House of Secrets had seen her twin disappear in a wink, a blink. First there, then nowhere. That had been thirty years ago. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets.
Dinner was Beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The experimental chickens were laying again, and so there were poached eggs, too, as well as the chocolate cake. Maureen increased gravity, because even fake Beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “Look at that, will you?” she said. “Every now and then a girl likes to watch something fall.”
Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and Archaea. “I made enough to get us lit,” she said. “Just a little lit. Because today is Gwenda’s birthday.”
"It was my birthday just a little while ago,” Portia said. “How old am I anyway? Never mind, who’s counting.”
"To Portia,” Aune said. “Forever youngish.”
"To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said. “Getting closer every day. Not that much closer.
"Here’s to all us Goldilocks. Here’s to a planet that’s just right.”
"Here’s to a real garden,” Aune said. “With real toads.”
"To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.
"To our House of Secrets,” Mei said.
"To House of Mystery,” Sisi said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed Gwenda’s hand again. They drank.
"We didn’t get you anything, Gwenda,” Sullivan said.
"I don’t want anything,” Gwenda said.
"I do,” Portia said. “For starters, a foot rub. Or wait, I know! Stories! Ones I haven’t heard before.”
"We should go over the log,” Aune said.
"The log can lie there,” Portia said.
"The log can wait,” Mei agreed. “Let’s sit here a while longer, and talk about nothing.”
Sisi cleared her throat. “There’s just one thing,” she said. “We ought to tell Gwenda the one thing.”
"You’ll ruin her birthday party,” Portia said.
"What?” Gwenda asked Sisi.
"It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “Nothing at all. Only the mind playing tricks. You know how it goes.”
"Maureen?” Gwenda said. “What are they talking about, please?”
Maureen blew through the room, a vinegar breeze. “Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She performed several usual tasks, then asked me to bring up our immediate course. I did so. Twelve seconds later, I observed that her heart rate had gone up. When I asked her if something was wrong, she said, ‘Do you see it, too, Maureen?’ I asked Sisi to tell me what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘House of Mystery. Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi I had not seen it. We called back the visuals, but nothing was recorded there. I broadcast on all channels. No one answered. No one has seen House of Mystery in the intervening time.”
"Sisi?” Gwenda said.
"It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God, I saw it. Like looking in a mirror. So near I could almost touch it.”
They all began to talk at once.
"Do you think—
"Just a trick of the imagination—
"It disappeared like that. Remember?” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t it come back again the same way?”
"No!” Portia said. She glared at them all. “I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash all this again. Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and we theorized and we rationalized and what difference did it make?”
"Portia?” Maureen said. “I will formulate something for you, if you are distraught.”
"No,” Portia said. “I don’t want anything. I’m fine.”
"It wasn’t really there,” Sisi said. “It wasn’t there and I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were tears in her eyes. One fell out and lifted slowly away from her cheek.
"Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said. “Maureen, what did you find in Sisi’s blood?”
"Nothing that shouldn’t have been there,” Maureen said.
"I wasn’t high, and I hadn’t had anything to drink,” Sisi said.
"But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Maureen sobers us up and we just climb that mountain again. Cheers.”
Mei said, “I’m just glad it wasn’t me who saw it. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore either. Not right now. We haven’t all been awake like this for so long. Let’s not fight.”
"That’s settled,” Portia said. “Bring up the lights again, Maureen, please. I’d like something fancy. Something with history. An old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, bluebells, sheep, moors, detectives in deerstalkers, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know.”
"It isn’t your birthday, you know,” Sullivan said. “Not anymore. It’s Gwenda’s.”
"I don’t care,” Gwenda said, and Portia blew her a kiss.
That breeze ran up and down the room again. The table sank back into the floor. The curved walls receded, extruding furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They were in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. Tapestries hung on plaster walls, threadbare and musty, so real that Gwenda sneezed. There were flagstones, blackened beams. A roaring fire. Through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.
You could smell the cold rising off stones, the yew log upon the fire, the roses and the dust of centuries.
"Halfmark House,” Maureen said. “Built in 1508. Queen Elizabeth came here on a progress in 1575 that nearly bankrupted the Halfmark family. Churchill spent a weekend in December of 1942. There are many photos. Additionally, it was once said to be the second-most haunted manor in England. There are three monks and a Grey Lady, a White Lady, a yellow fog, and a stag.”
"It’s exactly what I wanted,” Portia said. “To float around like a ghost in an old English manor. Could you turn gravity off again, Maureen?”
"I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”
"Of course I am,” Portia said. “We all are.” She made a wheel of herself and rolled around the room. Hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.
"Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”
"Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”
"No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen can provide the special effects.”
