The Dream Gatherer
Return to Seven Chimneys
“We have been away too long. Farnham will have his hands full.”
Two sisters, clearly in their elder years and of gentle breeding, looked in dismay upon the grounds of their estate. Entire swaths of greenery had browned and died from an unnatural inland incursion of seawater and were only now starting to regreen. In other places, the forest encroached on the formerly well-kept lawns and gardens. Plantings that had once been carefully cultivated and groomed now grew in riotous abandon. Farnham, their groundskeeper, certainly would have his hands full.
The taller and frailer of the two sisters, attired in a dark-green velvet dress and leaning on a cane of twisted hickory, shook herself. “The grounds are not the first thing I see when I look upon our home. Is that what you see?”
“Well,” the other mused—she was rather rounder of girth than her sister and favored the color of burnt orange with a crisp white apron. “The ship does add character to the house.”
They stood in the drive beside a carriage burdened with trunks and parcels and furniture, with no evidence of horses or carriage driver or attendants to be seen.
“Honestly, Bunch,” the one in green said, “I have never heard such understatement from you in all my years.”
The home their father had built, a country manse of stone and timber, rose in the midst of the estate. Grand it was, or at least it had been. Peculiar, it now appeared, with the addition of a pirate ship protruding from its midsection. The figurehead of a mermaid seemed to stare at them in accusation.
“Perhaps we should rename the house Three Masts,” Bunch suggested.
“Don’t you dare,” her sister, who went by Bay, countered. “Father named it Seven Chimneys, and so it shall always be known.”
There were actually nine chimneys, or there had been until the ship’s materialization had knocked one over. Others slanted at precarious angles. Their father, the late Professor Erasmus Norwood Berry, who had been a collector of arcane curios, had deemed the number seven far more magical than nine, and so bestowed the name “Seven Chimneys” upon the house. Whatever it was called, the masts towered above the roof, the slate tiles now neatly arranged around them as if the ship had been part of the house’s original construction.
“I do believe birds are nesting on yon spars,” Bay said, squinting.
“Oh, let us not start arguing about birds again.”
“They are gulls. They do not belong, and their rookery is making an unacceptable mess of the roof.”
“Never mind the roof,” Bunch said. “Our front door seems to have been replaced by the bow of the ship. We will have to use the kitchen entrance.”
The two slowly made their way along the drive, observing how, like the roof with the masts, the house had incorporated the ship into its structure by reassembling the masonry and timbers to hug the contours of the hull.
“A master craftsman could not have done better,” Bunch said with admiration and pride.
Bay hrrrumpfed. “We’ll see what it looks like on the inside.”
As the sisters rounded the side of the house where the kitchen entrance awaited, the carriage they’d left behind, seemingly without the aid of horses or driver, rolled off toward the stables.
The sisters glanced at one another when they reached the kitchen door. Since there was no reason to lock a house out in the wilds of the Green Cloak Forest, Bay simply pushed the door open.
Bunch placed her hands over her eyes. “I do not know if I can bear to look.”
“The house has mended its exterior,” Bay replied, “as much as it can with the pirate ship, at any rate, but as for the interior?”
The two lingered on the threshold.
Bay took a sniff of the air that flowed out. “Has a briny tang to it, wouldn’t you say?”
Bunch only moaned.
Holding onto one another, they stepped into the kitchen. Hazy light filtered through windows and fell upon tables and counters and cabinets, and the great cookstove. Pans gleamed dully from where they hung overhead. Debris crunched underfoot—broken dishes and bits of furniture and unidentifiable bric-a-brac that was evidence of the tide of seawater that had washed through the house when the thief Thursgad had broken the bottle with the ship in it.
“Letitia will be none too pleased,” Bay said, a quaver in her voice.
“Oh, our poor things.” Bunch picked a piece of broken vase out of the debris. They’d rescued some of their belongings in the immediate aftermath, but certainly not all.
“Our house has mended itself but, alas, does not do the cleaning.” Bay turned over the moldering pages of a book with the tip of her cane. “As hurtful as it is, these are just things.”
“But mother’s and father’s treasures—”
“Things,” Bay insisted. “Their time is past. We’ve still the house itself, and I suspect not all is destroyed.”
“That is oddly optimistic of you, Bay.”
They made their way to the central hall, or where it was supposed to be, and were blocked floor to ceiling by the barnacle-speckled hull of the ship.
“I do not think Letitia will fancy cleaning the ship,” Bunch said.
There was a wisp, like a puff of air, beside them that indicated that, indeed, Letitia did not fancy it at all.
“We will clean this place,” Bay said, “and Farnham will cut doors through the hull so we can access all the house, but in the meantime, let us retire to the kitchen for tea. This all has been most distressing.”
At that moment, a thump came from above and both sisters looked up, but there was only the ceiling.
“What do you suppose that was?” Bunch asked.
“I hope it is not the accursed squirrels making a domicile of our attic again,” Bay replied. “The mess they made last time! If so, we’ll have squirrel stew on the menu again.” She did not look displeased by the prospect.
