I awake from a dream of suffocation.  As I scratch my way back to consciousness and discover that I can breathe again, I open my eyes and see Malice curled up in the bed next to me.  The longhaired black cat looks back at me with eyes that I know are green, but don’t look green right now.  My thoughts are pleasantly pink and fuzzy and insubstantial, like redpop froth.  “‘Lo, cat,” I say.  Malice yawns.  “What were we doing, anyway?”  I can’t remember, exactly.  Ian was…inside and outside.  And there was someone else, a writer, a Chinese girl, Dobie Cassarell, no, none of those was right.  No, maybe all of them were.  I roll my hands into fists and whack my temples lightly.   I was making bread, that was it.  Making it for…myself.  No, someone else.  It’s no good, I can’t remember.  Something to do with Late Apex magazine.  I consign it to the corner of my mind reserved for unimportant things and slide out of bed.  Malice doesn’t follow.

Downstairs, Dr. Zheng is in the library, or what will be the library when it’s finished.  If it’s ever finished.  I don’t like Dr. Zheng, as much as I dislike anyone at least, which isn’t very many people if you don’t count Becka Packard, who is to evil what Rolls-Royce is to basic transportation, or Tiffany Burke, whom I went to high school with.  Either way we don’t get along well, especially not when Ian has him stay in my house for days on end to watch over me.  I feel like a bug in a microscope with him around, and I don’t always like feeling like that.  I feel like I could deal with him better if I didn’t have to take the pills and deal with the pink cloud that goes with them, but he’s rigorous about giving them to me on time.  Besides which, mustering the energy to think and act and get rid of him would just be…just…something.

“Are you hungry, Lexi?” Dr. Zheng asks.

I like this room.  The shelves in the walls were there when we moved in, but the wallpaper and wood trim in the room had suffered thanks to a pair of windows that had been broken since the Sixties.  There are boxes of our books and other knicknacks and several crates stacked against the outside wall.  Dr. Zheng is looking through one of the boxes, and I drop into a tatty wingbacked chair that should be red.  He asks if I’m hungry again, and I tell him, “Him sad,” perfectly matching the strange pidgin accent that the dialogue from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is supposed to be spoken in.  “Brain broken!  This my vehicle!  You…pedestrian!”  It’s a shame he never saw the movie, and thus doesn’t appreciate the artistry of my mimicry.  I do like that he reads way too much into everything I say, though.

Dr. Zheng sighs a long-suffering, patient sigh.  “You really should eat something,” he says.  “You didn’t have very much for lunch.  You’re losing weight.”

“That’s Latin, darlin’,” I say, affecting a drawl and talking to an imaginary person next to me.  “Apparently Mr. Ringo is an educated man.”  I drop my voice to a threatening hiss.  “Now I really hate him.”  That one’s from Tombstone.  I get up out of the chair and turn in a less-than-graceful half circle, surveying the room.  I wish I knew why it’s easier to think of movie quotes than it is to actually talk.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, Lexi.”

Suddenly I have a clipped French accent.  “Too bad.  You could warn them, if only you spoke Hovitos.”  Doesn’t he recognize anything?  Has Dr. Zheng ever even seen a movie?  Just one?  Come on!  Raiders of the Lost Ark?  Everyone’s seen that, haven’t they?

I stand in front of my chair, incidentally aware that I’m swaying slightly back and forth but unable to stop myself, and look down at him for a minute.  He’s about an inch shorter than me, has a darkish Chinese complexion like that token Asian henchman who gets killed in just about every Mel Gibson movie, and he’s always wearing a gray suit with a vest.  On top of that he’s losing his hair, just like Ian is.  He’s too ordinary by far and it makes me want to wear yellow, which, now that I think of it, might be fun to do regardless.  Unless, of course, I’m already wearing yellow.  I look down at myself.  I can’t tell.  I don’t think I am.

The doctor doesn’t waver under my scrutiny.  “I’m going to make some soup.  Would you like that?”

I channel Brandon Lee in The Crow.  “I see you’ve made your decision.  Now let’s see you enforce it.”

Dr. Zheng frowns and takes a step back, then turns and marches off to the kitchen.  If he had seen The Crow, he’d have known that it wasn’t a threat at all, although there was no line he could throw back at me.  I miss trading quotes with Ren.  Maybe that’s why I’m doing it.  Even though I wasn’t thinking about him (I wasn’t, dammit) it’s still a fun game with the doctor, who takes everything I say so seriously, even if I’m talking about space ships.  I think he writes down everything I say.  He probably thinks I’m completely insane and I haven’t been much in the mood to try to convince him otherwise, either.

I can hear the doctor’s footsteps all the way to the kitchen, on account of the nice Italian shoes he wears all the time, even though the driveway’s muddy (he wears little rubber shoelets that slip over them).  I also hear a cat padding down the stairs and turn my head just far enough to see Nance trotting through the foyer on his way to the kitchen, expecting a handout that isn’t going to come.  Dr. Zheng doesn’t give the cats treats.  He rarely acknowledges them.

Upstairs.  I want to be curled up in my bed, so that’s where I go.  Halfway up the stairs the phone rings.  I hear Dr. Zheng answer it.

Clock-clock-clock, he’s coming out of the kitchen to the foyer.  I rush the rest of the way up the steps, so I can be at the top when he gets there.  My house has a grand sort of foyer, with a big central staircase that splits halfway up to go left and right, to each wing of the house.  I feel like looking down on the doctor from the landing, like a faded but still powerful dowager empress, or something of that nature anyway.  My feet are listening to me, but my knees are half an order behind, so I trip once.  Dr. Zheng doesn’t seem like he heard the ungraceful thump, though.  “You have a phone call,” he says, holding the cordless phone up as if I could reach down with a stretchy Plasticman arm and grab it from where I’m at.  “It’s Glen, the reporter from Late Apex magazine.”

“Three seconds, break neck!” I shout, loudly enough that Glen can no doubt hear me too.  “Who runs Bartertown?  MasterBlaster runs Bartertown!”  No way is either of them going to understand that, but somewhere beneath all the pink mist I want to be inscrutable today.  Only Ren would’ve understood me.  Only he was ever allowed to on days like this.  Why does Dr. Zheng have to stay here?  Sometimes I need to be alone.  I turn and run for my room, and my legs obey me this time.  It’s a perfect exit and I’m very happy with it.  I even slam the door of my room behind me, to give Zheng something to write in his silly journal about.

This is my room.  Since I’ve spent so much time hibernating in here, it’s the most thoroughly thought out one in the house, most of which is still sort of trashed-out apart from having basic weatherproofing and electricity.  Well, most of it has electricity.  My room used to be three rooms.  Ren and I were going to share it, swish-click, swish-click I am not doing that right now, no.  This is my room, this is my room, this is where I am and I want to stay here, I really do.  The walls are unrestored–the maroon and green paint is cracked and flaking off in trapezoidal curls, and there’s minor fire damage where the damaged wall was torn out.  My bed stands under a nine by four-foot antique mirror that was there when we moved in.  The silver has darkened, but the glass is undamaged and I like it.  A heavy, half-filled bookshelf blocks what used to be doorway to the other bedroom we cannibalized.  It shares space with an art-deco armoire and a much newer bureau of uncertain heritage or design along the wall across from the bed.  My bed is flanked by two doors; one leads into a deep closet, the other to a staircase that goes straight to the kitchen.

The best thing about my room is the turret at the back of the house, whose second story creates a sizeable rounded bay window at the outside corner of the room.  I put a desk in the turret, and stood the computer on it, but it isn’t hooked up yet.  I haven’t decided if it it’s going to stay there, and haven’t devoted any thought to it.

I fling myself into the bed (it’s a queen-size bed with three feather ticks and two down comforters, so I could jump into it from a helicopter if I wanted to) and make a perfect one-back landing between Malice and the mail, which I must have collected earlier but don’t remember.  It seems like I’m working on two or three things at once, like I always used to when Ren was alive, but I just can’t remember all of them at any given time.  None of it (the mail, not the cat) is interesting (the cat is always interesting) except for a manila envelope with a Detroit postmark.  It has a mix CD, from Cygnet.  She makes them for me all the time, which isn’t a surprise as she’s a DJ at the coolest radio station in Detroit and she lives for music.  She’s been sending me CDs that I’m sure are calculated to cheer me up.  Sometimes they really do.

“My bag is in the hat,” I sing to my cat as I rip the package open, “it’s filled with this and that.”  Malice blinks and says nothing.  She doesn’t like Marilyn Manson that much.

The envelope contains nothing except a months-old copy of a New York newspaper from the day that Ren died..  I have a moment of clarity, and think, What a perfectly awful thing to send to me! I’m actually insulted. 

It reads like this: 

Warren Packard Killed In VT Car Crash

AP–Warren Packard, scion of the multimillionaire Packard family, was pronounced dead at the scene of an automobile accident that killed four people in upstate New York Wednesday evening.  The incident came as a shock to members of an automotive community that had barely finished celebrating the public introduction of the Crane-Packard sports car at the New York Auto Show.  Packard’s death thrusts the future of America’s newest car company into uncertainty.
Police said the crash occurred near Roxbury, Vermont, some time after nine p.m.  Packard and Alexis Crane, his fiancee and partner in founding the car company, were transporting display materials and a show car.  Reports from the scene suggest that the Ford F-350 driven by Crane struck Packard’s car and a Cadillac limousine driven by Gerry Okurowski of Fashionable Transport in Boston, Massachusetts.  Packard’s car and the limousine were forced off the road and into a water-filled ravine.  Packard, Okurowski and the limousine’s three unidentified passengers were killed.  Also killed was truck driver Ernest Murchison, of Middlebury, whose truck was traveling in the opposite direction and struck the Crane-Packard display trailer.  Police say alcohol has been ruled out as a factor in the crash and will release further details pending an investigation.
The $42,000 Crane-Packard sports coupe and roadster created a stir when it was unveiled to the public at the New York Auto Show Wednesday morning.  The automotive press was excited by both the theatrical stage presence of the company’s founders and by the car’s Corvette-beating performance figures.  The initial production run of twenty-five cars was sold before noon.
Neither Crane nor the Packard family could be reached for comment on the future of the company.

Apparently no one knows exactly what happened, other than me, since I was there.  Why did everyone else have to go and die?  There are diagrams based on Vermont state police analysis of the scene.  They get a lot of things wrong.  They think that Deus rear-ended the limo and made it run into Ren, and that didn’t happen at all.  I fall asleep thinking about that.

I dream of walls.  Cream-colored tile walls, to be specific.  My point of reference is very close to the tile, as if I have my nose pressed right up against it as I move slowly along.  The air is cold.  My feet are wet.  The tile races quickly along under my nose.  I push myself away from the wall, wanting to see more of my surroundings, and find that I am in a tunnel, lined walls and ceiling with cream-colored tile and indistinct ahead and behind.  As I move down the tunnel, the light (if there was any) moves with me.  I can feel myself moving slightly up, then slightly down, then slightly sideways.  The tunnel widens, becomes a great hall with a dirt ceiling and a tiled floor.  Frozen puddles dot the floor, but I can’t feel my feet touching it.  I move across the hall, whose walls remain indistinct, and I come to a closed wooden garage door with a brass knocker and handle.

