by Tim Pratt
I don’t know if he saw something scary in my expression or what, but he slumped, shrugged, and turned back to the car, climbing in and driving off without another word.
I went back inside and honestly didn’t think much more about the guy for the rest of the afternoon, which shows how finely tuned my sense of intuition isn’t.
#
Trey called that night before his family dinner to find out what time I wanted him over on Monday, and whether he should bring anything. (I said wine. Because wine.)
Of course, that was his excuse for calling, but I knew he just wanted to talk to me. He was smitten, and I liked it, because I was, too. We chitchatted for a while and I mentioned the appraiser who’d come to the door.
“Huh,” Trey said. “Mr. Grace usually arranged stuff like that through our office—he didn’t much like dealing with people directly, when he could avoid it. I can ask around, see if this guy is on the up-and-up.”
“If you want to, sure. He didn’t attempt to kill me, though, so I’m not that worried.”
“He tried to talk his way into the house, though, which is an approach we’ve seen before. Better safe. If he comes back…”
“If he comes back, I’ll sweep him off the mountain. But, sure, find out what you can.”
“What’s his name?”
“Let me see it, it was Ken…something. Tenzil?”
“That’s almost Matter-Eater Lad’s name,” Trey said.
I took a moment to try and parse that, then gave up. “I recognize all the words you just said, but they make no sense to me in the order presented.”
“Right, you don’t do comic books. Uh, Matter-Eater Lad, real name Tenzil Kem, is a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes. His power is…eating stuff. Any stuff.”
“As far as superpowers go, I don’t think I’d choose it over flight or super speed.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He can bite through anything. Castle walls, diamonds, Superman. Comes in handy sometimes.”
“‘Human Garbage Disposal’ is a snappier name than ‘Matter-Eater Lad.’ Or maybe ‘Man-Goat.’ See? I should write comics.”
“I’m sure you’d be great at anything you put your mind to.”
I chuckled. “You’re such a lawyer.”
“I thought that was more diplomat than lawyer—and more cute and flirty than either—but I’ll accept your ruling. Let me do some googling, maybe make a couple of calls, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything worrisome about Mr. Tenzil. And, more importantly, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
#
The next morning I had an email from Trey. He said no one at his firm had recommended Ken Tenzil to Mr. Grace. Some digging around on the Internet turned up some information about the guy, though: Tenzil ran an antique business in Providence, and there were a few bad reviews suggesting he was unscrupulous in the expected ways: swooping in on the recently widowed, offering to help them “sort through the mess” of a dead husband’s stamp or book or coin collection, and paying way less than the stuff was worth to “take if off their hands.” Still, there was indeed a big auction in nearby Banner Elk that Tenzil could plausibly be in the area attending. Trey concluded by saying, “Seems like a garden-variety sleazy asshole. Either Mr. Grace hired him for some reason—like not knowing how to use the Internet—or Tenzil saw an obituary that mentioned Grace was a collector and he was just snooping around the house hoping for an easy score.”
Fair enough. Not everyone who came to my house had to be part of some sinister supernatural cabal, right? Like, I was pretty sure the cable guy was just a cable guy, and not a dark technomancer in disguise.
I spent the rest of the day in front of my easel. At its best, painting is better than sex. (Okay. Maybe I was just telling myself that because it had been a while since I’d done a direct comparison.) After I was done painting for the day, enjoying all that glorious light in my studio and making my haunted monstrous liminal dissolving house as good as it could be, I went into the kitchen to start making dinner for my date with Trey.
This process began with putting my laptop on the counter and launching a video chat with Charlie back in Chicago.
“Did you buy everything I told you?” he said, that adorable face of his filling the screen. Charlie has the sort of cherubic features that make you think he must secretly be a debauched hedonist, which he is, though not entirely—he just throws himself fully into whatever he does, whether it’s art or sex or researching protofeminists of the ancient world. Sometimes just watching his enthusiasm makes me tired, and he tends to jump to new passions (or boyfriends) as soon as his interest wanes, but that simply means he knows a little about a lot of things and a lot about some other things, including: how to cook a meal for company. Which was good, because really I had no idea. My family subsisted on jar spaghetti sauce and takeout food and whatever meat and veggies my dad felt like tossing on his beloved propane grill.
