A Haunting in San Rosille (202)

[PSI-1]

“That is literally the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” Soup said, stabbing the air with his cigarette. “How dumb are actors?”  He was still wearing his regular clothes, but clutching a shabby jacket with extra soot stains. The dog sitting attentively beside him was wearing a red bandana with a tiny cowboy hat perched between her ears.

“That’s not really fair,” Erik said. He was in a dark suit with colorful patches soft-stuck to it and a couple paper flowers Euterpe had made him. The one in the band of his bowler hat was a daisy. “Milo makes sense to us because we know him. A bunch of actors aren’t going to guess someone is really two people and one of them doesn’t talk. They do know method acting, or they’ve heard about it and think they know what it means, so that makes sense to them.”

“Sean and Milo are playing to their expectations,” Maggie added. She had a flawless white gown with elbow-length black gloves, to which she’d added one of Ann’s tiaras and a wand with a star tip. “It’s basic psychological warfare, only they’re just messing around.”

“So you’re going to do Mischief Night at two in the afternoon like a couple of toddlers because you want to be there for the reveal later?” Soup said. “Even Bethany’s not going out this early!”

Maggie frowned and pointed, “Soup, you are not gonna stand there and call us toddlers when you have dressed your dog as a cowboy.”

Samantha noticed she was under discussion and wagged her tail, clicking. People were giving her lots of attention today!

“She requested it,” Soup said. “We’ve got one of those, whaddyacallit, psychic links.”

“Like hell.”

“Come on,” Erik said. “You’re gonna go out later and mug people anyway. We’re giving you an excuse to pretend you’re cute and get extra stuff.”

“I am cute!”

“You’re a teenager,” Maggie said. “You’re gonna get ugly real fast.”

“Just admit you were gonna ditch me,” he muttered. “If I didn’t show up to get lunch out of Miss Hyacinth, I’d come back here later and you’d be gone.”

“Not on purpose,” Erik said. “It’s just been extra crazy…”

“Don’t apologize!” Maggie cried. She stabbed Soup in the chest with a finger. “You have literally been complaining for thirty minutes about how stupid this is! It’s stupid we’re going out early, it’s stupid our costumes double as formal wear, it’s stupid we’d rather be out getting candy than changing clothes and arranging ourselves later, it’s stupid we’re going to a play and it’s stupid why we want to go tonight. If it’s all so stupid, why do you want to be included?”

“Just make a little effort to convince me, damn it!”

Maggie leveled her magic wand right between his eyes. “Come shake down the neighborhood for candy with us and bring your psychic cowboy dog or I’ll blow your freaking head off, okay?”

“That’s not a real magic wand.”

“I don’t need a magic wand!”

Erik tugged her arm down. “Soup has feelings.”

“Well, he shouldn’t! He’s a boy!”

Soup blinked at her and the corners of his mouth twitched involuntarily towards a grin. “Wow, Maggie, what the hell?”

“You know what I mean! Not like Erik! You take care of yourself and you’re tough!”

“Hey,” Erik said sadly.

“Seth takes care of himself and is tough,” Soup said.

“What color is the sky on your planet?” Maggie replied.

“Mags, if he wasn’t, he’d be dead by now,” Soup said evenly. “Come on. He’s teaching you how to teach and you know how hard it is. Like, his job practically broke your mom after one day. I’m not saying I’m about to burst into tears over here, I’m not that level of screwed up, but I’d still be a boy if I were. Cut it out.”

“Everyone standing on this porch wants to go out for Mischief Night and have candy and fun, and I don’t understand why we’re standing here doing feelings instead,” she spat. “Can’t you switch ’em off when they get in the way? How else are you gonna grow up and function?”

A distorted image behind the carnival glass picked up its hand and tapped on the window. Terpsichore blinked as if struck, then she motioned Euterpe over and put her whole hand on the glass. He put his hand on the glass too and laughed.

“It’s like some kinda messed up aquarium,” Soup said. He cupped a hand to his mouth, “We see you, Heckle and Jeckle, what do you want?”

