by Tim Pratt
Bound by Grace
by Tim Pratt
So, okay, yes, I lost a little kid in my impossible basement, but it wasn’t entirely my fault.
We have a rule, “no playing hide-and-seek in the house,” but my adopted daughter Clara’s little friend Hilly isn’t too good with rules. The boy is basically a nine-year-old slime golem, the human embodiment of post-nasal drip, and every other word he says is punctuated with a sort of back-of-the-throat sniffling snort. He’s also kind of a whiner and gets loudly outraged at the slightest hint of unfairness, but Clara has trouble making friends, so I always reciprocate playdate invitations. I just make sure there’s a lot of hand sanitizer around when Hilly comes over.
Enjoy the playroom upstairs, I say—I’ve used a lot of magic to render that space magic-free. Go run around in the yard—all the sharp and rusty and strangely enchanted things have been put away, thanks to my fiancé Trey’s tireless efforts at landscaping and threat assessment. You can even go explore the big dark woods—they’re my dark woods, and thus protected—if you want. Just don’t play hide-and-seek in the house. It’s a big house, full of the accumulation of my dead father’s unusually long and complicated life. There are too many rooms (an uncountable number, actually), and too much junk in too many of those rooms, and it would be easy to get lost, or crushed, or turned around (or transmuted, transformed, or transmogrified, though I don’t say that part, because the neighbors think we’re weird enough without bringing sorcery into it). I once heard about an ordinary suburban house that happened to have a seemingly infinite labyrinth in the cellar. I wish the peculiarities of the Grace house were so straightforward.
I made all those dire warnings and suggestions with the full force of my formidable parental authority, so naturally, the first thing Clara and Hilly did was go play hide-and-seek.
Clara came pattering into my studio with her usual breathless panic. Nine years old, and everything was always the end of the word with her. She’s technically my half-sister—our father got around—but she’d needed a guardian, and I was happy with the job, mostly. Having Clara had taught me how to work around constant distractions. “Bekah! Bekah! Hilly’s lost! He went in the basement and I can’t find him!” She wore an old-fashioned white pinafore (slowly turning gray from crawling around in dirty places) she’d found in some wardrobe and gotten attached to.
I looked up from my easel in my light-filled, glass-walled studio, where I was attempting to paint a view of the north pole of Jupiter from memory and a regrettably blurry photo. I opened my mouth to say “We don’t have a basement” but didn’t. We hadn’t had a grand ballroom, either, or an indoor swimming pool, or a room with leather club chairs and the stuffed and mounted heads of cryptozoological specimens hanging on the walls, until suddenly we did. I’d assumed the Grace house was sprouting new rooms at random, at first, but a bit of observation and research revealed patterns to me: new appearances keyed to astronomical events, or ancient magical time-locks popping open, or old wards from my father’s day wearing off with time. I’d even successfully predicted the appearance of the walk-in freezer a week before it showed up in a corner of the kitchen. I couldn’t discount the possibility that the house had developed a basement, but I double-checked: “Do you mean the root cellar?” There was a little excavated area by the north side of the house, with a wooden trapdoor set into the ground and a dirt floor and timbered ceiling beyond, more like the spider-hole where a deposed despot would hide from retribution than a proper cellar. We didn’t use that space for anything, and you couldn’t get lost in it any more than you could get lost in a bathtub.
Clara rolled her eyes. She was going to be a delight as a teenager. “No, there’s a basement now, a door opened up in the kitchen. Hilly went down there when we were playing hide-and-seek and he vanished!” She hugged herself and shivered.
I groaned. “You know it’s dangerous to play hide-and-seek in here—”
“Can I be in trouble after you find my friend?” That was fair, so I put my brush down. I popped up to my room and put on a necklace and earrings and assorted rings until I decided I was ready for an eldritch subterranean exploration. My father was a great sorcerer—he mastered more things that I’ll ever even try, though rather at the cost of life-work balance—but he’d been pretty haphazard about his enchantments, putting spells of clairvoyance on spoons and invisibility on trucks and healing on swords. I preferred to keep my most useful magics close to me in the form of fashion accessories, even though being fully loaded for bear made me look like a dramatically minded pre-teen who’d just discovered a trove of costume jewelry.
