Lifehouse Read online

  She put the phone away and squatted there in the woods, thinking hard, for a minute—almost but not quite long enough. Then she got to her feet, went to the shovel and picked it up.

  If she had thought just a little longer, it might have occurred to her that in fantasy stories, it is generally unwise to tamper with the belongings of one on whom a geas has been placed. The moment her fingers touched the shovel, she came.

  Chapter 2

  Silent light, Holy light

  Wally and Moira had, in a sense, spent most of their adult lives training for the advent of the naked bald man. That didn’t help them much.

  Happy round people in their mid-forties, they were hard at work at 11 P.M. on Halloween night, side by side at their respective computers in the study of their Vancouver home—popularly known as The Only Dump In Point Grey—when a short sharp silent blast of very bright light burst in the big window behind them and momentarily washed out their screens. As it faded, they saw that they were both hung, their mice impotent; each rebooted at once, then used the brief interval of startup to adjust their blood-sugar levels, Wally with a bird’s nest cookie and Moira with coffee.

  “More Halloween nonsense?” Wally suggested as he chewed.

  Moira frowned. “Thought we paid off the last of the little thugs hours ago.”

  “Maybe we should have given that Ace Ventura chocolate instead of rice cakes.”

  “It was instinctive. I see Ace Ventura: I think bowel movements: I reach for the fiber.” She gulped coffee and glared at her monitor. “No, a smart-aleck kid going to that much trouble would pick something with bang, not flash. Why waste that much magnesium to not annoy somebody very much?”

  “Right. Got to be a fan or fen, then. Dr. Techno, or one of the Latex Goddesses.”

  She shook her head. “Any other time of the year, I’d say sure. But this close to VanCon, all the fans bright enough are too busy. Like us. At least, they’d better be.”

  Wally finished his cookie hurriedly; his system was back up. “Maybe we should duck and cover,” he suggested, typing furiously.

  “Eh?”

  “Maybe somebody just nuked Coquitlam. Or points east.”

  “Huh.” She gave it half her attention; her own desktop had finally come up and typing with a coffee cup in one hand took some care. “Nah,” she decided, reopening her application, “if the sound wave hasn’t gotten here by now, we’re okay. I gotta get this thing uploaded.”

  “Damn,” he said. “It didn’t save.” He poked futilely at his own keyboard. “I lost the whole flippin’ file.”

  Moira smirked and kept working. “You should get a Mac.”

  “I hate obsequious machines,” he said automatically, and let it go. Mixed marriages can work, with enough good will. “You’re right: if it was a nuke, it was way out in the Okanagan somewhere. Come Spring we’ll have peaches the size of pumpkins.”

  “And use them for lawn lanterns,” she agreed. “Seriously, what the hell do you suppose that was?”

  Wally typed twelve lines before her question caught up with him, then shrugged. (She saw it; they knew each other’s rhythms.) “Bright. Short. Sharp; no perceptible waxing or waning. No sound at all that I heard. Magnesium…big laser…searchlight, maybe. None likely in our alley, even on Halloween.” He typed some more, then cycled back again. “No, I don’t come up with anything that makes sense. Except fannish humor, and you’re right: there’s no punchline to this one.”

  Moira finished a flurry of her own, played back his answer, and frowned. “So…what? Elvis has just entered the building?”

  “No, he was here four hours ago—and he got a Mars Bar. Seriously, hon, my honest best guess is that Captain Kirk just beamed down to ask for directions.” He resumed typing at top speed.

  Moira frowned fiercely now, and actually stopped typing for several seconds, even though she was paying connect time again by now. This was a perfect example of one of the Great Differences on which her twenty-year marriage to Wally was founded. He found the irrational, the inexplicable, amusing. She found it barely tolerable. “We ought to take a look out the window, at least,” she muttered, and resumed netsurfing.

