UD17 first Mrs. Thrash rolls him up in the Abominable Snowman rug. Ravi—Jane’s Ravi—is making anxious noises around first Mrs. Thrash, uncertain whether she might be destroying a priceless work of art or whether the snowman rug really is as awful as it seems.
“Why are you dressed like that?” Jane asks the pirate, crouching down at his head.
“For the love of a woman who hardly knows I exist,” the sad-clown pirate says gloomily, his floppy shoes sticking out of one end of the rug and his curly rainbow wig out of the other. He resembles a sad-clown hot dog.
“Do people always dress up like sad clowns here when they’re heartbroken?” Jane asks, trying to find patterns. Patterns are comforting.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m dressed like this because it’s how she dresses,” the pirate says as UD17 first Mrs. Thrash rolls him to the side of the corridor, then presses a button on the wall that allows her to communicate with Captain Vanders.
“I’m so confused,” says Jane. “Are you in cahoots with Lucy? I mean, Lavender?”
A bit farther along the corridor, the ceiling spits out an orange. It falls to the floor, bounces, and rolls toward Jane.
“Oh! Well! That’s just insulting,” the sad-clown pirate says from his rug roll.
“What?” says Ravi. “The orange? An orange is insulting? What’s wrong with you? God, I hate this dimension.”
“It’s my friend’s orange,” the sad-clown pirate says mournfully. “My friend has become part of the hull of this ship. After he cut through it, I mean. The hull shook his ship off, but hung on to him. It stuck his body into the opening to plug it up.”
“Like a finger in the dam?” Jane asks.
“The damn what?” he says.
“Your friend’s ship is gone?” says UD17 first Mrs. Thrash with rising alarm. “What do you mean? Does he have any air?”
“No,” says the pirate. “I watched him turn blue.”
UD17 first Mrs. Thrash stares at the pirate in disbelief. “Are you telling me that the house has killed him?”
“But decided to spare the orange,” says the sad-clown pirate. “It’s a bizarre ship you call home, if you don’t mind my saying so. Has some peculiar defensive capabilities. We weren’t warned of this. Judging by how summarily we were defeated, I feel that perhaps I have been used.”
“By whom?” Jane says. “For what?”
“By her, of course,” he says. “To create a distraction. Is it pathetic if I hope she gets away with it?”
“Huh?” Jane says. “What are you talking about? You’re not here for the portal?”
“Porthole?” he says. “What porthole?”
“Wait—are you even really a pirate?” says Jane. “Are you here for the art?”
“It’s true I am a painter of great talent,” the pirate says. “But I think I’ve said enough. Don’t you?”
“I—don’t know,” Jane says, trying to understand. Is Lavender after the art?
A number of staffpersons Jane doesn’t recognize have arrived with a gurney and are surrounding the rolled-up pirate. They lift him and the Abominable Snowman rug directly onto the gurney, then strap him in. UD17 first Mrs. Thrash is telling the staffpersons something chilly and grave about the dead man who’s currently plugging up the hole he himself cut in the roof. The staff doesn’t believe her. The house has never killed anyone before. Jane wonders if Captain Vanders will be surprised. She has a feeling she won’t.
Jane has been trying to remember where Lucy—Lavender—was headed the last time Jane saw her. “Ravi,” she says quietly. “Come with me.”
* * *
With perfect manners, Ravi offers to carry one of Jane’s umbrellas and makes no reference to how he kissed her in the halls of their own Tu Reviens that morning. He also takes off the roller skates to match himself to the clomping pace of her boots. Jane finds him easy company, really, when he’s not flirting all the time. It’s strange that her relief is mixed with wistfulness.
“Where are we going?” he asks, the skates dangling from his hand by the laces. When Jane was little, Aunt Magnolia used to walk with her to the park, then sit on a bench and wait for her, offering words of encouragement while she skated. On the way there and back, Jane would tie her laces together and carry her skates the way Ravi is carrying his.
“Well?” says Ravi impatiently.
