by Ellen Datlow
* * *
Andy woke in his own bed with a dry mouth but no other discernable effects from the night before. In the red and white bedroom, his laptop was open. When he looked to see what he’d written, it was only this: How to work? Deer in house. Not sanitary!!! WTF. He deleted these.
When he went downstairs, though, there were no deer and no Rose White, either. She’d left a note on the kitchen table. “Headed out. Finished off bacon but did a big clean (badly needed!) so think we’re even. Thanks for the hospitality. Left you the rest of the mushrooms. Use sensibly! Take care if I don’t see you again. Fondly, Rose White.”
“Fondly,” Andy said. He wasn’t really even sure what that meant. It was one of those signoffs like “kind regards” or “best wishes.” A kiss-off, basically. Well. “Summer loving, had me a blast.” Lester’s acapella group liked to sing that one. He didn’t even have her phone number.
While he was microwaving a bowl of oatmeal, he inspected the tile floor of the kitchen. He actually got down on his hands and knees. What was he looking for? Rose White? Some deer tracks? The rest of his dissertation?
He gave himself the rest of the day off. Texted Hannah: There are a lot of deer around here, right? Do they ever come up to the house?
She texted right back: Lots of deer, yes. Bears too, sometimes.
Well. He didn’t feel like explaining that he’d had shrooms with a houseguest he’d also been having sex with, and that possibly he had let some deer into the house. Or else hallucinated this.
Without Rose White in his bed, he found he did not fall asleep easily. Neither did he work, in his sleep, on his dissertation. He made some progress during the days, but it was much like it had been in the apartment in Philadelphia, except here he had no excuse.
About a week after Rose White had gone, the servants’ bell rang again. It wasn’t midnight yet, and he was in bed, skipping to the end of a Harlan Coben novel because the middle was very long and all he really wanted was to see how it all came out.
He put a pair of pants on and went downstairs. At the back door was a wild turkey. After deliberating, Andy did as he was supposed to do and let it in. It did not seem at all wary of him, and why should it have been? It was an invited guest. Andy went into the living room and sat on the couch. The turkey investigated all the corners of the room, making little grunting noises, and then defecated neatly on the hearth of the fireplace. Its cheeks were violet, and its neck was bright red. It flew up on top of the cord of stacked wood and puffed out all the formidable armature of its feathers. Andy’s phone was on the table: he took a picture. The turkey did not object. It seemed, in fact, to already be sleeping.
Andy, too, went up to bed. In the morning, the turkey was waiting by the back door and he let it out again. He cleaned up the shit on the hearth and two other places. This was when, no doubt, he should have called Hannah. But she was probably waiting for him to do exactly that, and really, she should have been up front with him. And also, he realized, he was having a good time. It was like being inside an enchantment. Why would he want to break the spell? The next night the bell rang again, though to Andy’s disappointment it was neither a beautiful girl nor a creature at the back door. A grayish man of about sixty in Birkenstocks, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, and khaki shorts nodded but did not speak when Andy opened the door. He did not bother to introduce himself. He didn’t speak at all. Instead, he went straight upstairs, took a long shower, using all the towels in the bathroom, and then slept for two days in the blue and green bedroom. Andy kept his bedroom door locked while the gray man was in the house. It was a relief, frankly, when he was gone again. After that, it was an opossum, and the night after the opossum, the mist was on the ground again. Skinder’s Veil. When the bell began to ring, Andy went down to let his guest in, but no one was at the kitchen door. He went to the front door, but to his relief, no one was there either. The bell continued to ring, and so Andy went to the kitchen door again. When he opened the door, the mist came swiftly seeping in, covering the tile floor and the feet of the kitchen table and the kitchen chairs. Andy closed the door and at once the bell began to ring again. He opened the door and left it open. The guest was, perhaps, Skinder’s Veil itself, or perhaps it was something which preferred to remain hidden inside the Veil. Andy, thinking of Bronwen’s ghost, went up to his bedroom and shut the door and locked it. He rolled up his pants and wedged them against the bottom of the door. He left his lights on and did not sleep at all that night, but in the morning he was the only one in the house and the day was very sunny and bright. The door was shut tight again.
