House of Dreams

by Michael F. Flynn

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

Sometimes, when the light is right, or the angle, you can see the shades of other worlds. There is a spot off Sandy Hook where graceful ships of unknown design sail past the double-turreted lighthouse. Near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, residents on Waverly Place claim that elegant but oddly dressed men and women sometimes cross the street. In Michigan, motorists passing the Six Mile Road exit in Livonia report fleeting glimpses of a line of dispirited men walking through pouring rain.

It may be some trick of the light, a peculiar form of polarization. Or it may be some sort of quantum resonance between worldlines abutting. Science is helpless to explain these sights; barely acknowledges their existence. It is not even clear if these are glimpses of what was or what will be or what might have been. Perhaps they are only places where the walls between adjacent universes have worn thin, allowing glimpses through the remaining scrim.

Now that’s a cold-blooded way to look at it! What do you know of worldlines abutting or the walls of universes? It’s all just words. It may be the heart that sees these things and not the mind; and what the heart sees is not bound by physics.

Ted moved into Pennyworth House one bright April day with two suitcases, full of dreams. No, the suitcases didn’t contain dreams (though they did hold architects’ renderings and plans) nor did April days (though they are certainly conducive to them). I meant that Ted was full of dreams; or the house was.

The joke about Pennyworth House was that it wasn’t. There had been a time when the block was called “Millionaire’s Row” and Plainfield was the country refuge of the great textile magnates; but those days are long fled. The mills are overseas now, and Plainfield no longer rural. Even a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. But they built solid back then, and age has only seasoned the place. It was that oddly American style we call Puritan-Victorian, extravagant but frowning on excess. Just the sort of house to appeal to the urban homesteader.

Ted laid his suitcases out in the room he and Sharon had chosen as a master bedroom. It was a fine room with a separate sitting area, a dresser and armoire, a four-poster canopy bed that scattered dust when he swatted the draperies. The bed would have to go. It was a bit too old and a bit too used to suit Sharon, though it would do for now while he sorted the furnishings and prepared the house for moving day.

He positioned a family portrait on the dresser facing the bed. That’s Ted in the rear, the one with the goofy, unworldly look. Sharon sits in the foreground, with large, prominent eyes and a crown of golden-brown hair. Her arm wraps around Billy, who tries (and fails) to conceal the six-year-old bored look. How can a boy squirm in a still photo? Yet, each time Ted looked at that picture, that kid was in a different position. If it weren’t for Sharon’s arm holding him, he’d be off the frame entirely.

From the suitcase flap, Ted pulled out pads of colored Post-It notes and the lists that Sharon had given him. There was a lot of old furniture to dispose of before the moving van arrived; and the sooner he got started, the better. Starting in the first floor “parlor,” Ted placed green stickers on the items Sharon had decided to keep, and red on those to be donated to the poor. The lists were systematic, arranged by room; but then, Sharon had a lawyer’s systematic mind. Ted was more the dreamer, the scientist.

The poor apparently had a desperate need for Victorian bric-a-brac. An umbrella stand—just the thing for a needy household! (Don’t laugh. Maybe their roofs leak.) Occasionally, an item puzzled him. A gasogene? A portmanteau? He would need a dictionary to finish this job! Hey, Ted was no mouth-breather! He had his share of degrees. But some things were simply beyond his ken. Chair with anti-macassars… What was an anti-macassar? Were there pro-macassars? Were macassars anything on which one ought even to take a position?

From time to time, Ted was tempted to switch the red and green stickers. Why toss that footstool but keep that monstrosity of a cabinet? But he refrained. Sharon had very firm notions, some internal litmus that separated the fashionably retro from the hopelessly outmoded.

In the basement stairwell, he found a flashlight as long as his forearm hanging in the space between the door and the wall. Ted noticed it because he was searching for the light switch. That was also how he discovered that the electricity hadn’t been turned on yet; so it was just as well the flashlight was hanging where it was. Though it would have been better if it hadn’t been.

It was surprisingly heavy, even for its size, and he nearly dropped it. Judging by the dust and the pattern of little rust spots, he thought the batteries would be long dead; so the glare almost blinded him when he pressed the stud.

People, that was a flashlight! It was the Mother of All Flashlights. Ted spent a long time blinking away the spots. A light that strong should have illuminated the entire basement. A light that strong should have illuminated Union County. Yet, when he aimed it down the stairs, the colors were dim and washed out; and the stairs, walls, support beams, all had a dull sepia tint, like an old photograph.

A hint of movement at the edge of the light caught his eye. He tried to track it, but saw nothing. But just to be on the safe side, he closed the basement door when he left and made a note to call the exterminators as soon as he had phone service. Sharon would have a fit if she knew there were mice in the house.

He was half-finished with the furniture checklist when the windows faded to twilight gray and the outlines of the furnishings took on a more tentative look. He could have tucked it in then and snuggled into the covers on that canopy bed. He could have waited until morning, finished his inventory by daylight, and had electricity by evening. But what kind of story would that be? Instead, he worked by flashlight until darkness fell entire. And because he had carried it with him from the basement stairwell, he used that mother flashlight.

He was upstairs by then, in one of the small rooms in the south wing. He had thought it unfurnished—just a small table that Sharon had drafted into the War on Poverty—but when he followed the sepia light inside, he saw that someone had co-opted the room. There was a low stool, a drafting table, and, near the window where the sunlight would catch it, an easel bearing an unfinished painting. On a small table nearby were brushes, a dried-out palette, and paint tubes, crimped and squeezed.