“Huh? Oh. Second story, east wing,” Jane says. “Or 01 level portside, I think they say here. I have a theory.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not ready to say yet. But I don’t think those guys were pirates after the portal.”
“Great,” he says. “Another mystery.” Ravi is not comfortable walking the corridors of this Tu Reviens. Jane can tell from his voice, and from the way he keeps glancing over his shoulders.
The lights in the second-story east wing are flickering wildly. They hold steady as Ravi and Jane arrive, as if they’ve been trying to get someone’s attention, and these two people will do. Jane supposes she’s not entirely surprised to find Lucy—Lavender—alone in the corridor. She’s standing there, whimpering, because her hand has been sucked up by the wall. It’s happened right at the edge of a small painting—really, almost behind the painting—of a woman writing a letter at a table while her frog stands peacefully nearby. It’s nighttime in the painting. The scene is softly lit by a swirling galaxy of stars.
“Lucy-Bear!” cries Ravi. “Clown Lucy! What happened?” Then, “Holy shit. Look at that Vermeer.”
“Vermeer?” Jane says.
“That gorgeous picture,” Ravi says. “A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog—or at least, that’s what it’s called in our dimension.”
“Oh, right,” says Jane, remembering. “Mrs. Vanders actually mentioned your Vermeer this morning.”
“She did?”
“She was worried about it, possibly?” says Jane. “She wanted you to look at it.”
“Worried? Hang on, what’s this?”
Ravi bends down to get a better look at a small canvas lying flat on the floor beside Lavender’s oversized clown shoes. Then he freezes. Putting his skates down carefully, handing Jane the umbrella he’s carrying, Ravi picks the canvas up and holds it at arm’s length. It’s a painting of a woman writing a letter while her frog stands nearby. It’s identical to the painting on the wall.
He turns to Lavender. Ravi, suddenly, is almost crying. “Lucy,” he says. “What are you doing?”
“My name is Lavender,” says Lavender, gasping. “And you’re not even my real Ravi.”
“All this time,” Ravi says, “you’ve been pretending?”
“It’s none of your business if I’ve been pretending!” Lucy—Lavender—cries out. “You’re not you. I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you! To any of you!”
“You told me you loved me.”
“Oh, listen to yourself. That wasn’t me and you, it was you and someone else, me and someone else. Anyway, you don’t even know what the word means!”
“Which painting is the real one?” Ravi asks, his voice choked.
“Figure it out,” Lavender says, “if you care so much! You don’t care who’s in your bed, but ohhh, it matters what painting is on your wall!”
“I will figure it out,” says Ravi. “I assure you. And I’ll tell your father and your cousin what you did. I’ll tell everyone!”
Lavender begins to laugh, a disgusted laugh that turns into a short scream as the wall sucks harder on her hand.
“I’m calling the police,” says Ravi, placing the canvas carefully on the floor where he found it. “Or the captain. Whatever it is you’ve got in this goddamn dimension for dealing with clown-nosed, lowlife art thieves. Guard the paintings,” he says to Jane stiffly. “I’ll be back.”
“All right,” Jane says. Then she waits, patient an
d still, an umbrella in each hand, until, swearing quietly, Ravi has retrieved his skates and rolled off down the corridor.
Jane turns back to Lavender. The wall, it seems, is steadily consuming Lavender’s hand. She’s in deeper now, almost to her elbow, and she’s gasping in pain. Tears are running oily tracks through her makeup; black is dripping onto her white shirt.
“Did you pay those two men to distract the house while you stole the painting?” Jane asks.
“I assure you,” Lavender says with a weak rush of fury, “you’re the last person in the multiverse I would ever explain myself to.” Her eyes go bright and flash at Jane. “The second-to-last person,” she cries out. “You’re just a copy! Of a nobody! Of Ravi’s latest in a string of nobodies!”
“What are you stealing it for?”
“Why does anyone steal anything?”
“Money?” Jane says, disgusted.
