Aeon Eleven

by Aeon Authors

  As Jim scrambled around the far end of the house he stumbled and fell clutching at a tussock of witch grass. It was a long way down. His heart galloped in his ears; he’d better get started on that exercise program. He gingerly picked his way back to his wife. There she was, trying to look in a window. “The place goes on and on,” he shouted.

  “What?” The wind took her words. Ginny rubbed at the windowpane with her sleeve to get a better look inside. Her cry had startled a flight of swifts from one unused chimney.

  “There’s an outhouse,” Jim bellowed through cupped hands. There was a mild medicinal odor of gin from the juniper branch.

  “You what?” Ginny called. Her husband was at the far corner of the house; he must have circled the place. The wind that twisted the juniper shredded her words. The chimney swifts twittered, circled, then flew off.

  “I said we have outdoor plumbing. I almost fell over a cliff. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “No. A privy? Really?”

  “Yeah, stuck on way down at the end so they didn’t have to walk through four feet of snow in the winter.” He dusted off his knees and tried to look none the worse for wear. “Neat.”

  “Think we can afford it?”

  “Let’s find out.” They called and made an appointment. Barbara Casmirczak, a licensed broker, would meet them the next morning.

  The Lady Mother of the Long Walkers was singing.

  Her ululations were a requiem: the kidnapped queens, her sisters, were dying. Large, pallid bodies lay lifeless in an orderly row. This was not the usual order of things. The queen suspected a slaughter by slaves, rogue elements running wild.

  The Mother of Us All, goddess and progenetrix, had summoned her Master of Messengers. “You will be my eyes. I seem to be blind.”

  “And wingless, goddess, as it was meant to be when you went forth from Paradise.” The goddess had been blind for all the generations that called her goddess and mother, but the royal scout—Indltainalyei, known as Indil—thought better of reminding her of this.

  “Indil?”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  “My sister, is she dead? Go and give her a poke, would you?” The great white presence that was the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers indicated the row of captive queens on their dais beneath her, deferentially lower.

  “Which sister, Lady?”

  “Pick one. The closest. Use your celebrated initiative.” This was as close to sarcasm as the Lady Mother allowed herself to come. She felt the threat of immediate extinction excused some flexibility.

  The Master of Messengers approached the nearest brood queen.

  “Well?”

  Indltainalyei, known as Indil, hooked into the supernumerary queen’s eye with the distal spur of a middle leg. The head detached and bounced dispiritedly away down a slight grade into a connecting chamber. “Your sister would appear to be indeed dead, Majesty.”

  The Mother of Us All, goddess and progenetrix, sighed. “Indil, Indil, what shall I do with you?”

  “I am your Master of Messengers, Lady.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes. But which one?”

  “Ask the Icaros, Lady. They will tally me out when I am enumerated at the doorway to beyond the sand.”

  “Suppose you ask them, then tell me. Are you not an individual? But then I suppose it is too much to ask you to think for yourself. And a rain of oily poison has enflamed the nannies and the soldiers. Look into it.”

  Indil pretended not to hear.

  “Hi, I’m Barbara. Call me Babs.”

  The woman was waiting when they pulled up, fiftyish and an almost natural blond. A great body, Ginny noticed, and eager—attractive, with the too-even tanning that spoke of hours at the spa. The woman wore a no-nonsense blue power suit with crisp shoulders and a deep cleavage that announced she was all business but could play hard, too.

  “Babs Casmirczak, your estate representative.” Babs negotiated a minor adjustment to her breasts. They jiggled back into their snuggery. Too casual, practiced, too unconscious this gesture, designed to draw an onlooker after them. The woman leaned forward to shake hands.

  “Jim Levitan.” Jim’s eyes lingered at Babs’s tanned clavicle, then dropped into her cleavage. He pulled himself up short and threw an arm across Ginny’s shoulder. He still held the woman’s hand.

  “This is Virginia Levitan,” said Jim Levitan. He did not say, My wife, Ginny. Ginny Levitan added Babs Casmirczak to her catalog of affliction, right after menopause, and dubbed her The Real Estate Vampire.

