The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  When she was three, they took her to the city.

  The motion of the car put her to sleep, and when she awoke, she saw through the window of the car an endless procession of stranger houses. Each house was tight against the next, all of them staring out at the street in a glare of hard, blue light, watching her. She began to scream.

  Mama picked her up and cuddled her, asking her what it was that hurt and whether it was teeth or tummy. It was neither. It was the sight of that endless row of stranger houses that had frightened her half out of her infant wits. They were the first closed places she had ever seen, the first unfamiliar sights or sounds in her life, and they came as a hideous surprise.

  If Papa had not had to take a detour, they would have gone through a park. Somehow, she remembered a park. The picture of the park superimposed itself on the row of houses and she fell asleep again. There should have been a park.

  Thereafter, from time to time, she experienced similar superimpositions, as though her life were a palimpsest on which one experience was written over another in confusing detail so it was difficult to know which was real and which was something else. Not less real, she thought as she began to be old enough to think about things. Simply less relevant to the other things that were going on.

  Her second encounter with a closed, unfamiliar place came a year or so later, when she was old enough to go for long walks. Her hand held tightly in Nanny’s hand, she strolled down the driveway and out onto the country road. She remembered turning left, but they actually turned right to walk down the road toward the river, passing on the way a tall, gray stone house set well back from the road with windows that stared at her from half-lowered lids. Its door pursed its sill and scowled. As in that time she had visited the city, she wept. She couldn’t tell Nanny what was wrong, she hadn’t the words for it, and everyone assumed some childhood indisposition when it wasn’t that at all. It was simply that she did not know the gray house.

  Every morning she could remember, Marianne had awakened knowing the people and places and events that day would bring. Each event was ready for her in her recollection, even before she experienced it, as well as the consequences of that event, sometimes far in the future. If she helped the gardener plant bulbs, the ultimate flowers were already there in her mind, though she would not actually see the blooms until spring. As she was lifted onto her pony for the first time, she already remembered learning to ride it. The horse she would love so much would come later, and the memory of that future horse was evoked by the present pony even as she struggled to master the muscles needed to stay on. Her body experienced it for the first time, but her mind – it already knew. It needed only a clue to come to mind. Bulb evoked flower. Pony evoked horse. All her teachers were amazed. ‘She seems to soak it up like a little sponge,’ her riding teacher said, laughing a little uncomfortably. It seemed unfair to the other children that this one should take it all in so easily.

  She assumed, for a time, at least, that everyone lived as she did, knowing what would come before it happened, knowing the places they lived in as soon as they were born. She assumed everyone had occasional visions of some alternate reality, sometimes dull, sometimes bright, sometimes frightening and bizarre. She did not know that she was unique, that no one else in the world lived as she did. She was unwilling to accept that there might be people and places that remained strangers. Instead she chose to believe that the knowledge would come later. She would get to know them someday. Someday there would be no more unfamiliar streets, no more closed doors, no more shut windows. Someday, when she was grown-up, everything would be understood. The gray house, with all its spaces, its roofs and porches, its closets and attics would come to her, part of growing up. She would be able to greet it as she walked on the street. ‘Hello old green-shingly-with-the-cupola. Still have that mouse family in the attic?’ Someday, she told herself comfortingly, intercepting a hard, opaque stare from her half brother, she might know Harvey, too. It would come. She would use the huge, old gray stone house as a yardstick to determine whether the time had come or not.

  The season came when she started to school, and for the first time she began to suspect she might be different from other children. Why should she enter the school on the first day knowing everything about it, while other children cowered and cried as though it were new and strange? Other children did not know where their classrooms were. Why did she? They did not know where the bathrooms were or where the drinking fountain had made a weirdly shaped yellow stain on the wall, like an upside-down giraffe. To Marianne it was all as familiar as though studied in advance. Why should she know her teacher’s name before they met when other children didn’t know? She had to accept the fact that they did not know, and in doing so she learned of her own strangeness. She did not want it to show, so she learned to counterfeit surprise and mimic apprehension. Still, she could never do so without feeling that somehow she was lying.

  She walked to school each day, often going out of her way to pass the great gray house. Each day she peeked at it, quick, birdlike glances, waiting for the day when it would open like a flower with all its high stairs and dormer windows, waiting for the first glimmer of recognition. That year, the year she was six, went by and the house did not open. Nor when she was seven, or eight.

  Still, she believed it would happen. She believed it for a long time, until one day she talked to Great-aunt Dagma, who was very old and thus of an age to have opened all the places of the world, and found that Great-aunt Dagma didn’t know the gray house at all.

  ‘Why, child, I haven’t any idea,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been in it. It’s occupied by some people called Carlson, I believe, but as to whether it has an attic or not? I just don’t know.’

  So the house really was a stranger house. So were the houses in the city. Strangers. Not understood. Marianne sat there, in a state of profound shock, unable to speak for a long time. Great-aunt Dagma was a sympathetic listener who did not make fun, however, and at last Marianne was able to confess that the house was very strange to her. ‘Not like home, Great-aunt,’ she confided. ‘It seems like—oh, like somebody who doesn’t talk our language at all. Some people are like that, too. Harvey’s like that.’

