I placed another food order with Ditsy Diner and went outside to inspect the garden before confronting the upstairs again. Everything seemed happier since the water got turned back on. I knew they were just pandering to me. Before leaving home, I’d made sure there were systems in place to take care of their needs. Simply turning off the water didn’t affect their outcome very much. Still, we all acted like long lost friends reunited after many hardships and had a good time.

The redmond busied itself creating a nest of mango and rhododendron leaves. It was a typical routine if one was preparing to flower, which was not the case here because flowering required at least half a dozen redmond  trees and there was only the one in this garden. It was up to something, and I thought it was cute.

“What gives?” I asked it.

“Busy.”

Trees don’t really have a front or back side, but this one was acting as if it did. It kept itself between me and its work, which it did not want me to see. Given that I was nearly double its height, that wasn’t too effective.

“Did you get the information I requested?”

“Working.” It broke one of its branches and added it to the pile that I was not supposed to be seeing. “Soon.”

Soon was a terrible answer. In tree time, that could be anything from yesterday to ten years from now. When you got an answer like that, it meant that they were not going to clarify. The best thing was to walk away and hopefully catch them in a better mood later. So I went to spend a few minutes among the lilacs, which were long out of bloom, but always comforting. Who can’t love a plant with heart-shaped leaves?

I steeled myself for the day’s activities. I should be happy that the worst that had happened so far was a stink bomb. I couldn’t.

Not much was different. The table saying ‘Feed Me’ was still there. The marigold-scented rose sat atop. The three doors were closed and locked. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for. Another day and I wouldn’t care. I’d seal up the house and wait for Mom to come back to deal with it. I was pretty sure she wasn’t coming back, but I could be surprised.

Not interested in playing games, I dissolved the locks on all three doors, dismounted them, and sent them to the basement. In the event there was something dangerous, I set wards at the top of the stairs to contain it. Bob wasn’t the sort to create things that were dangerous, but he was careless at times. I was more concerned with accidents than weapons or malevolent creatures. Growing up in the home of a wizard makes one consider things like that. 

The first room was as I’d left it, sans the workshop which had relocated downstairs. 

The second door led into a narrow corridor lined with ugly pictures that appeared to have been clipped from magazines and pasted into place. I thought about using a cleaning spell to clear the walls but decided I ought to look at the images first to determine if there was any thought or purpose behind their placement. At first glance, it seemed not. Then I realized they were all images of rooms in homes. This might have been what Bob used as inspiration to create expanding houses. I wondered why I’d never seen it before. There were no doors, magical or otherwise leading off that little hallway. It looked like a linen closet that went very, very deep.

“House? Is there any reason to keep any of this?”

“His first experiments with stretching.”

“This?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s lose it then.”

I barely had time to get out of the way. The hallway collapsed into a closet barely a foot deep, lined with shelves which were now filled with the once-mounted photographs. I decided to hold on to them for a while longer. They had been serving an interesting purpose holding the room stretched like that. I didn’t remember seeing magic being worked like that.

 

The third room was dark at first. Then, tiny lamps mounted on the walls began to glow. Not of my doing, but I was grateful for the light. At first glance, it appeared to be another office, though in a state of deconstruction. The floor was cluttered with books, papers and boxes. The shelves lining the walls were in disarray. The desk in center of the room had its drawers pulled out and dumped on the floor. The other furniture, a couple of chairs and tables were turned over.

If I had to guess, I’d say that someone had come in and tossed the room, but that seemed unlikely. To my knowledge, Bob was too mousey to have made enemies, and he wasn’t a good enough wizard to have secrets worth stealing. So my two prime subjects for leaving the room like this were Bob and the house.

“Did you do this?” I picked up the drawers and put them back in the desk.

The house said nothing.

I programmed the black hole to link to Eclectic Books and started shoveling in. Some of the books were my old school books which I’d thought were long gone. There were lots of rudimentary magic volumes, of no particular use to anyone but a student of wizardry. I paused to flip through a few to see if there was interesting stuff written in the margins, but found nothing worth while.

It didn’t take long to put the room to rights. Then I started looking for secret doors. I figured there had to be at least one. I found one under the desk, a secret stair that seemed to lead down to the workshop. It was dusty and dirty. Hadn’t been used in years. The steps were clogged with useless junk. I dumped it all then ran a quick cleaning spell to clear out the remaining dust.

Through the door at the bottom of the stairs, it looked like a mirror image of the workshop. A disorienting spell could make a back entrance backward, but there didn’t seem to be anything like that here. And in this version of the workshop was a lot of the stuff I’d gotten rid of in the other workshop. 

This was going to take some thought. I went back upstairs, then down and out to the front stoop to eat lunch and consider.

