Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  We’d survived.

  After running afoul of a spike-armed enforcer, a Sorcery-Lord, and the Ring of Knives, my friends and I had survived. We were also cut loose from our burdens: the Sparks were on the case, and didn’t need help from mere schoolteachers. We’d even told Knife-Hand Liz her daughter was dead...and once you’ve informed the authorities and the parents, what more must a teacher do?

  Quest over. Home to bed.

  But even as these thoughts passed through my head, Impervia asked, “So how do we get to Niagara Falls?”

  I groaned.

  Arguing with Impervia was futile. Besides, my heart wasn’t in it—though part of me wanted to run back to Simka, another part oozed with guilt at abandoning Sebastian. If I could believe Dreamsinger, it seemed certain the boy was now in the clutches of a Lucifer. Furthermore, the Sorcery-Lord was in hot pursuit of the couple; even if she saved Sebastian from the shapeshifting alien, I doubted that she’d treat the boy kindly. A lunatic like her would probably consider Sebastian the Lucifer’s partner-in-crime.

  Boom.

  Besides, if we went home now, we might never learn what was going on...and despite my past deficiencies in scientific curiosity, this time I wanted to know everything. Therefore, when Impervia began preaching about our divine calling to see this business through, I put up only a token protest: I just pointed out that Dreamsinger and the Ring might both slit our gizzards if we meddled, and that by the time we got to Niagara Falls, all the excitement would likely be over.

  Impervia admitted the risk of gizzard-slitting but not that we might be too late to affect the final outcome. We’d been called; therefore we had a part to play. God and the Magdalene had summoned us, and if we stayed true we would end up where we were supposed to be. Holy foot-soldiers in a divine battle plan.

  I had no answer to such rock-hard faith. My own sense of religion had never developed one way or the other: I was too embarrassed to say I believed in God, but not angry enough to say I didn’t. Neither hot nor cold. I’d always longed to receive a clear vocation (“Philemon Dhubhai, this is your purpose!”) but mistrusted anything so pat. When Impervia said we’d finally been called, all I could do was dither.

  “Yes, but...”

  “No, but...”

  “I see that, but...”

  “I know that, but...”

  I was saved by the arrival of Myoko, Pelinor, and Annah.

  They’d been down on the docks when they saw the milky tube descend from the sky. Hard to miss on a dark silent night. So they’d left their fruitless questions about Sebastian—in a port full of smugglers, no one would divulge anything—and they hurried up the cliff-road to the mansions of the rich. Dreamsinger’s travel-tube had vanished by the time they arrived; instead, they followed the howling of dogs and found us at the epicenter.

  Myoko shook her head ruefully as she approached. “What did you do this time, Impervia?”

  Impervia only sniffed.

  Tales were quickly told. Myoko said she envied us for finding so much excitement. The Caryatid suggested where she could put that excitement...and much crude-mouthed banter ensued.

  Annah, of course, did not take part—not quiet, doe-eyed Annah. She merely listened with a polite smile, glancing my way from time to time. I couldn’t tell if those glances meant she was glad I’d survived or if she was having second thoughts about me, my friends, and this whole crisis-prone outing. Before I could draw her aside and ask, Impervia’s voice cut through the chatter.

  “Enough! We have to find a boat for Niagara Falls. A fast boat. Did you see any possibilities in the harbor?”

  “Not among the fishing boats,” Pelinor answered. “For speed, you’d want the marina; the expensive pleasure yachts that rich people keep here over winter.”

  “I’ll bet,” Myoko said, “we could find a yacht that wasn’t securely locked up...”

  “Don’t even think it,” Impervia growled.

  Myoko pretended to be surprised. “We can’t commandeer a boat in the service of God?”

  Impervia only glared.

  “I know people in town,” Pelinor said. “Horse breeders with money. They probably own boats.”

  “If we’re thinking of people with money,” said the Caryatid, “there’s always Gretchen Kinnderboom...”

  Everyone turned toward me—even Annah, who I’d hoped might not have heard any gossip about me and Gretchen.

