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The Land Beyond Summer

The Land Beyond Summer is posted for entertainment purposes only and no part of it may be crossposted to any other datafile base, conference, news group, email list, or website without written permission of Pulpless.Com^tm.
Copyright © 1996 by Brad Linaweaver. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER FOUR
A LETTER FROM MRS. NORSE

"Maybe we're lucky," said Clive after reflection, "that the TV wasn't playing The Simpsons."

"Or Married With Children," said Fay, getting into the spirit.

"Or The Addams Family."

"TV or movie?" Fay caught herself. "This is completely unreal."

"Remember what Grandfather said would happen," Clive reminded her.

Fay's eyes opened wider. "They'd take orders from us?"

"Yeah." They gave each other that special look they had when they were going to do some mischief. Fay momentarily forgot her dread, and Clive took the initiative.

He led her from behind their hiding place and they began a slow, deliberate march toward Dad. "Hi kids!" he called out cheerily, continuing to water the plants.

"Hello, father," Clive answered somewhat stiffly. "Looks to me like the grass over there could use some water." He pointed at a brown patch of dirt.

"OK," said Dad, turning in their direction while continuing to hold the hose. The water splashed both of them before they could jump out of the way.

Fay laughed. Clive frowned and said a bad word. "Well," said Fay, still giggling a little. "Now it's my turn."

"Dad," she said. "His head didn't turn. "Dad!" she said in a louder voice. Still nothing. "I want you to turn off the water." Absolutely nothing.

"He doesn't hear you," answered Clive. "Let me try again." He walked up close to the man who bore the aspect of his father and said, in as parental a tone of voice as he could muster, "You've done enough watering for today." Dad dropped the hose, walked over to the side of the house, turned off the faucet, then went into the utility room. Clive and Fay looked at each other.

"I think I understand," said Fay. "You can control Dad, which means...."

"You can control Mom!" Clive finished. "Grandad never said exactly how we would handle them. Maybe we're each allowed one. It makes sense for you to have Mom."

While her brother was talking, the unfortunate choice of wording penetrated deep into Fay, like a needle vaccinating her with cruelty. These people, whoever or whatever they were, only appeared to be Mom and Dad. Surely Clive hadn't forgotten that. Why, he had seen their parents whisked away in front of their nose.

Glancing over at her brother, she saw his eyes shining and a peculiar smile, like the expression he'd had on the lake. Some old quotation slouched toward her conscious mind, waiting to be born: was it the wheel turns or the worm turns? She wasn't sure.

Clive continued exploring the myriad possiblities: "What if we tell them to do opposite things? You know, one's supposed to turn on a light and the other turns it off."

"We don't know yet if the ... person who looks like Mom will obey me, Clive."

"Oh, she's gotta. Nothing else makes sense. Hey, you won't be able to tell on me anymore!" His smile was becoming actively unpleasant. "No more of this: Clive took my radio and it's his turn to walk the dog." He adopted a shrill sing-song voice that was unlike her own in any way, but seemed to be his generic choice for the portrayal of kid sisters.

"You won't be able to tell on me either," she answered slowly and with great dignity.

A wise man knows when to change the subject. "Let's go in the house," he suggested, "and find out what we can get away with."

She wasn't about to deny that her curiosity was fully the match of her sibling's. But she preferred that he pester her to do the dirty deed. There was something comforting in the redistribution of guilt and pain. If she'd been an only child, she was sure she would still test "Mom"; but now, more than ever, she was grateful to have a brother.

Clive, for his part, was glad of Fay's presence. This was no time to be alone. His bravado was tied to her reactions in a dozen ways he couldn't properly articulate. If she was all the family he'd have from this moment on, then he realized he could have done a lot worse. He saw value in her he'd somehow missed before.

As they sensed themselves slipping into an ever more uncertain universe, neither wanted to admit how afraid they were. With a tentativeness worthy of a young suitor, Clive held out his hand to Fay. Coming from him, the gesture was so unexpected that at first she didn't recognize the nature of it. He wasn't grabbing or pushing; he was offering. She took his hand.

