“And I look after the rest of him,” I added, grinning a bit more widely still.
JinYeong met my grin with something very close to rolling eyes, but I saw one of his incisors briefly through his lips, so he must have grinned a bit, too.
“You can use my balcony to get over the fence, if you like,” said Vesper, pointing at it with her momentarily free knitting needle. “If you’re really going. You won’t get through the door at the front, but you might be able to manage one of the windows or the back door.”
“Is that how people usually get in?” I asked her curiously.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, knitting studiously again. “I’ve never offered it to anyone, if that’s what you mean. All I know is that they can never get through the front door—it confuses them no end.”
“Doesn’t it confuse you?”
“There are so many things that confuse me about this life, dear. The television remote is one of them—I never know where it has gone, or where it will turn up, and it has a mind of its own.”
“I’ve got a friend who feels the same way,” I couldn’t help saying. “I should introduce you.”
“Should we come back again the same way?” JinYeong asked her. “Or will the door open for us when we are inside?”
Vesper looked at him admonishingly over the top of her spectacles. “I’m sure I don’t know, young man.”
“What do the others usually do?”
“Once they go in, they seldom come out,” she said, knitting her way back across, surprising me with her matter-of-factness. “Did no one tell you that seven people have gone missing in that house these last ten years?”
“Good grief!” I said, startled. Ghost stories and frights were one thing—I hadn’t realised that the people we’d been talking about hadn’t actually made it out of the house to tell their stories in person. “What about—you said you still see the investigations man!”
“Just every now and then,” she said. “Near the windows or on the roof—I’ve never been sure if he’s a ghost or not, but he certainly seems to be busy.”
I met JinYeong’s eyes and found that he was looking faintly wary.
“Do you want us to wait for hyeong then?” he asked.
“Nah, might as well go in. You’re scarier than anything we’ll find in there, anyway.”
I caught Vesper giving JinYeong an assessing look-over, as if trying to decide if he was actually more frightening than whatever might be in the flat. He must have passed muster, because she gave a small, decided little nod, and went on with her knitting.
“Do keep the door or window open when you go in,” she suggested. “It might make it easier for you to get out, who knows. I did see someone tumbling out of the window one day, but the trees got him before he could make it to the road.”
She said it so pleasantly that it was hard to feel the chill I should have felt at her words.
“Right,” I said. “We’ll watch out for the trees, then.”
“So long as you’re polite and leave before dark, I don’t think you need worry,” she said. “Off you go then, my dears. Just knock on the patio door if you need to come back through, won’t you?”
“Sounds good,” I said. I was grinning, which was stupid, but the whole thing just tickled me. Here was an old human woman who had no idea what she was faced with every day as she knitted, giving out completely sound advice on being polite to otherworldly things that would no doubt use any excuse to take offence and retaliate for the offense taken.
When we were out on the patio with the door safely shut behind us, I said to JinYeong, “Givus a sec: I’ll give Zero a call first.”
“I am not frightened,” he said, but he didn’t tell me not to call.
“Yeah, but we gotta look out for your pretty face,” I reminded him. “Can’t be damaging that now that we’ve already ruined your best suit. Fair warning, though: if the house gets hungry, I’m shoving you at it and running for it.”
Chapter Nine
It was a bit of a drop down from the patio to the top of the stone wall, and a bigger one from the top of the wall to the unevenly paved courtyard below, but it wasn’t the sort of drop that should have given me the feeling of floating in mid-air for one brief, horrible second.
I left JinYeong swearing in Korean behind me and started toward the house with the rather fatalistic thought that if I didn’t go for it now I would probably run for it instead.
Explore carefully, Zero had said on the phone. If it has that many stories surrounding it, there’s likely a very strong presence Between, not unlike your own house. Call me if you run into any problems you can’t solve.
I might not be as stubborn as JinYeong—yeah, I know, I said might—but his eyes had met mine when Zero said to call, and I’d seen in them the same determination not to need help.
So when the front door didn’t open to either gentle or no-so-gentle persuasion, I wrestled open one of the front windows instead and climbed in that way. JinYeong didn’t assist with the opening of the window, but he made use of it after I tumbled through into dust and floating motes that were hopefully dust and not spores.
“Oi,” I said, as he slipped through the window behind me. “Thought you vampires could still get into houses without an invitation if you tried hard enough?”
“You opened the window for me,” JinYeong said. “And what is hard for me is easy for you. Why are you asking questions suddenly?”
“It’s not suddenly,” I protested, gazing around at the room we’d entered. I didn’t know exactly what interior to expect from the twenties, but the thing that most struck me was how tidy the place was in spite of the bit of floating dust. Unlike the houses beside the block of flats in front, there was no smell of decay and mould, and there wasn’t even a lot of dust lying around the place if you didn’t count the stuff floating in the air. Everything was decorated in deep blues in a range of ocean shades and thick gold lines; this was a house that had once been both very expensive and very expensively decorated.
We were in what looked like a sitting room, all polite couches and cushions, with a bar in dark wood at the far end of it that was sifted with a faint layer of dust. Couches and cushions both had been kept to much darker shades of blue than the walls and fixtures, almost as if they were shadowed underwater.