Hey, what’s going on here? None of that crap was there when the realtor had showed the house! Had someone set up an art studio? In his house? And why? (The view wasn’t much; but there might be some special quality to the sunlight. Artists were a strange breed. Stranger than physicists or lawyers in some ways.) Ted turned his light on the painting.

People, that was one nasty collection of daubs! Call it impressionistic if you want, but only if you want to make a bad impression. Even in the dull sepia light, it was a horrid dark. Swaths of black and Prussian blue and other dismal hues swirled on the canvas, suggesting a mouth open in an endless howl. Lurking in the blackness behind it, emergent shapes. Not shapes you could name, or even want to.

The painting both repelled and intrigued, and Ted reached for it. That was how he discovered it wasn’t there. His hand closed on nothing, and the unexpectedness of it threw him off balance, and he stumbled forward.

Hear that clatter of easels toppling over? Hear the snap of paintbrushes broken underfoot? Smoke and dreams! Silence, that’s what you hear. No easel, no brushes, no palette full of colored pastes. Not even (when he waved his hand through the air where the easel seemed to be) his own arm.

People, that was one weird flashlight! It lit up what wasn’t there and didn’t light what was.

Now Ted was a scientist, so while he was surprised and a little uneasy, he was also a little curious. He did cry out, but let’s be generous and say he cried, “Wow!”, because after he had caught his breath and his heart (which had skittered halfway down the hall before coming back), he set out to discover what the hell was going on.

First, he turned the flashlight off and contemplated the room. The twilight was just strong enough to show that it was indeed empty. He turned the light back on and the room was…

Full of furniture. Okay, so the furniture had been chopped up and the wood stacked in the corner; but you could tell that the pieces had once been chairs and drawers and the like. Ted pursed his lips and wondered if his mind was playing tricks, but discarded that hypothesis as inherently untestable.

He tried the light several times, and each time the room was a little different. An empty, cobwebbed room, an artist’s studio, stacks of wood… Once, he even saw the furniture intact, a bedroom for two small children. There was no continuity among the glimpses, no order. Hey, if what he saw wasn’t real, why should it come in any sort of order? The worldlines might not be temporally congruent.

(Temporally congruent? Sure, Ted thought that way all the time. This was science, man! But maybe Ted pulled that science around him a little more tightly; because this was not exactly dropping cannonballs from towers or watching gorillas in the mist.)

Naturally, he opened the flashlight up and looked inside. Don’t think for a moment he could resist doing that. But, all things considered, he didn’t really expect to see a couple of D-cells, and he didn’t. Though a pink bunny rabbit could have jumped out beating a drum and it would not have been as perplexing as the mass of gizmos and wiring he did see. Some gizmos looked familiar—rather like a whatchamacallit—but the twilight had deepened to the point where most of the mechanism was shrouded in shadow, so he couldn’t really tell what was in there.

Did he pull the modules out? Did he lay them out in the fading twilight so he could study the circuit, find the power source, puzzle out the logic? Fat geese and golden eggs! What kind of fool do you think he was? That sepia light might be dim, but Ted wasn’t. A lot of things could happen if he tried to take that thing apart, and most of them were not good. That flashlight was heavy, and it wasn’t big enough to be so heavy. Whatever powered it, it wasn’t a dry cell battery; so he wasn’t about to poke around inside.

In the end, he decided to postpone matters until the morning, and made his way along the hallway to the master bedroom, playing the ghostlight on his surroundings. Doors, woodwork, main staircase, wallpaper—most of it looked the same as he remembered from daylight; but he didn’t know the house that thoroughly yet, and once he left the south wing, it was too dark to make the comparison by twilight. He saw just one more oddity, but it was a showstopper.

He saw a woman.

She strode right past him, arms swinging, legs pumping, a purposeful stride. (She must have walked right through him; and didn’t that give Ted pause!) Dark, heavy-looking boots with light-colored, canvas trousers tucked in at the ankles, a dark jacket, unbuttoned and flapping loosely. He didn’t see her face, not then. The view was strictly from the rear.

But, oh, what a rear that was! It rolled in five directions. Ted had been married and faithful for seven years—but he wasn’t blind. And even though he was a scientist, he never once tried to estimate the relevant equations and boundary conditions for that rolling gait. (A quartic polynomial, since you ask, but there were transcendent elements in there, as well; and the complex and irrational. Unsolvable—as Galois proved. But that’s women for you.)

Ted turned the flashlight off, and the darkness enveloped him. Partly he was upset at the impure thoughts that wiggled through his mind. But partly, too, he wanted to check if a real woman was walking through his house at night. You never could tell.

But the dark was also quiet, except for the sometime rattle of the wind on the windowpanes and the odd creak or two of an old building. No footsteps. Nothing he could mistake for footsteps. And when he turned the light back on, the woman was gone.

He checked each of the rooms down that hallway. He checked the back stairwell. He even checked the linen closet. But he caught no further glimpse of her. In the back stairwell, though, he saw a weapons cache. Two crossbows and a clutch of bolts. A stand of bolt-action rifles. A pistol that looked like an automatic. Four cartoon bombs—black spheres with exposed fuses. I don’t know who that woman was, people, but I wouldn’t mess with her!

Ted found his way back to the master bedroom. The same four-poster was there in the sepia light, in the same position—though maybe the drapes hung a little differently. But by then he was too tired to do anything but drop on the bed, and too wired to do anything but lie awake.