They walked to the house. One sign of the normal was waiting for them, Wolf. Fay preferred Kitnip but she liked Wolf. She had no doubt this was the real McCoy. She was sure that Clive's bond to the animal was so strong that he would suspect anything wrong. Yet he happily embraced the dog without a second thought. Fay looked around for Kitnip but the cat was nowhere to be found. Perhaps feline instincts had sounded a warning when the cosmic axis tilted.

Mom and Dad came out of the kitchen together, arm in arm, smiling identical smiles. "How's my little darlings?" asked Dad.

"Ready for lunch yet?" asked Mom.

"Try it," whispered Clive insistently.

"Give me a minute," hissed Fay. She felt more uncomfortable than the time she'd celebrated her eleventh birthday with her first period.

The doppelgangers had some traits in common with real parents: "Keeping secrets from your old man?" asked the man who looked like Dad.

"Isn't it delightful, dear?" said the woman who looked like Mom. "They're playing some kind of game."

Sometimes Clive was given books by Aunt Miner who assumed that because of his age and good grades that he liked to read. Inevitably, these gifts found their way into Fay's hands. When reading some of the stories in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, she had been fascinated by the title, "The Imp of the Perverse." She didn't fully understand the story but she grasped the central idea well enough: to do something wrong for wrong's sake. That's how she felt about being made mistress over her own parents. But her feelings were for her real parents, not some imposters who seemed to be taking their cues from 1950's reruns.

Impatient over sisterly scruples, Clive decided to force the issue. "Hey, Dad, give Mom a big wet kiss. And pull up her dress, too." Dad crossed the short distance and had his hands on her.

Without thinking about it, Fay gave a counter-order: "No, don't let him." Mom started pushing him away.

"Just like they were really here," said Clive, impressed by the demonstration.

Fay gave her brother a dirty look. Now that she had started, there was no reason to stop: "Uh, Mom, you know how it's my turn today to get the mail?"

"Now, now, you're not going to dump your chores on your brother?" asked Dad, beaming.

"She's talking to Mom," said Clive in a very cold voice. "You keep out of it."

Fay would have been shocked except that Dad smiled and stopped talking. There was not the shadow of a hint of a suggestion of anything sinister in that smile. It was just so pleasant that it made Fay's headache worse to look at it. Dad lifted a pipe to his mouth. This was most remarkable, too, as Russell Gurney had stopped smoking before Fay was born.

"That's correct, dear," said Mom, completely unfazed by husband or son. "And if old Mr. Clock is on time today, the mailman should be arriving any moment."

"OK, Mom," Fay pursued the objective, "I want you to get the mail in my place. But first, I want one of your aspirins for my headache. And not a half one like you usually give me. My stomach isn't bothered by a whole aspirin."

There was something gratifying about the alacrity with which Mom fulfilled her assignment. Nor was she a robot without initiative; she provided Fay a glass of water without being asked. Then she opened the screen door and walked out to the mailbox where she stood silently, a reliable sentry, awaiting the representative of Federal authority.

"Wow!" said Clive.

"Shall I serve lunch?" asked Dad. He couldn't have been friendlier. "But first shall I turn on the television?"

Neither request struck Clive as unwelcome and he assumed these questions were addressed to the son. He nodded. Dad went over to the TV set and turned on Nickelodeon, now showing old episodes of Superman. As Dad flipped through channels with the remote control, Clive noticed: "We even have the premium channels now." Finally Dad stopped on a channel that seemed to be featuring a special on static and snow. He walked into the kitchen and begn puttering around with lunch.

"Great show," said Fay. The hisssssss grew louder. Clive was on his way to change the channel when a picture came into focus. It looked like the Public Broadcasting System with Mr. Wizard ... except this was someone else performing one of the do-it-yourself experiments.

Fay took Clive aside, pleased to note that he was more pliable than he'd ever been, responding easily to her touch. "How much longer is this going on?" she asked. "They're not Mom and Dad."

Clive nodded. "They're better!"

"Clive!" She didn't like the emotions bubbling up in her chest. She didn't want to agree. She wanted to love her parents. But it was better to feel anger than fear.

He realized that he'd gone too far. "We've got to make the best of the situation, don't we?" he asked.

"There's no escape from Grandfather," she answered.

Clive was crestfallen. It was as if he had actually made himself forget, however briefly, the incredible reality that was Grandfather Donald. If the man could do all this after he was dead, what else did he have in store for them?

