annotated floorplan - simple floorplan
Leo was not expecting, when he came into Ophelia’s room—with great care that layers of skirts didn’t sweep anything off a counter—that he would find Thalia present as well. The wicked grins they had in common, well, those were less of a surprise.
“Still looking good,” Thalia teased. “And you haven’t switched back to jeans.”
“Dora dared me,” Leo said, spreading both hands. “What can I do? I’m helpless. Besides, I think I’m sort of getting used to it. It’s not actually uncomfortable.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Too much clothing makes me itch. Outside of Hallowe’en, I frequently wear nothing at all.”
“Talk about getting back to nature,” Ophelia teased. “So. We were hoping you’d be back. We collaborated.”
“That’s an alarming thought,” Leo said, “considering what you do separately.”
“Some things overlap and need both of us,” Thalia said. “Fi’s potions tend to have direct physical effects. My concoctions tend to have less drastic physical changes but they can affect perception and mind, which Fi’s generally don’t.”
Leo knew that. Thalia was the one who had given him an hour or so of being completely unable to tell the truth about anything. Ophelia was the one who had given him a duplicate of himself, which had not been an evil twin but had been himself if he’d been born a girl. Both had been educational, possibly edging towards enlightening, but in extremely different ways.
“This,” Ophelia said, holding up one of her usual half-cup jars on one palm, “is the result.” The contents were the purple of blueberry juice, and light gleamed faintly through it. “Want it?”
“Don’t be silly,” Leo said. “Of course I do.”
Both women laughed, and Ophelia waited while Leo came close enough to take the bottle.
“Is it going to be a problem with the clothes?” he asked, as he opened it.
“Probably not,” Ophelia said. “Although I don’t think going back to Cosmo for your regular clothes or something easily adaptable could be considered losing that dare, at this point.”
“Easily adaptable. Uh-oh.” He gulped it anyway, wondering what would happen.
It tasted, despite the colour, reminiscent of coconut and lemon, although the aftertaste trailed into a kind of flowery honey.
“So, now what?” Leo asked, setting the bottle down and looking at his hands. Not that much skin was currently visible, but what he could see appeared to be the same as always—if softer thanks to Thalia’s lotion.
“It may take a moment,” Thalia said. “I don’t entirely agree with Fi as far as clothes. I think it would be an extremely good idea to visit Cosmo. You don’t need to do anything as extreme as my preferred next-to-nothing or nothing at all, but I do think you’ll want much less.”
Leo had managed to mostly dodge the mental image of Thalia working in the loggia with all of that green skin showing the first time, as the subject had quickly moved on, but this time, both women paused, and he thought they were waiting.
No, he knew they were waiting. The psychic impression was clear and strong, like the volume had been turned up from barely-audible-if-listening-for-it to a comfortable speaking volume.
And the hands still in his field of view were both turning green. Exactly the same green as Thalia’s skin, in fact, and he’d have sworn the shape was altering subtly.
“What...?”
“It worked,” Ophelia said in satisfaction. “Anyone you think of, you’ll change to look something like them. Not an exact clone. I could tell you from Thalia without clothes as a hint. And if you think of Sally...”
The green of his skin shifted, over the course of several seconds, into rich familiar blue.
“You still have a skeleton and all. You don’t have her nature, just some of her appearance.”
Thalia laughed. “But it should be fun for everyone to be able to see who you’re thinking about. And they do know what we’ve been working on for you. It’s possible they might have some fun seeing who they can get you thinking about.”
“Not just one change,” Leo said. “Constant changes.” This should make for an extremely wild ride for the next hour or so.
“Exactly,” Ophelia said brightly. “I’m sure you can handle it. Go see Cosmo. Thalia might be right about the clothes. Those ones might be uncomfortable if you find yourself thinking of, say, Tarragon.”
Blue started changing to red.
“It might get stronger before it fades,” Thalia added. “Our collaborations have been known to do that. Enjoy yourself!”
“I’ll try,” Leo said. “I’m going to Cosmo now.”
Cosmo found it all highly amusing, Leo was sure of that, even though he stayed for the most part pragmatic and practical. He helped Leo out of the royal-blue and magenta dress and all the underthings right down to the corset—and that releasing its pressure after several hours felt as strange as anything else, some distraction from the weirdly clear intuitive impressions. He offered in return a casual pair of lightweight black pants with fairly loose legs and elastic in the waist along with a ribbon drawstring, and a black pullover shirt of the same material that was hip-length and had short sleeves with wide openings. They felt a little like pyjamas, but they were loose and non-restrictive, which would take some adjusting after the Victorian dress. They were also much more comfortable for phasing through being Tarragon—briefly having extra arms and a tail, though no ability to control them, and being moderately larger—and then Ophelia and Thalia in dizzyingly rapid back-and-forth succession as he talked to Cosmo—the snakes were more distracting than the sudden curves that he hadn’t really noticed under the lab coat. His skin even went Cosmo-like a couple of times during that conversation, very smooth and more cool and firm than Leo was accustomed to.