  Great-aunt, with a strangely intent look, agreed that this described Harvey very well. ‘He does always seem to be saying one thing with his mouth and something else with his eyes, doesn’t he, Marianne. Ah, but then, he’s always been a tight, closed boy, like a treasure box with the key hidden away somewhere. His mother was like that, herself, and his aunt is a perfect example. Lubovoskans, you know. It’s a strange, shaman-ridden, paranoid country, Lubovosk – unlike sunny Alphenlicht from which our family comes – so it’s no wonder the people show that characteristic. Harvey is a hard boy to get to know. Don’t let it worry you, child. It isn’t your fault.’

  Marianne had not thought it was her fault. Still, the implication was inescapable, and she was neither so stubborn nor so unintelligent as to miss it. Merely growing up would not open the gray house or her half brother to her after all. And if Harvey and the gray house would not open, then neither would all the other closed places or people – the people like Mrs Sindles at the school, who was always so pursed-lipped and unhappy about no-one-knew-what, who were capable of doing frightening and unexpected things. They would always be that way. Nothing she could do would change it. She wept over it for a few nights, then accepted it, using one of Cloud-haired mama’s favorite phrases, ‘All part of growing up.’ Disillusionment, pain, unpleasant surprise, all were part of growing up.

  She became accustomed to her life: accustomed to knowing ninety-five percent of everything before it occurred; accustomed to the shock of the other five percent, the wild happenings, the accidents, unpredictable and truly frightening; the double visions that were like waking dreams; the occasional places that greeted her as though they were old friends, though Marianne could not recollect how or when they might have met.

  There was a stone church at the corne
r of Beale Street, for example, set back a little behind a clump of trees, that spoke to her every time she saw it. ‘Remember,’ it said. ‘Remember?’ Its tower had an admonitory look, like a raised finger. ‘Remember, Marianne. Pay attention, now.’ A massive rock shelter at the entrance to the Bitter River Road spoke in somewhat the same fashion. ‘Here,’ it said. ’He has been here for some time. He will be here when needed.’

  What was she to make of this? It was a mystery.

  There was a small frame house where an old, old Chinese woman often lay half-asleep on the porch. When Marianne passed by, the woman spoke without opening her lips, ‘One of them is inside. One you’ll need, Marianne. Just keep it in mind.’ Perhaps it was not the woman who spoke at all. Perhaps it was the house that spoke.

  There was a certain maple tree, bigger around than her arms would reach, which, when it was half turned yellow in the fall, whispered, ‘Just now, on the grass. Just this minute he’s come. He’s usually here. Don’t forget.’ And a wall of Virginia creeper, bloody scarlet upon the brick, breathed, ‘One of them lies here every day, waiting for word from you.’

  Messages. From inside. Inside the church, the house, the shelter, the tree, the wall. Messages that were always delivered in the same voice. She believed the voice without understanding it at all. She did not recognize the voice although it was her own, its sound subtly changed in a way she could not have expected. It would be some time before she realized it was her own voice as an adult, as she would someday be.

  Now she could only reply to the church, ‘No, I don’t remember. I’m sorry, but I don’t.’

  She tried to put the messages and the voice out of her mind. It was too troubling to deal with. For a year or two, she succeeded.

  Until she was ten years old and had a dream.

  It was very early one fall morning. She lay in her room, her arms beneath the covers, the window blowing a gauzy curtain half across her face. She was aware of this and aware at the same time that she was dreaming. In the dream, also, there was a window, but she was older, much older. An old woman, twenty or more. She sat at a desk by the window, oak twigs tapping at the panes, looking out at a green, park-like place across the street. Something horrible crouched at her feet. When she looked, it was only a box, but there was something dreadful in it. Tears dripped from her eyes onto her hands, and in the dream she knew that she grieved. She was crying because Cloud-haired mama and Papa were dead.

  She was crying because Harvey had had something to do with their deaths!

  Ten-year-old Marianne sat straight up in bed, the dream as real as something she might have seen on television, a scream trembling unvoiced somewhere deep in an aching hollow inside her. They were dead. Gone. Killed. And Marianne herself was in terrible danger.

  The dreamlike quality of her terror was something she recognized within a moment. Her heart was not pounding. Her mind screamed, but her body lay upon the bed quietly, without panic. It was visionary terror, not real – or if real, not real in the way that other, more immediate things were real. Though it might hold the essence of reality, it did not exist in the here and now. It was another of those double visions, experienced this time as a dream and coming as an unmistakable warning. The message was clear and unequivocal. ‘If things go on as they are going,’ she heard that inner voice saying, ‘this dreadful thing will happen.’

  For the first time, she recognized the voice as her own.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, less frightened than angry that some part of her should have separated itself in this way and be playing such tricks on her.

  ‘You know,’ the voice answered. ‘You. I am you.’

  ‘How do you know such things?’ Marianne demanded aloud before she realized she did not need to vocalize for that other self to hear.

