Chapter 10
"Are you okay?" Bob asked.
"I'm fine, but … Who's Sophie?"
Figuring out that she wasn't Sophie, Thomas struggled to sit up and demanded, "Who are you? What is this place? What propels this wagon? Ugh." He raised a hand to his forehead and turned green.
"Into the house," Bob said. "Now. Quickly. There are people down the block."
Thomas pulled himself to a sitting position and started again with the who-what-where.
"Come on, Thomas. You need to come with us." Elizabeth reached out her hand to him. He did not take her hand and she sat there for a minute, hand held out like an idiot, while he poured out a slew of questions. She couldn't understand more than half of what he said, his accent was different, English by way of the seventeenth century and all the modern cadences he'd picked up over the years were just gone. Realizing that he probably couldn't understand her and Bob any better, and with Bob crawling over the side of the truck to haul Thomas away bodily, she repeated herself again, slowly and clearly. This time he looked like he was listening and some of what she said sank in.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because—because you can't sit out here in the truck all night. It's December and you'll freeze. Come inside to the house where you live with us and we will explain everything."
Still shivering from his centuries of deep freeze, he nodded along with the December part of her argument. He tried to stand, couldn't because his muscles weren't working right, and finally allowed them to help him out over the tailgate, which fell off when Bob put his knee on it. Bob fell to the street after it.
Bob popped up again, unhurt, and kicked the tailgate under the truck. He and Elizabeth each took one of Thomas's arms and half-carried him across the street to the front gate, where they ran into Trip who was just leaving his apartment.
"Hi, Elizabeth, Bob." With a puzzled look at Thomas, he asked "Have we met?"
"No, no, you haven't," Elizabeth said quickly. "This is my, uh, cousin Thomas from England. He, uh, had a really bad flight. So we need to get him inside now and see you later bye." She hoped that the sword (and what was up with that? He didn't have one in the portrait) was concealed what with all the darkness, and it being on the side of his body away from Trip. The odd clothes she didn't know how she might explain—theater project? historical re-enactor?—so she didn't. She gave Trip a little wave and shoved Thomas and Bob through the gate.
On the front porch, Bob had to dig around in his pocket for the keys and accidentally slipped on the ring of invisibility a couple times, eliciting a strangled noise from Thomas. When Bob got the doors open, they stumbled into the hall. Bob tried to set Thomas down on the futon, but he broke free and threw an arm around the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He stood there, shivering, staring, and still breathing as if he'd been holding his breath too long.
Elizabeth tore the cloak from her throat and threw it onto the futon. She turned on the lights and stared at Thomas. You don't know this man. He looked back at her without recognition and an air of calculation, as if he were totting up the ways that she was not Sophie. He looked different from his portrait and from how he'd manifested himself. He must have forgotten his true appearance as the years passed. The portrait must have been meant to flatter, but hadn't quite. The flesh and blood Thomas was a little taller than his incorporeal version, almost as tall as Bob, so he must have been a big man for his time, and broader across the shoulders. His coarse black hair—he wore his own hair as he had in the portrait—was still tied back from his face, a few locks had escaped and hung in wisps to his shoulders. His front hair fell over his forehead and he shoved it back out of his eyes. He still had the same long hands, but his fingers were blunt, not tapering, and stained with ink. He was squarer of jaw and longer of nose, but his eyes were the same dark blue. She could have cried to see how, instead of wearing his usual sardonic (and, let's face it, know-it-all) expression, his face was a study of confusion. He was also kind of smelly.
"Now," Thomas gasped. "Who?"
Elizabeth and Bob introduced themselves.
"Where?"
'When' might be a better question, Elizabeth thought, but told him that he was in Virginia.
"The colonies?"
"Not for a really long time," said Bob.
"I don't understand."
"I—it's—" Elizabeth started.
"Just a second, I have an idea," Bob said to her and asked Thomas, "What's the last thing you remember?"
This prompted a flood of unintelligible speech and they had to beg him to slow down. Thomas closed his eyes and recited, as if to idiots, "I was standing in the garden in the sun. That idiot painter was setting up a blind and a lens to project an image inside the blind. His patroness had come calling and my aunt was trying to get rid of her. And Sophie—" He glanced at Elizabeth and quickly averted his eyes. He fixed his gaze on the wall over Bob's left shoulder. "We were to have gone riding. I was standing in the garden. It is—was July."
"The year?" Elizabeth asked.
"1689." Thomas knit his brows and looked around the hall and up at the light fixture, where six flame-shaped bulbs shone brightly from plastic candles. The calculating expression deepened.
"Okay, now you," Bob said to her.
She took a deep breath and repeated to Thomas the little he'd ever told her about how he'd been ensorcelled into the portrait, with lenses and magic and something about a personal matter that he'd never elaborated on. She described how he'd been living in an incorporeal form, tied to the portrait, ever since. Can't you remember?
This version of Thomas curled his lip whenever she said the word 'sorcery' and he was shaking his head by the time she finished. "That's not possible. This is some kind of trick."
"I'm right there with you, man," said Bob. "But I'm sorry to have to tell you, it's all real."
"So." Thomas's eyes flicked from Bob to Elizabeth and back again. His breathing slowed and he became very still. "Then send me back."
"I—I don't know how," Elizabeth said.
"But you brought me here."