“Heckle and Jeckle aren’t fish, they’re magpies,” Erik said.

“So is Calliope’s whole family,” Maggie told him, grinning. “It’s an ancient curse.”

Terpsichore popped open the front door, “I’m sorry, I got distracted by the magic on your glass. It looks like another one of Milo’s. He really is brilliant working with the ambient alone, I wish we had him to help blow up the cheese.”

“Why is it specifically cheese?” Euterpe said. “Are you guys mad at cheese?”

“It’s the government, and it’s not specifically cheese, it’s molecules. But it could be cheese, so we just say cheese. We’re theoretical people, they expect us to be total whack-a-loons.” She straightened her dress. “Anyway, returning to the subject at hand, I have done almost fifteen years more study than you, Maggie, and adults are even worse at keeping their emotions out of the way so they can function. They’re only better at justifying it. You ought to feel sorry for them. If you were all a decade older, I’d expect you to split up and decide not to do Mischief Night at all, out of spite. But I like you and I want you to have fun, so I’m going to intervene before you work it out for yourselves. May I come with you?”

“You?” Soup said. “What are you, thirty? Gods, we really are going to be toddlers!”

“I’m twenty-five, but you’re free to round it up. Polyhymnia and I abstained from Mischief Night during our designated childhoods, we preferred to observe. I don’t have to participate. I could hide in a trash can, we often hide in trash cans, or does that count as a costume in this context?”

“Ooh! I want to participate!” Euterpe put on his hat, which he had purchased at the same thrift store as Erik and also decorated with a paper flower. This model had a bit of a higher top and a flat crown. “I’m almost a teenager and I’m tiny, I can pass! You’ve got enough clown paint, Will, right?”

Erik snickered and nodded. He wasn’t sure if Euterpe really thought his middle name was ‘Will’ like his gold tattoo or if this was just a little joke they were going to have. Either way, it was great. And Eglantine gave them a bunch of makeup, so he didn’t mind sharing.

“You had better take candy or some other sort of prize with you in case the younger participants don’t accept you at their level,” Terpsichore said.

“I will have you know the hospital ladies said I have a child’s intellect and therefore I get to have candy on Mischief Night forever,” Euterpe said. “It’s implicit. That last bit there is implicit, sis.”

“I suppose I will have to give something out, if I’m not going to wear a trash can.” She put a hand to her face and considered. “Calliope must have stickers. Calliope always has stickers.”

“Oh, gods, not stickers,” Maggie said. “Nobody wants stickers on Mischief Night. Just break into the glass jar in the kitchen and give ‘em cash, you guys.”

“I’d rather have stickers than cash,” Erik said. “If it’s scary stickers, at least. Like you care. Cash is like you don’t even know what day it is and you’re boring.”

“I vote for cash, you can’t eat stickers,” Soup said.

“That’s a quitter’s attitude,” Euterpe said.

“I need my notebook!” Terpsichore cried.

———

Erik, Euterpe and Soup excused themselves to the downstairs bathroom to put the finishing touches on their costumes, while Maggie and Terpsichore investigated Calliope’s sticker supply.

When the gentlemen emerged from the restroom, the ladies had arranged themselves in the kitchen. Calliope’s hair was the shape of a traffic cone for some reason. She was wearing her reading glasses and carrying a clipboard. Lucy was wearing a caped outfit and sucking a fanged pacifier. The Lu-ambulator had also been altered for the season, with a pair of huge googly eyes glued to the front and a shopping bag hanging from each arm for the forfeits. Maggie was still in her minimalist fairy outfit, sans wings or makeup, and Terpsichore was making Mordecai nervous by taking furious notes on the construction of Calliope’s birthday cake. (“What about the cream filling? How will you be doing the cream filling? Can I get you a syringe?”)

“Oh, gods, not you too,” Soup said. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”

“Brushed it straight up and shot it with fixative,” Calliope said. “I’m a mad scientist, like Milo’s play. I can stay like this for tonight!”

“It is efficient,” Terpsichore noted.

