—We already decided not to change the voice,—Tabasco said.
—The less we change, the sooner we get back to acting just the way I used to, the less anybody will remember that you’re here.—
Julio felt flickers of unease and apprehension. They didn’t come from him.
—All right, what’s the problem?—
—Do you really want to make me disappear?—
—No!—Then Julio thought, What am I asking? Ask anybody to pretend they’re invisible, and it’s the next best thing to asking them to leave. Is that what I want?—I don’t want people looking at me funny, or being scared of me, or noticing me in any way that they don’t already. I don’t want that Tasha girl thinking I’m some kind of monster, I don’t want the house to think I’m a stranger. I don’t want Mom to worry. And I want you to stay with me. Is this possible?—
Tabasco was silent for a long, long time. Julio thought, Okay, maybe everything has to change now. Well, of course it does. I do have to turn into someone else. Maybe even someone people will notice. Okay. Okay. I can work with that, just because I want everything to be the same doesn’t mean it will be. This is my brother I’m talking to. I have to give him some room. Did I ask for him? No. Do I know him? Not very well. Do I want him to stick around? Hey. He gives me magic! He wants to work with me! He’s trying to learn how to be human! I like him! What’s my problem? I’m so stupid. He was just about to say this when Tabasco interrupted:
—I have something to show you.—
A sheet of air in the room fluoresced, turned deep, velvet, larkspur purple. Faint piano notes, three octaves struck at once, sounded, and then a second triad of notes a half step lower sounded as ice blue spiked through the purple, left a wake, A third triad, three octaves at once, dropped down deep, sustained for six beats, a shock of black. The Rachmaninoff prelude. Then came the attack, dense triplets, syncopation: red fireworks, orange streaks, dots of turquoise and splashes of lilac, appearing and vanishing at the strike of each note, and when the deepest note struck again, black flashed through the whole tapestry—
The first four measures of the piece—
The colors flickered out. The notes faded.
Julio blinked at darkness. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end, and ice chips danced on his spine. Strange shadings of image and thought had flickered through his mind in response to color and sound, a distillation of feelings he couldn’t name.
He didn’t understand his response. He knew it was strong, and closer than ever to what he wanted to get from music.
—Forget everything I just said. I’m an idiot,—he told Tabasco.—That’s not …—
A knock sounded on the door.
“Come in.” Julio reached over to turn on the bedside lamp.
His mother, wearing a red bathrobe, slipped into the room and sat beside him on his bed. “Are you all right? I heard music.”
“I tried to keep it quiet,” Tabasco muttered.
“It wasn’t loud, it was just there.” She glanced around. The cassette player was out in the living room. The radio alarm clock beside his bed was off. “Where did it come from?”
—Can you do that again?—Julio asked.
—I think so.—
“Mom.” Julio took Juanita’s hand. “Watch this.”
They waited a moment, and then the shimmering sheet of midnight air flickered into sight as music struck; colors shot through, shapes flashed and vanished, notes followed each other—
—Stopped.
She sat silent for a long time, staring at the air where the colors had appeared, then turned to him, her eyes wide. “What was it?” she whispered.
“It’s his art.”
She rubbed her eye. “It was beautiful, mijo.”
“Thank you,” Tabasco said. Julio sensed his confusion.
“We’re trying to figure out how to live together,” Julio said after a little while, “and all I could think of was to ask him to pretend he’s not even there, but that’s not fair. He has things to say too.”
She pulled her hand out of his and cradled his head between her hands, stared into his eyes, her own searching, dark, soft. “You’re both inside one head. Maybe just be the same person.”
Julio looked back at her. “I don’t understand.”
“And maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “Thank you for showing me the music. I’ll see you tomorrow. We have setup at eleven at the Larsons’.”
“Okay.” His stomach growled. “Ouch! Again? I’m going to get some toast, Mom.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Now you eat like a growing boy.” She used to tease him all the time about his height, until they both realized he probably wasn’t going to get any taller than five-foot-three. She was short herself, five feet. She had never told him anything about his father’s height, or any of his father’s features. All he knew about his father was that he was gone. “Good night, mijo.”
He was definitely going to need more jobs to support his fire habit.
He got up and dressed, then went to the kitchen and fixed toast. It only took three pieces to fill the hunger Tabasco’s art had created. He sat for a while at the kitchen table. He touched the toast crumbs with the tip of his finger, and they burned, charred to ash. He could taste them, a strange sensation coming from his finger: charcoal, crispy, delicious.
Too weird!
Should he go back to bed? No. He still had questions.
He checked the crack under his mother’s door and saw the light was out. She’d had a long day too. Chances were good that she was asleep. He slipped out of the apartment as quietly as he could and walked the deserted streets of the little beach town.
Streetlights silvered the fog, glistened on everything dewed by the ocean’s nearness. The air smelled of salt, woodsmoke, cold. Julio buried his hands in his jean pockets and hunched his shoulders. He had thrown on a windbreaker at the front door, but it was cold out tonight.
