Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  Freddy saw a stranger: a girl with long curly hair, several shades lighter than the plain brown she was used to. Her skin, on the other hand, was several shades darker. The shape of her face had changed. It seemed longer and more angular. Her cheeks were thinner, her nose more prominent. At fourteen, she had looked eleven or twelve. At nearly sixteen, she looked almost grown up. The breasts she had known about, but she hadn’t been paying attention to the hips. Somehow, she had those now, too.

  “No one is even going to recognise me,” she breathed, staring at the mirror in horror.

  “Well, it’s not as bad as you think,” said Josiah. “You look like your own older sister. We’ll cut your hair just before you go back, and we’ll get you something baggy to wear. The tan’s pretty deep, so I’m not sure about that. But all right, yes, you’re going to have some problems.”

  “Not as many as your imagination is telling you right now,” said Cuerva Lachance. “People see what they want to see.”

  Freddy had been having the same thought a few hours and/or a couple hundred years ago, but she wasn’t sure it applied here. “Maybe if I’d been gone for a month. I’ll have been gone for five minutes.”

  “You could stretch it to an hour and say you were sulking,” said Josiah.

  “Try not to worry about it.” Cuerva Lachance patted her reassuringly on the head. “You’ll have other things to worry about soon. You’re living with us now. We can bake cookies. It’s possible I’ll accidentally make the closets come alive, but I’m sure you’ll be able to deal with that.”

  She drifted into the living room, humming. The Josiahs cast each other long-suffering looks before they followed. Freddy stood alone in the front hall. The bottom had fallen out of everything. It wasn’t just that there wasn’t a place for her at the moment. It was that when her place did become available again, she wasn’t sure she was going to fit back into it.

  15

  “Get up,” said Josiah the next morning. He was sitting on her feet.

  Nothing she saw when she woke up ever confused her any more. There was no point in being confused when everything was constantly changing. Freddy opened her eyes. She was in the bedroom she and Josiah had been hiding in the day before. Her bed wasn’t really a bed; it was a futon mattress Cuerva Lachance had absentmindedly created from nothing.

  There was only one bed. A second bed was what she had noticed missing a year and a half—or, technically, half a day—ago. Knowing Josiah, she didn’t find this surprising. “Well, obviously,” Josiah 2 had said the day before as they manoeuvred a couch into position. “What would I do with a bed?”

  “You could try sleeping in it,” Freddy had pointed out.

  “You people waste far too much time sleeping,” Josiah 2 had said.

  Freddy had grown used to Josiah’s behaviour at night. He never did sleep. He just walked around and fidgeted and occasionally engaged in monologues when other people were trying to sleep. Cuerva Lachance slept, though not always, and usually not where anyone could see her. She said she did it because it was fun and beat listening to Josiah all night.

  “I’m tired,” said Freddy. “Why don’t you go talk to yourself?”

  “Myself has gone to school,” said Josiah. “First day, remember? I spent the night filling him in on certain essential details. He’s being tormented by fiends in human form even as we speak.”

  Freddy pulled the covers over her head. “What do you need me for?”

  “Well, I’m bored,” said Josiah, “but that’s not really it. It’s the whole living-in-a-house-with-Cuerva-Lachance thing. It’s better if you’re awake when she is. Fewer unexpected things can happen to you that way.”

  Groaning, Freddy sat up. “I have only one outfit, and it needs to be washed.”

  “You can borrow something from me for now. I’m not all that much bigger than you any more.”

  “How much better that makes me feel,” said Freddy. “Give me the clothes and get out.”

  She spent half an hour in the shower, just because she could. There hadn’t been many showers during her travels. Josiah’s jeans turned out to be only a little roomy but about three inches too long. She had to borrow a belt as well, then roll up the cuffs. The T-shirt was too big, but as it was a T-shirt, that didn’t matter. Freddy preferred her clothing baggy. Cuerva Lachance gave her some underwear and a bra that were far too big. She claimed they were new. Freddy decided not to think about it.