  ‘I lived them,’ the voice said.

  ‘Are you from the future?’ she asked, silently.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the voice said, very sadly. ‘In a manner of speaking. Your future is my past. I left you word, Marianne. Messages. I left you helpers. So it won’t happen! You must not let it happen!’

  So that was the reason for the messages. When the old stone church begged her to ‘remember,’ the word was not from this time, not from this life but from some other time, some other life in which the church had also existed. Another Marianne had known the church then, there. She had been inside the church, intimate with it, able to do something there, leave some symbolic taint of herself, some word, some information. Marianne the child struggled with the concept. It was as though someone had put a message in a bottle or a hollow tree, except that the message was just for her. Someone, herself, had left her a message about a terrible thing.

  ‘Something terrible happened in that other world,’ she told herself. ‘To me. To that Marianne. And in this world, it must not happen. That is what the messages are all about.’ She was as certain of this as she was of her name. Marianne. Marianne Zahmani. This Marianne. Herself.

  As she lay there in bed that early morning, she worked it out, slowly. The person who had left these messages was another, a grown-up Marianne. She began to sense, however vaguely at first, that the life of the grown-up Marianne had always been there, hanging at the edges of each day’s experiences, awaiting its own reaffirmation. The discovery came with a sense of shock and ultimate recognition, like seeing her face in a mirror and realizing for the first time that it was her own unique and mortal image, not an immortal shadow awaiting her in some other world. Most of her present life had simply affirmed and repeated another life! A life previously lived. By someone else! By that grown-up person that was in some strange way herself! That is why everything had been so familiar!

  She had figured it out by the time people had begun to stir. She dressed for breakfast as she did every morning, not suspecting what would come next. She had not foreseen the implications of the change. Because this thing had happened that had never happened before, this morning, for the first time in her life, she went down the stairs to confront a day in which there were many events she would not foresee.

  Harvey said something angry at breakfast, something she did not understand and had not anticipated. There was a guest for lunch, someone she did not recognize. By early afternoon, she was in a panic, unable to deal with this sudden, horribly surprising world. She retreated to her room, trying desperately to appear poised, failing miserably.

  She felt lost, betrayed, and angry, too, at that other Marianne for having done this to her. Other children met the strangeness of the world as babies; by the time they were ten, they had some notion of how it was done. Now she must learn it all at once, late, without letting anyone know how hideously unprepared she was.

  She learned.

  Most days there were only one or two things she was not ready for. Some days were totally anticipated, just as they had always been. As she learned to poise herself upon the moment, taking her clues from others, reacting as they did, her fear and panic dwindled, but the anger remained. It was not fair to have done this to her. Not fair. Not right! Even though there was reason for the messages she had received, still, whoever-it-was shouldn’t have done this to her! Shouldn’t have done it even though Marianne believed that what it had told her was true.

  Gradually, she came to act on that belief.

  Harvey asked her to go riding with him. She remembered having done so on a bright spring morning just like this one. Now, on the morning of that day – on this morning—she decided it was better not to go.

  ‘What’s the matter, Marianne?’ asked Mama. ‘Don’t you want to go riding with your big brother?’

  ‘No thank you, Mama. Not right now.’ Knowing why, precisely. That other time, in that other life, she had gone riding with Harvey and he had asked her certain questions about Mama that Marianne, all unwitting, had answered. It would be better not to talk about those things. Better not give him the opportunity to ask.

  But since she did not go with him, she spent the day being terrified. By ch
anging now what she had done in that other life, she had changed the day completely. Everything in it was different and unexpected. By evening she was exhausted at the emotional battering, and yet there was a touch of wild exhilaration as well. It had been like a roller coaster. A kind of swooping weightlessness.

  Was this the way most people lived? With this shock of events? She could not decide whether she could bear it or not.

  As the spring and summer wore on, the choices became more difficult and the former life increasingly unclear. Sometimes it was only possible to guess what had been done before and what kind of deviation was needed to change the old life into something new. Still, she kept trying. By August, the greater part of every day came as a surprise, and she relished the few familiar hours as rewards for the struggle she was making.

  ‘I wish you’d girl-talk just with me, Mama. When Harvey’s there, he spoils it.’

  ‘Now, Mist Princess. Harvey is your half brother. My stepson. He’s family, and we have to make him feel loved and welcome.’ Cloud-haired mama looked surprised and a little offended, but Marianne persevered.

  ‘He looks at you like the man looked at the lady on TV when she took her clothes off. I just don’t think he should come in your bedroom with us all the time. He makes me feel nasty.’

  That was not something an eleven-year-old Marianne had said the other time. Now that it had been said, however, Mama saw what Marianne had seen. What she had accepted as filial affection—Mama had very little experience of the world and Papa liked her exactly that way—could be interpreted as a much more basic emotion. Harvey was, after all, a grown man only a few years younger than Cloud-haired mama and not of any blood kin to her. The bedroom visits were curtailed, and Marianne felt relief. That particular juncture had been safely passed.

  Mama did not leave well enough alone, however. She spoke to Papa in the garden.