The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  Thadius adjusted the mirror to look in the backseat. “Can he walk around? How mixed up is he?”

  “Oh, he’s mixed up all right. He’s confused and scared and going through some kind of . . . metaphysical crisis.”

  “Existential,” Squishy corrected. “Blast—apologies, ma’am. Not another peep, I assure you.”

  “He can talk,” Thadius said with a certain flatness that demonstrated he was on the verge of bursting. “Like, actually speak? I—I think we got to pull over. I’ve got to see this. Hold on.” He pawed the wheel, throwing us over onto a turning lane. There was a dirt road coming up that looked like it led into the countryside. Barns and open farmland peeked beyond a dense copse of trees down a few miles. During the turn, the LeBaron’s rust-eaten frame creaked sorely, to the point I was sure the car would snap in two any minute. The seat belt bit into my chest, and I planted my hands on the dashboard.

  “Drive normal.” Even though I was sure we were about to careen into the diseased-looking bog next to the road, I managed to ask, despite the seat belt strangling me, “You’ve—ugh—never actually made anything like him before?”

  “Let’s just get off the main road a piece.” After evening out the car, Thadius rumbled us up the country lane till we couldn’t be easily seen from the main road.

  Throwing the parking brake—and nearly giving me whiplash—Thadius promptly leaped out. The door ajar alarm incessantly rang as he charged to the back. He pulled my backpack to the backseat’s edge, lifted the blanket up, and eased open the zipper.

  The mad scientist met his monster. And he apparently liked what he saw.

  Thadius’s eyes exploded to saucers. He squealed, clapped his hands, leaped back from the car, and spun in place. He started punching and kicking the air with joy—reminding me of the sweaty, lei-wearing version of Elvis—the biggest smile plastered on his face. “Good shit, good shit, good shit.”

  “Hey,” I shouted, leaning over the seat back, “care to enlighten me here? You never actually did this before? Because that’s what I’m getting.”

  Thadius’s smile didn’t fade as he rushed forward, closing the back door and leaping into the driver’s seat. He turned around and pulled the backpack into the front with us, thwapping me on the side of my head in the process. With care, he lifted Squishy out under his arms and set the squidmouse on his lap. Squishy looked at me with a look that said, Is this guy for real?

  “And he knows more than just the show, right?” Thadius asked, glowing. “He can talk, he knows how to say stuff other than just his dialogue?”

  Squishy looked at the man holding him, then at me again, and sighed.

  “I don’t think he likes being held like that.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, little guy.” Thadius set Squishy on the seat between us. He didn’t look any more comfortable there and climbed onto my lap. He took a seat and stared at Thadius. Thadius stared back, round eyed. His expression immediately reminded me of how Dad looked when he first suggested we scan something with the cauldron.

  I said, “Will those people in the cloaks kill me too when they find out what we’re doing?”

  Thadius cleared his throat—excitement dulling at once. “They don’t know anythin’. They were just at the Siren House today doing routine visits. They check all businesses. And since mine is the most profitable in town, they check regularly.” He sat back, the seat’s cracked vinyl creaking.

  “Is this okay?” I asked, nodding down at Squishy in my lap. It felt awful, talking about him when he was sitting right there, like he didn’t matter, that he wasn’t a living thing, like he was just a crude something Thadius and I had made in shop class, but I had to know. “Because if this is what you do with the machine, I don’t feel this is the right thing for me. I . . . I don’t want to be using it for anything like this.”

  I scratched behind Squishy’s pointy ear, hoping that’d be enough to let him know it wasn’t his fault.

  Apparently it didn’t work. Squishy lifted a paw, removed my hand from his head, and crawled back inside the backpack. He pulled the zipper most of the way closed behind him. He made a small huffing sound—the back deflating around him—as he sighed, lying down within.

  Thadius looked up at me. “Girlie, you have no idea how big this is.” He faced forward, dropped the car into drive, and we pulled ahead, rumbling over the dirt. “No idea,” he echoed, shaking his head and grinning toothily. “No. Idea.”

