Victoria Blackwoodstone had not taken her husband’s name. One didn’t, in her family; but nor had her husband Dmitri taken hers—his name had been Blackwood, and hers Blackstone—so, it seemed the most logical to simply combine them into a truly aristocratic length.
As she always had, Victoria’s May had been spent cheerfully directing other people as they packed for her. Being a vampire, her husband was dead to the world during the day (as much as he liked following her orders); however, he had owned a small apartment building since coming to America, and Victoria hired various of the residents to help her with the work of packing up to go stay in her family manse for the summer. Many of them had known her since she had married their odd landlord.
The general opinion, from the seventy-year-old black queens in 1Z to the Dominican immigrant family in 4A, was that Dmitri had been a very good landlord, as landlords went. Itemised receipts breaking down exactly why rent was what it was were mailed out every year, and despite the inherent fussiness of a historical building kept to museum quality, and the rules (there were a lot of them), he’d fought for them during times when no one else was, from being the Designated White Man when the cops came calling on black tenants in the twenties (and onward), to actually physically ejecting homophobic families attempting to remove the possessions of a tenant dead from AIDS in the eighties, to halting rent entirely during the first Covid quarantine and quickly implementing masks and handwash stations, and having the building assessed and an air circulation and filtering system carefully put in. His wife had been an addition in the nineties, and she had proven to improve things even more, taking over the daytime management and finding the funds to hire a front desk staff again—something that Blackwood Keep had not had since 1929.
So, by now, everyone knew that May 1 marked the day when Mrs Blackwoodstone needed someone who could follow directions and pack boxes, that she moved up to her family’s house in Sleepy Hollow for the summer; and the abled residents showed up at her door in the morning. Today, it was the entirety of apartment 3H, which meant that packing felt more like a party. All of them were drag artists—Lorenzo and Tristan were queens, and Dean was a king—and were part of an all-queer all-gender beauty salon across the street, whose staff was spread across a handful of the apartments. Tristan was the tallest, being that Lorenzo and Dean were Sicilian, and so it was to him to reach things on top of the built-in shelves.
‘And I said, “honey, I may have back-rolls, but you have to look at that dye job in the mirror every day”,’ Lorenzo was saying, as he arranged books into a box. Tristan, who was handing him the books, holding securely to the railing of the brass ladder with one hand, had to pause to shriek with laughter.
‘Honestly, it’s the twenty-first century,’ Dean deadpanned, as he continued packing away the china in its padded storage bags.
‘I can name like twelve queens with back rolls that are on national TV,’ Tristan said. ‘Is this okay to talk about?’ he asked Victoria.
‘My dear, if fatphobia bothered me that much, I would have gotten liposuction already,’ Victoria said, not looking up from her crochet. ‘I have a husband, and not less than six lovers, that think I’m the most beautiful thing on wheels; and besides, if someone makes personal remarks about a lady in a wheelchair, who has done nothing to them, I can only assume they were brought up without any education in the higher conversational arts.’
‘Honestly, Victoria, you would slay as a bio-queen.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
‘She does banter like that at shows,’ Lorenzo said, ‘I watched her put a heckler down without looking up from her crochet, just like that.’
‘It helped that it was Hexx Typhoon,’ Dean said.
‘She’s a very dear friend, cousin Hexx, and I look like a very certain kind of White Lady.’
‘You mean you’re an Aunt of the first water,’ Dean translated.
‘Puts broken glass in her morning coffee,’ Tristan added. ‘She did that Auntie Voice and you should have seen the colour drain out of him. May I?’ he asked her politely.
‘You may,’ she said, knowing Tristan was rather good at imitating her Stentorian Aunt Voice.
‘ “Young Man”, she said, and you could seeeee the blood turning to ice. “I believe the name ‘Hexx Typhoon’ is on the ticket, not ‘Sossled Hokum-peddler’, and furthermore, you are blocking my view.” And she lifted up the cane and gestured for him to move out of her way, before doing that thing she does with it.’
They’d all seen her do it before. The punctuating tap-tap of her brass-tipped, skull-headed wooden cane after an order was, in some ways, more devastating than a shot. Lorenzo and Dean had completely stopped working, and Lorenzo was wiggling eagerly with a huge grin taking up half his face.