He woke to sunlight streaming through the tattered drapes. Too strong a sunlight, he quickly discovered, for the ghostlight to overcome. So, he went around the house pulling the drapes and the shades, casting the interior into an artificial twilight in which the flashlight could—just barely—pick out ghostly images.

Exploration convinced Ted that it was the same house he saw, but it was not clear whether it was the house as it was or as it would be. The furniture was mostly the same, though sometimes in different positions, and the wallpaper had not yet begun to peel. That argued for the house-that-was. But the ground-floor windows had been painted black or boarded up, and there was no sign in the real light that any of that had ever happened. That argued for the house-that-would-be. But would Sharon ever replace that horrid, peeling fabric with its identical twin?

He saw the woman again, this time in the master bedroom and late in the afternoon. The sun had moved away from that side of the house, but enough sunlight broached the window shades that the shapes of things that were could be seen through those that weren’t—as if the world had been double-exposed. She was a wraith, sitting on the bedside and garbed in a dark, ankle-length dress with oddly placed bows and flaps, and white, decorative borders at the hem, cuffs, and decolletage. Slim, lace-up ankle-boots peeked from the folds of her skirt. Her hair (also dark) was cropped in a page-boy cut—except that it was shaved short in the back, exposing the curve of her neck and jaw and her bangle-less ears. It was no style—either of clothing or hair—that he had ever seen. The hands that covered the woman’s face bore stains that might have been dirt or paint or blood.

She was weeping.

For a moment, Ted watched the woman rock to and fro; then, embarrassed at his inadvertent intrusion, he thumbed the switch and plunged the room into darkness. When he turned the light on again, the room was empty and ghostly cobwebs draped a ghostly bed.

Ted went back to tagging the furniture after that, but I have to tell you, his mind wasn’t on it, and maybe he put some green tags where he was supposed to put red. Hey, why throw away a perfectly good gasogene? And maybe he really did forget to get the phone connected and the lights turned on. Or maybe he just wanted to sit alone in the dark again that night.

Ted was in the kitchen when the real light dimmed and a phantom kitchen emerged in the pale ghostlight. A kitchen sink, identical to the real one—but with buckets, tubs, and pails of water stacked all about. The same electric stove—but a quaint old brick fireplace in the west wall that looked like it was being used. Ted turned the flashlight off and studied the wall, and, yes, now that he knew where to look, he could see the outlines of the fireplace. It had been bricked up a long time ago. Maybe Sharon would want it restored: distressed brick, andirons, maybe a copper kettle on a decorative hook—it would be just too cute for words.

When he turned the light on again the table in the center of the kitchen had been shoved aside and a tarpaulin laid over the tiles near the floor drain. Two lumps about a meter long lay under the tarp. As he stared, an unaccountable dread stole over him, causing his hand to tremble and his throat to go dry. He extinguished the light and did not turn it on until he had left the kitchen.

The back stairway would have been a dark climb even if there had been lights. Ted guided himself as best he could, considering that what he saw by ghostlight was not necessarily what actually lay under his feet. Hey, he was in the dark; the flashlight didn’t change that.

At the top of the stairs, he came face to face with the woman, clad in the boots and trousers in which he had first seen her. She stood by the window gripping a crossbow. Ted stopped in his tracks.

Oh, that face would stop any man in his tracks! It wasn’t the glamour we sometimes mistake for beauty. This was no finely chiseled, dainty elegance; no hothouse flower. This was a rounded face with a wide mouth and full, soft lips; with cheeks that looked as if they had pinked in laughter more than once, with a nose that was short and wide and turned up a little at the tip. Her eyebrows were heavy and unplucked, and a dark smudge highlighted her cheek.

But it was her eyes that drew him in. They were hard and black, like coals; set deep, so that, if the light were angled right, they became dark pools. Seen full on, they brimmed with sorrow and resolution. There were no tears, but there once had been.

Still as a falcon, she hovered beside the open window, watching, waiting, sad determination on her face, her eyes fixed with infinite patience on a spot in the outside world, where Ted’s light failed to penetrate. Ted could not have moved had he wanted to. He was rooted to the spot, as still as she was, unaware of the passage of time.

How long did they wait together? Do you measure time in the swings of Foucault’s pendulum? Or do you measure it in heartbeats? It’s the heart-time that matters. That was the clock the woman ran on; that was the tempo Ted felt.

Abruptly, smoothly, the crossbow rose to her cheek and, a heartbeat later, the bolt had sped on its way. The woman watched, smiled, and ducked back from the view of the open window.

People, I would not want to be on the receiving end of that smile! The arrow would be bad enough, but that grin was deadly. It was the falcon’s smile; or perhaps that of a mouse that has just brought down a falcon. There is a difference. The raptor’s smile is almost friendly; but the curl of a mouse’s lips can freeze the blood.

The woman turned and walked right through Ted. Startled, Ted took a step back—which was a mistake because, as you might remember, he was standing at the head of the stairs. He stumbled, slipped, grabbed hold of the rail, and the flashlight tumbled down the stairs. Halfway down, the ghostlight winked out.

That stairwell was dark! High noon and midnight were all the same. Cautiously, Ted went to hands and knees and backed down the stairs one step at a time, rubbing his hands across the runners as he searched. His heart raced. What if it were broken? How could he ever solve the puzzle if he had no more pieces?

His groping hands finally discovered the light in a corner of the landing, where the stairwell doglegged to the kitchen. He snatched it up, fondled the switch, and sank with relief against the wall when he saw the landing bathed in a familiar circle of pale light.