Wanda and Sally were lurking right outside the door.
“Hi, Leo,” Sally said merrily.
“We heard there’s a new game available,” Wanda added, in much the same tone. “That making you think of people—like, say, Mistress?”
“Haven’t met her,” Leo said. “I don’t have anything to visualize so I guess nothing happens.”
“Hm,” Sally said. “That’s a shame. But I know you’ve met Dora.”
The skin of his arms turned scaly, and he felt a subtle shift in his proportions.
“You two are a little bit evil,” Leo told them. But there was no malice, he was absolutely certain of that. Only good-natured mischief.
Both giggled.
“We’re monsters in a haunted house on Hallowe’en,” Wanda said reasonably. “We’re supposed to be. It’s not like Sally’s wrapping herself all around you like the Blob in that really silly movie...”
Leo began to turn blue.
“And I’m not stripping off all my clothes and washing my face so you can’t see me at all and sneaking around scaring you and making you think you’re crazy.”
Naked Wanda was not something his mind could create an image for, but it tried.
The blue faded to a kind of bland medium grey and grew somewhat indistinct.
“Hey, not bad,” Wanda laughed. “Not invisible, but in dim light, I bet you’d be hard to see. Especially with no clothes.”
“If you’re going to keep acting like two cats with a mouse, can we at least find somewhere more comfortable than standing in the hallway?”
“My room has a really huge mirror,” Sally suggested. “So you can see how you look. And it’s right around the corner. And probably the mirror won’t do anything except be a normal mirror right now.”
“Sure,” Leo said. “Probably it won’t?” He followed them towards the corner and around it.
“It gets a bit chatty sometimes. Mistress suggested swapping it with the mirror down in her reception room, it’s almost the same size, and Amerie and Jake are going to help because they’re both really heavy mirrors. Just haven’t gotten to it yet.”
“Who’s Amerie? I haven’t even heard the name.”
“It’s extremely hard to get her to let Mistress out of her sight on Hallowe’en,” Wanda said. “She’s very protective. We don’t very often have guests who are trouble, but it does happen now and then, and Amerie just... feels better if she’s ready when there are strangers in the house.”
“Makes perfect sense.” Why was he certain this Amerie had endured bad experiences and that made her determined to defend her family from any threat? He’d only just heard of her and knew next to nothing about her, not even what kind of monster she might be. Could monsters even have bad histories? What on earth was going on with his intuition?
Sally’s bedroom fit with the rest of the house—warm wood, white fabric everywhere with cranberry circle patterns and highlights of navy blue. Did she actually sleep in that neatly-made bed?
The iron-framed mirror was the size of a door.
Which meant he got an excellent view of himself while the playful pair sprawled on the bed tossed names at him, leaving time between for him to finish changing and for all of them to consider the results. Mostly they named house residents, but somehow a few others crept in. His only mental image of David Bowie was from the movie Labyrinth he’d seen in his last year of high school; several of Freddie Mercury chased themselves around confusingly until he deliberately decided to concentrate on Wanda until it stopped. The simple black clothes Cosmo had provided didn’t change all that much—but the longer they were there, the more he noticed that the fit was shifting somewhat in sync with the physical changes, and not as a simple alteration to his build inside them. They got a lot tighter and faintly glossy when he was visualizing Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he’d seen most recently in that rather silly but fun Batman movie that he’d gone to with a co-worker he’d hoped, in vain, to get closer to. When he asked how they knew about all these celebrities, they just shrugged, and Wanda said they weren’t completely out of touch.
It wasn’t really an answer, but he was sure it was true, as far as it went—and that it actually extended farther, that there were ways the house residents had access to the objects and media of his own world and time. They weren’t floating in an isolated bubble. Food, clothes, the more mass-market books in the library, all of these things came from somewhere, after all.
How did he know that? It wasn’t like his imagination to run away on him without that being obvious, and this still felt more like his intuition feeding him information.
“We can’t monopolize you all night,” Wanda said finally. “Fun effects only last for a limited time, after all. Shoo. Go wander. See who else you run into.”
Sally giggled. “So they can play around with making you think of people.”
