The Dream Gatherer

by Kristen Britain

  “I do believe birds are nesting on yon spars,” Bay said, squinting.

  “Oh, let us not start arguing about birds again.”

  “They are gulls. They do not belong, and their rookery is making an unacceptable mess of the roof.”

  “Never mind the roof,” Bunch said. “Our front door seems to have been replaced by the bow of the ship. We will have to use the kitchen entrance.”

  The two slowly made their way along the drive, observing how, like the roof with the masts, the house had incorporated the ship into its structure by reassembling the masonry and timbers to hug the contours of the hull.

  “A master craftsman could not have done better,” Bunch said with admiration and pride.

  Bay hrrrumpfed. “We’ll see what it looks like on the inside.”

  As the sisters rounded the side of the house where the kitchen entrance awaited, the carriage they’d left behind, seemingly without the aid of horses or driver, rolled off toward the stables.

  The sisters glanced at one another when they reached the kitchen door. Since there was no reason to lock a house out in the wilds of the Green Cloak Forest, Bay simply pushed the door open.

  Bunch placed her hands over her eyes. “I do not know if I can bear to look.”

  “The house has mended its exterior,” Bay replied, “as much as it can with the pirate ship, at any rate, but as for the interior?”

  The two lingered on the threshold.

  Bay took a sniff of the air that flowed out. “Has a briny tang to it, wouldn’t you say?”

  Bunch only moaned.

  Holding onto one another, they stepped into the kitchen. Hazy light filtered through windows and fell upon tables and counters and cabinets, and the great cookstove. Pans gleamed dully from where they hung overhead. Debris crunched underfoot—broken dishes and bits of furniture and unidentifiable bric-a-brac that was evidence of the tide of seawater that had washed through the house when the thief Thursgad had broken the bottle with the ship in it.

  “Letitia will be none too pleased,” Bay said, a quaver in her voice.

  “Oh, our poor things.” Bunch picked a piece of broken vase out of the debris. They’d rescued some of their belongings in the immediate aftermath, but certainly not all.

  “Our house has mended itself but, alas, does not do the cleaning.” Bay turned over the moldering pages of a book with the tip of her cane. “As hurtful as it is, these are just things.”

  “But mother’s and father’s treasures—”

  “Things,” Bay insisted. “Their time is past. We’ve still the house itself, and I suspect not all is destroyed.”

  “That is oddly optimistic of you, Bay.”

  They made their way to the central hall, or where it was supposed to be, and were blocked floor to ceiling by the barnacle-speckled hull of the ship.

  “I do not think Letitia will fancy cleaning the ship,” Bunch said.

  There was a wisp, like a puff of air, beside them that indicated that, indeed, Letitia did not fancy it at all.

  “We will clean this place,” Bay said, “and Farnham will cut doors through the hull so we can access all the house, but in the meantime, let us retire to the kitchen for tea. This all has been most distressing.”

  At that moment, a thump came from above and both sisters looked up, but there was only the ceiling.

  “What do you suppose that was?” Bunch asked.

  “I hope it is not the accursed squirrels making a domicile of our attic again,” Bay replied. “The mess they made last time! If so, we’ll have squirrel stew on the menu again.” She did not look displeased by the prospect.

  “That sounded larger than squirrels,” Bunch said.

  “Raccoons?”

  “Bigger.”

  “Then you will have to take a look.” Bay did not do stairs.

  “I will not go crawling in that attic,” Bunch declared.

  They both turned and stared into space. A breath of air huffed into their faces.

  “I believe,” Bay said, “that Letitia does not plan on climbing into the attic either.”

  * * *

  Over the days that followed, there were no more mysterious thumps from above, though the old house creaked and groaned in ways that were new to the sisters due to the addition of the ship. They threw themselves into cleanup and salvage, and Farnham cut doors through the hull of the ship, which allowed access through all parts of the house, but from which drafted the odor of dead fish and worse. All windows were left open whether it snowed, rained, or the sun shone.

  The interior walls of the house had plastered and repainted themselves around the ship just as stone and timber had on the exterior, but the repairs did not intrude past the hull. So, inside the hull, the ship was a ship. It did, however, change the shape and size of some rooms in the house. Bunch was beside herself that there were portholes looking into her bed chamber, and the east gable guestroom now featured a jolly boat.

  Decks were swabbed and the ship cleaned as best as could be. The detritus of the pirates was, fortunately, little, though Bay groused about the lack of treasure. She did claim a few scattered coins. Any other metal they found—a broken knife, a navigator’s backstaff, anchor chains—was rusted. Anything that was leather or textile or paper was almost nonexistent, except for the sails and rigging. Even the waggoner, a book of charts depicting the known seas and a treasure of its own on any ship, looked . . . gnawed upon. Something had nibbled away most of the pages, and the cover, too. Oddly, the sisters found no evidence of rodents—unheard of on any ship.

  “Raccoons.” Bay picked up the tattered waggoner. “Raccoons chewed on it.”

  “It is not raccoons,” Bunch replied. “Look here.” A corner of a writing desk in the captain’s cabin was marked unmistakably by the indentation of human teeth. “The pirates were starving.”