What I wanted to check now was the lighting. It was shadowy inside the house, but not dark, and across the room I could see a light switch that definitely wasn’t twenties, though it was stylish.
To JinYeong, I said as I crossed the room, “I’ve been asking questions ever since I met you lot! I just don’t usually get answers unless they’re in riddle form. According to human lore, you lot are forbidden from entering houses without an invitation.”
“There are a lot of ways around the rules,” JinYeong said. “And it is not forbidden, it is uncomfortable. Like when you put things crooked around the house.”
I tried very hard not to laugh. “What, you get uncomfortable because you’re being rude?”
“I,” said JinYeong, as I flipped the light switch to absolutely no effect, “am a very polite person.”
This time, I didn’t try to hide the crack of rude laughter that escaped me. “Yeah, why not? So you’re a polite person. C’mmon, let’s check the other rooms. Maybe if you’re really polite, the house won’t eat us.”
The place wasn’t huge, so it only took us a few minutes to check out the rooms on the bottom floor—sitting room, formal dining, kitchen, downstairs bathroom, and study—and all of them were both surprisingly clean and entirely unthreatening.
It was all laced with Between, of course, but nothing like as bad as my own house was. I could feel it in every corner and room, but it wasn’t crawling over the walls and ceiling and making things move in the corners of my eyes.
“This is a bit of a let down,” I said to JinYeong as we came back out into the receiving hall. “Reckon we should try the front door and see if it opens?”
&
nbsp; “Ani,” he said. He seemed discontented, as though he had been expecting to be able to fight something and had been robbed of that opportunity.
Come to think of it, that was probably exactly what he was feeling.
“We can have a poke around upstairs first, anyway,” I said, still gazing around the hallway and up the stairs. “Vesper said that not much happens until dark, usually, though: what do you reckon we could do to change that?”
He grinned. I should have known: born trouble-maker, is JinYeong. “First, you will bother it,” he said.
“Okay, following you so far—you want me to have a bit of a go at the Between bit of it and see if I can shake anything loose.”
“Yes,” he said, with great satisfaction. “Then if it does not work, I will bite something.”
I sputtered a laugh. “What, like a wall or a chair or something?”
“You’re not to bite anything!” said an imperious, snooty little voice. “I forbid you!”
“Flamin’ heck!” I said, jumping. There was a kid on the stairs now; he hadn’t been there a second ago, but he was there now, all pale face and starched collar with britches that only came to his knees and shoes that looked far too shiny. I looked him up and down, wondering if I was imagining the faint red gleam to his eyes, and said, “You must be Ralph.”
“Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” His eyes travelled rather disdainfully over to JinYeong as he added, “And why are you wearing those awful clothes?”
“You should not talk about other people’s clothes,” said JinYeong coldly, “when your hair looks like that.”
The child fairly swelled with rage, his face reddening, and I protested, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, he’s just a little kid!”
“And at least I do not look like an old grandfather,” JinYeong continued, eyeing the tweedy material of Ralph’s trousers and jacket with a certain amount of fascinated horror. “I am smooth and beautiful.”
“Get out of my house!” shouted the child, in a rage-filled but reedy voice. “I won’t have you in here!”
“No need to be like that,” I said soothingly. “Just ignore the vampire; he likes to think he’s the pinnacle of sartorial magnificence—”
“I am beautiful and stylish.”
“Get out of my house,” Ralph said, his eyes gleaming almost red, “or I will tell it to eat you both!”
“First of all, there’s not enough flesh on either of us to make a good meal,” I told him. “Second, does this house actually eat people? Because I know a bit about Between and my house likes changing around from time to time, but it’s not like it actually eats people.”
“My house,” said the boy, in what he probably thought was a terrible whisper, “is hungry and vicious. It will chew your bones.”
“Yeah, but with what teeth? And how does it even digest stuff?”
He stared at me, and I saw him actually thinking about it, but the house was already on the move by then. I grabbed JinYeong’s arm to reef him out of the reach of the bannisters, which had separated and now flailed and grew like a line of sentient vines dressed up as bannisters for a fancy dress party.
JinYeong snarled at them and said to Ralph, very clearly, “I have very many teeth and I also can bite very hard.”
He started up the stairs at a run, which startled the boy enough to make him take a couple steps backward, trip over one of the stairs, and sit down suddenly. The stairs bulged, ensnaring JinYeong’s feet like massive bubbles of chewing gum, and the walls seemed to bend toward him, too. Undeterred, if a bit slower, JinYeong grimly waded through it, snarling at the encroaching wall.
“You’re wooden,” I told the stairs fiercely, and started after him without waiting to make sure that they obeyed. They must have listened, because they felt solid beneath my feet when I dashed up the stairs to JinYeong.
“Stop it!” shouted Ralph. “You can’t tell my house what to do!”
“That’s all you know, kid,” I told him. To the stairs that ensnared JinYeong’s feet, I said, “You’re wooden. You can’t do that.”
“They’re not wooden, they’re tar!”
It was too late; JinYeong already had his feet free. I heard him mutter, “Ah, I will bite that child!”