The last human guest while Andy was in Skinder’s house was Rose White’s sister, Rose Red.
* * *
When Andy opened the kitchen door, it was Rose White who stood there. Except, perhaps it was not. This person had the same features— eyes, nose, mouth—only their arrangement was somehow unfamiliar. Sharper, as if this version of Rose White would never think of anyone fondly. Now her hair was exuberantly, unnaturally purple-red, and there was a metal stud in one nostril.
“Rose Red,” she said. “May I come in?”
This was the sister, then. Only, as she spoke Andy saw a familiar crooked tooth. This must be Rose White, hair colored and newly styled. And would he even have noticed her nose was pierced previously? Not if she’d not had her stud in. Well. He would play along.
“Come in,” he said. “I’m Andy. Filling in for the original housesitter. Your sister was here about a week ago.”
“My sister?” she said.
“Rose White,” Andy said. It was like being in a play where you’d never seen the script. He had to give Rose White this: she wasn’t boring.
“We don’t even have the same last name,” Rose Red said. She looked very prim as she said this. She was, it was true, a little taller than he remembered Rose White being, but then he saw her ankle boots had two-inch heels. Had she really come up the path wearing those? Mystery upon mystery.
He said, “My mistake. Sorry.” After all, who was he to talk? He’d managed not even one complete paragraph in two days. Maybe he’d do better now that she was here again.
Rose Red (or Rose White) went rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. “Help yourself,” he said. “I was just about to make dinner.”
Rose Red was regarding the plate beside the sink where Rose White’s mushrooms were drying out. “Yours?” she said.
Andy said, “Happy to share. You going to make tea?”
“What if I made some risotto?” she said.
And so Andy set the table and poured them both a glass of wine, while Rose Red made dinner. The risotto was quite tasty and, Andy saw, she had used all of the mushrooms. Once again, he tried to discover more about the owner of the house, but like Rose White, Rose Red was an expert at deflection. Had he hiked any of the paths, she wanted to know. What did he think of the area?
“I’ve been kind of busy,” Andy said. “Trying to finish my dissertation. It’s why I’m here, actually. I needed to be able to focus.”
“And when you’re finished?” Rose Red said.
“Then I’ll defend and go on the job market,” Andy said. “And hopefully get a teaching job somewhere. Tenure track, ideally.”
“That’s what you’ll do,” Rose Red said. “But what do you want?”
“To do a good job,” Andy said. “And then, I suppose, to be good at teaching.”
Rose Red appeared satisfied by this. “Have you been on the trails at all? Gone hiking? So much to explore up here.”
“Well,” Andy said. “Like I said, I’ve been busy. And I don’t actually like trees that much. But the Veil is pretty interesting. And people keep showing up. That’s been interesting, too. Rose White, the one I mentioned before, she had all these weird stories.” He wasn’t sure whether or not he should bring up all the sex.
After dinner they had more wine and Rose Red found a puzzle. Andy didn’t much care for puzzles, but he sat down to help her with it. The longer they worked on it, the har
der it grew to fit the pieces together. Eventually, he gave up and sat, watching how his fingers elongated, wriggling like narrow fish.
Upstairs, one of the bells began to ring again. “I’ll get that,” Andy said, excusing himself from the puzzle of the puzzle. In the kitchen he could perceive, once again, that it was not a kitchen at all. Really, it was all just part of the forest. All just trees. The puzzle, too, had been trees, chopped into little bits that needed arranging into a path. It was fine. It was fine, too, that a brown bear stood on its hind legs at the door, depressing the bell.
“Come in, good sir, come in,” Andy said.
The bear dropped down onto all fours, squeezing its bulk into the kitchen. It brought with it a wild, loamy reek. Andy followed the bear back into the living space where Rose Whatever Her Name Was sat, finishing the puzzle. You could see the little fleas jumping in the bear’s fur like sequins.
