What October Brings

Inheritance Ann K. Schwader

This part of the country has too many trees. Too many, too close, and even the last of those famous fall colors isn’t helping. Fighting claustrophobia, Zill stares out the window of Thali’s Mercedes.

“So, did my mother tell you why she really wants me here?”

Here. Not home. Zill has learned to be careful with words, which unlike numbers harbor feelings. She is brilliant with numbers. She is not good at feelings. Her father told her this often when she was growing up, especially when he was drunk.

Which was also often. Toward the end, continually.

Thali shrugs, concentrating on the twisting seaside road towards town. “Only that she was sending you a ticket. And that you’d better use it.”

There are breaks in the trees now, but that’s not helping either. All Zill can see through those breaks are waves, gray and opaque in the failing light. She can’t smell them yet, but her memory fills in: slime and fish guts from her father’s last boat, gone from her life for over a decade. There’s another scent underneath, but it doesn’t bear thinking about. Not this time of year.

She drags herself back to the conversation. “Did she tell you it wasn’t round trip?”

Thali keeps her eyes forward. They’ve been friends forever, but she’s a few years older—and her mother and Zill’s are friends, too. Or were.

“Not that it matters,”Zill finally admits. “I owe so much already.”

Inheritance. Another word with feelings. Very complicated feelings, and one Zill’s mother has been using a lot lately. She has some sort of inheritance here, and if coming home is the only way to claim it—

Thali smiles grimly. “I hear you!”

She’s got an MBA, Zill remembers. Those don’t come cheap, though she’s been doing all right since she moved back last year—a few months after her mother went. She’s heading up the Chamber of Commerce, with two businesses of her own.

No wonder she looks so tired. Or at least older than Zill was expecting, when Thali met her at the… Oops.

“I’m really grateful you made time for an airport run. Grad school’s done a number on my social skills.” She hesitates. “Mom was so dead set on me coming, I’m surprised she didn’t pick me up herself.”

“Your mom’s… not getting out much,” says Thali. “Nothing wrong with her, I don’t think, but she doesn’t feel comfortable driving.”

Which does not sound at all like the woman Zill’s been talking to—every week—for these past couple of years. Shrike Harbor may be a classic small pond, but her mother has always made the biggest splash. Committee meetings, school board, library council: you name it, she’s chaired it.

She and her friends have, anyway. Her father used to call them the Seven Pushy Broads.

On a good day.

“Probably just drama.” She shrugs. “Like the damn ticket.”

Mouth tight with grimly suppressed curiosity, Thali turns back to her driving, sliding the Mercedes into the last long stretch. Zill holds out for almost five minutes.

“It’s not like I have much to go back to. That grant I won last year probably won’t be renewed.” Her hands fist in her lap. “My work isn’t going well.”

At the quantum level. Literally.

Physics plus math plus magic—that’s what she’s always called it. And until this fall, the magic still played nice with the math. The physics didn’t twist into broken equations that had nothing to do with the shining patterns she revolved in her mind.

Now her dissertation is going nowhere, and the department’s losing patience. She can still see the answers her advisor wants—from multiple angles at once—but the crude vocabulary of symbols and numbers is failing her.

Every time she almost breaks through, he shoves chalk in her hand and points at the old-school blackboard covering one wall of his office.

“Don’t talk. Calculate.”

Language for him is worse than useless, a tangle of imprecision. Only the purity of formulae will do. And there are no two-dimensional formulae for what happens—or might be made to happen—in the unseen dimensions beyond. The ones she has always sensed like shadows, behind the tedious three or four every idiot learns in school.

Thali’s lip curls. “What a useless piece of—”

“Yeah, but he’s still my advisor.”

Zill’s stomach clenches. How much of that actually came out my mouth? Thali’s always been able to read her, but either she’s gotten scarily better or her own subliminal whining is out of control.

Deep breath time. “And it’s not like I can explain any of it to Mom.”

“Probably not. Not one of them went to college.” Thali’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Or needed to.”

This stark truth silences them both for the next couple of miles, to the first outlying houses. Then Zill feels a sigh rising.

“I still have to try. And you know how she gets this time of year.” Another nasty thought strikes her. “She’s going to expect me to attend services tomorrow, isn’t she?”

In the deepening dusk outside, Shrike Harbor is tidy and well-preserved, not rundown like most fishing villages on this part of the coast. People still bring in good catches, and there’s a little light industry. Doesn’t look like the refinery’s operating right now, but later this fall—

“Have you still got my number in your phone?” Thali asks.

Relieved to have her train of thought derailed, Zill digs in one jacket pocket and checks. Nods.

