“Here’s the crux of the problem. Suppose that there is a gate somewhere in this house, and suppose he could get through it. We’ve got no way to tell him that.”
“The dreams told me he couldn’t reach us, not that we couldn’t reach him.” Aunt Eileen frowned at the floor. “That doesn’t sound helpful now that I say it aloud.”
The angel appeared beside her. “Think!” It waggled its wings at me. “Messengers can go where angels fear to tread.” It vanished.
“Actually, it’s very helpful.” I stood up. “These cookies are oatmeal-raisin, huh? Can I have one?”
“What? Of course!” She turned to Ari. “Any time that I can make her eat is a triumph. She won’t, usually.”
“I’ve noticed that,” he said. “I’ve been coaxing her, but she’s stubborn.”
Sean and Al both laughed. I reminded myself that I could kick Ari later and merely smiled. By her phone Aunt Eileen had a pad and pencil for messages. I took a piece of paper and wrote “Mike, go to the Houlihans’. Nola.”
When Eileen handed me a cookie, I started to leave the kitchen. She hurried after me.
“Nola,” she said, “you can eat in front of other people.”
“Huh?”
Aunt Eileen frowned. “You don’t have to hide when you eat something.”
“Oh. This isn’t really for me. There’s this creature—”
I would have said more, but her frown disappeared. “I suppose,” Aunt Eileen said, “you really do know what you’re doing. After all, the government trusts you.”
With a sigh she returned to the kitchen. As I continued down the hallway, I was thinking of Ari’s smartass crack about my having an eating disorder. I shoved the thought away. I had something more important to attend to.
At the ghostwalk angle I crouched down and made the chirruping noise that Kathleen uses to call her cats at feeding time. With an answering chirp the lizard-meerkat thing walked out of the wall. Its long scaly nose twitched as it sat up to beg. I wrapped the cookie in the note and handed both over. With a snap of yellow claws it grabbed the bundle, then nibbled them together. When it finished, it licked its lips with a long green tongue, then dropped to all fours.
“Michael,” I told it. “Find Michael. He looks like me.” I pointed to my face. “Michael, my brother. Find him.”
It trotted for the wall and vanished. I could only hope that the Agency’s FAQ sheet on Chaos creatures was accurate. I’d followed the stated procedure for transferring information via lizard mail. Whether my ugly little friend could find Michael was another question entirely. I stood up and realized that Ari was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at me.
“What happened to that biscuit?” he said. “I saw you place it in midair, and then it disappeared bit by bit.”
“I was feeding an invisible creature,” I said, “just like the ones you didn’t see that day you went to the office without me.”
“I suppose you were talking to it, too.”
“Yeah. You should be used to that by now.”
“I’m trying.”
He looked so woebegone that I walked over and reached up to kiss him, a very modest in-the-family-house kiss, and patted his arm. “You’re heroic,” I said and decided not to kick him later.
Back in the kitchen, Al was shredding grilled steak for the lasagna—no fatty hamburger meat for him—while Aunt Eileen had joined Sean at the table. When Ari and I sat down, she made her usual offer of getting out the photo albums. My first thought was to change the subject fast, but luckily the Collective Data Stream came to my aid. I had a second thought.
“Do you have any pictures of Nanny Houlihan?” I said. “Like in her sitting room?”
“I probably do,” Aunt Eileen said. “I wonder where they are? I haven’t thought about her in years.”
“How nice for you,” Sean said. “A blessing!”
We all laughed, except Ari, whom the Fates had spared from knowing her. While Eileen hunted for the pictures in her collection of albums, I explained about Nanny. She’d been a schoolteacher in her youth, and old habits die hard. She would suddenly turn to the nearest child and point while snarling out questions like “twice nine!” God help you if you got the wrong answer!
“She liked to rap small children on the head with one finger,” I finished up, “a finger wearing a steel thimble, that is.”
“The heavy china one with roses was worse,” Sean put in.