  “Is there food?” said Freddy as she entered the living room. It already contained an extra chair, a carved wooden one with a faded orange cushion.

  Josiah was flat against the wall beside the window, looking oddly like he had at Coleridge’s farmhouse. “Shut up and get out of sight. Your stepbrother is sneaking around outside.”

  “Roland?” said Freddy. She ducked back out into the hall. “He’s supposed to be in school.”

  “I’m aware. Did you actually see him at the morning assembly today?”

  She tried to remember, but it had been far too long since she had been at that assembly. “Maybe not. He was in school in the afternoon. I saw him in math class. What’s he doing?”

  “He was looking in the window earlier,” said Josiah. “He may have seen me. Now … no idea. I thought your sister was the detective.”

  “Roland’s…” She trailed off and sputtered for a moment, then confessed, “I don’t know very much about Roland.”

  “You live in a house with him.”

  “I try to keep out of his way.”

  “I’ve noticed that. You haven’t even bothered learning to talk like a baby in sign language, have you?”

  Freddy shrugged.

  “Well, he seems to be going all Hardy Boys on us now,” said Josiah, “so good luck with keeping out of his way.”

  Cuerva Lachance poked her head through from the kitchen. “Is something exciting happening?”

  “Roland,” they said together.

  “Roland who?” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “Big awkward one,” Josiah said.

  “Oh, good,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I need muscles.”

  Josiah said, “What? No!” But Cuerva Lachance was already heading for the front door. Freddy peered through into the living room again, shrugged at Josiah, and ran for the stairs.

  She had gained the landing and hidden around the corner by the time Cuerva Lachance had opened the door and presumably caught Roland standing on the porch, snooping. “Big awkward one!” Freddy heard her cry happily. “How nice to see you nosing conveniently around our front door!”

  “I wasn’t—” started Roland, but as Freddy knew from experience, having a conversation with Cuerva Lachance was mostly a matter of keeping up with her thought process as she completely failed to take in anything you said. “I could use your help,” she said. “The piano is in the wrong corner of the living room, and Josiah and I can’t shift it alone.”

  As far as Freddy knew, the piano hadn’t turned up yet. It certainly wasn’t in the living room, or it hadn’t been fifteen seconds ago. Roland mumbled a reply, and Cuerva Lachance said, “Oh, I’m sure we don’t need anybody but you.”

  Roland said something with the words “grand piano” in it. He seemed to be in the house now. Freddy suspected Cuerva Lachance had physically dragged him in.

  “I know,” said Cuerva Lachance. “But I’m an optimist. We may not be able to lift it, but we can push it across the floor, leaving heartbreaking grooves in the hardwood. Josie, stop lurking and help us with this.”

  After a pause, Roland said clearly, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “Aren’t you?” said Josiah.

  “I thought I saw you crossing the park earlier.”

  “I started across the park. Then I was overcome with ennui, and I came back to play moody New Age music and think about death.”

  “Don’t trip over the chair,” said Cuerva Lachance, though Freddy could hardly hear her over the crash that presumably resulted from Roland trippin
g over the chair.

  There were several more crashes and a couple of loud thumps. Freddy, cringing upstairs, strained to hear any conversation, but all she caught was an exclamation of “What a beautiful trail of destruction we have created!” from Cuerva Lachance. A few minutes later, after Roland had done some more mumbling, Cuerva Lachance said, “Be sure to come again when you should be in school, learning.” The front door closed. Cautiously, Freddy crept back down the stairs.

  Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were standing beside the piano, having an argument. An argument between Cuerva Lachance and Josiah involved Josiah snarling viciously and Cuerva Lachance missing the point, conceivably on purpose. “He saw my ponytail,” hissed Josiah as Freddy looked into the room. “Don’t come in here, you fool; he could still be outside.” Freddy stopped in the doorway.

  “Does it matter if he saw it, Josie, dear?” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “It will, believe me,” said Josiah. “From what I gathered last time around, this is just the beginning of the weirdness. Why did you tell him I was here?”

  “I don’t know. Did I? I was getting the piano,” said Cuerva Lachance vaguely.