Shortly, two children scampered up the stairs, stuffed with silent laughter, making shushing motions to each other—as if three-year-olds were capable of stealth! They were both dark-featured, like the woman, and dressed nearly alike, one in skirt, one in knee pants. They passed from sight, but Ted just sat there, too drained to follow.

The woman followed softly in the children’s wake.

People, let’s stop calling her “the woman.” She had a name. She deserves a name. Maybe it was Guinevere or maybe it was Janey Sue. We’ll never know. Call her Sweet Betsy from Pike, who did what she had to do when she had it to do. Betsy wasn’t her name; but it will serve.

She was smiling—again or still or already. Who could say, when time was all jackstraws? But it was an indulgent smile, without the knife-edge sheen of the crossbower. This smile glittered like the sun off a gentle pond. She wore another of those peculiar, ornately bordered, ankle-length dresses, and her face and hands this time bore no dark smudges.

Ted turned the light off and sat alone in the dark. Too many jumbled images, no sense to them. He needed time to sort them out.

This’s what scientists do in their spare time: they try to sort things out. Ted lay awake in the canopied bed that second night, gnawing over what he had seen, trying to explain it. He was no linear thinker, but, looking back, you could lay his reasoning out in the semblance of logic. Primus: You can’t see a damn thing without photons. Secundus: He had seen the damnedest things with the ghostlight. Ergo: there was some peculiar form of photon—a paraphoton. (Hey, don’t blame me. Ted made that one up!) These paraphotons leaked over somehow from the universe next door; and the flashlight somehow excited them to visibility.

How did they leak over? How did the light excite them? Details, people. Details. They shouldn’t spoil the grandeur of the theory.

Don’t complain. It was Ted’s theory. Though he only called it a “working hypothesis,” which is the science version of whistling in the dark. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong—but it did explain everything he’d seen.

Don’t be silly. It explained nothing! What had Sweet Betsy shot with so much wicked satisfaction? What were those two lumps under the tarpaulin? Why board up your windows and paint them black? And why had she been crying? Hey, there was a lot more needing explanation than any damn photons could account for!

Maybe Ted knew that. Maybe that was why he awoke in the middle of the night, and, hesitating only a moment, played the ghostlight around the bedroom. Call it intuition; call it dumb luck. Call it leakage from the world abutting—but there she was, lying in bed beside him, with her tears streaming down her face, staining the pillows. Once before, he had seen her weeping and had, in consideration, turned off the intrusive light. This time, he lingered, though the moment was more private still.

Sweet Betsy was as naked as God’s Truth. People, if her face was arresting, her body was hard time pounding rocks! Ted could no more have turned that light off than he could have stopped breathing—though things might have ended happier if he had.

Her body was a heaving sea—lines curving and flowing with the grace of the ocean’s swells. Her breasts crested like billows; her belly was the flat calm of a tropic lagoon. Her hands were mariners, mounting the waves, sliding toward shore, backing away in the undertow before shipwrecking in the secret, seaweed-matted cove between the cliffs of her legs. A storm was building—the rain poured from her eyes, the winds rushed from her mouth. Who knew what name the breezes of her lips whispered? The gusts came faster; the waves mounted higher. Muscles tensed, back arched, hips rolled, legs clamped tight. Her mouth opened in a cry that might have been rage or ecstasy, or both.

Ted had never been unfaithful to Sharon. He had never even seriously considered it. But if Ted did hard time and pounded his rocks, you’ll understand, whether you approve or not. It wasn’t being unfaithful. After all, Betsy was only a phantom, a paraphoton fantasy. What Ted did in the bed beside her was not betrayal.

But he didn’t turn the light off for a long time after—and that was.

The next day, Ted had the presence of mind to get the utilities connected and the Goodwill truck booked, and had the grace to feel a twinge of shame. The woman had been in grief, and he had used her like a centerfold. For his penance, he threw himself once more into prepping the house. When the phones became active, he even called Sharon long distance and told her he loved her and missed her. But as the day moved toward dusk, his thoughts dwelt more and more on the phantom woman.

Finally, he told himself that he had worked enough for one day, and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. Hey, he wasn’t too tired to climb those stairs! He sat in the chair to one side of the bed, flipping the ghostlight on and off. He was hunting.

Most of the time, the sepia light revealed nothing. A room empty and abandoned, sometimes cobwebbed. One time, a pile of ruined clothing on the floor. Another, and the woman was playing with the two children. Still another, and a man leaned with his fists on the dresser, shoulders hunched, head bowed. An average kind of guy: a little paunchy, a little soft around the edges. He wasn’t Joe Sixpack; but he wasn’t Adonis, either.

Another glimpse of an empty room. Then, a child groping under the bed, withdrawing a ball, running from the room. Then, the man again, peeking sidewise through the window shade with a pistol in his hand.

The woman again. Standing in the center of the room, unbuttoning a long, pale dress with dark borders. The dress buttoned up the front, Ted noted—large, practical buttons hidden under those peculiar flaps. The cuffs and the neckline were tattered; the edging hung loose from the hem in two places. She undressed with stiff, deliberate motions, nearly yanking the buttons off. Her face was set in grim, straight lines. Ted settled back. The hunter had found his quarry.

