Soldier slowly lowers her gun, easing back on the trigger, and turns her face away from the bore of Odd Willie’s .45. Then she glances down at Emmie Silvey, who’s still standing there beside her on the dais. “You asked me,” she says to the Bailiff, “and I told you my dream, and then you took me up to the attic.”
The Bailiff laughs, his laughter made painfully loud by the demon’s architecture. “Finish it, Soldier,” he says. “I am a foolish old bastard, and my clumsy schemes and machinations have only made my fate more terrible. Our purpose lies in ruin. The Cuckoo is undone. A masque which has endured down untold ages is ended here. All my world is ended here.”
“Take me home,” Emmie says, and there are tears streaking her cheeks. “Please, Soldier. Take me home now.”
“Close your eyes,” Soldier tells Emmie, and she thinks about that stormy night in Ipswich, and she thinks, too, about the cemetery in Woonsocket, the shrill voices of imagined birds singing on a misplaced summer day—All lost, lost, lost now. And, as easy as blinking an eye, Soldier does her trick for Emmie…
…and they’re sitting in the car outside the Museum of Natural History in Roger Williams Park, and Soldier asks Emmie if she knows where the stuffed black bear is.
“No. I don’t remember a black bear,” Emmie tells her.
And then Soldier remembers the Bailiff and his dead boys, the cold muzzle of Odd Willie’s gun against her skin, and the words she spoke three and half years ago, when she was only five years old.
“If there’s a bear in there somewhere, then I never saw it. I think I wouldn’t forget a whole damn bear.”
“Never mind,” Soldier says, and to Odd Willie, “Something’s wrong. We have to go to Benefit Street instead.” And he has questions, but only one or two, and it’s easy to fake the answers she doesn’t know. She tells him what he needs to hear, and then Odd Willie turns the key in the ignition and starts the car again and pulls out of the museum parking lot.
TEN
The Yellow House
S oldier can’t remember the first time she saw the yellow house on Benefit Street, not the first time that she saw it from the outside. It seems she might have been a grown woman before she ever looked at it the way that other people do, those unsuspecting people of the sunlight who have not been raised in the deep and rotten places of the world, who have never walked the silent halls of the house or climbed the narrow stairs leading into and out of its vast basement. If Soldier had ever paused to consider this juxtaposition—that she knew the terrible heart of the yellow house before she ever glimpsed its concealing face—she might have thought it odd.
There has never been a less haunted house, nor a house more filled with bad memories and restless spirits.
It has a reputation, of course, but then many old houses in this city suffer from unpleasant reputations; too many houses that have stood far too long to escape insanity and murder, suicide and all the less mundane improprieties of men and women. But the “haunted Providence” tours never stop in front of the yellow house, and no medium or investigator of the “paranormal” has ever held a séance in its front parlor or attempted EMF readings in its upstairs bedrooms. There are occasionally sensitive minds who feel a sudden unease whenever they pass by, and some will even cross to the western side of the street to put more distance between themselves and the house. But these people are few, and they rarely spare the house more than a quick, anxious glance.
Mr. H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who made the yellow house the subject of one of his stories, wrote: “Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street.” He also noted, “The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense ‘haunted.’ There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was ‘unlucky,’ but that is as far as even they went.” And, fortunately for him and innumerable others, even Lovecraft’s excitable and prying imagination never guessed more than a misleading fraction of the truth.
Since its appearance in 1764 (in no conventional sense was it constructed), the great yellow house at 135 Benefit Street has kept its secrets to itself, ever faithful to the iron wills of its architects, just as Soldier and Odd Willie Lothrop and the other changelings have kept their covenants with the Bailiff and the Cuckoo and the Hounds of Cain. The sum of improbable geometries and Cape Ann granite, nails and fallen trees and dim words whispered in forgotten tongues, the house knows its purpose well, as do all those who dwell within its walls and all those who might ever have cause to enter its doors or windows or come slipping up its drainpipes.
“Do you think they’re expecting us?” Odd Willie asks, and Soldier shrugs and drops the butt of her cigarette. She grinds it out with the toe of her cowboy boot.
“I’m not sure it much matters,” she says. The three of them—Odd Willie, Soldier, and Emmie Silvey—are standing together across the street from the house, standing there on the icy blacktop beside the stolen Chevy Malibu, and Emmie keeps sneezing. Soldier watches the house and knows that it’s watching her, in turn, that the silver-eyed ladies and gentlemen inside are waiting for them to cross Benefit and come up the steps to the front door. She knows that somewhere below the yellow house, Madam Terpsichore and Master Danaüs and the other ghul are whispering among themselves, that Madam Mnemosyne sits in her burrow, hunched over her scrying glass, watching the black water for the moments Soldier hasn’t yet caught up with. And in the attic, the alchemist’s daughter is waiting, too.
“I know this house,” Emmie says and sneezes again.
“Gesundheit,” Odd Willie mutters and jingles the car keys in one hand.
“I’ve had dreams about this house,” Emmie says and wipes her nose. “I dreamed it isn’t really a house at all.”
