Tempt the Stars

Page 19

The creature didn’t move.
I stopped in front of it.
It just sat there.
I bent over and reached out a hand, which I admit was trembling a little. But that was probably a result of the evening’s entertainment. Because whether due to the apron or the eyelashes or the fact that I was high as hell, I wasn’t . . . actually . .
“Oh, thank you!” someone said brightly as the eyelash slid back into place, and I snatched my hand back.
Someone else cursed, “Damn it, woman!”
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” the first voice asked. It was female, and she sounded peevish. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She can obviously hear us.”
“Yes, of course she can!” the man said. “That’s the point!”
“Well, I wasn’t going to be rude, what with her hurt and scared and nobody even getting the dear any dry clothes. . . . She could catch her death.”
“Then she’d fit in here just fine,” the male voice grumbled.
And okay. I might not be the world’s greatest warrior. Or, you know, anywhere on the list. But there was one thing I did know. One thing I knew very . . . damned . . . well . .
I bent closer. And in the shiny white surface of the bucket I saw the reflection of the light over the table, a blurry impression of an old pie safe, and the long rectangle serving as the stairwell. And a pair of big blue eyes, beaming back at me—from inside the plastic.
“Caught me,” the woman said cheerily. “Look at you!”
I stood up, swaying a little, but managed to point a finger. “You. You’re not a homun—humunk—whatever,” I said accusingly. “You’re a ghost.”
A pleasant, lined face with a mop of gray hair popped up over top of the bucket, letting off a bit of green steam into the dark room. “Right in one,” she said, apparently thrilled.
“No, she isn’t!” the other voice crabbed. And an old gent in a blue uniform with swaying gold epaulettes poked partway out of the clock. “We’re both. And the word is homunculus,” he told me, officiously.
“It means ‘little man’ in Latin,” the woman added. “Although I always thought that was awfully sexist. After all, I’m better at it than him.” And she jerked a metal thumb at the male ghost.
“You are not!” His great gray sideburns quivered indignantly.
“Am, too,” she said complaisantly. “That’s why I get the good hands.” She flexed one ostentatiously. And smiled at me. “He can’t handle them.”
“You can’t even get an eyelash back on, woman!”
“I can so. I was trying to be subtle.”
“Subtle? You’re five hundred pounds and built like a tank!”
She rolled her eyes. “I bet you used to get all the girls.”
I sat down again.
“What are you?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two of them. “If you’re ghosts, why are you in . . . that?” I gestured at her metal hulk of a body.
She looked down. “It’s not very pretty, is it?”
“It gets the job done,” the old man told her severely.
“Well, yes, but . . ” She looked back up at me. “I wanted bosoms, you know.”
“All right, that’s enough,” my host’s irritated voice came from behind me.
I turned around slowly, because too-fast movements weren’t working so well for me lately, and found him holding another pan of water. Or maybe the same one, only it had been washed out and a towel was draped over his arm. He thrust them at me, along with a bar of rose-scented soap.
“In case you want to clean up,” he said stiffly.
I felt like pointing out that it would take more than a pan of water for that, like maybe a river. But I didn’t. Because he hadn’t had to bring it, and just getting my face clean would be nice.
Of course, I could have done that at the sink, just like he could have emptied the pan there. Maybe he was fastidious, and didn’t want to wash off forest gunk in the same sink he prepared food over. But I was betting on another reason.
I deliberately didn’t look at the stairs. “Thank you,” I said, and sat at the table again.
“Your friend will be fine,” he said, after a minute, without mentioning how he knew. “And once he is, you . . . well, you need to be going.”
I ignored that, because I wasn’t up to a fight right now. And because I wasn’t going anywhere. I settled for washing my face while he stood around awkwardly.
I decided it was kind of nice not to be the one doing that, for a change.
There was a shiny silver kettle on the stove. I saw it when I was washing the back of my filthy neck. “I’d like some tea,” I told him, because I would. And because it would stall for a while.
He looked like he was debating telling me he was out, or possibly to go to hell, but then the woman ghost spoke up. “Some of the peppermint, dear. It’s wonderful for nerves.”