“Oh, now, honestly!” Aunt Eileen returned, carrying an old-fashioned leather photo album. “When people get old, they lose their patience easily. Well, not that she ever had a lot to lose.”
More laughter, and Aunt Eileen opened the album with a flourish. When she set it down in front of me, Ari turned a little in his chair to look. One photo, a faded black-and-white, showed Nanny in her sitting room, a thin, sour-faced woman with her hair done up in a messy bun on top of her head. She sat rigidly straight on an uncushioned chair, her hands folded tightly in her lap, and glared out at the camera. Behind her I could pick out the violets on the wallpaper, a fair bit darker than they currently were. A good-sized crucifix hung on the wall, the only other decoration, if you could call it that.
“That!” Sean pointed at the crucifix. “I remember that. The pope blessed it or something. She always said she wanted to be buried with it.”
“She wasn’t, though,” Aunt Eileen said. “When she passed away, I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it, not anywhere in the house.”
“You should have called Sean.” Al turned from his cooking and smiled at Sean.
“He was away at school, dear,” Eileen said, “or I would have.”
Sean returned the smile, then let it fade. He got up and stood looking out into space, his soft mouth slack.
“That’s it,” he said. “Come on, Nola. Aunt Eileen, can I borrow a good strong knife?”
“What are you going to do with it?” Eileen stood up and glanced at the counter.
“Make a cut on the wall of her old sitting room. I think the crucifix is in there. What do you bet she put it between the studs or something to scare the ghosts off?”
“Oh, good lord!” Eileen rolled her eyes heavenward. “She got so odd by the end, but Jim wouldn’t hear of putting her in a home.”
Aunt Eileen rummaged through kitchen drawers until she found an old but formidable looking carving knife. She handed it to Sean with her usual ritual reminder to be careful and not run with it. I followed him as he trotted out of the kitchen. At the ghostwalk angle I paused for a scan, but I picked up no trace of the Chaos critter.
In the erstwhile sitting room the sun still shone through the window, enough light for Sean to start digging at the wallpaper in the area I’d seen as water damage. I thought that getting through the wallboard underneath would be a chore, but the knife slit a double layer of paper and revealed a hollow space. Sean handed me the knife and pulled a long strip of wallpaper right off. We could see the mangled edge of what had once been wallboard and beyond that, the lumber forming the wall itself. Another slit, more pulled paper, and there it was, Nanny’s crucifix, jammed into the wall between two studs.
“She must have cut this hole in the wallboard herself,” Sean said. “With those old sewing shears of hers.”
“Or else she gnawed it with her fangs,” I said. “I’d guess she pasted a strip of leftover paper back over the hole, and that’s why it was such an odd color.”
I took the crucifix out and held it up to the light. Its years of incarceration had tarnished it black, turning it into an effective ward against both Chaos and Harmony.
“The gate’s open now,” Sean said quietly. “I can feel it.”
My heart thudded once, then steadied itself.
“Let’s hope Mike can find it, is all,” I said.
“Yeah. What should we do with that?” He nodded at the crucifix.
“If we polish it up, I bet Uncle Jim will be glad to have it, a reminder of his mother and all.”
&n
bsp; “He probably will.” His voice turned flat and cold. “For some odd reason.”
“How’s our mother treating you these days?”
“The same as always. I wish she’d lay off Al, is all. She keeps calling him ‘that fag,’ and then she cocks her little head and simpers like she’s said something cute.”
“Anger pretending to be just a joke, yeah. That’s her MO. Or part of it.”
Sean started trembling. I got a good grip on the crucifix with one hand and caught his arm with the other.
“Let’s go back to the kitchen,” I said. “I think I just heard Brian come in.”
“Yeah, I heard him, too. He had basketball practice today.”
In the kitchen Brian was standing by the table and stuffing cookies into his teenage metabolism. With his mouth full he mumbled a hello, then took a handful of cookies from the plate and bolted. I heard him pounding up the stairs.
