“Alice comes home. No matter how hard it is, no matter what it costs her, Alice comes home.”
—Laura Campbell
Standing on a backcountry road in Buckley Township, Michigan, at long last
WHAT THE HELL IS wrong with that house?” demanded Sally, gesturing toward the old Parrish place with her spear, like she thought the house might be some sort of terrible monster she could square off against if she just tried hard enough.
The house did not oblige her by getting up to attack, but sat there in its horrifying splendor. I smiled.
“That, my friend, is home.”
“Does it look like that on purpose?”
“No, we think it’s cursed.”
Sally blinked. “Cursed.”
“Yup.”
“But you live there, voluntarily.”
“Semi.”
The old Parrish place was a fairly classic example of middle-American farm architecture turned gothic and just a little menacing. The windows seemed to follow people as they moved, watching them with an oddly malicious expression. Houses shouldn’t be able to look malicious, and yet this one did. Three stories tall, or maybe more, depending on the light, with a decrepit wraparound porch that was sturdier than it looked, thanks to both my own efforts and Cynthia keeping an eye on the place when I was out of town, and painted the leprous gray-green of rotting flesh, it was not the sort of place anyone should really be glad to see.
I had never been happier to see a house in my entire life.
The porch swing was rocking gently back and forth, meaning our appearance had startled a few of the local tailypo, who liked to curl up there when there weren’t any strangers around. Good. They needed to see us sooner than later. I hefted the hamper Phoebe had given us with one hand, my other arm still wrapped firmly around Thomas, keeping him from toppling over.
He’d woken up about ten minutes after Phoebe finished delivering her tincture, but had remained groggy and only half-present since then, with the bleary gaze and slightly slurred speech of a man who’d had far too much to drink. I was just grateful that Helen had been able to open her doorway this close to the house.
Thomas managed to stay on his feet as we crossed the street, and with Sally on his other side, we were able to make it up the porch. I eased him onto the porch swing as my backpack cheered uproariously, the mice rejoicing in their return to one of the places they recognized as home.
Sally watched warily as I shrugged out of my pack, putting both it and the hamper next to Thomas, and moved to the rail, where I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled, high and shrill and piercing. Sally winced.
“What, the mice aren’t loud enough, you have to break my eardrums on your own?”
“Not quite,” I said. The bushes rustled. “See, the man who lived here before us axe-murdered his entire family as a sacrifice to a swamp god he swore was talking to him. We’ve never been able to find any proof the swamp god existed, but most ghosts don’t like the house, and it may be because of whatever convinced him he should make hamburger out of his wife and kids. The Covenant bought it sight unseen when they decided to banish Thomas to the hinterlands in order to get him out from underfoot.”
The fact that they hadn’t bothered to scout the area before sending Thomas here made it so much easier to convince their strike team that they’d wiped us all out, back when they finally came to clean up their little mess. That was, oh, forty-five years ago at this point, and the sting of it was still fresh. I whistled again. The rustling in the bushes got louder.
This time, I stepped back, not repeating my whistle, and gestured for Sally to keep quiet. She blinked but held her tongue. A few seconds later, half a dozen long-tailed, stripy bodies burst out of the bushes and swarmed onto the railing, chittering.
They looked like ring-tailed lemurs if they had been designed by someone trying to spin a toy line out of the idea of plush toys whose tails could double as boas, bondage devices, and rappelling lines. Their bodies were a little more than a foot and a half in length, while their tails hit five feet, easily. The smallest wrapped its tail defensively around itself, forming a cocoon of stacked stripy rings that covered its entire head. They had masks, like lemurs, or raccoons, and clever little hands, and all of them were staring at me.
“Sally, meet the tailypo,” I said. The mice cheered. Sally stared.
“Tailypo,” she said, finally. “Like the ghost story you tell on Girl Scout campouts. That tailypo?”
“I’ve heard the story, and they’re nowhere near that vicious most of the time, although I don’t recommend cutting their tails off to test the theory. Especially because the house conspiracy is mine, in that nebulous way that things which don’t belong to you can be yours, and I’d be upset if someone hurt them.”
