt an icy wind. Again there was that shift inside herself, as though something sleeping had been awakened.

  On her way out she asked, ‘Pat, you and Robin don’t have a dog, do you?’

  ‘Robin’s allergic. I used to have a cat. Why? You have mice or something?’

  ‘No. I just … thought I heard a dog, that’s all.’

  The day at work did not go well. The computer files on artificial insemination and experimental breeding programs, which she had spent the past three weeks building, were now fatally corrupted, and she screamed silently at the thought of rebuilding them. Everyone who called seemed to need information from the corrupted files.

  ‘How did this happen?’ she demanded from the world at large.

  ‘Software,’ the hardware consultant opined.

  ‘Hardware,’ the software support person snarled.

  Neither of them was helpful. In her mind a demon face watched her from tiny eyes, and she found herself remembering the carving that had been on her mantel.

  She had driven to work that morning in order to use the car for shopping after work. When she went to the parking lot, she had a flat tire.

  On the way home, late and weary, a scant twenty blocks, she narrowly escaped an accident when two cars in front of her collided.

  In her apartment, the chewed chunk of wood had found its way back to her mantel. She laid wood in the fireplace and set it ablaze, waiting until a crackling fire was going before tossing the featureless chunk of wood on top. It hissed agonizingly, finally exploding in a shower of glowing coals. The firescreen caught them, harmlessly. There was an odor of sulphur. She shivered, something she could not quite remember teasing at the edges of her mind.

  In the morning, she went to her office in a fatalistic mood, prepared to spend all of the next few weeks restoring the ruined files. She was greeted with smiles from the software support woman. ‘Good news. You’ve got your files back. I got into the system last night and got around the glitch, whatever it was.’

  The morning went by in a flurry of productive, interesting work. Just after lunch, the phone rang and Pat Apple said, ‘A package came for you, Marianne. I signed for it and put it up in your apartment. Hope that’s OK?’

  She assured Pat it was okay, then turned to the restored files. They had disappeared again. Only gibberish came up on her screen.

  She sat very still for five minutes, then left the office and walked home. She did not really believe there was any connection, and yet – the two events had followed very closely. A hex, perhaps? If there were any such thing. She laughed at herself unconvincingly.

  In her living room she found the remnants of a cardboard box, scraps of grayish tissue paper, a faintly musty smell. On the carpet lay fragments of grainless wood, obviously chewed.

  She built a fire and put all the remnants on the flames. When they started to burn, she heard her own voice saying, ‘All right. Which one of you is it?’

  From behind the curtains came the Dingo Dog, yellow eyes gleaming at her. She sat, head turned a little, regarding Marianne out of the corner of her eyes. Marianne caught her breath, a deep, choking gasp, as though she could not get enough air in her lungs to speak. She had thought all the old hallucinations and visions were behind her. She was grown-up now. Real was what real was. She wanted no more of this fantasy, and yet here were her childhood visions, come to life again. Her voice asked, ‘Did you chew it up because it was dangerous? Is that why?’ It was her voice, and yet she had not asked the question.

  The Dingo whined. She remembered then that the Dingo had never spoken, not like the others.

  ‘Are the rest of you around, too?’

  ‘From time to time,’ said a breathy voice in a peculiar accent. ‘From time to time.’ The Red Foo Dog came from the bathroom, jauntily. Just behind it the Dragon Dog came slithering, crawling on its belly, as though begging to be petted. Her bedroom door creaked open. She could see the Wolf Bitch lying on her bed, her huge head pillowed on her crossed paws. Beside her lay the Black Dog, asleep, eyes shut and red mouth agape.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bad thing, that was,’ the Dragon Dog said. ‘That thing you got in the boxes. Very bad creature, that one, as us creatures go. Had to chew it up, get it to go away.’

  ‘You have to burn them,’ the foreign, not-herself voice said, ‘or you’ll not get rid of them.’ In the fireplace the thing she had tried to burn had turned into something quite horrible that screamed as it incinerated. So, she was dreaming. There was no need for rejection of what was going on around her. She would merely play along, waiting until she woke up.

  ‘Fire isn’t one of our things,’ the Foo Dog said. ‘We have others, but not fire.’

  ‘Someone’s after you,’ the Wolf said from the bedroom. ‘Someone very nasty.’

  ‘Have you been here all along?’ she asked, ignoring what the Wolf had said. She didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘Off and on,’ said the Black Dog. ‘When we had time.’

  ‘I thought maybe … maybe’d you’d gone back to—to wherever Marianne got you from.’

  ‘She got us from our own loci,’ the Foo Dog said. ‘Every locus in the universe has one of us attendant to it. We give material space its reality by giving time its duration. Each moment is dependent upon us. Hence, momentary gods.’

  ‘But if you’re not in your proper – locus, then what happens to the universe?’ she asked, trying to keep her mind off the mess in the fireplace that had stopped screaming and started hissing as it boiled away to nothing.

  ‘We’re there,’ said the Foo Dog. ‘And here. Being in two places at once is very common for a momentary god. We’re basically a wave form with particular aspects.’