Victoria, obligingly, tapped her cane the way she had then, and the room exploded into delighted shrieks of laughter.
‘Did he slink out of the theatre?’ Lorenzo asked eagerly.
‘Oh, I know he slunk right out of the whole borough and back to hell, where he belongs,’ Dean opined, as Lorenzo cackled.
‘And then—this is the best part—and then, after getting a standing ovation, she just says, “Now, dear lady, you were telling us some very fine jokes about genitalia, and I should like to hear more of them”.’
The black phone on the end-table rang amid the laughter, and Victoria picked it up. ‘Blackwoodstone residence, Lady of the house speaking,’ she said, in her perfectly Trans-Atlantic diction. Her face broke into a beaming smile. ‘Michaela, darling! One moment—darlings, take a break, I need to take this call.’
Buring with curiosity—Michaela was one of those people you heard the name of a lot, but never saw—the three went through the kitchen and onto the balcony. It was a roomy balcony, with a hot tub tucked away in one corner, pretty tile on the floor. Automatically, Tristan grabbed the broom inside the outdoor closet and started sweeping, while Dean actually got out a box of clove cigarettes. Lorenzo got out his case of Nat Sherman Fantasias, Dean lighting a match for him before lighting his own.
‘Don’t do it for free, darling,’ Lorenzo called over to Tristan.
‘I’m doin’ it for a nice lady who can’t do it herself,’ Tristan shot back, flipping him off, sweeping the last of the pine needles off the balcony through the railing. Unlike most buildings, Blackwood Keep was detached, with six old pine trees marking the corners and two halfway along the long sides. They’d been planted with plenty of room to get their full size, and were over a hundred years old by now, more than tall enough to drop needles on the fifth floor.
Inside, Victoria was speaking to Michaela about a visit.
‘Oh of course, darling, of course Mumsy has room! We love guests—what does he need?’ She jotted things down on the monogrammed memo pad as she listened. ‘Mm, can I talk to him? Hello, poppet!’ she said. ‘Simply marvellous to meet you, darling! Now, cripple to cripple, what do you need to be a happy guest? We have a full staff at the manor and nothing is too much.’
⁂
Aix had heard Mike talk about Victoria, before the phone call, but he still froze up at being told to say what he needed to be happy, because it was—it always was—a trap. He was supposed to say he was easy, that he didn’t need anything at all, that he’d be happy with what he got; but now that stuck in his craw, because it was a lie, and he knew it was a lie, and he resented feeling pressured to harm himself for politeness’ sake.
‘I have IBS, the biggest thing I can’t have is anything in the allium family of plants,’ he said, in as much of a monotone as he could manage. ‘I’m very sensitive to sound, especially infrasound. I need a pretty firm mattress because my joints dislocate easily—’ He paused as Victoria interjected, and relaxed a little. ‘Yeah! Yeah, I have that too! Do I need a wheelchair—I do, actually, but I can’t afford—what do you mean, a spare one? I mean… I don’t know if it would fit me…’ His eyes widened. ‘Oh. Uh. Well, I guess it might then…. Thank you.’
Fixing them both lunch in the galley of the bus, Michaela smiled as she heard the signature sound of Aix being bowled over by Victoria’s force of Hostessing.
‘Oh, I have a clown—she’s weetiny, though. Nonono, not a teacup, no. She’s naturally just real small, Idunno why, she was a feral I took in. Oh, I don’t know how she gets on with other joeys, she was alone. She did okay with my friend’s cat, though, so I guess she’s been around them… wow, really? I’ve never even seen a photo of a Tummler, before…’
Pippin climbed up on Aix’s lap, beeping.
‘Oh hi—that’s her, I guess she wants to say hi, hang on…’ Aix unplugged his headphones, and put the call on speakerphone. ‘Hey Pippin, you wanna talk to Lady Victoria?’
Pippin beeped, and her Mask went into an expression of surprise when Victoria’s voice answered.
‘Well, hello, darling! Do you like other clowns?’
Aix mimed with Victoria’s words, explaining as well as he could that there were other clowns where they were going, knowing that clowns understood humans very poorly when the human was only a voice, like most animals. Pippin threw her hands up, laughing and beeping excitedly, her Flash going bright and her Mask gaining lots of happy colours, which was unusual because she was usually all black and white with little touches of blue.