"Not exactly. You were already here. We only broke the curse that was on you. By accident. You didn't want it broken … " Her voice trailed off.
"If I could be brought here, then there must be some way to send me back. I must return, they'll be wondering what happened to me." Thomas straightened up and took a half step towards them. His hand dropped to the hilt of his sword.
Bob rocked forward onto his toes and edged slightly in front of Elizabeth. One of Thomas's eyebrows twitched upwards and, though he didn't smile, he looked slightly amused.
Around Bob's elbow, she said, "Listen. We—I didn't bring you here. Even if I could, why would I pick some random guy from three hundred plus years ago and conjure him up in the back of my truck while we're driving around town trying to get away from the lowlife who broke into our house and stole a certain portrait (by the way)? That makes no sense at all!"
Finally, a little uncertainty crept into Thomas's eyes, but he set his jaw and said, "Logic does not appear to be relevant."
"Well, he's definitely the same guy," Bob said.
"Why can't he remember anything?" asked Elizabeth. "He banged his head in the truck, he got knocked out when that car ran into us. Do you think—"
"Maybe not that. I have a theory." Bob turned to her. "Not that this kind of thing is in the literature, but anyway. Memory is biological. His biology has been … someplace else, not storing information, while this non-biological part of him has been passing time in the world. How that part of him stored information I don't know, or if he can ever retrieve it, but it would explain why he can't remember anything since the initial cursing."
"Miss Price said she'd encountered people who'd been under this curse before. Maybe she would know how to get his memory back."
"Maybe hypnosis, except that memory recovery isn't reliable. Unless he could recover memories that you can corroborate." Bob rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"Pardon me," Thomas said, a plaintive tone creeping into his voice. "But if you're sorcerers or witches, why not just curse me back to where I belong?"
"Because we're not," Elizabeth told him. "In fact, the person most likely to know how to do that is you, if you can remember how."
"I'm not a—"
"Yes, you are," she said firmly. "Or were, or will be."
"Face it, you're going to be here for a while. But if you can get cursed back to exactly when you left, then a few weeks here won't matter," Bob said. Somewhere in the house, a clock started chiming. "Damn, I've got to go." He wheeled to face Elizabeth. "Will you be all right? He should be checked out, what with the head injury and the germs, but I can't take him to the hospital. He should be isolated; he's never been exposed to post-antibiotic bugs. When I get back … Till then, maybe try to get him clean? You should be all right … " He poured a world of feeling into a look, kissed her on the forehead, and went back out into the night.
"Bye," she called after him, inadequately.
Thomas was leaning on the newel post again. He looked like he could use a drink. "What now?"
Good question. "Would you like something to drink?"
After five minutes in the kitchen, Elizabeth resolved never to have children. If she had to answer the questions "What's that?" "Why?" and "How does it work?" ever again, she'd go stark raving mad. She huddled over her tea and considered the matter of hard liquor, and whether she'd have been better off dosing herself instead. He seemed to have recovered physically, at least, and begun to accept the situation with good cheer, though much of that acceptance must have been based on his certainty, first that this was a dream, and second that he would wake up soon.
After examining the faucets, the microwave oven, the refrigerator, the gas range, and all two of the electrical outlets, Thomas finally noticed the old mechanical typewriter sitting on the table. He pulled out the little levers and examined the mechanism.
"It's a typewriter," she said, before he could ask.
"Like a printing press, only letter by letter," he marveled. "If I had had one of these at the university … " He pecked experimentally at the keys and looked at the stack of typed pages beside it. "Who wrote all this?"
"You. I'm the only one who could see or hear your ghost and so you communicated with the others through the typewriter."
"Others, in addition to your husband? You have servants, of course."
Dreading the explanation that would ensue, she buried her face in her hands. "He's not my husband."
"Ah?"
She explained the living arrangements.
Thomas disapproved. She was saved from having to explain that, nowadays, unmarried girls often lived apart from their families, even with unmarried men, when they heard the front door and Alice, Dirk, and Kevin came running back to tell her that someone had crashed into her truck. They spilled through the doorway and halted in mid-shout when they saw Thomas, who was struck equally dumb. Elizabeth tried to see her housemates through his eyes. Short-haired men, Kevin in his actuary's drag of suit and tie, and Dirk in the workout clothes he wore for his job at the health club. Alice was still working her femme fatale look in black leather pants and a little black sweater that showed off both midriff and cleavage. Her long, blonde hair hung loose to her waist. In the seventeenth century, they would have looked utterly alien. Alice would probably have been burned at the stake.
"Whoa! It's the portrait guy!" Alice cried. "We can see you! What's up with that? Do we all have magic powers now? Is that, like, a leftover from the spell you did, Elizabeth?"
"Magic? You told me you weren't a witch," Thomas said.
"I'm not. Y'all—" Elizabeth rapidly poured out the story of the evening's events thus far. God, when will it end? She talked too fast for them to interrupt and breathlessly finished, saying, "He's got amnesia and doesn't remember anything about the last three hundred-odd years since he was cursed. So, introduce yourselves."
"Amnesia? That sucks. But, at least we don't need the typewriter anymore," said Dirk.
"But he's really excited about the typewriter," Elizabeth said dryly. "It's like the greatest thing since sliced bread, except he has yet to experience that either."