Rose Red jumped up and got the serving bowl with the remains of the pasta. She placed it before the bear, who stuck its whole snout in. Andy lay down on the floor and observed. When the bear was done, it leant back against the couch. Rose Red scratched its head, digging her fingers deep into its fur. They stayed like that for a while, Rose Red scratching, the bear drowsing, Andy content to lie on the floor and watch them and think about nothing.
“This one,” Rose Red said to the bear. “He’s going to be a great teacher.”
“Well,” Andy said. “First there’s the dissertation. Defend. Then. Go on the job market. Be offered something somewhere. Get tenure. There’s a whole path. You have to go along it. Through all the fucking trees. Like Little Red. Little Red Riding Hood. You know that story?”
“I don’t care much for stories,” Rose Red said.
“Oh, come on,” Andy said. “Tell me one. Make it up. Tell me one about this place.”
“Once upon a time there was a girl whose mother died when she was very young.” It wasn’t Rose Red, though, who was speaking. It was the bear. Andy was fairly sure that it was the bear, which he felt should have troubled him more than it did. Perhaps, though, it was all ventriloquism. Or the mushrooms. He closed his eyes and the bear, or Rose Red, went on with the story.
* * *
“Once there was a girl whose mother died when she was very young. They lived on a street where almost every house had a swimming pool in the backyard. Not the girl’s house, but the house on either side did. There was an incident, the girl never knew exactly what, and the mother drowned in the swimming pool that belonged to the house on the left. It was a mystery why she was in it. It was late at night, and no one knew when or why she had come over. Everyone else had been asleep: her body wasn’t discovered until morning.
“When she wasn’t much older, the girl’s father remarried a woman with a daughter of her own. Don’t worry, though, this isn’t a story about a wicked stepmother. The girl and her stepmother and the stepsister all got along quite well, much better, in fact, than the girl got along with her own father. But all through her adolescence, there were stories about the pool next door; that it was haunted. The family who had lived there when the mother drowned moved away—the new family loved their house and their pool, but it was said that they never went swimming after midnight. Anyone who went swimming after midnight ran the risk of seeing the ghost down in the deep end, long hair floating around her face, her bathing suit losing its elasticity, her mouth open and full of water.
“The girl sometimes swam in the neighbor’s pool, hoping she would see her mother’s ghost, and also afraid that she would see her mother’s ghost. All the girls in the neighborhood liked to swim in that pool best. They would dare each other to swim after midnight, and the rest would take turns sitting on the edge of the pool, facing away, in case the ghost was too shy to appear in front of them all. Sometimes one of the girls even saw the ghost—a thrill, a ghost of their very own!—but the girl whose mother had drowned never saw anything at all.
“Eventually, she grew up and moved away and made a life of her own. She had a husband and two children and thought that she was quite happy on the whole. The path of her life seemed straightforward and she moved along it. Her father died, and she grieved, but her stepmother was the one who had been her true parent. Her mother she hardly remembered at all. Life went on, and if the path grew a little rockier, her prospects a little less rosy, what of it? Life can’t always be easy. Then, one day, her stepsister called to say that her stepmother, too, was dead.
“The daughter left her children with her husband and flew down for the funeral. Afterward, she and her stepsister would sort out their childhood home so it could be put on the market. The economy was in a downturn, and the daughter was not sure she would have her job for much longer, so half the proceeds from the sale of the house seemed fortuitous. But the real estate market was not good, and she saw that over half of the houses on her old street were for sale, including both houses on either side. Several others were vacant, or seemed so. It seemed to her possible the house would not sell at all, but she and her stepsister gamely went on for three days, making piles for Goodwill, piles for the trash, and piles that were things they might sell or keep for themselves.
“They reminisced about their childhood, and looked through old photos, and confided in each other their fears about the future. They wept for the loss of the two mothers and drank three bottles of wine.
