Household Gods Read online

  Hysteria yammered still, not far under her hard-fought calm. She looked around, not wildly but not what you’d call calmly either. No mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, she thought dizzily. Who’s the craziest of us —?

  Calm. Be calm. She raised those stranger’s hands, those hands that answered when she called, and laid them shaking against her cheeks. Like a blind woman, she explored the face that, it seemed, she had come to live behind. Not her face, of course not. No soft, faintly sagging curves. No blunt German nose. This was leaner, longer, with cheekbones standing sharp in it, and a nose with a pronounced arch. She had to look — God, she couldn’t giggle, she’d break down completely — she had to look something, maybe a little more than something, like Sheldon Rosenthal.

  Calm. Calm. Focus. Explore. Make this make sense. She ran her tongue over her — someone’s — teeth. They weren’t hers, any more than the rest of it. No years of orthodontia here. No caps, no crowns, no carefully cleaned and regularly brushed and flossed tributes to modern dentistry. These are crooked. One in front was broken. Two uppers and one lower, a molar, were gone, long gone, the gaps healed over, no sign of a wound.

  One of those that hadn’t vanished still made its presence felt. It was broken, too, and ached, not horribly but persistently, as if it had settled in and meant to stay. She prodded it with a finger. It twinged. Her finger jerked away. Dentist, she wrote in a mental file. Find. Make appointment. Soonest.

  Find where? Find how? Where was she?

  Here. She was here. Wherever here was. She had to keep going. She had to take inventory. Right now she had two choices. She could fret about tiny details, or she could fall down in a screaming fit.

  She wiped her finger on the blanket, shuddering a little at the scratchy wool, and reached up to touch her hair. It felt greasy, dirty between her fingers. It was shorter and curlier than her own — what she remembered as her own. Her scalp itched, too. Dandruff, she thought.

  She pulled a strand forward to peer at it out of the corner of her eye. It was dark, dark brown, almost black — nothing like her own light brown shoulder-length professional woman’s cut with its faded blond rinse. The name of the rinse was as clear as if she’d read it on the wall: Amber Essence. She’d chosen it as much for its name as for what it did for her hair.

  Nicole lowered the hand with care, folded back the blanket, and rose gingerly to feet that had not, till now, belonged to her. They were filthy, black with grime, hard-soled and ragged-nailed. They were — and this was almost a pleasure — both smaller and narrower than her own broad Austrian farmer’s feet. Cleaned and pedicured, they might have been something to look at.

  They protruded from beneath the hem of a garment as completely unlike her Neiman-Marcus sweats as this body was unlike her own. Wool again — no wonder she wanted to scratch — dyed much the same color as the blanket. The rasp of her legs against it told her what her eyes confirmed as she pulled it up: they were desperately in need of shaving, though not grown out as full and shaggy as if they’d never been shaved at all. Under the furze of dark hair they were, like her arms, leaner, narrower, finer-boned, than the ones she’d always owned, with long ropes of muscles in the calves. The ankles were fine, finer than hers had ever been; her legs went to thunder thighs at the drop of a plate of strudel. No thunder thighs here. These were lean but shapely, muscled and strong, as if she — this body — worked out on the stair-stepper every day.

  Her foot brushed something under the bed. She reached down and pulled out a pair of sandals that, for fancy leatherwork, would have run into three figures at a boutique on Ventura Boulevard — if they were new. These were anything but. The leather was faded and filthy and sweat-stained, and patched here and there.

  For a moment, as she reached for the sandals, she’d touched something else. She hesitated, shutting down visions of skulls and bones and monsters under the bed. Go on. Find out everything.

  She stooped and got a grip on the thing and pulled it out. Her nose wrinkled. Bigger than a skull, than two skulls, wide-mouthed, unglazed like the lamps, sloshing with acrid liquid: no doubt about it. She’d found the facilities. A chamberpot. A real, live chamberpot.

  She wasn’t dreaming. Dreams didn’t take care of every last detail. Even fantasy gamers didn’t do that — and she’d seen a few when Frank was in his Multiple-User Dungeon phase. Dreams slid over the essentials of life: an unshaved leg, a half-full chamberpot, a bladder that told her in no uncertain terms it would like to finish filling the pot.