"No kidding? Wait till he checks out my laptop." Alice leaned over the table and grinned.
Thomas stared at Alice. His eyes darted down to the region of her lap and his jaw dropped.
"Ha!" Alice jumped back. "Laptop! I guess if you don't know, it sounds kind of obscene. Like a lap dance. Heh." She and Dirk shimmied around the kitchen in a naughty bump-and-grind dance, chanting "Oooh, baby! Lap Top!"
All the blood left Thomas's face and he was doubtless wondering what kind of a house this really was. In a low voice, Elizabeth told him, "We're not harlots. Really. Not by today's standards."
"Speak for yourself," Dirk said.
Kevin was rubbing his chin and looking critically at Thomas. "You know, you're like a dab of gel and a blow dry away from a total eighties hair band thing. That wasn't a good look then, and it hasn't aged any better. I could get my scissors …"
"Eh?"
Elizabeth considered how she might translate that and gave up.
"So you're thinking haircut?" Alice stopped dancing around. "Probably a good idea, unless you're going to join a metal band. And a shower too. I'm surprised Bob didn't hose you down in the backyard before he let you in the house."
"You cut hair?" asked Dirk.
"Yeah. I never told you about that? From way back. In high school one of my girlfriends dared me to use the free space in my schedule and take cosmetology. Turns out I've got the haircutting gene (what a surprise) and I ended up clipping my way through college. I had a job in this chi-chi salon in Charlottesville. They wanted exotic gay hairdressers, so I started out calling myself Kevin-with-a-C, but since no one got the C, I went by Ceviche and pretended I could only speak Portuguese."
"Ceviche? You called yourself 'marinated raw seafood'? No way." Alice hopped up on the counter and banged her heels against the cabinets.
"Way. The only person who ever looked at me funny was the owner, but since the ladies just loved me, she never said anything. Anyway, my scissors are sharp and at your service." Kevin bowed. "In fact, I insist."
"You are all speaking English, but—" Thomas began.
Elizabeth slouched down in her chair and said slowly, "In the twenty-first century we bathe regularly, so you are going to go wash and put on modern clothes. Then Kevin will cut your hair so you will not look out of place."
"This is a dream," Thomas said with a little less certainty. "It doesn't matter what I look like."
"If this is a dream, then when you wake up you'll still have all your hair and be unwashed. So there's no reason not to experience the modern joys of hot running water. Go on. The guys will show you. Be sure to ask Dirk how it works, " she added evilly.
In the face of her reasonably solid logic and unable to resist his own curiosity, Thomas allowed Kevin and Dirk to escort him upstairs. Shortly the girls heard water running in the pipes and some unidentifiable thumping around. They started preparing dinner.
By the time the men came back downstairs, the kitchen was filled the scent of onions and garlic frying in olive oil. Kevin carried a barber's case and a bath towel. Thomas wore modern clothes pulled from the leavings of some prior resident and the bemused expression of someone having a first encounter with elastic. He tried to put off the haircut a while longer by wandering around the kitchen and asking more questions. He cast a look of dread at the stack of typewritten paper. Evidence that all I said was true, Elizabeth thought with sour satisfaction. The "it's all a dream" theory was staring to wear thin.
When Kevin tried to make him sit down and accept the haircut, Thomas resisted until Alice threatened him with not being allowed outside unless he acquiesced.
"She's right," Elizabeth put in. "You don't want to attract any more attention than you will already. Especially since the woman who had your portrait stolen will still be hoping to sacrifice you to Hell. Besides, dream, remember?"
Finally they got Thomas to sit in a chair, a towel wrapped around his neck, and Kevin started lopping off long pieces of hair with abandon.
The doorknocker sounded and since she was the only one not occupied with something productive, Elizabeth dragged herself to the front of the house to answer the door.
It was Miss Price, smelling of cinnamon and butter, with a wild look in her eyes. She stepped into the house and whipped off her coat. "I've just spent two hours helping my mother bake cookies. My sisters were there, so were their kids and six! Six grand-nieces and nephews. And not one of them has any idea what Alastair is up to. Oh no! 'Isn't it nice that he's following in uncle's footsteps and getting involved in one of the family traditions.' Hah! Hah, I say! This is the boy who knocked chips off the Great Pyramid at Giza to sell to his little friends back home! Really, defacing the work of the ancients for pocket money. I ask you, why would he do that when he could pick up any old rocks that looked just the same?"
"Wouldn't that be fraud?" In the face of all this energy, Elizabeth swayed and propped herself up against a wall.
Miss Price stamped around in a tight circle and waved her hands. "Yes! That's the point! Fraud is Alastair's middle name. And, I'm sorry to say, another one of the family traditions. But vandalism is not. I never trusted him, even as a toddler, he …"
"Uh, Miss Price? What kind of cookies were those?"
"Sugar, why?'
"No reason. Give me your coat. Let me tell you what's happened." On the way through the house she described her and Bob's adventure in housebreaking.