“That sounded larger than squirrels,” Bunch said.
“Raccoons?”
“Bigger.”
“Then you will have to take a look.” Bay did not do stairs.
“I will not go crawling in that attic,” Bunch declared.
They both turned and stared into space. A breath of air huffed into their faces.
“I believe,” Bay said, “that Letitia does not plan on climbing into the attic either.”
Over the days that followed, there were no more mysterious thumps from above, though the old house creaked and groaned in ways that were new to the sisters due to the addition of the ship. They threw themselves into cleanup and salvage, and Farnham cut doors through the hull of the ship, which allowed access through all parts of the house, but from which drafted the odor of dead fish and worse. All windows were left open whether it snowed, rained, or the sun shone.
The interior walls of the house had plastered and repainted themselves around the ship just as stone and timber had on the exterior, but the repairs did not intrude past the hull. So, inside the hull, the ship was a ship. It did, however, change the shape and size of some rooms in the house. Bunch was beside herself that there were portholes looking into her bed chamber, and the east gable guestroom now featured a jolly boat.
Decks were swabbed and the ship cleaned as best as could be. The detritus of the pirates was, fortunately, little, though Bay groused about the lack of treasure. She did claim a few scattered coins. Any other metal they found—a broken knife, a navigator’s backstaff, anchor chains—was rusted. Anything that was leather or textile or paper was almost nonexistent, except for the sails and rigging. Even the waggoner, a book of charts depicting the known seas and a treasure of its own on any ship, looked . . . gnawed upon. Something had nibbled away most of the pages, and the cover, too. Oddly, the sisters found no evidence of rodents—unheard of on any ship.
“Raccoons.” Bay picked up the tattered waggoner. “Raccoons chewed on it.”
“It is not raccoons,” Bunch replied. “Look here.” A corner of a writing desk in the captain’s cabin was marked unmistakably by the indentation of human teeth. “The pirates were starving.”
Bay brightened. “Do you suppose they ate one another?”
“What an awful thought! Not at all proper for a lady. What would mother say?”
Working in the affected rooms of the house proved more difficult than the ship, for the sisters had to go through personal items, including those that had belonged to generations of the Berry family. Objects that could not be rescued—priceless rugs, artworks, furniture, pottery, and, worst of all, books—were sorrowfully consigned to rubbish heaps.
Their father’s library, with all its rare books and artifacts of an arcane quality, was the place where the ship-in-a-bottle had been when it broke and caused the cataclysmic emergence of the pirate ship, along with a good deal of ocean and at least one flock of seagulls. The room took the brunt of the destruction and was weirdly melded with a lower deck of the ship, wood cladding twisting through plaster. In some places, shelves of books remained as if untouched. In others they were just piles of moldering pulp. Still others stuck halfway into the hull, the gold-leaf lettering on the spines glittering in the light.
Bunch brought baskets of the debris down to the parlor where Bay was sorting through some of their father’s papers that had been water damaged. Bunch picked a dented brass tube out of the basket. “Oh, look,” she said, “father’s special telescope. The lenses are broken out of it, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps it is not entirely a bad thing,” Bay replied. “Its visions were dangerous on occasion.”
“True. As I’ve always said, it is never advisable to dabble with the past or future, but it was father’s prized possession, so I am sad it is broken. His old harp is in splinters, too.” Bunch picked up a mangled piece of wood, broken wire-wrapped gut strings hanging crazily in all directions. She sniffed. The glistening of a tear filled her eye. “I shall miss the music, but perhaps the voices of the strings are finally free.”
“You are getting much too maudlin, sister.” Bay set aside the papers and started sifting through the basket with the tip of her cane.
Bunch pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. “I can’t help it. All the devastation, all of our things.”
“Not everything,” Bay reminded her. “What we need—” Her cane scuffed against something metallic. “What’s this?” She nudged the object again, then bent to investigate.
“What?” Bunch asked.
“Eh?”
“You were saying what it was that we needed.”
“Yeees, right. What we need is a party to celebrate our return to Seven Chimneys.”
Bunch clapped her hands. “That is a fine idea.” Then she sobered. “But we are alone out here. How will we ever get anyone to attend?”
Bay tugged the object she’d been inspecting out of the debris and raised it for Bunch to see. “This might help.” It was a tin lantern pierced with the design of constellations.
“Father’s draugmkelder? It survived?”
“It seems it has,” Bay replied. “Not even rusted. Now we can invite as many guests as we wish.”
Bunch gazed at the lantern with trepidation. “But gathering dreams can be perilous.”
Bay gave her sister a catlike smile. “And amusing.”
A thud from above gave them both a start. Bay rapped the ceiling with her cane. This was followed by a scurrying sound and she rapped the ceiling again—bang-bang-bang!
“I will have my squirrel stew! I will!”
“Or perhaps,” Bunch mused, “our first guest.”