Raise the door or knock first?  I choose to raise the door.  Inside I see only headlights, massive headlights that rush out as if freed from a cage.  There’s no time to jump out of the car’s way, and as it runs into and over me I find myself suddenly inside, behind the wheel.  It’s an old car, but I can’t quite place what make it is.  A big sedan, anyway.  1930s for sure.  I can smell potpourri.  The road ahead is dark except for the twin tunnels of white speared into it by the headlights.  The road curves gently, and the car turns with it.  The headlights turns with it too–it has Pilot Rays, I realize, those old foglights that connect to the steering rack and turn with the front wheels.  What a great thing!  I’ve never seen them work before, but there they are.  Super-cool.  I’m on the verge of identifying the car by its hood ornament, but it’s way too dark to see it well.

An imperceptible shift, and I’m not driving any more; I’m in the passenger seat.  I look toward the driver’s side and see a woman in her late thirties, her auburn hair shot through with gray and pulled back into a loose knot at the back of her head.  She’s wearing clothes that match the car’s time period, as far as I can tell.  The woman looks back at me; in the dim light from the dashboard’s dials I can tell only that the woman is handsome, with sad eyes.  We drive on without speaking, into the dark and then the dream drifts on to other things.

Molly set her laptop on Lexi’s dining room table, plugged the machine in, and slapped her notepad on the table.  The sound echoed in the room, a flat smack that denoted irritation.  Ian jumped, but she wasn’t actually annoyed.  Of course, having him walking on eggshells around her didn’t bother her; since the dressing-down he’d gotten the last time she’d been here, he had been positively rabbit-like.  That was fine with her.  “You’re still following me around,” she said, glancing at him over the top of the PowerBook’s screen.

“I’m just curious,” he said.  “I expected you’d have all sorts of ghost-hunting equipment, not just the notepad.”

She refrained from rolling her eyes.  It had taken Ian long enough to warm up to the idea of her coming to Lexi’s house for a short visit at all, and she was determined to be cordial, even while she was making him twitchy.  He’d avoided her calls for weeks after she’d dressed him down about the missed meeting in Detroit, and while she was glad he was afraid of her, it made it awfully hard to get in touch with Lexi.  Lately a man who claimed to be Lexi’s doctor had started answering the phone most of the time.  “Phone jack?” she asked, holding up the modem’s cord.

Ian nodded and took it.  Molly carried a twenty-five foot loop of the stuff; you never knew how far it would have to stretch sometimes. 

She was at once glad Ian had let her come up, and annoyed that she felt compelled to ask his permission.  It was Lexi’s house, after all.  Unfortunately, she couldn’t get through to the lady of the house.  Molly wanted desperately to talk to Lexi, apart from the occasional addled late-night phone call, so she’d decided to pull some vacation time ahead and take a Christmas shift on the newsdesk to make up for it, if she had to. 

Of course it was looking like it would be for naught; when she arrived, Lexi was barely lucid, loopy on antidepressants.  Ian had introduced her briefly to Dr. Zheng, a florid little Chinese man who had assumed the mantle of live-in doctor for Lexi, and then she’d gone right to exploring the house for evidence of Lexi’s ghosts.

“So what happens next?”

“It’s very exciting, Ian.  I’m going to sit here and transcribe the notes I took while we walked through, while it’s still fresh in my mind.  You’ll be able to feel the tension in the keystrokes.”

“But what are you writing about?  We didn’t see any spooks,” he added.  There was slightly mocking skepticism in his voice.

She ignored it.  “No, we didn’t.  It doesn’t matter.  I want to describe the house.  What it feels like.  What it smells like.  The way that the original wallpaper feels under your fingertips as you walk down the hallway upstairs.  The fire damage on Lexi’s wall.  Every old house is different and I want to take my readers into the moment.”  She typed in her dialup number and let the modem’s screech change the subject.  “So, isn’t the doctor expensive?” she asked. 

She had hoped that Ian would be taken by surprise, but he merely folded his hands on the table in front of him.  “It’s better than having to rush to the emergency room in town, if something happens,” he said.  “The funds from the auction are paying for it.”

“And how’s Lex taking it?”

“Taking what?”

“The cars being gone,” she said, pushing her chair back.  Connection made, she clicked open her mail program, fingers dancing on the trackball.  She disliked having to ask Ian things she’d come up here to talk to Lexi about, but decided to make the effort to trust him.  He was looking out for her friend, after all.  She needed to let the Detroit thing go; he’d made an honest mistake, and it wouldn’t happen again.  If she kept treating him like an asshole for it though, things certainly wouldn’t get any better, and Molly wanted to be on the list of people Ian would call if he needed help or advice.  Grudges were a bad habit of hers. 

“Ah, that,” Ian said.  “As well as could be expected, I suppose.  We’re trying to get her to sleep less.”  Neither of them really wanted to talk about Lexi–at least not to one another–so the subject faltered and died.  Molly fussed with the hair at the back of her neck, looking through her email.  Newspaper stuff, newspaper stuff…here was a note from an editor saying that no, thank you, her ghost column didn’t sound like it was for them.  And an email from Glen Grant.  Molly frowned.  The name was vaguely familiar, and curiosity brushed the sting of the rejection note aside.

“So, how do you do…whatever it is you’re going to do?  What other tests do you run?”

She smiled.  “There aren’t any tests, Ian.  All I do is pass on the stories about the ghosts.  Kind of like modernizing folk tales.”  Oh, now she remembered.  She’d met Mr. Grant at the Crane-Packard introduction, in New York, he was another car journalist, and Lexi had mentioned that she’d done an interview with him, or was going to.  It was hard to tell what was in the present or past with Lexi lately.  “I’ll spend the night and keep my ears open,” she told Ian, plucking at her earlobe for emphasis, “and that’s about it.  I’ll also contact the town hall, or whatever passes for one, and try to get the history of the house.  Maybe I’ll be able to figure out who the ghost might be.”

“Purported ghost,” Ian corrected her.  “Lexi says she sees ghosts everywhere,” he sighed, shaking his head in disbelief.

Molly nodded, dividing her attention between Ian and Glen’s email.  He had gotten her contact info from the business card she’d given him, and wanted to ask her about Lexi–specifically, what kind of treatment she was getting.  He added in a postscript that it was off-the-record; he’d seen something that concerned him was all.  “Seen anything yourself?”

“I’m sure I haven’t.”

“No need to be shy.”  Her lips curled in a teasing smile.

“No,” he said, meeting her eyes but not matching her amusement.  “I haven’t seen anything.  You do realize that she likes to make up stories, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”  His tendency to be condescending was one of the things Molly disliked about Ian.  It made it hard for her to remember how big a help he’d been these past few months.  While he talked she keyed a rapid response to Glen Grant:  Ask me anything. It was coquettish–she remembered Glen being moderately attractive, in a semi-bookish way–and of course she could decide whether she was going to talk about Lexi behind her back or not once she knew what he wanted to know.  She sent the email and said, “Lex does make stuff up sometimes, but we’ve shared experiences before, and she wouldn’t have me up here on a wild goose chase.”

Ian nodded, unconvinced.  “You say you’ve seen ghosts together?”

“More than once,” Molly said.  The things that she and Lexi and Cygnet seen as teenagers flitted through her mind, and she decided not to share the details with Ian.  “More than once,” she repeated.

“And then newspapers buy your stories?”

“Are you asking lots of questions because you’re curious, or because you’re trying not to give me the chance to ask any of my own?”  She looked from the computer to Ian and was satisfied to see a slightly guilty look on his face.  “Yes, newspapers buy them.  In fact I’m up to twelve papers a week now.”  Yeah, twelve positive responses from three hundred query letters, a sarcastic voice in the back of her head droned. Molly ignored it.  “People like to hear folk tales.”

“Do you make a lot of money at that?”

“I have no plans to quit my day job, if that’s what you’re asking.”  Molly stood up and looked around the dining room, idly clicking the “Send & Receive All” icon as she did.  She stretched her back, looking at the ceiling.  There had once been a light fixture over the dining table, probably something ornate judging by the molding that remained, but it was long gone.  The ceiling and walls of the dining room were stained dark with candle-soot.

When Molly brought her head back down, she caught Ian’s eyes jumping away from her breasts.  She said nothing; most men did it, and it wasn’t the first time she’d seen Ian looking either.  At least he didn’t talk to them.  “So what did you sense?” he asked.  The mocking tone was back.

“I told you, I’m not a medium.”  There was already email; Glen had responded.  He must be at his computer.  “So tell me more about this Dr. Zheng,” she asked.  “I thought Lex was off the suicide watch.” 

Glen’s question was startling:  Does Lexi have a history of epilepsy or other neurological problems?  She had a grand mal seizure while I was interviewing her, and Mr. Warnock seemed unaware of any long-term health problems.  She was heavily medicated and I was concerned that it might be a reaction.

“She is” Ian said.  “But I can’t stay here with her all the time.  I’ve got to go back to work, and she’s not ready to be left alone.”

“I understand,” Molly said.  “How has she been reacting to the anti-depressants?  You said Dr. Zheng had her on something new?”

“She’s been fine,” Ian said, pushing his chair back.  “No problems at all.”

“I just wondered.  She used to have funny reactions to some things when we were younger.”  This wasn’t a complete truth, since Lexi’s ability to get slightly intoxicated on massive amounts of sugar wasn’t something Molly considered particularly funny.

“There hasn’t been anything untoward,” Ian said.  “I’ve got a phone call to make.  Will you be using the phone line for long?”

“Just a couple of minutes,” she said.

“Oh, before it slips my mind–when Lexi wakes up, if you get a chance to talk to her, I need you to ask her about a few things.”

Molly raised an eyebrow.

“I’m just tying up loose ends, and there’s a lot of Crane-Packard inventory missing.  Parts, mostly.  It’s been inventoried, but none of it is at the factory.  I was hoping Lexi might know if she and Warren did something silly with it.”

Something about the way he said it annoyed her.  “Yes, because abject silliness was the business model that they followed.”  On her computer, she typed while she talked:  I’ve never known Lex to have a seizure of any kind, and I. (sitting right in front of me) says she’s had no adverse drug reactions.  Is he lying?  Now I have a question for you:  why is he asking me to ask L. where the inventory of C-P parts is, because it’s not in the warehouse? And even if I knew–if she wouldn’t tell him, why would I? She sent her response as Ian stood up, suddenly afraid he’d walk around the table and see what she was writing about him. 

“I didn’t mean to be insulting, I’m sorry.  But you have to admit that they could be unorthodox.”

“Indeed.  Why can’t you ask her?”

“She’s been playing games with me.  I can’t tell if she’s keeping things from me on purpose, or because of…”  Ian let the sentence hang.  “Anyway, I thought she might be more comfortable talking to you about it.  It reminds her of Ren, and you know how she gets.”

Ian’s excuse was lame, and she didn’t believe it for a moment but pretended to.  There was something going on.  She didn’t know what, but something wasn’t kosher.  Molly kicked herself for sending the email to Glen.  She’d met the man once, and the last damn thing Lexi needed was another reporter intrigued by what was going on in her life.  They’d only just started to get rid of the first thousand or so.  Still, something wasn’t right.  She’d have to email Glen some more and find out what he was thinking, exactly.  Maybe they could do lunch some time, and talk at length about Lexi.  Swap ideas.

The idea had more appeal than it ought to.  She wanted an excuse to talk to Glen some more, and she had no idea why.  There were better people to talk to, however–mutual friends she was more acquainted with.  She started writing an email to Ajax Jaxon.

Lexi woke up some time in the middle of the night–she could tell, because she’d fallen asleep without pulling the curtains and northern Michigan’s uniquely black night sky seemed to have leaked into the room.  She didn’t wake from a nightmare, but calmly.  She could feel Malice sleeping on her chest; the cat woke when she did, and looked down into her face.  Lexi’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dark, and when they did she was looking at a ghost.