  * * *

  We hit a particularly bad pothole, and Squishy became airborne before crashing into the floorboard. I asked if he was all right. He seemed to have injured nothing but his pride. I put the backpack onto the middle seat again and strapped a seat belt across it.

  We were on another country road. Many of the farms still had the red flags affixed to their gates, cautioning hoof-and-mouth infection. I imagined all of those cows and horses were long gone by now, but the plastic government-issued flags, now wind-tattered and faded, were reminders that the disease had swept this area once.

  We passed one red-flagged farm after another. Soon, it became nothing but the road and the gentle rise and fall of the hills. Going up, I felt myself scrunch into the seat. Going down made my guts rise, tickly and weightless for a second. I remembered loving this sensation as a kid.

  “Are we going to the hideout?” I asked.

  “Hideout?”

  “You know, the base of operations for the fight or whatever. Where all of you guys store your cauldrons, make plans, do . . . stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, that might be a good idea once, you know, we get there. Let’s pencil that in under someday.”

  “Uh, okay, so where are we going?”

  “I really shouldn’t act like we’re some big rebel outfit with all of these members and backin’ and whatnot. I mean, you probably would’ve figgered it out eventually.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “Every group’s got to begin somewhere. How many members do we have? There’s you, me, Mosaic Face. How many others?”

  He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “That’s it. That’s everybody.” He said it with such plainness that it could hardly be called confessing. It was like he was admitting to using the last of the ketchup.

  Up a hill, down a hill. I didn’t enjoy the zero-gravity sensation in my stomach this time.

  “You’re pissed, aren’t you?” he said.

  “No, no. Just surprised is all, I guess. Mosaic Face made it sound like there was a whole network of you guys all over the world.” Honestly, yeah, I was pretty crushed. And a little mad. That mix made me ask my next question rather bluntly. “So what’s the goal? To take out the Smocks? If they’re doing what you and Mosaic Face are claiming they’re doing, then—”

  “Claiming?” Thadius sputtered.

  “Mosaic Face says they’re stealing parts of the planet,” I said, letting it be clear I was skeptical.

  Thadius stomped on the accelerator. The engine responded after a slight hesitation, sharpening into a droning whine. The next uphill, downhill made my belly really swirly.

  “You don’t believe what we say they’re doin’, yet you want to be a part of the fight?”

  “Not much fight. There’s only two of you.”

  “So what, you’re not counting yourself in this anymore?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just think you can’t really call it a fight when we’re so stupidly outnumbered. It could be a fight one day, once we got some more people, but I think—”

  “You just joined. Today, girlie. Today. You haven’t been here the whole time. You don’t know they’ve been trackin’ us down, one by one.”

  “But what’s the fight?” I shouted over the straining engine. I should’ve been scared we were going so fast, but I wasn’t. I was too angry, too disappointed. This was all there was for me, the only reason to care about this fucked-up world. And this, like everything else, turned out to be bullshit. Like Dad’s promises he’d keep us safe. Or like Mom saying she’d always be there
for us. And the lies I told myself, every morning, that today would hold a reason to stick around for tomorrow. “There is no fight. It looks to me like we’re the idiots here, messing around with stuff that’ll get us killed,” I shouted.

  “The fight is just as Mosaic Face said. The Smocks got the same stuff as us, the harvester guns and reconstructors, but they’re a lot better than our gear. And instead of just harvestin’ a bit here and there, they’re takin’ entire megatons of the planet at a swing. And well, we don’t take too kindly to that kind of behavior—so we intend to stop it.”

  Good speech, but what rang out was the term harvester gun. I supposed that was how one got a can of fixins. I wondered what was in the can I’d used to make Squishy, what it used to be. Did Thadius harvest a mouse and a squid? Was that jazzing? I was about to ask when he interrupted my train of thought.

  “So you just wanted to get in with us to bring your mom back, right?” Thadius glanced from the cracked windshield to sneer at me. He shouted, downright screamed, “Tell me I’m right.”

