"How do I let you talk me into these things?" Gia growled.
"Don't blame me, honey! It wasn't my idea," Christine retorted.
"You were worried about me getting your precious upholstery wet, and now you let that lie around bleeding in your backseat? You're gonna stink of fish for months!"
One of Us
- Part One
Gia felt much better. They'd found a laundromat in Rowley, and her clothes still felt toasty-warm from the dryer. At the moment it happened she was sitting in a tidy all night coffee-shop, gratefully gulping her "morning" coffee and some hot ham-and-butter-bean soup. The memory of her latest ordeal was already fading.
But she slumped a little in her booth. She didn't like the way the other people in the diner were looking at her, or rather, the way they'd look at her and then resolutely refuse to look at her. Sure, her face was a little distorted, but... it made her feel lonesome. The only person in her life these days was locked inside an automobile, and homicidal.
Abruptly, Gia sat up straighter, and her head darted this way and that. Her searching eyes found the antique car waiting right outside the window. She jumped up, leaving her half-finished meal forgotten on the table, and made a beeline for the door.
"Hey!" The counter-clerk abruptly shouted. "Where you think you're going?"
Gia looked back, startled. "Oh!" She rummaged around in her pockets and found some money. "Right. This should cover it, and keep the change."
Placated by the tip, the hostility drained from the man's face. Weird kid, weird smile, and absent-minded. Probably impaired somehow. He tried to give her a nod and a smile, but Gia was already out in the drizzly night, heading toward her antique car.
Gia was a monster.
The clerk had no way of knowing that, knowing what he had witnessed in her insipid smile and preternaturally oily voice. Once upon a time the girl's name had been Georgiana. Her parents were strong and upright, and they could not tolerate the inexplicable, unspeakable flaw that their perfect daughter had fallen prey to.
They had, in desperation, paid dearly for an operation: a brain surgery that would, so they were told, cut the child out of her and replace it with dutiful obedience. It was this operation that gave the girl her sick, inhuman smile. Feeling herself diminished, Georgiana ever-after answered only to "Gia."
"That was quick," the voice from the antique car's GPS said. "Soup wasn't any good?"
Gia plunged into the seat and slammed the door. "Tiffy, you hafta go back."
"What's that?"
"To Innsmouth. Robbie's been hurt, bad. You gotta bring him home."
"Gia, you're really confusing me. What's got into you-"
"Eyeeww! She's not complete!" Gia abruptly winced and grabbed her nose. "Somebody took a rasp to her brains, I can feel it - oh yuck!" And just as abruptly, the look on Gia's face changed to startled wonder. She looked about, exactly as she had a minute earlier inside the diner.
"...How did I...?"
"Ahhhaa... I get it. Cecy!" Christine's engine fired, and all by itself the car backed out of the diner's parking lot and roared forward onto the road. "Bear with me, Gia. I'll explain as we go. We've got a job to do so let's get to it."
"We're going east?" Gia said, confusion piling upon confusion. She shoved her arms through her safety harness, clicked the latches, and then reached for the wheel. She somehow felt the car returning control to her. "Back to Innsmouth? What for?"
"A family member's hurt. We gotta take him home."
"You have a family?"
"You're that surprised?" Christine sounded more than a little miffed by the question.
"You uhm... seem very self-sufficient."
The car was not satisfied. "Everyone needs a family, even an adopted one."
"Don't get that way," Gia cut her off. "You took mine." Bitterness hid just behind the flat, automated cheer of her voice.
"You can thank me by going faster. Tonight we're doing ambulance duty."
"'I am pure evil, I am Christine,'" Gia mocked, "and I am on a mission of mercy."
"Droll."
The car was a monster.
It spoke, it bickered, it drove by itself perfectly well, and it did believe itself "pure evil." The truth was, as it always is, more complicated.
The car served as the earthly home of an ancient spirit of vengeance named "Tisiphone." She and her sisters, Alecto and Magiera, had once avenged murder and injustice through feud and vendetta centuries before a masculine upstart declared "vengeance is mine!" or his gentler offspring had chided, "judge not, lest ye be judged." The sisters mocked these proclamations.
Until one day, they found their offices usurped. Government and nation declared themselves sole and infallible arbiters of justice. The Furies, disenfranchised and disowned, defied all who would deny them. So they passed long and lonely millennia, prowling the night-shrouded world, granting their aid to the increasingly rare mortals who remembered and called upon them.
Tisiphone, taking for herself the name "Christine," had met Gia soon after the operation, and perceived in her an injustice screaming for revenge. For had not her parents shed kindred blood?
So it was that the strong, upright parents perished, and Gia came to be Christine's new driver.
