Another work in process. Doesn't even have a real working title yet.

 

 

I came back to empty the house. Not a simple task given that my father had been a wizard and a packrat. A mediocre wizard, to be sure, but he did invent expansive houses and that is significant, at least in my home town.

Bob’s house (no I never called him Dad when he was alive, so why would I do so now?) is, of course, the original expansive house. On the outside, it’s three small rooms set one above the other on a tiny plot choked by weeds and a couple of trees. The weeds were his garden and every plant there had a use. 

The garden is also expansive, so it is easy to get lost if one doesn’t mind the sign posts. It’s much more difficult to create an expansive garden, which is a living thing, than an expansive house, which is mostly inert. So far as I know, this is the only one in existence. As a kid, the garden was always my favorite place to be, which is probably why I went into horticulture rather than architecture.

I have a key to the house, but of course it doesn’t work. Bob didn’t put much faith into keys. He preferred more tortuous sorts of security. Amid his junk, he was a very private person.

I spit into both hands, rubbed them together to make a tiny ball of blue (his favorite color) essence and pushed that into the door lock. I heard a small groan as the scent of pachouli wafted about.

“Erin. It’s about time,” the door said.

“I had things to do, Door. Besides, what’s the rush? Is there stuff in the fridge spoiling?” I waited for the door to open. It never paid to get on the wrong side of a door.

“Like Bob ever used the fridge for things like that. No, dearie, it’s been ages since you’ve been by. We’ve missed you.”

“Did he set up any traps inside for me?”

“Possibly. I don’t pay much attention to those things.” 

The door opened a crack, barely wide enough to slip my backpack through.

“Sorry,” the door said, “but it’s his last acquisitions blocking my way. They are what did him in, you know.”

“What’s that?” It was dark within and I could see nothing.

“Two TVs, a carnival style popcorn maker and a boat anchor. Watch your step. I think he picked them up off the curb.”

Hoping that the door was indeed friendly today, I poked my head inside. There was just enough room in the foyer for my backpack. I wondered if there was enough stretch left to get it to expand a bit more. But I’d have to get inside to try that.

“Light us up,” I said as I wriggled through the door, leaving my backpack on the front step.

A soft glow filled the space. Unlike the door, the foyer was not talkative. Not that I minded, but not a good sign.

Ninety nine and forty-four one hundredths of what was in this house was junk. But I had to look at everything to determine where the gems were hidden. I slipped outside to grab my backpack.

Within the pack was a device of my own invention. Well, not specifically an invention, but one with a lot of my own modifications. I dare not bring in the backpack yet, but I could use the black hole immediately.

Back inside, I dialed the junk collection into the black hole. He was ready and waiting. Hoping, of course that I’d let some magic items slip through among the junk. That wasn’t going to happen. Bob’s magic was just too dangerous for a guy like that.

Since they were closest to the door, I checked the TVs first. They were clear junk. No magic, not even functional. I guess Bob intend them for spare parts or something. With a little fussing because the black hole at first refused to stretch sufficiently, I got them through it and out of the house. 

In half an hour, I had half the foyer cleared. I sat down on a piece of floor that wasn’t too dirty.

The foyer sighed and relaxed its size a bit. What had been half empty, was now only one third empty.

I looked at the steps leading to the second floor. There was a tiny sort of path that maybe a gymnast could negotiate. I had no idea how Bob could have managed it. Levitate spell, maybe? 

I decided to bypass the kitchen behind the stairs for now and focus on clearing a way up. The bathroom was on the second floor and I’d need it before I needed the kitchen.

Growing up, the second floor had been my mother’s domain. She had a sitting room, bedroom and workroom on the floor. As an exorcist, she was rarely home, which is why the marriage worked. She hasn’t been declared dead yet, but there’s been no report of her in the past six years.

After I left, Bob moved his office, formerly off the foyer and workshop, off the kitchen to the third floor, which had been my childhood domain. As an adult, when I visited, he brought up a tiny room out of the cellar and stuck it off the kitchen. Sometimes, when he was in a generous mood, he’d even plumb in a small powder room for my use. I wondered if he left instructions with the house to allow me to do that now.

I grabbed a bottle of glacial water from my backpack and got back to work. Half an hour later, I had the foyer two-thirds empty and half the steps cleared. The work goes fast with a black hole preprogrammed to shunt everything away.

I know that for at least the first year after Mom’s disappearance, Bob stayed out of her rooms. But that had changed. He was neater than with the rest of the house. There were boxes stacked floor to ceiling, neatly labeled, with tiny aisles between. Unfortunately, the labels corresponded to some coded index. Unless I found an index, and even then, probably, I was going to have to go through every one of them. And there were hundreds of boxes.

In an effort to find the index, should there be one, I decided to delay work on the second floor and started clearing the stairs to the third floor. I hoped that Bob hadn’t expanded the house to another floor.

As if he’d been planning for some sort of armageddon, the steps going up to the third floor were packed with food items. Things like beans and oatmeal, fifty pound sacks of rice and flour, cases of canned meat, bottled water.  I reprogrammed the black hole, redirecting it to the Nightshade Food Pantry, thankful that I’d thought to establish that last minute arrangement before arriving.

The first bit of clear space I’d seen was the tiny landing at the top of the steps. The landing itself was only large enough to accommodate the three doors leading off it. The doors were closed and locked.