“Call me later, OK? After you’ve gotten unpacked and talked to your mother—“

“You think I’ll need to?”

Thali looks conspiratorial. “I think you’ll need a drink.”

The house is nearly dark as she walks in. It smells as though it’s been closed up a long time, or… No, that’s all it is. Stale air. Flickering light and indistinct voices guide her back to the living room, where her mother sits wrapped in afghans on the couch. The big television her father bought last year is on as usual; some fake courtroom show.

And not another light on in the whole house.

“Well, finally!”

Unfiltered by long distance, her mother’s voice grates. Zill steps closer anyhow. “You were just lucky Thali could pick me up. If I’d had to find my own way out here—”

“Athaliah Bishop is certainly not her mother.” A slow head-shake reveals thinning white hair. “The girl tries, I suppose, but she’s just not.”

Thank God. Zill reaches for the table lamp. Bad enough to start arguing with her mother the minute she gets in, without arguing in the dark—not that she hasn’t been doing that her whole life.

But when she twists the knob, she wishes she hadn’t.

It’s not just the hair. It’s the eyes—well, mostly the eyes—and the lipsticked line of a once-generous mouth, grown both too narrow and too wide. And the changes may not stop there: even these afghans conceal ankle-length skirts rather than pants.

Why didn’t you tell me?

She stifles the question. When you don’t come home for over two years, you should expect a few changes. The kind nobody bothers to warn you about, because you really should have been around.

Zill exhales slowly and starts over.

“At least I’m here now.” She clutches the handle of her rolling suitcase. “Do you know when Dad’s lawyer wants to meet?”

Her mother just blinks. Zill feels a cold sickness: she has misunderstood, or been helped to misunderstand. There is nothing in that will for her. She has been dragged cross-country and forced to buy a return ticket she can’t afford, just to satisfy her mother’s urge to see her. Or something

“I’m only here until November second, Mom.” She takes another breath. “If we don’t have an appointment yet, maybe you ought to call and—”

“Oh, your father left you something, right enough.” Her mother’s mouth quirks. “You’re a Mason clear through, direct line back. Been proving it half your life. Why else do you think I married the man?”

Her… smile…? widens at Zill’s confusion. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she says. “After services.”

Driving in with Thali, Zill had glanced away as they passed the old meeting hall, its front porch crowded with corn shocks and pumpkins. Festive it might be, but no decorations could cover so many shadows.

Zill’s earliest memories are of this hall crowded to overflowing, lit only by memorial candles set into niches in every wall. One for each community member departed; lost to the sea or industrial accident, to sickness or war. Yet the promise of eternity remains, so long as the people are strong. So long as the chant is raised in its seasons, and the communion Between is maintained—

Not by me, it’s not!

Two years, she realizes, has not been long enough. “Sorry,” she finally says. “I won’t be going.”

Tipping her suitcase forward, she starts towing it towards the staircase. Her mother unsnarls herself from the afghans and struggles to her feet.

“Zillah…!”

Zill bumps her luggage up the stairs, drowning out the rest of her mother’s protests. The moment she reaches her bedroom door, she’s pulling out her phone.

Thali’s always been able to read her.

As they pull away from the house, Zill feels a rush of relief. It’s a little high school, but that doesn’t stop her from checking Thali’s glove compartment for the bottle. Pre-party, they used to call it. Jack and Coke in Dixie cups on their way to wherever, just enough to take the edge off.

Looks like Thali’s ahead of her tonight. The pint’s already unsealed. Zill sneaks a sip before looking around for the soda and cups.

“Sorry,” her friend says. “Pretty much nothing in this town stays open late, grocery stores included.”

“But not liquor stores. Or bars.” Zill rolls her eyes. “Gee, I wonder why.”

It takes her another few sips to start talking, but after that she can’t stop. The whole weird confrontation with her mother was both more and less than she’d been expecting, and nothing she’d been prepared for.

Though she should have been, after Thali’s mom last year.

Staring into the night, Zill hears her own voice at a distance as the shock and disappointment sink in. Maybe it was stupid of her, but she really had believed her father left her something. That she’d have one more semester if her grant didn’t get renewed—

“But why wouldn’t it?”

Zill blinks back into focus. She’s answered this question before, but Thali sounds a lot more interested in the details now. Physics plus math plus magic.

It’s the last term that’s widening the rift with her advisor. The man’s blackboard mind cannot stretch into those dimensions. Cannot see that the answers he wants are such a miniscule part of what is—and not even the most interesting part. Not the part she’s known about all her life, taken all the math she could trying to get close to.