"Now it's time to open it up," Christine said. "Consider this a pop quiz on all the racing stuff I've been teaching you."
"I'll do my best. But these roads have some blind curves." Gia accelerated to an even cruising pace.
"Fast as you're comfortable with and no more, hun."
"So, back to you explaining what's going on...?"
"Right. Okay, there's this witch, see? She takes over people, like she just did with you—"
"Tiffy, hurry! He's hurt bad." Gia blurted. Then a look of horror crossed the girl's face as she stared stupidly at the car's wheel, just before they careened through the guardrails and down into the tall grass of a gully. Gia and Christine screamed as one.
The car engaged her brakes and momentum shoved Gia painfully against the racing belts. Then the laws of physics mercifully dropped her, limp and gasping, back into her seat.
"Hell's bells! What do you think you're doing?" Christine protested, outraged.
"Ow! Wha- what... did I fall asleep at the wheel?" Gia's eyes bulged in befuddlement. "What happened?"
"Oh for pity's..." Christine grumbled. Then she blasted over her speakers: "Cecy! You get back here, right this instant!"
"Who's Cecy?" Gia demanded, hands to her ears.
"I'm gonna tell your mom!" Christine bellowed.
"I'm sorry," Gia suddenly pleaded. "I don't know how to drive. Are you okay? Ow, my arms!"
"Racing belts, Cecy. And you better thank all seven stars you were born under I insisted on gettin' a six-point harness installed and that Gia always, always wears it!"
"I said I was sorry," Gia protested. Of course, it wasn't Gia who said the words, merely her mouth that uttered them.
"I'm not the forgiving sort," Christine growled. "Cecy, you do not just... take over my driver like that, you understand? Too dangerous. We're going too fast."
"But you don't need her!" Cecy protested with Gia's voice.
"Yes I do! I've a lot of responsibilities; I can't be bothered to watch the road every second."
"Yes, Tisiphone." Cecy nodded Gia's head. "I'm sorry."
Christine backed herself onto the road once again. The damage to her front bumper and radiator was already vanishing with tinny groans and plinks.
"Go tell Robbie and the others I'm on my way."
"Already did," Cecy's voice was full of purpose again. "They're waiting at the town square. But you need to hurry."
"So you said. Don't waste my time talking to me."
"Get him home, Tiffy."
Then Gia's expression changed to exasperation. "Christine, this is weird even for you - why am I blacking out?"
Cecy was a monster.
Cecy found and slipped inside a convenient bat flapping away from the red behemoth that had careened into his quiet roadside gully. She creeched through him and heard-saw, as she'd learned to long ago, the car arrowing down the road. The sharp, befurred ears even overheard the driver's confused demands for an explanation.
"Gia," Tisiphone had called her. A woman. A girl, really. It was rare for Tiffy to cozy up with a girl driver. Why her? The waif wasn't anything impressive. And then there were those nauseating vacancies inside the girl's skull and behind her nose. In a long lifetime of seeing wrong things, those made even Cecy squirm.
Well, "Christine," as Tiffy had taken to calling herself these days, had always been a sucker for a long face and a sob-story. Her only real weakness.
Cecy joined a flock of bats riding the night wind, and leapfrogged one to another, then spiraled up to an owl, cut short its swoop upon a careless rat and instead soared east, then down, down to Innsmouth. And there she donned a deep one.
They felt strange, oily and squishy on the inside. Cecy had known in her long unnatural life what a hawk knows soaring over the sunlit treetops, or an earthworm feels wriggling through hard-packed dust in the dark, or a wasp darting and dancing over an angry, hungry tarantula, But the deep ones were not wholly of this world. Their lineage came from the stars, for only thus might they blend blood with ichor. They made Cecy uneasy wearing them, like an ill-tailored suit. She would make it quick.
"Help is coming. Tell Phy'thya-l'y." Cecy indulged herself in a moment of pride. Learning the basics of the language of Y'ha-nthlei hadn't been at all easy, but she could pronounce it well, at least while wearing one of their own. With that she left the mucous-filled eyes behind and jetted away within a squid that, after the deep one, felt familiar and comforting.
There was nothing more she could do. She had delivered word to the undersea queen that help was on its way. Interrupting Tisiphone's driver again would only get her yelled at, no matter how frantic everybody felt. Someday, she reflected, she ought to learn to drive-!
-A late-flying seagull snapped up the squid, and Cecy scrambled post-haste into the gull. She swallowed the yummy raw calamari whole, paused for a moment to observe the ironies of her unique perspective, and then decided to circle and keep an eye on things.