Miss Price looked quite pleased whenever she mentioned her partner in crime, especially when she blushed, but was otherwise frowny. "I don't know about the amnesia," she said. "I'm surprised that, well, you all weren't burned to a crisp. A tremendous amount of binding energy was released when the portrait was destroyed. That's why Titania and her lot wanted it. They can use that energy, especially if they can release it gradually. I've been doing some research on her too. She's not the Queen of Faery, I found out, just a queen in Faery, a minor one. I was wondering how a backwater like Richmond rated so highly with the Gentry, but it seems we don't after all. Titania's not as powerful as she used to be (though as an elf, she's still far more powerful than we are) and she must have had something planned for the binding energy from the portrait, or even Thomas himself, for her machinations here or in the Fair Country, over and above the tithe."
"There're more like her?"
"Certainly. Lucky us. There must be a natural gate around here because of the city being built on seven hills, such as they are. Titania must have a devil of a time getting the gate open on her own. That's one reason why they were trying to get this house, because of the ley lines running through it. More power to work with. I'll bet the Gentry rarely come calling on her," Miss Price was saying with acid pleasure as they entered the kitchen.
"I'm almost done." Kevin pushed Thomas's head down, making a few more adjustments and brushing the clippings from Thomas's neck. "The high hair. There's no getting away from it, but I guess the bedhead look isn't totally out of place with the two days' beard, so … " He removed the towel and Alice fetched a broom from the closet.
Thomas rose from his chair, his eyes on Miss Price.
"Mr. Penrose, it's nice to finally meet you in the flesh," Miss Price said briskly.
"You're the witch," he said. "You'll send me home."
She shook her head. "A witch, I'll grant you. I'm afraid my art doesn't extend to time travel. If anyone knows if that's even possible, it's you. I suggest you make recovering your memory the highest priority. You knew more about the curse you were under than anyone else and you have a library filled with books on every conceivable subject relating to the supernatural. I suggest you start there. Maybe reading books you've already read will help jog your memory. I'll help you if I can, of course, but it's not like I can just snap my fingers and pop you back to the seventeenth century." With that, Miss Price rather abruptly turned to Elizabeth. "Now, about your curse. You'd better show me what you did to get yourself into this mess."
Alice and Elizabeth exchanged an uneasy glance. They had to keep Miss Price from going out into the carriage house and seeing that they had not only moved the mummy, but put it in a cursed and stolen car.
"I followed the directions Thomas left. Let's look at his notes." Elizabeth hurried back to the library. When Miss Price didn't follow her, she called back over her shoulder, "Are you coming?"
Placidly, Miss Price said, "Bring them here. You'll probably need to show me where you performed the spell."
"We did it outside," Alice said. "It's cooling off out there, maybe you can figure out the problem from the notes."
Miss Price made non-committal sounds. When Elizabeth returned from the library with the notes, Dirk and Kevin were finishing up their stew and Alice was fidgeting with increasing unease under the narrow gaze of Miss Price. Elizabeth opened the notebook to the page of the doomed lovers curse-breaking spell and held it out to Miss Price.
She took the notebook and examined it carefully. "I don't see why you would have had any problems with this. It's unlikely to work at all, but given that it removed the curse from Alice, you must have done something right."
"We had these other notes that Thomas made up. He worked out a way to break the curse and release Alice at the same time."
Thomas edged around behind them to read the notes over Miss Price's shoulder. "That's not my handwriting. Mine is not that good."
"You've had lots of time to work on your penmanship," Elizabeth pointed out.
"Very interesting," Miss Price murmured. "You must show me the site where you performed the spell. I hope that your symbols haven't been completely rubbed out by the weather."
As if she could mitigate the inevitable scolding by putting it off for a few more minutes, Alice slowly went back to the front of the house to fetch their coats. She slowly buttoned her coat while Miss Price tapped her toe and looked pointedly at her watch. Once Alice was finished accessorizing (gloves, a hat, then a different hat), the three women went out to the carriage house. The lid on the well rattled as they walked past.
"Stop that." Miss Price kicked at the stone blocks surrounding the well and it subsided.
Alice unlocked the carriage house door and slowly pulled the door back with an ominous creak. The girls held their breath and braced themselves.
"Oh no! You didn't!" Miss Price wailed. "You moved the mummy! I told you not to. And you shouldn't have it standing up at an angle like that, the mummy will be crunched all down at the foot of the mummy case." Then she caught sight of the smudgy chalk marks still on the trunk of the Cadillac. "And you did your spell on this cursed automobile?"
"Well, it took up all the room on the floor of the carriage house," said Alice.
Elizabeth crawled over the car and turned on the light. She was surprised that Miss Price hadn't said anything about the presence of the car on their property, like how it got there and why, but maybe that was of secondary importance. Miss Price stepped up on the rear bumper and examined the chalk marks. "Tell me where you stood when you did this spell, Elizabeth. I'm assuming that you followed the instructions for where to place the artifacts and Alice."
Elizabeth pointed to a dusty spot on the eastern part of the diagram. "I stood over here. I can't remember exactly where I was standing when I did all the chanting, but I had to crawl into the middle of the circle to mess with the herbs."
"And did you step back out of the circle to finish up the last part of the chanting?"
"I stayed in there. A big wind came up and I sort of had to hold everything down."
"I see. And what did you use as artifacts of the lovers?"
"We used one of the mummy's canopic jars," said Alice. "It's over there in the backseat now. And we—I found these leaves by the mummy in the museum. We thought we could use those as his possession since they'd been sitting around beside him for so long."
"And none of it got destroyed," Elizabeth chirped. "So we could have used the scroll after all."