Was she quite awake?  Maybe not.  The fact of a ghost in her bedroom bothered her not at all.  Should it have, though?  She’d been seeing so many ghosts lately, although none of them had glowed cool blue like the woman at the foot of the bed did.  She was mistier than any of the others had been, too.  Fuzzy, almost.  Lexi could make out the woman’s face, except for her eyes (it could have been the woman from her dream, except that she couldn’t see if the eyes were sad), and her upper body became clearer as she watched, but the woman’s legs never coalesced into anything more solid than mist.

“Nihao,” Lexi said, not that the ghost would get a reference to anime, but there you were.  Malice looked at the ghost and stepped primly off of Lexi, tail very discreetly fluffed (quite an impressive display for a long-haired black cat) and a low growl in the back of her throat.  “S’okay, cat,” Lexi said softly.  Malice stopped growling.

The ghost drifted backward across the room, then through the door that led to the kitchen.

Lexi didn’t think; she followed the cool blue light downstairs.  She half-expected it to be gone when she got there, but it was in the dining room, drifting slowly around the table as if it were setting places.  It moved nonchalantly, as if it didn’t care if Lexi followed or not.

As she passed the refrigerator, the phone rang.  Lexi nearly jumped out of her socks.  She grabbed it off the hook without a second thought (or a second ring) and then promptly lost it.  She couldn’t feel the phone in her hand, but she didn’t hear it hit the floor, either.  It took her a moment to focus in the dark and see that the silly thing was in her hand after all.  So the drugs were still working.

The ghost moved in the dining room.  It had finished its circuit of the table and was moving toward the ballroom.  Lexi took a few steps in that direction, moving as far as the telephone cord would let her.

Oh, right, the phone.  It was saying, “Hello?  Lexi?”

She lifted it to her ear.  “Nihao,” she chirped again, not too loudly lest she wake the doctor.

“Hi, Lexi, it’s Ajax.  I was hoping I’d catch you awake.”

“General Ajax!” she said happily.  “How are things at the front?”

“Not too bad.  Listen, I heard from Molly, and she had some questions.  I’m glad you’re awake still.”

“Still?”  Lexi couldn’t see the clock on the wall.

“It’s almost two.  But listen, do you know what’s going on at the factory?  Molly told me there were questions about the remaining inventory of cars and parts, so I took a drive by there, and saw–”

“What, you just happened to be in Detroit?”  Ajax wasn’t usually the type to make random road trips.  Nashville was a bit of a haul for him.  Maybe he could come to Arcadia, too. 

“I’m up for the holiday,” he said.  “Do you know if anything’s happening at the plant?”

The factory.  Oh, yes, the Crane-Packards.  Lexi felt the beginnings of a howl at the back of her throat.  It was almost Thanksgiving, they should’ve had about a thousand cars built by now.  She fought it back, forced the feeling down.  She had to get herself back into now.  Into the real world.  The one without Ren, the awful place with no colors or sounds.  “It’s late,” Lexi said.  She was happy to hear from Ajax, so happy, but it was hard to get the happy to the surface.  “I haven’t…”  She lost her train of thought completely as the ghost passed out of sight into the ballroom.  “There’s something strange and wonderful happening, Ajax.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she said dreamily.  “I haven’t figured it out…if it’s real or not.  I’ll let you know.”  She squinted and could just barely see the blue glow fading in the ballroom.

“Are you okay, Lexi?”

“More or less…more more than less,” she replied.  “Just pre ock.  Pre.  Preoccupied,” that was the word.  “Can I call you later?”

“Sure.”  Ajax sounded disappointed.

“I’m sorry.  I just–”  She wanted to talk to him, too, but he could call back tomorrow.  The ghost wasn’t waiting.  “I…have to go, ‘kay?”  She left the phone on the counter and walked away from it.

The glowing blue woman was going out the front door when she reached the ballroom.  Night air delightful and crisp on her face, Lexi followed her out into the dark.  It was the middle of the night in October, about forty-five degrees in Arcadia, Michigan, whose biggest retail outlet was a very small party store which doubled as the post office, and Lexi Crane was outside in pajamas and socks, chasing a ghost.  It was a good life.

No, chasing wasn’t quite the right word.  She was following the faintly glowing, faintly woman-shaped specter, and it was leading her down the weed-choked circular driveway, past Dr. Zheng’s Saab, and toward a dilapidated carriage house whose drive was so overgrown it had all but vanished.  Clay roof tiles had suffered from years of neglect, but the walls looked more or less solid.  The doors were another matter.  When the ghost passed through the ancient wood, Lexi was able to slip through a Dolph Lundgren-sized gap rather than test the rusted hinges.  She’d never explored the carriage house, come to think of it.

The weak nighttime light died completely once she was inside.  The concrete floor was uneven (and cold!) beneath her feet, and the ghost was gone.

“Well, what?” she asked the dark.  “Going to jump out for a surprise birthday…”  She could see her breath clouding in front of her.  No, she couldn’t, that was her imagination, she couldn’t see anything, and besides, it wasn’t that cold.  It was quiet, though.  All of the summer bugs were gone, of course–the woods were sparsely populated with animal rustlings and the ssshhh of bare-branched trees socializing.

She put her hands out in front of her and took a careful, sliding step forward, mindful of her toes (she hated stubbing them) and any sharp object she might encounter.  She walked for a long time, moving slowly but finding nothing.  She was beginning to think she’d gone farther than the opposite wall (you are entering a new dimension…) when her fingers touched dusty, vertical metal.  It wasn’t the far wall of the carriage house, which would have been brick in any case.  Lexi pressed her fingertips, then palms to the cold surface, knowing right away from the slick glass and painted steel that it was a car.  A shiver of excitement went through her.  A car!  In her garage!  It had been there all along, probably calling her, and she’d been too busy (preoccupied really, or was that the same thing?) to go and look for it.

She traced the vehicle in the dark, creating a mental map of its shape with her fingertips.  It was old–she could tell by the mostly flat, very upright side panels, and, after a moment, from the way it smelled, like dust and ground oil and something else she’d never been able to place.  Kind of like an antique shop, a good one.  There were running boards, too, and they led up to big fat fenders at both ends.  Lexi’s mind sketched out a long-nosed touring car, 1930s or early ’40s.  If only she had thought to bring a flashlight!  The grille  was fluted at the top–the notched corners made her guess that it was a Packard, and that made her heart hurt and giggle with joy at the same time.  Ren would have been so happy, but he was dead.  Lexi ran her fingers over the sculpted chrome of the hood ornament and down the broad, vertical slats of the grille.  Yes, it was a Packard.

“This cah belongs to the Pah-kee-stah-nee ambassadah,” she said, doing a poor Michael Caine imitation.  She sat on the floor in front of the car and rested her head on the blade-like edge of the bumper.  Lexi Antoinette, she thought.  She fell asleep like that, and dreamt of a guillotine descending with impossible, grinding, scraping slowness down a hundred-foot execution frame toward her throat.  A crowd cheered through tinny speakers, and Ren was the red-hooded executioner.  It had all the elements of an awful nightmare, but somehow it wasn’t.

The blade never did reach her neck.  She woke up curled against the car’s front tire on the cold floor.  Sunlight squirmed in through the cracks in the ceiling and doors–the car was a Packard, after all.  A ’39 Twelve, to be exact, a massive touring sedan.  Judging by its condition (dust, bird and mouse poo, flat tires) it had been in here since before the drive had succumbed to weeds.  But why was it still here?  Twelves were among the most desirable Packards; surely if someone here had owned one and then died, some relative would’ve dragged it out and sold it off during the speculation wars of the Eighties?  Lexi sat up and considered the Packard for a while. 

Lexi was so excited and pleased about the Packard in the garage that she ate breakfast.  Dr. Zheng was already up, and didn’t seem to notice that she was coming in from outside rather than from her bedroom.  He did notice when she opened the cabinet and poured herself a bowl of cereal, though.

“Good morning, Lexi,” he said, trying and failing to act as if he weren’t shocked, as if she’d stop if he made a big deal about it.  He did make a note in his journal.  He made lots of notes in his journal.  Sometimes she wondered if he was going to write a whole book about her.  She didn’t care right now, though, because she was happy about the car and in the mood to eat.  Breakfast, and then she’d go for a drive.  A very nice morning indeed.

She slid into a chair across from him.  “So this is Paris,” she said, and shoveled a heaping spoonful of heavily-honeyed Rice Chex into her mouth.

“Actually, it’s Michigan,” Dr. Zheng said patiently.  “You’re in your house in Michigan.”

“I’ve been here before.  I think it was in a dream…”  Dr. Zheng said some other things to her, but she was tuning him out by then; her thoughts had moved past breakfast already.  At some point she was given a glass of nasty juice, and had to drink the honey-flavored milk that was left in her cereal bowl to wash away its bitter taste.

After eating she got up and went up the staircase next to the fridge, the one that led directly to her room.  Her intent was to take a shower, but by the time she’d made it to her room the pill had begun to put fuzz on everything.  Lexi sat on her bed for a moment (Malice, Nance, and Amy-Ann were all in it), which turned into almost an hour.  She had a waking dream that she had fallen out of an airplane and was tumbling slowly through the clouds, which were all pink.  Some of them purred as she went past them.  What was she planning to do, once she got to the ground?  Go for a drive, that was it.

The thought of driving spurred her back to her room, to the here and now, if that was what you could call it, and Lexi was suddenly a swirl of manic activity, rushing back and forth about the room, throwing on clothes (and simply throwing others) until she had a pleasing outfit.  On this day, that meant black jeans (which had been tighter the last time they’d been on, it seemed), a red turtleneck under a black T-shirt under an expensive red designer shirt that had belonged to Ren under a big bright yellow jacket, her yellow Doc Martens, and a black cloche hat to top it all off.  If she concentrated hard enough she could almost see the colors of her clothes.  Almost.  Cygnet had left a “cheer-up” mixtape for her, and she played it loud-ish.  She sang while she dressed, and attempted to dance a little bit, too, but fell down twice.

Zheng listened to Lexi sing and jump about while he wrote; her voice carried down the stairwell.  He wished that he’d have thought to bring a tape recorder, so he could remember the things she said, to better analyze them later.  At the moment she was singing in a distinct, nasal voice:  “Six-foot-two and rude as hell, I’ve gotta get him in the ground before he starts to smell…”

She seemed to enjoy juxtaposing violent imagery with her generally cheerful mien; there was a lot of anger in her, judging by that, the violent movies she enjoyed watching, and the horrific novels that lined her bookshelves.  She wouldn’t talk about the source of her anger, but Zheng had made the obvious connection that it stemmed from Ren’s death, and she was entering (or deep into) the anger phase of her grief.  That it always manifested itself as malice toward fictional characters was interesting.  He expected her to displace onto him, because he was convenient, but she was more likely to bang her own head against the wall than to lash out at him.  And if the images she enjoyed reciting for him were any indication, that was a good thing.

“We had our words, a common spat…so I kissed him upside the cranium with an ‘luminum baseball bat, my name is Mud!” she sang.  Definitely full of malice…wait.  Zheng flipped backward through his notepad.  One of her cats was named Malice, wasn’t it?  Yes, there was the list of their names.  And she clearly hadn’t renamed it after Ren had died.  He smiled to himself.  Yet another wrinkle to the puzzle.  Lexi’s peculiar mixture of disconnection from the real world and attention details was something he’d never encountered before.  Although she had no mental retardation to speak of, Zheng had watched Lexi recite from memory entire movies that she’d seen days ago, and that was the sort of thing that he’d only seen in autistic patients.  As far as he knew, Lexi didn’t have an eidetic memory, either.