Then it wasn’t.
He lowered his shoulders.—What happened?—
—You don’t like being cold? Why be cold?—
—What?—He remembered burning handprints into the kitchen table and thought,—Oh.—He had an internal heater now so hot it could melt metal. Why be cold?
A cop car cruised past, and he faded into a shop doorway. At the next corner he turned west, off the main highway through town, closer to the beach. Three blocks farther along, he came to the haunted house.
The fog caught light from the city and held it above him, diffuse, but making things dimly visible. A guard light on a pole in a neighbor’s driveway cast light on the weatherworn fence around the yard.
Julio put his hands on the gate, remembered how the house had let him slip under its surface before so that he could sense, somehow, people coming, air temperature, weather, time of day, other things. “House?”
The gate opened. He threaded his way past the attack blackberry bushes in the front yard and walked up the front steps to the porch, then stood there for a couple of minutes. He crossed the porch and sat down with his back to the wall and his palms to the floor. “House,” he said.
“Julio.”
“You know it’s me this time?”
“I do.”
“When you let me be part of you, before? That was—I loved that.”
“I, too.”
“When I came back and you didn’t know me …” Julio felt again that sense of strangeness and loss, a despair all the deeper because the house had been so welcoming when he needed it the most.
“But you were someone else, Julio.”
“Who am I now?”
“Julio-eshue.”
Tabasco startled inside him.
“Julio-eshue-shiaka,” murmured the house in low tones. The wall he leaned on ran fingers up his back, and his hands sank into the surface of the porch.
He felt the warm turquoise surround his hands. He stared, confused, at his
wrists where they disappeared into wood. “House?”
“You want to come back inside?”
“Can I do that when I’m still inside myself?” He tried wiggling his fingers. They didn’t move. Yet it didn’t feel as though they were trapped in wood, more as if he had no outside edges and had melted into the house’s energy.
“I don’t know,” said the house.
This was so strange. “Nathan?” Maybe Nathan would understand more about this, or at least tell him what was going on.
“Nathan’s gone for the night.”
Oh. The séance. It gave Nathan a whole day and night free of his bond to the house, and he would probably spend it with whoever had broken the circle at the séance. Julio wondered which witch, then decided there was no way to know unless he asked them. “House, are you mad at me?”
“No,” said the house. “I just want to eat you.”
“What?” Julio laughed. Then he looked down at his wrists, swallowed by the wood.
—What does it want?—Tabasco wondered.—Does it want to hurt us?—Julio felt fire flare under his breastbone: Tabasco, prepared to burn.—It knows my name.—
“Julio.” Wood crept up over his shoes, his ankles, up around his butt toward his waist; his forearms sank into it now. “Hey, Julio. Want to come inside?”
“What—” The house swallowed him slowly. He watched the tide of wood rise up his legs, leaving his knees as diminishing islands, up his abdomen, up his arms. Or was he sinking into it? He should have fallen through the porch by now, but there was no thud of his feet hitting the ground below; instead, all of him under the wood’s surface had lost its sense of touch. He didn’t feel numb, exactly. All he felt was warm.
The wood rose to his chin, and stopped. “Julio?”
He couldn’t feel his arms and legs at all. His body had vanished from his awareness. His perspective was strange. This must be what the world looked like to a short cat. He could see the splintery grain in the floorboards stretching away from him, dimming with distance. If anybody came up the stairs right now, he’d be staring at their shoes.
“Uh,” he said. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
He closed his eyes before the wood rose up to them.
And then he was as big as a house.
His nerves spread through frayed and frazzled wiring; shingles covered some of his skin like dragon scales; boards were his bones and every room was like a lung; old pipes were his circulatory system, umbilically connecting him to the town water system, and other pipes acted as intestines, carrying waste away; his concrete feet foundations sank down into the sandy earth. The hearth was the house’s heart. Its walls were full of secrets, memories, magic. Shadows of the house it had been lurked everywhere, only waiting to be summoned into solidity. Again, Julio’s sense of himself spread out from the house, through the blackberry bushes and under the ground to the fence, under the sidewalk and halfway across the street.
Yet he knew he wasn’t alone; he and Tabasco were exploring their new body together, and there was a shadow behind them, like a big brother or sister walking beside a kid on a bicycle that still had training wheels.
Warmth, and welcome, and a host of strange sensations that the house knew how to interpret.—You’re here.—the house said.
—I noticed.—
—It worked! I ate a boy. I never did that before, except for Nathan, and he was already dead.—
—Did you want to?—
—Sometimes.— It sounded cheerful. —Some special people.—
—Now that you ate me, does that mean I have to stay here the rest of my life?—
The house didn’t answer. Julio tested his new senses and wondered what his mother would say if he didn’t show up to help her cater the Larson party. How was he going to tell her what had happened to him? She wasn’t going to be happy. He wasn’t sure he was, either, but it had seemed rude to ask the house to let him loose while it was eating him, and something in him had wanted to be eaten. Why? He couldn’t think about that now. Worse came to worst, he could get Edmund to take Juanita a message ….
