When Davey found a door to another world in the mural on his bedroom wall, he thought he had a destiny and an adventure ahead of him. But maybe the portal was just malfunctioning. And maybe it can be useful despite that.
The person who used to own the house until she died was an artist. She’d painted murals in every room. Davey could hardly believe that Dad was planning to paint over the battle scene in the living room and the mural in his and Mom’s bedroom, which he hadn’t let any of the kids see. Davey’s big brother Carson had snuck in to see it, and he wouldn’t tell Davey or Amy what it was; he just snickered when they asked him about it.
part 1 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Davey Platt knew he was going to miss his old friends, even if Mom and Dad said he could go visit them, or have them come visit sometimes. They weren’t moving that far. But he’d be in a different school, come Fall, and would have to make new friends there. His sister Amy was only one grade ahead of him, but she’d be in middle school while he was still in elementary.
On the plus side, their new house was totally awesome.
It looked like it was about a hundred years old, and though Dad said it was old-fashioned for the time it was built, it was still pretty old. “We couldn’t have afforded a house this big if it were newer,” Dad said. “And those murals didn’t exactly raise the price either...”
The person who used to own the house until she died was an artist. She’d painted murals in every room. Davey could hardly believe that Dad was planning to paint over the battle scene in the living room and the mural in his and Mom’s bedroom, which he hadn’t let any of the kids see. Davey’s big brother Carson had snuck in to see it, and he wouldn’t tell Davey or Amy what it was; he just snickered when they asked him about it. But Dad said the kids could decide whether to keep the ones in their rooms. Davey was totally keeping his.
Standing inside his room the day they decided to buy the house, with no furniture in the room, it was like you were in the courtyard of one of those houses in Italy that had their yards on the inside. There was a sun in the sky above the window, and the roof of the house below that, and small trees all around, and a bench with a vine-covered trellis over it. And just to the right of the door to the hall, leading to Carson and Amy’s bedrooms and the bathroom they’d share, was another door, or rather a gateway, that would lead to the outside of the villa. You could just see a road and a horse and buggy going down it, off in the distance, and hills beyond that, dotted with what Mom said were probably olive trees.
When Dad asked him where he wanted his furniture, he made sure that gateway wasn’t covered up by the bed or dresser or anything.
Davey and Amy were too little to carry anything heavy in from the moving truck, but Mom kept them busy helping her unpack boxes in the kitchen and put plates, bowls, silverware and so forth in the cabinets and drawers. Then they had to unpack towels and put them in the bathroom closet. Then Mom told them to go unpack their own boxes of stuff now that Dad and Carson and Uncle Rob had gotten the furniture in place.
So Davey was pretty wiped out by the time he finally went to bed. They hadn’t had time to look at the yard much, though Davey remembered from the day they’d decided to buy the house that it had several big oak trees, one of them with a treehouse. Dad said they weren’t supposed to climb into it until he’d inspected it and made sure it was still safe. Maybe he’d have time to do that tomorrow, and he and Amy could see what it looked like inside.
He lay there in bed looking at the mural in the dim glow of the nightlight, seeing the trees, the trellis over the bench, and the shadowy gateway.
“You can’t deny that it’s good art,” Carson said, drawing his paint brush across a vast swath of mermaid tail, “but I’ll be glad when it’s gone and we can come and go without being so careful not to let the kids get a glimpse of our bedroom.”
Amanda laughed through her paint mask. They had the windows open and box fans pulling fresh air in and blowing paint fumes out, and they kept taking frequent breaks to go over and stand by the windows and fan, but they were keeping the door to the living room scrupulously closed at all times. Amy and Davey were in there playing video games; they could hear the sound effects even over the noise of the fans.
There wasn’t much more to do here, and then they could start on the gory battlefield in the living room. They’d wanted to paint these rooms before they moved in, but the timing hadn’t worked out, with the people buying their old house needing to move in by a certain date and willing to pay extra to make sure it happened. They’d already painted over most of the erotic scenes covering the walls, some of them depicting episodes from classical mythology that Carson vaguely recognized, others unfamiliar. What was left on the east wall was just a young couple, human and mermaid, sporting in a tide pool on a beach with more rocks than sand.
“They look chilly,” Amanda remarked. “I don’t know why, but I get the feeling they’re on a beach fairly far north, and the reason they’re in the tide pool is that the ocean water is too cold for the man.”
“I think it’s... yeah, you can see goosebumps on the man’s skin if you look close,” Carson said. “Not the mermaid’s, though.”
“Of course not, they’d probably be adapted to a wide range of temperatures.”
Carson hoped the photos he’d taken before they started painting would show that level of detail. The artist who’d owned the house before had put an enormous amount of thought and work into this, and in a way it seemed a shame to destroy it. But spending the next eight years until Davey left for college slipping quickly in and out of their bedroom without letting the kids get a glimpse of it, constantly tempting them with the forbidden... it just wouldn’t do. What if one of the kids needed to wake them in the middle of the night for an emergency?
No, he thought regretfully as he painted over some reefs on the horizon, it was better this way.
It was over a week before Dad found time to inspect the treehouse. First he wanted to paint his and Mom’s bedroom, then the living room, and that involved moving a lot of furniture around, which had to wait for times when Uncle Rob or somebody could come over and help. Davey and Amy explored the yard and the attic, which had some stuff left over from the previous owner — some dried-out paints, a broken easel, and some half-finished paintings, nothing as good as the murals downstairs. They walked around the neighborhood and met some other kids who lived nearby. Unfortunately, none of them were particularly close to Davey or Amy’s age; there were a couple of girls close to Carson’s age, and a boy and girl who were at least two years younger than Davey, and a family with twin babies. The younger kids didn’t have much to say about the Platts' new house, which had been empty as long as they could remember. The older girls remembered the lady who used to live there, back when they were kids. “She had the best Halloween and Christmas decorations, and the best candy,” said Tanya, the younger of the two high-schoolers. “And she’d have us over for tea, and let us look at her paintings. But she disappeared, back when I was around seven or eight, I think. Her family couldn’t sell the house until she’d been gone for seven years and the state declared her dead, is what I heard.”