“What did you do to your face?” Mordecai countered, staring at Erik. “Are you a clown or a go-go dancer?”

Euterpe appeared in the bathroom doorway, likewise with a painted flower around each eye and one in each corner of the mouth like rouge. He put a hand on Erik’s shoulder. “Don’t speak that way to my son.”

Erik giggled.

Mordecai sighed. “Just please be back by sunset so I have some time to clean you up, all right? I’ll try to be done with the cake by then, but you know what kind of house this is and I’m positive someone will be by to vandalize it at some point.”

“You don’t have a lab coat or test tubes or anything!” Soup protested.

“Scientists can look like anyone,” Calliope and Terpsichore said.

“We like to blend in so we can study you better,” Terpsichore added.

“Soup, you are about to go forfeiting with three…” Maggie paused and regarded the vampire baby. “Four whole Otises. This is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure!”

“It looks like we’re on a day trip from the asylum!”

“Hey, thanks!” Calliope said.

“Maggie, do you want makeup?” Erik asked. He had saved most of the glitter pink for her, that one seemed the most fairy-like. Maybe she could paint wings on her face or something.

“Nah, don’t need it,” Maggie said. She tapped herself with her fairy wand, for effect. Two enormous crow wings sprouted from her back, glowing with bluish purple light like magic rain. A matching mask winked into existence on her face, and the tiara began to glow likewise. “Let’s hit the road.”

Terpsichore applauded. “Brilliant! The glow hides the warping of the optical effect when viewed from an angle! Damn it, I can’t wait a whole ten years to work with you. Can’t you forge yourself a diploma?”

Maggie beamed. “I thought about it, but Mom says I should get used to jumping through pointless hoops. She wants me in the army.”

“That’s a waste.”

“Please leave,” Mordecai said weakly, scrunched up against the wall and clutching the mixing bowl so as to avoid being knocked over by a set of wings that weren’t really there. “Just be back by sunset.”

Calliope saluted him, “Like reverse vampires!”

“Do they turn into tabs?” Euterpe asked her. “Or stab?”

“Ba-ba!” Lucy added, waving her pacifier.

“Eyes override brain,” Terpsichore noted, and she underlined it.

———

“Damn it, there goes another one.” Soup pointed at the man crossing the street a block ahead of them. He ducked down an alley before they could even get near enough to yell at him, let alone throw eggs. “Maggie, I’m telling you, it’s the wings. Turn down the wings. Make it look like a real costume.”

“So you’re going to blame me over the spider-creature and the vampire baby?”

“At least the spider-creature looks like it’s based in reality!”

They continued to snipe at each other as they walked up Eddows Lane, unimpeded by passersby to hassle for candy. The highlight of the ‘night’ so far had been giving Seth and the kids at school a bunch of stickers and change. However long they’d taken to do that, it was still barely three in the afternoon.

“I like you, Terpsichore, but the notebook isn’t helping,” Erik added. The few people who’d strayed close enough to hear them say “FORFEIT!” had departed swiftly when an auburn-haired woman popped up and started asking questions about culture. One man had shoved her and demanded to know if she was a cop. Maggie left him glued to a rooftop with pigeons pecking at him, three storeys up.

“I did notice it’s irritating the already-hostile population, I’m not completely stupid, but I need it,” Terpsichore replied, frowning.

Euterpe picked up the clasp of his penguin tie. “It’s like Kuro-chan and Sweater-chan.”

“Sweater-chan?” Calliope said. She hugged her shoulders. “Oh, man, now I feel bad about washing him in the bucket.”

“No it is not like that,” Terpsichore snapped, clutching her notebook. “For starters I don’t go around anthropomorphizing it! It also contains valuable information about navigating your stupid society, which I am picking up piecemeal and still need to review. I never thought I’d actually have to be one of you, but Polyhymnia wore me down.” She scowled. “Now she’s gone native and she has children. Even if I want to quit, there’s no way she will, so I’m stuck with you savages. I am trying to make the best of it, but you cannot expect me to perform without a net.”