  I sighed. “Yes, Gretchen has a boat—and she claims it’s the fastest in Dover. That’s likely just idle boasting, the way she always...” I stopped myself. “Gretchen has a boat. It’s supposedly fast. Come on.”

  Silently, I led the way forward.

  Kinnderboom Cottage was thirty times the size of any cottage on Earth; but Gretchen reveled in twee diminutives, like calling her thoroughbred stallion “Prancy Pony” and the three-century oak in her side yard “Iddle-Widdle Acorn.” (Gretchen had a habit of lapsing into baby talk at the least provocation. She was that kind of woman...and beautiful enough that I often didn’t care.)

  Like all houses in this part of Dover, the Kinnderboom mansion squatted in the midst of a pointlessly large estate overlooking the lake. The building itself was an up-and-down thing, equipped with so many gables it seemed more like a depot where carpenters stored their inventory than someplace people actually lived. Wherever you looked, there was an architectural feature. Each window had a curlicued metal railing; each door had a portico, an arch, or an assemblage of Corinthian columns. And everything changed on a regular basis: an army of construction crews, landscapers, and interior decorators passed through each year, ripping out the old, slapping up the new. I don’t think Gretchen really cared what any of the workers did—she just hired them so she could have more underlings to boss around.

  The workers were always men.

  The grounds of Kinnderboom Cottage were surrounded by a wall; but I had a key to the gate, plus a good deal of practice sneaking in under cover of darkness. I let my friends enter, locked the gate behind us, then motioned everyone to stand still. Ten seconds...twenty...thirty...whereupon an unearthly creature appeared from the shadows, his stomach pincers clicking as he walked.

  “Ahh,” he said. “Baron Dhubhai.”

  Myoko turned toward me and mouthed the word Baron? I shrugged. I had no title in my native Sheba—no one did, except a few old men, indulgently allowed to call themselves princes—but Gretchen knew how rich my family was, and she fervently believed such money would make me at least a baron in any “civilized” province. Therefore, her household slaves were obliged to address me in that fashion.

  As for this particular slave, he was the size of a full-grown bull but built like a lobster. Eight legs. Fan tail. Chitinous carapace—colored cherry red, though it looked nearly black in the darkness. His body angled up centaur-style to the height of a human, so his head was a hand’s breadth higher than mine. He always had a light smell of vinegar, faint here in the open air but still quite noticeable. His face: flat and wide with dangling whiskers and a spike-nosed snout. His arms: two spindly ones almost always folded across his chest and two nasty pincer claws at waist level, jutting forward at just the right height to disembowel an adult human. He was still clicking those claws idly as he looked us up and down.

  From past visits, I knew this alien’s name was Oberon. He served on guard duty every night; Oberon was one of Gretchen’s most trusted “demons.”

  All of Gretchen’s staff were extraterrestrials. In fact, the Kinnderboom fortune came from “demonmongery”: breeding and selling alien slaves. Gretchen didn’t dirty her hands in the family business—she didn’t dirty her hands with any sort of work—but she kept more than a dozen ETs in her household “for the sake of appearances.” Foremost among those ETs were Oberon and his family, who came from some species with human-level intelligence but an antlike predisposition to follow the commands of a queen. Even though Gretchen couldn’t have resembled the queens of Oberon’s race, she still filled that role in his ey
es. After all, Oberon had never seen a queen...and he’d been raised from the egg by Gretchen herself, brought up to obey her every whim.

  There in the yard, lobsterlike Oberon was obviously trying to decide how Gretchen’s whims would run tonight. If I’d been alone, he would have let me proceed to the house immediately; Gretchen’s standing orders were to let me pass, and she’d decide for herself whether to admit me to her glorious presence. But I’d come with five strangers in tow, and Oberon wasn’t eager to let them close to his exalted mistress. He belonged to his species’ warrior caste, and his first instinct was to keep his queen safe from outsiders.

  He clicked his pincers softly. “We weren’t expecting guests tonight, baron.”