Soldier looks nervously back up Benefit Street. They’d picked up a tail shortly after leaving the museum parking lot, Kennedy and Sea-grave and that dyke bitch Amasa Sprague in the same black hearse that Soldier and Sheldon Vale had used for the long drive up to Ipswich. She knows that Odd Willie saw it, too, but neither of them has said anything about the hearse.
“I used to know the difference between my dreams and being awake,” Emmie says. “Now I don’t think I ever will again.”
“Soldier, we can’t just fucking stand here all day,” Odd Willie says. “If we’re going in, let’s please just get it the hell over with.”
“Maybe you better hang back,” Soldier tells him. “Stay here with the car. I don’t think this is about you.”
Odd Willie shakes his head and rubs his freezing hands together. “Fuck that. You got me into this shit—you and the Bailiff and Saben and that kid,” and he stops talking long enough to point at Emmie. “And now I’m in it, right, and it’s too damned late for valiant fucking gestures, and you know that just as well as I do.”
“I was just trying to go home,” Emmie says. “I’d go home right now, if she’d let me,” and she sneezes, then wipes her nose on the sleeve of her coat and glares at Soldier.
“You had a chance to run,” Soldier says, “both of you. You could have left me to die back in Woonsocket, or you could have left me in that motel room in Uxbridge.”
“Well,” Odd Willie sighs, “we can’t stand here all goddamn day long waiting for you to take your thumb out of your ass and finally make up your mind. I swear, I think I’m getting fucking hypothermia.”
Soldier shuts her eyes, and she’s back in Miss Josephine’s dining room, sitting across the wide mahogany table from Sheldon’s corpse, and he looks sad and smug and angry and very dead, all
at the same time.
“You already know what comes next,” he says. “All you have to do is cross the street. It’s all been arranged. They’re waiting for you inside.”
And the clock on the mantel, the tall clock with a girl’s tattooed face, begins to chime the hour.
Soldier gasps and opens her eyes, and the yellow house is still there, gazing indifferently down at her. An awful, bottomless box of secrets hidden in broad daylight for the past two hundred and forty-six years, and Soldier takes Emmie’s hand and crosses the slushy street. A moment later, Odd Willie whispers a well-worn prayer to Mother Hydra and follows her.
Standing in the anteroom of the yellow house, Emmie tries to be polite and not stare at the woman who opened the door, the woman whom Soldier calls Miss Josephine, but she’s never known that anyone could be so beautiful and so completely hideous. The woman, who is very tall and dressed as though she’s just returned from a funeral in an Edward Gorey book—Miss Underfold in The Other Statue, perhaps—has skin like an antique wax doll. Emmie thinks that if she pressed a finger too roughly against that pale skin, she’d leave an impression behind. But the hardest part about not staring is the woman’s shimmering silver eyes, eyes that remind Emmie of an experiment with liquid mercury that she did in science class just before winter break. And mercury is poisonous, she reminds herself and stares at her feet.
“I didn’t think anyone would be awake,” Soldier says, but Emmie can tell that she’s lying. She suspects the silver-eyed woman knows Soldier’s lying, too.
“We’ve all been very concerned,” the woman says, and something about her voice makes Emmie flinch. “The household is not quite itself today. There have been the most extraordinary rumors, and sleep has eluded most of us. The Bailiff—”
“Yeah, he said that I should meet him here,” Soldier says. “He said that I should go to the attic and wait for him there.”
The woman nods her wax-doll head and leans close to Soldier, sniffing the air around her. Then she smiles, and Emmie’s sorry that she isn’t still staring at her feet and minding her own business, because she knows she won’t ever be able to forget that smile, not if she lives to be a hundred and twenty. Like the dead starling, the bird she killed when she was only six, and Deacon said, “Just try not thinking of a white elephant sometime.”
“This unfortunate affair,” the woman says, her voice all honey and ice and broken bottles, “it is not truly any of my concern. This affair, it’s between you and the ones downstairs. We mind our business, and the hounds kindly mind theirs. But the Bailiff, and the attic…” and the woman pauses and sniffs at Soldier again. “You’ve hurt yourself, my dear,” she says and touches one index finger gently to the cut on Soldier’s cheek. “You should be more careful.”
Odd Willie glances apprehensively at Soldier and shifts from foot to foot. Emmie wonders if he’s about to take out his gun and shoot the silver-eyed woman; she wonders if it would make any difference.
“Stop your fidgeting, Master Lothrop,” Miss Josephine says and looks directly at him. “If the Bailiff said the two of you should meet him in the attic, then meet him in the attic you shall. As I have said already, this is no proper concern of ours. You and Master Lothrop answer to the Bailiff and to the hounds, not to me nor mine.”
“Thank you,” Soldier says, and Emmie isn’t sure if she sounds relieved or only frightened in another way.
“This one here,” Miss Josephine says and turns towards Emmie. “She is also a Child of the Cuckoo, is she not?”
“My name’s Emmie Silvey,” Emmie says, and the woman nods her head.
“Then I have a message for you.”