“Notebook-chan,” Euterpe said. “You’re hugging him.”

Terpsichore growled.

Calliope spoke aside to the kids, “Terpsichore and Polyhymnia made up their own language and only talked to each other until they turned twelve.”

Soup slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, of course they did!”

“It was the only rational course of action — damn it, the sarcasm is so uncool in this context!” Terpsichore folded her arms and pouted. “It really was the only rational course of action. We didn’t know what your deal was and we needed some time to figure it out. Polyhymnia made up her mind around age ten and she spent the next two years trying to convince me. I caved to peer pressure. I’m very vulnerable to that, I only have one peer. She still thought I was going to back out, that’s why she made me go first. ”

“They blew out the candles on their cake, then Terpsichore stood up on her chair and said they’d decided to join the human race, in perfect Anglais, and Polyhymnia said it was provisional.” Calliope turned to her sister. “She remembers it more like a joint thing.”

“Of course she does.” Terpsichore glared at Soup. “I’m being sincere. She never listened to me. Never, never. At least since I’ve started speaking Anglais, sometimes people listen to me.” She waved a hand. “Usually you two. I appreciate that. I was always fond of you two. It seemed like you had your head screwed on straight, Calliope. It lowered my opinion of everyone else when they treated you like you didn’t.”

“Thanks.”

“How about my head, Terpsichore?” Euterpe said.

She considered him. “Hell, I don’t know. You didn’t grow out of the nightmares like the rest of us, so maybe you do have a child’s intellect. That’s a compliment. Children make a lot more sense.”

“Sweet.”

“You’ve barely been a human for thirteen years, so it’s like you’re Soup’s age,” Calliope said gently. “Maybe we should’ve put you in a costume. Do you want to hit up a thrift store?”

“Oh, please. I’m already pretending I’m something I’m not. I’d look like that poor robot cowboy dog.”

Samantha wagged, happy to be included.

 “…I’m sure Polyhymnia would if you offered.”

“Maybe next year.”

“Oh, come on!” Soup said. The woman coming up the street in front of them had just taken an abrupt right turn through the sparse hedge surrounding an abandoned old house. She wasn’t even willing to risk a few steps closer to use the broken gate.

Euterpe stopped dead in his tracks with a grin. “You guys! We are scarier than this clearly haunted house right here! How cool is that?”

It was the same style as Hyacinth’s house, but bigger. Four storeys, with a front yard and a back and two rooftop cupolas. And zero maintenance or attempts at making it habitable or cheerful. Every dusty window had been broken and multiple holes were punched through the shingled roof. At any moment, one expected it to eject a cloud of bats. The only thing it was missing was lightning and sound effects.

Maggie shook her head and threw a gesture at it. “It’s not any more haunted than anything else. There’s houses and stuff like that all over. They’re historic, so if you buy the land you’ve either got to restore it or pay extra to tear it down. It’s like the Slaughterhouse, except you can’t even sell tickets. This one’s got a big yard and you can cut through the back straight to Chapman Lane and Blueberry Square, that’s all. It’s practically a street.”

“Yeah, okay, but she did go through the hedge,” Erik noted.

“Sometimes there’s a hot dog cart,” Soup said. “You guys want hot dogs? I mean, we got money and nobody’s going to give us candy or ask for a forfeit, so…”

Calliope put up both her hands, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You mean this cool house is sitting right here with people going past it every day and nobody’s done anything to it?”

“You mean like burn it down?” Soup said.

“I mean like furniture climbing all over it and jumping in and out the windows! Or puzzle pieces! Come on, you guys, can’t we at least do puzzle pieces?”

“You want to quit Mischief Night and do art to an abandoned house for three hours?” Maggie said.

“It’s my birthday!” Calliope said. “Please?”

“I think Mischief Night already quit us,” Soup muttered.

“We have money and we can buy candy,” Terpsichore said. “I only mention it because it seems like you’re all so blinded by tradition you forgot. I hazard I’d be able to walk to this Hot Dog Square and buy candy or the equivalent right now, while Calliope puts stickers on the house.”