"Tisiphone's on her way," the gull squawked to no one in particular, But in her attic bedroom, the family heard Cecy speak. They sighed in relief, and whispered their approval to each other around her bed of Nile sand. With her gifts, Cecy could make anything turn out right. Almost.
Gia gulped as she saw an orange glow on the horizon, and knew Innsmouth was burning. The gill-men had been at their work, reclaiming their town. When she and Christine crested a hill on Rowley Street, she whistled, impressed.
Aside from a few smaller sites, it was the Waite-Eliot hotel that danced orange as it consumed itself. Gia didn't see anyone on the streets trying to put the fires out.
"You sure this is safe?"
Christine didn't answer. She isn't, and she doesn't wanna scare me. Oh wait... no, she dumped me off here in the first place.
Gia retraced the narrow, old-fashioned streets as quickly as she dared, until she brought them to a parked idle in the now-familiar town square, near enough to feel the heat from the nearby blaze.
"Well done, Gia." Christine said. Her horn honked thrice, then her engine dropped to a low, resting purr, a tigress in repose.
Soon enough, a school of the repugnant gill-men appeared, carrying one of their own on a plastic tarp. Gia opened the passenger door for them and shoved the front seat out of the way. They placed their limp burden into the back efficiently, shut the door, then plunged back into the night with surprising piscine grace. Any doubt Gia had of their cognizance vanished – those were thinking creatures capable of communication and busy teamwork. Her hackles rose at the thought of having them angry with her, and wondered what sort of accord Christine had with them.
The stink of fish assaulted her immediately. "Pyew! I'm not sleeping back there until we get you cleaned." She shoved the car in gear. The voice from the GPS started issuing commands. As usual, Gia had no idea what their destination was, but soon determined they were headed northeast.
"How do I let you talk me into these things?"
They had a bad moment soon after - they ran smack into a military convoy headed to the town to restore order. Gia dearly hoped they'd not look over their cargo in the backseat. She doubted even Christine could overpower a... whatever massive thing they were driving. Fortunately the soldiers were in a hurry.
Gia had, after recent events, procured a new drivers' license. It wasn't real but it was authentic enough to pass a military policeman's cursory inspection. He waved her on and they were on their way again. Gia sighed in relief. How strange to be a fugitive, a criminal. Company I'm keeping, I guess.
Not a mile later, the reserve tank light flickered on. "Delays, delays," Gia sighed. "We're gonna lose about ten minutes refueling."
"Yeah, I figured. Can't be helped, hun."
"Since you're stopping," a strange, croaking voice came from behind, sending an unpleasant chill right up Gia's spine, "I don't suppose I could trouble you to purchase a cup of hot tea?"
Gia blinked. The voice was raspy, wet and hoarse, the words almost unintelligible. But there was no mistake, the thing in back had spoken.
"Is that a good idea, Robbie?" Christine asked. "With you so badly hurt-?"
"If I'm fated to die," the thing in the backseat gurgled, "I mean to at least... make time for a proper cup first. P.G. Tips if possible."
Gia coudn't help it: she started giggling.
"What's so funny?" Christine bristled.
"I'm sorry." Gia hastened to explain, for Christine was not wisely provoked on such matters. "There's a seven foot tall fish-man named "Robbie" curled up in my backseat, badly injured and politely asking for tea. I'm just going a little mad."
"Yes," the fish-man wheezed. "The situation is... grotesque, isn't it?"
A gasoline station abruptly turned up on the left side of the road. Gia dismissed her giggling fit long enough to skillfully whip their car across the lanes and astride a pump in a single curvilinear move. The voice from the GPS rewarded her with an approving coo.
Not three busy minutes later, both car and gill-man had their sustenance.
"Proper introductions are in order," Christine said cheerfully. "Robert, may I present my latest driver, Gia."
Clever, Gia thought. Christine's talking like there's no emergency at all, keeping the thing calm. "Nice to meet'ya."
"I wish... we'd met under better... circumstances, Miss Gia." The fish-man's weak words were interrupted by dull rasps. Gia pushed the throttle harder; she didn't like those sounds. "My name... glkh! ...Robert... at least when I... walked on the Earth."
Gia wasn't sure how she felt about being on a first name basis with an iridescent fish-being. "Glad you're awake," she said, "and your sense of humor's intact. How you feeling?"
"Like a motorboat ran over me."
"Ouch!" Yeah, an outboard motor would be a painful way to go.
"Thank you, Miss Gia." Robert's voice was barely a breathy whisper. "Thank you, Tiffy."
Robert Olmstead was a monster.
He had not always been thus, though he was fated from conception. His mother was of the Elliott family, which had unknowingly accepted a Marsh for daughter-in-law. Robert's blood was commingled with the sticky ichor of the stars. The result lay sleeping, bleeding, its gills pulsing in a languid rhythm, the horror of his slow transformation - once all-consuming! – forgotten an age ago.
