by Tim Pratt
“Is everyone ready?” I—that is, the other me, the Bekah with the scepter—said.
“When you are, darlin’,” Trey said.
“Let’s go.” Future-Bekah took two steps forward and then vanished from sight. Trey ran toward the burning woods in an easy lope, axe at the ready. Hannah roared and rushed for the tree line…and the three strangers lifted up off the ground, levitating, and began to float toward the forest.
Something huge emerged from the trees. I couldn’t make out its precise form in the smoke, but it was definitely alive, as tall as the trees around it, and had a long dinosaurian neck. The smoke eddied away, and I saw a woman sitting astride the thing: the Firstborn, her long hair hanging loose. She threw her head back and howled, and birds and blackflies and butterflies poured out of her mouth in a torrent.
Then everything jerked to the side and I was back in the kitchen, holding onto the counter to regain my balance. The kitchen was no longer ruined, but it wasn’t the same—it was vastly less cluttered than I’d ever seen it, the dozens of cookie jars gone, everything gleaming and shiny. No longer a monument to Grace’s collections and obsessions and dementia, this was a house I could actually live in—and after the chaos of that strange battlefield, it was astonishingly quiet and peaceful. I padded through the house carefully, and the downstairs was similarly altered—cleaned up, redecorated, freshly painted, and far more minimalist than before.
There was a wedding photo on a shelf in the living room. I was in the photo, in a vintage-looking white dress. Trey was beside me in a tuxedo. Charlie flanked me—clearly he was my brides-man—and a man I didn’t know stood on the other side of Trey. “Oh, no way.” I turned the photo face down. It tipped over obligingly, but then blipped back to its upright position when I took my hand away. Me and Trey, smiling. Did this mean there was a path out of our impossible situation, where he was enslaved to my will? Or just a future where I went power mad enough to order him to marry me?
I went to the stairs, where more photos of me and Trey and assorted friends and family hung on the wall. I paused before the half-open door to the master bedroom, afraid of what I’d find when I stepped inside.
Check that—afraid of what I thought I’d find: me snuggled up in bed with Trey, the happy couple, in a future I couldn’t imagine a way to reach.
Instead I found us both in bed, dead, the sheets and blankets a sea of gore, only our faces recognizable in the devastation, and the Firstborn doing slow pirouettes around the bedroom, humming to herself.
I turned and ran down the stairs, and felt another sideways jerk, sending me stumbling into the kitchen counter. The room was dark now.
“Okay, okay,” I muttered. I’d seen the house burned down, and a supernatural war against the Firstborn, in one vision. I’d been murdered in my marriage bed by the Firstborn, with the house still standing, in the second. Those seemed like mutually incompatible outcomes, so I probably wasn’t seeing the One True Future. Maybe I was seeing possible futures? If so, it’d be really nice to see one where I wasn’t dead or surrounded by devastation.
I explored a little, and the house in this future was…witchy, I guess. Dried bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling. There were lots of mirrors in the living room, and hunks of volcanic rock and geodes, and chalk marks on the floors (huh, there was nice hardwood under all those rugs and carpets—who knew?) and drapes and altars and candles and an iron cauldron in the fireplace and jars full of things that squirmed or buzzed or shivered. I went back into the kitchen, which was clearly not a place where food was prepared anymore, and through the door that led to Grace’s study, which stood open in this—reality? Dimension? Possibility?
There were thumbtacked pieces of paper on the doors lining the hallway, pages that looked like they’d been torn from the weird blue book we’d found in Grace’s sanctum. The pages were incomprehensible as always, but the doors were also neatly labeled with words written on blue tape. One said “Kauai,” another said “Hannah’s Place,” another “Europe”—no, wait, it was “Europa”—and one was labeled “Gallery.”
I pushed open that one—it seemed like the least freaky option, and I was feeling fairly freaked out already—and then stepped through. The space beyond the door was a gallery, a big one with high ceilings and white walls and lots of windows. The place was closed, and from the ladders, drop cloths, and toolboxes I assumed an art installation was being prepared.
