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When Aix woke up, they had a splitting headache, and smelled blood, and couldn’t breathe; panic heaved them upright, and they had to quickly feel their face and check the date just to be sure they had hallucinated the past seventeen years, because the last time they’d had that bloody a nose, it had been because they’d just had four hours of jaw surgery. Thankfully, it wasn’t true, but Aix still had to spend a while grounding themself.
It helped that they could immediately hear the bustle of Manhattan, outside, and turning on the light revealed they were still in the guest room of Victoria’s penthouse, where they’d been staying for the past week. The soft, rosy light of the lamp caught in the foil of the Art Nouveau letters in the wallpaper. The room was decorated in a way that suggested to Aix the most frequent visitor was a child of some sort, and they’d never asked, secretly enjoying the vintage children’s décor—kids got much more playful décor than adults, and Aix liked it better.
Thinking about all that helped solidify reality and the present, so Aix carefully levered up, going down the hall to the bathroom and carefully, painfully trying to clear out their nose. The mirror showed crusted blood trailing down one side of their face to the ear, and they washed it off, disturbed. They were still at it when there was a very soft tapping on the door, and an English, male voice Aix had never heard before.
‘Are you all right, Aix? It’s Dmitri.’
Because Dmitri was only ever up at night, owing to his job working long distance for some kind of time zone that was a jillion hours ahead, Aix had never actually met him, or even heard his voice. It was a nice voice. Baritone, with a lovely smooth, dark timbre, hyperarticulate sibilants that suggested to Aix he had possessed a lisp once, and had carefully trained out of it. Should narrate things.
‘Bloody nose. Uh. Is Victoria up?’ Aix said, wincing as they tried to work the clots loose so their airways could clear.
‘If you had another dream, I expect she will be. I shall start some water boiling, there is camphor in the medicine cabinet. Do not tilt your head back.’
Despite his being both a man and a total stranger, Aix was surprised to find themself not afraid—possibly because Aix knew he not only cared for his disabled wife, but spoiled her and trailed around like a puppy dog after her. Aix was both pleased to bask in their happiness and a bit jealous.
Another surprise, despite the panic and the immediate need to focus on something other than the dream, Aix remembered all of it, about as well as though it had happened in real life, only moments ago. They carefully blew their nose as much as they could without doing themself a mischief, splashed their face one more time, and went back into the guest room, getting their tape recorder and saying as much of the dream as they could remember, just to be safe, before going down the creaking hall to the kitchen. There was barely any light, the curtains were all closed, but Aix could see well enough.
‘Uh,’ they said, seeing Dmitri quietly bustling around the kitchen in total darkness, ‘so… you’re a vampire too?’
He actually startled, which was a little weird. ‘A vampire?’
‘That’s what I call my motley collection of weirdness that basically gives me all the vampire weaknesses. Bright light gives me headaches, noise gives me headaches, I’m allergic to garlic… you know, vampire stuff.’
He chuckled behind his hand. ‘Ah, I see. And here I thought Victoria had told you.’
It was Aix’s turn to startle. ‘Told… told me what?’
He looked up from where he’d been carefully arranging tiny pastries on a decorative plate, and smiled, revealing a long, elegant set of fangs.
‘Ohmigod you’re that kind of goth!’ Aix said excitedly, and covered their mouth, then uncovered it and started flapping excitedly, beaming. ‘I’ve always wanted fangs,’ they confessed. ‘Permanent ones.’
He hummed, but he was smiling. ‘Come over here, pet,’ he said, motioning Aix over to the window seat. ‘Sit,’ he said, pushing Aix gently down. Aix sat. Dmitri went back to arranging pastries, letting Aix have a chance to look around the kitchen. It was a gas stove, so the blue flames lit the kitchen in a dim glow.
Rather like the blue glow of that temple, Aix realised as they watched it reflect on the copper of the kettle and the small saucepan on their respective burners. They didn’t know how long they watched it, but apparently they zoned out a bit, because the next thing they knew, Victoria was patting his hand.
‘Aix dear, come back,’ was the first thing Aix heard her saying clearly, and they blinked, shaking their head, looking down at their joined hands.
‘Sorry, just zoned out. Thinking.’
‘Your eyes were sort of a swirly glowing orange and you were repeating something.’ Victoria looked down at the notebook in her lap. ‘ “T’ka na tha”. Which, curiously, is the same thing that soldier was saying.’
Aix’s mouth tugged up on one side. ‘I have a feeling it translates into “Release me.” That’s pretty much the only thing Big Guy says to me with words.’
‘Aha,’ Victoria said, noting it down under her transcription. ‘Do you feel all right? Dmitri says you had quite a bad bloody nose—there’s steam now, if you want to lean over and breathe it a little? I’d put a bit of mint in it, to help.’
Aix pushed themself up, Victoria wheeling back to give them room, and went over to the steaming pot, leaning carefully over and trying to slowly breathe in through their nose. It helped a little, and by the third repetition they felt less panicky about how difficult it was to breathe through their nose.