“Don’t help me,” he snapped. But he went to make it.
My stomach rumbled, having never gotten dinner, however many hours ago that had been. “And there’s some shortbread,” she added. “I think it’s in the—”
“I know where it is!”
“He’s not usually like this,” she confided as a bread box was opened and then slammed shut. “Just when he’s nervous. I’m Daisy, by the way.”
“Daisy.” Daisy the ghost. Okay.
“Well, my real name was Gertrude, but I always hated it. Named after my grandmother, and I could never stand the woman. My husband called me Daisy, ’cause I loved them so.” She smiled, a bit teary-eyed.
I looked from her to the . . . lieutenant? Colonel? Whatever. “Is . . . is he—”
“Good Lord, no,” he said, mustache fluffing up in indignation.
“He should be so fortunate.” She sniffed. “Ralph was my husband. He died in, oh, 1942, it was.”
“Under enemy fire?” I guessed, considering the date.
“No.” She looked surprised. “Under the six a.m. to Hoboken. He got drunk and went to sleep on the railroad tracks.” She sighed. “He was not a bright man.”
“All right, I mean it,” Roger said, coming over with a tin of cookies. “Cut it out.”
She rolled her eyes at him, too.
I took a cookie.
“Who are they?” I asked, gesturing at the robots again.
“Daisy has already introduced herself, I believe,” he said sourly. “That’s Sam.”
“Servant, ma’am,” the old gent muttered, and emerged the rest of the way out of the clock. He had a portly body covered by a starched blue uniform. “I left it outside,” he told the man, I guess talking about Big Red. “Do y’want me to go back, see if I can salvage anything?”
“I don’t know.” My host looked at me. “Is there anything left?”
“Of the other one?” I guessed.
He nodded.
I thought about it. “The hat?”
He scowled. “No,” he told the colonel, who muttered something and went over to give Pritkin the hairy eyeball.
“What did we destroy?” I asked, in between stuffing my face. The cookies were homemade. God, so good.
“Do they not feed you in your time?” my host demanded.
“Not often,” I said honestly.
He joined the colonel in scowling at Pritkin.
“What was that thing?” I asked again as the kettle went off.
“My gardener,” he told me, getting up to attend to it. “Your—my wife,” he amended, glancing at Pritkin, “is fond of the woods. But there was not much left when we arrived. The former owners had cleared some land for farming and more to build the main house. And then Tony burnt a bunch of the rest in order to have an open field of fire, in case any of his enemies tried to sneak up on him.”
That sounded like Tony.
“We managed to reverse much of the damage, but it requires upkeep to maintain. And more now,” he said dryly, pulling down a couple of brightly colored pottery mugs.
“Then the potions . . ”
“Were fertilizer, yes.”
“Some fertilizer!”
He frowned and slopped water in a teapot that matched the mugs. “It functions perfectly well in the correct amount. Maybe next time you should take a moment to find out what you’re attacking!”
“We didn’t attack anything,” I said, remembered fear sharpening my voice. “Why did you tell it to target us? You had to have recognized me!”
“I wasn’t there,” he said, setting the teapot down on a tray, harder than necessary.
“Then you’re telling me that creature did all that on its own?”
“That’s the point of a homunculus—it has a will of its own. Too much sometimes.” He shot a look at Daisy.
“I was just trying to trap you,” she told me, looking sheepish.
“That was . . . wait.” I took the mug I was offered, because my throat was full of cookie crumbs, and I could barely talk. But as soon as I gulped down some truly scalding tea, I put it down. “That was you?”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” the colonel said. “A good soldier knows when to act, and when to ask for instructions!”
“Too bad I’m not a soldier,” Daisy huffed.
“As you continually demonstrate.”
“And I wasn’t expecting you,” she told me, ignoring him. “I was just doing a little pruning, tidying up and such, and then the alarms went off and practically scared me to—well, not death, but you know what I—”
“You lost your head!” the colonel accused.
“I don’t have a head, old man, and neither do you!” she said snippily. “And I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, just to hold them until I could find out who they were. But then those horrid vampires arrived and blew me up. And by the time I came back here and got my other body and got back out there—”