At some point, the material must have torn. The stitching came loose or a button or something. It was an old dress. What do you expect? She looked for a moment at the rent; then, as if that had been a trigger, she gave the fabric a vicious tug and ripped it across. “Rending her garments”—that was the old Bible phrase, wasn’t it? She tore the rest of that dress off, sleeve to dart to pleat, and threw the scraps to the floor.

She didn’t peel down to the buff, just to socks and underwear; but that was enough for Ted. If nothing else convinced him that he was seeing a world that never was or would be, that underwear did the trick. Plain, serviceable, but unlike any he had ever seen. Baggy shorts with a loincloth panel that passed between the legs and tied in the back. A brassiere that consisted of twin slings and a bib that hung over the top and fastened with bows. The overall effect was odd—half Victorian, half Victoria’s Secret.

She crossed the room, looking more ghost-like than ever. Lovely, vulnerable, and inaccessible; suffering some nameless hurt—was anything better suited to elicit his sympathy or longing? Ted followed. He even reached a hand out to her shoulder. I don’t know what he expected. The walls of two universes rippled between them. His touch was insubstantial, not even a breath of air.

Hey, who’s the ghost here? Betsy or Ted?

But as his hand reached the lustrous curve of her shoulder, she turned sharply—lips parted, eyes wide—and pulled a knife.

People, that was a knife! I’m not talking your apple-peeling, fingernail-paring, prissy kind of knife. I’m talking an ugly serrated edge and hooked prong. A knife like that would rip a wound that would never close. It made you bleed just to look at it!

Ted certainly thought so, because he danced away as pretty as you please. He knew it couldn’t touch him; he knew she couldn’t see him. But why take chances? Only males think women enjoy being watched by men, and she held that knife like she knew how to use it.

The woman ran on cat’s feet into the darkness beyond the flashlight’s range. When Ted found her again, she was crouched by the bedroom door, peering down the hallway, shielding the knife blade from the light.

Wait a minute! Let’s back up here! Sweet Betsy was stripped to her skivvies, and that underwear didn’t do a very good job at hiding her, let alone an arsenal. Where had that shiv been lurking? That’s a puzzling question, all right; but, people, can’t we leave her some secrets?

Ted waited, helplessly aware of the rasping of his own breath, until, slowly, the woman relaxed and backed away from the doorway. No. She backed away; she never relaxed, though the knife did disappear. At the dresser once more, she pulled out a heavy, denim-like shirt and trousers.

Ted resumed his hunt. Hey, he knew what he was looking for, and you have to admire his persistence, if not his goal. He flicked that light until he found another tableau more to his liking: The man and the woman were coupling on the bed. Ted moved the chair a little to the side and settled in, cradling the flashlight in his left hand.

Hey, don’t be too hard on old Ted. You weren’t there, and his motives don’t matter any more. The whole situation was surreal; the woman, no more substantial than a photograph. How was it different from reading a skin mag or watching a triple-X flick? Ted wasn’t where he needed to be yet; but in his mind she had graduated from “phenomenon” to “sex object.” That was progress, sort of.

It was a slow, wary congress that he watched. Both were fully clothed, but had unfastened the panels in their clothing. Sweet Betsy’s long, embroidered dress was gathered up to her waist, exposing the sweet curve of her hips and thighs. He lay atop her, rising and falling while she rocked her hips against him. Her legs danced, caressed him with her heels. Her mouth was parted and, when the man was not exploring it with his own, moved as if she were speaking or crying out. There were no sounds, though; so Ted had to supply the panting and sighing on his own.

He did a good job, too. He was done before they were.

Well, the action was pretty erotic, all right—if you overlooked the pistols each held in their right hands. They never let go and they never closed their eyes. If Ted had been less focused on the matter in hand, he might have noticed, and pondered, that little point.

Look, this wasn’t like peeking into someone’s bedroom. It was his bedroom, and the woman was not real. She was someone who never was, or only might have been. But Ted felt badly enough that he turned the flashlight off and did not turn it on again until he had left the room to make his way downstairs to the kitchen. He had confidence now that the house was structurally identical in the ghostlight, though he was still wary when it came to the placement of furniture.

In the kitchen, he found the man and woman again. She wore a dark dress; he wore rough work clothes. He might have been going out to work on the garden, if it weren’t for the crossed bandoliers and the bolt-action rifle slung on his shoulder. Their arms enwrapped each other and they kissed like there was no tomorrow. Then—perhaps there was a knock at the kitchen door—the woman let three more men into the house.

You know those men. The mailman; the grocer; the truck driver down the corner. Ordinary joes. They were all dressed up for a hunting trip. Billed caps pulled down low; cartridges stuffed in pockets, bandoliers, pistol belts. A shotgun. A longbow. One of those funny-looking crossbows he had seen the woman use. They all looked nervous and scared, but determined. Hey, if this was a hunting trip, Bambi must be shooting back!

Handgrips all around, and the party left swiftly, slipping out the door. The man—her husband?—was last. He and the woman touched each other briefly on the cheek; then she was alone. She threw home the big bolt on the kitchen door and, turning, placed her back to the door. After a moment, she strode away, brushing at her eye with the back of her hand. The gesture left a smudge on her cheek.

Ted wondered how she expected the man to get back inside with that big, honking bolt on the door.

Ted made his way to the front of the house, where he scanned the parlor with his ghostlight. A piano stood near the window. Maybe it was a harpsichord. This view was dimmer than the others. The woman, a half-seen wraith, clad in a lightweight two-piece dress of summery fabric, sat at the keyboard. The two children sang. (Well, their mouths were open. Call it what you want.) In a chair on the other side of the room, the man watched with a contented smile while he read a newspaper. A happier scene; an older one, perhaps—which might account for its dimness. The man spoke. The woman looked up from the keyboard, and he pointed to something in the paper. But the woman frowned and shook her head, nodding toward the children.

