Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “You’re being just like Cally,” said Mel. “This is happening, Roland. Ignoring it doesn’t make it not be happening.”

  It should have worked, and maybe it would have if the story hadn’t been about a dog. “So now you’re comparing me to your cocker spaniel,” snarled Roland. “Thank you very much. It’s nice to know you care.”

  He turned and took off across the park, through the gentle rain. “Great merciful Zeus,” said Mel, “I used to think he was reasonable. Why’s he acting like this?”

  “He’s scared,” said Freddy. And then she realised: it was another clue. As far as any of them knew, Three really did just have to make a tiny little choice. Few of the Threes Freddy had met, pre- or post-choice, had seemed to have much of a problem with this. But Roland saw the choice as a trap. Maybe it was. Maybe his dreams, whatever they were, had told him something Freddy couldn’t know yet. Claire had had dreams, and she hadn’t wanted to choose, either.

  “We’ve got to talk to him,” she said.

  But they couldn’t. He had barricaded himself in his room again. Freddy banged on the door for a while, just to relieve her feelings. He may not have been able to hear it, but maybe, she thought sourly, he would feel the house shaking if she thumped viciously enough. Until he accepted what was happening and dealt with it, they were stuck.

  22

  She had another dream herself that night, but she could never remember afterwards what was in it except that Ban and Filbert were featured. They were both trying to tell her something immensely important, but their voices were drowned out by the organ music. There was organ music all through the dream, crashing like waves, overwhelming everything.

  Freddy opened her eyes. Just like last time, the music was real. Cuerva Lachance was at it again.

  She had stumbled out of bed and down the stairs into the hallway before she realised something wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have been the only one. Cuerva Lachance had played at night more than once, and every time, she had brought the entire family, with the occasional exception of Roland, out of bed. Jordan had never tried to call the police after the first time, but there had always been a certain amount of swearing and complaining and going out into the yard to yell uselessly at the tower. It was impossible to sleep when the organ was sounding. Only Roland had ever been able to manage it. It had all happened quite a long time ago for Freddy, but she didn’t remember Mel ever accusing her of sleeping through a midnight concert. It couldn’t be done.

  And yet the house was perfectly still. Even Jordan, who could be counted on to go ballistic at the faintest hint of chiff from next door, hadn’t stirred.

  Freddy crept back up the stairs. She cracked open Mel’s door and flicked the light switch. The light stayed off. Dimly, Freddy could see the outline of Mel’s bed, rumpled but flat, unoccupied. She began to be aware of her heart thumping in her chest.

  She moved to Roland’s door, which she half expected to be barricaded still. It wasn’t. The light didn’t work here, either, but again, she could see there was no one in the bed. Down the hall to Mum and Jordan’s room … and once more, no one.

  The organ music was making her head go fuzzy; it was hard to think. Were they all outside already? Or had something worse happened? Were they next door? Had Cuerva Lachance and Josiah got to them? Why weren’t the lights working? Through her mum’s door, she could see the computer’s power bar blinking sleepily. There was electricity but no light. She was alone in the house, and something was very wrong.

  She went back to her room. Forcing herself to be steady and methodical, she got dressed in the first thing she could find, which turned out to be her time-travelling outfit. It looked a little odd in twenty-first-century Canada, but it was designed to look a little odd everywhere. That didn’t matter at the moment. She picked up her bag as well. Yesterday, she had felt naked without it. It had been her companion for so long that it was reassuring to loop its strap across her body, even if it didn’t truly hold anything that could help her. She slipped her keys into the pocket she had sewn into her tunic in the seventh century AD in the land that would one day be known as Brazil, and she walked back out into the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen. The music was still everywhere. Freddy thought she recognised “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” which Mel occasionally liked to sing. She opened the kitchen door.

  Aside from the organ music, the night outside was as still as the night inside. There was no breath of wind. The streetlights on Grosvenor and Elm shone into the yard, and the clouds glowed faintly with the radiance of the city. As Freddy moved out into the lane, she saw that all the other houses were dark. That was wrong. The neighbourhood always ended up in a blaze of light when Cuerva Lachance played the organ after midnight. Was it after midnight? Freddy hadn’t checked the time. The lights hadn’t worked in her house. Was it the same in the other houses? Why had the light on the power bar been shining if the light switches had done nothing? Her head was going fuzzy again. She thought she might be panicking now, but there was anger there as well. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah could play their little games, but they had no right to kidnap her entire family. Why had they left her behind? She couldn’t think properly with the music this loud.

  She ran through the backyard of the house on Grosvenor Street, right to the porch. No one was in sight. The house itself was as dark as all the other houses. The music played on, evolving from Gilbert and Sullivan into something in a minor key. Freddy, panting, grasped the doorknob. She wasn’t expecting much, but the knob turned, and the door opened. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she stepped inside.

  She thought she could just barely recognise the contours of the kitchen, but it was hard to be sure. The room had been taken over by the spider plants. In the faint light that trickled through the windows, Freddy saw what looked like a jungle made up of snaking, sinuous trailers with little baby plants sprouting at their ends. There shouldn’t have been movement. Baby plants, thought Freddy, sure, but they look like spiders, don’t they? She could hear nothing but organ music, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see something scuttling. Slowly, carefully, Freddy shifted her bag around in front of her and eased out the microgun. She didn’t know how much it would help against mobile spider plants, but it felt better to have something in her hand.

