by Kari Maaren
Josiah kept putting his head through the curtains to squeak at her. She ignored him. For almost seventeen months, she had been running around frantically, lying about herself to everybody she had met. She hadn’t known she had been missing telling the truth so much.
Sam listened without interrupting. At some point, he sat down on a hard little couch and folded his hands over his knees. His distraction gradually vanished. By the time she had ground to a halt, he was totally focussed on her.
The silence between the two of them stretched out, broken only by Josiah’s whispered running commentary, which went more or less like: “And now she goes and spills her guts to a Three, of all people, and completely disrupts the space-time continuum, thank you very much, and bring on the paradox, why don’t you—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Freddy. “You keep telling me the past can’t be changed; the present can just be acted upon.”
“Right,” said Josiah, “except now you’ve gone and told him about the future.”
“It won’t be a problem,” said Sam. “Robin Goodfellow has explained about his journeys through time. I’ve often considered writing it all into a poem, but I fear it would be considered too fantastical.”
Josiah coughed theatrically. Freddy heard the word “Albatross!” in the middle of the cough.
Sam steepled his fingers and tapped them gently against his chin. “Your life seems an interesting one to me. What I wouldn’t give to visit the days of Julius Caesar or witness the fall of Troy. But it sounds lonely, too.”
“She’s not lonely. She’s got me,” said Josiah.
“Even so, Master Mustardseed,” said Sam. “She isn’t built for such travels.”
“I’ve done all right so far,” said Freddy, a little stung.
He smiled. “Of course you have. You’re young; the journey is exciting. But now you have walked into a stranger’s house and unburdened yourself for no logical reason. The melancholy has crept up on you, as it often creeps up on me.”
His smile turned rather sad. “I have found some recourse in laudanum, but I wouldn’t recommend this solution for you. I would say you badly need to return to your own time.”
“Oh, really?” said Josiah, who seemed unable to stay out of the conversation. “We would never have guessed it. We would return if we could. If there were any way of making sure we were connecting to our Three … but we don’t even know who it is.”
“I would also suppose you need to talk about what happened on your last excursion,” said Sam. “The story you heard—”
“—means nothing,” said Josiah.
“I wonder,” said Sam. “I think it may mean everything. Oh, damnation!”
He stood up and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. “Weave a circle round him thrice … and close your eyes with holy dread … for he on … on honey-dew hath fed … and drunk the milk of Paradise. That’s all that’s left. The sunny dome! The caves of ice! All vanished into air. How fleeting are the realms of fancy! You have broken my poem.”
“I’m … I’m sorry,” said Freddy, taken aback. He had seemed relatively normal until the ranting had begun.
“It’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ you ninny,” said Josiah from behind the curtain. “We came in at a bad moment.”
“‘Kubla Khan,’” repeated Freddy. A stately pleasure-dome decree …
“You know the name? Queer,” said Sam. “I had three hundred lines fast in my head, but your visit has banished most of them. No matter. I’m not sure I would have missed your story, even for a poem.”
“A poem,” said Freddy. The plan that had been tiny and formless just before was growing, taking shape. Her hands curled again into fists. Maybe …
Josiah came properly out from behind the curtains. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you keep repeating everything?”
“Shut up,” said Freddy. “Mr. Coleridge … you said something about a dome.”
“Oh yes.” Sam’s hands went up to his forehead again. “The pleasure-dome. Glorious image come to me in a dream!”
“An opium dream,” said Josiah under his breath.
“Shut up,” said Freddy, “really.” The day of the crash. The book on the pile. If only she could just …
“Mr. Coleridge,” said Freddy, fighting to keep her voice steady, “I’d like to hear your poem.”
“What? No,” he said, lowering his hands. “It will never be finished now. It will never be any good—”
“I don’t think that’s true,” said Freddy. “Could we just hear the first few lines? I really like that image of the pleasure-dome.”
He paced the length of the room, then back again. “It’s no good. Vanished forever! There was something about a tree. Oh, very well.”
Sam stopped in place and recited:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man—”
“—Down to a sunless sea,” said Mel.
14
The voice had come through the kitchen window. Freddy seized the astonished Josiah’s hand and pulled him past the purple smoke bush and through the back gate and into the lane, then over to the side yard of the house on Grosvenor Street. They stopped next to the cedar hedge, and Freddy threw herself down on the grass and started to laugh.
After a while, the laughter became problematic, and she had to reach into her bag and close her fist around her key. Josiah sat down beside her and watched her as if she were a scientific experiment, possibly one involving marbles and inclined planes.
“Did you just get us back?” he asked eventually.
“I think so,” said Freddy. “I remembered about Coleridge. Does this mean Mel is Three?”
“She was reading the poem aloud,” said Josiah. “Who was in the room with her?”
“Well … Roland. And me.”
“Then it could still be any of you. Damn. At least we’re back.”
But now something else was occurring to Freddy. “We’re back back. Over three weeks back.”
