The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  Just have to wait, I reminded myself. See what the machine gives me and accept it, good or bad. But before turning in for the night, I faced that side of the rig and issued a silent promise. You let me down, cauldron, and I’ll sink you. I promise.

  Track 5

  HOW BIZARRE

  After I got all the tomatoes and a few crooked carrots bagged up in a burlap sack, I put them in the kitchen’s walk-in cooler, hung them up, and did a quick inventory of what I had left. Still in the green. I dropped some dishes into the dishwasher—minimal, with it just being me living here—and headed to the bathroom. Brushed my teeth (a vital habit to keep in a post-A world), eased myself onto the floor, and did my swimming lessons. Even though that Supersexy Swingin’ Sounds cover still made me feel like I was wasting my effort every single time, I still did them. One leg up, one leg down, all with the aid of stretchy rubber tubes looped through eyehooks bolted to the ceiling.

  I got into bed, read for a while, clicked off the light, and rolled over. Another thing I always did: slept on my side to, according to the doctors, promote blood flow to my legs. My legs never got any better as far as I could tell, but I feared them getting worse, so I kept up the routine.

  I thought about Mosaic Face’s videos. I didn’t know how much of them I believed. People stealing the planet? Seriously? The A—all three parts of it—was a coordinated effort by some enigmatic them? Come on. I didn’t know much about the Smocks other than what I’d heard that day, and I wasn’t even sure if they were the them the fight was with. Still, my curiosity had been piqued. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything. And once I did, I wanted to take all of it, fold it up, and use it. I could bring Mom back. And if I helped Mosaic Face and Thadius Thumb in the process, fine by me.

  Just gotta be patient. The mantra was aided by the soft rumbling from the cauldron reverberating throughout the rig and into my pillow. In a short time, peaceful sleep found me.

  * * *

  I had a dream Mom was still alive and Dad had actually stuck around. We were back at the house in Sugarburg. Darya was there, but she had this look on her face—scared and confused. I kept trying to ignore her—it was Christmastime, this time—and we were opening presents, and she wouldn’t open any of hers. And Mom was looking at Darya like she was mad; then Dad noticed Mom looking at Darya and looked at her too. I told Darya they wouldn’t be mad at you if you just acted normal and quit making that freaked-out face at everyone, and she said, “But this isn’t real. We’re here, but this isn’t real. They shouldn’t be here.”

  And Mom and Dad stood up and started screaming like they were on fire or something. Standing in place, in their pajamas still—Mom in her cotton robe and Dad in his flannel pants and T-shirt—and screaming. “White Christmas” was playing, clear as day. And the walls fell away from the house, and the Christmas tree got sucked out into space, and then it was just me. And the nothingness.

  Stupid Darya. Even in my dream she ruins things.

  * * *

  Thump.

  I continued to lie there. Maybe my heart was racing because of the dream or because of the noise and my heart got going before my mind had time to catch up and be scared along with it. Inexplicable noises always banged around the rig at night. Common. This sounded different, though, and my eyes refused to close. I listened. If someone had broken into the oil rig, there’d be footsteps once they were in. There’d be no way to hide it. The entire rig was metal. A sneeze could echo for hours around this place. I’d learned not to jump at every sound, but rarely did I have my gun farther than arm’s reach. I told myself it was nothing, rolled over onto my other side, and—

  Thump. Th-thump.

  The kitchen door moaned on its hinge, which I’d deliberately avoided oiling for just such an occasion, and then closed. A muffled snap of the bolt, a breath of silence, and then another set of thumps. Closer.

  My bedroom was just up the hall from the kitchen—less than twenty paces away. I didn’t turn on the light, but I reached out and slid the revolver off the nightstand and brought it under the comforter with me. Cold in my hands.

  I’d surprise them. Once they came in, saw this young woman in bed, and thought to start their fun with her before she woke up, I’d put two in each chest and one in each head. Just like Dad taught me.

  For a while, I didn’t hear anything more. Except my own racing heart.

