Hey, Dad. It's Me, Lily, I've Come Home

“Hey, Dad! It's me, Lily, I've come home!” I call.

Nobody responds. I guess technically I’m not really home. It looks like home, sort of. It definitely smells like home in that “I bought fifty air fresheners to mask the odor of the dead people we stash in the basement” way. But it’s not real. None of it. I’m still in the veil. I should have known I never left it. I came in through a tunnel in the nurse’s closet, as weird as it is to say that. I didn’t go out that way. So stupid!

“Dad, I’m home and I brought Roger!”

Still nothing.

I cup my hands over my mouth like a megaphone. “Dad, Roger ran over my therapist! Your son Roger! Who died!”

“Technically he bounced off the side of the car,” Roger says. Like it really makes a difference whether Felix went under the wheels or into the woods.

The house seems to be empty. Not even Paschar is here, as weird as it feels to think that. I left him in the road, because it wasn’t really him. He’s still on the other side of the closet door, probably wondering why I haven’t come back from school in several days.

I go in the kitchen to get a snack because almost being murdered by Felix made me hungry. He wasn’t really Felix though. I’m still trying to understand it all, but from what Roger told me, I made this version of Felix in my brain in order to play a role in my imaginary life here. I wonder if my brain is secretly out to get me if that’s the kind of stuff it pulls without me even thinking about it.

The kitchen doesn’t smell like the rest of the house. It smells more like food usually. Except now. Not it smells like a dog. Probably because there’s a black dog sitting in the kitchen. It’s staring at me with big, black eyes. I know this dog, it’s the one that was following me in the real world before everything started. The dog stares at me. I know how to play this game. I stare back at it. You don’t try to pet strange dogs. Especially magic dogs, and I’m pretty sure this is a magic dog.

“Good doggy,” I tell it. I put out my hand for it to sniff.

But the dog doesn’t sniff my hand. Instead it reaches out with its paw and slaps my hand away. “Is she ready?” the dog asks in a woman’s voice.

“Not a bit,” Roger says. He’s standing in the kitchen doorway behind me, leaning against it and picking his teeth with a toothpick.

The dog lifts up onto its hind legs and stretches its front paws upward. For a moment I think it’s turning into a werewolf. Instead, it shakes itself like one does after it’s gotten a bath. I don’t know how dogs dry themselves by shaking like that. I tried it when I was little but afterward I was still wet and the bathroom had water everywhere. It really annoyed Mom. And it made me kind of dizzy. The dog doesn’t spray water everywhere because it’s not wet. Instead, it sprays the fur right off itself, like a porcupine with its quills. The fur goes everywhere. I even breathe in some of it, and end up coughing and spitting. Stupid dog just tried to choke me on its fur bomb!

“Bad doggy!” I snap at it. I wave my arms to try to fan the cloud of fur away. The dog isn’t there anymore though. Instead there’s a pale lady in mummy wrappings and a rope belt standing in my kitchen. I recognize her immediately. “Oh no.”

“That’s right,” Ohno says. She’s still got the black eyes the dog had. I was fine having a staring contest with the dog, but the same eyes on her is too creepy, so I just look around the kitchen instead.

“Look at this! You got dog hair everywhere!”

Ohno grabs me by the arm and twists it around painfully. She seems to be examining the burn mark I got from when Hekate dragged me through the halls of her maze. “Hmmm... well, she’ll have to do.”

“Are you going to eat me?” I ask. She looks hungry, always licking her lips. When she was a dog, I would have fed her a can of dog food, but I suspect as a human she’d rather eat a hamburger or something. Not a Lilyburger I hope.

She ignores my question. “You’ve learned nothing all this time?”

I have to think. I did learn some stuff. I was at the library for hours. “I learned about harpies.” I bet she’s got harpies. She seems like the type of person who’d have harpies.

Ohno sputters. “I don’t care about harpies! Haven’t you learned anything about yourself and this place?”