“I bought everything I could find,” I said. “It might shock you, but the grocery shopping situation in Meat Camp and environs does not compare favorably to the one in Chicago. You know, lasagna doesn’t have to be this complicated, and I’m not sure I need endives, chicory, and radicchio when I could just use lettuce to make a salad—”
“You think ‘making a salad’ is opening a bag of wilted baby greens and pouring half a bottle of store-bought dressing over it, maybe throwing in some stale-ass croutons if you’re feeling fancy. There’s a reason you got dishwashing duty when we threw dinner parties. You’re lucky I’m even letting you make something simple like lasagna when you’re trying to impress a boy.”
“I need something that can bubble patiently in the oven while I get dressed up. Unless you’d rather me open the door in a tomato-stained apron with ricotta cheese on my face?”
“No,” Charlie said. “We can’t have that. Better to make him think you’re supernaturally efficient and eternally poised, basically a supermodel chef, right? What could possibly go wrong?”
“I have it on good authority that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but it can’t hurt to look sexy, too.”
“I’ve always had better luck going through the pants, but suit yourself. I don’t suppose you’ll give me credit for this act of culinary mentorship? Sing the praises of my wisdom and counsel—”
“I’m trying to impress a boy here, Charlie. I might say I learned the recipe from you. If you’re nice.”
“I’m never not nice. Better get started if you want time to make it look effortless.” Charlie talked me through the process: the chopping, the dicing, the sautéing, the browning, the boiling, the mixing, the layering. He had ample critiques regarding my knife technique and repeatedly warned me that since he was two thousand miles away and couldn’t taste anything I might be ruining everything by oversalting or undersalting, and if so, it was my own fault. “I’ve heard these southern boys, if they find out you can’t cook, they lose all interest,” Charlie said. “I mean, not that you should be nervous about tonight, or anything…I’m just saying, be realistic. You’re not going to top his mama’s biscuits and squirrel stew, or whatever.”
“You are a terrible person.”
“But I’m a good friend.”
“You are spending your Monday night keeping me company while I cook, so I guess you could be worse.”
“I do miss you, Becks. Mocking you from halfway across the country is far less enjoyable than doing it in person. I was thinking maybe I’d come out during winter break, if I’m still invited. There’s skiing there, right?”
“That’s what I hear. Just don’t expect me to hit the slopes with you. You know me and high speed and the cold don’t mix.”
I joked, but I really did hope he would visit…because then I could tell him about some of the truly weird things that had happened to me so far. I had already come close to broaching the weird-magic subject several times with him, but always held back. He was my best friend, but even he would (quite reasonably) assume I was having
profound mental health issues. If he were here in person, though, I could show him the magical objects, the door that healed itself, and maybe even the helpful properties of the Amazing Intermittently Obedient House, in a way that would be a lot more convincing than trying to demonstrate through a video chat connection.
“All right,” I said at last. “I think everything’s prepped. All I need to do is turn on the oven and dress the salad and crack open the wine, which means I actually have time to wash the sweat off my body and put on some decent clothes.”
“You’re going with decent, huh? I thought for this date you had indecent ideas.”
“That vintage black lace dress—you remember?”
“You’re going to wear that, and then make this boy sit through a whole dinner looking at you wearing it? You’re a cruel woman, Rebekah Lull.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Oh, hey, before you go—I got the pictures you sent, of the paintings you’ve been working on.”