“Not the stickers, I don’t have enough. No one will notice them,” Calliope said. “Maggie, could you make them bigger?” She offered what was left of the roll.

“I guess,” Maggie said. “But it’d be easier just to put a giant rainbow spider on the wall with optical magic.”

Calliope squealed. “A flat one or like a real giant spider?”

Maggie shrugged. “Which one you want?”

“How long will it take?” Euterpe asked.

“I guess about ten minutes, if I do the glowing to hide the edges and we don’t care about it looking real.”

“So, like, eighteen spiders in the time we have?”

“No, I could do eighteen spiders in, like, a half hour. Or less. Depends how you want them to move.”

Euterpe grinned and clasped his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, and Soup, and baby…”

Lucy giggled.

“…And Erik and Maggie and my sisters, and various birds, and mice. And me. Huh. I guess we don’t have any ladies and gentlemen. Anyway.” He spread his arms. “I propose that since this is Mischief Night, we do a Mischief right here and haunt this house. Calliope can design the scary shit, Maggie and Terpsichore can apply it, and I’m useless but I’m pretty sure they’ll let me buy candy. Or hot dogs.” He stabbed a finger in the air, “I will bring it back here and by the power of junk food we will leave something really cool right here for people to find tonight. What do you say?”

“I say I can do magic too and I’m up for anything with candy, but I’m coming with you to make sure you don’t buy a hammer or nose hair trimmers instead, because you are a goddamn loon,” Soup replied.

Erik jumped up and down and applauded. Maggie clapped too, but a little more sarcastically.

Terpsichore shrugged. “Okay.”

“Awesomesauce!” Calliope said.

———

Absurdly, the General knocked on the door of the abandoned building. Euterpe Circus Peanut Otis answered it, still in full clown getup, with the stick end of a sucker hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. “Hnah?”

“Mr. Otis, I have been observing…”

He removed the sucker. “Yeah, I saw you hanging out by the school. You’re a pretty big bird, Glorie. Do you want to help?”

“No. I am trying to tell you that I cannot allow this to continue. You are going to attract foolish adults and small children into an unsafe structure. I was willing to allow the spider, but now that you are adding specters to the windows, people are going to come inside to investigate. That is basic psychology. The house is not safe. I have also become concerned about the state of my daughter’s dress.”

“She did that repel thing to our clothes and we’ve got…” He looked over his shoulder and called up the spiral staircase, “Hey, sis, what’s that thing we’ve got?”

“I need more context, Euterpe,” Terpsichore’s voice drifted down.

“Why aren’t I going to get tetanus?”

“Vaccinations!”

He sighed and shook his head with a smile. “I love my family, but they’re nuts, you know?” He raised his voice again, “No, the thing you did to our hands, Terpsichore!”

“Virtual PPE!”

“Yeah, virtual easy-peas,” Euterpe said. “I’m good for anything up to small magic-based explosions and microbes the size of the common cold. You wanna sneeze on me?”

“I am not going to pursue you down this rabbit hole, Mr. Otis,” said the General. “This house is unsafe and what you are doing to it is going to get people hurt. I am telling you to get rid of the images in the windows and resume forfeiting or just do anything other than this. Now get out of my way so I can tell someone who might listen.”

“Sam and me found another dead cat, Maggie!” Erik’s voice said distantly.

“Okay, I’ll get it!” Maggie’s replied.

“We’re already vaporizing all the garbage, and my sister put in a whole new invisible floor.” He stamped on the splintered boards. There was no movement or sound. “Is there something else you want to do to it?” Euterpe said, still stubbornly in the way.

He was only half a head taller than her, and still shorter than Terpsichore, who might’ve made five-foot-six in heels. If one ignored the scale of the doorway, it looked a little like a disagreement between a small boy and a large bulldog in a green dress, except the gentleman clearly had no idea that the dog wanted into the house.