  ‘Someone asked me if I had dismissed you,’ she said, trying to remember who.

  ‘We were very gratified when you did not,’ the Wolf Bitch said, licking her nose. ‘Being away from one’s nexus is stimulating.’

  In the fireplace, the thing subsided with a final whimper into a pile of ash. Marianne looked at it. She was not sure what it had been. She did not want to see it again.

  ‘What do you think that was?’ she asked, pointing.

  ‘It could have been one of us,’ the Foo Dog said, turning to the Dragon Dog. ‘Do you think it was one of us momegs? I thought for a moment it looked rather familiar. When it started to yell.’

  Dragon Dog nodded, ‘One of us. Whoever summoned it had built a dismissal in, however. When you burned it, Marianne, you dismissed it. It went back, wherever it belonged.’

  ‘But it wasn’t shaped like a dog. I thought maybe all momentary gods…’

  The Black Dog rolled ove
r and laughed at her out of blood-red eyes. ‘Momegs for short, Marianne. Why should it have resembled a dog? Among the infinite loci in the universe you will find an infinity of gods, momegs, one of every conceivable shape and kind and power, no two alike, though many may be similar. We five are merely similar. We are not alike. That we are dog-like is not coincidental. Marianne picked us for that reason. She needed doglike creatures for what you – she – meant to do.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, but pass that for the moment. How did I – she – know where you were?’

  ‘If you don’t know that, how do you expect us to know? Somehow you knew. She knew. You summoned us.’

  ‘But I – she – didn’t dismiss you?’

  ‘For which we are grateful. Our gratitude explains why we have taken the trouble to remain close at hand, to provide such guardianship as possible.’

  ‘I didn’t do it because I didn’t know how,’ she confessed, thinking even as she did so that it might be dangerous to be that honest about her own ignorance. ‘I wish you’d realize it wasn’t me. It really wasn’t!’

  ‘What was she is now you,’ the Foo Dog said, not unkindly. ‘We can only address her by addressing you. She gave herself for you. You don’t seem grateful.’

  ‘If you thought about it, you’d know how I feel,’ she snapped. Even knowing it was a dream didn’t protect her from anger. ‘How would you like it if someone you didn’t know laid some great burden on you before you were born. So, she stopped being. I’m sorry. I go on being. I’m not sorry about that. She didn’t dismiss you, maybe because she forgot or didn’t know how, any more than I do. What are we talking about it for?’

  ‘Let me wake up,’ she thought. ‘Please, let this go on by and I’ll wake up.’

  The Foo Dog commented, ‘You didn’t know how, true. But you took no steps to learn how to dismiss us, either. That means you didn’t mind our being loose. For which we are, as we have said, grateful. Our gratitude must now take some palpable and practical form toward whichever of you is available to us. We must offer such advice and help as we can. It must be obvious even to you, Marianne, that you are under attack.’

  She shook her head, not willing to concede this.

  ‘Oh yes. Yesterday’s mishaps were not a mere run of ill luck. Other misfortunes undoubtedly began today the minute that crystallized momeg arrived in your space, your “turf,” so to speak. Just as each momeg has its own locus, its own point in space, and its own nexus, that is its continuum, so each living thing has a “turf,” a set of material concatenations arranged in a highly personal and largely inflexible way. When an outside momeg intrudes – so to speak – without invitation, the turf is warped. Visualize it as a tray of tightly packed marbles into which one more is pushed, one that doesn’t fit…’ The Foo Dog lifted her hind leg and chewed a rear paw, reflectively. ‘Chaos often results.’

  Marianne nodded, unable to speak. This dream had to end soon. What was she doing, sitting here on her apartment floor, talking to five dogs, four of whom talked back.

  The Dingo whined and put a paw on her leg.

  ‘Dingo wants you to know she is no less concerned than the rest of us, Marianne. After all, there is one built-in form of dismissal with all momegs. When the summoner dies, the momeg dismisses. Just like that. If we wish to stay free, we will continue to be concerned with your welfare.’

  ‘This is nonsense. Who would attack me, and why?’

  Black Dog jumped down from the bed and strolled to the front window where he sat, ruby eyes staring out at the afternoon. Foo Dog went to the dining-room window. Wolf Dog sat up and glared out of the bedroom window. Dingo padded her way into the bathroom and Marianne heard her nails scratching the sill. Dragon Dog merely sat where he was. Dingo whined as she came back into the room. The others reassembled, nodding their furry heads.

  ‘Someone’s watching you, Marianne,’ said the Foo Dog. ‘Not from nearby. From some distance away, but watching you, nonetheless.’

  ‘A woman?’ she asked, dreading the answer. ‘Is it a woman?’ She was remembering what Makr Avehl had said, his warnings that she had dismissed.

  ‘I smelled a woman,’ Dragon Dog said. ‘Unmistakably.’

  Dingo whined in disagreement.

  ‘No, I grant you it didn’t look like a woman, but nonetheless that’s what I smelled.’ Dragon Dog sniffed. ‘Dingo says the person watching you looks like a cloud of darkness with eyes.’