The center of the gallery was filled by a maze constructed of ten-foot-tall wooden panels, each hung with paintings that ranged from the size of a hand to the size of a garage door. I drifted toward the maze, and I recognized the paintings, if only from my mind’s eye: they were my melting houses, my dissolving houses, my transforming houses. The amped-up colors in the vision made the paintings look even stranger than they would have anyway. I walked into the maze, and the walls curved and turned sharply and diverged, offering assorted paths, each with different paintings on display, but all variations on a theme. I liked the idea: disorienting corridors lined by disorienting houses.
“I don’t know, Charlie, do you think I should make it possible to see everything?”
I froze. That was my voice, coming from one of the other branches of the maze.
“What, put in dead ends and make people backtrack?” Charlie’s voice was thoughtful. “I like the idea of three or four paths to different exits, with people having to go through more than once if they want to see everything.”
“Except we’ve already got those rotating panels, so we can spin them around between walk-throughs, change up the paths, alter the configuration…that’s not disorienting enough?”
“I think you want people to know they’re being disoriented,” Charlie said. “Otherwise they’re walking around mistakenly thinking they’re oriented, and who wants that?”
Future-me and future-Charlie turned the corner, then, and I was confronted with my own face—or I would have been, if she hadn’t been dressed all in black, including long black gloves and a black veil. This Bekah was so goth her pee was bats. Me in a vintage dress with an uneaten broom didn’t even compare. This version of Charlie was older, getting a bit of a belly, wearing rimless glasses and a strangely cut suit—presumably the height of future fashion. Her arm was linked with his, like they were strolling along a scenic waterfront.
I backed away into a corner, hoping they wouldn’t brush against me. Touching my dead father had been weird. Touching myself would be weirder.
Goth Bekah suddenly stopped, put a hand to her forehead, and said, “I just got such déjà vu…wait. Charlie. Remember when we turned the spoon clockwise?”
“And you saw all that crazy shit? Sure.”
“I saw this…I have to remember what I did, I mean, what she did. I’d better do it, the same thing, don’t you think? I…” She shook off his hand and took a step forward—toward me. Then she lifted her veil.
Her eyes were fogged over and blank, and terrible scars crisscrossed her face—my face. “Bekah,” she said. “If this is where you end up, if this is the path that unwinds before you…just know it isn’t as bad as it looks. There are other ways to see, besides through your eyes.”
“Wait, she’s here now?” Charlie said.
“Hush,” future-me said, turning her head toward him, then looking back at me—though she couldn’t look at me, not really. “I can still paint, in my way. I still have friends, and family—my parents are alive, Charlie’s okay. The Firstborn has been taken care of, maybe forever. But the house…Hannah, the Trips…and, oh, I know you’re confused about Trey right now, and you have reasons, but without him…without his sacrifice…I’d be so much more than blinded and wounded, Bekah. He would die for you. You should know that.”
I shook my head. “He has to die for me. He’s enchanted.”
“I think I remember what I said…” she muttered. “Bekah, you don’t understand. Trey can’t ask you, but all you have to do is—”
And then I jerked sideways. I don’
t know if the spoon has a sense of humor, or what, but it dumped me back in the kitchen, in yet another possible future, before I could hear whatever wisdom blind future-Bekah had to offer.
Another me was sitting cross-legged on the floor, across from a woman I’d never seen before—long black hair, on the pretty side of plain, maybe thirty years old—so close our knees were touching. We held hands, and in between us, a globe of light floated and bobbed. “Shit, it’s really working!” the other woman said, voice all bouncy with glee. “We’re really doing it!”
“I knew I could work this out from first principles,” other-Bekah said. “Whatever my father was, whatever weird stuff he had flowing in his veins, I’ve got a little bit of it, too. So what if the Firstborn has the vessel—I’ve got my own power, and I’ve got friends.”