What did I learn about myself? I guess I learned what Roger only just shared with me on the drive home after he ran over Felix. I look at Roger. He nods at me. I think he thinks I’m thinking what he’s thinking but I’m pretty sure I’m not. I nod back, then I look at Ohno and puff up my chest. “I control the horse’s uncle.”

Ohno blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

“And the vertigo.”

Roger smacks me in the back of the head. “That’s horizontal and vertical, stupid.”

Ohno looks at Roger, then at me. Her mouth just kind of hangs open slightly. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” I admit. I look at Roger and nod again but he doesn’t nod back. He just puts his face in his hands.

Ohno scowls. She points a finger at Roger, then makes a dismissive wave. “Leave us.”

Roger looks somewhat shocked, then annoyed. He opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, probably something rude, but then clamps it shut, turns and walks out to the living room where he stands there by the coffee table with all the books my parents never read, crosses his arms and stares at us.

Ohno shakes her head at him. “Go outside, pleb.”

I’ve never seen my brother act like a whipped dog before. Roger twitches like he just got slapped across the face, scowls at Ohno, then at me, then at the world around him as he marches stiffly out the sliding glass door onto the back patio. He slams it shut behind him, turns to stare at us again briefly, then walks out of sight.

Ohno turns her attention back to me. She takes a single step back and then seems to grow in size by about a foot. Maybe two feet. It’s hard to measure things like that when you’re small. She gets bigger, okay? Her body swells up and her eyes turn from black orbs into black slits. She raises her hands toward me threateningly and each hand now has six fingers on it and the fingers are claws like on a bird’s foot. “Make a weapon,” she hisses.

“Make a what?”

“A weapon! Make a spear, a sword, anything! I want to see you do it. Otherwise, maybe I’ll pluck out one of your lovely little eyes.”

“Eek!” I cover my eyes and crouch down into a ball. It’s my go-to defensive strategy. I studied the art of the armadillo. Maybe I can grab one of the kitchen knives in the wooden block on the counter, even though Dad said I should never play with them. This isn’t play though, right, Dad? This is self defense!

“What are you doing?” Ohno towers over me. “Just make something!”

“I don’t know how!”

“JUST THINK OF IT!”

Reaching out with one hand but keeping my eyes clenched shut so Ohno can’t pluck one out, I think as hard as I can. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be making swords or spears. I want to be at home, playing in my new treehouse that apparently Dad was building for me. I wish I had one here. I’d run outside and hide in my treehouse. I just need wood and nails and a hammer. Suddenly, I feel the weight of something in my hand. I risk a peek and gasp.

“I made a hammer!” I look up with a proud smile, but Ohno looks angrier than ever.

“Couldn’t you have made something bigger?” she snarls. Her teeth have gotten longer, like snake fangs, and they stick out of the sides of her mouth.

“A sword or a spear would be too heavy for me.” I guess I could make a dagger. Roger has a whole collection of daggers he bought online. Had a collection, I mean. Mom and Dad sold it after he died. That collection was worth a lot. I wonder if it annoyed him to lose them. He always carried one on him that was called a switchblade. It looked like just a handle, but if you press a button, the dagger part pops out.

Suddenly Ohno lunges. Her mouth tears open at the seams and another row of fangs comes jabbing out of her gums. I shriek and swing the hammer like her head is a nail and I end up smacking her right above her nose, between her eye slits. Her head snaps forward and she goes down on her hands and knees. When she looks up again, there’s a deep red mark in the middle of her face now.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” I tell her, “I thought you were going to eat me!”

One of Ohno’s hands comes up fast and grabs my hammer-wielding arm by the wrist. She shakes it hard until I lose my grip and the hammer falls to the floor with a clatter. Her other hand reaches out and grabs my other wrist. Then a third arm pops out with a ripping sound from under the right one, and a fourth from under the left, and she’s standing up slowly, pulling my arms up over my head.

“Do you think this is a game, little girl? Do you know what my mother is going to do to you?”

“Let me go?” It’s a guess but also a request.

Ohno clenches her fists on the two new arms. “She’s going to tear you apart!”