I tried not to tense up. Charlie’s opinion means a lot to me, and though he’s always encouraging, he also took me seriously the time I told him, “Always give me your honest opinion.” I sat down on a bar stool and looked into the laptop’s camera. “Charlie, if you’re planning on crushing my spirit—”
“No, Becks, I wouldn’t have brought it up right before your date if I was going to abuse your ego. I think it’s really promising work. The ones with the weird animal heads, they’re maybe a little sci-fi magazine cover or creepy children’s book illustration for my taste, but they’re well-executed—your chops are solid as always—and more importantly they’re original, you know, not like…well…”
“All my other stuff? The ones that are all technical skill and no heart? My favorite critique. Me and that critique, we’re old friends.”
He nodded. “Exactly. You’re painting out of your dreams now, or your nightmares, or something, and it shows—usually I can name the artist you were thinking about when you painted something, see you working through variations on another person’s obsessions, trying to extrapolate someone’s mental landscape from their art and then trying to make it your own. But these paintings, they’re you, not you thinking about what you ought to be. And that painting of the dissolving house—keep it up. More weird houses, please. You could make a show of those. The mixed media stuff you did, incorporating bits of your actual house into the canvas, the splinters and the wallpaper scraps and the carpet fibers, it’s a little gimmicky but I like it, it works.”
I bounced on the stool. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, actually hugging the computer. I pulled back to look at him again. “That means a lot, especially coming from you, Charlie. You really think they’re good? Like, I really might have something here?”
“You can stop fishing, Bekah—I already praised you up one side and down the other.” He hmmed. “Or do you mean, are they going to clear out a wing of the Louvre to display your oeuvre someday?”
I groaned. Why did the men in my life like such terrible wordplay? Clearly I emitted some pheromone that drew them to me.
“You’re asking the wrong guy, Becks, and I think you’re asking the wrong question. The question should be: Do you think it’s great, or at least important, or at least the best you can do, or at least the only thing you can do? You can’t paint for the judgment of the future. I hate to see you put this weight of greatness on yourself. I couldn’t get any work done at all if I was constantly wondering what history would think of me. I make art to please myself, period—if I’m lucky, enough other people will like it to make me a little money, but if not, it doesn’t matter, because making myself happy is the important thing.”
We’d had variations on this conversation before, and I shook my head and gave the same old stubborn rejoinder: “I am trying to please myself. I just have very high standards.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t I know it. You know, I had my doubts about your self-imposed exile to Murder Camp—”
“Meat Camp.”
“Oh, right, because that’s better. But I think it’s good for you. You needed the change in perspective, maybe. Something’s changed for the better, anyway. Keep working. Except for tonight. Tonight you should do other things.”
“You are my guide and advisor in this as in all things, Charlie-boy.”
#
I put my hair up, and slipped on the black dress with the nice lacework around the hem and the bodice—not slutty but just a few letters away: sultry. The house did its knock-at-the-door trick to give me advance warning of Trey’s arrival, and I went to the door and peeked out just in time to see Trey’s car pull in and park beside mine.
I stepped out and picked up the broom, since the presence of Trey’s car didn’t necessarily mean Trey was in the car. Even when Trey climbed out, a bottle of wine in one hand and a smile on his face, I didn’t let go of the broom. It looked like Trey, but I was not necessarily convinced it was Trey, because my life was just that screwed up. “Hey,” I said. “What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the sea?”
“That was needlessly hurtful,” he said, and I relaxed. If he’d given the actual punch line I would have known it was the Firstborn in disguise, but he’d come back with the right response.
Trey skipped up the steps, pausing at the top to look at me, his expression somewhere between a surfer gazing at a sunset and a wolf looking at a pork chop. “Wow. I like the dress. Very…witchy.”
“It’s the broom.” I leaned the magical tool in question back against the wall. “Anything looks witchy if you accessorize it with a creepy broom.”
“You have a point. Still, that black lace—I never pictured you in a dress so goth. Not that I’m complaining. I am the opposite of complaining.”
I sniffed. “I can be goth if I want to. I’m so goth my pee is bats.”