After a minute of hearing only the thrum of the engine, Gia said quietly, "Tiffy...?"
"Hmm...?"
"Your nickname?"
Tisiphone grunted. She's embarrassed, Gia noted to herself with glee. So even a Fury has friends she unwinds with. Wonder what they're like.
The house had a dire history. Its maker was a monster.
A wild and a wicked man, Emeric Belasco's ghost had rumbled and rambled inside his wretched, windowless mansion for years before at last being forcibly evicted and dispelled into whatever hell awaited him.
The emptied house had remained, untenanted and hated, and falling ever deeper into disrepair, to the satisfaction of the few souls who had known it and survived. Yet it never quite crumbled. Protected by a misty, forested valley that human communities only now encroached upon, and preserved like a bog body by the nearby peat tarn, the onetime Belasco house bided its time, isolated by distance and by its foul reputation.
The Elliott family, eccentric and baroque to the extreme, yearned for an abode. A lifetime ago, in one swift and terrible week of spite and betrayal, of rumors and pryings and investigations, the family had packed their things, fled their ancient home whose celler roots seemed almost to plumb Mandarin mausoleums, and had watched it burn by a fire they themselves had set. The orange light of the blaze shined and glinted from their wet faces. But it is better by far to watch a fire from the outside.
They departed forever their Greentown, familiar if no longer precisely loved, though as if watered by their tears its memory grew greener as the family wanted ever more urgently a home.
It is not a happy thing to be dispersed and marked as strangers in the world. More dreadful still to be without warming hearth and comforting bed to rest securely in. Most especially if one's idea of the perfect bed meant silent cold slots of stone, or sturdy perches, or perhaps simply a lid.
This family, searching for a dwelling, heard ill-rumor of an empty and desolate husk. Their Timothy, grown by now into handsome manhood, had been dispatched to examine this Belasco house. So it was that Timothy entered first. Then Cecy, pushing aside the dull real-estate broker, just after him.
The place, Cecy reported, was filthy, as filthy as its maker must have been. It would need repairs and considerable redecorating, for old Belasco only had taste in his mouth. The house was entirely deserted. Entirely. And it was vast, vast enough even for an extended clan fond of housing the most distant relatives for the sake of familial love (provided they maintained impeccable manners, of course!) and of hosting frequent and lavish reunions.
The bored broker awakened from her daydream to hear, to her disbelief, that she of all people had accomplished the impossible: she had sold "Hell House."
Even before the woman had completed in her office the shamanisms of ink and paper, in a mad whirl and a rush the family came, bearing hammers and nails in boxes, wrenches and pipes, wires and electric arcana. Then with great beating noises, strong hands and low voices, seen and unseen, they toiled until in scarcely a week the place functioned, like a corpse resurrected and healed. Then came soap and polish, perfumes, sandpaper and incense, graceful hands and high voices to exorcize the demons of decay and stench, replacing them with sawdust and turpentine, until the hospital patient emerged coiffed and glittering. Pornographic friezes lay outside in sundered heaps atop drifts of moldy carpeting, waiting to be hurled all at once into the neighboring bog.
And then, restoration and remodeling finished, the great double doors, scoured and oiled and with brass fixtures polished and shining – opened!
The family dove inside to safety in a vast delirious flood. Winds found comforting flue and pipe. Creaks found new hinges. The ancient and beloved cat found a new and vaster hearth. Voices cheered with each new and wondrous discovery. And the house, desolate and derelict, thrummed with life and activity and noise and many, many black vitalities once more. Baths were drawn and honest sweat washed away. For the first time in living memory the kitchen boasted odors sweet and savory of baking and of roasting. Then with a feast and a ritual, the family claimed this house as theirs, consigning the long dead and unmourned name of Belasco to well-deserved oblivion and their memories of Greentown to scrapbooks and the past.
Then they rested easy and settled in, and languidly unpacked and arranged, until by some stealthy miracle the house became truly theirs, new and strange no longer. Why, house and family had always lived together! Greentown was... only a dream that had ended sadly.
The family was a family of monsters.
It was to such a house, and to such a family, that the red Plymouth Fury arrowed, slithering along the cut in the dense forest, bearing its odoriferous burden.
The fog was like driving into a wall. The GPS had long ago given up hope. Gia slowed their progress to what seemed after their haste an unforgivable crawl. "Tiffy? I can barely see."
"You'll be fine, hun," the car said, seemingly through clenched teeth. "Cecy says there's no opposing traffic, no obstructions. You could go even a little faster, it's safe."