“Don’t... don’t you want that?” I stutter. I mean, she’s the freaking boogeywoman. She brought me here to die because I broke the place, right? It feels right now like she’s about to do just that. She’s pulling just enough to make it hurt, but not enough to tear my arms right off. She probably could though.

But she doesn’t rip my arms off. Instead, Ohno lets go of them and turns away, shaking all four of her six-fingered talon fists in the air. “No!” she cries, “I want to be rid of her! I hate her!”

“You hate your mommy?” I can’t imagine hating my mom, and mine makes me eat spinach. “Does she make you eat spinach?” I ask.

Ohno seems to melt. She’s taking on a different form. I hope it’s the doggy again, because she was a lot less scary as a dog. She doesn’t become a dog. Instead, she becomes smaller, smaller, almost as small as me. When she’s done, she looks younger by a lot. If she weren’t wearing mummy wrappings and a rope belt, I might mistake her for one of the high school kids who ride the bus with me. Her face looks somewhat older, with lots of worry wrinkles as my mom calls them. There’s also a big, long scar running from her right ear to the corner of her mouth that almost makes it look like she’s smiling, except her eyes say she’s sad.

“She’s not my real mother,” Ohno says, “I was just the first. The first one after her who was like you. I came here by accident, and she tested me like she’s testing you, like she tests them all. I was the first she tested, and the first who failed.”

I suddenly feel bad for her. She may have almost pulled my arms out, but-- no. That’s... that’s pretty awful. The feeling bad for her goes away again. I wonder if this is what she actually looks like, or another illusion. It’s probably rude to ask. Same for asking her age, but I think she’s about sixteen going on two thousand.

“After me was Lamia who became my sister. She tears each of us down and then remakes us in whatever way amuses her.” There are tears in her eyes. She probably could use a hug. I doubt anybody’s hugged her since before I was born. Hell, since before my mom was born, or my mom’s mom, Nana. But that’s another thing you don’t just do to strangers. Besides, it might be a trap.

“It seems like you’re able to remake yourself,” I say, waving at her new form. “Why don’t you just leave? You’re able to leave.”

“I can’t leave,” Ohno says sadly, “not permanently. I’ve been here so long that... it’s like a tether. The void pulls me back. You’ll see what I mean once you’ve been here long enough.”

“I hope not!” I don’t actually say that, but I think it so loud I have a hard time telling if I think it or say it. I have no plans on staying here. I have a mommy and daddy of my own to get back to. “Why don’t you and your sister just team up and fight her?”

Ohno pulls out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sits down at it. She pulls her feet up and hugs them to her chest. “Lamia is completely devoted to mother-- to her. And she can’t change herself like I can. She’s stuck in the form she gave her.”

Now I feel bad for Snakebutt. I can’t imagine having a snake for a butt. If I did, I’d probably go crazy too. And at least Snakebutt, as ugly as she is, didn’t almost tear my arms out. So for Snakebutt I will continue to feel bad.“How am I supposed to fight her like this?” I ask, “I can’t even beat you. I’m only ten years old! This is stupid.”

“You have the gift of foresight,” Ohno waves her hand at me like my dad does when I try to show him one of my paintings and he’s too busy working on a dirge to look at it. “With that, your strength of will, and the power of this place, you should be nigh unbeatable.”

“I’m not Superman, I’m TEN YEARS OLD.” Why doesn’t anybody get this?

“You tore a hole in the veil bigger than any I’ve ever seen!” she sticks her hands out like she’s trying to show me the size of the hole, but her arms aren’t long enough. I saw the hole and she’d have to grow arms five times as long as her body to really show how big it was.

“That wasn’t me!” I bend over and pick up the hammer off the floor. I wave it at Ohno in a stern manner, just like my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Carter-Dogbill always used to do with pieces of chalk when kids weren’t listening. “That was Samael. He’s an angel who apparently doesn’t care about rules. He’s like doctors without borders if the doctors were evil and the borders were the universe.”

Ohno doesn’t say anything. She just sits and looks at me and my dangerous hammer.