  The Vampire turned to Ginny. “Hi there?”

  The woman ended every sentence with a question mark like a high school girl. Moves and boobs were her stock in trade. The Vampire was a people person. Ginny figured Babs and she were about the same age.

  “Command me, Lady. I am your Master of Messengers.”

  “But you all look so alike,” said the Mother of Us All.

  “We are not the same. Your sisters leaven the moiety, Lady. The captive queens strengthen our blood lines.”

  “But you are the same.”

  “The same as yesterday, Lady.”

  “Indil, don’t lark about. You are worse than one of the nannies, rolling my eggs and clucking lullabies. Indil?”

  “Yes, Lady?”

  “If my sister is dead, and believe me she has been thus for some days, where then is Housekeeping? They should be hauling her off.”

  “They have gone mad, Lady.”

  “And you did not think to tell me.”

  “I am yours to command, Lady.”

  “And I neglected to ask. Very well. Go out, beyond the sand. Tell me what you see.”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  “While you are gone I shall recite the annals. Rains of poison have enflamed the nannies and the soldiers. I shall now sing.”

  The Master of Messengers departed, down the dais, stepping over the large white corpse of a supernumerary queen.

  The Real Estate Vampire rummaged in her bag, dipping and jiggling. “I do have the key. Oh, here it is.” She produced a large key ring with a green tag, held it up triumphantly, and they were in. The great mahogany door swung on silent hinges.

  The men must have oiled it, thought Babs.

  She probably had it oiled, thought Ginny.

  “Nice door. Lignum vitae, the captain brought it home from the Indies. Architectural detailing…” said Babs. She let her sentence hang, an inflected question with no answer.

  “Nice door.” It was mahogany, thought Ginny. There probably was no captain; the woman was winging it. She heard a remote fluttering; a trapped bird banged its head again and again against a windowpane on one of the upper floors.

  “Oops.” Babs dropped her set of keys. At the jingle the trapped bird gave a last desperate flutter. Then there was silence. Jim leapt forward to retrieve the keys but with a sidelong glance at his wife let Babs pick them up. As she straightened she shrugged her décolletage out of play and tossed back her hair. Jim studiously examined the turnings of a baluster.

  “I know it seems a little bleak now. But wait till you see the kitchen.”

  Kitchens were a girl thing. Ginny noticed a pair of running shoes in Babs’s shoulder bag. For a fast getaway after a quick sale? Ginny doubted it.

  Nodding dismissal to the Master of Messengers’ retreating second abdomen, the goddess, the Mother of Us All, intoned the chronicles of the Long Walkers. Her emissary felt the tremulous trilling rise behind him as he gaited down an access gallery. The Lady Mother noodled vaguely recalled scales, a bagpiper testing a psychic melody pipe, a music that was new when the moon was closer to the Earth and the pine forests shivered to the cry of the giant red wolf.

  There was nothing, not a clue of colony-wide madness and death in all the millennia of her kind. Time was smooth; the madness of the great-headed soldiers was but a stutter. The poisoned rains were nowhere in the annals.

  Indil passed out of the brood chambers and turned upward toward the light.

  “The
owners left in a hurry but the house is broom-clean. We had the exterminators in. Just in case.” Babs was improvising as she went along, but she figured that they had. “And here…” She attempted a piece of stagy business involving her arm and a window blind. “You have a wonderful oceanfront view. Without all the extra taxes…” The blind collapsed, scattering slats across the floor. The Real Estate Vampire stepped gracefully aside as a minor dust cloud settled on her Clark walkers. “…because of the road. Between your property and the shore,” she finished.

  Aplomb, grace under fire. Gotta hand it to her, thought Ginny. Already it is our house; we have a view. She took a surreptitious peek at her husband.

  “Really?” said Jim. Evidently the hustle was working.