  “Yes, and what a good idea it was for you to do that practically in front of a civilian,” said Josiah.

  “It just came,” said Cuerva Lachance. “This sort of thing is always happening to me.”

  “Well, he’s going to be all suspicious of you guys now,” said Freddy. But … that wasn’t quite right, was it? Roland had been suspicious before Cuerva Lachance had invited him into the house. She tried to remember if anything had happened while they had been helping with the moving. Nothing came immediately to mind.

  “I need to get the other me to cut off this bloody ponytail tonight,” said Josiah. He went storming off into the kitchen in a huff. Cuerva Lachance smiled brilliantly, then simply wasn’t there any more. It was, Freddy decided, going to be a very long three weeks.

  * * *

  First she had to get through a very long day. There was little to do. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had some books, but they were all in Russian. “Well, we came here from Russia,” said Josiah when Freddy asked. “You know that. We were there for a few weeks in the 1960s.”

  “If you even just had a computer,” said Freddy.

  He shook his head at her. “You get bored more easily than I do. There’s a TV somewhere, likely broken. We have a laptop, but there’s no Internet yet. We just moved in, remember? The phone company’s coming by on Thursday.”

  “Isn’t Cuerva Lachance supposed to be a private investigator?” said Freddy.

  “That’s what she tells people,” said Josiah gloomily. “She’ll take a few jobs eventually because she thinks it’s amusing, then lose interest. But we’re really just investigating your family.”

  “Oh,” said Freddy, “right.”

  The TV was broken. It also seemed to be a refugee from the 1990s. Freddy gave up and went home.

  It was a bad idea, but she knew there would be no one in the house until after three. She could at least grab some underwear and socks, plus maybe a few books no one would miss.

  Freddy felt like a burglar as she let herself into the kitchen with her key. She kept having to stop herself from tiptoeing. It was stupid to feel like an intruder. She lived here, after all. But it was all a little strange. The house seemed smaller than she remembered. It was indescribably odd to look at the pile of books on the chair by the door and recall that exact pile from a year and a half ago. The pile would shift and mutate over the next few weeks, and yet here she was, looking at an old version of it. She’d thought she’d got better at thinking like a time traveller, but it seemed she hadn’t. It was immensely hard to reconcile her personal timeline with chronological time.

  Her bedroom, like the rest of the house, seemed too small. She blinked around it in dismay. Had she ever liked that duvet cover? It had great big flowers on it. She thought she remembered her mum giving it to her for Christmas one year, but she did have a plain blue one as well. Why had she chosen the giant flowers? Was there really a pink shirt draped over her desk chair? She didn’t even like pink. Rochelle and Cathy wore a lot of pink. Was that why she had a pink shirt? Had she ever truly enjoyed hanging out with Rochelle and Cathy?

  There was a book on her bed. She picked it up. It was the one with the tragic immortal nuzzling teenagers in it. Freddy stared at it, puzzled. She remembered starting it the day she had met Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but she didn’t remember what had happened to it after that. She had certainly never finished it.

  Still holding the book, she wandered around the room. Everything in it was wrong. All the clothes and books and DVDs and games belonged to someone else. I haven’t changed that much, have I? It’s only been a year and a half. I’m still the same person.

  She sat down on the bed and opened the book.

  It was the most brain-numbing thing she had ever read. She had thought it was stupid before, but she had been able to get through several chapters. Now, she could hardly manage a paragraph. She rose, walked to her bedroom window, slid back the pane and then the screen, and flung the book violently into a tree.

  * * *

  “Went home?” said Josiah later when Freddy was poking at a peanut butter sandwich in a moody sort of way. Cuerva Lachance had gone shopping and brought back a surprisingly logical selection of food. She had also bought twenty pounds of sugar, but as Josiah had pointed out, it wouldn’t have been Cuerva Lachance if something hadn’t gone wrong somehow.

  Freddy nodded.

  “Bad idea,” said Josiah, “though understandable. Got some books now?”