  I remained on my side, waiting to hear the bunk room door pushed aside or footsteps to the rec room, where there were electronics, the stuff worth stealing.

  It was beyond dark in the rig at night, like the bottom of a well. I had to blink to make sure my eyes were open. I sat up and tried not to gasp.

  A silhouette. Something small standing in the doorway, a shade lighter than the darkness surrounding it. My arm moved automatically, slapping the light on.

  Squishy raised a hand to cover his eyes. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t mean to disturb you, but I was—”

  “What the—?” I didn’t shoot. I guess I was too shocked to even think of it.

  Instead, I threw my pillow at him. I still don’t know why.

  I reached for my crutches, took one by its end, and swung the padded side toward him. It slipped out of my hand, so I took the other and threw that one at him too. It hit the wall above his head, and he shrieked.

  The two-foot-tall creature dodged back, fell out through the door, and scuttled up the hall, feet smacking metal floor in a torrent of tiny thuds. “Good gracious,” he exclaimed as he sped off. “Oh, good gracious, she means to kill me!”

  I sat there, staring at the empty doorway, wide eyes going dry in a numb face.

  I’ve lost my mind. Yep. Sure have. It’s gone, man. Gone.

  But those pitiful cries of terror echoed. Do hallucinations obey the rules of how sound carries? I don’t know.

  I made myself fall out of bed, got my crutches under me, got to my feet, and set off after him, gun tucked into the front of my pajama bottoms.

  I found him in the dining room under one of the long tables. It was easy to spot him under there once the lights were on. I felt sick, so weirded out, seeing this thing I’d grown up absolutely loving, scuttling about, trying to hide.

  He wasn’t like the high-end Squishy dolls in the commercials. All they could do was totter about, creakily raise their arms, spew canned lines when you asked a question but only if it pertained directly to the show. They weren’t able to run away screaming for their life. Good thing. A lot of kids’ Christmas mornings would’ve been awkward.

  I eased myself onto the floor. Settling on my knees, I peeked under the table at him, down at the far end.

  I swallowed. “Okay . . . uh . . .” Go ahead, tell me you’d know what to say here.

  “Don’t kill me,” he blurted. “Good gracious, please don’t kill me.”

  The cauldron was supposed to take three days to build this thing. Even when it completed, I never figured this is what it’d spit out. I wondered, sure. Hoped. But here, presented with it, right here, alive, well . . . I didn’t know how to feel.

  He lowered his paws from his face, peeked, saw I was still there, squeaked, and raised them again. “Ma’am, I implore you, please, if you must end my life, make it quick.”

  Perhaps he was waiting for an anvil to fall on me or for something to go awry, as it always did to Dr. Werewolf. Squishy was continually being saved with deus ex machina, and I’ll be honest: for a second there, I did expect something to happen to me. It felt wrong cornering him like this, so I scooted backward across the floor to the other side of the room, as far as I could get without losing sight of him.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Funny,” he scoffed, “one does not typically throw walk-assisting apparatuses at those they don’t mean to inflict harm upon, ma’am.”

  “Sorry. Are you what Thadius wanted me to make?”

  When the harsh fluorescents of the dining room caught his eyes, they flic
kered with a reflective shine, like a dog’s or a deer’s. That . . . troubled me.

  I asked again, “Did I pass the test?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what the blazes you’re talking about.”

  “Thadius Thumb. He gave me the recipe on that flash drive. And the canister. He said if my cauldron worked well enough, I’d pass the test and—” I cut myself off. I was talking to a cartoon character.

  I began to piece it together. Was this jazzing? Not just re-creating life from broken-down materials to remake it as it was before but interpreting it, translating it, rejiggering it? Was this thing a rip-off, like Thadius’s Dharma & Greg, except sentient, scared, and breathing?

  “Are you alive?” I asked.

  “Until you finally get the gall and put an end to it, yes, ma’am, I am alive.” Same accent, even. Tweedy English, with that nasal quality as if he had an unshakable head cold.

  “Why don’t you come out? We’ll talk.”