Ted winced, toggled the light—and now the parlor was deserted and the windows boarded up. Of the harpsichord and the singing children, there was no sign. Whatever music had filled this room was long faded. Suddenly, Ted bolted for the front door. Maybe he felt the walls closing in on him. Maybe those glimpses were stuffing him up like a Christmas goose and he needed to get away so he could think.

Outside, night had fallen badly. It always did in that part of town. It lay here and there in scattered pools, in the corners of houses, behind bushes, in the black slashes that were the shadows of light poles. Shattered and broken by triumphant streetlamps and houselights. To the right, behind the tract houses, a dome of light marked downtown. To the left, two blocks away but hidden by the trees, the strip mall created a wall of iridescent neon. There are places in the world where night never truly falls, outside the heart.

What chance did the ghostlight have? When Ted played it about the porch, when he aimed it at the old mansions on either side of Pennyworth House, when he tried for the tract houses on the far side of the road, the best he could elicit was the faint hint of a double image.

Bushes lined the porch. Ted went to the rail and leaned on it, watching the leaves rustle in the wind, listening to the voices of the breeze. Maybe he was thinking of the woman, naked and weeping beside him in the bed. Her breasts, soft and erect; her legs spread in welcome; her lips hungry and parted; her fingers playing the lover. Or maybe he was thinking only of his own inability to touch her, to console her. Perhaps he gave her a name, then. Who can say? It was probably not our name, not Sweet Betsy; but any name will do. Names make us human.

She was a ghost, and she haunted the house like a forgotten dream. There might be a plausible scientific rationale. Given parallel universes, you can explain anything. But she was a ghost. That was the nub of it.

And yet, she wasn’t just a ghost. Somehow, Ted’s curiosity had shifted gears. It no longer focused on paraphotons, but on what had happened or would happen or might happen to Sweet Betsy. What tragedy was playing out in those brief, disconnected glimpses? Hey, if a little bit of crossdimensional pud-knocking is what it takes to make a connection, who are we to frown disapproval? Betsy had been a phantom; now she was a person.

He stood there for a long time, listening to the whispering bushes. What they told him, only Ted knows.

In the end, and almost as an afterthought, he aimed the ghostlight onto the dark recess between the shivering bushes and the porch. Dirt, twigs, leaves, the detritus of a dozen years of weather and wind. Flowers, blooming and trampled. Footprints with drag marks between them. Odd prints, as if someone barefoot walked tippy-toe. The tracks led toward the right, and he followed them around the last bush, out of the blackness into the paler shadow of the great hickory in the front yard. The bush shook—but was it a breeze? Ted walked to the corner of the porch to get a better angle.

Someone crouched there. A woman? The long, flowing hair said so. The flare of the hips cried it out. But the hair was matted and tangled and full of burrs; and the grimy skin was a tattoo of scars and scratches and cicatrices. She crouched over something small and still. Ted’s hand trembled. Was this Sweet Betsy in some final, degraded, feral moment? Somehow he couldn’t believe that. He aimed the light straight at the crouching figure.

The woman turned and shielded her eyes with both arms. Oh, yes, it was a woman, all right—or at least, a female. The breasts were small and tight, but there was no mistaking the mat of fur at her groin. Ted lowered the flashlight a fraction of an inch, and the woman dropped her arms and snarled. Her eyes glowed like charcoal in the penumbra of the light. Incongruously, she seemed to have long, painted nails. As well expect lipstick as nail care on such a creature! Ted stood dumbfounded for a fraction of a second and the creature leaped!

As it leaped, it seemed to move forward from its background, as if the universe had zoom control. Its arms arced and its nails raked the air. Ted turned that light off damn fast, I tell you! And he left it off the rest of the night. When he lay in bed, later, his eyes refused to close. Well, he’d been scared enough to wet his pants, and when was the last time that ever happened to you? The very fabric of space had bulged; and there might even be a claw mark or two on the walls of the universe.

What sort of talk is this? What sort of flimsy, gimcrack universe is it, if you can push its walls and stretch them and scratch them up? And what was that thing? Ted had only seen it for an instant, but it was a real Kodak moment, and he lay awake a long time trying to forget.

It had walked on the balls of feet grown so long that the heel had become a sort of second, backward-facing knee. Think of the leap you’d get from that compound leverage! (Think about it? You saw it. Why, you could spring from one universe to the next, if such a thing were possible.) A narrow torso, hairless except for the underarms and groin and a little shag on the lower legs. A browless head wreathed by a lion’s mane of hair. Those nails were claws, and it wasn’t nail polish that made them so dark, and it wasn’t lipstick around its mouth and dripping down its long canine teeth.

People, that creature was inhuman, but you could see the human in it. It was what humans might have been had the lion niche been empty. Or maybe it was what humans might yet become: a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong; or (even more horribly) right.

Call it Homo leonis. Call it a leaper. Call it any damn thing you please. Ted pondered how small children liked to play hide-and-seek. But some places you shouldn’t hide in, because something else may have hidden there first. Ted shivered through the night, though it was unseasonably warm for April.