“People keep telling me I’m a knife who cuts the veil but that’s nonsense. I just see things before they happen. And the only reason I can do that is because of Paschar. And he’s not here! And the longer I stay here, the more likely he’s going to leave and go find someone new, just like the angels did with Ambrose Viccars!”

Suddenly, I get a glimmer of an idea. I look out toward the living room. Roger is still outside and hasn’t come back. I hope he didn’t sneak around to the garage and come in through there. At this point, I don’t know if I can trust him. He saved my life, but he seems to be devoted to Hekate. Ohno, on the other hand, isn’t. And she doesn’t want Roger to know that she isn’t.

“You know what?” I ask Ohno. “I do have something she doesn’t.” I tap my chin, but not with the hand holding the hammer, because then I’d be bashing myself in the face. “You got doors in that maze that go everywhere?”

It takes Ohno a moment to understand the question. She shrugs. “The labyrinth grants me access to almost any place. Moth-- Hekate has been building it piece by piece for centuries. Any enclosed space with a door, like your bedroom closet or a basement with no windows, it’s connected to.”

“And can anyone come in if you open the way?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like, was I only able to come here because of my gift, or can any normal person come through?” Please say yes. I cross my fingers.

Ohno nods and licks her lips. It’s weird to see the same tic she had in her grown-up form on this young girl. “Of course, we’ve taken people here since as far back as I can remember.” She doesn’t say it, but I suspect that the rest of that sentence was, “to eat them.”

I bite my lip. “Then I think I got an idea. But I need you to do something for me.”

“I’ve already done more than I should have. Mother would split me from top to bottom and spread my entrails out across the entirety of the labyrinth if she knew even a fraction of what I’ve told you.”

“That’s awful. Thank you for sharing that.”

She shrugs.

“If you want her gone, I just need one little... okay, one big favor.”

Ohno stands up and brushes the wrinkles out of her mummy wrappings. It doesn’t really do much. I think she just does it out of habit. She tosses her hair back and puts her hands on her hips. Is she trying to look dramatic? This isn’t a dramatic moment.

“You better know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t.” I take a deep breath. “And if this gets other people killed, I’m going to feel really bad about it. But... I think it might work? That’s gotta count for something.”

We spend several minutes talking about my plan. I don’t give Ohno the specifics of how everything falls into place, because for one thing, if Scooby Doo taught me two things, one is that most monsters are just people wearing masks, and the other is that plans never go the way you want them to. Also, dogs will brave anything for a biscuit. I still don’t fully trust her either. She’s been at this for so long that she may very well have the whole “I’m your ally, oops, I stab you in the back teehee!” thing down pat. All I tell Ohno is what I want her to do, and how she’s going to be able to do it.

“We gotta hurry before Roger comes back.” I say when we finish.

She nods, and then closes her eyes and starts to melt. Her shape grows slightly smaller and thinner, twists over itself, then back, like some sort of human flapjack trying to eat itself. After another minute, I find myself looking at my mirror reflection. Except it’s not my mirror reflection, because that’s reversed, and this isn’t reversed. It’s a little weird to feel like you’re looking in a mirror but everything is the opposite from what it should be.

“You’re gonna want to get some of my clothes from my bedroom,” I tell my new clone.

Ohno-as-me looks down at her mummy wrappings and rope belt. “You don’t think these will do?” she asks in her own voice. She’s being sarcastic of course. Maybe she and Roger will get married some day.

“You won’t fool anyone,” I say, shaking my head, “and maybe you oughta work on my voice or stick to whispering or something because you don’t sound at all like me.”

Ohno shrugs, then peers over my shoulder. Over my actual shoulder, not her as me’s shoulder. You know what I’m saying. She looks past me. I look over my own shoulder. Me, my shoulder, not Ohno’s shoulder. There’s a shadow in the back yard that’s approaching the sliding glass door. It’s probably Roger.

“Go, quick before Roger sees you!” I tell her. “And of course watch out for anybody else.”

“What’ll you do?” she asks.

“I have to return some library books.”

Submitted June 15, 2019 at 12:56AM by Lillian_Madwhip http://bit.ly/2ZnrhiY