  “A few.” Freddy, in desperation, had raided her mother’s library and come away with half the English literary canon. She had also snagged the Coleridge book from the chair in the kitchen so she could read the poem she had interrupted.

  “You won’t have that much time for them, all things considered,” said Josiah.

  She stared at him. “There’s nothing to do here.”

  “Yet,” said Josiah. But when she asked him what he meant by that, he didn’t reply.

  16

  “Josiah,” said Freddy, “the second-floor bathroom has stopped existing again.”

  It was the fourth time in as many days. She never knew when it was going to happen. She would mount the stairs and turn left and nearly walk into the wall. The basement bathroom was permanently plugged, and the third-floor one was on the third floor, which terrified everyone except Cuerva Lachance. Once, in desperation, Freddy had gone out into the backyard and used a bush.

  The Josiahs, who were seated at the kitchen table, turned to her with identical expressions of harassment. Josiah 2 had cut off Josiah’s ponytail a few days before, but she could always tell which was which. She thought she would be able to do so even when the gash on Josiah 2’s forehead had faded completely. Josiah 2 had trimmed Josiah’s hair just a bit too short. Besides, Josiah looked slightly more long-suffering.

  “Damn it,” said Josiah 2, “I don’t know why she insists on doing that. And it’s always the bathroom, too. It’s never the kitchen or the basement or that cursed piano. This from someone who hasn’t even discovered—”

  “Ssh!” said Freddy and Josiah simultaneously. The three of them had been working quite hard to stop Cuerva Lachance from finding out about the organ. Josiah hadn’t told Josiah 2 that they would eventually fail.

  The house was changing. Freddy had first noticed it on Wednesday, two days ago, when she had got lost on the way down to breakfast. It wasn’t possible to get lost in the house on Grosvenor Street; the second floor contained one corridor with one turn in it. Still, she had ended up wandering down corridor after corridor, past an endless succession of locked doors. There had been nothing interesting about the corridors. There had just been far too many of them. She had found the stairs by sheerest accident.

  On Thursday, Josiah 2 had wound up on the fourth floor of their three-storey house and hadn’t been able to get out. Josia
h and Freddy had climbed out onto the roof to fetch him. They had seen him as standing beside the chimney. He had seen himself as being in a room without doors. It had taken some time to persuade him to walk through what had, to him, seemed to be an impenetrable wall.

  Now it was Friday, and the bathroom had disappeared again. There were also chairs everywhere, though the spider plants hadn’t turned up yet. Freddy had considered using the third-floor bathroom, but she had heard strange noises in the stairwell and ultimately decided on flight.

  “Cuerva Lachance,” said Josiah, “please come in here.”

  Someone upstairs cackled. It sounded like a man.

  “I mean it,” said Josiah 2. “Honestly, there’s no excuse for this behaviour.”

  “Is she always like this?” said Freddy as something very large slammed into something else above, making the whole house shudder. “I don’t remember her being like this.”

  “She was on her best behaviour around you,” said Josiah. “Besides, the last Three did choose her. And you know she’s … erratic.”

  “Sure,” said Freddy, but it had been different before. She thought Josiah must have been protecting her. She had rarely lived in the same house as Cuerva Lachance for more than a day at a time.

  “Cuerva Lachance,” shouted Josiah 2, “do you want to wreck the house already? Get down here!”

  “I don’t want to wreck the house at all,” said Cuerva Lachance earnestly from the living room doorway. “Something’s gone strange with the third floor again.”

  Both Josiahs buried their faces in their hands. “Perfect,” said Josiah 2. “I love it when you have no idea what you’ve done to make reality implode.”

  “If I understood what was going on all the time, I would be you,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I think this kitchen lacks something. What is it this kitchen lacks?”

  Freddy said, “What’s happened to the third floor?”

  “Well,” said Cuerva Lachance, “I think it may be in space. It’s not clear at the moment, but I would suggest not going up there. I don’t think there’s much atmosphere. And there’s a stereotypical supervillain floating around in the asteroid belt, laughing and smashing things.”