  So she’d gone crazy, yes? Gone right around the bend. She’d never had such a detailed dream in her life.

  She’d never heard of anyone going crazy quite like this. Delusions could come only from your own experience. She knew that. She’d seen it on TV, one night when she’d actually had time to watch, some shrink show or other, or maybe one of those movies, disease of the week, delusion of the decade, whatever. Maybe it was the shrimp she’d had for dinner. No, they’d been frozen. The ones from lunch at Yang Chow? God, shrimp twice a day. Not only was she in a rut; she was repeating herself from one meal to the next.

  This sure wasn’t any repetition of anything she’d done before. She was feeling punchy again. She couldn’t get a grip on anything. This body she was in, this room, these things that were all completely and unmitigatedly strange — this was insanity. Had to be. The shrink show had talked about that, too. “Things aren’t real,” some thin intense person had said, rocking back and forth, talking to her — his — its knees pulled up to its chest. “Things don’t connect. The world isn’t there, not the world. You know? Just all this not-realness.”

  This was not real, it could not be real, but it was as real as a stink in the nose, a prickle of wool, a taste of sour morning mouth and bad teeth and something she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.

  She got hold of what she could get hold of, which was an increasingly urgent need to use the bathroom. Except that, according to the chamberpot, there was no bathroom.

  She glanced at the door. A bar lay across it, a heavy wooden thing lying on dark metal hooks. She had no desire, none whatsoever, to lift that bar and open that door and see what was on the other side of it. Even if it was her bedroom, or a nice safe insane asylum — because it might not be. It might be blank nothingness, or worse: it might be the world that went with this room.

  She pulled up the tunic to identify the garment underneath: linen, she recognized that, though it was rougher than her linen suits, and undyed. It looked more like a loincloth than panties, and had no elastic to hold it up. She tugged at it. It came down over hips narrower than her own were — had been. What it had covered…

  Her ears flamed. Her pubic hair was shaved as well, or as badly, as the hair on her legs. Awkwardly, she squatted over the pot. Damn, she’d hated doing that on camping trips, or on long drives when her father wouldn’t stop for anything but immediate, screaming emergency — and when he did, there’d only been bushes by the side of the road. He would never stop at someplace civilized, like a gas station.

  As she squatted there, she knew the half-angry, half-sinking sensation she’d had on those drives. No toilet paper. None hiding under the bed among a jostling herd of dust bunnies. The stains on the loincloth told her what she didn’t want to know. Grimacing, struggling a bit as it passed the curve of her hips, she pulled it up.

  There was no rent to go back to, no car, no impatient parents and squabbling sisters and hours more of travel before she could get clean again. Only the room she’d trapped herself in, the chest she hadn’t explored, the window she hadn’t dared look out of. Chest or window? Window or chest? The lady or the tiger?

  After a moment, she walked over to the window. The light that came through was as strange as everything else. It wasn’t the harsh, uncompromising desert glare of Los Angeles, or the gray-gold wash of morning in Indiana. It was softer, moister than either. It reminded her of something. But where? When? The memory wouldn’t click.

  She looked out, east
, toward the strongest of the light. She couldn’t see the sun. Most of her horizon was the wall of another building across a narrow, muddy alley. It was as tall as the one she stood in, two stories, more or less. If she craned down the alley she could see what must be the front of it, where it shrank to a single story. The first floor of each building was stone, with whitewashed plaster above. The red tile roof on the building across the alley made her think of California houses, the ones she called pink palaces, by Taco Bell out of a Spanish hacienda.

  She leaned out the window to peer north — left — up the alley. It opened on another street that ran perpendicular to it. Some of the buildings along it and across the other, wider street were of stone and plasterwork like the one she was in. One or two had front porches supported by stone columns. Others were built of wood, with thatched roofs. Picturesque, she thought, as if she were a tourist and could relish the quaint and the twee. But even as she thought the word, she discarded it. There was nothing cute or touristy about the muscular stench assaulting her nostrils. She was getting used to it, enough at least not to gag and choke, but it never came close to disappearing.