The other woman chuckled, and it was a great laugh, low and musical and full of caramel. “Oh, we’re just friends now?”
“You know I’m not big on labels, darlin’.” Hearing Trey’s habitual term of endearment on my own lips, directed at this woman, was weird. “What we are right now is the world’s smallest coven, but we’ll bring in Julie and—”
Then the girl across from other-me died, an arrow complete with feathered shaft sprouting from her throat. The globe of light fell and vanished, and other-me scrambled backward, cursing. The Firstborn stepped out of the shadows behind other-me and I said, “No, look out!” and then the Firstborn lifted a crossbow—an actual goddamn crossbow—and put a bolt through my alternate’s heart. Coven-of-one Bekah looked down at the arrowhead protruding from her chest, grunted, and then fell over.
The Firstborn lifted her eyes to mine. “Move along,” she said. “Nothing to see here.” She took a step backward into a shadow and disappeared.
It took another minute or two, while I watched my body bleed out, before the spoon jerked me back to the kitchen.
I’d had enough. The future was nothing but assorted varieties of terrible—
But before I could get the spoon into the cup to go back to my time, things changed again, and an elderly version of me wandered into the kitchen, hair white, housecoat filthy, waving her arms around and muttering, “Where, where, where did I put it, I need it, why, why, why…” Just a babble of syllables. The resemblance to the last-days dementia of my father was pretty clear.
I finally got the spoon in the cup, but I was so disturbed by the stumbling apparition of me as a doddering wizard who’d given up her humanity that instead of turning the spoon counterclockwise and rolling back time, I turned it sunwise again. Apparently that was the manual control to jump to another future, because things shifted once more.
Music tinkled in the sunny kitchen, a song by a singer I’d never heard before, but I liked it right away. And…there I was with Trey again, this time sitting in a little breakfast nook, each of us with a cup of coffee before us, and a plate of untouched Danish pastries between us. I was wearing the velvet smoking jacket I’d seen in the sanctum, looking really quite ridiculous, and Trey was gazing at me solemnly. “So,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“End it,” other-me said.
“Are you sure? You couldn’t go through with it last time.”
Other-me shrugged. “What choice do we have? The spoon doesn’t lie. I mean, yes, it shows all sorts of crap that doesn’t actually happen, but if you take the average, you can get a sense of what’s most likely, and I didn’t see a single future where the Firstborn just retired to the Bahamas and left us alone. I gave her every opportunity.”
“I just…I know you didn’t want to be…”
“A murderer? I don’t. But we’re talking existential threats, here. Murder’s got one thing going for it, anyway. It’s definitive.”
Another jerk. This time I didn’t move much, since I’d stayed close to the cup, and I quickly whipped the spoon around counterclockwise. All the garish brightness faded, making the real world seem oddly muted in comparison. I carefully set the spoon down beside the mug, then looked over at Charlie. “Did anything weird happen to me?”
“Apart from you turning into a black-and-white movie version of yourself for about a second, no,” Charlie said. “It’s possible I just got something in my eye, though. Did anything weird happen to you?”
“Let me tell you about it.”
#
Apparently I did tell him about it. At least, he knew about it later. But I have no memory of any such conversation, because that was the moment I started losing time.
Damn it, right? Nothing’s ever easy.
#
The next thing I knew, I was standing in my studio, brush in hand, having made changes to my painting I couldn’t recall. I looked around blankly, and Charlie was there, sketching on a pad and sipping from a cup of tea simultaneously. I didn’t have a clock on the wall in the studio, but from the angle of the sun I thought it was an hour or so later than the moment I remembered standing in the kitchen…if it was even the same day. Nothing was garishly colored, or black and white, so I didn’t think I was peering through time…but I’d certainly lost some.
I opened my mouth to tell Charlie something was wrong, but he’d just want to rush me to the hospital or call Trey or something. The last time I’d assumed my brain was glitchy, the weirdness was just the consequences of magic. Probably this was simply a hangover from using the cup and spoon. Right?