 

After lunch, I looked for a door in the workshop in the kitchen that matched the door into that other workshop via the secret stairs. It was there today, although I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there yesterday. The stairs from the kitchen workshop led up to the basement. Geometry in expanding houses is normally a little convoluted, but not like this. No wonder the house was cranky.

I’d have to fix the perceived orientation of the stairs, but that could wait. I went back to see what goodies the second workshop contained. Neither of these were the lab I remembered Dad doing his magical work. That had to be somewhere, though.

I found a couple more mis-scented roses in that other lab, plus a lot more junk that was barely worth recycling: broken appliances, ugly furniture, heaps of used clothing, stacks of old magazines. The more I took out, the smaller the room became until it was the size of my old bedroom. It might have once been that room, but I didn’t think so. That was something else I had yet to discover.

Later, as I ate my supper on the front porch, Dad paced the foyer.

“If there’s something you want me to find before you pass on, you could give me a hint,” I said.

“Conjure a rose for me.”

“You’ve the ingredients?”

“If you haven’t thrown them out already.”

“In your lab, I presume.”

“Where else?”

“Which I haven’t found yet.”

“You know where it is.”

“At the top of the stairs, through the green double doors,” I answered automatically, which is what I’d been taught as a little girl. Problem was, I hadn’t seen any double doors, green or otherwise, in quite some time.

“So you haven’t forgotten.”

He seemed relieved, if that was something ghosts could do. I wondered why he was so interested in roses. I didn’t think he could touch or smell one in his current state.

“Why a rose?”

“Your mother needs it.”

“But you couldn’t take the time to do it?”

“I tried and failed many times. I feel I was close, but I died too soon. An accident. According to the Hall of Records, I should have lived at least another forty years.”

The Hall of Records wasn’t accessible to mere mortals such as myself, so I had to take his word for that. I didn’t think he had any reason to lie about something like that. But it meant that he’d be haunting this house for a long time.

“Wouldn’t a natural rose, held in stasis, do just as well?” As a profession of love, it ought to be better. It wouldn’t take much to persuade one of the shrubs in the garden to produce a beauty.

“The guardians of the netherworld would recognize it for what it was. We need it to plant a bomb.”

“You and who else? Wait, did you get Mom involved in one of your hair balled schemes?”

“When have you ever known me to be a schemer?”

He had me there.

“No, this was your mother’s plan. She always knew it would take me some time. She wanted that.”

“But she didn’t think you’d die before seeing the plan to fruition.”

“I’m terrified for what might happen now.”

 

As I trudged back up the stairs, I thought about the fact that I’d never tried to create artificial flowers. I wasn’t sure I knew how. I was a horticulturalist, not a wizard. Sure, I could do some magic. I was the product of two magical parents. It was inevitable.

The upstairs was as I’d left it. Three doors, two leading into similar looking offices and one a small closet.

“Listen, Table,” I said, “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. If you’ve anything useful to share do it soon, or you’re destined for the black hole. You can go pester someone else.”

Other than the words ‘feed me’ on its surface, it looked and acted like any ordinary table. I had to decide where was the best place to send a magical item like that which is the only reason I didn’t get rid of it right then.

I thought more about the lab. In my childhood, the top floor was home to my bedroom, not Bob’s lab. So the double doors at the top of the stairs referred to another staircase, not this one. The stairs leading from the workshops led up to the cellar, but maybe that wasn’t the real cellar, just like the stairs leading down from the second office didn’t lead to the real workshop. When had this house gotten so confusing?

I did a quick look around what I knew to be the basement via its normal access through the ground-level hall. Just to be sure, I got rid of a pile of old stereo systems and blenders so there’d be something different if that other basement was not the same place. Bob went to a lot of trouble to set up this confusing arrangement. It could not have been for my benefit. What else was he not telling me?

If that other basement was part of the real cellar, then I was going to have to do some serious exploring. It looked like the real thing, this area filled with old fans, air conditioners, a few kitchen disposals and a lot of toilet parts. But something about it just didn’t feel right. It contained about the same amount of junk per square foot, which I dumped into the black hole.

Eventually, I was left with an empty room. It had cinder block walls and an open ceiling, like the other basement. There were a couple bulbs dangling from the ceiling providing adequate, if dim light. The thing that this space notably lacked, now that I could see it all, were doors and windows. In fact, I was not even sure how I’d gotten into the room.

Had something I’d moved sprung a trap?

I didn’t think so. I was looking for one of two things: the stairs down, or the green double doors. I wasn’t worried about being trapped. If I found no other way, I could program the black hole to Mom’s bedroom and simply jump through it. 

I wished I’d brought another bottled water with me. Moving all that junk was thirsty work. 