Halfway down the stairs the radio station in my head (at which Cygnet is the official DJ, thanks to the mixtape she sent me) switches from Primus to EBN-OZN:  “So I’m feeling really cavalier, and I say ‘now call me, if you want to…yeah.  Call me, if you want to.  So she rang me up, and she says, ‘Hey!  Do you wanna go out?’  Ha!  Do I wanna go out!”  I feel like I’m momentarily ahead of the goo in my brain, and I like it.  If I slow down the pink cloud’s going to catch up again, so I swish through the kitchen, barely touching the floor.  I grab an apple, my glasses, and Dr. Zheng’s keys out of the fruit basket as I go past it and then I jam right on through the dining room, the ballroom, the foyer, and out the front door.  I’m going for a drive.

It’s snowing, just a little flurry that’s probably going to continue for some time and the calendar in my head tells me that it’s the middle of November.  Where did the year go? Dr. Zheng’s car is a Saab 9000 Turbo, which makes me happy even though it’s painted either silver or white, instead of red like Saabs are supposed to be.  The door handle obeys my fingers with a light but expensive double click, and then I’m inside, smelling that crisp leather-smell, that Saab-smell.  The pink cloud recedes even more.  The Saab-smell clears my mind and I want to drive.  And, for the record, the car is silver, not white.

Where to go?  It doesn’t matter.  I want to drive, need to drive, to go, to move, and the key turns, the car gives a little shudder–kwith-thithvrrrrmmm–and comes delightfully alive.  I squeeze the cold steering wheel and let the wonderful living mechanical feeling vibrate through me.  The low Saab exhaust-burble makes me smile.  The car will know where to go, off through the snow.  I hope Dr. Zheng put on snow tires.  Probably not.  I could ask him, seeing as how he’s on the porch yelling, yelling my name in a pink cloud and tinted glass-muffled voice like a curious backward echo–”…lexi?  lexi get out of there, you shouldn’t…”

Silly old Dr. Zheng’s shouting is unimportant, though.  I hate it when people shout at me.  I lock the doors with my elbow and feed Cygnet’s tape to the player.  He yells too much; I’ll listen when I come back.  If I come back.  Will the fuzz let go of me long enough for a decent drive?  My left foot wiggles on the clutch, right on the gas.  So far, so good.  Right hand on the e-brake, push the button to release, then on the shifter.  Left on the wheel, resting lightly, not clutching.  This is the position I belong in, this is the first thing that’s felt right in weeks, in months, in all this swish-clicking time since Ren died.  I put the Saab into gear and it gets a lot easier to think, to see from here, yes indeed it does. The tape is just starting that EBN-OZN song, which is why it fell into my head; I sing “A E I O U sometimes Y,” and back up.

Gravel crunches and clatters against the underside of the car as I swing it around in a reverse J-turn that’s not as graceful as it could be because I haven’t been practicing.  The pink goo trapping my thoughts surges briefly, then falls completely away as the world spins around the car.  The falling snow is getting heavier and it makes the air look opaque.  I shift from reverse to first, reach out by instinct and twist the knob that my fingers touch, and there are lights.  In the lights, I see my gate, not as fancy as the Packards’ gate and rusted permanently open.  I put my foot down and the Saab listens, after a customary hesitation.  Turbos always lag a bit, and Saabs are notorious offenders.  Ren and I have a Saab somewhere, painted properly cherry red and named Spirit of Indulgence, because Ren bought it on a complete whim.  And Molly has a Saab, too, a convertible.  Also red.  Good karma, that is.

I give the car a little bit of foot and Dr. Zheng’s Saab launches, faster than I remember Saabs did.  The engine catches the rev limiter and then we’re out the gate and bouncing across cold dry asphalt, hurtful bright light and a blaring horn as something–a pickup truck, a heavy-duty diesel grumble–blurs past, a hairline miss.  Yeep, I didn’t see him!  I spin the Saab in a half-circle to complete the avoid, and it stalls.  Whoops.

Dr. Zheng is running down the driveway in his expensive little Italian shoes, still yelling my name.  I restart, get the car pointed in the right direction, and the Saab charges forward again, faster still on the harder surface, needle climbing and yellow lines running under the car, delightful feeling, fast, white-frosted air and trees and mailboxes flashing by in silhouette.  I can feel the road through the steering wheel and I can talk to the car with my hands and feet.  It’s delicious, oh goodness it’s delicious, grounded flight, one of the best sensations in the world.  This is what talking with Ren was like, what being with Ren was like, each of us knew what every little motion meant and responded and we were both in control at the same time.  There’s less pink fuzz around my thoughts now, in fact it seems to almost be gone except for a wriggling sort of dopey feeling like Dramamine.  And there’s snow coming out of the sky now, too, big blurry polka-dots of it.  Snow!  Yes, snow!  I can hear my laughter mingling with the car’s.

I drive aimlessly and fast.  A left turn, a right turn, then straight for a while.  The roads are mostly straight up here.  The Dramamine-y feeling doesn’t go away, and sometimes my reactions are muddy, a half-second slower than they should be.  That will just have to be fine, since I can’t do anything about it.  If the road gets twisty, I’ll slow down.  Dream Theater is singing and I sing along to sharpen my brain.  Clouds roll by, and I roll with them.

The sheep comes as a complete surprise.

I clip over a little rise at about sixty and there’s a SHEEP standing in the middle of the road and looking back at me. 

A sheep? 

Here? 

How doesn’t matter; I’m closing on it too quickly for the question of how.  Too quick for the stupid thing to run, in fact too quick for it to react at all.  My foot pops off of the gas, a reflex, and I dodge past it on the left.  As I go past I get a glimpse of an open gate, a dog running down the drive toward the sheep, a farmhouse that looks old enough to be handbuilt, and maybe someone sitting on the porch.

Then things get interesting.  I’m not completely right with the swerve; my reflexes haven’t caught up to my brain and I swerve out way too far, right across the lane and into newly fallen snow.  I fight the wheel as the handling gets greasy, stay off the brakes even though I’m going too fast.  There’s a rumbly sort of scrape beneath me as a strip of fresh snow turns to ripped-up brown grass under the car.  I overcorrect back onto the road, a hundred feet past the sheep, dog, gate, and house, still going too fast to touch the brakes and too far sideways to steer, and then just like that I’m off the right side of the road at a bad angle, too fast too fast ohhwww and a hard bounce, world spinning banging around the car, lights on snow telephone pole tree road dirt tree and STOPPED looking up at mostly sky. 

For a moment I think there’s another ghost in front of the car, but it’s only falling snow and steam swirling, making a dancing pattern in the lights.

Oh, poop, I just wrecked Dr. Zheng’s car.  Somehow, though, I don’t feel badly about that.  Not sure why.  Have I turned into a sociopath?

The Saab is quiet, stalled, cocked at a wrong wrong wrong angle in the ditch.  It’s not coming out under its own power.  I’ve done this before and am pretty familiar with the process.  At least the airbag didn’t pop.  “Sorry, Saab,” I tell the car. 

Now, there’s the mystery of the sheep to solve.

By the time I push the door open and struggle out of the car, the sheep’s gone.  The road’s empty and silent except for the not-quite sound of snow falling.  Tracks from my back-and forth fishtail skid are already vanishing under snow, but sapling I crunched might not recover so quickly.  It’s almost serene.  The Saab’s damage I can assess with a glance:  a tire peeled off the rim but no wheel damage, the wheel itself cocked, which means I snapped a suspension piece or two, part of the front bumper knocked into little bits and scattered across the street, and a healthy dent in the left front fender.  Ick.  I don’t want to think about that right now.  I walk back up the road to the drive from which the sheep presumably issued.  Sure enough, it’s there, and the dog I saw is chasing it up the drive, nipping expertly at its heels as it drives it back into its pen.

The house is the centerpiece of a very small and increasingly snowy farm; small pastures on either side of the fence, house at the end of the drive, and a petite barn out back.  Beyond the barn, the woods lean close, just like they do behind my house.  It’s a quaint house, with rolled-over eaves suggesting a thatched roof and irregular stone walls, and there is indeed a person on the porch, sitting and clapping. 

I wave on my way up the rutted drive.  I’m getting mud in my shoes. 

He’s in his late fifties or early sixties and he’s in a wheelchair, with a big, flat triangle of stiff yellow and blue fabric on his lap.  He’s got a beard–more of a glorified goatee really–long but neatly trimmed, and the hair poking out from under his Union cap matches it.  The thing on his lap is a kite, I see as I get closer, and there’s a small table next to his chair with a teapot, four mugs, and the usual tea accouterments on it.  The table looks handmade.  The porch smells of tea and cinnamon and I like it here already.

“It’s a little snowy for kites,” I say as I reach the porch.  I stop short, so the snow can keep falling on me.  I like the little individual flashes on my skin as the flakes hit, like cold sparks. 

“I’m mending Ramona, not flying her,” says the man, picking the kite up again.  I realize that for a moment I was half-afraid he would be a ghost, and I’m glad he’s not.  His face crinkles up charmingly when he smiles.  He has a Scottish accent so light it might be an intentional affectation, and I like that, too.  It explains the sheep, in a perverse way.  Livestock sounds and smells drift through the nonsound of the snow–more sheep, and goats, too.  “Have some tea?”

“Do you have lemons?”

“Always.”

“Sugar cubes?”

He smiles.  “Tourist?”

“Hm?”  I look around.  Oh, he means me.  “Oh, not me.  I live over…” I point in the direction of my house, which isn’t in sight of course.  “It’s a big old haunted house, with two towers that are unrelated to Tolkien.  One’s round and one’s square.  Tea would be good.  Lots of lemon and sugar makes it like hot lemonade.”

The man smiles.  “You’re the lass who moved into the old Maddox place, eh?”  He sets the kite aside and pours me a cup of tea with a care that’s almost dainty.  “William Charles Stirling, at your service.”

“Alexis Andrea Victoria Margaret Corinne Crane, at yours,” I reply, ascending the single step to the porch.  My legs are a bit shaky, as if my body has already forgotten how to get around without wheels.  I sit on the stoop and turn halfway so I can see him.

“What a title!  Are you royalty?”

“Nope.  Creative parents.  But why do you have four extra mugs, Sir William?” I ask.  He hands me a cup of tea.  It is practically hot lemonade.  Lovely.  I give him a big smile.

“Just in case a lass like you drops by.  She can’t escape whilst I’m bumbling about inside looking for a cup, you see,” he says.  “And one smile like that makes it worth lugging the extra tray out here.  That’s a smile a man could go to war for.”

“It happens…”  The pink clouds are pushing back a little bit, and I get lost in the falling snow and tea for a bit.  A View-Master scene change tries to happen, but I stop it from happening.  The tea keeps me in the moment, it’s almost as good as hot chocolate.  But why am I here, again?  There was a car, a dog…”The sheep!”

“Ah, that stupid old ewe’s fine, don’t worry about it.  She deserved the scare.  She’s back in the pen.”

“Do you live here alone?  Except for…um…the animals, of course.”

He’s smiling, with a gleam in his eye.  “Of course.  Been here by myself for going on forty years now.  The kids say I’m the local crazy old wizard, since there’s no witch, if you don’t count yourself.  But that’s just because they know I’ll chase ‘em with Ramona, if they don’t stop trying to ride my sheep.”  He picks the kite up again, and I can see that the ends of the delta are tipped with pieces of flat, hook-shaped metal.  There’s a whetstone on the tea caddy; Sir William has been honing the edges.

“It’s a kite with claws…” Am I really here?

“Linoleum knife blades, actually,” he says.