  “And give you an easier time in dispatching me? Never.”

  “I’m not Dr. Werewolf,” I said.

  “Indeed you’re not. He, at least, would have the mercy to not drag things out. Mindless brute, he is, yes, but he is forthright in his intentions and does not beat about the bush when he knows the game is his to lose.”

  “Do you know how you got here?”

  “I assume you captured me, devilish ma’am that you are, and brought me here to engage in your own handicapped person’s version of The Most Dangerous Game to feel empowered to attempt a recoupment for your physiological shortcomings.”

  This went on for a while.

  I dug through the pantry to try to concoct Squishy’s favorite food to lure him out. His preferences changed from season to season, depending on the team of writers working on the show at the time, but usually it was fried bananas. I didn’t have any fresh bananas, only dehydrated ones, but with a little olive oil and salt, I had a steaming dish ready before long. The whole time I cooked, I shouted out the kitchen door to him, asking if he wanted to come out and help me. He’d say no, insult me, and use some other imaginative comparison to serial killers of yore to detail what an unpleasant individual I was. More than once he suggested he should contact the local mental health facility to inquire about any current unexpected vacancies.

  “There aren’t any more of those,” I said, backing away from the steaming dish on the floor, returning to my far corner of the room.

  “Which? Bananas, which you undoubtedly laced with cyanide, or mental health facilities?”

  “They aren’t poisoned. And I meant the second one, the mental hospitals.”

  I saw him eyeing the dish of fried bananas. He’d glance at it, then at me, and back at the dish. Unable to resist any longer, he reached out and pinched one off the plate and ate it, staring at me the whole time. Again, in the shadow under the table, his eyes were two green discs for a moment, flashing. “While we wait for the poison to take effect, do tell, what are you planning to do with my hide? Make a little hat out of it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Listen, do you know—?”

  “Do I know what?”

  “Do you know what you are?”

  “I’m a squidmouse. Naturally.”

  “I know you’re a squidmouse, but do you know where you came from? What’s the last thing you remember?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you care?”

  “Because I like to know the story of all my victims.”

  “I knew it!” He glanced at the bananas, gasped.

  “I’m kidding. Come on. Seriously. I wouldn’t do that. Besides, what would be the point of wasting all those bananas if I just wanted to kill you? I have a gun.”

  He sighed. “You make a point. Still, that wasn’t very nice.”

  “Sorry. But come on, tell me what you remember.”

  He took a deep breath and began. “Well, I was in the Savannah, minding my own business.” He went on for nearly twenty-two minutes and then said, “And yet I knew, even though Dr. Werewolf had plummeted to what I hoped was his demise off that ravine, he would return as he always did.” He made the trademark worrisome smirk and even began wringing his hands. He’d just detailed the final episode of Dr. Werewolf & Squishy and pantomimed the last thing he was doing when the camera’s aperture closed on him.

  My head felt heavy all of a sudden. A rush of what felt like a million bugs landed on every inch of my body. The back of my head bumped the wall.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “You’re the real thing.”

  This wasn’t a test for me to prove myself to Thadius or my equipment, not like he’d said. This was Thadius testing if I could take it or not. If I could stomach the jazz. Right then, I wasn’t sure I could. I chuckled, making that noise when something isn’t ha-ha funny but plunging headlong into disbelief overload.

  He finally came out from under the table. “Ma’am? Are you unwell? You look somewhat flushed.”

  The edges of my vision crowded with glittery fluff. But before I passed out, I had to know something. “Come here.”

  He ambled forward, still wringing his hands. I reached toward him, and he looked at my hand, then into my eyes. I wiggled my fingers, and he hesitantly put a hand in mine. Furry. Soft. Warm.

  I put two fingers to the inside of his wrist.

  A pulse.

  He had a pulse.

  “Shall I summon the paramedics, ma’am?”

  “Don’t bother. They’re not around anymore either.”

  My own pulse began taking on a scattered rhythm, fast, then slow, and fast again. When it evened out into a muffled jackhammer’s patter, I knew. It was coming now. The blackout.