  “I know. But we need to see Gretchen immediately.”

  “The question is, does she need to see you?”

  “Excellent point, good fellow,” said Pelinor. Our noble knight liked aliens almost as much as he liked horses; he’d been gazing in admiration at Oberon ever since the big ET had appeared from the darkness. And just as he had a feel for horse psychology, Pelinor could guess what was on Oberon’s mind. “How about this,” he told the demon. “You keep us here while, uhh, Baron Dhubhai goes for a private chat with Ms. Kinnderboom. No problem with that, is there?”

  Oberon nodded immediately and waved me toward the house. I gave my friends one last glance (attempting a soulful meeting-of-the-eyes with Annah, then a warning glare at Impervia, who was gazing at Oberon with the thoughtful look of someone considering where to punch a lobster for maximum effect); then I hurried up the gravel drive.

  The front of Kinnderboom Cottage was dark: no lights in any of the rooms, just a single oil lamp above the main entrance. Still, I was certain Gretchen would be awake; for the past five years, she’d slept days instead of nights. If anyone asked why, she’d say, “I’m a vampire now, darling, didn’t you get my note?”...but in fact, she was just a woman on the high side of forty, trying to deny she might ever show her age. Daylight was too unforgiving, especially since the cottage had mirrors in every room. Gretchen preferred to see herself by candleshine, or when she was greatly daring, by the muted glow of sun through curtains. Her bedroom had curtains in three different colors—red, gold, and dusky brown—plus meters of thick white lace, so she could make love in the afternoon and tint the lighting to whatever shade made her feel sexy.

  She never went outside. Ever. Sometimes after a night together, she would nudge me out of bed at dawn and get me to open the doors to the balcony outside her window. She would ask me to pull the thinnest lace curtains across the opening, like a sheer white veil; then she would make me get back into bed, and she would go alone to the doorway, standing naked in the sunrise, inhaling the morning and the breeze that fluttered the curtains around her.

  But she never threw the curtains wide open. Never took that last step onto the balcony to feel the sun on her skin. She always stayed behind the thin lace barrier. Sometimes I wondered if this was all just a performance, so I could see her body backlit by dawn and imagine the breeze licking her nipples, the sheer curtains swishing against her stomach and thighs...but at other times, I was sure I could sense an ache inside her, a yearning to be truly outdoors instead of a single step shy. She would stand there for minutes, closing her eyes and taking deep silent breaths; then she would come back wordlessly to bed and either cling to me like a little girl or throw herself into ravenous love-making, driving, driving, driving until we were both obliterated.

  Those moments were what made me keep coming back to Kinnderboom Cottage—not for the sex itself, but for the woman who used sex to run from herself. Lonely, silly, exploitive Gretchen. She made me feel needed...which is not the same as being loved or appreciated, but it can still be addictive if you don’t ask yourself too many questions.

  The door opened as I walked up the front steps. Oberon’s mate Titania stood in the entrance, bowing low in greeting. Like her husband, she was built on lobstery lines, but smaller and colored a deep earthy brown. Instead of pincers, Titania had a second pair of arms: nimble and strong despite their thinness. She served as Gretchen’s majordomo, keeping the other slaves organized. If Titania were human, she might easily have become total mistress of the estate, since Gretchen had neither the shrewdness nor the discipline to resist. Gretchen could have become a pampered prisoner with Titania controlling the staff and the purse-strings. But Titania was not human; she was an alien lobster whose instincts to follow a queen were just as strong as Oberon’s. Though Titania ran the cottage far better than Gretchen ever could, Titania would never dream of usurping ultimate command.

  “Good evening, baron,” Titania said. “It’s provident you came. Mistress Gretchen could use some company just now.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not why I’m here. I need Gretchen’s help.”

  Titania stared at me a moment, the tips of her whiskers lifting. I’d come to recognize that as her species’ look of disapproval: Queen Gretchen was apparently in some black mood and Titania wanted me to make things brighter, not bring new problems of my own. On the other hand, it was not a courtier’s place to shield her queen from making decisions; in Titania’s mind I was behaving with commendable sense, approaching Queen Gretchen with a humble petition for aid. That’s what loyal subjects did...and loyal retainers didn’t stand in the way.