Sally gave me a sidelong look. She seemed to have a near-infinite repertoire of ways to look at me like I’d just said something ridiculous. “Conspiracy?”
“It’s the collective noun,” I said. “A group of fish is a school, a group of geese is a gaggle, and a group of lemurs is a conspiracy.”
“So they’re lemurs?”
“Sort of. We call them the American lemur, and we’re pretty sure they’re primates—not a lot of good phylogeny when it comes to creatures science doesn’t admit exist.” One of the tailypo made a chirring sound. I whistled softly. “The tailypo got labeled folklore pretty early on in European colonization, and no one managed to convince the people who were putting things in ‘real’ or ‘not real’ boxes that they needed to be put in the ‘real’ one. Didn’t help that the Covenant of St. George labeled them too ridiculous to exist, and did their best to make sure no one who saw a live one told anybody about it.”
“Why? They’re adorable.”
The tailypo didn’t speak English, so it was entirely my imagination that they looked pleased by Sally’s praise. But it made me think better of her. “The Covenant started out fighting things that were a danger to humans,” I said. “I mean, there’s a good reason to be a dragon slayer when the dragons are trying to burn your village down on the regular, and nobody likes sharing their bay with a bunch of swamp hags. But they did such a good job that they ran out of real threats, and they were so convinced of their own necessity that rather than dissolving or pivoting to being a general public-service organization or something, they started focusing on anything they considered unnatural, or potentially dangerous in ways other than the physical. Why kill a tailypo? Because it’s a silly thing. Evolutionarily, they don’t make a lot of sense, and they make kids want to laugh and play dress-up with long tails of their own, and they can be pests. Better to get rid of them. Better to make sure people stay serious, and focused, and afraid of anything they didn’t recognize. Like a raccoon with a super-long tail. Better to make the world a little simpler, because then it’ll be a little easier to control.”
I stuck my hand out to the largest of the tailypo while Sally was still trying to formulate an answer. “Key, please,” I said.
The tailypo chirped.
“Key,” I repeated, more firmly.
It—he, most likely, since the males tend to be about twice the size of the females—fell backward off the rail, vanishing into the bushes. I stayed where I was, my hand still outstretched, as he rustled around down there, then popped back up and pressed a dirty housekey into my palm. “Thank you.”
“They speak English?”
“No, but they know a few words, like most animals.” I turned to unlock the door. “That whole ‘dude killed his family at the behest of a swamp god who he wasn’t shy about describing to the locals’ thing, followed by ‘weird British dude moves to town, marries daughter of a family whose members have all died under mysterious circumstances, becomes a shut-in, disappears,’ means local kids try to break in all the time, to show each other how brave they are. We’re the least haunted haunted house in the county.”
“Meaning you can’t safely hide keys anywhere outside the house,” said Sally thoughtfully.
“Got it in one,” I agreed, pushing the door open and moving to lever Thomas out of the porch swing. He came accommodatingly enough, leaning on me like a man who no longer fully understood how to use his legs. “Go on in,” I said, to Sally. “Nothing in there’s gonna bite you—although the mice may yell a little, if they don’t hide in the walls when they see a stranger.”
Sally looked dubious, but went inside. No screams followed. Neither did cheers; the local Aeslin had clearly read her for a stranger. That was fine. They’d learn the truth soon enough.
Thomas propped against me and staggering along, I whistled under my breath, and the tailypo poured through the door around my feet as I half-carried him across the threshold.
Home.
Getting Thomas up the stairs in his current state was a no-go, so I helped him to the couch, sweeping aside the nest the tailypo had made of pillows and two of my grandmother’s afghans as I lowered him to the cushions. He made a small sound of protest, then sighed and rolled onto his side, nestling down into the upholstery.
I went back outside to the porch to get my pack and the hamper. Taking another deep breath of the Michigan air, I turned, went inside, and focused on Sally. She was looking around the living room with frank, unshielded curiosity. I didn’t interrupt, trying instead to see it through her eyes.