  Squishy’s brow furrowed. “No paramedics? What sort of world is this?”

  I snorted, slumped onto my side, my head banging off the floor. The sparkly rainbow swallowed my vision, Squishy disappearing into it. I heard my voice gurgle, “Good question.”

  Track 6

  WITH YOU IN YOUR DREAMS

  I had watched the Mosaic Face videos so many times I could karaoke every single one. When I blacked out, I assume some synaptic snafu occurred, because the videos rolled. They played not as if on a monitor or tablet screen but as though I were standing before Mosaic Face as he schooled me on vershes, space-time, and planet stealing. Couldn’t really hit stop or pause or anything, blacked out as I was, so I rolled with it.

  The pudgy man in the black turtleneck, his head exploding and rearranging in a flurry of squares, stood in his mother’s basement. I was guessing, but it seemed about right since the edge of a plaid couch was always in view off to the left in all his videos.

  Mosaic Face impatiently cleared his throat—even that sound was autotuned. In the overcooked-brain dream space, I set aside my crutches and took a seat. I’d be here for the duration of the blackout, so I might as well be comfortable.

  “Alternate universes, segments that make up the multiverse,” he serenaded to me, “are like bricks separated with a mortar of dark matter. The bricks, vershes, short for different versions of the same universe, each holds a different iteration of Earth, each with its own Earth with its own mass, level of pollution, and population—those two likely connected, ha—etcetera and so forth.” He explained that our time, with the rate at which it moves, is directly dependent on Earth’s mass to maintain its same rate of revolution. High noon on Earth could not be high noon on Mars or anywhere else because “our time is strictly ours and, while time does exist on other planets and in space, it does not move the same way, because our planet’s mass is uniquely our own.”

  My eyes began to glaze over. Thankfully, he had visual aids.

  He presented a plastic shower curtain with a rubber ducky print. It was flat, kept aloft from the floor with each of its four corners pinned up. He suggested that the view should think of the curtain as space-time. Earth, represented by a bowling ball, sits upon space-time. He set the ball in the middle of the curtain.

  Mosaic Fac
e then took the bowling ball by its three holes and gave it a spin. It rotated in place at a pretty good clip for a while. As it did, Mosaic Face went on to say that if Earth were any smaller, time would accelerate because Earth would be spinning faster due to its decreased mass. Any bigger and time would slow.

  “But here’s the kicker,” he sang, the autotune spoiling the effect of how grave he was trying to sound. “If somehow something happened to make time speed up or slow down, it would be imperceptible if it was done incrementally, bit by bit.” Pause for dramatic effect. “If a lot went missing at once, yes, that’d be impossible to overlook. But half a second here, another here, we’d never notice. Chew on that for a while.”

  The room darkened. Then over him like a holo: Your next video will begin in 10, 09 . . .

  My brain made a choppy edit, and the floating Play button pressed itself. Mosaic Face was now in a snug T-shirt and a pair of acid-washed jeans. He sat on a stool casually, hands on knees, as if he were about to lay down some killer slam poetry.

  “The waylaid time flow, or WTF, is a direct result of our planet’s mass being changed. Of course, none of you know this is happening. It cannot be felt, only measured with very sensitive equipment that I have created myself. But how would one feel a change in the time flow, if it got to the point where it was noticeable? Right now, you might feel like a day might fly by or it was all of a sudden Friday or you woke up feeling like you only got half a night’s worth of sleep. We’re shedding a few milliseconds per day, and right now, why question it further if it’s such a small loss? But on a long scale . . . oof, that’s some serious bad news.”

  He stood. Hands clasped behind his back, he strolled, a professor who’d given this same rap a thousand times and could do it in his sleep. His speech faltered, the autotune squeaking out his ellipsis into a chirpy high note. His eyes were nothing but hazy shapes bouncing around in the space above his neck, so it was hard to say for sure, but he seemed to be checking cue cards.

  I turned to look. There was nothing there but a void, like this bisected basement was floating in outer space. Huh.