  “How do you . . . know about that?” Ahead of us, the dirt road was dropping onto a paved road again. “And where the hell are we going?”

  “You want to play the cynic? That’s fine. I wasn’t convinced at first either. I think everyone thinks it’s all horseshit. Yeah, until they see a pit, that is. Matter of fact, I think I should’ve brought you here first, before I even asked you to put him together.” Thadius cocked his head to the trembling backpack between us. “But stupid me, here I thought you’d be a little more understandin’, willin’ to accept what Mosaic Face said in his videos. Since you’re young, I thought you’d be more open to big ideas and thinkin’ outside the box. Apparently I was dead wrong.”

  “How did you know that about my mom?”

  Did Dad know Thadius? Did they meet on one of his trips into Duluth? But Dad said he never went farther into town than the market, right there off the boardwalk. The next question flew out of my mouth: “What’s the pit?”

  Track 8

  DITCH

  Trails for a while, surrounded on all sides by trees and open fields. Crickets played their songs. Bats swooped overhead. They were so much darker than the birds I was used to seeing: the seagulls, pelicans, and geese. I ducked each time, thinking they’d dive-bomb me. I clack-thumped along, trying to keep up with Thadius, but I found myself distracted. I hadn’t seen woods in so long. This place looked like it used to be a nature center or some kind of state park. Signs meant to look rustic, nestled among the overgrowth, gave descriptions of certain plants of interest as well as diagrams of bugs.

  Squishy kept pace with me, even slowing down once in a while when I needed to adjust a strap or get a crutch rearranged.

  Thadius plodded right along, never looking back, just leading the way. His gait was long, as if he were twice his height. In the moonlight, he cut a striking figure. Like a dirty prince or a snooty hobo.

  He stopped.

  I ambled up next to him. “What’re you—?”

  His arm flew out ahead of me.

  I stared forward. And down . . . and down . . . and down.

  I’d nearly walked right into it. The pit. A hole carved into the ground, probably fifty miles across, if not more, and twice as deep. The moonlight shone on the strata, its many layers making me think of the shards of a stomped jawbreaker. At the bottom—I could tell it was just a shadow because of the occasional glint off a piece of quartz—but it looked like a second star-sprinkled sky was down there, wearing Earth as a candy coating.

  It gave me the sensation of staring at the whirlpool into a bath drain after a long, bad day. A sucking feeling, like this massive hole in the ground wanted me to move forward just a smidge and let gravity do the rest.

  “So they are literally stealing the planet,” I said breathlessly.

  Thadius nodded gravely. “Hey, you want to have a look, little guy?” he asked the squidmouse.

  Squishy dared a peek over the precipice and promptly backed away, shaking his head. “Indeed not. Absolutely not. Nope.”

  Thadius gazed into this Grand Canyon in the middle of northern Minnesota, his face crinkled up as if this spot gave him more than just vertigo. Only when the wind changed did I realize he was humming to himself. A sad song of some kind. Then I recognized it: “Without You.” He noticed me looking at him and stopped.

  “Ever see those flashes of light?” he asked, giving the sky a wave. “Green, blue. Sometimes red an’ orange?”

  “My sister and I used to call them rainbow poppers.”

  He smiled. “Funny, a friend and I used to call them champagne supernovas. See, ’cause that’s a song by—”

  “Oasis. I know.”

  He nodded, seemed pleasantly surprised I knew that bit of trivia.

  (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? got a lot of play on the rig.

  “Well, whatever you call them, that’s when you know they’re comin’ over from their versh or goin’ back. The pop sound is air gettin’ displaced when they come through. Makes that greenish flash. The pop when they leave is a little different, sounds different, flatter, and is usually a warm color, the red or orange. But when they’re takin’ something back with them—like an eight-megaton hunk of our planet, as an example—the larger the amount of air that has to rush in to replace it, the bigger the pop.”

  “Science, right? But why are they doing it?”

  Without breaking his staring contest with the abyss, Thadius ran a hand down his black stalactite of a beard and said, “Mosaic Face made it clear enough, didn’t he?”