I sat on the floor. If this was an illusion, it was the best one I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some good ones. Eyes open or closed, walking the room, feeling for hidden mechanisms, there was nothing here but four bare walls, ceiling joists and a couple light bulbs.

I thought about the lights. There was no apparent on/off switch and no cords on the fixtures to control them. They came on automatically when I entered the room. I could spell them off or on. That worked as expected.

“Will you show me what is hidden?” I asked the lights.

The lights dimmed. Magic symbols glowed on the walls.

I never went to magic school. So I’m not all that fluent in magical symbolism. Now that I knew the room was spelled, though, I had no difficulty breaking the spells.

At one end of the room, the stairs leading downstairs appeared. The wall at the opposite end was filled with two massive green doors. Not surprisingly, the doors were locked.

“For the love of all that’s sacred, what are you hiding that requires such measures?”

I expected no answer, and there was none. It was late. I was tired and dirty and this latest challenge could wait until the morning. I wished Mom would break into my dream time and explain what was going on. She didn’t. I slept soundly.

 

I purposefully slept late. I was tired of the games and the junk. There’s a reason I never visited home much after leaving for college. If the parents minded, they never said. Part of me believed they wanted me out of the house. What, after all, did I have in common with a wizard and an exorcist?

I took my lazy time getting back to the lab. These doors, it seemed, had better locks than the ones on the third floor. I could not simply dismiss them. 

I asked the lights to show me any remaining symbols. The doors were covered in the most arcane gibberish one could imagine. I tried removing them with a cleaning spell. That didn’t work.

Bob was nowhere around. It seemed that he wanted me to solve this conundrum on my own. Which felt unfair and made me angry. I thought about finding some explosives and destroying the doors that way.

I sat on the floor facing the doors to the lab.

“You know,” I told them, “I’m not crazy about the fact that Bob is gone, either. But from beyond the grave, he’s asked me to finish a job for him. And to do that I need to get into the lab. I could really use your help.”

Slowly, as a jumble of faint creaks and groans, I heard the locks open. Then, with a louder cry of anguish the doors slowly opened.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m going to find some graphite for your locks and oil for your hinges.”

“Thank you,” the door croaked.

Once the doors were open, I could see why they were in such grief. It looked like the inside of the lab had been blasted time and again. Bob was a slob, but it wasn’t like him to leave that sort of mess. 

“What happened here?”

I got no answer.

The lab, usually a gentle soul, felt terrified.

“I am going to run a simple clean and sort first,” I told who, or what, ever was listening.

There were layers of ash covered in some foul smelling tar-like substance, followed by more ash, tar and charcoal. Broken bits of metal and glass were strewn everywhere. There was so much spell residue that I dared not use more magic. I worked with lots of soap and water and soft cloth rags. What I could scrape up, I put in industrial weight garbage bags which I stored in the room outside the lab. The stuff would have to be neutralized before disposal. I did not dare to send it through the black hole as it was.

Wizard’s labs are not large, they like to concentrate their magic into small spaces to make it more effective. Or so I was told. Not being a wizard myself, I didn’t have a lab. At any rate, it meant the worst of the mess was cleaned up in a couple of hours.

The lab was left with a small, stainless steel table and matching chair. If there had been any apparatus, it was destroyed in the explosions. That the table and chair—they were both dented and wobbled—were mostly intact was interesting.

To the right of the entrance on the side wall was a steel door leading to the supply room. It would have been etched with magical symbols to make it appear like a blank wall, but the blasts had taken care of them. 

Someone, it seemed, wanted all evidence of magic wiped from this room. I couldn’t imaging who. Bob was not the type to make enemies and he wasn’t a good enough wizard to have anything worth stealing.

The door to the supply room was unwarded and unlocked. It opened easily. An eerie peach light illuminated the space.

It had not suffered the same fate as the lab, but the stuff nearest the door had been damaged by the explosions in the other room. The shelves lining the walls were full of stuff, as befitted the hoarder whose place it was. Some of it was recognizable. Most was not.

Now that I had found the lab and its supply room, I had to decide what to do next. If I tried to make a rose, it wasn’t going to be in the lab. For me, the most logical place was out in the garden where I could sit next to a real rose for inspiration.

Despite my bravado earlier, I had no idea what ingredients should be used to construct something like a rose. I would be winging it. I looked around for anything that might attract my attention. I found a package of popsicle sticks; one could be a stem. Some pink crepe paper; that might form petals. A card of thumb tacks; those could be thorns. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so hard. I thought about the scent. Assuming I couldn’t be so literal as to use rose water, I decided to grab some air freshener.

With my ingredients, I headed back downstairs. I picked up my lunch from the delivery box on the front porch and headed into the garden. As I ate lunch, I looked for the redmond tree. It was nowhere to be seen. I assumed that it was not ready to give me an answer and was hiding. Redmond trees can be clever, but they aren’t always brilliant.