‘Oh yes, we do like other clowns,’ Aix said, all smiles at Pippin’s delight.
⁂
By the time Victoria hung up with Michaela’s new find, she was rather excited to meet him. She called her family; while she was waiting for it to ring, the phone slipped from her suddenly nerveless hands, and she only had enough warning to lean back in her chair, so she wouldn’t fall out of it.
The phone receiver clattered over the table, and into her skirted lap.
‘Hello? Hello?’
They weren’t seizures. Victoria did not have any kind of seizure disorder, despite what most modern people might think of seeing her the way she looked to outsiders when this happened.
In daylight, her dark eyes were wide and staring, and covered over with a milky scrim; but in darkness, that milky scrim was a glow of light, faint and ectoplasmic violet.
She picked up the phone receiver with a will that wasn’t hers, speaking into it.
‘In the Underdark, he waits!’
On the other side, there was an attentive silence, waiting.
‘For all roads and no hame
‘In Domrak, he waits!
‘For priest of no sectary
‘In Khazad-dûm, he waits!
‘For open hand with no name.
‘In the Deep Roads, he waits!
‘For—’
The woman on the other side of the phone was already transcribing it onto the notepad by the phone, but the prophesying was interrupted by the sound of distant voices.
‘Oh my god! Mrs B!’
‘Call an ambulance!’
‘Hang on, let’s see who she was calling first…’ Someone picked up the phone. ‘Hello? Is anyone on the line?’
‘Hello, this is Sitrine Averay, I’m Victoria’s grand-mere,’ she said in her low, velvety voice.
‘Mrs Blackwoodstone is sitting in her wheelchair and is not responding and her eyes are open and glassy. Her pulse seems lowered and she’s breathing normally. What should we do to help?’
‘Just let her be, and write down anything she says. Do not call an ambulance, do not try and snap her out of it. Wait.’
‘Yes ma’am.’
Sitrine waited, heard this message relayed to the others, heard the sound of Victoria’s voice, lucid, and someone handed her the phone again.
‘Grand-mere? Who was it? It felt terribly local.’
‘It wasn’t a whom, but a what—you were prophesying, my dear not channelling.’
‘Or someone had already prophesied something and needed to tell me,’ came the riposte—of course it would, Sitrine thought, Victoria was Jewish, and had a no-nonsense view of that sort of thing happening to her. Ghosts using her to speak to the living was one thing, but prophesying was not on the menu. G-d hadn’t Chosen her for that sort of thing, and anyway the Age of Prophecy was over.
‘As you say, my dear,’ Sitrine said, tactfully; because Sitrine was not Jewish, Sitrine was an Averay, and had congress with the Dark Powers. But on this point, the Averays and Victoria had always disagreed, and always would; one tactfully moved on with the conversation.
‘We can look into it when I get there, I have another call coming through. Oh, the reason I called—Michaela and a guest are arriving, with the dearest little Pierrette—shoo, my dears, I’m perfectly fine, it’s all right—and I wanted to lend the guest one of my wheelchairs, the lighter aluminium one I used when I first came home, perhaps, since he’s not used to having one yet. I’ll call you back with particulars, ta ra.’
⁂
The landscape wasn’t changing every time Aix thought about it or questioned it, that was the first odd thing—odd but calming. He hated dreams of any kind, because nothing was ever solid about his surroundings, and it kept getting worse and more confining the more he noticed it, because it responded to his fear.
This was… not a strange place, he realised. It was dry, throat-stingingly dry the way only the desert could be—and dark, the sky blanketed with stars, hulking shadows of mountains a comforting closeness.
And quiet. Not a buzz nor a chirp, and no distressing infrasound—no motors, no fans, no air conditioners, no generators, nothing marred the silence.
It was wonderful. He’d spent years having to deal with infrasound grating his nerves, inescapable and sometimes randomly oscillating, and the relief was tangible. He could hear his own thoughts again, he could breathe….
K’na yzhrog
Whispered in the air, rumbled in the earth. The stars, somehow, shimmered and sang with it.
He smelled the sea, on that breeze, and went toward that scent, the scent of home….