  The alley was amazingly narrow; she could almost touch the house on the other side. The street beyond it was broader but equally unpaved, and no wider than a California alley. It didn’t look as if two cars could slip past each other in it. Not that she saw any try. There were no cars parked on it, either, the way there surely would have been anywhere in the Los Angeles area.

  The thought slipped away before she grasped it. She didn’t see any cars. She didn’t hear any, either. A mournful cry close by nearly startled her out of her skin. It sounded like a train whistle crossed on a car horn and mis-mated with a flat trumpet. A human voice growled in the wake of it: “Come on, curse you!” The sound brayed out again. A sharp whack cut it short. The man snarled, “There, that’ll shift you, you dirty bugger.”

  Nicole gasped. Automatically, as if in her own bedroom, she looked around for the telephone book, to find the number of the SPCA. No phone book. No phone. God, what if there was no SPCA?

  She leaned out the window again, half sagging on the rough wood of the sill. Her knees weren’t so steady as they might be. Two figures came down the street, the man who had spoken and the thing that had made that braying sound: a small gray long-eared donkey.

  The man looked as strange as everything else in this world, dream, hallucination, whatever it was. He wore a belted tunic of undyed wool, a little shorter than hers, with a hood shrugged down over his back. In one hand he held a rough rope knotted to the donkey’s halter, in the other a stout stick, no doubt the weapon with which he’d abused the poor beast.

  The donkey tottered along under a massive load, four huge clay pots strapped to its back with a complicated set of leather lashings. The pots all together stood higher than the donkey, and looked hideously heavy.

  The man caught her eye and waved without letting go of the stick, a bit of bravado that made her think of Tony Gallagher. “Good morning to you, Umma,” he called. His smile showed a couple of missing teeth. The molar in Nicole’s mouth twinged in sympathy. “Looks like a nice day, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she answered — and ducked back into the room in astonished confusion. He’d spoken to her — and to the donkey, for that matter — in a language she’d never heard before. And she, worse, had answered in the same tongue.

  If she let it, that other language came to her lips as readily as English. When she thought What in God’s name is going on? it came out as Qui in nomin Dei fit? It sounded something like the Spanish that made sizable parts of Los Angeles seem a foreign country, but that wasn’t quite right, either.

  When her mind groped for the name of the language, she felt a shift and a click, a sensation somewhat like opening a program that someone had installed on her computer’s hard drive without bothering to tell her. Frank would do a thing like that. But did Frank know Latin?

  “Sed non possum latine loqui,” she protested, and stopped. She wanted to scream, or to giggle crazily. Could you say But I can’t speak Latin in Latin? Of course you could. She’d just done it.

  As if opening that one file had opened another cross-referenced to it, her memory came clearer than it had since she awakened in this strange place, in this body that wasn’t hers. She remembered the wish she’d made just before she went to bed in West Hills, California. Or maybe it had been a prayer, to Liber and Libera, the gods with the names that to her had always meant both freedom and sympathy. To go back to their time. To live in their world.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, deliberately making herself speak English. Odd, came the fugitive thought, that the language hadn’t vanished with all the rest of her, subsumed in strangeness.

  She didn’t believe it. But she’d felt the gods’ kisses on her palm — could feel them now, like the memory of a static shock. She looked down at the rough, callused, workworn hand and the arm it sprang from. That was not the hand that had felt the touch of those stony lips, or that small and doubled snap of divine energy.

  Once more Nicole turned to the window, half hoping that it would look down on something she knew. The street was still there, the house next door, but the man and the donkey were gone. Other people had taken their place, a morning rush of people. Rush hour in — where? Ancient Rome? Most of them wore tunics and kept their heads down. A few men strutted along importantly in what looked like enormous beach towels wrapped around their bodies and tucked over one shoulder. Togas, those had to be togas.

  Something creaked and squeaked — the axle of a cart, she saw as it trundled past. The wheels, solid slabs of wood without spokes, sent up a cloud of dust. So did the hooves of the oxen drawing the cart. One of the oxen lifted its tail and dropped a trail of steaming green dung down the middle of the alley. No one came rushing out with a pooper-scooper. The cart creaked down the street and groaned round a corner and out of sight.