The Goodwill truck came the next day, and Ted lost himself in the petty details of the loading. He took the three workers through the house, pointing out what he had flagged for them to take. Two burly men in sleeveless shirts, wearing back-support belts; one woman, short and chunky, who looked as if sheer determination could make up for lack of size. Maybe Ted took comfort from their presence. Strong, competent, full of good cheer, they carted everything down the front porch, over to the driveway, where they secured it in the van. (Though the woman placed the gasogene in the cab under the shotgun seat. Hey, why throw away a perfectly good gasogene?)

When they were done, they went through the ritual of receipt-giving and bill-of-lading-signing and shook hands, and Ted very nearly let them take the ghostlight with them. Good riddance! He watched them go, but, at the last moment, ran after them and fetched it back. He returned to the house with the instrument cradled in his arm like a newborn. He might not be sure if he ever wanted to turn it on again, but he was keeping his options open.

People, the worst thing is not knowing. Terror festers in the gap between intimation and confirmation, feeds on uncertainty, grows on fancies. There might be a lady behind that door or a tiger—but either way, it’s got to be a relief when it’s finally opened.

Ted carried that light around with him the rest of the day as he readied the house for the moving van’s arrival. He carried it with him most of the evening as he prepared a quick, cold meal for himself. He carried it with him to bed. Half a dozen times, he ran his thumb over the switch without pressing it; but, people, he could no more not turn that light on again than he could hold his breath forever.

One flick: a deserted bedroom. A second flick: a fully furnished room with a carpet on the floor that he had never noticed before. One more try, then stop. No point pushing your luck, right? No telling what might jump out at you.

No telling. The third try showed Sweet Betsy once more lying in bed beside him, swathed in bedclothes that were half pajamas, half duffel bag. She stared into the bed’s canopy with a worried frown. It was not the inconsolable sorrow that he had seen before, nor was it the icy satisfaction of the crossbower, and still more, it was not the pure delight that had tracked the two children up the kitchen stairwell. Perhaps the worm was only beginning to gnaw at her bosom then; perhaps joy was not yet something that could only be remembered.

A hand reached out and stroked her, running down her side and across her stomach, and the woman turned toward Ted. With a sudden shock, he realized that the husband must be lying just where Ted was. Ted fixed the flashlight into a space in the carved headboard so that it spotlighted the bed. His own body was transparent to the ghostlight; so he was not even a shadow on that other world. Insubstantial, he became a ghost himself, and contented himself with conforming to the motions he observed.

The man worked gently and kindly, as if the act were intended for comfort more than pleasure; yet he also worked with a certain urgency. A swift, practiced flip of the wrist, and the drawstring of the overgarment pulled loose, exposing the woman’s strange lingerie of flaps and ties. Those ties were fastened with knots to delight a sailor, and—who knows?—maybe in that world knotwork had become a kind of foreplay. A simple square knot, that was easy; and the fingers that Ted imagined as his own disposed of it in a trifle. But cat’s-paws and hawser bends and blackwalls? And the one that mattered most of all, that was Gordian’s knot itself!

Don’t you believe it! Sweet Betsy had dressed herself in slipknots and bows. Those laces untied themselves. The man’s fingers were not the only ones tugging at the ends. The woman was not the only one needing comfort; nor the man the only one giving it.

It was all visual, of course. Ted could not taste the honey of her mouth, nor smell the musk of her desire. He could not hear her whispered endearments. He could not feel the warmth and softness of her skin or the smooth, enveloping moistness of her love. Anything tactile, he had to supply himself. It was a poor thing that he substituted, though in a strange and weird fashion, he had come to love her, and, barred from all other senses, he did what little he could.

If you flip back and forth through a book, opening pages at random, sooner or later you happen on the last page. Ted’s light brought him glimpses of one tangential segment of congruent space-time. Depending on luck, or on infinitesimal differences in initial conditions, what he saw each time fell earlier or later along that segment. But chaos theory and differential topology, metrics and local continuity, are the last thing that matters here. Make up whatever explanation you want.

Let me tell you what was in that last chapter.

Start with the woman. Start with Sweet Betsy, fallen backward on the hallway floor, one hand gripping a discharged crossbow, her heavy canvas jacket torn by three parallel rents starting near the shoulder and running crosswise down her torso. Start with the blood seeping through in those tears and her labored breathing as she pushed herself slowly to her feet. She staggered and leaned against the wall, but, by damn, she recocked that bow and set another bolt before she let her hands explore her wound! How could you not love a woman like that?

Start with the woman; but look down the hall at the body twitching near the main staircase. A fine specimen of H. leonis, don’t you think? Sure, those leapers are lethal. Humans have always been top predator, and this particular breed has made a specialty of it. But you have to admire the grace and power, the lean, powerful lines. Thighs like pistons; claws like ten-penny nails! Even dead, it looked deadly. You had to admire, too, those eyes that chance had shaped to see another light. It may be that clawing your way between universes is no great feat. Universes are flimsy things; paper bags. It may be that you could do it yourself, if only you could see which way to leap.

Sweet Betsy backed into her bedroom, and Ted saw that she had moved her arsenal there. Whatever game of cat-and-mouse had been played out here—whatever victories the mice had won—it was clearly the endgame now. She was at bay and she knew it. Ted could read that in her eyes.

He couldn’t bear to see her go down. So he flicked the ghostlight off—and tried for an earlier, happier scene.