I opened my mouth to tell him not to bite the kid, but he pushed me away before I could get the words out, and all that came out was a startled, “Oi!”
JinYeong snarled, his waist banded by blue paint with golden stripes that would have embraced me but now wrapped around him instead, and the stretchy edges that reached for me too writhed in what looked like annoyance.
“Flamin’ heck!” I said, and grabbed for him. I missed by centimetres: the wall snapped back into itself, taking JinYeong with it before he had a chance to even bite it, and the entire thing immediately flattened and hardened as though it had always been flat and hard, and, above all, a wall.
I turned a very nasty look on the kid at the top of the stairs and said, “You’d better tell it to let him back out, or you and me are going to have a problem.”
“Get out of my house!” yelled Ralph. “Or I’ll tell it to eat you, too!”
I reckon he wasn’t feeling too brave about it, though—maybe he hadn’t seen anyone else copy what he’d done to the house before—because he turned and leaped through the wall behind him that had begun to swirl in a distinctly watery way.
“Come back here, you little brat!” I said wrathfully, taking the last of the stairs two at a time. “Give me my vampire back!”
I ran for the section of wall that was still swirling in a combination of Between and water or paint, and burst through it with the refreshing feeling of running through a waterfall and into the coolness of the cave behind it.
Someone’s bedroom, I realised, forging forward as the wall tried to cling to me and draw me backward. Plain floorboards were beneath my feet, unpolished but clean, and an old metal frame bed with a mattress that had seen better days—or was it a carpeted bedroom with a set of bunk-beds?
I didn’t bother to try and figure out which one it was, because the wall, wet and clammy, was still trying to drag me backwards, and it was beginning to feel more like a whirlpool than a wall, too. I had the distinct feeling that I might end up drowning if it managed to pull me back again.
“No, you don’t!” I said sharply to it, with dread in my heart for JinYeong. Things that ate other things could always be forced to spit them out again—things that drowned other things weren’t as easy to fix. “You’re a wall, not water, and you’re not going to drown me! Down boy!”
The wall released me and I couldn’t help taking a couple of swift, instinctive steps away from it. I looked around the room a bit more carefully and found the interior of the room just as hard to comprehend now that I wasn’t fighting to escape the embrace of a wall.
“Heck,” I said irritably to myself. “What’s it matter whether it’s got bunkbeds or a single? JinYeong! Oi!”
There was no answer, but I hadn’t expected there to be one. I threw another look around the room and caught a faint trail of reddish something that wasn’t exactly red and wasn’t exactly visible, wafting out the door.
I said savagely, “Gotcha!” and started off after it.
I stepped from bare boards—or maybe carpet—and into snow, a frigid breeze whipping colour into my cheeks and a teal-tinted snowflake wafting past my nose. At the end of the snowy hallway, a very surprised-looking Ralph said, “You can’t do that!” and disappeared between tree trunks that began to look more and more tree trunky and less and less hallway-ish by the second.
Branches reached out to me, icy with snow and glittering teal paint, and I said to them firmly, “Get back into your lattice, you flamin’ creepers!”
They didn’t quite go back into the lattice work that ran along the hallway, but they didn’t stretch out quite so much, either, which gave me just enough space to pass down the hallway, slipping my phone out of my pocket at the same time to call Zero
.
He answered just after I followed the lingering trail of red into the lavish upstairs living room, giving my heart a jolt of relief.
“Yes.”
“Zero?”
“What is it, Pet?”
“Reckon you’d better get here quick,” I said, in a hushed voice that helped hide the way my voice shook. “’Cos the walls just ate JinYeong and I reckon they’re about ready to try for dessert.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yep, but this kid really knows how to use Between and it’s taking all I’ve got to keep catching up with him. I need reinforcements to get JinYeong back.”
“I’m coming. I’ll put out a message to Athelas too. Is there anything I should know?”
“Yeah, come in via the flats and ask Vesper in unit nine if you can use her balcony to get over the wall. Heck! He’s just changed the house again; I’d better go.”
“Don’t pull anything from Between that could get you noticed,” Zero said, his voice distinctly warning, and then the line went dead.
I stopped and took a moment to settle myself in my surroundings again as I shoved my phone back in my pocket. Ralph had outdone himself this time: the floor was now the ceiling, and vice versa, and if I looked at the windows for too long, I could see a world outside that wasn’t the human world.
“Come out here, you little sniveller!” I yelled, crossing the floor and avoiding a giant, blue-glassed chandelier that looked like a blooming tree from this perspective. It made my head feel weird, but it wasn’t exactly dangerous: the thing I wanted to avoid was the distinctly Behind world outside the house.
I wondered briefly if this was something I’d be able to do with my own house, but there was no time to think about it, because the house had begun to tilt again, sending me sliding back across a suddenly sloped roof and toward the windows like a pinball in a pinball machine. I grabbed the chandelier on my way past and held on for dear life while the whole room did a loop-de-loop around me, and didn’t let go until it was back up the way it should be. It was a bit of a drop down, but at least there was carpet, and not much of a chance to go flying out the windows.
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 18