‘Fuuuck, bloody noses are the worst,’ Aix muttered, sitting back down on the window seat. ‘Thanks, Dmitri—oh, where’d he go?’ Aix said, looking around. He’d just assumed Dmitri was still in the kitchen, but it was just Victoria and themself, now.
‘He had a meeting,’ Victoria said. ‘Don’t fret, though; he made sure I was here with you before he left. This sort of thing rather overwhelms him, he’s much stronger a psion than I am.’
‘…I’m not a psion though, so why is it me that gets the glowy eyes and stuff,’ Aix said, puzzled. By now, he knew Victoria herself was what Aix’s religion called an oracle—she got visions of events, usually events happening far away, sometimes in the past. She also could see what few ghosts there actually were in the world, and often helped them find peace in the traditional Jewish manner, which was far less hostile and combative.
‘Are you certain of that?’ Victoria asked, her Mid-Atlantic accent making it sound both polite and a bit wry, like everything she said.
‘Yeah?’ Aix said, ‘I mean, I don’t get visions, I don’t channel ghosts or whatevers… Victoria, I’m autistic, the regular kind of social stuff seems like psionics to me, there’s no way in hell I can do the regular kind of psionics. I can’t even tell when someone is being passive-aggressive!’
‘Didn’t you say your patron was Apollo? And that you laid the cards?’
‘That’s—that’s the cards, Victoria. Isn’t psionics supposed to be… more distressing than laying the cards, or… being extremely helpful during a ouija board session?’
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps your autism protects your mind from the harmful channels for the same reason it prevents you understanding social cues.’ She offered her sensible black handkerchief. ‘Oh dear, you’re bleeding again.’
‘Dammit,’ Aix muttered, taking the handkerchief and pressing it to their nose. ‘I really don’t want this guy to give me an aneurysm.’
‘Oh don’t fret, that’s not what the nose bleeding is,’ Victoria said cheerfully. ‘Can you carry the tea-tray to the kitchen table for me, darling? Let’s sit and chat about your dream.’
It took a few minutes to settle the plate of pastries and the black flower tea set, but Aix liked the rituals of Tea as much as Victoria, and soon they were settled.
‘So,’ Aix began, in a rather queenly, gossipy tone, ‘apparently it’s a sex game? The chains are sex bondage, not uh… non… sex… bondage.’
‘I see. But something went wrong.’
‘Yeah it’s… hang on, let me back up. So it’s like, a test? Sort of game? They indicated it was immersion language learning, they had to like, figure out how to communicate with a non-telepathic race well enough to have sex with one. That’s… not been going well, obviously.’
‘Until you.’
‘Until me!’ Aix said, rather pleased with themself. ‘I think that cheered them up quite a bit. Also, I told them about Squidgy, and they seemed kind of shocked? They wanted to know where he was, so I said he was with his adoptive family and they loved him very much. I… hope that was the right thing to say.’
‘The truth is always the right thing to say, you can’t lie to Them anyway,’ Victoria replied, and sipped her tea for a while. ‘Do try one of the cream puffs, they’re fresh. Dmitri made them tonight.’
‘And he bakes,’ Aix muttered, rather jealously, but took a cream puff. Victoria chuckled.
‘He made this tea set as well, many years before he learned to bake.’ She sipped her tea. ‘That was before he met me. Did your young man tell you anything else?’
Aix did not protest her wryly calling the being Aix’s ‘young man’. ‘Um, I got farther into the temple thing. Very art deco.’
‘Did you see any symbols?’
Aix thought about it. ‘Um… there was a wheel sort of thing. Or a star? Like this…’ They picked up the pencil and notepad Victoria had put on the table, and drew an eight-pointed stick-star with a circle going through the middle of the spokes. ‘Sorta like that? Um…’ It didn’t look right. They stared at it, and slowly put little crossbars at the ends of the spokes. ‘Yeah,’ they said, nodding. ‘There we go. That.’
‘Oh my,’ Victoria said, looking over at it. ‘That’s Azathoth’s seal. Did you get a look at your young man, or was he sort of formless?’
‘No he had hands, and a face. Lots of eyes, like a spider. And definitely mouth tentacles, like all the drawings of Cthulhu. The seal was on all the chains and… pillars? I guess those were like… bars? He held onto them like they were bars, like he couldn’t reach past them?’ Aix frowned. ‘They, not he,’ they corrected.
‘You’ve shared mindspace with this entity,’ Victoria pointed out, but gently—she, after all, wasn’t the trans person.
‘Yes but we didn’t… exactly… have a conversation about gender. Though you’re right, he did kind of flip through the whole sexuality department of my brain, so I guess my automatically starting to use “he” might be… indicative. Or maybe it’s just that “he” seems universal to them. I don’t know. Pronouns don’t matter to eldritch aliens, I suppose.’