“That’s deeply, deeply sick,” I tell him.  I’m leaning farther and farther toward the kite, and make a point of straightening, lest I fall completely over.  “I have just decided that I like you a lot.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Alexis.  Should I call a tow truck for your car?”

“It’s not mine,” I say, trying to concentrate.  He called my house the Maddox place.  “So…you know something about where I live?” I ask.  “Did you know it’s haunted?  What’s the kite for, besides chasing kids out of your yard?  What makes me a witch?”

Sir William looks at me.  He has grey-blue eyes under rather bushy brows, and I realize I’ve been calling him Sir William as if he was a knight, because but for a sword and armor, he looks like one.  An aged one, but noble nonetheless.  I wonder if he minds.  At length, he says, “Shall I answer one at a time, or all at once?”

It’s getting hard to concentrate without the car, and I have to let the words roll around in my head for a moment before they make sense.  “Sorry.  One’s good.”

“You certainly know how to keep an old man entertained.  What do you want to hear about first?”

“The kite.”  My butt is cold; I shift to a more comfortable lean.

Sir William tells me about his fighting kite Ramona, and of summer afternoons spent slicing children’s kites out of the sky down by the lake.  “You might think I’m just an evil old codger, but the boys line up to challenge Ramona whenever I’m there.  One lad built a box kite with metal framing, no less.  Ramona cut him down in two skirmishes.”  I laugh.  A lot.  I can’t wait for summer.  “You planning to leave your car out there?” he asks, nodding toward the road.  Dr. Zheng’s Saab is barely visible from the porch, a smear of silver on the white and brown landscape.

“Oh, right.  I should call Dr. Zheng and tell him about that.”

“Dr. Zheng is…?”

“It’s, um, his car.  He stays at the house.  With me.  He’s not my regular doctor.”  I stand up and turn in a half-circle; the motion pushes the pink clouds back again.  “My regular doctor is Doctor Hu,” I tell him.  Why I mention Josie is a mystery to me, it just falls out of my mouth.  “Is there a phone?”

“Tinpot, phone,” Sir William says.  The Australian sheepdog that I noticed earlier has been sitting at the foot of the porch this whole time, and he pricks his ears, rises and trots up the stairs.  The door has a modern-looking lever-style handle, and just like that the dog lets himself into the house.  “Tinpot takes care of ‘most everything,” Sir William says.  “I cook and clean, and the dog handles ‘most everything else.”

“I can cook,” I say randomly.  “I could make lunch.”

William looks carefully at me.  Maybe I’m crazy, and I’ve come to poison him and take his car.  That’s what it looks like he’s considering, with that assessing look.  “That sounds all right, then,” he says, wheeling his chair around.

“What do we have?” He leads the way to the kitchen, which has low counters and a high ceiling and walls with lots of postcards and photos on them, and I poke around until I find fixings to bake a dish of macaroni and cheese.  Fresh Wisconsin cheddar, yum!  I tell him about Molly’s mac and cheese recipe, which is wonderful just like everything else she cooks, and once lunch is in the oven I use the cordless phone that Tinpot brings to call Dr. Zheng.  He seems annoyed when I tell him where I am, and even more annoyed when I tell him to bring a tow truck.

“Tinpot, fetch my reading glasses and scrapbook, if you could,” William says.  “I’d like to show Lady Lexi some things, while that damned fine-smelling dinner bakes up.”

The dog is back in a few minutes with Sir William’s scrapbook, and we adjourn to the den.  I guess it’s a den, anyhow.  Sir William has a couch and an empty spot under a lamp where a wingback chair would be, that’s clearly where the wheelchair parks.  There’s no television, just a fireplace.  There is a big vacuum-tube style radio in the corner though, with books piled on top of it.  The room smells like tweed, and there’s a china cabinet that appears to be full of Scotch.  He settles me onto the couch and Tinpot arrives with Sir William’s glasses carried delicately in his teeth.  Sir William praises the dog and ruffles his fur gently.

“That’s so cool,” I tell them both.  “I don’t like dogs on principle.  But he’s not a dog, I like him.”

I get an over-the-glasses wink.  “Let’s see what I know about your house,” Sir William says, opening the scrapbook.  “It was empty when I homesteaded here, but since I quit walking I sometimes paint the town with a ravishing older lady by the name of Constance Smith, Connie to her friends.  She actually lived in that very house, as a boarder during the Second World War.”  Sir William looks at me over his glasses again.  “Convenient, eh?”  He puts the glasses back up, holds up the scrapbook so I can see what’s in it.  The pictures are black and white photos of my house, maybe in the Forties, mixed in with pictures of other local homes.

“It was built in 1928,” I say.  “That’s all the realtor lady knew.”

“That ain’t all Betty knew,” he scoffs.  “That’s just all she told you.  I’ll give her a tongue-lashing for that when I see her.  She means well, of course.”

“I wouldn’t have been scared away just because it was haunted, though.”

“Is it, now?”  The glasses go down again,  “Now that is something.  Have you met your tenant?”

“Sort of.  There are more than one.  I haven’t seen the Chinese girl for a while, but there are at least two others.  I think one of them is the lady of the house.  She floated ’round the bed last night.” 

Sir William grunts.  “Five’ll get you ten that’s Marion.  Marion Maddox was always the lady of that house, and always will be, I’m sure.  It was her husband’s money that built the place, but it was her soul that made it come alive.  They built it as a party house, Marion and Henry did.  They lived in Chicago, a young pair of partiers who made it through the Depression with their lifestyle intact.  Happy couple, I’m told.  Marion loved it up here so much she spent most of her time at this house, and when Henry died overseas in ’32–bad heart, they said–she sold the Chicago house and moved up here full time.

“She married again in ’37, to a fellow by the name of Brantley Foster.  He was in a similar business as Henry.  Couldn’t tell you what it was.  It took him on a lot of business trips, from one side of the country to the other, overseas during the war, even.  Hard to see why Marion married him; from what I hear she almost never saw him.

“A few years after that–this would have been on around 1940–it turned out that was just as well.  Something happened to Marion.  Until ’40 she was as she had been married to Henry Maddox.  She brought her friends up from Chicago and in from New York City to have their parties, and she went and saw them.  Great fun.  That year, though, she stopped going out.  Came up to Arcadia and stayed here.  Stopped entertaining, too.  I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure, but Connie says that Marion told her friends she didn’t want to see them any more.  She wrote to them, but that was the only contact she’d have with them.  Says she treated Brantley like dirt, too.  Yelled at him all the time, wouldn’t let him stay in the same room as her.  Funny stuff.

“That’s about the same time Connie started boarding with Marion.  She shooed all of her friends and husband away, and then took in a boarder.  The other strange thing, Connie says, was the building.  Five or six years she had workmen up at that house, coming and going.  Connie says they worked mostly in the basement, and Marion couldn’t abide having them around.  Wouldn’t let them be in the same room as she was, if they were up in the house.  Connie was a boarder, but she wound up being a companion for Marion, too.”

“What did she build?” I ask, thinking of the passage from my room to the kitchen.  There are other passages in my house, too.

Sir William shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  I wasn’t there.  And Connie never said.  We could go over and ask her one day, I suppose.  You’re fixing the house up, of course?  Restoring it without destroying it?”

I nod.  “What did Marion drive?”

“Funny question.  I have no idea.  Connie said that Marion used to take long drives, all around the state.  And all of that stopped a couple of years later, when the war got going.  I imagine the work stopped because she couldn’t find the boys to do the work.  Why she quit going out, I don’t know.  Connie did the shopping for a while, with the car, and when she moved on, she says Marion had a boy deliver her groceries.

“In the summer of 1946, a salesman found his way out to the Maddox place.  Lord only knows how or why he thought he could sell something to the town recluse.  Didn’t matter, since he never got the chance.  No sooner did he get out of his car and set foot on the porch, than Marion comes out the front door with a pistol in her hands.  A damned flintlock, if some stories are to be believed.  She yells at him, throws curse words at him.  No one knows for sure what was said.  He gets back to his car and throws himself inside, but she gets a shot off at him anyway.

“The bloody pistol explodes in her hand.  She lost the hand, and flying bits of the gun mangled her face.  She was blinded instantly, and died before the doctor could be fetched, right there on the porch.”

“Well, that’s an unpleasant ending.”

“I never said it was over,” Sir William says.  “Poor Brantley comes home to a dead wife and an empty house.  He does manage to retire on her inheritance, and not a year passes before he’s living there with a sixteen-year-old Chinese girl named Opal.”

“So that’s who she was…” I don’t meant to say that out loud.

William doesn’t pause.  “This particular girl had a bad time in that house.  From what I hear, she hated it here, hated the house, hated the weather, and, after a while, hated Brantley as well.  They say she came into town to do the shopping dressed to the nines in traditional Chinese clothes, and she was bitter as nails to everyone she met.  She barely spoke any English, and made no effort to learn.  Poor Brantley; some guys have no luck with wives.  Opal died in 1950.  Choked to death on a sunflower seed, on the porch, I’m told.”

“Note to self:  stay off the porch.”

“Here’s the funny thing; folks I’ve talked to swear up and down that old Brantley found himself another young girl not long after Opal was buried.  But when he moved out of that house in ’55, he was traveling alone.  Girl just up and disappeared.  No one even knew her name.”

There’s an engine in front of the house, a wheezy Chevy big-block from the sound of it; Dr. Zheng has arrived.  I go outside to meet him and get there as he climbs out the passenger side of a rusty red and white Chevy tow truck.   He’s barely polite.  It hadn’t occurred to me that he would be, but he’s actually really pissed off.  “What the hell is the matter with you?” he hisses.

“Hardly professional,” I chide.

“Take this,” he snaps, holding out a little pill cup.  I keep making fun of him for using them, but he insists.

I take it from him, but don’t put it in my mouth.  It just means more pink clouds, and maybe I’m not in the mood.  I want to stay with Sir William for a while.  Dr. Zheng is staring at me, waiting.  I hold up the pill between two fingers and say, “Prostognockis!”, quoting the first Three Stooges doctor scene that pops to mind.  He keeps staring.  “Cotton!” I try, getting an equally blank look.  “You remember, don’t you?  You’re old enough for the Three Stooges.  They’re tree surgeons, and they get mistaken for real surgeons.  But of course, it pays well, so they take the job anyway, and make a huge mess of things.  You don’t remember that one?” 

He just keeps staring sternly, even though I’ve just told him exactly what’s on my mind.

“You make me sad,” I say.  I put the pill in my mouth and swallow it dry, and immediately wish I hadn’t.  Why did I do that?  It’s just going to make me loopy again, and I don’t want to be loopy.  “See you tomorrow,” I say, and sit back down on the stoop.  The pink clouds coalesce quickly, saving me from crushing grief which wasn’t all that crushing.  In fact, I was fine, wasn’t I?  No, not possible, I can’t be fine, Ren’s gone…I’m going to go talk to the goats, that’s what I’m going to do.  Swish-click.

Lexi hadn’t slept under the covers of her bed since Ren had died.  She couldn’t bear being under there alone, couldn’t sleep like that.  When it got too cold to lie on top of the blankets, she grabbed one side or the other and folded them over herself.  The scratchy top surface of the duvet didn’t evoke the same depth-charge explosion of loneliness and insomnia.  She’d tried sleeping with the blanket upside down, but her subconscious wasn’t fooled.