After Dad inspected the treehouse, then tore out some rotten boards and replaced them, Davey and Amy celebrated by having their lunch in the treehouse. (Carson thought he was too old and cool for that.)
“This is an awesome place to live,” Amy said, taking another bite of her ham sandwich.
“Yeah,” Davey replied. “I wish it was in our old school district, though.”
“We’ve still got each other.”
Large parts of the novel, especially early on, are from Davey's point of view, but there will also be POV scenes for his parents and other adults, some of which will have more adult themes. No explicit sex, though.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
The moonlight from the window was falling directly on the gateway in the mural. But he couldn’t see the road and horse and buggy and the distant hills. Instead, he saw — a chair. A high-backed wooden chair, with red velvet cushions on the back and seat and arms, and to the left of that, part of what looked like a sofa or armchair.
part 2 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
That night, Davey woke up and needed to go to the bathroom. When he got back, he realized the moon was full and shining directly into the window. He looked out the window at it for a minute.
When he turned around and took a step toward his bed, he saw that the moonlight from the window was falling directly on the gateway in the mural. But he couldn’t see the road and horse and buggy and the distant hills. Instead, he saw — a chair. A high-backed wooden chair, with red velvet cushions on the back and seat and arms, and to the left of that, part of what looked like a sofa or armchair. And it wasn’t flat, like the mural, but as he stepped closer, the perspective changed and he saw more of the sofa, and another wooden chair to the right of the first.
Weird. Weirdly normal, actually. It was like a secret passage had opened up into a normal room with normal furniture. But there couldn’t be a secret passage there — right behind that wall was Amy’s bedroom. And none of that furniture looked like Amy’s.
And the light and shadows on those pieces of furniture was weird, too — it wasn’t just the moonlight shining on the gateway part of the mural. There was another source of light on those chairs and sofa, softer than electric light but much brighter than moonlight — kind of like sunlight filtered through several rainy days in a row.
Davey stepped right up to the gateway and put his hand into it. He felt a shock, and stumbled forward — passing all the way through it. He seemed to step down as he did, and almost lost his footing.
He was closer to the chairs and sofa, and from here he could see that there was a long row of pieces of furniture — chairs, sofas, cabinets, shelves, even the pieces of a bed frame with no mattress. Some of them looked battered or stained, he saw, like the old sofa they’d gotten rid of before they moved here. He turned around and looked back at his room — and found it framed inside a cabinet several feet taller than him. The cabinet’s wooden doors were standing open, and inside it was his bed, dresser, the shelf full of toys and books, and the moon shining in the window at the other end of the room.
What was odder still was that his Transformers pajamas were suddenly super big on him. Part of the reason he had stumbled was that he’d tripped over the pants legs. And when he rolled up the cuffs of his sleeves, he saw that the skin of his hands was a shade darker. He rolled up his pants legs, and twisted and tucked in the waistband of his pants to keep them from falling off and tripping him. He looked up to see where the light was coming from and saw a raftered ceiling with little round light bulbs or lamps placed here and there in the rafters. There weren’t any obvious wires connecting to the light bulbs.
“It’s like the wardrobe into Narnia,” he said, “if Narnia had furniture stores.”
On closer examination, he saw that the cabinet had a little paper label stuck to its left door:
“Mahogany cabinet, strong unknown enchantment. Provenance available on request. 35,000 crowns o.b.o.”
It wasn’t in English, or even in English letters, but somehow Davey could read it. At least mostly. There were a couple of big words he could sound out but didn’t recognize. Davey didn’t know how much a crown was compared to a dollar, but 35,000 of them sounded like a lot of money.
All the other pieces of furniture seemed to have little labels as well. And many of them had at least one big word Davey didn’t recognize. The cabinet was the cheapest piece on the aisle, it looked like, as the other prices ranged from 50,000 crowns for a little “Massaging footstool” to 480,000 crowns for the “Aphrodisiac bedframe,” whatever that was. Davey put his foot on the massaging footstool, and it felt really weird, but kind of nice.
Obviously, the thing to do was to explore. Little or no time would pass back home while he had whatever adventures you could have in a magic furniture store.
As he walked down the aisle of furniture and turned the corner, he realized the store was stocked with a lot of things besides furniture. The next aisle had shelves full of miscellaneous stuff. There were a lot of little statues and pictures, like Mom kept in the windowed cabinet in the living room, and some jewelry, and what might have been toys, and ornamental boxes. The next aisle was full of books —
— and there was someone in it, a girl; from her face and figure she looked older than Amy but younger than Tanya, but she was tall, taller than Tanya or even Carson. Her skin was darker like Davey’s new skin, and her hair was shorter than Amy’s but longer than Davey’s. She was sweeping the floor with a broom and dustpan. A moment later she noticed him, and her jaw dropped.
“Oh, you poor dear! Did your mother or father go off and leave you here? We closed half an hour ago! How did you escape notice until now?”
She wasn’t speaking English, but he understood her perfectly. “I didn’t come with Mom and Dad,” he said. “I came through this portal, it was in the wall of my bedroom, and then it came out of this cabinet over there —” He pointed.
“Talk sense, child, now isn’t the time for games. Who are your parents? Do you know their names? And why are you dressed like that, and barefoot?”