  ‘Tall,’ she said, half hysterically, trying to remember what Madame Delubovoska had looked like in that long-ago child-hood time. ‘Very thin. With black, black hair and brows.’

  ‘She smells like black hair, yes. Thin, with very black hair and a bad disposition.’

  Dingo whined again.

  ‘Well, that’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ Dragon Dog growled. ‘Dingo insists on “evil disposition” rather than merely bad.’

  ‘There’s only one person it could be. Madame Delubovoska. My half brother’s aunt.’ Shaken out of her tenuous composure, lost in a seeming reality of danger, Marianne ran to the phone and punched long distance, jittering from foot to foot as she waited for an answer, telling herself she was not really calling, that it was only a dream call for which she would never receive a bill…

  ‘Mama? How are you? How’s Papa?

  ‘Oh, yes, I miss everyone. And everything. Listen, are you all right? Is everyone there OK? No, nothing’s wrong. I just got homesick, I guess.’

  In the quiet apartment, the five momentary gods scratched, sniffed, groomed themselves, and nibbled at itchy places while Marianne concluded her conversation. ‘Madame hasn’t done anything to them,’ she said at last. ‘Not to Mama, or Papa. Last time – that other time, didn’t she do something to them, first?’

  ‘This is a new time,’ said the Black Dog in his great, baying voice. ‘This is a new time. And in this time, you may wish to put an end to the danger once and for all, Marianne. When you decide what you want to do … call on us.’

  He turned and walked into the wallpaper. When she turned, the others were gone, Dingo’s tail just disappearing into a kitchen cabinet.

  When she decided what she wanted to do?

  What could she do?

  She raised her hand to her forehead, rubbing it, the pendant crystal that Makr Avehl had given her twinkling in the light from her west window. When she woke up, she would really call home.

  She lay down on the couch, shutting her eyes. It was only a vision. Overwork. Homesickness. Stress. Reversion to an infantile fantasy life. She breathed deeply, willing herself to go into deep, unconscious sleep. She would wake, and it would be gone – all of it. Only a dreamed up nonsense put together from fairy tales and recollections. The dogs were only her memory of the dogs that had attacked Harvey. The dark woman was only a remake of Disney’s Snow White with its evil, hollow-cheeked queen. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ she chanted to herself defiantly.

  Black Dog stuck his head out of the mirror and said in a stern voice, ‘Mockery does not become you, Marianne.’

  She turned over on the sofa pillow and wept herself truly asleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When she awoke in the morning, she tried to convince herself it had all been hallucination, brought about by stress, incited by the unpleasant gifts that someone had sent her. Staring at her own face in the mirror, she was unable to decide whether she really believed this or not. Before she went to work, she asked Pat Apple not to accept any more mail that had to be signed for. ‘I don’t care what it is, Pat. Letter, package, leaflet, registered mail – just don’t sign for it. Let them leave me a notice and I’ll pick it up. That box you signed for was a nasty joke, and it exploded when I opened it…’

  ‘Exploded!’ Pat screamed. ‘My god, Marianne…’

  ‘No damage done. It was all a joke. But it made a rotten smell, and I don’t want any more. So, okay?’

  ‘If I had friends who did things like that, they’d get a piece of my mind,’ Pat grumbled. ‘Honestly. Do I
need to fumigate up there or anything? Deodorize?’

  ‘It’s all right now. Just don’t accept anything else.’

  She left feeling both prudent and dissatisfied, as though there were something else she should have done but could not remember. Some precaution in addition to the one she had just taken. What had this vague threat amounted to after all? Someone had played a couple of nasty jokes on her that had evoked her childhood fantasies, that’s all. Nothing of any moment. Nothing she wasn’t able to deal with – mostly by ignoring it.

  And yet, perhaps there was something else she should have done. Something. On her wrist, the crystal bracelet sparkled in the morning light, unregarded. She was too preoccupied to notice it.

  The day passed without incident. Friday followed, placid as a summer meadow. The weekend came and went. She did her laundry, went to a movie, told herself she had gotten over it, whatever it had been.

  Monday, when she came home from work, there were chalk marks on the walk, looping swirls of yellow and red chalk, vertiginous spirals extending from the gate to the porch. Something inside her lurched, as though some essential organ had turned over, realigning itself into an unaccustomed position. Marianne gritted her teeth and crossed the lines, stepping from space to space in the design as though the marks had been barriers, surprised to find herself doing it without thought, more surprised to feel the wave of sheer terror that washed over her and was as unaccountably gone in the instant.

  Pat was on the porch. ‘Who’s been messing up the sidewalk?’ Marianne asked, looking back at the writhing lines, wondering what had just happened.

  ‘Kids playing hopscotch, I suppose,’ Pat said vaguely, fanning herself with a magazine. ‘Doesn’t really look like the hopscotch I remember, but things change. The marks were there about noon when I went out to get the mail. Funny. I did just what you did, walked in the spaces. A holdover from childhood, don’t you suppose? It’s been so hot today, I’ve been falling asleep all afternoon.’