“Gee, thanks,” Leo said, but they had a point. They were enjoying themselves a lot, they were both outgoing types who loved making new friends and they genuinely liked him, and his curiosity about how various mental images manifested—rather than discomfort or panic—delighted them, that was why they’d gotten more creative. But they knew they weren’t the only ones who’d find the game entertaining.
He strolled down the corridor towards the balcony and stairs, trying to decide which direction to go in.
Jake was probably in the labyrinth, Ophelia and Thalia back in their respective rooms, Dora in the music room... no, Dora was with Thalia in the loggia, and Jake was in the kitchen getting a drink, but Ophelia was in her room, and Cosmo was in his own room content and focused on something, and there were two people in the house he had somehow not met all night, that must be the Mistress and her shadow Amerie because he’d met the Master while stopping to visit Dora and being coaxed into dancing with her, a remarkable experience while in the blue-and-magenta dress, and there were animal minds, and...
And the impressions his intuition gave him, indistinct shadows that he could usually translate if he paid enough attention, kept clarifying, no longer just shadows but images resolving themselves further every moment, no longer just grey but tinted more and more with colours.
With so much information inside his head, he barely realized he’d stopped walking and dropped to his knees, the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes in a vain attempt to block out any kind of input.
“Leo?” That was Jake, he knew that before he identified the voice, felt the alarm and concern. “What’s wrong? Fi and Thalia’s potion shouldn’t have bad effects.”
“Intuition overload.” It was the best he could manage, the only words that he could claw out of the chaos that might be any use at all. “Too much...”
“Not leaving you on the floor out here. C’mere. Promise I’ve got you.”
Leo doubted anyone had picked him up since he was a small child, not in any way, let alone sliding an arm around his shoulders and one under his legs and cradling him gently. He wanted to resist, but was fairly sure walking safely was highly questionable right now, and his mind was flooded with Jake’s worry and refusing would make Jake feel bad.
Jake did pause once. “Fi? Side effects?”
That triggered a surge of alert attention, tinged with a suggestion of apprehension. “There shouldn’t be any,” Ophelia said, her voice and self coming closer. “It was meant to set up a link between thoughts and form. Not all that esoteric, really, we’ve done much more complex combos. What’s wrong?”
“Did you take into account Leo being psychic enough to find and help ghosts?”
“I do know that, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant.”
“It is. Still changing. Changed to you when I decided to ask you, but I didn’t say anything. Does this look okay?”
“I... no. Obviously something really unexpected happened. I’ll go talk to Thalia and see if we can figure it out and find a quick cure, but I don’t think we’re likely to be able to invent something before it wears off on its own.”
“Will be in my room.”
“All right. I’ll come tell you if we come up with anything.” Leo felt a light hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry, Leo, whatever’s happening, it should not have.”
He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t exactly bad, just overwhelming and difficult to process, but that meant finding more words which felt like just that last straw, so he shrugged as best he could.
Then Ophelia was farther away and Jake was walking again, they were going in Tarragon’s direction because the cook was growing brighter... and brighter... and blinding neon brilliant, completely unlike anyone else in the house except the peculiar hard-to-grasp presence he thought was Maggie, why was Tarragon so different? It faded somewhat as he squinted mentally at the image, the neon remained but he could make out more detail, Tarragon taking pleasure in planning out the menu for tomorrow night while cleaning up and putting away leftovers... and then there was a new shock, it felt like Tarragon looked right at him and saw him. No anger, just something more like sudden deep thought and speculation, and then he could sense Tarragon’s presence and location but nothing else.
Jake set him down carefully on a soft surface, probably his bed since they were roughly above Tarragon and Jake had told Ophelia they were going to his room; Leo curled up in a ball, too lost in everything happening in his own head to care about anything except being safe. He felt the bed shift as Jake sat down beside him, felt a large gentle hand brush his hair back from his cheek and possibly his mouth.
That touch had information too, and he groped for words, he had to say this.
“The hospital painting... that was you.” Somehow, that skinny pale boy who had nearly died had become the minotaur who had carried him with no obvious effort.
“A long time ago.”
“You left... so much of your childhood was there, and when you could, you left, and stumbled over the house...” The images were there, the same skinny boy outside the Mallory house gates in jeans and a battered brown sheepskin-lined leather jacket and a backpack, thanking the driver of a car for the ride.
“Technically died a couple times. Stopped caring about living. Just wanted to see something outside a hospital while I could. Parents paid but didn’t want me to. Wandered around with a sketchbook hitch-hiking. Not always good, but at least it was new. Came in here to sleep for that night.” He snorted. “Best accident ever.”
Was it just Jake?