  Something brushed against the top of her head. Freddy reached up with her left hand, and her fingers closed on a writhing bundle the size of her fist. She flung it across the room. The jungle came alive. Plant-spiders erupted from the undergrowth on all sides while trailers whipped across her face and tried to twine themselves around her legs. She flung her right arm across her eyes and lurched forward. “Don’t make me shoot you!” she shouted. She couldn’t even hear her own voice above the screaming notes of the organ. Plant-spiders crawled onto her tunic, heading for her face. She squeezed a bolt out of the microgun, and it crackled through the kitchen, crisping leaves and tendrils. Plant-spiders tumbled to the floor and dived for cover. A trailer sneaked around her neck. She tore away from it, staggering through the last of the jungle to the living room door.

  A few plant-spiders followed her in, but they seemed more docile here, out of their element. This room belonged to the chairs. Not entirely unexpectedly, they, too, had come to life. Freddy glared at them. She had lived in this house for weeks, and she didn’t find it all that difficult to adjust to the strange things it did. “No. Just no,” she told the chairs as they edged closer to her, their seat covers curling back to reveal the rows of teeth beneath. “I’m sorry, but I’ve seen scarier. Is there any point to this, Cuerva Lachance? Oh, and now the piano’s going to eat me, too?” It was creeping through the chairs, crouched on its rollers, like a very bulky tiger hunting in the grass.

  The anger was getting more acute. It just about did in any lingering fear. Freddy shoved three or four slavering chairs aside and slammed her hands down on the keys of the piano. All she could think of to play was “Chopsticks,” but she played i
t as vengefully as she could. She could even almost hear it over the roaring of the organ. “There,” Freddy screamed at the piano and the organ and anything or anyone else who may have been listening. “You want music? Here’s some music for you. Everybody’s playing music now! Shut up!”

  The piano looked at her sheepishly without eyes and slunk off into a corner. Freddy kicked some more chairs aside and headed into the hall, then up the stairs, which kept trying to tip her off. She had to put the microgun back in the bag so she had both hands free. It was a bit of a struggle to squeeze past the phone booth that kept phasing into and out of existence, and she nearly stepped on a rat in a waistcoat and trousers, but she knew they were just some more of Cuerva Lachance’s figments, and she pushed on through, finally gaining the landing.

  The corridor had split in two. Both branches were littered with small somethings that glittered in the light coming from somewhere or other. Freddy crouched and scooped up a handful of whatever was in the first corridor. The whatever pricked her palm gently in several places. She found herself gazing down at a tangle of what looked like the kind of pins she’d had to use in her textiles class last year. She ducked into the other corridor and came up with a handful of needles. “I know this is symbolic,” Freddy howled at the walls, “so watch me not caring!” A wolf wandered up to her and sat down, its tongue lolling. She flung away her handfuls and, randomly, took the needles path, scuffing aside the needles with her boots so they wouldn’t go straight through the soles. She didn’t look back to see what the wolf did.

  The corridor was a path now. It twisted on through what could have been a forest, lurking in what could have been moonlight. One of the most frightening things about the house on Grosvenor Street was the way it wasn’t always possible to tell what was in it. Settings would shift or just remain ambiguous. Something heavy was forcing itself through the maybe-trees. Again, she couldn’t hear it, but she could catch the movement on the edge of her vision. She sighed. The organ music was getting no louder and no fainter. “That’s enough, Cuerva Lachance!” said Freddy. “Where are they?”

  Her left foot came down on needles; her right foot came down on sand. Freddy stood blinking in what most people would have been fooled into believing was sunlight and gazed out on what those same people would have thought was a desert. Freddy knew it wasn’t. It was foreshortened. Though the sand stretched away into the distance, the distance was very close by. The light had no heat to it, and the sand beneath her boots had the consistency of wet clay.

  The organ music stopped. Josiah stepped out from behind a rock that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  Freddy had thought the anger she’d felt at Ban after her adventure in the medieval dungeon had been the worst possible, but it was dwarfed by what she felt now. “You let her do this?” she said. She was impressed at how calm she sounded. “It doesn’t seem like your sort of thing.”

  “It isn’t, believe me,” said Josiah, “but sometimes, it’s more productive to give her relatively free rein.”

  The chill started at the base of Freddy’s spine and worked its way upward. “Why? What did you do with my family?”

  “Do you care? You don’t seem to have all that much to do with them.” Josiah was leaning against the rock. She struggled across the sand towards him. Walking here was surprisingly difficult.

  “They’re my family,” said Freddy.

  He began to tick them off on his fingers. “Well, you’ve got your mother, who talks to you about once a month, and your stepfather, who bonds with you only in the wee hours when he’s yelling at Cuerva Lachance. I presume you have a father as well, but since I’ve never once heard you mention him, I couldn’t say for sure. You take your sister for granted and treat your stepbrother as an interloper, and in the last day or so, your relationship with them has involved you bullying them into seeing me and Cuerva Lachance as some sort of threat. And now you’ve come storming over here to get them? Is it just the possessiveness, or do you, quite unexpectedly, have a heart of gold? Tell me; I’m interested.”