“He still feels guilty about teasing Michael,” Aunt Eileen said. “If it looks like Michael’s really gone, I’ll have to get him into counseling.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Do you have any silver polish?”
“Baking soda’s better,” Al put in. “I saw some in the cupboard by the fridge. Aunt Eileen, do you have an old aluminum pan?”
“Of course,” Eileen said. “I save it for cleaning silver.”
Trust them to know, I thought. While Al finished assembling the lasagna, Aunt Eileen took over cleaning up the crucifix. She agreed that Jim would be glad to have it. While she worked, she chattered along about Nanny, Nanny’s husband, other Houlihans, old family stories that I’d heard a hundred times, yet hearing them again comforted me. Soon, I supposed, our grief over Pat would have receded enough for us to tell stories about him, whether rueful or humorous.
Every now and then I’d glance at Ari. I expected him to be bored halfway to tears, but he listened with what appeared to be real attention. A couple of times he even asked a question. Somewhere inside him, I thought, lurked a core of good manners if he could feign so much interest.
There were only a couple of cookies left on the plate when I heard a whine at the door into the hall. I looked and saw the Chaos creature, sitting up and staring at me. I took a cookie, grabbed another piece of paper and wrote, “bottom storage room.” The creature followed me out to the ghostwalk angle, where I hunkered down. The creature stared at the cookie and licked its green lips.
“Find Michael?” I said.
It nodded a yes. I wondered if the nod truly meant it had found Michael or if it was lying in order to get the cookie. I handed over the loot anyway, just because it looked so hungry. It crunched the note and cookie down, drooled, then turned and darted back through the gate.
I’d gotten my plan underway. Now I had nothing to do but wait, hope, and try to think of another plan to use when this one failed. Optimistic I was not.
I’d just returned to the kitchen when the phone rang. Aunt Eileen left off simmering Nanny Houlihan’s crucifix at the stove and answered, smiled, then turned to the rest of us.
“It’s Dan!” she said. “He’s in Chicago. He’ll get here tonight. Late, but tonight.”
Sean and I cheered, yelled, and called out greetings that Dan probably couldn’t hear until Aunt Eileen told us, with great dignity, to pipe down.
“He’s only got a few minutes till his plane leaves,” she said. “I need to write the time and all of that down.”
I got up and handed her the pad and pencil. Out of the corner of my eye I caught movement in the doorway: my Chaos creature had returned yet again. I took the last cookie from the plate and followed it into the hall. This time it trotted past the ghostwalk corner into the living room, where it stopped and looked back at me. I followed, and it trotted across the living room to the hall that led to the other upstairs.
At the door to Nanny’s old sitting room it stopped and looked up at me with a wag of its scaly tail. I opened the door and realized that the room had changed. The cartons had disappeared, the wallpaper, too—painted yellow boards covered the walls. Instead of a shade, a dirty piece of old sheet hung drooping at the window. The creature sat on its haunches, paused to scratch under its chin with a hind paw, then whined at me. I threw it the cookie, which it snatched neatly from the air and gulped down.
The creature walked into the room, then paused to look at me over its shoulder. I considered following it in, but an attack of intelligence stopped me. It would do the family no good if I disappeared along with Michael. Besides, I could hear voices just outside the window. One of them sounded like an old man’s, thick with a Hispanic accent and a hard, exhausted edge to every word. A shape appeared just beyond the filthy glass.
“Get your hands off that window,” the old man said to the shape. “You no can go in there.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Michael! But I’d never heard him snarl like that, never heard so much rage in his young voice. “Get out of my way.”
The window slid up with a screech and a scatter of dried paint. Michael swung one leg in, then the other, and slithered through the window into the room. The moment his feet touched the floor, the room changed back. Violets on the wallpaper, a shade over the window, stacks of cardboard cartons—my brother stood in the midst of it all, staring at me.
Dirt streaked Michael’s jeans and the Juan Marichal replica jersey he was wearing. He’d combed his oily hair straight back from his dirty face, which looked thinner, too, as if maybe he hadn’t eaten in a while. The creature did a little four-legged dance and trotted over to him.