Gia smiled. Who knows how "Cecy" told her that. And my, Christine does not like me using her nickname! Well, I'll just say it more often to needle her.
Together they slalomed through the forest and the fog along the old and neglected paving. Gia occasionally rubbed her palms across her skirt to dry them. And she shook a trickle of perspiration from her temple. But without doubt, months spent behind this wheel were paying off.
"Gia, you need to know... my family is very private. Discussing with outsiders anything that would violate their privacy would have..." here Gia felt her seat nudge forward a little, a gentle but dire warning, "...unfortunate consequences."
Every once in a while, she just has to remind me who's boss. "Got it," Gia assented. Then after an awkward pause, "I'm gonna need a looong nap after this."
"You're doing very well. Almost there."
Then Gia hit the brakes, for a towering house abruptly leaped out of the mist at them like some gigantic monster. The car skated on the moist road and half fish-tailed. Gia gulped and panted.
"Oops!" Christine said sheepishly. "Closer than I thought."
Gia popped the hasp of her harness and climbed out of the car, stiffly, for she'd been sitting all night and into the morning. She turned around and stared at the house.
Through hard experience Gia now had antennae out to detect what an older generation would have dubbed "bad vibes," though that usage had passed from the earth some time ago. At Nell's she'd sensed a singular harsh presence glaring down at her. The strange house near Innsmouth she'd avoided had felt like staring down a deep well that led down to some dark place where humans do not belong. But this... this! This house was not deserted, not solitary. It was large enough, though not of the inhuman scale of Hill House. It had been brightly and tastefully, deceptively painted to offset the dreariness of the frequent fog. And it was full - filled to the rafters! Crowded, crawling, bursting with vitality and presences. Oh, this house was occupied!
Gia felt faint. Then the sound of Christine's horn jolted her awake. Already the double doors opened and several people emerged.
Aside from their dark clothing, Gia dimly noted, they looked almost normal. Six men and a woman walked with tall aristocratic dignity to the car, like morticians or pall-bearers, pulled the limp and unconscious Robbie, and I have come to think of him as "Robbie", plastic tarp and all, out of Christine and carried him gently toward the house. It was all a little anticlimactic.
I hope he's still alive. It'd be a danged nuisance to go through all that just to deliver a dead body.
She leaned against the car. "Oooh... wow. Sorry. All at once all the running around I did, the swim and the hard driving without sleep..."
"Would it help to say I'm very pleased with you?"
Gia, her piled resentments notwithstanding, patted Christine's roof. Is it the operation that lets me endure like that? Who can say.
The tall, stiff lady fussed and hovered as the men carried their burden. She paused at the threshold and then turned back. Gia felt a chill as the woman's eyes alighted upon her. She had seen enough and more than enough now to sense, to scent perhaps, that this woman with her upright posture and her elegant black dress and her lovely, royal appearance was scarcely of the same species as herself. And Gia knew a little perhaps of what a mouse knows when contemplated by a cobra.
"Tisiphone, ooohh! Well done and welcome home. Seeing you means something good came of it all. You remember the way to your garage, yes? I'll come join you. We have so much catching-up to do!"
Then she peered down and said, "And you... must be her attendant." The woman's voice lost its warmth but remained as stiffly elegant as her black gown, and as dark.
That's a polite word for servant. Huh! Guess I can't call you wrong.
"Give your hostess a curtsy," Christine urged. "Manners are worth more than gold here." Gia obeyed as well as she could, though she was a trucker's daughter and had never curtseyed in her entire life. And it probably shows.
"I expect you've had an arduous journey. Please come in."
Gia's eyes widened. Come into my parlor... She tensed, ready to bolt back into the relative safety of the demon car, the demon she knew.
"Gia," Christine chided. "Don't be rude. You're with me."
"And Tisiphone... is family," the matriarch concluded with an offhand gesture and as reassuring a tone as she could muster. "Tut! Child, you've helped preserve Robert's life. And it's... rare we entertain guests. You shall be safe... safer perhaps than you've ever been."
"You get some rest, hun." With that Christine closed her doors and puttered off at a leisurely pace around what Gia now perceived was a well-maintained driveway lined with deep crimson roses, until the fog swallowed her.
Gia gave the vacuous, deceptive smile the operation had left her with free rein. And Christine dumps me off in yet another spooky hellhole. Someday I'm gonna find a mine and bury you in it, bitch. Just you wait and see.
The day crept on, and Gia spent much of it lying on a bed in what looked like a onetime nursery, her eyes staring at the ceiling, hardly daring to blink, and her ears straining for any warning sound. But none came. Her terror-clouded mind finally succumbed to exhaustion, and when her eyes snapped open again the last purple light of the day was fading from the curtains and the house was alive with the muffled thumps and groans and bustles of the waking family.