“It’s a painting,” Lavender spits at Jane. “It’s a thing. It doesn’t hurt anyone for me to take it. Other than Ravi, maybe, and he deserves it!”
“One of your associates died,” Jane says. “The house killed him.”
Lavender cries out as the wall slurps her arm in past the elbow. She’s lost the strength of her legs and is hanging from her trapped arm like a sad-clown ragdoll. Jane tries not to think about the state of her hand, her forearm, inside that wall. Jane tries not to wonder how far the wall is going to take this punishment.
“Is there anywhere you can run?” Jane asks her.
“What?” Lavender gasps, confused.
“Do you have an exit plan?”
Lavender swings her head up to look at Jane briefly, exhausted, her eyes glazed with pain. “I wasn’t supposed to get caught,” she says. “But yes. There are places I could go.”
Jane has the feeling that deliberation will only convince her of the impossibility of her plan. So, without deliberation, she jams her unfinished, flapping black umbrella into the wall, right at the edge of the spot where Lavender’s arm is being eaten. The wall shudders, growls, and squeezes. Lavender screams.
Jane grips her brown-rose-copper umbrella hard and jams it into the wall on the other side of Lavender’s arm. It’s hard to know what’s happening, exactly, as the wall shrieks and balks and drips a strange, glutinous, snotty substance around Jane’s stabbing places, but instinct causes her to use the umbrellas as crowbars, to pry open the hole that’s sucking Lavender in. The wall roars, then screams. Lavender pulls. Lavender screams.
Then her arm, bloody, mangled, and limp, slips out of the wall like some sluggish creature being born. Lavender falls.
“Run!” Jane yells. “Run!”
Lavender staggers, then, bent over her arm, runs. Alone in the corridor, Jane yanks the umbrellas out of the wall and jams them back in, stab, stab, stab, trying to keep the house distracted while Lavender runs. The wall buckles; it forms fingers that grab at the umbrellas; Jane stabs, keeps stabbing.
But then the floor beneath her boots begins to rumble and shift and she decides she’s risked enough. She lets go of the umbrellas, leaving them stuck in the wall. “Nice house,” she says. “Wonderful house. I would never hurt this dear, lovely house.” Jane breathes jellyfish-deep through her very sincere intention not to do a single thing to cross this horrifying house.
Lavender, when she ran, left behind both paintings. Jane leaves them where they are too, and backs away. The wall still seems to be having a bit of a tussle with the umbrellas, which jerk back and forth, but the floor is calming itself.
“I want to go home,” Jane says. “Please, god, let me go home.” It’s funny to find herself speaking words that sound like prayer. She’s never been religious, she doesn’t know what she believes, and she doesn’t really know what she means by home, either.
She does, however, give herself a second to mourn the brown-rose-copper umbrella with the brass handle. Her heroic-journey umbrella; she realizes she’s going to have to leave it behind. She thanks it for the important job it’s done.
As she leaves the second-story east wing, she understands that there’s one more thing she needs to do before she departs this dimension.
* * *
When she reaches the third-story east corridor, Jane finds that the mess has been cleaned up. No pirates, no paramedics. Even the Abominable Snowman rug is back in place. Judging by the thunks from above, it sounds like a team of people on the roof, or the hull, is retrieving the dead man and repairing the breach. Jane wonders if the house is giving the man’s body up willingly.
At the sound of skates, she turns to find Ravi gliding toward her from the direction of the atrium, looking like a stormcloud. “We got to the painting and Lucy was gone,” he says testily. “You let her go, didn’t you?”
“That wall was going to kill her,” Jane says. “And her name is Lavender.”
“The wall wasn’t going to kill her!”
“You didn’t see what it did to her arm,” Jane says.
Ravi swallows. He looks uncomfortable. “What did it do to her arm?”
“Maybe it’s better you don’t ask.”
“Well?” he says, anxious now. “Will she be okay?”
“I have no idea! But you know as well as I do that this house kills people!”
