Household Gods

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 di

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 co

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 bu

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.