"Don't even start with that," said Miss Price. She stepped the rest of the way onto the trunk and walked carefully around the outside of the remnants of the circle. She pulled one end of the dust sheet from the mummy case and checked it for damage. She opened the lid of the canopic jar and sniffed at the contents. "You've made a real mishmash of things," she said finally, after hopping down from the Cadillac and dusting off her hands. "There are at least three curses on you now, Elizabeth. You have the curse of the mummies, which was on Alice, and in addition to that, you have part of the curse of the Cadillac. It could hardly help but jump onto you, what with all this magic happening right on top of it."
"And the third curse?"
"From those leaves, I expect. I want a closer look at them before I can be certain. You know, Alice, proximity and possession are not the same thing at all. This may be hard for you to understand, given your flexible concept of ownership. In any event, you all have managed to complicate the curse immensely. If we simply repeat the spell that you performed on Alice, it would only remove part of it. I'll have to do some more research. I really didn't need this right now," Miss Price complained as they walked back to the house. "See if you can get Thomas's memory back and have him deal with it. It's all his fault anyway," she said, rather ungenerously, Elizabeth thought.
"Can you put a ward on my forehead like you did for Alice?" asked Elizabeth.
"I don't think it's necessary. You're keeping it at bay well enough on your own."
They entered the kitchen where Kevin had cleared his beauty shop paraphernalia and they were setting the table for dinner. Dirk laid out six places and Thomas hovered in the corner, watching the process as if mystified.
"Are you going to stay, Miss Price?"
"No, thank you. I must go harass Alastair to see if I can get him to own up to whatever it is he's plotting. I'll see myself out. The leaves, Alice." Miss Price planted her hat more firmly on her head.
Alice retrieved the tissue packet from where she'd put it up with the tea and Miss Price spared it a glance. "Well, at least they're only mildly hexed. They're not even all that old."
"What kind of leaves are they?" asked Alice.
"No idea. They look rather like willow oak leaves, only much larger." Miss Price shrugged and marched to the front door. They heard the door open and then voices. After Miss Price let herself out, someone else's footsteps sounded through the house.
"Is Bob back?" Dirk asked Elizabeth. She shrugged.
Alice tilted her head and listened carefully. "Oh, I know who it is."
A few seconds later, Joe appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing his police officer's uniform and holding a crumpled piece of paper. "Okay, I got an address for you. I can't say how current it is, but—oh, look, the haint. Never mind," he finished up with an annoyed look at Thomas. He crumpled the paper in his hand. "I guess you won't be needing this after all."
"Haint?" asked Thomas.
"Yeah, you're the ghost. All visible and everything. You don't look all that much like your picture," said Joe.
"Thank you anyway," said Alice sweetly. She sidled over and gazed up at him with her big blue eyes.
Joe immediately became suspicious. "And now what?"
"Stay for dinner," Kevin cried. "We set a place for you and everything." He gestured grandly to the table, laid with six mismatched soup bowls and six mismatched wine glasses.
"Well, in that case." Joe removed his hat without even a token show of reluctance. He looked around the room with his round brown eyes and retained the suspicious look he now automatically assumed in Alice's presence. "So, you still a ghost? You look real enough," he said to Thomas.
"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," Thomas said.
"He has amnesia," Alice said with a proprietary air. She introduced them and they all sat down to eat. Alice took a chair beside Joe and was actually nice to him. Elizabeth tried to recall, and failed, the last time she had seen Museum Boy. Joe seemed unaware of the speculative looks being passed around the table as the housemates considered the probability of a reversion in his status. Alice distributed warning glares liberally and filled up Joe's dish with stew. He declined the wine that Dirk poured out for everyone else.
Kevin and Dirk had taken over and thrown together a stew of every kind of vegetable they found in the refrigerator and freezer, and seasoned it with herbs selected through some random algorithm. On the side, they provided crusty bread they'd picked up from a baker friend of theirs. Accustomed to the vegetarian offerings at the house, Joe didn't make a sound about the stew, but his look said it could stand a few chickens to fill out the flavor. Thomas jabbed his spoon at the stew in a puzzled manner and said nothing about the food as the others all dug in.
Alice had Elizabeth tell Joe the story about Thomas's rescue. Elizabeth sighed and went through it again, this time carefully editing it to make her and Bob sound less like burglars. They hadn't broken in, after all, Thomas had let them in. Joe nodded along and didn't appear to be as disturbed as he normally was when Alice came up with ideas that weren't quite on the right side of the law. "I heard about that truck," Joe said when she finished. "The one that ran over the picture? All the on-board electronics got totally fried. The driver ran into a tree and got a concussion."
"Good," said Elizabeth. "Except for the tree, I guess. The tree was just an innocent bystander."
"Yes, you can look it that way. But then so are all these vegetables. Are you guys going to start trying to live on algae next?" Joe asked.
"Ha ha," said Alice. The others mentally recalculated Joe's stock.
"How is it that you have fresh summer vegetables in midwinter?" asked Thomas. "And what are these red things?"
"Tomatoes. Did you all have them back then? I think even here people thought they were poisonous until really recently, white people anyway," said Dirk. The subjects changed to food, transportation, and Thomas managed not to tell them they ate like peasants, not more than once.
"What are these? More stew herbs?" Joe poked at the leaves lying on the tissue paper.