Ravi is fighting with some thought inside his head. “Okay,” he says. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it at this point, and given what we saw, I’d like to get back home now. I need to have a chat with my Lucy about a Brancusi. Maybe also take a closer look at our Vermeer.”
“One more stop first,” Jane says.
When Ravi raises questioning eyebrows, Jane holds out her hand. He takes it, puzzled, and Jane pulls him down the corridor.
“No,” Ravi says, when he sees where they’re going. “No way.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No,” he insists, breaking out of Jane’s grip. “I’ll meet you at the portal.”
“What are you afraid of?” Jane snaps at him. “The truth?”
“No,” he snaps back, finally, thoroughly losing his temper. “I’m afraid of exactly the opposite, of believing things of myself that aren’t true. You don’t get it, do you? UD17 Ravi is a prick. I know. I’ve met him. He’s like me, but without any—” Ravi waves his hands around in frustration, reaching for the words. “He’s cold. He has no compunctions. And he’s so much like me. It screws with my head. He’s not the only Ravi I’ve met and not liked, either. Kiran too. You know when Kiran started moping around all depressed, and pushing Patrick away? It was after she met UD17 Karen and Patrick, who’re so disgustingly motivated and happy and in love, and made her feel like her own Patrick was holding back, keeping secrets, being dishonest somehow. She’s decided something’s wrong with her, and she doesn’t trust her Patrick, and she feels like she’s stuck in the wrong world. This place will screw you up!”
“UD17 Ravi isn’t you,” Jane says. “Don’t you know who you are?”
“Yeah,” he says, “and I intend to keep it that way.” Then he turns and leaves her.
He has not left her alone. UD17 Ivy is walking calmly down the corridor toward Jane.
“Hi,” she says. Her grin is so much like the Ivy Jane knows that Jane flushes, remembering that other Ivy—real Ivy—saw her kissing Ravi earlier today. Though this Ivy, Jane realizes, doesn’t wear glasses. Her eyes are less brightly blue too.
“Captain Vanders sent me to do a last check of this passageway,” UD17 Ivy says.
“Is she your boss?”
“Yes. One of my bosses.”
“Wait,” Jane says. “If she’s a captain, does that mean you’re some kind of soldier?”
“It’s not a military ship,” she says. “But as it happens, I’ve been getting some pressure to train as a military officer.”
“Really!”
“My brother is one,” s
he says. “He’s in intelligence. Karen’s thinking about it too, after she weans the babies.”
Now Jane is trying to imagine the Ivy of her world as a military officer, involved in intelligence. “Do you want to be in the military?”
“Not particularly,” UD17 Ivy says, another smile transforming her face. “I have other interests.”
Jane is feeling a sudden urgency not to know this Ivy’s interests. She doesn’t want this Ivy to overlay her Ivy, whom she only met yesterday. Her Ivy does beautiful carpentry and this world probably doesn’t even have forests. And what carvings would a carpenter in this oceanless world carve, in lieu of Ivy’s whales, sharks, and girls in rowboats?
“Well,” Jane says. “I’ve got one more visit to make before I go home.”
“Here?” says UD17 Ivy, indicating the door behind Jane. “You know that’s Ravi’s cabin, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think you’re going to catch him alone,” she says. “You know who’s in there?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Someone told me. I was—surprised,” she says, leaving it at that. “It’s not Ravi I’m wanting to see.”
“Oh,” UD17 Ivy says, her eyes widening. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Jane pauses, swallowing. “There’s a question I need to ask.”
UD17 Ivy bites her lip. She’s trying, Jane thinks, to stop herself from telling me not to go in there.
Instead, UD17 Ivy says, “Would you like me to wait here for you?”
Jane’s breath comes out in a rush of relief. “Really?” she says. “Do you have time for that?”
“Sure,” says Ivy. “I could stand outside the door, if you want? You could knock if you need me.”
“Yes,” Jane says. “Please. That’s awfully kind. I won’t be long.”
* * *
Jane doesn’t knock. She pushes right in, takes one look, and perceives, immediately, why everyone’s been warning her.