“Is there something else I want to do to improve the safety of a house that has been abandoned for over eight years and survived a siege, and which I can accomplish within the next hour and forty-five minutes so that we will not be late to the stupid play I’m being forced to attend?” the bulldog said, with incredible patience. “Is that what you are asking me, Mr. Otis?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.” She twisted her hand into his shirt collar and backed him out of the way as she spoke, “I want you to stop making it look like a theme park attraction!”

“So you’re saying it’s too hard?” Euterpe said.

The General’s mouth fell open.

“What? I was just asking.”

“Stop talking to me and just let me look at it.”

———

It wasn’t a house, it was a nest. Maybe a warren for burrowing animals. Lots of narrow hallways and branching chambers. The stairways were enclosed and narrow, fluffy with dust in the corners. The only source of light and air was the broken windows, and their intact pieces were incredibly dim, if not black. The gaps let in not only light and air but more dirt and animals. The dark hallways where all the doors had been closed were actually the cleanest.

The years of postwar abandonment had stripped the place of everything useful that could be easily removed. There were some framed photos of strangers, and a few nests from recent inhabitants, human and animal, but no signs of current occupancy. The holes in the roof rendered the whole building a dubious shelter — obviously so.

She encountered a few stray ghosts on her cautious journey to assess the damages. (She had little experience with Terpsichore’s magic and did not trust it.) A recording of a female scream, presumably Calliope or Terpsichore’s, that played when pressure was applied above a certain board. Filmy figures anchored to doorways which displayed themselves at the very edge of vision, and vanished if the jury-rigged spells detected the passerby turning around. (About sixty-percent efficacy, not bad for the time constraint.) A split-seamed baseball which rolled itself across the hallway to the sound of childish laughter. She followed it and picked it up. Maggie’s recorded voice scolded her, “Hey, put that down! Don’t ruin it for everyone else!”

That warranted a brief chuckle.

When she encountered people, she told them to stop what they were doing and get out. “I will meet you in the front yard. We do not have time to clean this house on a case-by-case basis. I will get everything at once and you may resume haunting while I design something to shore up the structure.”

She already had a spell for cleaning years of neglect out of a given space; she had used it to prepare Room 103 for Calliope’s occupancy.

Probably it wouldn’t require the specifications for cheese, but it wasn’t worth altering the spell to remove them.

In the front yard, she counted heads and made certain that no one had seen any signs of recent human occupancy. She sent Maggie and Soup into the backyard with the dog to make sure no stray humans happened to wander in during her application of the spell — she trusted them the most.

“Magnificent? Before I dismiss you, would you please examine your dress? Particularly the fabric under the arms and around the waist.”

Maggie gasped and clutched her shoulders with her gloved hands.

“Would you like to hazard a guess why that happened?”

“Perspiration,” Terpsichore began, but the General silenced her with a hand.

“Sweat is on the inside and I put a repel charm on the outside,” Magnificent said miserably.

“If you have time, and if you wish to practice bans on a smaller scale, you may rid yourself of the stains and still be able to wear it tonight.”

“Mom!” Maggie bent forward to emphasize but continued to hang on to her shoulders, hiding the gray stains. “If I kill this dress, I can’t buy another one! It’s from the ILV!”

“Why, Magnificent, I distinctly recall you insisting your father bought you this dress in Farsia and its matching sweater was definitely not knitted from illegal magically-modified llama wool. Don’t you recall that?”

Maggie winced.

“I require your assistance to dispose of the house. At some later date, I will have you practice your penmanship by writing the line ‘If I can’t keep track of my lies, I will just tell the truth,’ a hundred times or so. You may continue to the backyard.”

She cast an area ban on the entire house and its basement. When the orange glow faded, she opened the front door and checked her work. “It is safe to proceed but please make certain your existing spells, especially the virtual flooring, are still intact. Their anchors may have been removed or altered beyond recognition.”

“You get scorch marks like that because you’re overtaxing the ambient and your heat buffers go all kerflooey,” Terpsichore said.

“You are incapable of expressing yourself in language that reflects the precision of your thoughts because you refused every opportunity to practice Anglais for half of your life,” the General replied.