  Once more she looked up, straining to see northward. More buildings, a gray stone wall, and beyond them a blue curve of hills. Those hills… she knew them. She remembered…

  “The hills on the other side of the Danube,” she whispered, not noticing or caring whether in English or Latin. She remembered those hills. They hadn’t been so thickly forested when she saw them, but she’d promised herself never to forget their shape, the way they rose and swelled under the soft blue-gray sky. She hugged herself. She was cold and warm, both at once: awed, astonished, terrified, overjoyed.

  “Carnuntum! “ In Latin, with this body’s accent, it had a sweeter, stronger rhythm than she’d known before, and a lilt to it like the refrain of a song. “I’m in Carnuntum! This is the Roman Empire, and I’m in Carnuntum, and the year is — the year is — “

  That, she didn’t know. It hadn’t been uploaded, or installed, or whatever the word was. As if her brain had hit a bad sector, the lawyerly part of her clicked awake, looked around, and said a flat, No. And, when the rest of her tried to argue with it: This isn’t real. This isn’t Carnuntum. You’re hallucinating.

  Really, counselor? the rest of her asked a little too sweetly, the same tone she’d taken in court more than once, just before she moved in for the kill. So it’s not Carnuntum. and this isn’t the Roman Empire. How do I know enough about either of them to hallucinate anything this elaborate?

  The lawyer-self couldn’t answer that. Nicole turned in the room, all the way around, from window back to window again. After awe, fear, hysteria, panic, disbelief, all the wild mishmash of shock and realization, she settled on the best of all, the one she should have had from the first: dizzy, singing joy.

  “Thank you,” she said in a voice almost too full for sound. Then, louder: “Thank you, god and goddess! Thank you!” She danced across the room in a country-western step that wouldn’t be invented for — how long?

  She paused before she spun right out of the window, and forced some small calm. So — what did she know? The Roman Empire had gone on for a long t
ime, then declined and fallen. The label on Liber and Libera’s plaque, which she’d read often enough to have memorized it, said it dated from the second century A.D. She could reasonably suppose that that was the time she’d come back to, at least till she had a chance to ask. If that was when she was, the Achy-Breaky Shuffle wouldn’t be born for another eighteen hundred years.

  Good thing, too, probably.

  Still whirling with delight in her discovery, she pulled open a top drawer of the chest. She hesitated an instant, with a completely silly attack of guilt — this wasn’t her room, after all. These weren’t her clothes.

  This wasn’t her body, either, but she was using it. She had to cover it somehow.

  The drawer she opened held three or four loincloths like the one that clung clammily to her hips and buttocks. She pulled it off with a hiss of relief and put on a clean one.

  Under the loincloths on the drawer lay a small and carefully made wooden box. It was not too heavy, not too light, longer than it was wide, about half as deep as the breadth of her hand. She lifted it out and set it on top of the chest. It wasn’t locked or latched. Its lid yielded easily to the pressure of her fingers.

  A scent of dust and old wood wafted out of the box as she opened it, overlaid with a strong, musky perfume. A small pot lay inside the box. When she opened it, she found it half full of white powder. Two more, smaller yet, held a greasy salve the color of — “Sunset Blush,” Nicole said in English. She used Touch of Dawn herself. Sunset Blush was for serious occasions and for old beauties with fading eyesight, who thought its strong carmine red could trick people into thinking they were young again.

  Nicole knew what this box was, then. A makeup set. Jumbled in with the pots were a wooden comb with very fine teeth; a pair of tweezers of bronze or tarnished brass; a thin and pointed piece of the same metal, about as long as her little finger, that might have been a toothpick; and another implement that looked like nothing so much as a coke spoon. She didn’t think the Romans had known about cocaine. Maybe it was the Romans’ answer to a Q-tip: not stylish, except perhaps in a campy way, but practical. Did they even have cotton here? she wondered. And what did they use for paring nails, if they didn’t have nail scissors or clippers?