"No," said Alice. "Those are just some leaves I found."
"Really, where? They don't look like they're from any of the trees around here. And they're kind of brown, it's not like they're pretty or anything. Why did you pick them up?"
Alice took a big bite of stew and chewed it slowly. With the look of a man who'd found the other shoe mid-drop, Joe asked her again. Alice swallowed and shrugged. "I found them in the museum. They were down in the pit with the mummy, with all that dirt."
"Oh, you found them? Christ Almighty, woman! I hope you never you have to argue your definition of found objects before a judge." Joe rested his head on his hands, his shoulders shaking, but he was smiling when he raised his face again. "So, you think they might be tanna leaves?"
"What are tanna leaves?" asked Alice.
"For the mummy. You make tea of the tanna leaves and you give it to the mummy and the mummy will walk around and do your bidding. Your evil bidding," he said with a significant look at Alice.
"And your source for this information?" asked Elizabeth.
"The movies. Remember? I told you about the Late Late Show. They had a double feature of The Mummy and The Mummy's Hand. You make the tanna leaf tea and pour it into the mummy. You should only use one or two leaves. If you put in too many leaves, then the mummy gets out of control. So, of course, in the movie, they made tea with, like, seven leaves. But even the out of control mummy didn't move all that fast."
"How interesting," said Alice. "Do you think it would work on our mummy?"
"You have a mummy?"
"We have a mummy? An entire mummy?" asked Thomas.
"Oh, yeah, we have a mummy. It was in the upstairs and Thomas forgot that he had it, even before the amnesia. It started giving me bad dreams and trying to possess me." Alice filled Joe in on all the details.
When she was done, he asked her, "When are you going to make tea for this mummy?"
"I'm not," she said. "These are probably not the same leaves anyway. Nothing would happen. Although, if it did, maybe making the mummy walk would break the curse or something."
"Or something," said Elizabeth.
Alice shrugged and muttered, "It couldn't hurt."
Elizabeth did not sleepwalk that night. She flew.
When she went to sleep, she drifted off slowly after shoving the curse down around her ankles like a pair of tight jeans. Her aura was stretched out of shape and wrinkled, but the rest of her seem to be intact after a day of being cursed. Alice moved back to her own room to sleep that night, alone. Joe was on duty, but he'd hung around after dinner until he could no longer ignore his radio.
Elizabeth placed a chair in her doorway to fall over if she went sleepwalking again. The night before, her dreams had not been that bad. She and Alice compared notes and found that even with Elizabeth under the curse she wasn't getting the same dreams as Alice. Elizabeth was still getting to suffocate, although now that she was cursed, she was getting to suffocate in a room with better lighting and interesting wall paintings.
As she composed herself for sleep, she checked her housemates' auras. Alice was back to her normal sparkly-poo. Dirk and Kevin were unchanged from before. When she couldn't find Thomas anywhere, she feared that he had wandered out of the house until she found him down in the library.
He had not gone to bed when the others had. He'd been cursed at mid-day and now, as far as his body was concerned, it was only early evening. When the rest of them were yawning and explaining the concept of jet lag to him, he was still wide awake. Now he sat at his desk, leaning over as if reading. She wondered if he was looking at things he himself had written in an effort to a jog his memory, or if he was swallowing his rationality and looking in the books of magic. His aura was the same vibrant blue, even more vibrant now that the dark strands of the curse had been combed away. His fingertips sparkled more than before. She would have to ask Miss Price about the sparkles.
When she'd introduced him to the library after dinner he had looked around, utterly appalled at its contents. "The Royal Society has spent decades disproving all of this," he said in a shocked whisper. "I would never have put together such a collection."
Elizabeth had opened the glass doors of a bookcase and pulled out a random volume. When she'd shown him the bookplate he'd groaned and slapped a hand to his forehead. "Not to be believed! My tutor would have my head on a platter if he'd had the slightest intimation I'd go on to this. I don't suppose I made up an index?" he'd added as he turned slowly around and took in the sheer quantity of books.
"Not that you ever told me; you seemed to carry it all in your head," Elizabeth said.
"Blast! I'm an idiot. But not surprised; I never write things down. I suppose I had better get started." He'd sighed and taken the book from her hand.
He was still sighing and turning pages in a resigned manner.
Now Elizabeth projected herself beyond the walls of the house and moved in astral form across the park to look at the city by night. Downtown was a mass of pink from all the electrical wiring. She could make out the shapes of the office towers by the presence of the Christmas lights. The bar at the foot of the hill and the apartment house across the way appeared in the ether as roiling blobs of color, distributed regularly in the case of the apartment building and in a single swirling mass down in the bar. Elizabeth felt a breath of cold on the back of her neck and turned around to find Thomas standing behind her on the brow of the hill.
He was manifested as she'd grown accustomed to him, as he'd appeared in the portrait. When she saw him and not his aura, she looked down at herself and realized that she must be dreaming, for she saw not blue light, but her own hands held out before her, and her arms in the long sleeves of her pajamas. A fleeting bit of concern crossed her mind, that she had gone and misplaced her astral self, then fallen asleep. She had no memory of returning to her body.
"I'd forgotten what an idiot I was," said Thomas, stepping towards her and taking her hands in his. "So damned stubborn, I can't get through to my own self. How have you put up with me?"