“Of course I know their names, I’m not a little kid. They’re Carson and Amanda Platt, and I’m Davey Platt —” But somehow the names weren’t quite coming out right. Some of the vowels sounded wrong, and he couldn’t seem to pronounce “Platt” without putting an extra little whispery vowel in at the end.
“I suppose you can spend the night with us, and your parents must surely come back to look for you in the morning,” the girl said. “More likely they’re searching the quarter for you even now, silly child, and they’ll come knocking on our door soon enough.”
“No, they won’t, they’re asleep, and they’re in another world, the world I came from. What do you call this world?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come look,” he said, and walked back around to the aisle of furniture. The girl followed, carrying her broom and dustpan.
There was the cabinet, and there was his bedroom inside it. He could go back through, but he hadn’t had his adventure yet. “Look,” he said, and the girl looked in astonishment into the cabinet. She reached out a hand and he reached up and held it.
“Don’t put your hand in unless you want to go through,” he said. “I stuck my hand in and I fell all the way into your world.”
“I must tell Mother about this,” the girl said. And a moment later, Davey’s bedroom vanished and the cabinet was just a cabinet, full of empty shelves.
Davey was a little bit worried, but not much. The girl seemed friendly, and in the stories, the portal always opened up again once the main character had had their adventures in the other world.
“Come with me, child,” the girl said. “I’m Syuna-lan Zindla. Did you say your name was Deviplata?”
“Plata is my family’s name,” Devi said, “Devi is my own name.” Though he was pretty sure he used to pronounce his names a little differently, when he was speaking English. Well, when in Narnia, speak Narnian, he supposed. (Somehow, he knew that Zindla was the girl’s personal name, even though it came last, and Syuna-lan meant that her mother’s name was Syuna.)
The girl glanced aside at him strangely, and led the way through a “Staff Only” door into an office and storeroom. Its shelves were even more cluttered and crowded with miscellaneous stuff than the front part of the store. In the middle of the room was a table or desk, and side by side there sat a man and woman, about Devi’s parents' ages, looking together at a big open book and some papers spread out beside it.
“Zindla, have you — Oh. Who is this little child? Where did she come from?” asked the woman, probably Zindla’s mother.
“I’m a boy,” Devi said angrily, “and I’m not little. I’m ten years old.”
But Zindla looked really tall for a girl who’d just barely started developing a woman’s shape, and probably Davey’s clothes hadn’t gotten bigger — he’d gotten smaller. And this man and woman looked kind of tall, too, once he got closer to them. And now that Devi thought of it, he realized that the furniture across the aisle from the cabinet had looked a lot bigger once he got close to it. Had he gotten smaller and younger — young enough to be mistaken for a girl?
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Boys and girls are hard to tell apart at your age, especially with the strange way you’re dressed. But there’s no way you can be ten, unless your growth was stunted by some disease...?”
“No,” Devi said with a sinking feeling, “I guess the portal made me younger.”
“What are you talking about, child?”
“He’s telling the truth,” Zindla said. “He said he saw an opening in the wall of his bedroom, and went through it and came out in the furniture aisle, out of that cabinet you bought from Tirishkun’s estate sale. And I went and looked at the cabinet and I saw a bedroom in it — a bed and chest of drawers and other furniture, and a window at the other end of the room with the moon shining in. And then the bedroom disappeared and the cabinet had empty ordinary shelves in it.”
“Show us,” the man said, standing up. So they all four trooped back into the front part of the store, and they looked at the cabinet. Zindla’s father touched several of the symbols that were carved into the cabinet, and closed and reopened the doors several times, but nothing made Devi’s bedroom reappear.
“We’ll have to get expert help,” he said. “Or maybe we can send you home on the train. Where do you live?”
“Douglasville,” Devi said. “It’s near Atlanta.” But again the sounds didn’t quite come out right.
“I’ve never heard of those places,” the man said. “I’ll look them up in the gazeteer tomorrow —”
“I don’t think they’re anywhere near,” Devi said. “What city and country is this?”
The woman looked at him curiously. “Rishpara, in the Inupara Republic,” she said as if explaining things he should already know.
Devi nodded. “I’ve never heard of those places, but it figures. Magic portals always go to different worlds, not just different countries.”
“How do you know? Are magic portals common where you come from?”
“It’s in all the stories,” Devi said.
“I’ll go consult a wizard tomorrow,” the man said, and Devi’s face broke into a wide grin.
“We definitely don’t live in the same world,” he said. “There aren’t any wizards where I come from.”
“Then how do you know so much about magic portals?” Zindla asked.
“From the stories,” Devi said. “I didn’t know they were real until now.”
“Well,” Zindla’s mother said, “let’s deal with all that tomorrow. Zindla, you still need to finish sweeping the floor, and your father and I need to finish the accounts before supper. I suppose Mother can look after the child and put her to bed. Him,” she hastily corrected herself at Devi’s glare. “Sorry, child, but if your mother didn’t want people confusing you for a girl, she should have give you more boyish clothes and put something in your hair.”
That sounded weird to Devi, but he didn’t say anything about it right away. He’d noticed that Zindla’s dad was wearing a couple of sticks stuck through braids of hair, and her mom wasn’t. Both of them had long hair, like Uncle Rob, but her mom’s hair was loose where her dad’s was braided.
Zindla went back to sweeping, and her mom — Syuna — led Devi through the office and up a flight of stairs into a nice cozy living room, packed with comfy chairs and sofas, and through that into a kitchen, where an old lady was cooking something. She looked kind of like Devi’s Grandma Platt, except her grey hair was long and loose, and she was wearing a loose robe like the other adults.
“Good evening, Mother,” Syuna said. “This is Devi, a child who’s been left on our hands. We’ll be looking for his parents tomorrow, but can you take care of him while Tyemba and I finish the accounts?”
“Of course,” the old lady said, looking Devi over. “A boy, you said?”