In many ways, the house was an extremely cluttered, if eclectic, museum, with virtually everything still in the exact place it had been on the night Thomas disappeared. I couldn’t call it “tidy,” because stacks of books dotted the floor and leaned against the wall, far more extensive than the room’s overstuffed bookshelves could accommodate. There was the couch, two armchairs, and a coffee table; the former were softened by knit wool blankets in a rainbow of shades, bristling with tailypo fur, and the coffee table still had magazines and research notes on it from the mid-fifties.
A toybox near the front door provided a primary-color reminder that we were parents once.
There was no dust. There were no cobwebs. If not for the tailypo fur, it would have been easy to believe the place had been cleaned, if not decluttered, only a few days before. The air smelled a little musty, but that made sense, since the only regular occupants were a group of wild animals and a colony of talking mice. Sally blinked, slowly, before she turned to me.
“You have a maid service that comes to the creepy murder house?” she asked.
I almost laughed with relief to have her starting off with such a mundane question. “Something like that,” I said. “You’ve heard me mention Cynthia? She runs the Red Angel, a sort of bar and gathering house for our local humanoid cryptid population. You can find all sorts drinking there. She’s known me since I was a baby—knew my mother before me. She’s a skogsrå, one of the most common types of Huldrafolk, and she always has younger staffers on hand who are willing to come over and keep the place tidy in exchange for a few extra dollars in their paychecks. She’s got a key, of course. She’s who I’ll be calling about groceries as soon as we get settled.”
“Why are you calling someone about groceries? Don’t you want to go to the store?”
“I want us all to go to the store, so we can start getting the locals used to the idea that the Prices are coming home to Buckley. That means waiting for Thomas to be awake enough to come along, and getting our story straight before anyone starts asking questions.”
“What’s to get straight?”
“I know it’s been a while since you had to deal with Earth and its annoying dependency on logic, but. The people in Buckley are used to me coming and going. They think I’m my own granddaughter at this point, which is probably less offensive to my actual children than the period where they thought I was Jane. I’d been pretty visibly pregnant before my disappearance, and she came out looking just like every other woman on my side of the family, so I never minded the confusion. She, on the other hand, minded a lot. Pretty sure she’s never been willing to spend time in Buckley because she couldn’t stand the idea that people already thought they knew Jane Price, and it wasn’t her.”
The thought made me more than a little sorry, and more than a little sad. I’d abandoned both my children. I’d let them both down. But somehow, the rift between me and my daughter had always been infinitely deeper than the rift between me and my son. Maybe it was because Kevin and I had those first few years together; maybe it was because he had more time with Laura before she also disappeared. Maybe it was just something about mothers and daughters. Whatever the reason, she didn’t want to be mistaken for me, or for me to be mistaken for her.
“So if I’m my granddaughter, and I’ve brought my new husband back to occupy the family house with me, probably because I’m too much of a loser to wash up anyplace more urban or sophisticated, what are you?” I looked at her mildly. “You’re pretty obviously not biologically mine, age aside. Thomas doesn’t look old enough to have a daughter your age, and we’d both have needed to be barely out of high school when we adopted you for that to make sense.”
“Cousin,” said Sally, firmly. “I’ll be a cousin. Never tell them whether I’m adopted. Genetics can be bizarre as hell sometimes, and it’ll be a nicely distracting mystery to keep people from focusing on how intensely weird we are.”
I laughed—actually laughed—at that, and kept laughing as a vast cry of “HAIL” rose up from behind the couch, followed by enthusiastic cheering. Sally jumped. I gestured toward the sound. “Remember, I told you we had a whole colony living here? Sally, meet the mice. Mice, meet Sally. She’s your newest priestess.”
The mice poured around the side of the couch in a furry tide, the members of my congregation racing up my legs, the members of Thomas’s running up the arms of the couch and stopping to gaze at him with awe. Others, dressed in the livery of other family members or in novice colors, surrounded Sally and stared worshipfully up at her.
Sally squirmed. “Uh, a little help here?”
“There is no help for the Aeslin mice,” I said. “You wanted to be family, and that means you get the full package, congregation and all. You think this is bad? The colony in Portland is three times this size. I only have about ninety mice living here.”