"It hasn't been such a chore," she said with a smile. This couldn't be anything but a dream, because his hands were as warm as her own, warmer even.
The corners of his mouth twitched upwards. "I'm trying, I really am. I am as stubborn as myself. At the very least I'll drive myself mad with voices in my own head. Don't give up on me. And don't let your sister mess around with that mummy anymore." He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, as a wind rolled up from the valley and rattled the tree limbs over their heads.
"That's my signal," Thomas said. He scooped her up in his arms and tossed her towards the house.
She flew home backwards with her arms outstretched towards him. "Wait," she called. "You have to tell me …"
"Wait!" She sat up in her own bed, the covers pulled up tight around her and Rififi curled against her hip. Outside the bedroom window, the branches of the oak tree rattled against the gingerbread on the porch.
Elizabeth lay back down and stared at the underside of the canopy over her bed. That dream was certainly better than suffocating in an Egyptian tomb, but she did not know what to make of it. A dream of what she wanted was still only a dream.
She curled up around the cat and wished herself back to sleep. Sleep was slow in coming, but when it came, it came with a bang. The bang of a tomb's stone portal being slid shut. "That's enough," she cried when the torch that she was holding flared up and the gods and goddesses painted on the walls leered down at her. She woke up, really awake now, and crawled out of bed. This business of waking up at four in the morning to go downstairs and drink tea was getting to be a bad habit, but she didn't think she could handle any more sleep right now.
In her slippers and bathrobe, she moved the chair from the doorway and went down the back steps. The kitchen was dark and empty, and damply cold. She turned on the lights and filled the kettle. Rififi followed her and hung out by his dish. She gave him a little bit of food after picking him up and carrying him, belly up, in her arms. She commented on his developing weight problem and he hissed at her. While harassing the cat, she walked in circles around the kitchen. The shadows of the extension cords, which hung down from the light fixture and carried power to various small appliances, look like a giant spider's web on the floor with bits of cat food and a stray fragment of potato peel caught in the strands. Setting down the cat, she picked up the peel and threw it in the sink. On her next circuit around the kitchen, she glanced out into the dining room where the gloom was faintly lifted by the light from the library door down the hall. Either Thomas was still awake or he had gone off and forgotten how to turn off the lights.
The kettle began to roar. She removed it from the heat and made a mug of tea. Walking to the library, she held the tea bag by a corner and swished it around. From the doorway she could see Thomas, still at his desk. The banker's lamp on the desk exuded a bubble of warm greenish light and left the room beyond cloaked in shadow.
Thomas was not, however, bent over a heavy tome of ancient lore. He was leaning back in his chair with his heels on the desk. In his hands he held a small paperback. A bottle of whiskey and a small tumbler sat on the desk within easy reach. In the low light, his hair was inky black. It would need another washing before Kevin's haircut settled in, and for now it was spiky. His cheeks were darkened by a few more hours' growth of beard, which couldn't possibly have grown all that fast, so maybe it was just the bad light. He absentmindedly rubbed a thumb along his jaw, generating a rasping noise which she could hear across the broad expanse of the library. His skin glowed palely and his throat, when he looked up and saw her standing there in the doorway, looked oddly vulnerable above the open collar of his white shirt.
Rififi brushed her ankle with his tail as he proceeded past her into the library. She followed the cat across the room.
"What are you still doing up?" she asked him.
"Waiting for sleep. I wonder that you all ever get sleepy, with as much light as you want, any time you wish. I usually read until the eyestrain grows unbearable and then put out the candle."
"You'll see in the morning. We'll get you up in a few hours and you'll have to try and get through the day on no sleep. By tomorrow night you'll be plenty tired," she said.
Rififi hopped up on the desk. Thomas leaned forward and scratched his chin. "Whose cat is this?" he asked.
"Yours, I guess. He just lives here in the house. He always ran away from you in your spirit form. He must not realize you're the spectral thing that sneaked up on him all the time."
"Oh, did he—I do that?"
"Mmhm. Do cats usually like you?"
"Most of the time." He marked his place in his book with a finger and hauled the cat on to his lap. Rififi purred at a volume Elizabeth had never heard from him before. The cat butted Thomas's chin with his forehead and then rolled over on his back to present his belly. "Why are you awake?"
You told me you're trying to drive yourself mad with voices in your head. "I had a bad dream, it woke me up." Elizabeth curled up on the horsehair sofa and sipped her tea. "What are you reading?"
"This book about mummies. The story is very … colorful. I've never read anything like it, I know, but it seems strangely familiar." He held up the book and she could see that it was The Curse of the Were-Mummy's Jewels.
"You've read it before."
"Ah. That would explain it." He looked at the book with a faint tinge of horror. "Do you think this means I shall start to remember other things?"
"I hope so," said Elizabeth. With a little well-meaning malice, she added, "We have lots of trashy novels in the house. You've read them all, so if they'll help you regain your memory, you have an excellent excuse to sit around and read junk for days on end. It'll be almost like reading them for the first time."
"What do you mean by 'trashy'?"
"Mob entertainment of the lowest sort." She grinned over the rim of her mug and reclined into a heap of throw pillows.
"Indeed. An apt description of this book. It has that tea in it that your sister tried to make."
"What?" Elizabeth sat bolt upright and nearly spilled her tea.