“Nola?” Michael said. “Is that really you?”
“It is,” I said. “Come on, get out of there before the gate switches again.”
Michael ran across the room and into the hallway. The creature skittered after him, then disappeared. I shut the door to the room, then turned to speak to him. He smiled at me, took one step, and passed out. I caught him, and although I staggered under his weight, I managed to lay him down before he hit the floor. The weight, and the way he stank of old sweat, reassured me that, yes, he had really returned.
“Ari!” I yelled across the living room. “Al!”
I heard them call back that they were on the way. I knelt down beside Michael and laid a hand on his cheek, which sported an ugly blue and purple bruise, though the skin looked unbroken. He lay so still that I grew terrified. Was he going to die right there in the hall?
“What?” Ari came running and stopped to stare. “That’s your brother.”
“It sure is, but something’s wrong.”
Between them Ari and Al picked Michael up and carried him into the living room while Sean hovered, mouthing useless advice. Brian shoved the brown armchair into a reclining position; then Al and Ari draped Michael into it. Aunt Eileen came in from the kitchen with a bowl of water and a wad of paper towels. When she began to wash Michael’s face, he opened his eyes and stared at her.
“Am I really home?” he whispered.
“Yes, dear,” Aunt Eileen said. “But I do think you need to see a doctor.”
“Not right now. Please. I want to be home.” He struggled to sit up, finally managed it, and swung the chair down so he could sit upright. “Nola?”
“I’m right here.”
“I got your notes. That thing barfed them up on my shoes.”
“I’d always wondered how they relayed information,” I said. “Well, now we know.”
Everyone else turned to look at me, a bristling hedge of questioning glances. I heard the back door open, then bang shut. I was saved from having to explain when Uncle Jim called out from the kitchen.
“I’m home! Where is everyone?”
“In the living room, darling,” Aunt Eileen called back.
Uncle Jim came clomping down the hall and walked into the room. He glanced at the tenant of the brown armchair and stopped to stare, then took a few more steps, grinning all the while.
“Michael!” he said. “Thank God.” He wiped t
he smile away and arranged a scowl. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Now I know I’m really home,” Michael said. “Uncle J, I don’t know where I was. I really honest to God don’t, except it looked like San Francisco, but it wasn’t. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re going to have to,” I said, “but maybe not tonight. We had the police looking for you and everything.”
“Dinner first,” Aunt Eileen said. “Al, why don’t you start that lasagna?” She glanced my way. “I’m going to have to call your mother.”
“Not right now!” Michael sat up a little straighter. “She’ll want to chew me out.” He turned to me in appeal. “I bet she’s not even worried. I bet she’s just mad.”
“Being angry is how she expresses her worry,” I said. “But you know, Aunt Eileen, you could wait a couple of hours to call. The saints will forgive you.”
“Yeah,” Uncle Jim put in, “wait until after I’ve had my dinner, at least, so I can digest the damn thing without having to listen to her.”
When Al started for the kitchen to put the lasagna in the oven, Sean followed him. Aunt Eileen followed Sean because she wanted to start making the salad, and Uncle Jim drifted after her. I sent Ari into the kitchen to fetch Michael a glass of milk and some soda crackers to settle his stomach down.
Brian stood looking at his cousin for a moment. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I never should have piled it on about that thing.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. “I might have done it anyway. I dunno. It kind of called to me.”
Brian turned and bolted. I could hear him running up the stairs toward his room. Once we were alone, Michael leaned back to rest his head against the chair.
“What happened to me?” He looked up at me with eyes desperate to understand.
“I was hoping you could tell me. Let me make a guess, though. You walked through that portal in the park.”
“Yeah. Big mistake.”
“Do you remember what happened next?”
“Some kind of electric shock. After that I didn’t remember much of anything for a while. I mean, like a couple of hours. I just sat there in the park and looked at the sand dunes where Fulton used to be.” His eyes filled with tears. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
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