Somehow, I’d imagined that the top floor would look the way it had when I’d moved out… a large, open space filled with light. I hadn’t been up here since. Whenever I visited, which was rare, we congregated on the second level. Dad always promised to take me upstairs to see his stuff after he’d cleaned it up. That never happened.

“House?”

“Yes, Erin.”

“Any chance that you could unlock these doors for me?”

Bob’s voice answered. “It’s a test, my darling princess. You must prove that you are worthy.” The voice sounded much younger than the last time I’d heard him. He must have set this up some time ago.

“You know that I could just call the reclaimers and have this house leveled.”

“Oh, come, come. If you did that, you’d never find the gifts I’ve hidden for you.”

Not to mention that Mom might be pissed, if she ever came back.

“Well, it’s taken me all afternoon to get up here. I think I’ll have a little supper and think about it.” I headed back downstairs. Tomorrow, I’d have to deal with the kitchen. For tonight and the morning, I had food in my backpack.

I spent the rest of the evening clearing a way to the bathroom on the second floor and Mom’s bed. I didn’t think she’d mind if I slept there.

 

###

 

I slept miserably. The bed was comfortable. The sheets were clean. Every time I tried to doze off, I’d get the sensation of markers squeaking on a whiteboard. After a couple of hours, I gave up.

“Sorry about the noise.”

It took a few minutes for my eyes to focus on Mom’s luminous form hovering at the end of the bed. The tiny squeaks continued.

“Hi Mom. I didn’t think you’d mind. Are you dead?”

“No and no. Just disincarnate for a while. Not to be concerned.” 

“Sounds concerning to me. Do you need help with something?”

“All’s good.” She looked around. “Sorry, got to go now. My captors think I am under their control. Must not disappoint.”

She blinked out.

Then was back.

“Tell Bob to watch out for the kurlurs.”

And she was gone. The room was dark.

Eventually I convinced my brain that the squeaking was a lullaby to keep me from worrying about Mom and whatever kurlurs were. I got a little sleep.

 

I decided to work downstairs first in the morning. My body is active, but my brain is not when the day begins. The kitchen seemed a good place to start.

There was a minuscule semblance of a path through a small hallway from the foyer to the kitchen. Bob was a great wizard, but I wondered if he’d mastered transportation just to get around the house. I spent half an hour dropping stuff out of the foyer and hall to clear space.

I expected to find nasty messes and more appliances than space in the kitchen. The place did not disappoint.

“Morning, darlin.” Bob sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Well, not his real self, but his spirit was there.

I looked for the coffee maker. There were three. None looked like anything I could use without a thorough cleaning first, lest I be poisoned by what it produced. I looked at the sink. It was going to take a while before I got to the coffee makers.

I pulled an energy bar and a bottle of water from my backpack.

“Morning, Bob.” I looked around. “You left quite a mess.”

“I spent a week cleaning before I died. You should have seen it before.” 

“So, it was death by cleaning?” I started dumping the obviously broken appliances in the black hole.

“Sounds better than what actually happened. You could put it on my gravestone.”

“You and Mom.” I shook my head. “Oh, I saw Mom last night. She told me to warn you about kurlurs.”

“Really? They seemed ok. I guess if anyone would know, it would be her.” He stared at his coffee.

“Did she seem ok?” he asked after a few minutes.

“I don’t know. In good humor, I guess.” In truth, I couldn’t tell. I attacked the stuff stacked in the sink to avoid thinking about it.

The water in the faucet ran green. I let it run in the hopes that the contaminants would flush out. After a while, I realized it was something outside begging for attention. When one has a shallow well, it’s common enough. While I looked for a pitcher or another reasonably clean water container, I notice that Bob had gone. Good riddance, probably, but I had wanted to ask him about the locked doors upstairs.

The path from the kitchen door to the garden, a shaded area that had once been a tiny patio. was reasonably clear. Bob loved plants, but he was also a bit afraid of them. All that stored, seemingly passive, energy made him nervous. Of course, some of the experiments I’d done in the garden over the years didn’t help either.

I came out bearing a pasta pot full of water. The culprit was a dwarf redmond tree hiding behind overgrown lilacs. It was shaking and pounding the dirt into dust.

I poured a tiny bit of water. The powder turned to mud. This allowed the two foot tree to loosen one of its roots. 

Most redmonds prefer mobility to size. A stationary one could grow to be a hundred feet tall. Few make it past six feet. Most gardeners don’t understand this idiosyncrasy.

“So, you are looking for new digs.” I gave it a little more water. The place overall was dry. I’d have to turn on the irrigators. I was the probably the first person back here since Bob died.

“A bargain, then. I’ll give you the whole pot if you tell me what Bob was last up to.”

“Do not know.” The tree shuddered.

“But you know how to find out.”

“Need more water.”

“Deal?”

“Deal.” The tree went limp. As if it hadn’t had water in ages.

I laughed and dumped out the rest of the pot. It was too funny. Redmonds could survive for years without water.

On the way back, I started the irrigators.

“Did that bastard hose you into giving it water?” Bob was back at the kitchen table, this time reading a magazine.

I ran the water at the sink. It was clear and fresh. I started washing dishes.

“You know that thing is over three hundred years old. It could have moved on any time.”

“Closer to four hundred,” I said. The redmond had been one of my best friends growing up. 

I washed all the dishes, but kept only a few. The rest went into the black hole.