I found a small stone bench near the rose bushes and set out my ingredients. I’d never conjured a rose, never saw the reason. Like most of the magic I did, I just made it up as I went along.

I started by cutting one of the pop cycle sticks lengthwise into thirds and laying them end to end. I wanted my rose to have a long stem. Then I tore bits of crepe paper off the roll and dumped a little pile at one end of the stem. Next came the thumb tacks which I laid out in a line along the length of the sticks. And lastly, I spritzed everything with the air freshener.

Of course, laying stuff out to symbolize a rose doesn’t make a flower. For that, I had to think about what a rose truly is, and what it is not. I had to imagine in my mind its heady aroma and the delicate feel of its petals. I had to think about what it felt like to twirl its stem in my fingers and the pain when one of its thorns pricked or scratched. I closed my eyes and felt all of those things with all of my senses. Then I sent the spirit of that imaginary rose into the ingredients on the garden bench.

I opened my eyes. Before me lay a rose, real enough in all of its aspects, but not truly real.

“Brilliant using wood to represent the stem. I always tried coat hanger wire. I think that’s why I could never get the scent right.”

Bob was back.

“Or perhaps your sense of smell wasn’t all that good.”

“You should send that to Guild Office to register yourself as a wizard.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Oh, because you’re one of the most gifted wizards in a generation.”

“I don’t know magic.”

“You’re a natural.”

“Then why did I go to horticultural school rather than magic school?”

“Magic school helps a person with limited gifts figure out how to use the little they have. You’re a natural. They’ve nothing to teach you.”

“But I don’t know the first thing about magical symbols or the like.”

“Look at that black hole of yours. It’s covered in symbols.”

“It’s covered in doodles I thought looked cute at the time.”

“Your doodles are what we lesser wizards copy to reproduce what you do naturally. And, by the way, be careful who you show that thing to. A lot of people would like a thing like that. Not all of them are savory.”

She’d heard that before. “So, why does Mom need this rose?”

“Not that rose, but it’s close. You’ll need to add a few more ingredients first.”

“Is it to break her out of the prison she’s in?”

“Oh, she’s not stuck. The rose is for a side job.”

“My instructions were to put it in her bedroom. She’ll pick it up when she’s ready.”

“So what else has to go into the rose?”

He sat and thought for a while. “The list was in the lab.”

“Not there now.”

“No.” He thought some more. “Her enemies made sure of that.”

“Why would they blow up your lab?”

“Misdirection. The lab has protection. More than the rest of the house.”

“So you had them blow up the lab because they thought there was something in it?”

“Well, there was. The list of bomb making ingredients. It was pretty unique.”

“I’m not following here.”

“Well, your mother has some unique connections.”

“I thought she was an exorcist.”

“That’s part of it. I really can’t say any more for sure.”

“You don’t know?”

“It was safer for me not to know. Hardly anyone knows she even had a family. You, me, one or two of the neighbors. But they never knew what she did for a living. A lot of what I know about her isn’t necessarily true.”

I had to sit down. She’d told me once that ghosts don’t lie. But this was too much.

“So the good thing about the rose is you can use as many inert ingredients as you want. You just have to be careful to get all the active ingredients in the correct proportions.”

“Which you don’t remember.”

“Ah, but the redmond tree does. He’s good with lists.”

“The redmond tree?” So far as I understood, Bob and the redmond were enemies.

“He’s been my filing system for years. Ever since he watched you create the expansion spell on the garden.”

“What?”

“Oh, right. Your mother and I put a block on your memory after that. We thought it was safer that way.”

“What?”

“You didn’t really think I’d invented the spell for expanding houses, did you? You wanted a bigger garden to run around in, so you figured out a way to — enlarge it. That was the first spark of your genius, but it was dangerous for a tot like you to go around inventing spells like that. So I published it as a general purpose expanding house spell and we blocked your memories of the incident.” He looked very sad then. “I won’t be able to protect you any more.”

“Protect me?”

“It’s dangerous for potent wizards to be discovered too soon. Too easy for them to be entrapped by the wrong elements.”

This was getting to be too much.

“It’s ok to do things like roses and expansions. People will assume that you learned them from me. But you probably shouldn’t try to invent any magic for at least another twenty or thirty years. The redmond can help. If he has the list for a spell, you can assume any one else will believe you got it from me. I’m sorry, honey. I really should have taken better care of myself.” He looked up and around. “Got to go. When you get the rose done, put it on the table outside my office.”

And he was gone. And I was sitting in the dirt in the garden looking at a fake rose. A damn good fake, but still a fake. Pretty much how I felt just then. Just a fake. What sort of a fake, I had no idea, but a fake all the same.