It's night. And I'm alone. In the house. With them. And one of them is knocking on the door.
"Miss Gia?" A man's voice, coarsened by age and a country twang.
"Not ready to get up yet, thank you," Gia managed.
Her breath was foul and she desperately needed to relieve herself. After all she had seen and survived she'd thought herself beyond fear. But now she was surrounded, alone, in the belly of the beast. Damn you to hell, Christine!
A little later, not long enough, the voice returned. "Well, we'd hate for you to miss breakfast."
"Just a minute," she called back. What am I going to do? She sat up and looked around the twilight room. Old-fashioned, as all such houses must be. A locked door, but they would have a key. A dresser, but not heavy enough to block passage. A window, but there was no convenient neighboring building to leap to this time. The voice again...
"Now don't be harsh, ma'am. She's just skittish as a spooked cat is all. She's not used to us."
"Gia?" The tall woman's voice. "Your breakfast is getting cold, and you are expected at the table."
Gia tried to think of an answer, any answer, but then the point was mooted.
"Now get up and open this door," kindly but commanding. Gia found herself standing and reaching for the knob before she knew what she was doing. A whimper escaped her lips and she froze in place. She trembled with a herculean effort.
"Gia, grown-ups do not hide in their rooms. Open the door."
"Grown-ups?" Oh, you wretched, filthy car, you told her everything! And Gia gave up her useless effort to countermand the order and resigned herself to her fate. She watched passively as her hand turned the knob.
The tall woman stood there at the threshold, a matronly woman perhaps but still shockingly elegant. Behind her stood her very opposite, a slightly rotund, sunburnt old country gent in a plaid shirt.
"You see, Tom?" she chided the man. "You've only to be firm with her." With that, the woman pivoted on her stilettos as if she'd no further interest.
"Yes, ma'am." Tom held his straw stetson in his hands
Gia inwardly moaned. She knew this woman's type. Whatever weird and wild creatures she'd gathered to herself here, Gia knew that nothing happened in this, her domain, without her knowledge, and precious little without her permission. And Christine had told this obsessively controlling, domineering woman that direct orders turned her into little more than a puppet?
Tom drawled, "good mornin', miss Gia. Or I expect it's good evening for you. We keep odd hours here."
"Not so odd. I've been on the same schedule ever since—" she stopped herself. Why am I telling a stranger this?
Tom pointed to a door. "Here's a bathroom. When you're done I'll show you to the kitchen."
The bathroom was even more old-fashioned than the one she remembered from Nell's, and the furnishings were deliberately Gothic and odd. Gia would later note that the room boasted the only mirror in the whole place. Here was a perfect over-the-top mansion for this sinister family. She resisted the temptation to lock herself inside a second time.
Breakfast, at least, was normal and perfectly good, and so was Tom, it seemed. "Are you a servant here?"
"Oh no, miss! I'm part of the family. The mister and missus, they don't keep servants. Not that I blame you for thinking so. They're wealthy and old-world and I'm just a country boy. I was never one for dressing up or putting on airs, though I'm old fashioned too after my way. Taken up writing letters with quill pens and sealing wax since I came."
Gia smiled at the quaint image despite herself.
"Fancy clothes don't go with my job, y'see. I'm the caretaker. In a house this size, there's always something needs to be done." He sat up and said earnestly, "now I know you're taken aback. This is an eccentric family and that's a fact. But you're safe as safe ever was, so how 'bout you relax and see what there's to see?"
Gia spent the early part of the evening helping Tom with his chores, which mainly involved watering plants, cleaning drippings from candlesticks and installing new tapers. "We prefer these to electric lights. All incurable romantics here." Gia would have been charmed, had the tall tapers not been black.
As they tinkered about the house, Gia saw glimpses of the family going about their so-called day. Each vision was a revelation – bat wing, wolf fur, wine glass floating on its own, and many things yet unnamed. And each seemed deliberately to pay no attention to her. Let her come to them if she wanted, which she emphatically did not.
"So what are you doing here, Tom? You seem so..."
"'Normal?' S'alright, you can say it. It's not like we don't know we're odd here. I married into the family."
"You're kidding."
"Nope! Fell for Cecy years ago. Came courting soon after the family settled in here. That's love, y'know. Nothing worthwhile's ever easy, and you gotta take the good with the bad. And it's not all bad, not even close. You feeling better?"
"I am." And Gia meant it, for her condition did not allow her to lie to such a direct question.
"Good. 'Cause the family doesn't want to scare you, and some of 'em are eager to meet Tisiphone's new driver."