And what, she wonders after another sip, would he do if he did see?

“He couldn’t take it,” Thali murmurs. Her windshield reflection looks pleased, though Zill can’t think why.

The night outside is total now: no house lights or streetlights or anything to indicate they’re heading for a bar in town. Shrike Harbor hasn’t got that much town. Maybe Thali’s found a roadhouse to do her drinking in since she moved back home?

When she tries to ask, though, something’s wrong with her mouth. It’s not moving right. There’s a slick bitterness at the back of her throat that wasn’t there a minute ago.

And the taste is getting worse and the night is getting deeper and no words are coming out—

Thali catches the pint as it slips from her fingers. “I’m so damn sorry, Zill.”

Blackout.

It isn’t the voices upstairs that rouse her. It’s the rhythm beneath them, tidal ebb and flow of the Samhain-rite. As it has been conducted every year since Shrike Harbor’s founding, and before that in another town laid waste by intolerance and ignorance.

As it must be conducted to maintain communion with those beneath the eternal waters sheltering Y’ha-nthlei, which the government believes destroyed—

“Zill!”

Thali’s voice is too far away for her to care. Entangled in the dreams (the nightmares) of her childhood, of the old meeting hall overfilled with worshippers and the strange deep ocean scent (visitors, you must call them visitors) from the back pews, she whimpers and tries to roll over.

“Fool girl.” An older woman’s voice, this time. “You gave her too much, and if she—”

Zill’s aching head thumps the floor as someone begins shaking her. That someone has grabbed a handful of fabric at her shoulder, though she can’t remember what she was wearing last, or how there could possibly be that much to grab.

But she’s going to puke if the shaking doesn’t stop, so she finally opens her eyes.

Zill doesn’t recognize her surroundings immediately. She has only been here once before, on her sixteenth birthday. Sweet sixteen and never been freaked so thoroughly in her life. She’d never looked at her mother and the other six Pushy Broads the same way again.

And that had been only the first Oath of Hydra.

Zill blinks once, twice, and the blur above her resolves into Thali’s worried features. She’s got some twisty gold thing (diadem, Zillah) around her forehead, holding back her dark hair. The rest of her is swathed in ceremonial draperies—just like the ones she’s wearing.

“Come on.” Thali offers a hand up. “ We don’t have much time. The service is almost over.”

Confusion washes over her as she stumbles to her feet, tripping on folds of heavy fabric. Upstairs, she can hear the last rising choruses of the Samhain-rite. It’s been over two years since she last joined in—almost long enough to heal from a language never meant for human throats. Or minds.

But that’s not where she is tonight.

The private chapel (Hydra Mother’s fane) under the meeting hall is smallish, barely large enough for a few plain benches and an altar. She still remembers to glance away from the altar. Candles flicker in iron sconces along the walls, revealing seven robed women—including Thali—waiting for her to clear her head.

The seventh, still half in shadow, is her mother. Her mother as she has only seen her once before, with the high-spiked diadem of primacy settled on her white hair. First of the Seven.

Eldest of the Seven, too. Even candlelight is unkind, and Zill finally sees what she has struggled to ignore: marks of change in every feature, from protuberant eyes to lipless mouth to neck folds disappearing into fabric. Her mother’s form underneath is bent and subtly twisted, already becoming something other—

“I know.” Thali grips her shoulder. “I wasn’t prepared, either.”

With her free hand, she passes Zill a goblet. It’s made of sea-gold, the same metal shining all around her in the diadems and ornaments of the Seven. Another gift of the communion being celebrated overhead, on this night when barriers between worlds and dimensions flicker.

Zill’s fingers clench around the stem.

“Sometimes it helps,” says Thali. “But you’ve got to drink it now.” Her voice drops. “Your mother… she can’t weave the gate any more. And it only opens out from this side.”

Something clicks in Zill’s mind at last.

It had happened last winter, though Shrike Harbor’s only hospital hadn’t called her immediately. A mini-stroke, they’d said. Her mother had come into the emergency room on her own, been evaluated and treated, and left on her own a few hours later. Against advice, but nobody in town would have stopped her.

What this has to do with weaving—or gates—Zill has no clue.

But Thali’s expression makes her drain the goblet in three bitter gulps.

By the time she hands it back, all the candles have greenish halos. Her breathing is ragged, and her heartbeat makes it hard to hear the women around her as they escort her through an open door (was it open before? was it even there?) to the right of the altar.

Just beyond that door, the space expands into a cavern. Or a sea cave—though it can’t be, this far from the ocean.