“I know he’s wearing blue, and has no ornaments in his hair, but he says he’s a boy. I’ve got to go — I’ll explain more during supper.”
“All right.” The old lady looked at the pot on the stove and said to herself, “That will keep for a bit.” Then to Devi, “Let’s sit down and have a talk, shall we?”
Devi sat in one of the big cushiony chairs. His legs didn’t reach the floor, which also made him think he’d gotten younger and smaller when he came through. It wasn’t fair. The kids who went to Narnia got to grow up and be adults, and he got turned into a little kid. The old lady sat down in a straight-backed chair across from him and asked, “How did you end up stuck in the shop after closing? Did your parents go off and leave you?”
“No,” Devi said, and explained everything over again. The old lady seemed surprised, but not disbelieving.
“...So that’s why my clothes are too big on me; I got younger and smaller. I don’t know why it didn’t change my clothes, too. And Zindla’s dad said he was going to go talk to a wizard tomorrow about the cabinet and how to get it to open up into my bedroom again. Do you think I can go with him? I’ve never seen a wizard before.”
“Let’s see if it suits,” the old lady said. “I expect the wizard will want to talk to you about this world you come from. You said there aren’t any wizards there?”
“No, not in the real world, just in stories. At least as far as I know. Some of the stories say there are secret wizards in the real world, but Dad says they’re made up, too.”
“Hmm. Tell me some more about your world. If you don’t have wizards, how do people get around? In carriages drawn by horses and oxen, I suppose?”
“No, we’ve got cars,” Devi said. For some time he and the old lady (who introduced herself as Pasyala) told each other about their worlds, and he learned that they had cars and trains and airplanes that ran on magic instead of gasoline. He remembered hearing Zindla’s dad, Tyemba, mention a train earlier. From time to time, Pasyala went and stirred the pot on the stove, and returned to continue the conversation. Devi was asking Pasyala another question about magic when the other three came trooping upstairs, ready for supper.
They all sat down around a small table and ate, and Devi asked and answered more questions about their different worlds. By this time he was getting really sleepy, and he nodded off twice during supper. He was sure he missed a lot of the conversation, as half of the others' answers to his questions went in one ear and out the other.
“Sorry,” he said, the first time he jerked awake with his head leaning toward his bowl. “It’s the middle of the night back home.”
“Yeah, I saw the full moon shining in the window of your room,” Zindla said. “It’s not the full moon yet for six days, here.”
After supper, Zindla’s mom Syuna put some blankets and sheets on the sofa in the living room and Devi curled up under them. He soon fell asleep.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Odd, though. You don’t look like you have a transformation spell on you. Or any kind of spell, really. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a transformation, but I think I’d recognize it. Must be some kind I’m not familiar with.”
part 3 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Devi woke early, while everyone else was still asleep. It was natural enough; he’d gotten a few hours of sleep early on, before going through the portal and coming here. He got up and figured out how to turn on the lamp — it didn’t have a switch, exactly, but there were magic symbols painted on it and you touched one of them to make it light up.
He needed to pee, and something felt weird about that too, but he wasn’t letting himself think about it. His pajama pants fell down as soon as he stood up, and he pulled them up and held them up with his hand for now instead of twisting and tucking in the waistband like before. Syuna had shown him where the bathroom was before he went to bed, and he was surprised they had indoor plumbing, though he realized he shouldn’t have been when they had cars and trains and stuff. He turned on the light in the bathroom and stepped in.
There was a mirror on the wall. It was the first time he’d seen his new appearance.
“I look like a little girl,” he said disgustedly. His hair was black now, and his face was round and cute like a four or five year old. And his eyes were brown now, and his skin darker... he looked like Zindla’s little sister. Last night, Tyemba had remarked that he looked like a Zyuneban, which apparently was the race or ethnic group that Zindla’s family belonged to. But they said his name was more like a Stasa name, with “Plata” shared by everyone in his family, instead of something like “Amanda-lan” to say that his mother was Amanda. Well, he could figure that out after he peed.
He stood in front of the toilet and let go of the waistband of his pajama pants so they dropped, and fumbled at his crotch so he could aim.
Nothing there.
He looked down, pulling up his loose pajama shirt to get a better view, then, with a feeling of dread, turned around and looked at himself in the mirror.
“I don’t just look like a girl,” he said. “I am a girl. That must be the worst portal ever!”
He knew what girls looked like because he and Amy used to take baths together when they were little, before their parents got weird about it and told them boys and girls weren’t supposed to see each other naked. He knew how girls peed, too. He sat down and relaxed and after a few seconds, pee came splattering out. The toilet paper was kind of rough and yellowish, not white and soft like the stuff back home. He couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet at first, finally finding a chain above eye level he needed to pull. The sink was easier, with a knob like he was used to from back home, but it only gave cold water.
He found some books on the shelf in the living room. None of them looked like kids' books, but he picked out one that didn’t look too hard and started reading. It was harder than it looked, with lots of words he didn’t know, and kind of boring. He had put it away and started looking for something else to read when Pasyala came downstairs to cook breakfast.
“I found something out,” he said shyly.
“Oh?”
“I don’t just look like a girl... the portal turned me into a girl.”
“That’s odd. I wonder why? Perhaps the wizard will know.” She pulled some ingredients out of the cabinets and started cooking. “On the bright side, you’ll be able to share Zindla’s bed, instead of sleeping on the sofa as long as you stay with us.”
“I guess.”
Zindla was the next one up, and was unsurprised to hear that Devi was a girl in fact. When Tyemba got up, he had some good news.
“Oh, I suppose it will wear off in a few days. Those transformation spells never last long.”
“Yay!” Devi cried.