“She’s with us,” Soldier says quickly, and the silver-eyed woman flashes her another of those smiles, a smile like a shark only pretending to be a woman, and Soldier takes a step backwards, bumping into Odd Willie.
“Indeed,” says Miss Josephine. “Nonetheless, this is an urgent message that I have promised to deliver, and I am ever bound to keep my promises. Unless, dear Soldier, you should object. Unless you believe, possibly, that I am overstepping my rightful boundaries.” And Emmie wants to shut her eyes, wants to turn away from that monstrous smile, but she seems to have forgotten how to move.
“Of course not,” Soldier says, almost whispering. “I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“Then be about your business, changeling, and I will be about mine,” and she waves her left hand, dismissing Soldier and Odd Willie. Then, before Soldier can protest or Emmie can cry out or Odd Willie can even go back to fidgeting, the smiling, silver-eyed woman places her right thumb firmly against Emmie’s forehead. There’s sudden cold, an ice age spilling out of the woman and into Emmie, and then a brief electric jolt, and the anteroom dissolves into dusk and the sound of a dry desert wind…
…and the twilight air smells like the dust between grains of sand and, more faintly, the musky sweat of the black-skinned woman.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again,” Emmie says. “I thought that part of the story was over.”
“You ought never second-guess a story,” the black-skinned woman says. She’s crouched only a few yards down the dune face from Emmie. She’s almost completely naked, wearing only a ragged sort of leather breechcloth strung about her waist and a few pieces of jewelry that shine faintly in the glow of the rising moon. Her white dreadlocks are tied back away from her face.
“Not even a story I’m in?”
“Not even then,” she replies. “Especially not a story that you’re inside.”
“It’s a very bad place, isn’t it?”
“That old house?” the woman asks and begins tracing something in the sand between them. “Dangerous would be a better way of describing it. Think of it as you would think of a nest of hornets. The nest itself is neither good nor evil, not as men reckon such things, but it can hurt you, because of the things that live inside.”
“Like that horrible woman.”
“Like her. And the others of her kind. And things you haven’t seen yet. And things I hope you never will.”
The black-skinned woman draws a circle in the sand, then draws a smaller circle inside it, then an even smaller circle at the center of the other two.
“So why am I here again?” Emmie asks, trying to figure out what the image in the sand is meant to be. “She said that she had a message for me, but then she sent me here to you. Why’d she do that?”
“Because she owed me a debt, an ages-old debt that she could never truly repay, and I offered to dismiss it if she would be sure you found your way back here.”
Emmie frowns and scoops a small hole in the sand, working the fingers of her right hand in like the spade-shaped snout of some furtive desert creature. Only an inch or two below the surface, the sand is still warm.
“They won’t take me home,” she says. “I did what you asked, but they won’t take me back to Deacon. It’s been days and days. He must think I’m dead by now. By now, he must have given up.”
The woman stops drawing in the sand and looked at Emmie, shadows hiding her golden eyes. “This path you’re on is a roundabout sort of thing, fraught with many twists and turns. But I believe, Emmie, that it will lead you home very soon.”
“You believe?” Emmie balks and digs her fingers deeper into the sun-warm sand.
“I’m sorry, but on this path nothing is ever certain. Even when the story seems to be finished, and the book is closed, even then, it may not truly be done.”
“We went into the museum, didn’t we?” Emmie asks, quick, before she loses her nerve. “We went in, but then she did something so it never happened.”
“You’re a very observant girl,” the black-skinned woman says and goes back to tracing her patterns in the sand. “You’re beginning to catch on, which is more than could ever be said for most.”
“I thought so,” Emmie says, and looks up at the moon and all the stars winking on above the dunes. “It was sort of like having déjà vu, almost. W
e were about to get out of the car and go into the museum, and then Soldier changed her mind, and, all of a sudden, I had memories of things that hadn’t happened.”
“It was passed down in her mother’s blood, that particular gift, that curse. It’s kept her alive many times now, even without Soldier knowing what she was doing, but it could still destroy her…and others.”
“It scares me, almost more than anything else,” and Emmie gives up trying to find the Big Dipper, because there’s something not quite right about these stars, something just unfamiliar enough to be disorienting. “I keep wondering if Soldier’s changed things I don’t remember. I keep wondering if that first time I saw her, when I gave her Pearl’s snow globe, if maybe it wasn’t only two days ago, because she keeps changing what happens to make it come out different, and so we keep doing the same things over and over again.”
“She’s trying to find something, Emmie,” the woman says, and draws a crooked triangle to enclose the circles within circles within circles. “Something that was stolen from her. When she finds it, I think the story will end, and you can go home. If she finds it.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to do? Help her find what she’s looking for?”
“That’s a part of it. But there are other things, as well.”
“Building bridges,” Emmie says very softly. “Building bridges for the ghouls and Pearl.”
“You have grievous choices ahead of you, Emmie Silvey, and I do not envy you.”
“You know, half the time, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The black-skinned woman laughs softly to herself and stands up, wiping sand from her thighs and legs. “You are a wonder, child. I’d keep you here with me, if I thought the world would ever permit such a thing.”
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