Hey, what kind of shit do you think Ted was? Do you really think he would let her go down alone? Maybe he couldn’t connect, but he could be there. Every one of Ted’s muscles were tensed, every part of him was ready; but all he could do was stand and watch. Sweet Betsy had lost all hope—she had lost her children, her husband, her neighbors, any thought that she would come through—but triumph still curled her lip. Ted could not help her, and he wept in despair. Helpless is a crueler state than hopeless.

People, lions hunt in packs.

And while you’re watching that one out front, the others are circling around where you can’t see them. On the other side of the grasses.

Space shimmered and tore. It bulged, and the background grew weirdly distorted, as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. For a moment, there were two doorways; there were two dressers against two walls. Then claws like iron raked down, the bubble popped, and space-time parted like a curtain.

It must have made a sound. Hey, you can’t rip the walls of the universe apart and expect to do it quietly! Sweet Betsy spun and swung her crossbow to her shoulder, firing even as it came into line.

H. leonis is human. Sever its carotid artery with a razor-sharp arrowhead, and it pumps its life out as readily as you or I. But it’s fast, and it’s not alone.

The second hunter was through the portal, sprinting across the body of its companion. Oh, that was a leap! Straight and true, claws aching for the throat of its prey.

Straight and true? Not with that ghastly ghostlight shining into its eyes and blinding it! It missed. Betsy didn’t. Hey, H. leonis wasn’t the only hunter in the room! H. sapiens may have been many things, here and there—but never mice.

Betsy dropped the second crossbow. No time to reload now. She seized a rifle. Bolt-action, but it fired a cartridge that could drop a lion. The leapers were dazed, shielding their eyes against a sourceless brilliance. Ted trained the ghostlight on their faces as they squeezed through the rent in space. Their eyes, sensitive to that preternatural light, glowed like charcoal in a blast. Cock. Fire. Cock. Fire. Cock. Fire.

It was a three-bullet clip. The rifle joined the crossbows and Betsy snatched the pistol from where it lay ready on the dresser top. She spared one bullet for a leaper still moving on the floor; then fired methodically into the pack.

Those leapers might not be intelligent, but they weren’t stupid. A second tear opened up. Through it, Ted glimpsed a third version of the bedroom: a shambles, smashed, decayed by rain and weather, a patchwork of light and shadow showing that portions of the roof were gone. How long had H. leonis been prowling about in that universe?

Two leapers came through, one from each hole. Ted cried out, chose one and blinded it.

And the other got her.

It was fast. Those creatures could move in a blur when they were motivated. It landed square on Sweet Betsy and bore her down—claws and fangs, one-two-three—then everything was still.

Several more hunters squeezed into the room. They pranced around the prone body in small impatient leaps. Their mouths opened and closed in mewls that Ted could not hear. What were they waiting for? For the one that made the kill to share it? Were there pack-hunter rules? Carnivore Miss Manners? Finally, one grew impatient, reached forward and nudged the victor with its foot.

And the victor rolled off Sweet Betsy with a great, honking knife in its heart.

People, Ted laughed! He wanted to dance, to savor her last victory. But he turned the ghostlight off once and for all. Nothing he could do now could help Sweet Betsy, and he absolutely could not abide watching the feast.

Besides, the leapers had started to squint in his direction.

Sure, if he tried the light again, he would probably see Betsy, alive and well, in some earlier time. Maybe playing with her children. Maybe making love to her man. Maybe, if he somehow aimed the light far down the corridor of time, a dim glimpse of a world to which the leapers had not yet found their way. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He took the ghostlight downstairs, to the cellar stairs, and hung it on the hook where he’d first found it. Then he closed the door and locked it and walked away forever.

Sharon refused to move into the house, of course. The realtor and the owner’s estate argued that it was a done deal and she had no choice. They were sorry, but a contract was a contract. The media saw things differently and drummed the story for all it was worth; and, people, it was worth plenty! Even the police officers went on television and said as how they would never move into a house where their spouse had been brutally murdered; especially not if they had found the body themselves! Sharon was in treatment, trying to work through her grief, and the seller’s obstinacy was only making things worse for her and for her son. In the end, the estate caved and ate the contract. They never did sell the place.

Stories about the murder circulated for a long time after. It was in the tabloids, and people chattered nervously in checkout lanes and around gas pumps. The self-righteous prattled—about moral decay or social injustice, depending. There was a brisk sale of locks and security systems, and a vigilante gang beat up some folks who, if not precisely innocent, had nothing to do with what had happened to Ted. Some said it was a drug gang that had been using the empty house as a crack den. Some said it was bikers on a sado-maso kick. Others said it was Satanists, because there were these rumors that the body had been mutilated and partly eaten. What Sharon saw when she walked into the house, she never told. So no one really knows what went down.

Oh, Ted knew. People, he knew when he turned that light into those feral faces that it could end the way it did. So, when you turn a glass over for Betsy, or whatever her real name was, turn another one over for Ted, or whatever his real name was, because he didn’t have to lift a damn finger.

Sometimes, when the light is right, or the angle, you can see the shades of other worlds. It may be only some trick of the light, a peculiar form of polarization. It may be the quantum resonance of worldlines abutting. Perhaps paraphotons leak over from the world next door.

It is not clear what these glimpses mean, or why we sometimes see them. In the end, we each sit in the center of our own universe and watch others dimly through the screening walls. Are those walls real, or are they only built of our own blindness? If we reach out far enough, we could touch, if only briefly. Ted did. He found a way.

Too bad that, in finding it, he showed the leapers the direction to the next universe. They’re in your world now, a few of them—and more will follow. You won’t like it.

Content

House of Dreams
by Michael F. Flynn