“Odd, though. You don’t look like you have a transformation spell on you. Or any kind of spell, really. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a transformation, but I think I’d recognize it. Must be some kind I’m not familiar with.”
“You can see when people have spells on them?”
“Sure — didn’t I tell you last night I’m a wizard?”
“I must have been too sleepy to remember. Sorry. But can you figure out how the portal works by yourself?”
“I’m not that powerful or that knowledgeable. I can see magic, and often figure out what it does if it’s not too complicated, but I can’t cast my own spells. Pasyala’s a wizard, too, a low-power one like me.”
“What about Zindla and Syuna?”
“Nope,” Zindla said, looking morose. “I was born three days too early. And Mother was off by a whole month.”
That didn’t make sense to Devi, so he asked: “Why does it matter when you’re born?”
“Because that determines if you’re a wizard or not,” Syuna said. “If you’re born on the summer or winter solstice, you’re a wizard. The closer to the exact moment of the solstice you’re born, the more powerful you’ll be. Tyemba and I tried to time it so Zindla would be born on the winter solstice, but I went into labor too early.”
“So I have to marry a wizard if I want to keep the shop going,” Zindla said.
“Sorry,” Devi said. Zindla didn’t look old enough to get married, but Devi supposed she meant when she was older.
“What are we going to do about clothes?” Syuna wondered. “You can’t go around in those oversized things all the time, and we don’t have anything that fits you... I suppose I’ll go see my sister or brother and see if I can borrow some of their daughters' old clothes and see if they fit you.”
So after breakfast, Syuna went out while Tyemba manned the store. Zindla stayed upstairs to keep Devi company until she got back; they talked about the differences between their worlds, and Devi asked some questions about the book he’d read a little of that morning, much of which he didn’t understand.
After a couple of hours, Syuna came back with several child-sized robes, gowns, undergarments, and pairs of socks and shoes. She had Devi try them on, and the best fit was a blue-green gown that was supposed to be worn with a white under-robe over the panties, and a matching pair of blue-green slippers, which were a little big on Devi, so he had to be careful how he walked. Neither the panties nor the robes had elastic or zippers or anything, but tied up with strings, and the panties were fluffy with something like accordion folds. When you stood or sat with your legs together, the folds closed up, but if you sat on the toilet with your legs spread, they would easily separate so you didn’t have to take them off to pee. Devi didn’t like the girly clothes, but supposed he didn’t have a right to complain, since he was a girl until the spell wore off.
Once he was dressed, they went downstairs. Zindla and Syuna took over the store, and Tyemba took Devi by the hand and led him through the front door of the shop and into the street.
Devi was excited to be seeing the larger world for the first time. There were more pedestrians and fewer cars than Devi remembered seeing when his family had gone to downtown Atlanta a couple of times. And the cars were weird, bigger than the ones he was used to, and made of wood, with intricate designs painted or carved on their sides. There was no engine noise from the cars, but plenty of noise from the large wheels rattling on the cobblestone streets, and people talking and sometimes shouting. The buildings weren’t that tall around here, two to three stories for the most part, sometimes flush together and sometimes with narrow alleys between them. Further off, he could see some taller buildings. They had ornamentation carved on their fronts like some of the older buildings in Atlanta.
They didn’t walk far, only to the next street corner, which seemed to be a bus stop. And the bus was the weirdest thing Devi had seen yet: its sides were open, and there were hardly any seats, and instead of seatbelts there were poles and bars you were supposed to hang onto, like in the MARTA train Devi had ridden when his family went downtown to see The Nutcracker. There were little stairs that a man lowered to the street whenever it stopped, so it wasn’t hard for Devi to climb up into it.
“Hold tight onto the pole with both hands,” Tyemba advised, and Devi nodded. Tyemba and Devi took hold of the same pole.
“I know. I’m not as little as I look, remember.”
“Yes, of course.”
Devi thought the bus wasn’t going very fast compared to cars back home, but it felt fast because it was open and the wind was blowing past his face every time it moved. They got off and waited for another bus a few streets later, then rode that one a lot longer, getting off in a neighborhood with taller buildings — still not huge skyscrapers, though, just five to ten stories high. Tyemba took his hand again and led him down a side-street and into the front lobby of what seemed to be an office building. They went into an elevator and Tyemba said to the woman sitting in a chair in the corner, “Sixth floor, please.” The woman nodded and made a couple of gestures; the door closed, and Devi felt a little heavier, like the elevator was moving, — but she hadn’t pushed a button or anything. And there wasn’t a light-up indicator saying what floor they were on or anything, like in the elevators back home.
A little later they stopped and the door opened again. Tyemba led him down a hall to an office with a glass window in the door; there was a wooden sign hanging outside that said:
Masu-lan Nidlaya — Talismans analyzed, repaired, or made to order
“Let me do the talking, at first,” Tyemba said. “Don’t speak unless Nidlaya asks you a question, all right?”
“All right.”
Tyemba opened the door and led him into the office. There was a young woman sitting at a desk, lighter-skinned than Tyemba and his family, with light brown hair, who stood up and said: “Tyemba, how are you? I’ll let Nidlaya know you are here.” But before she did that, she said to Devi, “And who are you, you precious little thing?” Tyemba cleared his throat, and Devi glared at her.
“She’s lost far from home,” Tyemba said. “I hope Nidlaya can help us return her to her parents.”
“Oh, poor thing! I’ll be right back.” She went through a door behind her desk, saying something Devi couldn’t quite hear, then coming back and sitting down to work on some papers.
They’d been speaking a different language from what Zindla and her family spoke at home. Devi could understand it just as well.
Just a minute or two later a man came out. He was older than Tyemba or Devi’s parents, but younger than Pasyala, and he looked like them, with the same skin and hair colors. “Tyemba,” he said, “come on back. Shmisi said something about a lost child?” He looked perplexed.