“Forgive me, Priestess, but our numbers have increased,” said one of the mice in my colors, politely.
“How much?”
“There are near to twice as many of us since the last time you inquired. The hunting has been excellent these past seasons.”
“Cool.” I turned back to Sally. “I have less than two hundred mice living here, mostly because their faith has been so sporadically renewed, what with me bopping all over the place looking for Thomas. Now that they have two Priestesses and a God in residence, they’ll probably have more babies. I think we have the space in the attic for about five hundred without crowding or triggering a schism.”
The mice around Sally cheered again.
“Usual rules apply to the new Priestess, guys,” I said. “No one in her room while she’s sleeping unless they’re invited, no one watches her shower. If she wants to bring a date home, you make yourselves scarce until the stranger is gone, unless and until she makes a formal introduction.”
“Yes, Priestess,” chorused the mice.
One of the mice in Thomas’s livery inched toward me on the back of the couch, ears flat and whiskers forward. “Priestess?” it squeaked.
“Yes?”
“Is this truly . . . is this . . .” The mouse’s voice seemed to give out, and it fell silent, wringing its paws for several seconds before it glanced up again, and asked, “Is this truly the God of Inconvenient Timing? Has he been Returned to Us?”
“It is, and he has,” I said, and held one of my hands up to the level of my shoulder, allowing the mice clustered there to step into my palm. I looked at them as I lowered my hand toward the couch. “He’s home, and we’re home, and we’re going to be living here in Buckley at least for a while. If we leave, I think we’re going to be leaving this place for good, and we’ll take all of you along.”
At Sally’s feet, the novice who had adopted her as the newest symbol of the faith was enthusiastically telling the gathered mice the story of the Conscripted Priestess. Some of the other novices were starting to nod along in a way that told me we’d be seeing more of her livery soon enough. That was good. She could tell her mice her entire story, and we’d bring a few of them with us the next time we went to Portland. Soon enough, the whole main colony would know, and she’d never need to explain herself again if she didn’t want to.
The mice on my hand jumped down onto the couch, followed by the rest who had swarmed me, all running to join the throng.
“The God of Inconvenient Timing is very tired,” I said, to the colony as a whole. “He needs to rest. For the next three days, I invoke the Holy Bargain of For God’s Sake, Alex, Make Those Damn Mice Stop Yelling While I Have A Hangover. Cheese and cake will be provided, and you may speak to any human who calls for you, but until the Bargain is concluded, you will leave the God alone.”
Ever see a colony of hyper-intelligent pantheistic rodents look disappointed? I had, and yet it never failed to amuse me when it happened again.
“Is the Bargain invoked even now?” asked a mouse in the robes of Thomas’s clergy.
“It is,” I said, and even faster than they had appeared, the sea of mice vanished, scampering to their holes in the walls and leaving no sign that they had ever been there.
“I would think that was a hallucination if I’d had anything to drink today,” said Sally.
“You knew about the mice,” I said.
“Not that there were two hundred of them!”
“Oh, there’s more than two hundred,” I said. “Probably about seven or eight, currently.”
“That is so many—”
“In the world.” I sat down in one of the armchairs. Three of the lurking tailypo immediately claimed my lap.
Sally stared at me. “The whole world?”
“Aeslin mice are small and adorable and basically defenseless if you’re much bigger than they are,” I said. “The religion is biological for them. Some twist of their brain chemistry makes them see the divine in everything around them, and they latch on to things as the cores of their worship. This colony, and the ones in Portland—both my kids have their own, although Kevin’s has been the main colony for decades—seized on my family a long time ago. They believe in us.”
“That’s . . . I knew they were religious. I don’t think anyone who’s been around them for more than five minutes could miss that.” Sally sat abruptly, cross-legged on the floor, resting her cheek against the shaft of her spear. “I just thought they had a choice.”