I carefully put my brush down. “Do I seem okay to you, Charlie?”
He looked up, raising an eyebrow, then shrugged. “My calibration could be a little off—you went from a one-handed woman on a deathbed to a two-handed woman painting in a studio—but, yeah, you seem more or less like yourself. Why? Feeling like someone else?”
“Just sort of strange, is all.”
“Ha. I can’t imagine why.”
“How long do you think you’ll stay?”
Charlie whistled. “You are out of it, Becks. We just talked about that. I cried family emergency to my professors, and I could stay here the rest of the week, but you said you wanted to get me out of here before some grim meat-hook scenario can come to pass.”
“Oh. Right.” That did sound like something I’d say. The Firstborn was lurking, I had to figure out what to do about Trey, there were possible fires and wrecks and monsters, and Charlie didn’t deserve to have his love for me put his life in danger. “I think I still have a time-travel hangover. It’d be nice to have an ally somewhere safe and far away, though. Then I can call you in case shit goes crazy again.”
“It’s a little late for that. Shit went past crazy seventy, eighty miles back. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch…but I don’t know how much good I can do here. You’re dealing with stuff way outside my many areas of expertise.”
“Outside everyone’s expertise,” I muttered.
“Not everyone. You know who could help you…”
I groaned. “Don’t say Trey.”
“He knows stuff,” Charlie said gently. “And he’s magically compelled to tell you about it if you ask. That’s what I call a precious natural resource.”
“I liked him, Charlie. I really did.”
“Sounds like he liked you, too.”
I shook my head. “He’s enchanted. He’s got no choice—”
“Bullshit.” Charlie drew out the word, long and slow. “You said his grandfather treated you like crap when you met him, and he’s under the same she-who-must-be-obeyed geas. It’s not a love spell.”
“You just said ‘geas.’ I have never heard that word spoken out loud. Does it really rhyme with ‘flesh’?”
“According to the Irish role-playing gamer boy I was dating last month, yeah. Don’t change the subject.” He knew me too well. “I’m talking about your love life. If Trey likes you, it isn’t because he’s enthralled. It’s because you’re likeable.”
I grunted. “Okay. So maybe the affection isn’t supernatural. But I still can’t date him. He has to obey me, Charlie. Me dating him is like the president banging an in
tern, or a CEO hitting on an assistant, or a general coming on to a private, or…hell, I don’t know. It’s creepy. Major power imbalance.”
“It is not the ideal basis for a romantic relationship, I grant you. Though you wouldn’t have to worry about him cheating on you, I guess.”
“Funny.” My tone let him know I didn’t find him amusing in the least at that moment. “I just wish…huh. What if I just…set him free? Cancel the geas? If I’m his boss, I can fire him, right?”
“Worth a try,” Charlie said. “If you love something, set it free, and all that.”
“Let’s leave love out of it. I just want a fully autonomous boy for purposes of making out.”
“I can relate.”
#
I lost time again. I came back to myself behind the wheel, in a line of cars edging onto the freeway, watching a plane take off in my rearview mirror. I almost crashed into the car in front of me—if I’d been going faster, not stuck in a slow lane full of airport traffic, I probably would have smashed up my reliable little car pretty badly. I had no idea where I was, but my phone was on the seat beside me, offering me directions: from Greensboro International Airport back to Meat Camp—a trip of about two hours.
Checking the time and date I saw I’d lost nearly an entire day with this shift. Apparently I’d seen Charlie off at the airport. I had no memory of that at all, only an empty hole. This was blackout fugue-state stuff. I was walking around, doing things, interacting with people, driving a car, looking up directions, but I wasn’t aware of it. Was I suffering from a memory problem—having experiences that just weren’t getting recorded? Or was it something worse? Was I even me during these periods of lost time, or was I just an empty shell that acted like me? A philosophical zombie, going through the motions? A hollow woman?