It was like this; when Ren had died, this empty space had opened up inside of her, a great howling whirling vortex of nothing.  It was always there, swirling around threatening to suck the rest of her in, threatening to tear her to pieces.  She’d been over and over the similes; it was a tornado in her head, it was a hole in some massive psychospiritual dam that was leading slowly, inevitably to its collapse, it was a drain she was swirling around and around, but never going down.  It was just a void.  Some days she barely noticed it, thanks to the pink clouds.  This morning she had nothing to do but stare into herself, into that primal scream frozen in time.  It seemed to get larger, as if it would swallow her whole if she didn’t at least do something, find some taskie or busywork or some other sort of armor.  But there wasn’t any armor.  There was nothing to do but move.

So when she awoke, early, wrapped up in a duvet taco, she threw the covers off and started to run.  Lexi didn’t have anywhere to run to, so she just charged out of her room and down the stairs and into the library, where she surprised Teague and Amy-Ann who were stalking some piece of fluff and scattered when she burst into the room.  Lexi went right past them.  Moving wouldn’t make the storm in her head go away, but if she could go the same speed it would cancel out, and she’d feel better.  There were a lot of thoughts behind the storm, and she wanted to see them.  She needed to move without stopping, for as long as it would take to bring her back off of the edge.  Through the TV room, then down the back hall and into the kitchen, where Dr. Zheng was sitting at the table.  Lexi paid him no mind, turning, turning, grabbing the jamb of the secret staircase to her room and pounding up it until she was back where she started. 

When she jumped across the bed she nearly stepped on Malice, who barely moved, and she kept going out into the hall again.  She was on the edge of that vortex now, she was looking into it and couldn’t see anything on the other side, and when she couldn’t see anything on the other side she wanted very much to die.  Lexi didn’t want to kill herself, just to die–and maybe that was the only way to fill the void.  She didn’t like feeling that way, so she kept running, to come down from that frightening boundary, to get back to where she could see the rest of herself on the other side of the crater Ren had left.  A drive would have helped, would have been even more motion, but Dr. Zheng had made sure she couldn’t get the keys to his rental.

This time she ran down the stairs to the first landing and then up the other side, to the other half of the house.  There were no stairways to the first floor from here, but there was the attic.  Lexi jumped for the cord dangling in the middle of the hallway, pulling the trap door down with her weight, and she grabbed the stairs and unfolded them, scrambling up the old wood as if she were being chased by demons.  She was in the attic in seconds, able to run the length of the house if she wanted to, without stopping.  And she did.  The attic had a peaked roof, like many of them this age did, but it had been partly finished, with a floor and some insulation, and she had discovered stairways into her room and two others as well, hidden under their own little trap doors.  They led into the closets.

Lexi ran from one end of the attic to the other and back again twice, three times, and then jumped up on a garment box full of pillows and linen and turned it over.  Pillows scattered in a silent, bouncing wave.  She could see down into the vortex if she looked inside now, could see all the way down for the first time, and coiled at the bottom was a snake made of anger, a black scaly thing that took up the entire space with its coils.  She had subconsciously known it was there, somewhere back in her pink fog, had known that it had been there for years, even before Ren had died, maybe since her father had died, but it rarely stirred, rarely had the energy.  Now it was restless, feeding on her hurt.  She needed something to weigh it down, something to channel its energy into because if it got strong enough to come up out of that vortex she wasn’t sure if it would destroy her or whatever else was convenient.

It was calm now.  She could feel the snake down there, but it wasn’t moving.  Lexi didn’t want a pill this morning, needed something else to keep her from going round the vortex, and there was something in her mind, something she’d dreamed about.  The basement, that was it.  Something in the basement.  Of course, with all the snow, she wouldn’t be able to get into the basement; the only door was outside, and it would be buried.

No, that wasn’t right either, was it?  Was it?  Lexi couldn’t remember.  There was some bogle chattering in the back of her mind that she had to get into the basement still.  She scanned the attic, all of the shelves part-full of things she and Ren had collected.  Too much of it was in boxes; she needed to get it all out.  Later, though.  On the way downstairs, she ran her fingers over Ren’s saxophone, and took a moment to take her compound bow out of its case.  The red fiberglass made her smile.  It was a nice bow.  She and Ren had both gotten them to play with, and then entered several four-by-four obstacle course contests which included canoe and target shooting stages, just for an excuse to use them.  Ren had been a horrible shot; she was somewhat better.  Funny thing was, with guns they were the opposite; she could barely hit a target with one of Ren’s pistols.  Practice was the key, of course, but Ren’s guns were the first things Ian had taken out of the house–thank you, suicide watch happy-squad.  Shooting the bow would be nice; that was a thing that would keep her occupied.  She drew it a few times, testing her somewhat less-than-optimal strength.  Exercise; she needed that, too.

But first, the basement.  Actually it could prove to be exercise on its own.  She took the attic staircase that led into her closet, and from there slipped down the secret staircase to the kitchen, walking where she knew the creaks weren’t.  There was some vague memory that maybe the ghosts had been showing her both hidden passages and how to avoid the creaks, but she couldn’t remember exactly.  She went into the TV room, thinking of the basement.  There was a snow shovel on the porch, she knew, so she could dig a path if she had to.  But there was something else…there was cold air blowing across her ankles, that’s what it was.  There weren’t any windows that low, so the air was coming from someplace.  The house had drafts, but this wasn’t one of the regular ones.

She wiggled her toes in it and followed the funny little breeze to the wall.  Knowing why and not knowing why at the same time, she pushed on the wall, and a door popped open.  Had she known there was a door here?  Of course she hadn’t.  There was something vaguely familiar about it. 

Behind the door was a hall with mirrors for walls, ceiling, and floor, and beyond that a staircase leading into–surprise!–the basement.  It came down in a little wine cellar, which she and Ren hadn’t explored when they’d been in the basement prior to buying the house, and thus they hadn’t known there were inside stairs at all.  But it was a good thing to know.

The basement’s dirt floor was frozen solid.  Lexi got a funny prickle in her toes and a shiver up her back as she walked on it, and imagined that there were murder victims buried underneath her floor.  The thought made her smile without managing to be truly creepy.

The basement itself was strange; she and Ren had been down there.  The floor was still dirt, but the ceiling had been finished, with lath and light fixtures.  It was divided into rooms, but the walls themselves were deteriorating rapidly.  She could probably knock most of them down with some healthy body blows.  There were metal house-jacks in place in a few spots, where it looked like structural bits were getting weakened.  Time to pour some concrete, Lexi thought.  Come summer, anyway.  The thought of serious home improvement made her smile, too.

Closer to the ramp that led up to a large door going outside were more crates, a wall of four by five by nine-foot wooden blocks.  Forty of them, to be exact.  They were stacked two high, almost reaching the ceiling, and they masked the enormous basement’s size.  They contained Crane-Packard stuff.  Yes, of course, that was why she’d come down here.  She had the parts to build at least twenty-six more of the V8-powered sports cars.  There were twenty-four Crane-Packards built, and these were the bits for their brothers and sisters, everything needed to build them except the frames, which were at the warehouse.  They hadn’t even gotten halfway through the supplies.  Lexi decided that she ought to build at least one more.  Ren would like that.  She promptly forgot about the cold that was numbing her feet through her socks, and about breakfast.

There was a crowbar on the dirty floor, where it had been dropped who knew how many months ago.  She picked it up–it was a cool, ultralight titanium crowbar that Ren had ordered through some catalog.  He had always liked silly things like that.  Somewhere, she had an umbrella with vent on top, to prevent it from blowing inside out, from the same catalog.  Lexi pried the side of the crate closest to her open, and saw naked engine shortblocks neatly packed in wood and sawdust, and smiled.  “Hel-LO, nurse,” she said.

Swish-click. I wake up in the middle of the night.  My pill has worn off completely, taking the pink clouds with it, and I want to dance.  Dancing seems like a good way to end a rather eventful day (which, technically has already ended, but this is not a time to argue with myself).  There’s no sign of my ghost, and I hope that learning her story hasn’t chased her off.  I like the idea of having a haunted house; there’s something comforting in it.

I don’t turn any lights on as I make my way downstairs.  Skulking about in the dark is fun.  At least one cat follows me, but I can’t tell who.  I find my way to the ballroom; the stereo is on the floor in a corner.  I put it in there some time ago, and set up a speaker in each corner of the room, but never got around to hooking up the subwoofer or dancing.  What a waste of a ballroom!

Tonight is the night to fix that.  My eyes adjust to the dim light, and I can see well enough to load the CD changer with one of the CDs Cygnet sent me.  She’s sent me songs for myself, and songs for Ren, and I can dance to all of them.  I squat in front of the stereo in anticipation.

The first song to play is Oingo Boingo.  The first strains of “Dead Man’s Party” fill the ballroom, and then the whole first floor as I turn the volume up, up, up.  Dead man’s party, indeed.  Perfect!  I’ll dance for Ren, that’s what I’ll do.  Maybe then he’ll come and visit, like so many other dead folk have been doing.  Surely he knows how badly I want to see him.

It feels good to move.  I’m rusty–it’s been too long since I used my body, and I’m distressingly out of practice.  For a while my feet don’t know where to go; they usually pick a path unerringly.  Oh, well.  I stretch and twist, following whatever steps come to mind next in a corkscrewing path across the long wood floor.  I wonder how long it’s been since my ballroom was danced in.  Too long, in any case.  The kinks begin to loosen as I relearn the familiar tricks of balance and motion.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to dance.  “Don’t run away!” I sing along with Danny Elfman, “it’s only me!”  Ren liked this song–so do I.  I can’t even remember which of us this CD belonged to originally.

Before the song’s half through I’m jumping and half-running from one side of the ballroom to the other, my feet sketching complicated patterns on the parquet.  I heel-toe, I step and stomp, I pop-turn and bounce.  I’m inspired by Janet Jackson and Ray Bolger (you know, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz) and Curly Howard.  More songs follow as the player picks music at random from what was in there; Shriekback, Hanzel Und Gretyl, Cibo Matto, Siouxsie, and other wonderful, bouncy or moody or twirl-able things.  It’s a good thing.  It’s a very good thing.

I know when Dr. Zheng arrives, because he turned on every light on his way downstairs.  He watches me dance for half of a song.  It inspires me to move even more, knowing that someone’s watching.  On some level I think (hope) that Ren is watching too, but if Dr. Zheng is my audience, that’s good enough.  He needs to see this, if he wants to know more about what’s going on in my head.  It would be fun if he’d dance too, but I doubt he has it in him, really.  It takes a special sort of madness to dance to 16 Volt, anyway.

Halfway through a really cool song called “Motorskill” Dr. Zheng turns on the ballroom lights and walks toward me.  He’s actually purple.  His short black hair (what’s left of it) seems to be standing on end, and he’s purple with rage.  Apparently Dr. Zheng isn’t a four-in-the-morning person.

He comes like a bull, not speaking (not that he’d be audible over the music anyway), fists clenched at his sides.  He’s a few steps away when I see the hypodermic in his right hand.

“Don’t do anything I’m going to refuse to forgive you for,” I tell him.  I’m not yelling, but my voice is pitched such that it carries over the music. 

Dr. Zheng lunges at me; I bounce backward, but he grabs my left wrist with his left hand in a painful grip and yanks me back toward him, pulling me onto my knees.  I try to stop the hand with the needle, and he kneels forward, dropping his weight on top of me.  I don’t like being physically overpowered; it makes my heart race in a bad way, makes me want to panic.  Bad, bad, horrible things have traditionally happened after I am outmuscled, and some part of my brain goes into reptile, kill-or-flee mode.  Not that it does me any good.  His arms are stronger than mine.  I close my eyes, squirm, buck, and finally scream, but my arm is bent inexorably back and a sharp pain in my shoulder tells me that I’ve lost.  Zheng lets me go and steps away, then turns the music off.