“What’s it like down there?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Concrete floor. One light bulb with spiderwebs on it. Lots of shelves with lots of jars. A workbench, with some old tools, but he wasn’t hiding under there. He’s easy to find, Bekah, he’s terrible at hiding.”
“You’re sure he went through the new door though? Weren’t you counting with your eyes closed while he hid? Maybe he went somewhere else.”
“I was peeking.” Totally matter-of fact. I snorted, and she gave me her Little-Miss-Prim look. “You always say it’s dangerous to hide in the house, so I wanted to make sure he was safe.” She chewed on her thumbnail for a moment. “Will he be okay, Bekah? There’s no bad stuff left in the house, right?”
We’d cleaned the place. Thoroughly. In multiple dimensions. But when new rooms appeared.... “He probably just found a secret passageway or something. You know our father loved that stuff. I wouldn’t worry about it. If I can’t find him the regular way I’ll use magic.”
“You’re not supposed to use magic to win games, it’s cheating, but since you’re not playing, I guess it’s okay.” Clara had more experience with magic than I did. I’d never even met my sorcerer father while he was alive, living my whole life with my adopted parents, and I hadn’t known magic was real until I’d inherited Archibald Grace’s house and powers a couple of years earlier, but the old man had been an intermittent part of Clara’s life, and he’d shown her things.
Trey was out lawyering—we didn’t really need money, with my inheritance and other skills, but being a kept man wasn’t his style—so I planted Clara on the good couch in the primary living room and told her to call him and tell him what was going on if I didn’t come back up in half an hour. (Clara liked Trey, though she kept pestering us about when we were going to get married. She wanted desperately to be a flower girl, and we were her best shot.) Trey knew how to activate the failsafes if something went seriously bad. I didn’t think the house was going to eat me, and my phone was so magically enhanced I’d successfully texted people from the moon, but better safe.
Once I’d secured Clara’s promise, I went to the kitchen, where there was indeed a new door on one wall. It was creepy-looking, I won’t lie. Super narrow, like half the width of a normal door, made of splintered gray wood, with a knob that looked like it had been carved from the bone of an extinct leviathan, which maybe it had. This had been my father’s house, and held his secrets. What kind of things would he hide in a basement, especially since he’d then gone on to hide the basement itself?
I took a small bottle of what was mostly my blood from the fridge and smeared a couple of dabs on the new door’s lintel, to bind the passageway and the space beyond to this location, so the basement wouldn’t go wandering again. Wouldn’t do for me and Hilly both to get lost.
After ascertaining there were no bad enchantments on the door itself, I reached for the knob. My phone buzzed, and I sighed, checked the screen, and then sighed harder.
Hilly’s mom Jilly (I know): hi how are the kids? coming to get Hilly around 2 if that’s okay
Jilly was a tiny yoga instructor who believed in the value of juic
e cleanses, but I halfway liked her anyway, because she was so friendly it was hard not too... even though I was pretty sure she was so nice to me because she wanted to have a black friend, especially one from Chicago, which I think made me count as extra-black. At least she believed in vaccination, so by our hippie-mountain-town standards she was barely woo-woo at all. When she took Clara for playdates everyone thought they were mother and daughter, because they’re both pale and blonde. People usually assume I’m Clara’s nanny. Even when you’re an independently wealthy sorcerer the world finds ways to crap on you when you look like me.
I texted back: They’re having a great time! See you then
So I had about an hour, though Jilly’s relationship with time was fairly casual, and “around 2” could mean as late as 2:45. I was trying really hard not to worry, because I’d done a pretty thorough cleansing the dangerous stuff from the house, but a surprise basement was troubling. With luck Hilly was just really good at hiding, and hadn’t fallen through a crack in reality or something, though in a normal case you could find him just by following the sound of sniffle-and-hack.