  “I guess, but I thought that was just his theory.”

  “No,” Thadius said and finally looked my way. “It’s not a theory.”

  “All right, I get that they are doing it, but . . . but why are they doing it?”

  “They’re trying to teach us a lesson. Somethin’ different happened in the time line of their versh. Either the microchip got figured out a few decades early or their cavemen came up with the wheel before ours did or something, but let’s just say they’re a good way ahead of us, technology-wise. Their molecular assemblers, and the people who decided to take the whole thing underground, apparently caused some major trouble. The Smocks are the answer to that, a group made to stop scratchers regardless of which versh they’re found in. The Smocks fixed their versh’s scratcher problem. Now they’re coming over here to fix ours. Personally, I take that kind of thing personal. Punishin’ folks for somethin’ they ain’t even done yet.”

  “Mosaic Face said the Smocks caused the A? Making all that happen at once; the earthquakes and the hoof-and-mouth stuff and . . .”

  “Yep. The earthquakes happened when they started doin’ that.” He nodded ahead at the pit. “But that whole story about the anarchists Trojan-horsin’ the power plants? Lie. Same as the hoof and mouth. They did that, the Smocks, right along with spreadin’ the hooey about how it happened. They don’t like killin’, but—”

  “They certainly have a funny way of showing it.”

  He chuckled dryly. “Well, their definition of killin’ is funny. If you happened to waltz into an infected barn crawlin’ with hoof and mouth or to eat some eradiated fish, that’s your own fault, far as they see it. They define murder only as what they do with their own hands, direct like. Even when they burn scratchers at the stake, they think of it like it’s the fire that’s doing the killin’, not them. Even if they’re the ones who lit it.” He looked at the sky as if expecting some rainbow poppers. “I’d like to introduce them to my definition.”

  “But why steal parts of the planet? That still doesn’t make sense.”

  “See, well, they’re having a hard time finding the scratchers. So if they cause a WTF and speed up time, they’ll just age us all out. Again, murder by proxy is all right by them.”

  “But why everyone? There are hardly any scratchers. I know of two, and I’ve seen only one of their faces.” It began to sink in. Everything that’d happened to my parents, the
reason we had to move to the rig—it’d all been the Smocks’ fault. If we hadn’t gone there, Dad and I never would’ve found the cauldron, Mom never would’ve had to start doing our chores for us, go out one morning when she was too tired to notice the stairs were wet, and—

  “Twofold benefit,” Thadius said. “They make our time speed up by takin’ hunks off, age us all out, scratcher or no. They can pack those stolen hunks onto their planet and inflict a reverse WTF on themselves. Reverse since they’re makin’ their planet bigger and makin’ their time go slower. Meanwhile, back here, they’re hopin’ with enough chunks taken off, no one can jazz if all the would-be scratchers are dyin’ of old age before they’re out of their teens.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Squishy testing some berries he found with flicks of his forked tongue. “What’s so wrong with jazzing?” I asked. It felt like a dumb question.

  “To them, it’s an unnatural art. Obscene. Really, anythin’ at all to do with molecular manipulation—harvestin’, breakin’ down, rebuildin’, jazzin’, any of it—they hate it all. Apparently it broke their economy, seeing as how manufacturin’ would become a thing of the past in a world with household assemblers. Transportation of anything would be rendered totally unnecessary, a waste of time and money when you can just swipe a credit card and—bam—there it was, whatever you wanted, put together right in your livin’ room. Cheap, too, seein’ as how the only people actually workin’ on new things were engineers. A product could go from idea to consumer in a day, if the feller dreamin’ the thing up was motivated enough. Problem was, with only so many resources in the world and so much of it being made into goods at such a rate, there was no way their planet could take it. They were getting wrung out like a sponge. And the Smocks saw us gettin’ there, figurin’ out how to make our own cauldrons, and they knew what was comin’ next. Where we would start going to look for raw materials once our planet was plum out.”