  “Sure thing,” he said, and kept typing. “Just as soon as I upload my column for the LMSFSazine, finish that web-page upgrade for the SCA, answer all the e-mail rumors on the new Beatles stuff, and—oh, yes—download about twenty megs of current VanCon traffic and route it to the proper serfs, I’ll join you there at the window. Save me a seat.”

  She didn’t bother to recite her own litany of tasks; she had already dismissed the matter and was deeply engaged in a rather tricky attempt to hack her way into NASA and sniff out information regarding the first live guitar jam—the first musical interaction—ever to be performed in space (scheduled, according to rumor, to occur aboard Mir, during the next visit by the shuttle Atlantis; a Canadian and a Russian trading off on acoustic and electric). It was her intention to obtain the best possible recording of the event, and play it at VanCon, the annual Vancouver science fiction convention she and Wally helped run.

  He was editing his column, and she had just settled on a promising line of attack, when they heard the wail.

  It came clearly through the window behind them: the unformed sound of a baby in distress. Odd that they both thought “baby” the instant they heard it—for both the volume and pitch of the sound were unmistakably adult (though the gender was indeterminate). But that cry was not even an attempt at a word.

  “There is a baby the size of a football player in our alley,” Wally said calmly, fingers poised over his keyboard, “on Halloween night.”

  Moira caught herself trying to use her own keyboard as a breed of Ouija board. “One of us should really look out the window.”

  He began to tap his keys without quite typing them, a nervous mannerism she was sure she would learn to accept in no more than another decade at most. “That’s the requisite number,” he agreed, and poked a key tentatively.

  Her face clouded up…then smoothed over. “And babies are my department. I see.” She disconnected from the net, treating her mouse with elaborate gentleness, and rose from her seat.

  Although their workstation was large by most home standards, so were Wally and Moira; she could not move her chair out of her way unless he got up too, so the only way she could get a look out the window was to kneel up on the chair and lean forward until her cheek pressed against the chilly pane. She did so.

  Several seconds passed. Wally typed, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.

  “What do you see?” he asked finally.

  “Bad news,” she replied slowly. “I think I’m getting a zit.”

  “Oh, for—” He got hold of himself, and saved his changes. “Right. Sorry. You’re quite right: we do have to take up the tacks before we can take up the carpet.” He darkened both monitor screens, extinguished both gooseneck lamps, levered himself up out of his own chair and went to dial the overhead light down. He waited there by the rheostat, in near darkness, watching his wife look out the window and down into the alley. “It’s Captain Kirk, right?” he said.

  More seconds passed.

  He was beginning to become irritated by the time she stirred slightly and spoke his name; but then his irritation vanished at once, for there was something wrong with her voice. “Yes, Moira?”

  “We’ve spoken of my ongoing ambiguity with regard to certain of the so-called assigned gender roles, right?”

  “Yes, dear. And I am sworn not to break your stones about it.”

  “Thank you. With all due respect to sisterhood, I think this is one of those times when a Y chromosome is called for. He’s naked, and he looks dead, and he’s bald—so for all I know he is Captain Kirk, but this is definitely not my department, okay?”

  “Our side of the fence, or Gorsky’s?”

  “Our side.”

  His pidgin, then. He sighed. “Wait here in the cave. Now, where did I leave that stone ax…?”

 
She turned away from the window. “Wally, seriously—”

  He halted in the doorway. “Woman, you have invoked the Y chromosome—now run for cover and get the bandages ready. No, better yet, go to the phone, dial nine one, and wait for my scream.” He grinned and left the room, feeling like a Heinlein hero. A Secret Master of Fandom and Permanent Secretary of the Lower Mainland Science Fiction Society had, after all, certain standards to maintain. And how tough could a nude bald corpse be?

  She turned her Mac into a voicephone and did just as he had suggested, then went back to the window—moving both chairs out of the way this time—telling herself that at the first sign of funny business she would punch that last digit into the phone and then put a chair through that window and…and…and rain coffee cups and lava lamps on the naked bald man until he surrendered, that’s what.