Her ears say otherwise. The salt air resonates to the same gray waves she noticed on her way into town yesterday. She and the others are walking over water-smoothed stone now, their bare feet damp. There’s a lingering scent, too, one her memory skitters away from.

Then she sees the mouth of the cave.

The roiling translucence that fills it is less sea mist than hallucination: there are no waves beyond it, no rocky shoreline. Only the ocean’s depths. A few spikes (spires? towers?) of unknown architecture rising from even deeper lend a dim fluorescence—

“Y’ha-nthlei.”

Her voice, or Thali’s? Either way, it is not a question. As the goblet slips from her fingers, Zill turns to face her friend.

“I still don’t understand why I’m here. Whatever Mom did… with that… she never mentioned it to me.”

In the dimness behind Thali, the diadem of primacy flashes as her mother shuffles forward.

“You already know what you need to. It’s in your blood.” The corners of her lipless mouth twitch up. “Your Mason blood.”

She gestures left and right at the cave walls. As Zill struggles to focus, thin lines of light manifest and begin twisting themselves into half-familiar symbols. Diagrams. Patterns that reach into places she could never make her advisor understand even existed—

“The Keziah formulae.” Her mother’s hushed voice.

Then Thali’s, and all the others.

Zill sways on her feet, reaching out with both hands for the patterns now detaching from the stone, shedding symbols in their wake. Physics plus math plus magic. They make more sense than any blackboard equation, pure and certain. Obvious. So damn obvious how they run between here and elsewhere—

“Yes.” Seven voices in the shadows.

Unimpeded by chalk, Zill’s hands move freely through the shining patterns, weaving and revolving them. Helping them synchronize with unseen counterparts. Quantum entanglement, but there are no tangles here. No flaws or knots in the pattern now opening before her in the mouth of the cave.

At first, she barely hears the footfalls at her back.

Then their scent (deep ocean strangeness turn your eyes away now) washes over her, and her fingers move faster. As she feels the last of this pattern (this gate) mesh with its partner on the other side, her blurred gaze drops to the cave floor. She keeps it there as the visitors pass through, still chanting some phrase of the evening’s rite. A reminder of their communion with the congregation; that all here are of one blood and one destiny, deathless.

After the last has crossed, she is still staring down at the wet stone when a hand fastens on her shoulder.

“Turn around, Zillah. Lift your eyes.”

When she does not, cannot, comply, the grip tightens to pain. “Turn around, daughter. See me.”

Her mother’s features have changed beyond words—almost beyond recognition. Below the sea-gold diadem, eyes clouded with more years than she ever suspected meet hers. Zill struggles not to turn away, even when her mother lifts the diadem from her half-bald scalp and extends it towards her.

Those hands against her own are damp and cold and slippery. And webbed? Zill’s fingers curl back reflexively, but her mother lifts the diadem higher.

Glittering in the cave’s watery light, the object suspended above her head is distinctly misshapen. Oblong. Unlikely to fit any human skull, let alone hers. Yet her mother is lowering it now, clamping it onto her forehead with a strength she never—

White agony blossoms behind her eyes.

Momentarily blinded, dazed with the contents of Thali’s goblet, she hears rather than sees her mother’s robes slide to the floor. Then flat-footed, claw-scraping steps head for the cave mouth, and the pattern-gate through.

“Keep watching if you can.” Thali’s voice catches. “I didn’t.”

Her vision is already shattering, but Zill tries to hold on. There are swimmers on the other side of that gate, now, reaching through dark water to touch the shimmering lines. Her mother stretches out her own arms and leans forward. No one breathes.

Then, with a single splash, she is gone.

Daylight seeps through her eyelids like cold acid. Zill curses, rolls over, and shoves her face into her pillow, wincing at the pain this simple action brings.

Pain and remorse. No matter what she’d been trying to escape, going drinking with Thali last night (last night?) was her worst idea ever. Jack and Coke minus the Coke, not even a decent bitch session, and now she’s got the mother of all hangovers—

Mother.

The word trips a trigger in her head—or a floodgate for nightmares she’s had too little night for. Zill’s hands clutch her blankets as the image-torrent rises, sweeping her back into memory, half-lit black waters and shards of a city drowned before Pangaea broke apart. Shining swimmers with gill-fringed throats stare out at her with her mother’s face. With the face of Thali’s mother, gone last year—

Gasping, she claws herself up into the light of waking. Her bed is a disaster.

As she struggles to pull the quilt straight, her hand closes on cold metal: some fragment of dreaming, sharp-spiked and impossible. Zill lifts it up with bloodied fingers, then carefully lowers it onto her matted hair. Into the fire still encircling her forehead.

It fits perfectly.