Past the Size of Dreaming

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  —Yes. It followed Dee in, walked right through the wards. I hope it’s a friendly spirit.—

  —Can you make it visible to Dee?—

  —What? Oh. Of course, if it consents. Give me your hand so I can use your eyes.—

  Matt shoved her hand down into the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Deirdre said, her gruff voice a little high. “What happened to your hand?”

  Instead of sinking into the house, Matt felt the house rise in her. When she had done this before, Nathan had been inside her, translating between her vision and the house’s ability to make things visible. This new method felt strange and familiar at once. She and the house had spent a lot of time entangled lately. She felt the presence of Other, but it didn’t intrude so much as augment.

  Together, Matt and the house looked at the coyote. It barked and took two steps back.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Matt said. “I just want to let you be seen. Okay?”

  —Ff—It ducked its head twice, then sat.

  House did something to the air the coyote occupied, and it stopped looking translucent, shifted from shadow to solid. “Oh!” Deirdre cried. The coyote cocked its head at her, rose, walked closer.

  “You’re here,” whispered Deirdre. She held out her hand, and it sniffed along the bottom and the top.

  —Whuff.—

  “Thank you for coming.”

  The coyote shook its head as though it had a fly in its ear, then backed off.

  —Is that enough?—the house asked.

  —Can you let it decide?—

  —It could do visible itself if it wanted. Sister, do you want us to remove our influence?—

  —Whuff.—

  The image of coyote thinned. Matt closed dream-eyes, and it was gone.

  —Thanks,—Matt thought to the house.

  —You’re welcome.—

  Matt slowly pulled her hand out of the floor. She felt her hand as it formed on the end of her wrist, a very strange sensation, warmth spinning into solid.

  “So she’s gone again?” Deirdre asked. She leaned forward and watched Matt pull away from the floor. “What are you doing? That is so weird.”

  “She’s not gone, she’s just not visible anymore. This?” Matt’s fingertips rose from the floor, as though the floor were water; like water, the floor closed behind them, though without ripples. Matt frowned at the floor for a minute. “The things a person can get used to,” she said. She stared at the tips of her fingers.

  “Makes sense to me that Nathan can walk through walls,” Deirdre said. “He’s dead. You’re not a ghost, are you, Matt?”

  “No. I never walked through walls before I came here. This house isn’t like other houses, though.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “House forgot about our hot water. It says the things the witches are doing tickle it.”

  Suki came to the kitchen door. “We’ve set up as many protections as we can think of,” she said. “Now the house is going to tell us what it wants.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  matt stood beside Nathan in front of the empty fireplace. Everyone was grouped in a loose circle around the room. The twins sat side by side on the fainting couch. Harry leaned on the wing chair that Lia sat in. Edmund, Suki, and Deirdre sat in chairs too, Suki directly across from the fireplace and the portrait of Nathan’s mother.

  “What is it?” Suki said at last. “How can we help you, House?”

  “My children,” said the house. It hesitated.

  Matt glanced around the circle and thought, yes. In a way, they were all the house’s children—except Harry, and it looked like he was going to marry into the family. They had each been changed and partially raised by the house.

  “I am tired of being a house.”

  Everyone shifted in surprise, glanced at each other, then peered up at the ceiling.

  Terry straightened and frowned. “You want us to change you into something else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Into what?”

  For a long time, the house kept silent. “A human,” it said finally.

  “Would that work?” asked Deirdre. “How would that work?”

  “I don’t know,” said the house. “I don’t even know if it is right for me to want this, or to ask for it. What I know is that I have been here in this place for a long, long time, locked in my half acre, clinging tight to my son, and I am weary of it. You have all fledged beautifully. I want to follow you into the sky.”

  “What happens to Nathan if you leave, House?” asked Suki.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do we change your actual physical structure into a human being?” Terry was still frowning. “There’s way too much of you for a human body. And it’s the wrong kind of stuff. If we just use some of it, which parts? How do we change it into what we need?”

  “That’s not right, Terry,” Tasha said. “Transformations usually take place between two forms that aren’t equal mass. When I turn you into a Pekingese, you don’t get more dense. You get much smaller and lighter in weight. There’s a matter bank in a neighboring dimension. You put what you’re not using in, or take what you need out.”

  Terry scowled. “That’s just your theory.”

  Tasha shrugged. “Come up with something better that matches the evidence. I don’t care. All I’m saying is that we’ve observed that the transformation of objects is not about conservation of size or mass.”

  Terry thought for a minute. “So it might be simple, House, but we’d want to think it through so we can get it right. All the transformations I’ve performed have time limits on them, or triggers that release them in response to certain stimuli. Maybe we could change you into a human for a day or a week. Would that be enough?”

  Suki cried, “Wait a second. What kind of chains are laid on Nathan? If we change you into something that can leave, will he still be bound to you? Or will he—” Suki jumped to her feet and ran to Nathan, stood beside him, her hands tight fists; she couldn’t touch him. “What if this kills him?”

  “Then we shouldn’t do it.’ said the house.

  Nathan said, “Suki, I’m dead already.”