“Yes, I’ll explain...” Tyemba took Devi’s hand again, which Devi was starting to resent, and led him into the back room.
The room was half filled by a large table with various little bits of something scattered on it, and tools, and papers weighted down by other tools. It was surrounded by shelves filled with miscellaneous statues, pieces of jewelry, carved wooden boxes, and so forth, like the second aisle in Tyemba and Syuna’s shop, plus bottles and jars of various liquids, powders, and other things. Nidlaya gestured to a couple of chairs and sat down in another, across the table from the others. Devi climbed into one of the chairs, his feet dangling a few inches off the floor.
Tyemba explained what had happened last night and what Devi had told them. “Have you ever heard of a talisman like that,” he asked finally, “something that opens a portal to a far-off place or even another world?”
“Vague rumors, but nothing reliable,” said Nidlaya. “I’ll come out to the shop and take another look at the cabinet, though. I think I remember it; you had me look at it not long after you bought it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and you couldn’t identify its enchantment then. But now, maybe with the clues from Devi’s story, you can find out more...?”
“I hope so. Devi, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.”
“Tyemba says you were a boy before you came through this portal, right?”
“Yes, and I was ten years old, not four or five or however old I am now. And I had whiter skin and brown hair, and blue eyes, and my face didn’t look anything like this.”
Nidlaya asked him a lot of questions about his bedroom, the mural on the wall, the house, what he knew about the previous owner, and so forth. Then he asked more general questions about Devi’s world. This went on for so long that Devi got hungry, but not long after that, Shmisi came in with a big platter of bread, cheese, smoked ham, and raisins. Everyone ate with their bare hands, instead of with spoons like at supper last night or breakfast this morning. After they ate, the questions went on for some time longer, and then Nidlaya got up from his chair.
“I’m going to touch you with some different things,” he said, “and see if I can figure out the spell on you.”
“All right,” Devi said. Nidlaya opened a couple of jars and got some dried flowers out of them, then touched each of them to Devi’s cheek or the back of his hand, and did the same with a couple of jewels. Finally he put both hands on his shoulders, closed his eyes, and stood there for a minute or two. Then he let go, opened his eyes, and shook his head.
“That’s odd,” he said. “I’d doubt your story if Tyemba hadn’t told me about you. There’s no transformation spell on you, no spell at all that I can see.”
“I’ll take her to a spellbreaker on the way home,” Tyemba said, “to make sure.”
“Hmm...” Nidlaya looked thoughtful, then said, “Devi, what about if you go sit in the outer office with Shmisi for a few minutes. I need to talk to Tyemba alone for a bit.”
“All right,” Devi said, and went, feeling left out.
It is no longer a spoiler at this point to say that Zindla's world is the setting of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid, though I think neither this novel nor that have any spoilers for the other. This one is set about a century later than The Bailiff and the Mermaid.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
In the stories, kids who go through portals to other worlds need to learn something from it. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn from being a little girl. And there’s definitely got to be something I’m supposed to do here, but I don’t know what yet.”
part 4 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
“Do you believe her story?” Nidlaya asked once Devi was gone and the door was shut behind her.
“It sounds far-fetched, but Zindla confirmed it. She saw through the portal for a few moments before it closed. I trust her, anyway.”
“Yes, but... perhaps the portal is real, but she isn’t telling the truth about it, or about her world, or about herself. I find it very odd that there’s no sign of a transformation spell on her, if she’s really a ten-year-old boy. Or a soul-switching spell. Either type of spell should be obvious to the kind of examination I gave her.”
“That’s true — Zindla couldn’t confirm that part, she didn’t see it happen. But she was wearing a shirt and trousers much too big for her, with strange creatures printed on them. I meant to bring them for you to look at, but forgot. And she does act more mature than a five-year-old, and has a larger vocabulary. Ten seems about right.”
“She could just be very smart and imaginative. My little granddaughter Syandi, for instance, started reading when she was just three, and has as large a vocabulary at five as her father had at seven or eight.”
“I don’t know. She seemed genuinely surprised and dismayed when she realized she’d been made shorter and younger by the portal, and then when she realized she’d been transformed into a girl.”
“Well, I’ll come out to your shop and take a look at the cabinet as soon as I can. And those clothes. Let me know if the spellbreaker gets any results.”
“All right.”
Tyemba paid for the consultation, then retrieved Devi from the waiting room and left. He mulled over what Nidlaya had said as they went down the elevator to the Murshan Spellbreaker Agency, on the ground floor of the same building. Devi seemed like an honest and open child, but Nidlaya was right that something was odd about her story — if she’d been transformed by the portal-cabinet, there should have been signs. Signs visible even to him, much less to a more powerful wizard like Nidlaya. Seeds of doubt had been planted in his mind. But there were the clothes, and she didn’t act or talk like a five-year-old. Well...
He cleared his throat and said to the man on duty at the desk, “I need to hire a spellbreaker. Just for a minute.”
“All right,” the man said. “What do you need done? How powerful a spellbreaker do you need?”
“No more than three hours off the equinox, I think.” A spell subtle enough to hide from him and Nidlaya couldn’t be all that powerful, right? Three hours should be fine.
“I can handle it, then; I’m two and a half hours post, myself.”
“Just hold hands with this little girl for a moment.”
Devi looked a little apprehensive as the man came around the desk and knelt down beside her. “Here,” he said, holding out his hand, “take my hand. It probably won’t hurt.”
Devi took his hand and grasped it.
Nothing happened.
Nothing continued to happen.
“There,” the man said, letting go of Devi’s hand. “What was the spell you needed me to break, by the way?”
“I don’t know,” Tyemba said honestly, and paid him for his time.