  “All right,” Titania said, making an effort to relax her whiskers, “I’ll present you. But take off your boots—they’re filthy.”

  We walked up to Gretchen’s room in silence: Titania in front and me behind, because she was too big for us to walk side by side through corridors built to normal human scale. She held a kerosene lamp in one hand, but its shine was blocked by her body; climbing the stairs, I was almost completely in the dark.

  Then again, I didn’t need any light—I’d gone up and down this stairway so often in blackness, I knew exactly how many steps there were and which were likely to creak under my weight. Heaven knows why Gretchen and I were so furtive when there was nobody else in the house except slaves, and the slaves were aliens with precious little interest in human sexual affairs...but we always conducted our meetings like an adulterous couple sneaking around while their spouses slept nearby.

  Stupid habit. But that’s what Gretchen and I had: just an ongoing habit.

  Titania tapped on the door of Gretchen’s suite, then went inside without waiting. I followed into the so-called Sitting Room: a place seldom used but often redecorated, with its appearance changing from season to season (sometimes month to month, or week to week). At the moment, it was designed to fight the dourness of winter with warm/hot colors—wallpaper of ferocious carmine red accented with a black and gold border around the top. The furniture (couch, rocking chair, ottoman) matched the color scheme with appropriate upholstery or afghan throw-covers draped neatly over bare wood. The neatness of the afghans proved Gretchen truly was in a bad way. When she was feeling good, she sprawled wherever she wanted with no regard for how the afghans might slip; when she was in a mood, she needed everything just so, and could spend hours fussing to get proper tucks and folds.

  Titania crossed the room as quickly as her eight legs would go—I think she deliberately avoided seeing how fastidiously everything was arranged—and she knocked at the door to the bedroom. “Mistress Gretchen,” she murmured, “Baron Dhubhai has come to visit.” Titania looked my direction as if daring me to say otherwise; then she turned back to the closed door and asked, “May I let him in?”

  If any answer came, it was too quiet for me to hear. Nevertheless, Titania turned the knob and pushed the door open. “The mistress will see you now.”

  I nodded. Titania bowed once more, then silently brushed past me as she headed downstairs.

  I’d never seen the bedroom so brilliantly lit: every flat surface held two or three shine-stones, beaming dollops of quartz I assumed had been enchanted by sorcerers working for Papa Kinnderboom in Feliss City. Usually Gretchen only kept one or two stones out in the ope
n, and she often draped those with squares of thin cotton to mute the gleam; but tonight there were dozens all over the place, standing uncovered on the vanity, the dressers, the night stands, even scattered on the floor. My eyes ached from the brightness—I had to shield my gaze with my hand as I searched for Gretchen herself.

  Despite the incessant remodeling in other parts of the house, Gretchen’s bedroom hadn’t changed in years—except for the darkening curtains, the place was always white, white, white, the walls, the bedding, the carpet. For variation, the furniture was painted in a range of bleached grays. There were also accents of color where Gretchen had thrown a sapphire blue dress over a chair, and left a crimson bra pooled on the floor; but the overall impression was still that eye-glaring white, illuminated now by several dozen shine-stones.

  Quite bright enough to show that Gretchen was missing.

  She’d recently been in the bed: the covers were thrown back and the sheets rumpled. The sight made me think of dead Rosalind, her covers wide open too. But Gretchen was not lying sprawled across the mattress...nor was she sitting at the vanity or lounging in the giant bathtub against the far wall. I peeked into the walk-in closet, but saw no sign of her. I didn’t get down to look under the bed, but I glanced in that direction while staying on my feet, and decided it was unlikely Gretchen had managed to crawl out of sight. Since there was nowhere else she could hide (short of scrunching into a cedar chest or one of the trunks in the closet), I was on the verge of leaving; then a puff of breeze swirled the curtains in front of the balcony doors.