  “Not always,” she whispered.

  “If we can figure this out for the house,” said Terry, “maybe we can figure it out for Nathan too.

  “Aren’t there a bunch of rules about this?” Harry asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Tasha.

  “I’m new to this, and I’m still learning basic lessons. I keep bumping into rules, and if I don’t know them or don’t follow them, I get into trouble. Why does a ghost happen? How does a house wake up the way this one has? Once these beings exist, what limits them?”

  “We know some of the rules,” Matt said. “Nathan’s not allowed to leave the house, except if there’s a séance or it’s Halloween.”

  “When we first started coming here,” said Deirdre to Nathan, “you told us all you could do was scare people.”

  “I used to believe that,” Nathan said. “But I didn’t confine myself to it. Maybe I’ve been breaking little rules all along. When we became friends, instead of scaring you, I welcomed you; I helped you when I could; but above all, I changed Edmund, Tasha, and Terry into witches, and I’m sure that was against the big rules.”

  “Who told you the rules?” Lia asked.

  Nathan shook his head. “When I grew aware of my continuing posthumous existence, the rules seemed self-evident. I died in 1919, and didn’t truly wake to an understanding of my condition for several years. I haunted the house before I woke, but it was as though I sleepwalked. A family moved in a year after I died, the Hawkinses. “Two of the Hawkins children saw an image of me—” He frowned.

  “Doing something,” Deirdre said.

  “Repeatedly. The same thing every night. They became accustomed.”

  “What did you do?” asked Deirdre.

  He glanced at her, closed his eyes. “Hanged myself in my room.”

>   After a brief silence, Deirdre said, in a hoarse voice, “They got used to that?”

  He opened his eyes again. “Apparently. They were quite small when they were placed there. The family set my room up as a nursery. The children were one and three, and I manifested after the nurse had put them to bed for the night. I think the older one was six when she finally asked someone who I was and what I was doing that hurt so much.”

  “Jeeze,” said Matt. “Then what happened?”

  “I had to reconstruct this afterward with the house’s help, because I wasn’t aware at the time. There are different kinds of ghosts. Some are just the residue of an event with strong energy or emotion attached to it, a repeating image of something that sank into a place or an object and has not yet worn away, like an odor. I think I started out as that sort of ghost.

  “I suspect one of the Hawkins parents or both of them listened to Genevieve, the little girl, and saw me. The family engaged a spiritualist. She tried to lay me to rest. In the process, she somehow woke me up, and I—” He frowned. “A ghost haunts. That seemed like the rule. It seemed to me I knew what to do: my job was to scare them. So I practiced scaring. I learned that I could do things that frightened them. Appear, disappear, make things float, walk through walls, make terrible sounds. Eventually, I drove them out of the house.”

  “Jeeze,” Matt muttered.

  Nathan glanced at her. “I was convinced that was what I had been brought back to do. Terrify. I spent decades doing that. The one night a year I was loose, I traveled the world to find other ghosts and learn more techniques from them. I wonder about that spiritualist. Obviously she had gifts: she pulled me back to myself. She certainly didn’t talk me into a quiet grave, though.”

  Lia asked, “House, what were you doing while this was going on?”

  “I had been awake and aware for forty years by the time Nathan died. His grandmother studied spiritualism, and had held séances in me before the turn of the century. Something she and her clients did opened—started—initiated—I can’t explain it. But she woke me, and she gathered energy in me, and from her I learned to collect my own energy. I grew stronger through time, more awake, more able.

  “When Nathan returned in spirit form, something bound us together, a power greater than ourselves, and unknown to us. We had these rules: he could not leave me. I was his captor. He could not physically harm anyone who came into me, but he was free to scare them into harming themselves.”

  “We hated each other,” Nathan said suddenly.

  “How can that be?” asked Edmund.

  “We worked at cross-purposes,” said the house. “I wanted a family to live in me. Part of my life force comes from having people inside. He wanted to scare everyone away.”

  “Dark years,” said Nathan.

  “Terrible battles.”

  “We were tied to each other. Neither of us could escape. All we could do was wound each other.” Nathan sighed and scuffed the floor with an immaterial foot. “So the house weathered and wore down and got a reputation for being haunted, and no one would buy it. Without people in the house, both of us suffered. Without people to scare, I faded, lost consciousness. Then House found something else.”

  “I reached out and found a way to expand, to tap into other energies. I grew stronger. Then I called people to me.”

  “People moved in here in the sixties, squatters,” said Nathan. “Their being here woke me up again, and the house convinced me not to scare them away. That’s when House and I started working together and making the best of our situation. There were six of these people initially. Some left, and some new people came. They lived here five years before the sheriff kicked them out of town. They experimented with a lot of things, drugs, religion, ways of thinking. They had passionate discussions about everything, and brought newspapers and magazines into the house. We watched and learned and used them to nourish us.”

  “I began to tamper with them,” said the house.

  Nathan nodded. “They were interested in parapsychology, among other things.”

  The house said: “I helped them develop their psychic abilities, very slowly and gently. Sometimes I made mistakes, but none caused lasting harm.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to Russell and Linnet.” Nathan muttered.