  Bay brightened. “Do you suppose they ate one another?”

  “What an awful thought! Not at all proper for a lady. What would mother say?”

  Working in the affected rooms of the house proved more difficult than the ship, for the sisters had to go through personal items, including those that had belonged to generations of the Berry family. Objects that could not be rescued—priceless rugs, artworks, furniture, pottery, and, worst of all, books—were sorrowfully consigned to rubbish heaps.

  Their father’s library, with all its rare books and artifacts of an arcane quality, was the place where the ship-in-a-bottle had been when it broke and caused the cataclysmic emergence of the pirate ship, along with a good deal of ocean and at least one flock of seagulls. The room took the brunt of the destruction and was weirdly melded with a lower deck of the ship, wood cladding twisting through plaster. In some places, shelves of books remained as if untouched. In others they were just piles of moldering pulp. Still others stuck halfway into the hull, the gold-leaf lettering on the spines glittering in the light.

  Bunch brought baskets of the debris down to the parlor where Bay was sorting through some of their father’s papers that had been water damaged. Bunch picked a dented brass tube out of the basket. “Oh, look,” she said, “father’s special telescope. The lenses are broken out of it, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps it is not entirely a bad thing,” Bay replied. “Its visions were dangerous on occasion.”

  “True. As I’ve always said, it is never advisable to dabble with the past or future, but it was father’s prized possession, so I am sad it is broken. His old harp is in splinters, too.” Bunch picked up a mangled piece of wood, broken wire-wrapped gut strings hanging crazily in all directions. She sniffed. The glistening of a tear filled her eye. “I shall miss the music, but perhaps the voices of the strings are finally free.”

  “You are getting much too maudlin, sister.” Bay set aside the papers and started sifting through the basket with the tip of her cane.


  Bunch pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. “I can’t help it. All the devastation, all of our things.”

  “Not everything,” Bay reminded her. “What we need—” Her cane scuffed against something metallic. “What’s this?” She nudged the object again, then bent to investigate.

  “What?” Bunch asked.

  “Eh?”

  “You were saying what it was that we needed.”

  “Yeees, right. What we need is a party to celebrate our return to Seven Chimneys.”

  Bunch clapped her hands. “That is a fine idea.” Then she sobered. “But we are alone out here. How will we ever get anyone to attend?”

  Bay tugged the object she’d been inspecting out of the debris and raised it for Bunch to see. “This might help.” It was a tin lantern pierced with the design of constellations.

  “Father’s draugmkelder? It survived?”

  “It seems it has,” Bay replied. “Not even rusted. Now we can invite as many guests as we wish.”

  Bunch gazed at the lantern with trepidation. “But gathering dreams can be perilous.”

  Bay gave her sister a catlike smile. “And amusing.”

  A thud from above gave them both a start. Bay rapped the ceiling with her cane. This was followed by a scurrying sound and she rapped the ceiling again—bang-bang-bang!

  “I will have my squirrel stew! I will!”

  “Or perhaps,” Bunch mused, “our first guest.”

  Stickles

  When it came to Letitia’s attention that some items had gone missing from the larder, she made the situation plain to the sisters. It was clear that the thumps and bumps they heard from above were not produced by squirrels or raccoons. Together they devised a trap for their “guest.” They left the remains of dinner in the kitchen, a roast fowl, a jar of pickled herring, a slab of cheese, and a dish of bread pudding. The sisters hid in Bay’s bedchamber, which was near the kitchen. They left the lamp turned down and a pot of tea at their disposal, and played Trickits to pass the time. They were at pains to place the wooden tiles down as quietly as possible so as not to tip off the thief.

  “How will we know when our food pilferer snatches the bait?” Bay asked.

  “I believe Letitia will ensure we are aware.”

  As the night wore on and the pot of tea cooled, Bay snored in her chair and Bunch dozed over the unfinished game of Trickits. A scream abruptly caused Bay to knock her cane against their tea table, clattering the service, which in turn caused Bunch to jump to her feet with her hand over her heart.

  “Gracious,” she said breathlessly, “I think that is our culprit.”

  The two hobbled to the kitchen as fast as they could, Bunch carrying a lamp. When they arrived, the lamplight revealed a skillet hurtling through the air after a man who ran around in circles in an effort to escape it.

  “Even after all these years,” Bay said, her gaze following the action, “I will never get over seeing, or not seeing if you take my meaning, Letitia wielding cookware.”

  The man glanced over his shoulder and screamed again. The skillet flashed down and clanged him on his head. The scream was cut short, and he wobbled on his feet before spiraling to a heap on the floor.

  The skillet then clattered onto a sideboard.

  “Well done, Letitia dear,” Bunch said. She brightened the lamp so they could see the man better.

  “He is a very large squirrel,” Bay said. “We’ll need a huge pot.”

  “Now don’t be silly, Bay.”

  The fellow was not much to look at. He was skinny with a long, narrow face. Hair straggled like seaweed from beneath his stocking cap, and he wore the garb of a disreputable pirate—a loose dirty shirt and baggy pants, and most damning of all, nothing on his feet.

  “My,” Bay said, waving the air before her, “but he does smell most inappropriate.”