  Wally did take the time to change to better footgear, put on a light jacket, and slide a short length of rebar up one sleeve before leaving the house by the back door. It was a typical Vancouver October night, save that it was not raining; the jacket was useful only as camouflage for the weapon. He rounded the corner of the house cautiously, staying far from the building and crouching slightly. Even with his own den lights extinguished, there was still enough light from the streetlights out front, the moon overhead, and spilling over the fence from the detestable frosted windows of the Gorskys (Gorskies? Gorski?) next door, to illuminate the alleyway with reasonable clarity.

  There was unquestionably and no shit a naked bald Caucasian male lying there on his back, just below the den window.

  Dead, however, he was not. He was in the slow process of trying to lever himself up from complete spread-eagled sprawl to a sort of sitting fetal position. Wally had plenty of time to see clearly that the naked man was not merely bald but completely hairless…and uncircumcised. Wally guessed him to be about twenty-five, and in excellent shape, well muscled and trim. He noted absently that the nude intruder was surrounded by a roughly circular patch of scorched grass, and that the circle of scorching was wide enough to mark both Wally’s own house and the fence as well. He further noted, and filed, the depth of the impression the stranger had left in the soggy earth; as if he were made of lead…or had somehow fallen onto his back from…ah, doubtless from the top of the fence: that explained it. Considering that the fence was made of chain link topped by savage little twists of jagged steel, and that the stranger was nude right down to his soles, he must have wanted to leave the Gorsky property quite badly. For the first time Wally warmed to him slightly. (Like nearly everyone else in the district except Wally and Moira, the Gorsky clan lived in a million-dollar stucco-and-plaster steroid monstrosity that looked like the box a real home had come in—and did not trouble to hide their disgust at the property-value-lowering presence of Wally and Moira’s shabby human dwelling in their midst. In retaliation, Wally had befriended his crabgrass.)

  The naked man saw Wally for the first time. His eyes widened comically, and he gasped, a sound so loud and sibilant it was nearly a shriek. He drew up his knees, buried his head between them, and wrapped his arms around them to keep them secure, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell.

  Wally moved, cautiously, to try and get a glimpse of Moira in the study window, thought he saw her wave a hand. He let the chunk of rebar slip out of his sleeve and into his palm, and tapped the stranger with it.

  As a lifetime science fiction fan, Wally feared little so much as the prospect of appearing stupid in retrospect. He chose his words with care, and was rather proud of them. “Excuse me,” he said gently, “but do I correctly understand that you are Blanched Du Boy, and you have always depended on the blahndness of stranguhs?”

  The stranger poked his head back out, and stared fixedly—not at Wally, but at the house…or more properly, at the portion of its foundation nearest him, about a meter away. His eyes seemed to be bulging out of his head—or was that just the lack of eyelashes? No…no, he was genuinely terrified…not of the large homeowner poking him with a piece of rebar, but of a cement wall. He scuttled involuntarily away from it, until he fetched up against the fence.

  “John!” he muttered. “Unsnuffingbelievable! One more hackin’ meter west, and—” He shivered violently.

  Wally thought it was about time; it wasn’t terribly chilly out here, this was after all Vancouver, but it shouldn’t take much to chill a naked man. “I say—” he began again.

  The stranger whirled on him—not easy to do from a sitting position. “What year is it?” he snapped.

  Wally bunked. “The same one it was when you decided to get drunk,” he said.

  The man was on his feet so suddenly he seemed to have levitated; he sprang at Wally and took him by the lapels of his coat. “What year?” he thundered.

  Unused to naked men taking him by the lapels in his own yard while he held a piece of rebar, Wally answered automatically, and very quickly, “1995, it’s 1995, I swear to God!”