“I know,” said Josiah. “I’ve known all along this would happen.”
Freddy let out what probably counted as a wordless yelp of rage. She seemed to have boarded the emotional roller coaster shortly after listening to Mika’s story. “You’ve known all along? You knew we would get back, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Ssh!” Josiah cast a nervy look at the hedge and dropped his voice. “You and your fellow ducklings aren’t really all that far away from us at the moment, so please keep it down.”
“But you knew,” whispered Freddy, “and—”
“I keep telling you,” said Josiah. “It’s better not to know what’s going to happen. That way, you don’t second-guess yourself all the time.”
“But you knew we were going to get back,” said Freddy, staring at him. “Didn’t you even see how worried about that I was?”
“Oh. Were you?” said Josiah. “I suppose you would have been. Are you going to strangle me again?”
She wrestled with herself for a moment. “No.”
“That’s a bonus, at any rate.”
“But three weeks,” said Freddy. “Isn’t there any way we could … well, get closer to the proper time?”
He sighed. “You’re being obtuse. You want to jump back into the time stream? We can’t chance it. Even this was a hundred to one against. If we try again, we could end up bouncing around through time for years. Frankly, I can’t believe we managed to make it back only three weeks early. It could have been years early … or years late.”
“I know,” said Freddy. She was being obtuse. And it was her doing they had got here at this time, at any rate. But it was frustrating. She had been wanting to get home for more than a year, and now she was home, but there wouldn’t be a place for her until September twenty-seventh.
Josiah eyed her sidelong. “I knew about this because you and the other me were living with us for weeks
.”
“I figured,” said Freddy, who had just begun to realise. “There were even clues. We kept noticing there was someone else in the house.”
She was going to have to start thinking in terms of the doubled timeline. Was this the way it had been for Josiah the whole time they had been travelling? Had he constantly been worrying about where everyone had been the last time? At least he hadn’t had to hide from himself.
To hide from himself. Oh damn it—
“Behind the hedge,” said Freddy. “I’m listening. Right now!”
“You’re what?” said Josiah.
“Listening to this. To us. In our yard,” she hissed.
“Well,” said Josiah, “we should go over to the other side of our yard, then. Are you going to be forgetting such important details often?”
“Shut up,” said Freddy, but she followed him quite meekly around to the other side of the house. She remembered walking around the hedge to look for the people who had been talking; she and Josiah would be out of sight by the time that happened.
* * *
They got into the house through an open basement window. Josiah admitted his future self had told him it would be open. “Isn’t that a paradox?” said Freddy.
“Please stop trying to analyse the time travel,” growled Josiah, yanking the window up. “If you start going on about stable time loops and the possibility of killing one’s own grandfather, I shall smack you.”
The window led to the laundry room, which contained a boiler, a run-down-looking washer and dryer, and nothing else. They climbed the stairs to the equally empty main floor, then went up another flight. Josiah led her into a bedroom at the front of the house. “This is where we were last time,” he said. Freddy nodded.
They passed the time by emptying their bags and taking an inventory of what they had brought back from their travels. There wasn’t much. Josiah had several articles of clothing, a bork, a handful of pearls a random Greek princess had given him, a jewelled comb, half a wheel of cheese, and the knife he had been carrying since medieval Sweden. Freddy had several more articles of clothing, a bork of her own, a sling, Ling’s sewing kit, a small book of German poetry, and the microgun she had picked up in Filbert’s time. Josiah tried to take the microgun away from her. “No,” said Freddy, “that’s mine.”
“It doesn’t belong in this time,” he said.
She just barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes at him. “I’m not going to use it. I want it as a souvenir. I won’t let it fall into the hands of mad scientists; I promise.”
Reluctantly, he handed it back to her. “Your sister is a mad scientist, so you may find that difficult.”
Freddy was trying to think of a sufficiently scathing reply when something went bang very loudly outside.
“The accident.” Josiah scrambled to his feet. “Here we go.”
They watched it all through the window. It wasn’t easy to see—the trees got in the way—but they caught glimpses of Freddy, Roland, and Mel having their first interaction with Josiah and Cuerva Lachance. It was only when everybody started carting stuff into the house that Freddy could finally see the five of them clearly.
She found she was clutching her key again. She had missed Mel. She had known that, but this made it worse. Her sister was right there, and Freddy couldn’t go to her. There was another Freddy down below. Watching herself was strange as well. She looked so … small. Next to her, Roland hulked huge and awkward. She squeezed the key again. She wouldn’t even have minded having a conversation with Roland. Her anger with him was a year and a half in the past.
About fifteen minutes into the moving session, Freddy heard someone mount the stairs. She and Josiah were just turning towards the door when the other Josiah flung it open.
He glared at them malevolently through his mask of drying blood. “Of course this would happen.” He backed out of the room and slammed the door shut. They heard him throw himself back down the stairs, snarling, “You’re not to go upstairs. No one is to go upstairs ever.”
“I was in a bad mood,” Josiah observed.