“They do, really. Colonies will schism when they get to be too big for their habitat. The ones who leave find something new to worship, and they don’t regret leaving what they’re basically genetically programmed to regard as having been a false faith. So they don’t have a choice about believing in something. They absolutely have a choice about believing in us. We know there’s a responsibility in being the chosen idol of an Aeslin congregation, and we try, as a family, to live up to it. Plus, as you’ve already experienced, their definition of ‘family’ can be pretty broad. As soon as they decided you were a Priestess, that was it. You were stuck. You can’t be de-deified now, even if you wanted to be.”
“So what would happen if I left?”
“Like, left-left? Walked away from the family and the mice and never came back?”
She nodded. I considered.
“Well, they have a concept of death.” Memories of my grandparents’ congregations, and my father’s, swam through my mind. “They know when one of their holy figures dies, and they deal with it in their own way. But they’d remember you forever. The mice here still perform rituals dedicated to my great-grandparents. And they never forget anything.”
“That seems sad.”
“I guess it is, in a way,” I agreed. “But it means nothing’s ever lost, and even when your family is far away, they’re always at least a little bit with you.”
“Sorcerers used to use them as living spellbooks,” said Thomas. “They would teach their magic to their mice, and the mice would preserve it, so that even if something happened to the original sorcerer, the magic would endure. They kept paper ledgers as well, but a spellbook that couldn’t be stolen, couldn’t be confiscated, and could run under its own power if challenged? That was something special.” He sighed, long and slow and tired. “I had time to wonder, while we were locked in that abysmal place, whether the scarcity of Aeslin might not have been in some way orchestrated by our common enemy. The crossroads hated sorcerers so.”
“Thomas!” I pushed myself out of the chair, spilling tailypo in all directions, and hurried to the couch. His eyes were still closed, his head tilted toward the ceiling. Kneeling, I smoothed his hair away from his forehead, leaving my hand resting there when the gesture was finished. “How are you feeling?”
“As if I’ve run a marathon with neither food nor water, and no prizes waiting at the end.”
“But there was a prize waiting at the end of this marathon,” I said, as encouragingly as I could manage. “We’re home.”
“Home?”
“Buckley. Your place.” I laughed. “We still have my family home, but it’s being rented out right now, and I never actually moved back there.”
He opened his eyes, finally, and blinked at me. “Why not? You always complained about how far we were from the woods.”
“Far?” asked Sally. “Did the woods move while you were away? Because that tree line is like five feet from the rear of the house.”
“It’s fifty yards, almost exactly,” I said. “Far enough that the roots don’t reach. The house where I grew up is only slightly closer, but the way the fields are laid out, some of the more ambitious trees have roots that make it all the way to the house. It’s nice to know they’re there. But no, silly, I didn’t want to leave our house just so I could be closer to the trees. Moving would have meant admitting this was going to take more than a few months, and by the time I had to face that, moving would have taken too much time. And I couldn’t explain it to the tailypo, and it would have felt like giving up. Like I was admitting I’d never be able to bring you home.”
“Alice . . .” He began to push himself up. I shifted my hand to his chest, pushing him gently down.
“It’s okay. Stay on the couch. I’m going to call Cynthia, let her know we’re home, and ask her to send someone over with whatever’s for dinner at the Angel tonight. Phoebe’s hamper is lovely, but we need something more filling than baklava and jam. I’m sure Cynthia will be thrilled to know I finally found you and won’t be crashing through her windows anymore.”
“I’m fine,” he protested, before yawning broadly and nestling deeper into the couch. “I’m just going to rest my eyes for . . . a second . . .”
“Sure thing, sweetie.” I kissed his forehead and stood, turning to Sally. “Keep an eye on him, okay? If he wants to get up to do anything more strenuous than using the bathroom, call me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Phone’s in the kitchen,” I said. “It’s an antique, but it works. So where I’m going is to arrange for dinner, and make sure there’s nothing dead and rotting in the fridge. And then I’m going to come back, and eventually he’s going to wake up, and we’ll give you the house tour together so we can all take showers—the hot water’s surprisingly good in this old place, courtesy of our son replacing the hot water heater every few years out of some weird sense of filial duty—and you can find yourself a bed. But first, there will be dinner. And we will enjoy the fact that we’re in a place where nothing’s trying to kill us, and tomorrow I will introduce you to the Galway Wood.”