Zindla was working the counter while her mother took a bathroom break when her father and Devi came back from their prolonged errand. A couple of customers were browsing, but no one had needed her help in a while.
“What did you find out, Father?”
“Not much,” he said. “Nidlaya had never heard of a talisman like that cabinet, and he couldn’t find any signs of a spell on her either. And when I took her to a spellbreaker and he held her hand, nothing happened. Here, why don’t I take over the counter and you take Devi upstairs? I think she’s wilting.”
Devi did look tired and grumpy; she hadn’t said anything. Zindla smiled at her and said, “Come on, Devi. Do you want something to eat?”
“We ate at the wizard’s office,” the little girl said, following Zindla into the back office and up the stairs to their apartment. “But I guess I wouldn’t mind a snack.”
Zindla got some sweetbread out of the cupboard. Her mother came out of the bathroom just as Zindla and Devi sat down at the table.
“Who’s manning the counter?”
“Father. He asked me to take Devi upstairs and let her rest.”
“You do look tired, Devi. You can take a nap on Zindla’s bed.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Devi insisted.
“Very well,” Syuna said, and went downstairs to the shop.
“So how was your trip to see Nidlaya?” Zindla said to Devi.
“His office was interesting, with all the magic stuff on the shelves and the table. But he didn’t know anything about the portal or why it turned me into a little girl. He said he’d never heard of a portal like that before.”
“There are other wizards we can ask about it, I expect,” Zindla said. “Father just goes to him first because he’s our cousin and we get a discount, and he’s good, but he’s not the best in the city.”
“Yeah,” Devi said. “Maybe somebody else can help. I guess I need to think about other stuff in the meantime. Like, in the stories, kids who go through portals to other worlds need to learn something from it. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn from being a little girl. And there’s definitely got to be something I’m supposed to do here, but I don’t know what yet.” She yawned and blinked.
Zindla was impressed. If she hadn’t already been convinced that Devi was really older than she looked, that would prove it. But: “Mother was right, you do look a little sleepy. You probably can’t figure out what you need to do until you get some rest.”
“No,” Devi protested, and took another bite of sweetbread.
“When you were this young the first time around, did you need naps in the middle of the day?” Zindla asked.
“Um — I guess so,” Devi replied after chewing and swallowing.
“Then maybe you need them again now. Being little doesn’t just mean being shorter than everybody else.”
Devi finally agreed to lie down for a while, after she finished eating her sweetbread, and Zindla took her upstairs to her room. “Here you go,” she said. “Take that off and I’ll let it air out while you nap.”
“Do you have anything else for me to wear?”
“All those other things we borrowed from my little cousins were too big for you, right? But better than anything of mine, I guess. Don’t worry, we can make you some new clothes soon enough. Now come on. You don’t have anything I don’t have.”
Devi finally took off her two-layered gown and her slippers, put on a nightgown they’d borrowed from Zindla’s cousin Nebya — it was too big, though not as big as those clothes she’d arrived in — and slipped under the covers. She was asleep when Zindla came back from putting a pot of water on to boil.
After talking to Tyemba about what he had learned, Syuna went into the office and looked up some records. She made sure she had the addresses of everyone who’d bought things she’d acquired from Tirishkun’s estate sale, especially Kashpur, who’d bought his research papers, and put those together with the usual list of their best customers — mostly spellcasters who might be able to figure out how the cabinet worked and make it work again to send Devi home, plus some rich talisman collectors who had wizards on their staff to maintain the items in their collection. She got a stack of blank paper and put it in the duplicator talisman, then traced a pattern in the runes on its lid, opened it, and took one sheet out. Closing the lid, she took up her pen and wrote a letter with a generic salutation, telling them about the cabinet, Devi’s arrival, and a little bit of Devi’s account of her world. She didn’t mention Devi’s supposed transformation; she wondered if Nidlaya might be right to doubt her. She wasn’t a wizard, even a low-powered one like her mother and husband, but she wasn’t ready to trust any details of Devi’s story that Zindla couldn’t verify. Tyemba seemed to trust her despite the evidence of his senses seeming to prove she wasn’t under a transformation spell, but Syuna wasn’t sure. She resolved to watch Devi carefully and judge for herself. She did talk more like a ten-year-old than a five-year-old, that was true, but how much of that might be because she was from another country, perhaps even another world, where children might be raised and educated differently? Or because she was smarter than the average child?
The thing to do would be to ask her more questions about her world and herself, and look for inconsistencies. And get more expert opinions.
She invited her customers to come and examine the cabinet at their leisure during the following month, and then, if they liked, place their initial bid. At the end of that time, she would inform everyone of the highest initial bid and auction it off among those willing to bid more, on the condition that the winner of the auction must allow Devi to go home through the cabinet once they figured out how to make it work.
Having finished the letter, she filed the original, took the duplicates out of the talisman-box, folded and sealed them, and addressed them one by one.
When Devi woke up, he looked around Zindla’s room. There were a few books on the shelf, and he looked through them, finding them easier to read than the ones downstairs. There seemed to be a mix of histories and made-up stories, though it was hard to be sure which were which when he didn’t know anything about this world’s history.
He took off the too-big nightgown and put on the other two-layer gown that fit better, and the slippers. He wondered: if they had magic cars and trains, did they have magic washers and dryers and stuff too? He put the book he’d been looking at back on the shelf and walked downstairs.
Pasyala was cooking supper. “Oh, hello, sweetie. I’m going to start making you some new clothes soon. Give me a minute to finish chopping these onions and peppers and I’ll measure you to see what I need to cut.”
“All right. Thanks.”
A few minutes later Pasyala led him into her own bedroom, which was on the same level as the kitchen and living room, at the front of the shop. She told Devi to take off his outer clothes, which he reluctantly did, and then measured him, which was a little embarrassing. Then Devi put the gown on again, and said, “I guess I’ll read for a while. Unless you want me to help you in the kitchen with something?”