"I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said, slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my great-grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”
The Great Room grew dark until all of them were only shadows, floating in shadow. Sisi wrapped an arm around Gwenda’s waist. Outside the mullioned windows, the gardeners and the rose bushes disappeared. Now you saw a neat little farm and rocky fields, sloping up toward the twilight bulk of a coniferous forest.
"Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My great-grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tr
ee, a great slab that looked like something like a table.”
Outside the windows of the English manor, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.
"My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting all around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”
"Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”
"Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my great-grandmother, her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose, one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”
The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. Sullivan waved back.
"Creepy!” Portia said. “That was a good one. Maureen, didn’t you think so?”
"It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”
"So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”
"I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”
"You could change things,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”
"I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “Anyhow it’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story my grandfather told me.”
The gardeners were outside the windows again. There was something ghostly about them, Gwenda thought. You knew that they would just come and go, always doing the same things. Perhaps this was what it had been like to be rich and looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible—just like Maureen, really, or even more so—for all the notice you had to take of them. They might as well have been ghosts. Or was it the rich people who had lived in a house like this who had been the ghosts? Capricious, exerting great pressure without ever really having to set a foot on the ground, nothing their servants dared look at for any length of time without drawing malicious attention?
Never mind, they were all ghosts now.
What an odd string of thoughts. She was sure that while she had been alive on Earth nothing like this had ever been in her head. Out here, suspended between one place and another, of course you went a little crazy. It was almost luxurious, how crazy you were allowed to be.
She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. They floated just above the silky ears of one of the greyhounds. The sensation of heat from the fireplace furred one arm, one leg, burned pleasantly along one side of her face. If something disastrous were to happen now, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, if a seam ruptured and they all went flying into space, could she and Sisi keep hold of one another? She resolved she would. She would not let go.
Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They hunted wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to a church on Sundays. There was a tornado.
Rain beat at the mullioned windows. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.
After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were going to look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather, a young man at the time, went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was with the group that found the girl. A tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in two. She was crawling, dragging herself along the ground by her fingernails.
"After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather only hunted in those woods a time or two. Then he never hunted there again. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”
"Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was crawling along the floor of the forest. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”
The gardeners again, with their terrible shears.
"No more old-people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”
Sullivan pushed himself up toward the white-washed ceiling. “You’re a brat, Portia,” he said.
"I know,” Portia said. “I know! I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good ghost story, right?”
"Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”
"That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”
"Maybe it isn’t always bad?” Mei said. “Maybe there are happy, well-adjusted ghosts?”
"I never saw the point,” Sullivan said. “I mean, ghosts appear as a warning. So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half? Don’t die?”
"I thought they were more like a memory,” Gwenda said. “Not really there at all. Just an echo, recorded somehow and then played back, what they did, what happened to them.”
Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. What would have happened then?”
"Nothing good,” Aune said.
"Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “Seeing ghosts. That kind of thing.”
"Then Aune and I would be prone,” Sullivan said.
"Not me,” Sisi said. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. No. It wasn’t a ghost. What I saw. How could a ship be a ghost?”
"Don’t think about it now,” Mei said. “Let’s not tell any more ghost stories. Let’s have a gossip instead. Talk about back when we used to have sex lives.”
"No,” Gwenda said. “Let’s have one more ghost story. Just one, for my birthday. Maureen?”
That breeze tickled at her ear. “Yes?”
"Do you know any ghost stories?”
Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”
"No,” Gwenda said. “I want a real story.”
Portia said, “And then Sullivan will give me a foot rub, and then we can all take a nap before breakfast. Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people though. I want a sexy ghost story.”
"God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”
"I have a story,” Sisi said. “It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”
"Go on,” Gwenda said.
"Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a few months.”
"A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi! Which one?”
We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. But here she is, here we are, together. And what are they? Dead and buried! Ghosts! Every last one of them!
"I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi was saying. “This was during the period when they weren’t building new ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fundraising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. Emphasis on the slinky little dress. I was supposed to be seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. I did a good enough job that they sent me over to meet a consortium of investors and big shots in London. I met a
ll sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one dude, Liam. Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this old family, lots of money and not a lot of supervision and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. She ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby. That was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and tried to make things good with her brother. Are you with me so far?”
"So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story,” Portia said.
"You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother were into collecting art. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the transatlantic exchange, the post-colonial relationship between England and the US, something like that. And what he did was, he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the original London Bridge. This artist bought the suburban ranch, circa 1980, and the furniture in it and everything else, down to the rolls of toilet paper and the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs and video so he would know exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to England and then he built it all again on the family’s estate. And simultaneously, he had a second house built right beside it. This second house was an exact replica, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to the cans of soup on the shelves in the kitchen.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 49