  She glared at him. He’s right, you know, said the contradictory, rebellious, incredibly annoying portion of her brain. Freddy snarled it aside. Maybe she did treat her family badly. It didn’t matter. If Josiah tried to hurt anyone in her family, she would kill him. She had spent eighteen months travelling through time, and she had never even considered not going back to them.

  “Stop trying to misdirect me,” said Freddy. “You’ve done something to them, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “Pity. I’m telling the truth. They’re at home in bed. The point isn’t where they are. It’s where you are.”

  Cuerva Lachance was there, melting out of the air on Freddy’s right. Everything seemed to go slow. Freddy thought afterwards that it was because in reality, everything had gone very, very fast. Cuerva Lachance pulled a pair of handcuffs out of her pocket and snapped one of the cuffs onto Freddy’s right wrist, which she yanked over so she could snap the other cuff onto the left. Freddy tried to jerk away and slammed into Josiah, who tore the bag off her shoulder, snapping the strap. Cuerva Lachance pushed her back against the rock, and a rope came twining out of it and wrapped itself around her torso. She held her arms free just in time, but since her wrists were locked together, that didn’t do much good. The rope had the strength of dried cement. It pinned Freddy firmly to the rock.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped. The rope was cutting off half her air; it was hard to get any words out.

  “I’m being pragmatic,” said Josiah, dropping the bag on the ground, out of reach. “Cuerva Lachance is just playing with the nature of reality for fun.”

  “It’s very educational,” she said, nodding. “Josie doesn’t usually give me this much leeway.”

  “What you thought you saw—and heard—in your house tonight wasn’t what was happening,” said Josiah. “Think of it as a sort of nightmare, if you like. As far as everybody else was concerned, there was no organ music, and the lights worked perfectly. You saw the beds as empty, but they weren’t. That was inspired, by the way,” he told Cuerva Lachance.

  “It just sort of happened. It was an idea I had,” she said.

  Freddy was becoming aware that she had been very, very gullible. She still wasn’t sure why it mattered. “Okay, nicely done,” she wheezed. “You caught me. What’s the point? Are you going to torture me into telling you who Three is?”

  “We don’t need to.” Josiah sat down in the sand, which bounced a little. “We know it’s not you. I figured that out while we were travelling together; you just don’t fit the profile. You’re smart and innovative, but you don’t have all that much of an imagination. It’s down to the other two. Mysteries and role-playing games, isn’t it? Unusual but workable. They’re going to tell us which of them it is.”

  Her brain was catching up. “This is a trap.”

  “You think?”

  “That’s stupid,” said Freddy, struggling for air. “Even if they realise where I’ve gone, they’re not going to come running over here for me. Mel’s more practical than that, and Roland doesn’t even like me.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Josiah. “They’re both sure you’re the key to them getting out of this. I’ll bet you keep telling them you all have to talk about it, don’t you? And I’ll bet you’ve held some details back from them so they have to depend on you for the answer.”

  Freddy stayed prudently silent.

  “They’ll come looking for you because they think you have information,” said Josiah. “When they notice you missing—which will be very soon—they’ll panic. They’ll be sure we’re making our move. Whichever one it is will be desperate for help.”

  “She does have information,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming towards the bright spot of light that wasn’t quite the sun.

  “She … what?” said Josiah.

  “She knows, or she will soon. I remember being Ban
. I gave her hints,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  Josiah gaped at her. “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cuerva Lachance, rubbing her hat in a puzzled sort of way. “High spirits?”

  He scrambled back to his feet. “But then—”

  “Why do you think I said we should call her in?” said Cuerva Lachance. “It’s not a bluff. A day more and she’d have spilled the beans to Three. She is the key.”

  Freddy didn’t feel like the key. She didn’t know … did she? Could it be she really had all the clues she needed? She’d thought maybe she was getting closer earlier, after Roland had panicked and run home across the park, but she hadn’t put the clues together yet. Why had she held things back from Mel? Was Josiah right that she’d just been trying to make herself important?

  She shoved aside the growing shame. At least Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had finally admitted there was something to find out. “I don’t know what you think I know—” she started.

  “Save it. You’re not going to catch us that way,” said Josiah, “obviously. You’re less cunning than you think you are.”

  I doubt it, thought Freddy, keeping her face stony. And I’m more imaginative than you think I am. One of the things she’d noticed about Josiah was that he wasn’t particularly good at figuring out when people were hiding things. Everything about him was out there on the surface, and he assumed everything about everybody else was, too. Cuerva Lachance knew about hiding things, but she didn’t really pay attention, and she missed details. Josiah thought Freddy was less cunning than she thought she was and less imaginative than she thought she was, but really, it was he and Cuerva Lachance who were less powerful than they thought they were—

  That was it. That was the beginning of the answer. She was sure it was. She couldn’t let on that she knew.