But this was so ridiculous. He couldn’t take it seriously yet.
There wasn’t much of this new self he could move. House could open and close its doors and windows. What about that? Julio enlisted Tabasco’s aid, and they eased into the hinges of the front door, feeling transitions from wood to metal, panel to screw to hinges. How to slide one surface across another, get it to move?—How do you move anything without muscles?—Julio wondered.
Tabasco said,—It’s easy; tickle the magic in it.—He demonstrated.
The door creaked open.
The house laughed.
They tried tickling different places in the house. It made all three of them laugh. Doors and cupboards and drawers slid open and shut. Julio remembered places to explore, and Tabasco figured out how to get them to work. Eventually Julio recognized that the house had a whole nonphysical nervous system, a neural network of magic, with nodes where nerve paths concentrated, a woven web of turquoise light.
—Hold still, now, Julio-eshue,—the house thought, and stretched him out, gently but firmly, until he felt like a snakeskin pinned to a board.
—What are you doing to me?—
—Studying you.—
—Why? It hurts.—His edges prickled and stung, salt along the rim of a wound.
—Not much longer,—thought the house, probing him.
It stirred something and scrambled his thoughts. He had the image of egg white, egg yolk, mixing together to form a new color of yellow in a frying pan.
Confusion swamped him. For a while, he couldn’t hook one thought to the next.
To coax fire from something that doesn’t burn, skorleta, he thought, and would have shaken his head if he had one. The memory of biting a candy apple, the hard red shell cracking between his teeth, its cinnamon taste mixing with the crisp wet tartness of a green Granny Smith apple. Water knife. Guitar quicha. Tickle magic. Skaks bread. Music fire. Work with—
The house released him. He lay gasping on the front porch, pulled in acres of air and panted them out again. “What was that?” he asked when he could use his breath for talking.
“Eshulio.”
“What? What?” He sat up, held his hands in front of him, turned them palms up, then palms down. Hands. Right. They looked right. He touched the porch, gingerly, and felt skin instead of woodgrain under his palms. He pressed a little harder, and his hand melted into the wood. He pulled back, slowly, until hand parted from porch with a faint kiss. “House,” he whispered.
“To understand something completely, you must digest it.”
“Guess there’s a lot of things I’ll never understand,” he said.
“There is much more you can eat now that you have fire in your fingers.”
“But that—doesn’t that destroy the thing you’re studying?”
“Not if you learn how to do it correctly.”
Julio stroked one palm past the other. His hands felt normal, all the musician’s calluses in the right places, and the little pillow pads of muscle in his palms and fingers.
The house had eaten him, and he wasn’t destroyed.
He had changed, though. His head still ached from whatever the house had done to him last. Unconnected thoughts bumped into each other.
“How do you—eat correctly?”
“You’ll have to teach yourself. Ask Nathan, too. Start small.” He heard a smile in the house’s voice. Then it said, in a more formal tone, “Julio, thank you for coming back, for letting me study you, for being part of me.”
“Thank you for taking care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself. Thank you for letting me in,” Julio said.
“My pleasure,” said the house.
“What did you learn from studying me?”
“You have changed, but your core is the same, as Nathan said. Today was a day of big changes. I initiated some of them myself.”
“In me?”
The hou
se was silent for a long time. Julio got to his feet and waited.
“The power of names has been diluted in human beings, but it’s still absolute law among the people of your second self,” said the house. “As long as you maintained separate selves, those who knew your second self’s name could command you, and you could not resist them. That’s no life for you, Julio.” Its voice had softened.
“Yes. I would hate it. I had enough of being bossed around today. Not that that’s going to stop it from happening again.”
“I hope you’re less susceptible now.”
“How does that work? What did you do?”
“Wait and see,” said the house.
The taste of scorleta was the taste of candy apples.
“What time is it? I better go home,” Julio said.
“Good night, Julio. Pleasant dreams.”
“Night, House.” He hugged himself, flashed to flame, slipped through the place of little fire, and dropped out into his bedroom.
Chapter Seven
The Present
matt sat up in bed, gasping.
Barely morning, and she was in Julio’s room in the haunted house. “How can you think he won’t mind you telling me that?” she yelled.
On the other bed, Edmund opened his eyes and looked at her.
—Why should he mind?—
“It’s like a total map of his mind. It’s not fair, House. That’s the kind of stuff I had to learn not to look at. People like their privacy. How did you know what he was thinking?”
—Close your eyes.—
She sighed and closed her eyes.
—Touch me.—
She placed her palm to the wall.
—Look.—
A vision of Julio inside the house.
So strange. He lay in the midst of a net of turquoise-blue light, his eyes shut like someone sleeping peacefully, arms and legs outstretched, fingers just barely curled. A frown shifted across his forehead, touched the edge of his mouth like the flicker of a dream. Then a whole other webwork appeared in myriad colors of light. Streams of colors flowed from his head, spread out and meshed with the turquoise net, colors staining it.
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