I opened the door on a narrow, steep, wooden staircase leading down to darkness. There was a light switch, of the old push-button sort, and I pushed, waking up a big globe of a lightbulb dangling from wires in the ceiling. The basement room was maybe fifteen feet square, lots of wooden shelves full of mason jars, a workbench on one wall, pretty much what Clara had described, though there was a big double sink, too, and some dusty steel pots bristling with gauges. I descended cautiously, my pearl earrings whispering about the presence of magic down there, and I could see a few of the tools scattered on the workbench were enchanted, as were the pots and some of the jars. The magical objects glowed in my vision, limned in gold, though I wasn’t sure what they did, and wasn’t inclined to investigate just now.
“Hilly?” I called. No answer. Once I got to the bottom, I checked under the stairs, but found neither children nor bogeymen, just spiderwebs, and not even any spiders. They’d probably died of starvation during whatever unknown time this room had been perpendicular to normal space. Well, crap.
I noted a pile of broken glass on the concrete floor. One of the jars had gotten smashed, though it must have been empty, because there was no splotch of preserves among the shards. The scores of other jars on the shelves were mostly full of preserved fruit in red and purple and peachy gold, though there were also pickles, and what looked like sauerkraut and kim chi, too... along with some jars whose contents were simply unidentifiable, weird swirls of mystery glop in colors I couldn’t have named even with the help of a pantone palette (and as a painter, colors are kind of my thing). Probably mystery fruits from other universes or planets, with bizarre psychogenic and aphrodisiacal properties. The fancy pots were pressure canners, and I assumed the enchantments laid on them were meant to make them run without power. It was hard to imagine giant-slaying sorcerer Archibald Grace making peach preserves and apple butter, but apparently he had. The guy had possessed layers, you had to give him that.
“Hilly!” I called again. “You win at hiding, come on out!” I didn’t expect an answer, and serious worry was creeping in on little rat feet, but suddenly Hilly came crawling out from underneath the workbench. I knelt down to look at where he’d been, and saw a dark wooden panel with a hinged top, access to some crawlspace behind the walls. “Good hiding!” I said. “But maybe don’t hide that way again, okay? Clara was worried.”
Hilly looked at me with eyes as blank as dead headlights and then scampered up the stairs. I laughed, a little jagged with relief, then looked behind the panel just to make sure it wasn’t full of venomous reptiles or something. The space behind was about as big as the inside of a dryer: a little cubicle room with dirt sides. I had no idea what purpose it had served, if any, but the house was full of random hidey-holes like that. Our father liked them. He was a hoarder, a hider, and a squirreller-away. Still, tight fit, even for Hilly. The kid must have folded himself practically in half to fit in there. No wonder Clara hadn’t found him.
I took photos of the preserves with my phone and sent a couple to Trey: Lookit. We have a basement now and weird preserves. Tasting party?
He replied: Pretty sure we’d turn into toads if we ate any of that stuff
Me: Never been a toad before, very interested, big fan of hopping
Him: Seriously I bet it’s all monster blood and ghost poison
Me: You have no sense of culinary adventure
Him: Do you remember the Thai street food incident because I do
Me: ha ha no, your lack of good taste is not the same as a sense of adventure, that’s a common mistake
I love that guy. I went back to the kitchen, and the kids were on their way up the stairs (toward the safety of the playroom, I hoped), Hilly in the lead, Clara pursuing. I decided not to go back to painting, and started poking through the fridge and cupboards instead, because it was my night to cook. Trey’s dinner nights tended toward the elaborate and multi-course, while I was more inclined to make quesadillas or pancakes and call it good, but we had a ton of great strange heirloom tomatoes from the garden and I was thinking of doing gazpacho and a caprese salad, which had the advantage of seeming fancy while still being pretty easy.
I was glaring at some wilted basil when Clara stomped into the kitchen. She crossed her arms and glared up at me. “Bekah. That is not Hilly.” She scowled at me expectantly.
“You’re gonna have to give me some more words there, kid.”
“That boy, or whatever it is. It’s not Hilly. It’s something else.”