  “You’ll love the kitchen, it’s original, or restored, whatever.” Babs led them down a narrow, twisting inside stairwell that seemed to revolve around the big central chimney. The Real Estate Vampire tossed back her hair. It fell into an effortless arrangement, styled. “They were going to open a colonial-style bed and breakfast before they divorced. A walk-in fireplace with a brick oven, Dutch tiling, terra cotta floors… Ta-Dah!” A wonderland of cooking paraphernalia depended from chains and hooks, there being a scarcity of shelf space.

  “The kitchen is indeed a panoply of pots.” Jim and Babs stared at her. “That was a joke,” said Ginny Levitan.

  Negotiating a series of switchbacks, the Master of Messengers gained a main tunnel where Icaro the soldier saluted him.

  “Hail Indil.” Mandibles gaped; antennae swept the floor beneath his massive and, compared to Indil, oversized head.

  “Which Indil am I? The Lady wants to know.”

  The Icaro caressed a scented ceiling. “Thirty-seventh. That’s the tally.” He consulted other patches of olfactory memory that clung to the walls of the passage. “Weather report: south southeast, go against the wind. Dry today.”

  “Thanks for the meteorology. Any of the others back yet?”

  “No. There is a thing out in the world that kills them.” The Icaro groomed an antenna. “Die well, Master of Messengers. The world is ours. Hail, Indil Thirty-seven.” Icaro the soldier returned to his post.

  “If they are dead, these Indils one through thirty-six, how do you know?”

  “Food exchange and perhaps I will tell you,” said the Icaro, exposing his underbelly, a gesture of trust. Indil had no food to share but mounted the Icaro and massaged his abdomen. “Ahh, that’s it, right there.” The soldier was ecstatic.

  “So how do you know they are all dead? Dead is dead.” Indil Thirty-seven clutched at the Icaro’s compound eye with his mandible. There was the urge to squeeze, ever the slightest. The Icaro felt the adjustment in Indil’s grip and his ecstasy diminished.

  “Careful there, Indil. You could die here and now.”

  “Pardon me if I breathe your air, Icaro. Go and milk a louse.”

  Mandibles snapped as the soldier threw off the Master of Messengers. “One made it home. Number One, not the pronoun. Died right where you are standing. Housekeeping came and cut him up for the common pot. Those guys are right on the ball.”

  “Eat any of the returned Indil number One before Housekeeping made away with him?” asked Indil Thirty-seven.

  “Just a nibble,” said the Icaro. Odd you should mention it, scout. I have been having the digestives ever since.”

  “We have gone too far, then,” said Indil.

  “Where is too far? Beyond the sand?” The Icaro was perplexed, for he was a creature of duty.

  “Too far is wherever you do not return from,” said Indil Thirty-seven, Master of Messengers.

  “Well then, we have gone too far. We must die, scout.”

  “Hail then, Icaro. And farewell for I too must go beyond the sand. Icaro?” There was no reply. The Icaro had died standing, his joints locked. The dead Icaro’s sweet death-sign was in the air. From two levels down there was a rustle as Housekeeping felt the snap of the soldier’s final rigor.

  Indil Thirty-seven gaited away.

  “And down there…” Babs Casmirczak peered over the soapstone sink to check on the view from a kitchen window “…is Delsey’s Head where they laid the keel of the Barbary Princess, the last of the opium clippers. That was in 1853.” Ginny wondered if the Barbary Princess got laid a lot. She just bet that Babs did.

  “Wanna look?” Babs wriggled off the sink.

  Jim took her place and with some effort got the window pried open. The tide was coming in. The kitchen looked out on a prospect of ocean and the outdoor privy. The stunted juniper was gone. He must have loosened it. “Whew! It’s a long way down. At least we’ve got some air.”

  Jim Levitan thumped a floor joist with a heel. He bounced up and down a few times. “Huh. Springy. Any trouble ahead?”

  The word trouble hung in the clammy air. “Like insect damage?” said Ginny.

  Ginny Levitan caught a slight movement at the corner of her eye. Indil Thirty-seven, Master of Messengers, threaded through a fisheye astigmatism of glittering implements, his passage mirrored in a hanging dangle of polished copper bottoms. A dot, the messenger moved in his myriads.

  “Our house seems to have an infestation,” said Ginny. She added a plague of ants to her catalog of affliction. Babs first, then menopause, then ants.