K’na yzhrog
‘I hear you,’ he said, letting the wind lead him. ‘Where are you?’
K’na yzhrog
‘K’na yzhrog…’ he repeated, giving in to the human instinct to mirror, to respond to a call.
He saw the starlight reflecting on the waves, and realised he could run—this was a dream, he could run if he wanted to, he could even… he picked up speed, and stepped onto the air—he could even fly, though for him, flying was running on the air, stepping lightly enough to leave the ground. It was always the same, in his dreams where he could fly.
K’na yzhrog
‘What does that mean?’ he asked the voice. ‘Show me.’
He landed on the powdery sand of the shore, and began to trip lightly over the softness, until he was ankle deep in the surf, then waded deeper, the water warm with summer, pulling at him, strong and friendly like he knew the Pacific to be.
K’na yzhrog
A question—no, a request! He didn’t close his eyes—you never closed your eyes to the sea, she took it as hubris—but he concentrated. ‘You want me to help you with something,’ he murmured.
Thg. Yzhrog.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Aix said, wading farther into the water, because that seemed to amplify the connection. ‘What’s yzhrog? Show me. Show me yzhrog.’ He concentrated on the idea—not difficult, he was a lucid dreamer, which played havoc with his dreams usually—but for this, it flowed naturally. It helped.
He concentrated on the concept, knowing how this mind might view words as ambiguous, and how difficult abstract concepts were to convey, unless you knew every angle of them. Show me wasn’t just sight, it was touch and sound and emotion too, it could be any way to observe an idea, abstract or concrete. He knew ‘K’na’ might mean something that English only conveyed with tone or punctuation—there was something of relief in the response when he’d realised it was a question, then clarified that it was a request. K’na was a request-word.
So ‘yzhrog’ was the request itself. Was a verb, a verb you needed someone to do… for you? To you?
Why couldn’t this being come to Aix? Why were they reaching out to Aix? He stood in the water, then sat down, the tide neck-deep when he did that, and let the water’s pull help him think. It was a dream, he couldn’t drown, and the tide wouldn’t go up nor down…
His mind, formally trained in grammar and languages, returned to the core idea, observing the facts and methodically working through them.
‘You need a friend to verb you preposition implied. You can’t come to me, you can’t come to me so… you’re hurt?’ He imagined being hurt, unable to move—it was very easy, he was almost always hurt.
A sense that this was wrong, not the case.
‘You’re trapped?’ He imagined being bound by rope or chain (touch-able, ‘literal’), a promise or threat (not touch-able, ‘abstract’, ‘metaphor’).
Thg.
‘Aha! Where are you trapped?’
Water.
Aix laughed. ‘Alright, that one is on me. Most of this world is Okeanos, my friend, you’ll have to help me figure this out, hmmmm.’
But there were new queries, and Aix was delighted to feel curiosity from this unknown person. They were curious about Okeanos, which seemed to have more than literal meaning, and at friend they were delighted, relieved, and eager to meet Aix.
They were lonely, Aix realised; they were lonely and had never met a friendly person like Aix.
Wait, person like Aix? ‘What type of person are you?’
Not of this… time and location were overlapping concepts, or maybe time wasn’t a linear idea for this person. Aix offered the idea of ‘time’ being nebulous—some people saw it as a line, some a cycle, some probably saw it other ways. He tried to convey time in as universal a way as he could: planets moving around a sun, moon moving around the earth.
There was a rush of gratitude at this, the sort that meant Aix had answered a long-standing puzzle. Time was difficult in many dimensions.
‘Ahhh,’ Aix said, nodding. ‘We have a story for that. Well, more than one. Do you know,’ he asked, all eagerness to share the best thing about his race, ‘what a story is?’
They did not understand what Aix meant by ‘story’, nor did the explanation clarify anything.
‘Oh, my friend,’ Aix said, ‘you are in for a treat. But let’s find you first. You said you only see water. Has anybody made contact with you before? Can you tell me about them?’
⁂
Aix’s eyes were black and black was oozing down his cheeks, but he was, also, writing furiously on his laptop, fingers flying over the keys.