“Now, the house on the left was vacant, and so was the house on the right. The swimming pool of the house on the left had been emptied, and the swimming pool on the right had not. Twice, in the middle of the day, they climbed over the chain-link fence and went swimming when they needed a break from sorting. The last night, tipsy and wide awake, the daughter left the childhood house where her stepsister lay sleeping in the bottom bunk of their childhood room, putting on one of the old-fashioned bathing suits from the pile they were taking to Goodwill. But instead of climbing over the fence to the right, she climbed the fence to the left.
“She found that the pool, which should have been empty, was instead full of clear blue water. The lights along the edge of the pool had been turned on and she could smell the chlorine from where she stood as if it had just been freshly cleaned. Little bugs, drawn to the lights, flew just above the water. Some of them had already tipped in and struggled. They would drown unless someone scooped them out.
“The daughter walked down the steps at the shallow end of the pool until she was waist deep. The water was pleasantly cool. The elastic of the suit had long ago crumbled, and so the pleasant and impossible water came creeping up the skin of her thighs.
“For a while she floated on her back, looking up at the stars and trying not to think about the future or why the pool was full of water. One was uncertain and the other was a gift. She floated until she grew, at last, cool and tired enough that she thought she might be able to sleep. Then she turned on her front, to wet her face, and down at the bottom of the pool she saw her mother at last. Here was the face she barely remembered. So young! The long, waving hair. It even seemed to her that her mother wore the twin of the suit she was wearing now. It seemed to the daughter that she could stay here in the pool, that she could stay here and be happy. Step painlessly off the path as her mother had done. It seemed the woman in the pool wanted for her to stay. They would never grow old. They would have each other.
“She could have stayed. She was very tired and there was still so much of her life ahead of her. There were so many things she needed to do. But in this story, she got out of the pool. She went back to the house of her childhood and she woke up her stepsister and told her what she had seen. The stepsister, at first, did not believe her. Wasn’t the pool empty? Perhaps, intoxicated as she was, she’d gone to the other pool, the one that was full, and hallucinated seeing her mother.
The daughter argued with her. Her mother had been wearing the bathing suit that she’d drowned in, the very same one the daughter was wearing now. Couldn’t the stepsister see how her bathing suit was wet? She was dripp
ing on the tile floor.
“The daughter insisted she’d gone swimming in an empty pool. She had finally seen the ghost. Okay, her stepsister said, what if you did? But you didn’t see your mother. There is no ghost. Your mother wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. She had a cocktail dress on. That’s what my mother told me. And even if she had been wearing a bathing suit, it wouldn’t be that one. No one would have kept the bathing suit your mother drowned in.
“No, the daughter said. I saw her. She was so young! She looked exactly like me!
“Come on, said the stepsister. She brought the daughter down to the room where they’d been sorting keepsakes. She spread out photographs until they found one of the mother. It was dated on the back, the date of the mother’s death. Is that who you saw? said the stepsister. She doesn’t look much like you at all.
“The daughter studied it. Tried to think what she had seen. The closer she looked, the less sure she was that she had seen her mother. Perhaps, then, all along she had been the one haunting the swimming pool. Why should hauntings happen in linear time, after all? Isn’t time just another swimming pool?
“Now, Andy, it’s time for you to go to sleep. But if you like, though I don’t care for stories, I’ll tell you one more.”
* * *
Rose Red says, “Once upon a time there was a house that Death lived in. Even Death needs a house to keep himself in. It was indeed a very nice house and for much of the year Death was as happy there as it is possible for Death to be. But Death cannot stay comfortably at home all year long, and so once a year he found someone to come and keep it for him while he went out into the world and made sure everything was as it should be. While he was gone from his house, it was the one place that Death might not come in. He knows this, even though, at times he wants nothing more than to come home and rest. And while Death was gone from his house, all of those creatures who, by one means or another, had found a way so that Death might not take them yet, might come and pass a night or two or longer in Death’s house and not worry he would find them there. In this way many may rest and find a bit of peace, though the one who follows them unceasingly will follow them once more when they put their foot onto the path again. But this isn’t your story. As a matter of fact, those who come and stay owe a debt of gratitude to the one who keeps house for Death while he is away. Even Death will one day pay his debt to you as long as you keep your bond with him.”