  “New England. Carpenter ants everywhere. Bob Vila said that.” Jim nodded knowingly. “I saw this one show where…” He was the expert; he watched home improvement TV. “Poison is tricky stuff, Ginny. We can learn to live with the ants.”

  Like we have learned to live with each other, thought Ginny Levitan. “There’ll be more.” She reached out to squash the ant.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, honey, it’s just one ant.”

  “I don’t want them,” said Ginny.

  “We had some men in,” said Babs, uncertain as to just what the men had done; they had probably done something. “The men put out some bait. They sprayed…” said Babs.

  Underfloor, maddened by the dust precipitated by Jim Levitan’s footfalls, the Icaros cast about, blindly killing any living creature that struggled past. A line of foragers passed the entranceway each carrying a grain of rice; they died under flashing mandibles. There was a distant clicking as Housekeeping readied to clean up after the slaughter.

  Indil Thirty-seven scuttled through a grouted aisle separating tightly fitted slabs of terra cotta.

  “Shit. It’s gone down a crack,” said Ginny.

  The Real Estate Vampire shrugged. “You know these old homes…” They were assured the house was sound.

  Jim thumped the floor one more time for good measure. Through the thunder, the Master of Messengers still heard the song of the Lady Mother.

  “Ginny. Ginny…”

  Jim’s wife had that someplace else look of hers. Ginny was hearing God’s dial tone, somewhere. Again. She was gone.

  “Ginny?”

  “You don’t hear it?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ginny! Not here.” To his immediate shame, Jim Levitan was angry at his wife for perhaps dying just as they were about to become homeowners. We can save the epileptics for our curtain call. Or at home. This home, ours if we just…

  “Snap out of it, goddammit,” he whispered in her ear. No response. Ginny Levitan’s pupils were centered and small, her eyes expressionless. For her, time had stopped; she was off counting the lines of force from the Earth’s magnetic field.

  “Ginny…” this was a hoarser whisper, more urgent. Jim Levitan felt, and rightly, that his wife having a fit during a house tour would damage their credibility in future negotiations. “Poor Jim, his wife has fits…” the word would get out and the neighbors would not exchange invitations for drinks, smorgasbords, croquet, whatever the hell they did in Maine. They were socially ruined before they had even begun.

  Jim took a fast check, one unmonitored quick peek to see if the real estate agent had noticed that she had lost half of her house tour.

  Babs had stopped cold. The
Moen faucets, her next destination in the directory of detailing, were forgotten. “Hey, you okay?” She smiled at Jim and knelt next to Ginny. She suspected one of those small strokes she heard about on TV. They were a sign of aging. Tiny pupils. Weird. Maybe she was on dope. You never could tell.

  Ginny willed her eyes into a coherent focus. “You really don’t hear it?”

  “Hear what?” said Babs. Maybe the house was settling.

  “A song, sort of. Music, singing,” said Ginny.

  Jim Levitan steered his wife to an upholstered window seat. The cushions had been covered with newspapers as a dust cover. The papers crinkled as they sat together. “Honey?”

  “I was hearing something strange. Like a cheap battery radio playing Armenian music in a far-off room. I just imagined it. I’ll be fine.” Jim looked at her for several long moments, silent.

  Babs picked right up with her pitch. “…completely rewired. I mean new. And they pulled out the stops on the plumbing. A thousand dollars a pop in all the bathrooms.”

  Ginny rubbed her eyes, checking for any for residual damage. Normal. Jim was such a worrywart.

  Babs smiled a thin, grim smile. “They spent all they had. They went broke before they opened.”

  Unchaperoned, Jim and Ginny examined their dream house. Babs Casmirczak had run them through to closing in a record five days. The Levitans adored the house, their house. It was an easy sale for Babs.

  They called in a contractor for a thorough inspection.

  “Whippy,” said the contractor. He bounced up and down a couple of times to demonstrate what he meant. The brass drawer pulls of a bleached oak dresser jiggled and rattled, its mirror tilted threateningly. “See? Whippy.”