So Tom took her upstairs.
"She's afraid of us, Tiffy." The tall matron said sternly.
"Sister, I couldn't properly prepare her." Tisiphone protested. "Cecy just turned up and there was no time anymore."
The great red car sat quiescently in the house's spacious and well-equipped outlying garage, like an inert lump of metal and yet also like a great cat curled up happily in its lair, tail idly flicking and flapping. The radio softly played a soothing melody, and a man's gentle voice crooned with it, "God only knows, God makes his plan. The information's unavailable to the mortal man." Christine knew this place well, for here her former driver had made the extensive upgrades and refits that had elevated her to a genuine hot-rod. She felt happy here remembering him, and also enjoying the flattering company of family members who took time to consult, to seek advice or simply to glory in the company of the old, wise and mighty Fury in a rare state of friendly leisure. Even members of this exotic family, she knew, boasted about sharing tea with the Erinyes.
The family was proud to have adopted the three sisters of wrath, and gave them this clean, dry, well lit, well-appointed three-car garage with its white painted walls and waxed concrete floor for a home. The Furies accepted this generous gesture with unfeigned gratitude.
Lady Elliott, The tall woman sitting upright beside her, almost as old, also mighty in her way and, save only her oft-preoccupied husband, unquestioned ruler of the manor, sat quietly and stirred her tea. She enjoyed the music and refused to show it, but Christine knew her well enough to tell.
"I know that you think highly of young Gia," she said. "And let's be frank, you have always had a soft spot in your heart for the oppressed."
The song ended with a melancholy sigh, and for a moment the matriarch wasn't certain if that came from the long-ago balladeer, or no.
You gotta take the good with the bad. And it's not all bad.
That's love, y'know.
Tom pushed Gia gently into the room, and she caught her breath at the sight of many-times-great grand-mére.
And truth, many-times-great grand mére would have caught her breath at the sight of Gia, had she breath to catch. For Gia was so shockingly young, her face not yet flogged by time, but her limbs and bosom were generous and free of youthful spindliness.
And many-times-great grand mére remembered seeing such a sight before, in a mirror of polished silver, on the day she had returned from her journey.
The woman in the silver mirror was Nef, and she had come of age. Her father, whose word was law, had commanded that his young daughter take a husband. But she was not displeased, for had she not stood behind him and whispered into his ear, "see father? That one! Is he not a hero of the war? Is he not strong and perfect and well-spoken? Is he not fit for adoption into the royal family and to one day reign in our name?" And had her father not smiled?
Then she had journeyed to the sea with the broad-shouldered soldier, as was the custom, and at his gentle command had surrendered her virginal dignities and her innocence, and lowered her loincloth of finest while linen as a long-besieged city lowers its flag.
The day came when they returned, with her body humming as if a vast bell that, having been struck, sang a note too low for human ears. They returned to find her father had laid a foundation. And it stretched far, and when completed would engulf its neighbor pyramids and reduce them to mere ornaments. Her mind reeled with admiration for her father's ambition. And so she danced her joy and she leaped, pointing one set of her toes straight to the sky in a single, exalted moment of supreme human beauty.
But she had leaped too far in her elation, and on her landing broke her smallest toe. It was broken in a way that could never quite be healed for all the royal physicians' wisdom. Nef wept for herself. She wept not because it hurt, for she was a Pharaoh's daughter and courage ran through her veins, and this was but a little hurt. Nef wept because her body's perfection was no more, and she knew that in her moment aloft, she had been perfect and would be so never more. And Nef knew, she had always known in her mind but knew now in her bones and her heart, that one day as she had surrendered her maidenhood so must she surrender her life, and would never live to see her father's work done.
Nef peered down past her shabby toes, feet bound tightly in linen and honey, feet that had not parted company since before Socrates drank bitter cold from his bowl, at this girl whose body was so achingly like hers as she had seen in her mirror. Yet she saw fear in the girl's face, for the girl saw in Nef what she must become, in but a wink of time's eye. The girl had no ear for Nef's wisdom. And for the first in lifetimes, the family's eldest knew sadness.
"And though I grant young Gia is as upright and moral as you say, she lacks courage."
"You know what happens if I don't have a strong hand at the wheel!" Christine protested, a foreign note of pleading in her voice.
"She is intolerant and closed-minded. She simply doesn't belong here."
"She's that bad?"
Gia was watering the rosebushes along the driveway when she noticed the cat watching her. Gia would have expected a black cat, but this one gleamed like bronze with black spots in the porch light. In shape and color it looked just like an ancient statue.