"Yes, she and those men, what is your relationship to them? They made an infusion of those old leaves and put it on the mummy. They couldn't give it to the mummy to drink, since it is all wrapped up in bandages. I've never seen a whole one," he confided. "My father has a jar of mummy in the shop, but only fragments and maybe not even real mummy, although my father insists it is. So your sister dribbled tea on the mummy's head and it made the mummy damp. Then when it didn't sit up and dance, she opened up the large metal wagon it was sitting in and poured the tea into a little box."
"The battery?" Elizabeth asked faintly.
"Yes, that was what she called it. She said maybe the tanna leaves would 'reanimate the car'."
A wave of dread washed over her. "And did it?"
"She said not. She sat in it and then said it still didn't work."
"When was this?"
"You were upstairs, in the bath, I think. Alice said that she wanted to try with the tea while you were busy and wouldn't stop her. We carried the pot out to the carriage house and Dirk and I moved the mummy case around so she could get at it. The seals on the case had been broken before, by the by, so perhaps Miss Price will not be so angry. We removed the portrait mask affixed to the mummy's head and she dripped tea on it. We left the mummy case open and the mask off so the mummy could dry out. Alice says she'll put everything back the way it was before Miss Price can see it. Why are you all afraid of her?"
"Miss Price? Or Alice?"
"Miss Price, of course. Although I can see why you should find Alice worrisome."
"Well, for starters, Alice and I work at Miss Price's bookshop and so she could fire us if we made her really angry, then we'd be stuck having to find new jobs. Other than that? She's intimidating. She was already annoyed when she saw that we moved the mummy case out to the carriage house. I can only imagine how angry she'll be when she finds out that Alice and the rest of you (well, not me and not Bob) opened up the mummy case and messed with the mummy."
"Yes, but according to this book—"
"That book is fiction," Elizabeth said. "Mob entertainment, remember?"
"Very well." Thomas leaned over and set the book on the desk. He pet Rififi while he looked around that the bookcases which lined the walls and reached to the high ceilings. "How unusual is such a large collection of books in this day?"
"A collection of old and rare books like this is very unusual. Some special libraries might have something similar in their archival collections. Maybe the Library of Congress. You never told us how you collected all these books."
"These are mine?"
"Oh yes. The rest of us have books of our own up in our rooms, but these are all yours. You have an amazing collection. I haven't even looked through half of it yet. Although the trashy paperbacks are new to me. You must have those hidden away out of sight to conceal your low tastes."
"I have low tastes?"
"Absolutely. When I moved into the house with my books, you got right into them. You completely bypassed the college textbooks and the literature and went straight for the junk. You watch a lot of trash television too." Elizabeth smiled, and then had to explain what television was. After a while, she gave up and pulled open the cabinet where he kept a television in the library. She turned it on and clicked through the channels. This television was not connected to the cable and normally had lousy reception, although tonight the picture was perfectly clear. It seemed Thomas no longer had his devastating effect on electronics. This television was old and the picture was dark, but now that Thomas was no longer disturbing the ether, the electron gun was working much more effectively. There was nothing on. At this hour the local broadcast stations were showing either very old movies or infomercials.
"There's nothing on," she said. She looked over at Thomas.
He was staring at the screen with his mouth hanging open. "That's fascinating," he said finally when she poked him in the shoulder to get his attention. "How does it work? Can they see out?"
"It's too bad you never bothered to collect any books about electronics," Elizabeth complained. "It would save me a lot of time." She took a sip of tea and recited what little she knew about televisions, broadcasting, recording media, and the difference between a transmitter and receiver. She couldn't tell if he heard a word she said. Finally she clicked off the television and he shook himself slightly as if awakening from a dream. Then he started asking more questions. By this time he finally ran down, Elizabeth didn't care if she never saw or spoke of (especially spoke of) television ever again. She tried to word her responses carefully so she wouldn't also have to explain radio and the Internet.
Outside the windows, the weak morning light painted the world in pale shades of gray. Rififi was passed out under the banker's lamp on the desk. Even Thomas was starting to look slightly tired. Elizabeth had a feeling that he had been operating on adrenaline since the curse had been broken and his glands were going to give out at any moment. He was also much more forthcoming about answering personal questions than the Thomas she knew. Once the subject drifted from television on to other topics, she asked him who was this Sophie.
"Oh, you both have yellow hair." He rubbed his face tiredly. "Sophie is my betrothed. When I suddenly found myself in a woman's arms, I couldn't imagine that it could be anyone but her. I do apologize. If I'd had any idea, I would have let go much sooner. But you see why I must find a way home. A life without her would be as nothing." He leaned forward with one hand outstretched upon the desk, palm up and open as if he were giving her something precious. In the lamplight his eyes were very dark and pleading.
"I see," she said and hesitated. Slowly, she added, "I saw you in one of the dreams I had tonight. You told me that you are still around and you're trying to get through to yourself." She stumbled over the excess of second person pronouns. "The ghost you," she explained. "He's still here."
"But that was only a dream."
"Maybe," Elizabeth said.
Over their heads, the floor creaked and water rumbled in the pipes. The front door opened and closed, Bob's footsteps sounded in the front hall, followed by the soft thump of him flopping down on the futon. Another day beginning. She wondered what this one held. It could hardly be more eventful, she thought and immediately regretted it.