Michaela knew how to babysit a medium, and by now Aix had told her why he’d come into being a writer so late—instead of handing him a pencil, she’d opened up a new document on his already-open word processor and put his hands on that. And he’d started typing. She just waited, only making sure he wasn’t interrupted. She’d started recording what Pippin was doing too, because the little clown had gone berserk and was trying desperately to communicate with Michaela, and Michaela had no idea how to speak Pantomime at all. The best she could do was turn on her phone and start recording.
Aix suddenly came out of it—the black goo was gone, his eyes turned normal again, and he kept typing. Michaela stayed very quiet and still, letting him make the first move.
Pippin had been beeping and honking up a storm, and went very quiet as soon as Aix came out of the trance. Michaela kept her camera steady.
‘…I need to look some things up,’ Aix said finally. ‘There’s someone out there, in the ocean I think, asking for help. Why are you filming Pippin?’
Michaela stopped the recording, and showed him the video. He took her phone to look closer at the video, intense, then looked at Pippin.
‘You know what just happened?’
Pippin nodded, her Mask in a fearful shape. She came up to Aix hesitantly, as though touching him were now dangerous. Aix hurt, at that.
‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ he said softly. ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m okay, see?’ He offered his hand. ‘See, baby? It’s just me. It’s just your friend.’
‘What was she sayin?’ Mike asked.
‘She says the person out there is one of Big Mommy’s siblings. Big Mommy Jocosa?’ he asked Pippin, miming the ideas as he did. Clowns understood a great many words, but not reliably. You had to use Pantomime if you wanted to get anything across clearly. It was just like any animal. Humans were the odd ones for only using noise to communicate.
Pippin beeped, putting a finger on her nose in the universal clown mime for having guessed correctly.
‘Friend has been out there all alone for a long time, did you know?’ Aix asked her.
Pippin indicated yes; but there was a Game in progress. Sibling was playing Hide-And-Go-Seek, so nobody could tell the humans where sibling was, that would ruin the game.
Aix puzzled over that. ‘Friend is trapped there by more than Hide-And-Go-Seek rules, and lonely.’
Pippin’s Mask went into a Pierrot’s signature Crying, but then indicated that Aix had to go get them, then. Finding them in Dreamland wasn’t the same as Finding them in… well, Not-Dreamland.
‘Yeah, we gotta find them. I don’t know how to go back into that Dreamscape, but maybe when I fall asleep again tonight….’
‘This person grabbed ya but didn’t tell you where they were?’ Mike asked.
‘They’re in the ocean somewhere, way down at the bottom, so it’s almost impossible to say where they are,’ Aix said, looking over their notes. ‘They gave me some names of people that have encountered them, and that should pinpoint where they are. I kind of got the impression they exist…’ he paused. ‘Hey, have you ever read Flatland?’
‘Sure,’ Mike said.
‘I get the impression that if we’re flat shapes, he’s a three-dimensional one.’
‘Hmmm,’ Mike said, in a way that was familiar—Aix’s good friend, Sokeenun, hummed like that. ‘Lovecraftian. We should talk to Lady Sitrine—that’s Victoria’s grandmother. Though if you need somebody to help you search the ocean, I’d wanna talk to Heather, up Narragansett way. She’s a selkie—know what those are?’
‘Seal women,’ Aix said. ‘Take off their skins and turn human, put them back on and turn into a seal. They’re a kind of Water Folk, aren’t they?’
‘In one,’ Mike said, buckling her seatbelt once more and swivelling the driver’s seat, checking the mirrors as she spoke, ‘You’re very well-informed.’
Aix buckled Pippin up on the sofa as he answered, ‘SCA in my youth. Would like to get back to that, actually. Auntie Sokeenun lives up in Providence,’ he added brightly, settling down next to Pippin.
‘Ah,’ Mike said, ‘Victoria knows her, I think. Indigenous steampunk lady?’
‘Yeah, that’s her!’
‘Small world,’ Mike said with a smile. ‘You buckled in?’
‘Yes ma’am!’
Mike pulled out of the turn-off carefully. ‘We’ll be there soon. Pippin, you holler if he starts goin’ into a trance again, hear?’
Aix tried to convey this as Mike was speaking, and Pippin made a little salute, beeping twice in a way that clearly meant ‘aye-aye!’. Aix giggled, which delighted her, and Mike put on her music as they got back on the road.