‘Probably not,’ Victoria agreed serenely. ‘From what writings my cousins and I have salvaged from the ruins of Miskatonic, Azathoth is one of the more high ranking entities, as far as power goes—though that could simply mean he’s older and more experienced, or was born into a high social class, et cetera.’
‘It is so cool to meet people that are looking at this from a xenoanthropological perspective. I suspect the reason we communicate better with these fellas than everyone else is because we’re both approaching it using the appropriate scientific disciplines.’
‘The “soft” sciences.’
Aix wrinkled their nose, and Victoria chuckled.
‘I know, I know, a terribly gendered notion of the sciences, that. But nevertheless, the soft sciences deal with soft things—flesh, and brains, and so forth.’
‘Hmmm… well, since you gave it such a mad sciency description….’ Aix said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not approaching it from xenoanthropology, so much as xenoethology—I’m no good with humans.’
‘I’ve long suspected Aunt Jessamine’s “eccentricity” was autism,’ Victoria said thoughtfully. ‘She was fussy in the same way—only wearing one colour, never quite understanding how to socialise past a certain point.’
‘Oh gods, I hope she didn’t get abused.’
‘Not by her family, no,’ Victoria said, patting Aix’s forearm gently. ‘She was bullied by the locals—mostly shunning, it is New England—but not her family; and not mine either, once she met Uncle Percy. He thought she was splendid. Of course, he might have been autistic as well. And they had contact with Them—or what my family calls The Star People—but unlike most, suffered no ill consequence. There was a lot of speculating it was due to some sort of neurodivergence—that they were mad before contact, so they couldn’t be driven such, I believe was my great-grandfather’s phrasing.’
‘That’s a helluva concept,’ Aix said, and popped one of the little flaky, jam-filled pastries in their mouth.
‘The more I learn about autism, the more I think you’re the ones that ought to be making first contact,’ Victoria said, pouring them both more tea. ‘You’re unswaying in your ethics, and used to reality being strange and unsettling, and not easily distracted.’
‘Eh, I’ve met some assholes that were still autistic. It depends on how you’re raised.’
‘True, but it is a fact that autistic folk do not compromise their beliefs as easily as the rest of us—whatever those beliefs may be.’
‘That, I agree with—I’ve read about that study. And not to sound conceited, but my beliefs are hitched to the scientific method, and evolutionary fact, and I think that does make me better at communicating with aliens, because I’m actually tuned into reality and not like… the weird social darwinistic “murr everyone is secretly selfish and the universe is punitive” or whatever.’ They paused. ‘…Huh, so allistic people tend to think everyone is evil because they’ll compromise their beliefs as soon as those beliefs inconvenience them?’
‘Well, there is certainly a struggle that never seems to occur to autistic folk, between the prosocial and more difficult behaviour and the antisocial and easy one.’
‘Is that why people need religions that threaten them in order to behave? And I don’t just mean Christianity, though they’re the worst.’
Victoria chuckled. ‘There are Jewish assholes just as there are autistic ones. People are never a monolith. I do like to think Judaism has more effort to be prosocial baked in, compared to Christianity.’
‘Well, y’all do have critical thinking baked in, so I’ve always thought that helped.’ Aix sipped their tea. ‘I didn’t get any more information on where Big Fella is, though.’
‘Oh, don’t fret,’ Victoria said. ‘We can go ask Squidgy about it today, he lives with the family up in Sleepy Hollow.’
Aix perked up. ‘I… I get to meet your family?’
‘Of course! I wrote to them as soon as I could. Squidgy has been rather disconsolate since his Mummy died, but we try to engage him even so.’
‘You said the nose bleeding wasn’t an aneurysm or whatever, so what is it?’
‘Simple dehydration. Thinking uses lots of energy—psionic brain activity uses a great deal more. That’s why we’re putting high value food in you. Sometimes the vibrations of their vocalisations can sympathy-vibrate blood to the surface of the sinuses, as well. It’s a strange pitch.’
‘The Ghost Frequency?’
‘Well…’ Victoria said, holding out a hand and wobbling it. ‘Yes and no. You have to understand They operate sort of sideways and upside-down from this plane of reality. If it were just a matter of resonance frequency, then yes, you’d be in medical danger. But it’s not, so you just need to remember that after every time you have a session, you need to act like you’ve run a marathon and skipped a day’s meals.’ She pushed the plate of pastries toward Aix. ‘So: eat.’ She wheeled back from the table. ‘I’m off to buy a brace of train tickets and stock the picnic basket.’
‘Yes, Mistress,’ Aix muttered under their breath, not at all displeased, and started in on the pastries in earnest, now that there was no audience.
They wondered if Victoria knew that they would respond to the Mistress Voice; she was obviously very canny—she was a psion, ‘canny’ was kind of the defining trait, after all—but without it being spelled out, Aix knew they’d never know for sure.
They were unfairly good pastries.
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