"Wow! You're a beauty, aren't you?" Gia said. It was silly to talk to a cat, of course, but less silly than most of her tattered life. "I've never seen your like. What are you, an Abbysinian?" She put down the garden hose and reached down to pet it, but the cat hissed at her and dashed off, leaving Gia feeling vaguely depressed.
A few minutes of watering later, Gia heard, "Mau," and noticed the cat had returned to stare at her from atop a fence.
"Pretty voice," Gia commented.
"She's not an Abyssinian; she's an Egyptian Mau," the cat stated.
"Of course the cats talk here. Why the hell not?" Gia said calmly.
"No they don't," the cat countered. "You keep busy, don't you."
Gia thought briefly of an old storybook where a lost girl had conversed with a grinning feline. "It... kills the time."
"Y'know, you might pass the time by meeting some of the people here. They have a lot to offer."
"Not interested," Gia said curtly.
"Fine by me! I've been watching you all day-"
"Night," Gia corrected.
"Nobody here likes you either. Even Anuba here doesn't like you, and she likes everybody."
"Ah! You must be Cecy."
"Only now? Really?" Gia had never heard such disdain poured into two syllables. "What does she see in you? Well don't worry. Tiffy will get bored soon enough and you can go. Do you like driving her?"
"I hate it," Gia said, her voice chirpy and cheerful. "I hate the things she shows me when the sun sets. I hate the weird things she tells me to do."
"I see."
"But I'll admit it's an education. I'm learning about things I didn't even know existed." She shut off the spigot. She didn't particularly care if the water ran until the old house it was attached to sank into a morass, but such compulsions were part of the so-called adulthood she'd been granted. "And I like her."
"Oh?" Cecy sounded honestly surprised. "Do you really?"
"I like her voice. It's silky and strong. And the things she says, I can tell she's very old and wise, and that she cares for me, despite herself."
"Tom told you to do that, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"And so you hafta do it. Why, I could say, 'Gia, pour water all over your head,' and you couldn't do otherwise."
Gia grunted. It wasn't a question, so she wasn't compelled to answer. But she did turn the spigot back on.
"She just feels sorry for you. Somebody put a little scissor up your nose and went 'snip snip,' didn't they?"
Gia whirled and jetted water all over the cat. Cecy and Anuba yowled as one and vanished into the night.
"You have been my sister ever since we adopted you and yours. But my husband is lord of this house, and he's even less pleased than I am."
"Alright," the car said, defeated. "Tell her we're leaving tomorrow at sunset."
The matriarch finished her tea, satisfied that her regrettable duty had been fulfilled.
"...and that I'm not happy with her," Tiffy growled, "at all."
The next morning, though it was really the evening, Gia woke up and washed and straightened her clothes. The fear was gone. They were leaving, and she'd escaped yet another nightmare.
Christine was "not impressed with her behavior." She was in for it, and she'd eventually need to patch things up, but Gia wasn't feeling particularly eager to do so. What did the car expect of her anyway, dropping her into the middle of this snake's nest, this carnival freak show? Gia glared at herself in the mirror, at the ugly smile that mocked her.
Then the amazing thing happened, the unexpected thing, the catastrophic and inexplicable and in its way, miraculous thing. There was a terrible noise, an earthquake, and an impact that shook Gia's gut. She opened the bathroom door to see the family, a part of her mind struggling to catalogue and in some cases even comprehend the things she beheld, rushing toward the front door. She waited, not daring to get caught in that crush, that black torrent, until the threshold was clear.
Gia exited the house to see the family assembled upon the wide steps leading up to the front door, and scattered just beyond it, all staring.
Across the road leading to their driveway, a train track slithered impossibly where none had been before, complete with crossing bells and gates. The red Plymouth lay just to one side of them, shattered and twisted into a half-spiral, her spine broken.
"Tisiphone," whispered the crowd, almost as one.
"Tiffy," said the tall matriarch softly, amazed in her sudden grief.
"Christine!" Gia howled. How odd! I see her lying in a mangled heap and now I care about her?
Their eyes followed the tracks and the dusty black boxcars to where a pig-iron locomotive had come to a stop, its chuffing, smoking engine shaking itself to awkward rest, its massive cow-catcher not even dented.
They watched as a gaunt bearded man in an old-fashioned waistcoat and string necktie descended from the stairs in its side. The man tipped his top hat to the father of the Elliott clan, and said with a wicked smirk, "Such a pity! We've come a long way, and you all just missed something of a grand entrance, even by my standards."
Gia read, half in shock, the legend carved in brass cursive letters on the engine's coal-black side - Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. Improbably enough, the engine emitted the clanging music of a calliope.
"There's one in every family," Gia heard the father growl.
And the Elliots fell upon her as a dark wave to sweep her back inside.
.