“You stupid, stupid shit,” I say, my voice as calm and deliberate as I can make it through rapidly encroaching numbness.  My vision is already getting blurry.  This isn’t a pink cloud; it’s a warm, wet down comforter, enfolding me, crushing me with its weight and blotting out the light.  Everything shrinks into a dot, like an old TV, and then winks out.  Unfortunately, I’m not conscious long enough to formulate an immediate plot for revenge.

There’s no View-Master swish-click this time.  I just open my eyes, and it’s later.  I’m awake, the sun is up, and it’s hard to move.  Nothing’s holding me down, not that I can see anyway, but the goo seems thicker than usual.  Heavier.  I think about getting up, but nothing happens.  I’m lying flat on my back in my bed, under the covers, and I’m hungry and I have to pee and it seems like I’ve been here for a long time, but when I issue the order to get up, whatever happens isn’t enough to make anything move.

I close my eyes for a moment, and it’s nighttime again.  I know I’ve missed my pill, and the pink cloud is gone, but I still can’t move.  I’m still hungry, and my bladder is about the size of Jack Nicholson.  I listen, but I can’t hear Dr. Zheng.  And I still can’t move.  If I concentrate, I can lift my arms a bit, but it’s not like they’re connected to me.  I feel like a psychic trying to lift a couch ten feet away with her mind.  They weigh too much, and I let them drop back down.  There’s only one thing left to do; I wet the bed, and there’s nothing quite so angry-making as having to consciously piss yourself, in your own bed no less.

I can’t move, but I can be mad.  That doesn’t take any moving.  It seems like I should’ve let it go by now, that it was a long time ago, the little fight in the ballroom, but it wasn’t long enough and I can’t stop being mad.  All I wanted to do was goddamn dance.  That was all.

That.

Was.

All.

One little thing, I’d been miserable and unhappy and had decided to do something about it, inspired by Sir William and my little drive in the snow, and he had shot me full of drugs.  That was wrong, it was wrong wrong wrong, and I can’t stop being mad about it.  The more I try to not think about it, the angrier I get.  Driving calmed the angry-snake down, and so did dancing, until Dr. Zheng stopped me, and now it wants to turn on him instead.  I can’t stop wondering why he’d stop me from doing something that makes me feel better?  Isn’t that what he’s here for?

And another thing occurs to me, too:  It’s my goddamn house.  Guests who do not want to be awakened at three in the morning should sleep more soundly, or elsewhere.  I never promised to be a good host.  I’d like to be an entertaining one, but I don’t promise quality.  But first and foremost I need to know why I can’t do the things I want to do in my own house.  I suppose lately I haven’t been trying, and I also suppose that’s on account of the pink clouds they’ve been feeding me.  But the clouds are gone now, I’m in my room and my wrists hurt where Dr. Zheng grabbed me, and I can’t move.  I close my eyes again.

Swish-click. I wake up, someone has changed my clothes, and I am even angrier.  It’s a vibrating, humming kind of anger that makes me curl my fingers and toes.  It makes me want to scream, to run around in circles and hit my head against the floor.  This is what the angry-snake feels like when it’s loose.  I haven’t felt like this since before I met Ren.

I’m not alone this time.  The ghost is here, the older woman I saw in my dream of the car.  Marion’s her name, that’s right. Sir William told me about her.  She’s standing by the hallway door, which is open, and I can’t see the expression on her face.  I get out of bed and she disappears.

The blood rushes to my head as I stand up, and I see spots.  I think I’ve fallen over, but I haven’t, I’m in the hallway and headed downstairs and the angry-snake is free.  I have a handful of AA batteries, eight or nine of them, but I don’t realize they’re there until I go into the kitchen, see Dr. Zheng sitting at the table writing in his notebook, and throw all of them at him as hard as I can, without even saying good morning.

He ducks his head and batteries hit the table and his chair and the wall behind him, bouncing and zinging everywhere.  He jumps out of the seat, barking something in his authoritative doctor voice.  I don’t listen to him.  There’s an open toolbox on the floor of the dining room, and I grab a half-inch drive ratchet wrench and throw that at him next.  I’m out of practice, because that one misses too, although it does smash the purple cookie jar on the counter (and the ginger snaps in it) to bits with a satisfying ceramic explosion.

“Tremble!” I scream at him.  “Tremble, and depart!”  That’s my favorite line from all of Shakespeare.

Dr. Zheng is purple again, but he’s running away from me, through the kitchen and down the back hall of the house.  I stomp my foot at him, and the whole house seems to shake.  I hear something go crashing to the floor somewhere.

I don’t run after the good doctor.  I go up the secret staircase in the kitchen to my room, and listen to him.  His little Italian loafers clatter on the hardwood floors, up the steps and to the room he’s sleeping in.  He slams the door shut when he gets there, and then there’s a big shuddering crash, like he lifted the bed up and dropped it.  He yells something.  Maybe he’s grabbing another needle full of the heavy-duty drugs for me.

I won’t let him do that, though.  I rummage around in the boxes in my room.  Soon I’ve got a roll of pennies and a hammer, and I walk to his room like I haven’t got a care in the world.  It’s so much scarier to just walk when you’re mad.  My dad never yelled or got angry.  He just did his thing, quietly and calmly.  It’s hard to be like that when you’re pissed off and there’s a giant boa constrictor of rage whipping about inside you, but I try.

Dr. Zheng hasn’t opened his door when I get there, so I put the hammer down and throw myself against it a couple of times.

“Lexi, calm down!” he shouts through the door. 

He must think I’m trying to break it down.  I’m not.  I’m shoving pennies into the jamb, stacking them up close to the latch.  Every time I throw myself against the door it makes just enough of a gap to slip another penny in there before it flexes back into place.  Five or six is usually enough to wedge it tight enough that the knob can’t be turned any more.  It’s one of those great college-dorm pranks that I paid good money to learn.  Who’d have thought it would have a real-world application?  I get eight of them in there, and tap in a ninth with the hammer.  Another nine at the bottom, and now Dr. Zheng won’t be going anywhere until I let him out, which will probably take a crowbar.

That’s just as well, though.  I really, really want to hurt him, but I know it’s not a good idea.  If I see his face I’m going to throw something at it, something that’ll do some damage probably, so it’s best to have his face where I can’t see it for a while.

I can’t believe he wouldn’t let me dance.  There’s something not right about him.  The angry-snake is still lashing about inside of me, so I start running.  I run outside, barefoot.  There’s still a bit of snow on the ground, but that’s okay, the cold doesn’t bother me too much.  I have tough feet; I’ve always walked barefoot when I could, regardless of the terrain.  I run down the driveway to the road, and then back to the house, past the garage on the way.  Then I run all the way around my big house, looking at the leafless gray woods and the tufts of dead grass that poke up through the snow and feeling the cold air charge through my lungs.

After two circuits of the house, the snake is going back to sleep.  Good.  Good.  I go inside, my lungs and toes burning.  The first thing I hear is Dr. Zheng shaking his bedroom door and calling my name.  When I shut the front door, he stops.

I go to the kitchen and make myself some hot chocolate.  While I’m doing that, the phone rings.  “Wonderland,” I say, my voice chirpy, “This is Alex speaking.”

“Hello, Lexi.  It’s Glen Grant, from Late Apex magazine.  How are you?”

I remember him.  I’m actually kind of happy to hear from him.  He’s better to talk to than Ian or Zheng, anyway, and he doesn’t make me think of Ren, unless I try.  “I’m flying high on caffeine, Yellow Number Five, and a variety of other complex carbohydrates, Glen, thanks for asking.  I’ve just barricaded my doctor in his room and the asylum is mine.  I think I’m going to eat an entire cheesecake as an encore.  How are you?”

“Not nearly that active, that’s for sure.  So, listen, I was wondering if we could continue our conversation some time?  We talked a few weeks ago, but not for very long, and there are some other things I wanted to chat with you about.  People magazine is interested in doing a story on you.”

“Really?  What a silly thing to do.  I fully endorse it–let’s try it at once.”  I laugh.  Mixing one little movie quote in with everything else reminds me that it’s nice to be talking in my own words, too.

“Great!”  He sounds relieved, for some reason.  “So, how does next Tuesday sound?  I’ll drive up there.”

“What day is it today?  I suppose I’m not going anywhere anyway, so it doesn’t matter much.  What’re you going to drive?  Bring something cool.”

“Let me see.  We’ve got a 911 C4 from Porsche here at the office, that we’re doing a drive report on.  How’s that?”

That makes me giggle.  “It’ll get you in the door.  I’ll show you how much fun it is to drive a Mini in the snow when you get here.  We’ll race.”

“It’s a date,” he says.  There’s some tone in his voice I can’t quite identify, like he doesn’t believe I’ll give him a ride.

“Oh, no it isn’t,” I tell him.

I think about cars for a while after I get off of the phone.  The house is quiet, so I put on one of Cygnet’s CDs, but I don’t dance this time.  My thoughts are running in directions that I’ve been trying not to let them run in, and it hurts, but not in a way that I want to escape from.  I wander through the house.  My feet are getting cold, and at some point I started crying but I’m not sure exactly when that happened.

I’m standing in the library, with its big built-in bookshelves on all the walls, and the books that Ren and I brought with us still in boxes.  Too much of my house is still in boxes but it’s not time to unpack it, something’s not right.  I feel unfinished, like a house with a frame and drywall but no doors or windows, and I can’t go out in the world like that, with the wind blowing through me.  But unpacking isn’t going to fill that hole, I don’t think.

I sit in the wingback chair and look at the library some more.  I remember talking with Glen before now, and telling him that I was going to put a car in there, and now when I picture the library with the books on the walls and nice warm, soft light from the ceiling fixtures and new carpet and proper paint on the walls, I can see the car, too, and it’s one of ours.  It’s a Crane-Packard.  Ren and I designed and built twenty-four of the little bug-eyed cuties.  I could put a CP in the library. 

I could build a CP in the library.  Most of the pieces to do so are in the basement, thanks to that hilarious shipping error.  It’d be too big to get through the door when it was done and I’d have to knock out a wall to get it outside, just like old psychotic Henry Ford did.

That’s the sort of project Ren and I would’ve embarked upon after an evening of homemade fried chicken and store-bought marshmallows (or store-bought fried chicken and homemade marshmallows, depending), and the idea makes me smile.  I could do that, couldn’t I?  Some part of me wants to look around for someone from whom to ask permission, but there isn’t anyone I need to ask.  It’s my damned house. I already told Dr. Zheng that this morning.  I can build a CP in the library if I want to.

I could build a CP for Ren in the library.  Maybe then I’d see him, like I see Marion and Alison and the others who won’t name themselves.

That’s what I’ll do.

I smile again, and slide down to sit on the floor.  From some dark, cat-cozy recess, Malice slinks out of the dark and climbs into my lap, purring.  I think she agrees that it’s a good idea.

The house is quiet except for my music and Dr. Zheng’s plaintive knocking on his door once in a while.  Screw him.  It’s his turn to starve and piss himself.  I get up, eat some fruit, clear out some space in the library and drag a few small boxes of Crane-Packard parts up from the basement.  Then I cry again for a while, and fall asleep in the wingback chair.

Glen Grant sighed.  He’d put it off as long as he could, but it was inevitable:  eventually, he had to put his Austin-Healey away for the winter.  Upon arriving home from the office, he tackled the task methodically, thinking more about dinner than what he was doing as he drained the car’s fuel, put it up on jackstands, and carefully plugged the air intakes and exhaust pipe with steel wool to keep rodents at bay.  He went through a mental checklist, which contained eleven items, then pulled the Healey’s cover snug and went into the house, shutting off the lights behind him.  His condominium’s garage was two cars deep and one wide, and with the Healey now stored behind his vintage Triumph racer, he wouldn’t be opening the garage much until spring.