He laughed, then stepped toward me and put his hand on my waist. “Hey. Nice to see you. You look nice. This is nice. Sorry I said you looked goth. I was a lot more complimentary inside my head.”
“I wasn’t insulted, counselor.” I like a little snark and banter in my romance—when I get nothing but flattery it starts to feel too saccharine. “Come inside, dinner’s almost ready.”
Once we got into the house he stopped in the middle of the living room, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply. “Oh, wow, Bekah, that smells fantastic.”
“That’s one hurdle jumped over, then. Let’s hope it tastes okay, too. Come on, let me show you what I did.”
I led him into the first room in the warren of cluttered spaced beyond the living room, which I’d carefully decluttered—mostly a case of putting things in boxes and putting those boxes on top of other existing boxes elsewhere. “When I moved a bunch of crap around in here, I found this gorgeous dining room table underneath and look: matching chairs.” The table was a beautiful slab of dark wood, its surface polished to a nearly mirrorlike shine. There were only three matching chairs—unless the fourth was still under a pile of junk somewhere else in the house—but they were in great shape, too, made of the same dark wood, carved with clean and elegant lines, and they performed the miracle of actually being comfortable to sit in, too. “I made a junk room into a dining room. I am the mistress of all things.”
“Wow. You know, this could actually be a nice house.”
I glanced at the ceiling. “Don’t listen to him, house. You’re super nice.”
“Is the, uh, house sensitive?” I’d told Trey a little about how the place seemed to respond to my wishes, but he hadn’t witnessed much, and I could tell he was nervous about transgressing and getting a lamp magically thrown at his head.
“I’ve got no idea, and neither do you, so don’t go around insulting the place.”
He trailed after me into the kitchen, and I poured us both some wine I’d picked out. (As I previously established: because wine.) “So what’s on the menu?” he said.
“Fancy salad with weird greens and some kind of Dijon dressing, and lasag
na with sauce that did not come from a jar even a little bit, garlic bread that’s more butter than bread, and for dessert peaches-and-cream popsicles, blended up with these very hands, or rather that very blender, and frozen in paper cups with chopsticks stuck in them for sticks, because the many wonders of the Grace kitchen don’t extend to popsicle molds.”
“Wow. Ambitious. I don’t think I’ve seen you make anything more complicated than oatmeal.”
I leaned over and kissed him. “Sweet of you not to mention how the oatmeal was burned. I make no promises regarding the quality of the food, but I’ll try to make up for it with the quality of the company. Also the wine. Best shiraz I could find, it tastes like expensive berries and light shining through rubies. First time I’ve ever bought a bottle of wine off the top shelf. You should be honored.”
“So why did I bring a bottle at all?”
“Showing up for dinner empty-handed is gauche, and as we discussed: let’s not be gauche.”
I’ve got the urge to write down every scrap of conversation I can remember from that night, to go on and on about the food (the salad was too spiky, but the lasagna turned out well, and the popsicles were good but would’ve been better with a bit of bourbon mixed in), to talk about how we sat close together in the makeshift dining room, our knees touching under the table, the way our hands would brush occasionally in passing, how we killed the first bottle of wine and opened the next, and how we laughed. How we forgot all the crazy shit for a few hours, and got to be just two people having a romantic evening, getting to know each other, and liking almost everything we found out.
The desire to dwell on the bright before I get around to talking about the darkness is almost overwhelming, because that was the last purely good night before my understanding expanded and everything changed.
I’ll just say this. After a long meal of lingering looks and even more lingering touches and not remotely subtle flirtations, I led Trey upstairs to the master bedroom and took off the witchy black dress—I may have made a joke about how real witches go skyclad—and undressed him, too, and we jumped into bed. I’ve had two kinds of good first times with new lovers: the intensely passionate, against-the-wall or on-the-floor frenzy, lost completely in a lustful heat, greediness matching greediness; and the playful, exploring approach, moments of intensity and ecstasy alternating with stretches of laughter and conversation.