  “That is putting it mildly. I thought all the pirates were slain.”

  “We were misinformed as it is clear they were not. The question is, what do we do with this one now that we have him? Aside from finding a large enough pot to stew him in, that is.”

  “You are being silly again, sister. Let us send Letitia for Farnham and Rolph for assistance.”

  The trouble with invisible servants was never knowing their location and if they heard what was desired of them, but when the kitchen door swung open and closed seemingly of its own accord, the sisters assumed it was Letitia heading out to fetch Farnham and Rolph.

  Bay peered down at their pirate once more. “Is that a barnacle on his chin?”

  * * *

  After the pirate had come to, he was told in no uncertain terms that he must bathe before tea.

  “Tea?”

  “Are you slow, Sir Pirate?” Bay asked, her voice nasal from pinching her nose closed against the stench. “Of course, tea.”

  “Patience, sister,” Bunch said. “Letitia did wallop him on the head quite hard. It may have rattled his brain.”

  After he got over his initial confusion, he said, “But bathing more than once a year isn’t good for you. It’s bad luck—everyone knows that.”

  “Then we shall turn you out,” Bay said.

  Much to their surprise, the pirate acquiesced. He reluctantly agreed to let Rolph and Farnham lead him to the bathing room where they scrubbed him down. The sisters listened at the door to water gushing and splashing, and the pirate blubbering and gahing.

  After the bath, Farnham cropped the pirate’s hair to his scalp. It had consisted in large part, as it turned out, of seaweed to which periwinkles and dog whelks clung. The sisters gave him some of Professor Berry’s old clothes to wear, his own being burned in the fire. He seemed not to know how to walk with shoes on, and the professor’s smoking jacket hung from him as though he were a scarecrow. Even though the barnacle still adhered to his chin, he smelled, much to the relief of the sisters, acceptable.

  They bade him sit with them. If they feared the pirate would go rabid on them, they were reassured by the skillet that hovered in the air behind him. He, on the other hand, did not appear reassured. He kept glancing over his shoulder. With questioning, they learned his name was Stickles, which disappointed Bay who wanted to call him Barney because of the barnacle.

  “Master Stickles,” Bunch said as she poured him a cup of tea, “tell us what position you held on the ship.”

  “Just a lowly hand, ma’am. Did whatever I was told.” He took the cup into weatherworn hands and held it like it was a foreign object, which it undoubtedly was to him.

  Bunch offered him a plate of dainties. It was late for tea, this being the middle of the night, but Bunch had declared it was never too late to be civilized.

  When he did not reach for any of the dainties, Bay said, “You’re not going to have any? You seemed perfectly willing to relieve us of our other food.”

  “Uh,” Stickles said, “I am woozy since your ghost knocked my head.” He took another anxious look over his shoulder. “Rum might wash it down.”

  Bunch shook her head. “Master Stickles, for one, Letitia is beyond a doubt in the land of the living, and for two, we run a good decent household. This is no unruly pirate den of miscreancy. You will find no demon rum here.”

  He gazed mournfully into his teacup. “I’m real sorry about taking your food. Y’see, we didn’t have much to eat on the ship, me and the other fellows.”

  “Did you eat the other fellows?” Bay asked eagerly.

  He just stared at her with wide eyes.

  “Bay!” Bunch cleared her throat. “Now Master Stickles, about those others. They left, went out into the wide world. Why did you remain behind?”

  “I thought they were crazy to leave,” he declared. “I mean, look at this place. Nicer than anything I’ve ever seen—even better than Madam Salas’s bawdy house on Helos Harbor.” At the sisters�
�� looks of disapproval and the rapid approach of the skillet, he hastily added, “Er, sorry, meaning no disrespect, ma’ams. I did not mean to suggest . . . ” He licked his lips. “. . . to compare this fine manse to a bawdy house.”

  “Go on,” Bay said tersely.

  “Well, your nice house was one reason I stayed, and my ship the other. The Mermaid’s about all I’ve known for many years and I couldn’t leave her, especially now that she’s landlocked and has doorways carved in her.” Crinkles formed across his forehead. “That’s cruel for such a grand ship.”

  “We are not exactly pleased to have a ship in our house,” Bunch said. “It has been something of a disruption.”

  “To say the least,” Bay agreed. “So you say you stayed behind despite the decision of your shipmates to venture forth.”

  Stickles nodded. “I couldn’t abandon the Mermaid, and—and the pantry was stocked and so—”

  “Was,” Bay said. “We had to go to lengths to refill it.”

  The skillet hovered menacingly.

  Sweat slipped down Stickles’s face. He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  Silence filled the room and Stickles seemed to sink into himself. After what seemed an eternity, Bay told her sister, “He is fairly well spoken for a pirate.”

  “Fairly, and seemingly honest at that.”

  “Not as heathenish as one might expect.”

  Stickles glanced back and forth from one sister to the other. They stared directly at him as if they’d come to some unvoiced conclusion.

  “We understand your ship was your home,” Bunch told him, “as you must understand this house is ours.”

  “Yes,” Bay said. “My sister and I shall keep you.”

  “Keep me?” More sweat glistened on his forehead.