Josiah 2 came back later, once the unloading was done and everyone else was eating pie on the front porch. “All right,” he said in a low voice, “this is going to be tricky.”
“We know that, thanks,” said Josiah. “It can’t be avoided.”
“Obviously,” said Josiah 2. “Is Thingy there going to be able to keep out of the way?”
“As far as I can remember, yes,” said Freddy.
“Your memories are useless. All we know is that you’re able to keep out of your way. Well, it will have to do.” He looked at his other self. “You need a haircut.”
Josiah fingered the ponytail he had grown during their travels. “You can do it later.”
“And she needs a … well, words cannot express what she needs,” said Josiah 2. “There’s going to be a right fuss over that.”
“Over what?” said Freddy.
The two Josiahs exchanged glances. “Tell you later,” they said together.
“No,” said Freddy, “tell me now.”
“We prefer to save the hysteria for when there aren’t ducklings quacking around on the ground floor,” said Josiah 2.
“Yeah, well,” said Freddy heatedly, “by this point, if I’m remembering in the right order, one of them is right on the other side of the door!”
Josiah 2 stared at her. “Why didn’t you say so before?” he said, and leapt for the door, which he wrenched open. Freddy caught a glimpse of a small, startled girl standing in the opening, blinking up at Josiah 2. She took a step back. “Who—?”
“No one,” Josiah 2 barked. “I was practising my impressions. I plan to join the circus. I told you to stay downstairs!”
He slammed the door behind him. They heard him tugging Freddy 2 back down the stairs. Freddy and Josiah moved to the window and watched Josiah 2 drive the others away. It was surprisingly difficult not to go running after them.
Josiah 2 returned a moment later, Cuerva Lachance in tow. “All right,” he said, “now we can deal with the hysteria. Quack away.”
Cuerva Lachance was doing a great big Cuerva Lachance smile. “Hello, curly-haired one.”
“Hi,” said Freddy. “What’s going on?”
This time, there was a three-way exchange of glances. “She’s very unobservant,” said Josiah 2.
“Be fair,” said Josiah. “It’s been kind of frantic lately. I trust you made the mark?”
“I’m not a complete idiot,” said Josiah 2, “so yes.”
Freddy said loudly, “I hate to interrupt, but what’s going on?”
Josiah twisted his face into what he may have meant as an expression of concern. She would have liked to tell him he wasn’t fooling anyone. “On September twenty-seventh, what are you planning to do?”
“Go home,” said Freddy.
“Good plan. Good plan,” said Josiah. “However … you may have to be prepared to deal with a few … hiccups.”
“Hiccups?”
“Well, it’s been a year and a half, after all. I mean … there are things … you need to…”
“Oh, just come here,” said Josiah 2. “It’s easier if we show you.”
He turned on his heel and marched out of the room. Freddy glanced at Cuerva Lachance, but she was gazing at the ceiling in apparent fascination. “There are all these little white bumps. Why are there little white bumps everywhere?”
Freddy and Josiah looked at each other, then shrugged and moved out into the hallway.
Josiah 2 was standing impatiently at the bottom of the stairs. “Here,” he said. When she reached him, he pushed her against the frame of the door and marked her height.
“Hey,” said Freddy, “you did that—”
“Five minutes ago,” said Josiah. “Look.”
Freddy looked. She continued looking for quite some time.
Finally, she turned to Josiah, who was sitting on the bottom step. “That’s not possible.”
>
“It’s called a growth spurt,” said Josiah. “You got yours late for a girl. Six inches in a year and a half isn’t bad.”
“But … but I’m short. All the other girls got taller years ago. I’m supposed to have practically stopped growing by now!” Freddy’s eyes kept being drawn back to those marks on the frame.
“You’re still short,” said Josiah. “Well, I suppose you count as average now. But you’re average for fourteen, not sixteen.”
It felt as if someone very large had sat on her chest, squeezing all the air out of her lungs. Finally, she managed to wheeze, “Sixteen?”
“Did you think time was standing still for you while you were travelling?” said Josiah. “Surely you noticed some changes.”
“I know. I have little breasts now,” said Freddy. “But I’m not sixteen!”
Cuerva Lachance, wandering down the stairs, said, “When’s your birthday?”
“I … what? March tenth.”
“Oh, my mistake. You’re still fifteen,” said Josiah, “but only just. You’ll be sixteen by the time you go back to your family.”
“I think there’s a mirror in the luggage somewhere,” said Cuerva Lachance, “though we may have broken it when we crashed into the tree.”
“No, I carried it in. I’ll get it,” said Josiah 2, and he nipped into the living room, looking relieved to escape.
“But I can’t … but people will notice,” said Freddy. “I’m half a foot taller than I was this morning!”
“And that’s not all,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Did I say that out loud?”
Freddy said, “What do you mean, that’s not all?”
“Take a look,” said Josiah 2, coming back out into the hall with a full-length mirror under his arm. He held it up in front of her.