It was a yearly ordeal, prepping the little cream-on-blue roadster for its season-long nap, and it never failed to bum him out.  The very sight of the snugly-covered car in the garage spoke to him of time’s passing, and of opportunities not taken.  It always felt like the year was over.  It might as well be 1997.  At just this moment in fact, Glen would have cheerfully skipped Christmas through Easter and everything in between, just to get back to a season in which it was an option to take a drive in the Healey. 

He tossed a desultory pot pie into the oven, trudged to his study to check email, and saw that Molly Snow had already responded to the email he’d left twenty minutes ago.  Answering her question about the missing Crane-Packard inventory, he’d told her that Ren had mentioned much of it being accidentally shipped to the Arcadia house.  Didn’t Ian know it was there? 

“Doubt he noticed anything,” was Molly’s typed reply.  “When I walked the house, it looked like he was seeing some of the rooms for the first time.  He hasn’t explored the place at all.”  The response was time-stamped only a few minutes before; she must be at her computer.

He responded quickly:  “I got that impression too, when I was there.  Any idea why he wants to know about the inventory?”  He sent the response and waited, impatiently clicking the “Get Mail” button four times in five minutes, then getting up to check on the pot pie which he knew full well wasn’t ready yet.  By the time Molly’s response arrived, he was tempted to simply send her his home phone number and ask her to call him.  She might get the wrong idea if he did that, though.  And it would be a long-distance call besides.

“He said he was tying up loose ends.  Seems feasible.  But I never got to talk to Lex about it & my hinky-meter is starting to go off a little.”

My grandmother used to call things hinky, he typed quickly, grinning, then deleted it when he tried to picture her response.  She might laugh, but she might be insulted.  Best to stick to the matter at hand—he did have something to tell her, after all.  “I took a drive by the former CP factory yesterday,” he wrote.  “It’s not empty.  The sign has been taken down, but there were trucks there.  CP owned rather than leasing; do you know if they sold it?”

Knowing the response would be several minutes in coming, Glen turned on the television.  The evening news had just gotten to the sports cast, and he muted the television, wishing he had something to do with his hands.  He had a couple of Stromberg carburetors that he was rebuilding for a friend, but they weren’t clean enough to bring into the study.  Glen had the soul of a grease monkey, but was determined to keep his house from looking like a stereotypical gearhead’s pad.  There was no engine on a stand in the living room, nor any partially-rebuilt components taking up space on the kitchen table.  He kept the works-in-progress on the workbench in the garage, and on the rare occasion that he did bring something inside to work on it, he had a rubber mat to put down, to protect the furniture and the carpet.  Too much trouble for tonight.

Besides, to get the carbs he’d have to go back out to the garage, and the Healey was in the garage.  Glen pulled a book (a history of Jaguar) off the well-stocked shelf that surrounded the computer desk on two sides and leafed idly through it, mostly looking at the pictures, until Molly’s response arrived.

“The warehouse belongs to Lex & is being leased,” was her reply.  “As far as I know, anyway.  I could ask I. but he’s avoiding me again.  Asked another friend of L’s—former stockholder—to call but she was too druggy to tell him much.  I don’t like this.  I don’t suppose I could talk you into trying to find out what’s going on at the warehouse?” 

Glen smiled.  He’d just been thinking that it might not hurt to drive by again.  He wasn’t an investigative journalist by any stretch and had no idea how to go about it, but taking a quick drive past the place might not hurt. 

A second email from Molly arrived a moment later:  “P.S.:  Isn’t it just excruciating waiting for messages to arrive?  Next time we ought to just pick up the phone, so this doesn’t take all night.”

He tried to imagine the expression on her face as she typed that, and pictured a wry grin.  Impulsively, he typed his home phone number and sent it before he could second-guess himself.  Molly responded in kind.  Instead of actually calling though, they spent another half hour firing messages back and forth, exchanging facts.  By the time his pot pie was done, Glen knew that Molly lived alone outside of Boston, had a house that exceeded her means and a new Saab convertible thanks to a crafty divorce settlement, and played tennis to stay in shape.  She knew corresponding details of his life—his condo, his daily commute to the magazine’s offices in Detroit, his summer vintage car races and road trips.  Emboldened by the discussion, he even bragged about his skill in heating up pot pies, which made Molly write, “On one hand I’m glad to see a bachelor feeding himself; on the other, JESUS WEPT, MAN, DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S IN THOSE THINGS?  Hie thee to an Italian grandmother, at once!” 

They got briefly onto the subject of movies, but as she began listing the films she’d enjoyed recently—Sling Blade, Feeling Minnesota, Emma, The English Patient just last weekend—he was forced to admit that he hadn’t been to the movies since seeing Twister almost six months ago.  Luckily, Molly had seen it too, and they bantered a bit about special effects and Bill Paxton’s ability as a leading man.  Glen even talked a bit about his notion that the tornado chasers’ cars could be considered supporting characters, and she seemed to find that interesting.  Well, it was impossible to gauge interest based solely upon the words on the screen, but she didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand like the guys at the magazine had, either.  In fact, she alluded that she might even want to sit down and watch it with him when it came out on video, to see what he was talking about.

That led them to an exchange about the significance of trivial objects to different people, which led them back to Lexi.  “She comes alive when she talks about cars, I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Glen typed.

After the delay, which he was getting used to, she replied.  “Absolutely.  Dammit, I’m worried about her. “

“I’ll see what I can find out about the warehouse,” Glen replied.  “And I’m going up there on Tuesday to do an interview.  Hopefully she won’t be incoherent.”

Waiting for her response, he took his bowl to the kitchen sink and ran water in it.  When he got back, Molly had replied.  “Say hi to her for me.  And why don’t you call me when you get back?”

The front door opens some time near dark and Ian comes in.  He brings me a tasty-looking bowl of applesauce complete with a swirl of cinnamon, before he even takes his coat off, and I’m so touched that I’ve eaten half of it before I notice the nasty pill-taste.  “What did you have to go and do that for?” I ask him.  “You could’ve just given it to me.”

By this time Dr. Zheng has heard Ian, and he starts banging on his door again.  Ian looks up, with a frown.  “Charlie called me and said you threw something at him.”

“Of course I did,” I tell Ian.  “He shot me up with some kind of drug that knocked me out for two days.  Take him with you when you leave, or I’ll throw something else at him.”

Ian looks at me with a half-smile, like I’m kidding, but I don’t think I am.  He goes upstairs to free the doctor, and I stay in the wingback chair and wait for the pink clouds to come back.  I hope they don’t, but they do.  Yarbles.

Swish-click.  I’m still in the chair, and it’s even darker outside.  There’s a big crack-crash upstairs, and the sound of coins falling all over the floor.  I laugh a lot.

Pink cloud time.  I dream of Marion again.  I’m standing on a hill in the woods, probably somewhere behind my house where there are seven hundred acres that belong to Marion and now, presumably, to me.  She’s kneeling on the ground, which is covered by years’ worth of fallen leaves, and she brushes some of them aside to reveal a stone square in the dirt.

I kneel to see also, and see that it’s not stone, it’s mortar.  Old, old mortar.  Marion brushes at the dirt and leaves around it, and it falls away like sand to reveal that it’s the top of a chimney, sticking out of the ground.  I look into the chimney, but it’s full of dirt as well.  I open my mouth to ask her why, why there’s a chimney buried in the ground in her (my) woods, but nothing comes out and the dream breaks up.

Still in the chair.  My legs have fallen asleep, but it’s daylight again.  The clouds are angry and solid gray, like they’re full of snow.  They probably are.  The library is cooler than usual, and I have a disconnected thought about getting some kind of weatherproofing for the windows.  The thought is sucked down into pink goo.

I hear voices in the kitchen, so I get up and walk through the TV room and down the back hall to hear them.  It’s Ian and Dr. Zheng and two voices I don’t know.

“What did she do?” a female voice asks.  It’s a whispery voice.

“She was twirling in the ballroom, as if she thought she was in a nightclub.  Perhaps it would have been more constructive to ask her why she was doing it, but at the time I saw that she was out of control and she was going to hurt herself if she continued.  I restrained her.  When she woke up, she attacked me,” Zheng says.  “She’s talked threateningly before, but this is the first time she’s become violent.  She threw a wrench at me.  When I went to my room to get another Thorazine shot for her, she locked me in.”

Thorazine?  He gave me Thorazine?  I almost get mad all over again, but my pink cloud keeps the angry-snake hidden and asleep.

“She jammed pennies into the doorframe,” Ian says.  “It wedged the latch in so tight I had to knock them loose with a hammer and chisel.”

The other unfamiliar voice, loud and very everyone’s-buddy like John Goodman’s, says, “I’ll keep an eye on my loose change.”  He sounds like he’s trying not to laugh, too.

“Your car keys, too.  She stole my car Wednesday.”  That’s Dr. Zheng.

“I thought she was on downers?”  That’s the new voice.

“She is.  She got about five miles before she wrecked it.  I wish I could stay, to work with her some more.  I’ve got a journal article partly written, but I’m afraid that her hostility toward me is going to make it impossible for me to do any further study.  If you could send me updates though, I’d appreciate it.  I’ll leave her file and my notes, so you can read through the patterns that that I saw.  I’m not sure what caused her to finally turn on me, but maybe you’ll see something that I didn’t…”  That’s Dr. Zheng again.  It’s getting hard to follow the conversation.

“As long as she gets her pill, she’s fine,” Ian says.  The female voice asks another question, and he answers it, but I lose track of what they’re saying until Ian says, “The plan is to get her out of this house and closer to Detroit.  I’ll be able to care for her better there.”  What?  I don’t want to move closer to Detroit.  Not that I don’t like Detroit, but I like my house, too.  When did I agree to move to Detroit?  I don’t think I did.  They seem to drop into mumbles again.  “Help yourself to anything in the fridge,” Ian says.  “I can tell you how to get to the store.  We have a lot of the basics already, but you should stock up before the snow really sets in.”  He’s right about that.  I look out the back windows at the steely storm clouds again.  Ren and I moved up here partly because of the snow.  I hope for a brutal, evil snow.  A snow that’ll wipe out the whole world, figuratively.

“It’s already snowing,” the woman says.  “A little late to tell us.”

“No, it’s barely started.  It’s supposed to be a bad one.  We’re leaving tonight, so we don’t get snowed in.”

Amy-Ann brushes past my legs, rubbing her scent on me, and then goes into the kitchen.  Ian and the new guy say something about touring the house, and I hear three sets of feet clump off toward the foyer, then upstairs.

When they’re up, I go all the way back around the house, through TV room and library and foyer and ballroom and dining room, and enter the kitchen from the opposite side.  The woman whom I heard talking is sitting at the table.  She’s tiny, with short dark hair and cool low-budget goth-girl clothes and makeup.  She turns to look at me and her eyes are a wonderful deep dark blue.  I think she’s close to my age, but with her small frame and round face and big eyes she could pass for anything between thirteen and thirty and I like her instantly.  I want to say something to her, but the pink goo makes it hard and that’s kind of frustrating.

She gets the first word.  “Hello, Miss Crane.  I’m Nicole.  I’m Dr. Sharp’s assistant.  We’re going to be replacing Dr. Zheng.”

That makes me smile, and she smiles back.  There’s something funny and contradictory about a smile on a goth girl, but it works.  I also like that Ian is getting rid of the rotten doctor.  “Welcome…to my little winter wonderland,” I say.  “That would make me…Alex.  Alex in Wonderland.”