Those rat feet were back, scuttling up my spine. “Why... what makes you say that?”
“I know Hilly. And I know about things looking like things they aren’t.” Very briefly, her body flickered, becoming misty and insubstantial, her features fogged over like a steamed-up mirror, and then she snapped back to clarity. Our father had been human, albeit altered by magic, but while my biological mother was homo sapiens too, Clara’s mom was something else, a shapeshifting creature of the forest, something like a will-o-the-wisp. (As I said: our father got around.) “He hasn’t said anything since he came upstairs, and he’s not sniffling. Where did you find that thing?”
The ability to teleport to the orbit of Jupiter to take reference photos for a painting is pretty nice, but there are times I wish I lived the kind of life where I could safely dismiss the possibility that a child had been replaced my some kind of supernatural duplicate escaped from my impossible magical basement. “He came out of this little hidey-hole under the workbench, this little square space—”
She shook her head firmly. “Hilly is scared of small places, and also the dark, that’s part of why he’s terrible at hiding. It’s not Hilly.”
I groaned. “Okay. Where is he—”
“It.”
“Where is whatever came out of the basement now?”
“Trying to break into your bedroom.”
Where I kept all my best enchantments. Well, crap. I went to the desk in Trey’s study and took out a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses, then told Clara to run out to the barn and wait. The house was warded in a number of impressive ways, but it occurred to me that most of them were no good against something that came from inside. The barn, which was more of a junk-shed, had a whole separate set of enchantments on it, though: it was the magical equivalent of a bomb shelter. I considered telling Trey to come home, but though he was cute, capable, and had a quirkier sense of humor than you’d think to look at him, he didn’t know thing one about using magic, and drawing him into what might become a supernatural conflict seemed an invitation to disaster.
My phone buzzed. Jilly texting again: finished errands early, coming over now, I have wine
She put a little wineglass emoji after the word “wine.” I did prefer her company when I was a little drunk, and at least she hadn’t said she was bringing over kale smoothies. “See you soon!” I wrote back. Just what this situation needed:
a ticking clock.
Clara went on her way, and I crept upstairs. I had a natural sense for magic, as part of my inheritance from my father, but the glasses enhanced my power: they were the difference between the Hubble and a backyard telescope.
Even so, the kid’s disguise was good. I paused at the top of the stairs, looking down the hallway, where he stood with his scruffy head bowed, palms pressed against the extremely well defended door to my bedroom. For a long moment he just looked like a little boy, and then I saw purple threads of smoke rising from the top of his head, invisible to normal eyes, betraying some otherworldly (or at least inhuman) origin.
“Hi,” I said. “You probably knew my father. Archibald Grace.”
He—or it, whatever—turned its head and blinked at me in a good approximation of Hilly’s typical blankness. The voice was even Hilly’s, though less mumbly and sniffly than usual: “The beast had a daughter.”
I shrugged. I’d heard my father called worse, and for good reason. “So, couple of questions. First, what did you do with Hilly?”
The thing smiled, then, and its teeth glittered, not like teeth at all, but like crystal and glass. “I did nothing—nothing—that was not done to me.”
Which meant the kid wasn’t dead, at least, assuming this thing was trustworthy. And also assuming it wasn’t dead. Sometimes it was hard to tell. “I’d like to get him back, and then I’d like you to get out of my house. How can we make that happen with a minimum of fuss and violence?”
The thing dropped its hands from the door and stalked toward me, swelling as it came, shoulders broadening, legs lengthening. Its eyes filled with orange light, and it reached out with a hand suddenly made of fire.
Okay then. I flicked my right hand, the one with the malachite ring. Manacles of spectral steel appeared on the thing’s wrists, chains disappearing into the shadows in the hall, and dragged its arms backward at an angle that would have been shoulder-dislocating for a human. The thing howled, a sound with bizarre echoes, like it was inside a cave instead of my hallway, and then its whole body burst into flame. Except “flame” wasn’t right: it was more like a burning strip of magnesium, white hot and blinding.