“Forty-seven-point-one-six-percent,” Terpsichore said with a smile. “Just about.”

The General smiled as well, eyes narrowed. “Ah, you have a May birthday.”

“The twenty-second.” She bowed.

“Terpsichore, come help me do some of those freaky paintings where the eyes move!” Calliope called.

The General sighed. “What a waste.”

———

They reconvened in the front yard perhaps ten minutes before sunset, if one equated the skyline with the horizon. The General intended to pay whatever it took to put the Otises and Erik on a bus, and then fly home with her daughter to get a head start on whatever madness was in progress at Hyacinth’s house. Perhaps they would deal with it in time to go to the play, or perhaps not.

She had shored up each individual room as well as she could and sealed shut the doors of the ones she didn’t have time for. One final spell over the whole of the building ought to keep the outer walls and the roof intact, at least until magic season.

Euterpe put his hand on her arm. “Wait, wait, Glorie? You’re doing the whole outside?”

“I will make certain the enormous spider is intact, Mr. Otis.” It had just scuttled over the roof of the left hand cupola.

“No, yeah. But put up a great big sign that says ‘Free Haunted House,’ like in fey lights, okay?”

Terpsichore flipped open her notebook, “My research indicates people around here distrust free stuff with a label. They expect a catch.”

“She’s not wrong,” Soup said. “It’s all those pubs with a free lunch, they ruined it.”

“They’d rather find it for themselves, then they don’t mind.”

“I kinda wanted to fool them, but I don’t want to scare the kids,” Calliope said.

“What about making it a different color?” Terpsichore said. “That will indicate some alteration has been made, and people may decide to investigate.”

“Ooh, make it green!” Maggie said. “Like a creepy zombie green, like a comic book!”

Erik put up both hands for a pause, but he wasn’t too slow with it, “No! Purple! So it looks like magic!”

“Green is creepier.”

“Hey!”

“Oh, enough feelings, you know what I mean.”

“Purple is still better.”

The General sighed. While they were still arguing, she applied her structural support spell and made the house puke green with a purple roof. “There. Now it looks like a comic book. Have we missed anything?”

Soup raised a hand. “If you have, I’ll stay and look after it.”

“I thought you were gonna go out and mug people,” Maggie said.

Soup smiled sweetly. “I can just say I’ll watch their bags while they’re checking out the inside.”

“No,” said the General.

“I don’t do art to screw people over,” Calliope said. She gave Soup all her remaining change, and stickers. “If you come back to Hyacinth’s right around eleven, we’ll have cake.”

“Deal.”

With some misgivings, inasmuch as they’d promised to at least try to be back by sunset, the General left the young felon in charge of Calliope’s latest art project and began to herd the others towards the bus.

———

In the front room, Barnaby was wearing his suit coat with pajama pants and holding up a creased theater program. “I only intend to spend one lifetime on this godforsaken planet, and I want to see Ann get murdered!”

“Barnaby, will you close your mouth for two seconds and look at that object you are holding in your hand?” Hyacinth snapped. “We’ve done Ann being murdered. It’s over. We’re at Milo being a zombie and you are not invited!”

Erik almost shut the door and went around to the kitchen. But Terpsichore caught it.

“Oh yeah?” Barnaby was saying. “Then where’s the awful woman with the note…”

“Mr. Graham!” Terpsichore cried, pencil and notebook in hand. “I’ve been looking for you for nearly three weeks! I couldn’t see in your windows ‘cos of the newspaper! So, how do you find insanity?” She laughed. “Let me guess, you looked under your psychic talent and there it was, right?”

“Oh, my gods, no,” Barnaby said. He went pale as a sheet and scuttled up the stairs, all the way to the attic. He took the pole to the retractable staircase with him.

Hyacinth smiled. “Terpsichore, would you like to live here?”

Terpsichore frowned. “What, with people?”

Mordecai waved Erik inside. “Hurry up, dear one. Let’s get ready to go so we can be somewhere on time for once. We don’t want to make tonight any harder for Milo than it already is…”