Fay remembered the odd words he had spoken in the boat. The style in which he had spoken the spell or chant, or whatever it was, had disturbed her more than the idea he was using magic. In fact, now that she was reminiscing, she realized that she'd always been put off by Grandfather's mannerisms. Even the arch of an eyebrow when he was trying to be mysterious could be annoying.

As she watched Clive reveling in his newfound power, she caught some of Grandfather's expressions on her brother's face. Or was she only imagining them? But they were all family, after all -- and there must be times when she couldn't bear to study her own reflection.

People couldn't help having characteristic gestures and expressions and ways of speaking. Fay knew it was ridiculous to dislike someone on that basis. As she studied Clive's face, her distaste for familiarity was replaced by comfort in those same qualities. She'd never thought about these things before, but what had told right away that "Mom" and "Dad" were not Mom and Dad was the complete absence of their distinctive selves. The replacements weren't robots. They were caricatures of someone else, with fake personalities. Leave it to Grandfather to poison any gift, even one that was already coming with strings attached.

"I hear him!" said Clive.

"Who?" asked Fay, but then she stopped short. She heard him, too. That wasn't Mr. Wizard speaking on the television. That was Grandfather. "Today's experiment," he said, holding up a beaker filled with dry ice, white steam rising as it slowly melted at room temperature, "is to settle once and for all, Mr. and Mrs. America, whether your kids have rights. Especially when the economy sucks! When your darlings are real little, you don't pretend they have any rights, any more than I'd say this dry ice has rights."

He lit a burner and, with a remarkably ugly Betty Crocker potholder, held the beaker over the flame. The dry ice steamed away to nothing, leaving a halo of white mist around Grandfather's head. "If something's your property," he instructed the home audience, "you can do what you want with it. If your offspring's your property, you see the interesting possibilities. On the other hand, if you say kids got rights, think what that means! Can they enter into contracts? Will they keep their word any better than you do? Can they consent to what they actually want at a given moment of a given day, hmmmmmm?"

Walking over to the TV set, Clive turned it off and gave Dad the bad news: "Sorry, guy, I've changed my mind. You can't watch TV after all."

"Whatever you say, son," came his cheery voice. But there was a louder banging of pots and pans.

As if on cue, the mailtruck arrived. Fay watched Mom take the letters, smile and wave goodbye to Ed, their regular mailman. He wouldn't notice anything different if Mom had been standing in the nude with antlers on her head.

"Mail's here," Mom chirped unnecessarily as the screen door banged shut behind her.

"What is it?" asked Dad, coming out of the kitchen, wearing an apron.

"Why look, it's bills!" said Mom. She couldn't have been happier if she'd just won the Publisher Clearinghouse millions.

"And junk mail, too!" said Dad. He sounded so happy that Clive expected him to burst out laughing at any moment. Before the situation deteriorated any further, there was a surprise in the mail.

"There's a letter for our little ones," Mom beamed.

"What? For both of us?" asked Clive. After years of strenuous effort, most of the relatives had been trained to treat brother and sister as individuals, even in such trifling matters as addressing correspondence. (Aunt Miner remained the exception.) Fay grabbed the letter and showed the envelope to Clive. The return address read:

MRS. NORSE

HOUSE OF THE CAT

AUTUMN, TENTH CYCLE

There was no zip code. As for the rest of the letter, it appeared completely normal. There was a real stamp, with its ridiculously high price. The postmark showed that, whatever the return address said, the letter had been mailed within the state.

"So open it already," said Clive.

She whispered in his ear, but so softly that he couldn't make out the words. He was about to ask her to repeat herself when Mom entered the fray with: "Why don't you join me in the kitchen, Pappa bear, so that our baby bears can read their letter in peace?"

"Sure thing, honey-lamb," he said, "but it's only fair to warn you, I'm making soup to go with your sandwiches."

"Did you make it yourself?" she asked, headed for the door.

"Opened two cans, which means it's home-blended," he replied, following her, and saying one thing more -- something that sounded suspiciously like, "Mmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmm good."

"I don't think I can stand much more," said Clive.

"Me neither," agreed his sister. "Let's see what's in the letter." She tore it open. Something black poured out.

The room disappeared.

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