  “You were practicing?” Lia asked the house. Her voice was strange and distant.

  “Yes,” answered the house.

  “Building the people you needed to grant you your wish.”

  Matt glanced around. Tasha and Terry clasped hands on the couch. Both looked sober. Edmund sat up straight, his green eyes silvery. Lia had a faint orange halo around her, and Suki stared at her hands in her lap. Deirdre looked serious and a little mad, and Harry frowned in concentration.

  “Yes,” said the house after a moment.

  Lia said, “Are we the people you need?” Her voice was cold.

  “I don’t know,” said the house. “All I can ever do is give you feathers and hope you build wings. And you have, and now you’ve flown home. I can only ask for help. You don’t have to give it.”

  Matt hunched her shoulders. “No matter why she did it, she always loved you, and she still does. Do any of you wish it never happened?”

  They looked at each other. Matt was tempted to open dream-eyes, but she resisted.

  “Not I,” Edmund said. “It was my dream come true. Thank you, House.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “I wonder who we would have been if it hadn’t happened,” Terry said.

  “I’m insanely happy,” said Tasha. “I can’t think of a better life than the one I lead.”

  “You give the word ‘airhead’ a whole new meaning,” Terry told her twin.

  Tasha socked Terry’s arm. “If it hadn’t happened, we’d be the same people, but we wouldn’t have half the fun,” she said. “Thanks, House.”

  “You always gave me refuge when I had the strength to seek you out, and refuge was what I needed most. Thanks, House,” Suki murmured.

  “You are welcome.”

  “What happened to me wasn’t even your fault, and you helped me deal with it and protect myself from its consequences,” Lia said. Harry touched her shoulder. She gave him a small smile, then spoke to the ceiling. “I’m sorry, House. I felt a chill when you talked about engineering people and I realized you had shaped us toward your ends. I don’t think I could have found a better mentor or a better direction.”

  “Thank you,” the house whispered.

  “So how come you never did anything to me? Don’t you know that drives me crazy?” Deirdre asked.

  “Opportunity had to operate for me to act,” said the house. “Each time I managed it, there was a collection of circumstances that let me … break a rule without severe penalties. I never found one for you, Dee, but I can keep trying.”

  “All right,” she said. “I have the coyote. Do I still have the coyote, Matt?”

  Matt peeked with dream-eyes and saw that the coyote sat beside Deirdre. “Yes.”

  “So that’s something, anyway. Thanks, coyote.”

  The coyote touched its nose to Deirdre’s hand. She started and looked down toward it.

  “The first thing we should do is hold a séance,” Edmund said. “If we free Nathan from the house, then we can try some transformations on the house itself; maybe they won’t affect Nathan if he’s free.”

  “Brilliant,” said Terry.

  Something hard rained down on the roof above them.

  “House?” cried Lia. They all stared up.

  “The demon-man has come,” said the house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What about the wards?” asked Terry.

  The house said, “He does not attack directly with magic. He uses stones, and the wards do not stop them.” Another wave of sound, hard thunks and clattering, as stones rained down on the roof and then bounced off.

  “We didn’t make an earth ward,” Terry said. “None of us is strong in eart
h.” She had to shout to be heard over the sound of the rocks, which now hit the sides of the house. A window crashed somewhere upstairs, and then another in the dining room.

  Lia rose to her feet and spread her arms, stretched her fingers wide. A tide of flame flowed from her fingertips, melted into the walls of the house, accompanied by a strange flow of music, soft but pervasive, building, racing violin triplets doubling back, syncopating.

  Orange fire blazed outside the living-room windows, driving back the night.

  The next stonefall was muted.

  Then the hard rain stopped. The subsequent silence shimmered and dazzled.

  Lia stopped sending out new flame, and gradually the cocoon of flame beyond the windows faded, and the night sky showed. She stood in the center of the living room, lowered her arms, and glanced around. “Tell me if it starts again, House,” she said.

  Matt went to the kitchen and got the plate of cookies, brought it to Lia, who blinked, focused, and took a cookie. Lia smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve found places to draw from, ways to store energy for later. But thanks.”

  Matt set the plate on a nearby table and walked over to press her hands against a wall.—How hurt are you?—

  —Two windows broke, some shingles fell; it is nothing, and puzzling. I am already rebuilding. Why would the attack come in that form?—

  —Maybe he’s testing the defenses. Is the guy standing around outside?—

  —Yes. He and the younger man whom we saw in Julio’s memories, and there are three strange beings behind them. They stand in the street, just past my edge, and stare toward us. Wait. He gestures again.—

  Sirens sounded, drew nearer.

  —Wait, he’s slopped,—said the house.—Now they re gone.—

  A fire truck raced up, sirens howling and spinning lights blazing.

  “The attack guys are gone.” Matt told everyone, “and the firemen are here. Guess the neighbors noticed, huh?”

  Pounding sounded on the front door. Suki stood. “I’ll get it,” she said.

  “Everyone else, let’s hide. Maybe the furniture should too,” Terry suggested. “Nathan, has Suki established residence here?”