  The stranger released him as quickly as he’d seized him, and the strangest thing happened. For just a moment Wally saw him begin to panic utterly, just totally lose it…then, confoundingly, he felt his own naked arms with his hands, felt his cheeks, and pulled himself back from the edge. Terror gave way at once to towering rage: he smote himself mightily on the thighs. “Crot!” he snarled. “Total snowcrash! Blood for this, my chop…grotty wannabes!” The date clearly displeased him greatly.

  On Wally, the light had just begun, dimly, to dawn. This was the moment he had been waiting for since the age of six—here—now! He opened his mouth…then glanced up at the window and closed it again.

  “Look, cousin,” he said after some thought, “it’s cool out here. Come on inside like I said, okay? Get some hot coffee in you—you drink coffee? We got real good coffee—”

  The naked man looked up at him and instantly, visibly, became devious. “Sure, yes, hot caffy, very kind of you, caffy would be optimal. I can…uh…I can explain all this—”

  “Yes, I’m sure you can,” said Wally. “I’m looking forward to it.” He gestured. “If you’ll just walk this…uh, in this direction.” And then he waved and gestured for Moira’s benefit, before leading the way.

  Wally watched the stranger carefully on the way into the house. He was one of those people who looks good with his head shaved—in fact, now that Wally noticed, he looked a little like a younger version of Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He seemed alert, but some of the things that interested him were interesting. He paid close attention, for instance, to the process by which Wally opened, and then closed, the back door—but did not attempt to hide his interest, as would a burglar casing the joint. He shielded his eyes with his hand from the meager 40-watt bulb in Wally and Moira’s back hall. He noticed the stack of newspapers and the recycle blue-box full of waste glass and metal waiting for Garbage Night, and for some reason they seemed to amuse him. The stove in the kitchen made him snort. Then they hung the right into the study, and the stranger froze in his tracks, gaping.

  Wally was aware that not everyone admired large women as much as he; nonetheless this behavior seemed rude for a guest. Then he realized that the stranger had not yet noticed Moira. He was staring horrorstruck at…

  …a painting on the study wall. The Jack Gaughan Analog cover, for a story called “By Any Other Name”—a simple crouched figure seen from behind, brandishing a futuristic weapon at a number of translucent fireballs. Wally owned many scarier paintings.

  But the stranger had clearly never seen anything so utterly terrifying in his life—not even the cement wall of Wally’s foundation. “Oh crash,” he moaned. “It’s worse than I thought! You’re science fiction fans, aren’t you?”

  Wally took a deep breath, and drew himself up. “Sir, I’m afraid it is worse than that. My wife and I are SMOFs.”

  The stranger fainted dead away.

  Wally gave Moira a meaningful look. “The first thing he wanted to know was what year it was.”

 
She stared down at the inert stranger, then back up at her husband. “Oh, Wally, really?”

  He nodded, unable to suppress the grin any longer.

  Her own eyes became large and round, and for just a moment it looked as though she might pass out herself. Then she got control, and smiled. “And the con’s only a few weeks away!” she cried.

  The two Secret Masters Of Fandom raced to each other, joined hands, and began to dance.

  When the hairless man opened his eyes, it was in a white room which had no windows and only one door. The door had no knob or handle or keypad or other obvious means of causing it to open, nor did it appear to slide on tracks. There was a bare lightbulb in the ceiling, but its switch appeared to be elsewhere.

  The room contained no furniture or decorations of any kind.

  The balance of its contents were all sentient beings. Specifically, the hairless man himself, Wally, Moira and the Buddha…represented in this specific instance by a football-sized and -shaped bronze statue of him which was, ironically, the only purely material object present. Everyone but the hairless man looked generally the same: short, round and smiling beatifically.

  He sat up slowly, took in his surroundings, and the fact that he was no longer naked. He now wore an old grey sweatshirt shrunken almost to normal-range size, a pair of sweatpants cinched tight at the waist but with adequate room to store a pup tent and an inflatable raft in the legs, and odd foot coverings that Wally was accustomed to refer to as “sockasins.” He seemed to find the coverings tolerable.