“I don’t think I need any help right now,” Pasyala said. “You’re a little too short to reach the stove or counter easily, anyway, and even if you help out with the cooking back home, where you’re older, I’m not sure I trust your little hands with a knife.”
“Oh... all right.”
So Devi went upstairs to Zindla’s bedroom again, picked a book off the shelf, and went down to the living room to read it. The light was better there, and he liked hearing Pasyala bustle around in the kitchen. She reminded him her of his grandma more than Syuna and Tyembla reminded him of his parents, or Zindla reminded him of Amy.
The book was a collection of adventure stories, around ten or twenty pages each, with one or two pictures to each story. The print was a little larger than in the books back home, and the pictures were all black and white. Each one had a little bit at the end where the author said which parts were true and which were made up, which was helpful for figuring out what things were like in this world. In the second story Devi read, the hero got turned into a cat by the villain, but the spell wore off after three days. The author’s note said that transformation spells usually wore off within a few days, and the longest they’d ever been known to last was a month. So even if he stayed in this world more than a month, he’d change back into his old boy self by then. That was reassuring, even though Tyemba had said much the same thing this morning.
But that wizard Nidlaya had said he wasn’t under a transformation spell. What was it, then?
He was halfway through the third story when Syuna, Tyemba and Zindla came upstairs for supper, having closed the shop. They all sat down to eat, and Syuna said, “Nidlaya came by just before closing, and looked over the cabinet —”
“What did he say?” Devi asked eagerly.
“Don’t interrupt, child,” Syuna said, and then continued: “He examined it for about half an hour, and said he thought he might be able to figure out how it worked if he had enough time. I told him he was welcome to come by the shop as often as he liked in the next month to examine it, but so would other wizards, and after that, I’d auction it off.”
Devi was shocked. He knew they were running a shop, and the cabinet had already been for sale when he came through it, but... if somebody bought it, how would he go home when he was done having adventures here? “How am I going to get home?”
“We’ll make that one of the conditions of the sale,” Syuna reassured him. “The buyer has to let you go home once they figure out how to make the cabinet open up a portal.”
That was somewhat comforting, but Devi wasn’t sure how they would make the wizard that bought it do what they said.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Do you want me to show you how to sew?” Pasyala asked. “Or has your mother already shown you?”
“No,” Devi said at first. “Girls do sewing and knitting and stuff.” But then he reflected: People go into other worlds to learn valuable lessons and have adventures and stuff. The portal made me a girl, so maybe it wants me to learn about girl stuff before it will let me go home and be a boy again? “I guess I’m a girl now, so I can learn how to sew and stuff.”
part 5 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The day after Syuna posted the letters, wizards started showing up to look at the cabinet. There was one on the first day, three the next day, four the day after that, and one or two a day for the next eight days. Several of them wanted to talk with Devi; Syuna chaperoned these meetings and cut them off after about half an hour. She didn’t want them to tire out or distress the poor child. She might have an overactive imagination, or she might be telling the exact truth, but either way, she was lost far from home. After a couple of days, realizing that most of the wizards were asking the same questions over and over, she sat down with Devi and wrote up a list of answers to those questions, and gave copies of it to all the customers who came in, and only allowed them to speak with Devi in person if they had important new questions that weren’t on the list.
The ones who seemed most serious about buying the cabinet were Nidlaya, her second cousin; Sumshar, a woman who’d grown rich from the royalties on a talisman she’d invented some years ago; and Kashpur, an older man with inherited wealth. They all came around to examine the cabinet more than once, bringing herbs and talismans to help cast analytical spells. The second time she examined it, Sumshar said to Syuna: “I think the portal will spontaneously open at long unpredictable intervals, but to get it to open on demand will take a lot of time-consuming work. You may want to have the child hang out in the furniture aisle when she’s not eating or sleeping, so she can go home if it suddenly opens without warning. I don’t think it’s likely to open again within the month, but it could happen.”
Kashpur confirmed this when Syuna asked him, the next time he came around; he sounded less sure than Sumshar, who’d been tentative enough, but it was enough for Syuna to tell Devi what they’d said and instruct her to wait around near the cabinet in case it should open again. The child said something curious: “All right, but I don’t think it’ll open until I’ve had my adventure.” She seemed fixated on having an adventure out of a storybook, which in Syuna’s opinion argued for her being as young as she looked. Zindla, at least, had been more mature and responsible when she was ten. But she hadn’t spoken in such complex sentences when she was five.
The next morning after the breakfast dishes were cleared away and washed, Devi expected that the whole family would be working in the shop. But Tyemba went downstairs to open for business, while Pasyala, Syuna and Zindla sat down at the dining table with some books and papers.
“You can join us if you like, Devi,” Syuna said. “Or just keep reading the storybook you borrowed from Zindla, or whatever. We’re working on history today, and I don’t suppose the history of our world will do you much good when you go home to yours.”
“No, that’s cool, I want to learn about stuff,” Devi said. He was sure that the history of this country must be more interesting than the history he’d learned in school back home. They had wizards and magic here. And those stories he’d been reading were supposed to be based on real history, though parts of them were made up.
The lesson mainly consisted of Zindla answering questions from her mother and grandmother about the pages of the history book she’d read since her last lesson, and asking them a few questions about things from the book she hadn’t understood. When they asked a question she couldn’t answer, they opened up the book to the right place and found the answer and made her read the passage aloud. It wasn’t as interesting as Devi had expected, but even more confusing than his history classes back home. Of course he was jumping into the middle of the story, and hadn’t read the book they were talking about. But he was disappointed that they hardly talked about magic at all, except that Pasyala asked Zindla at one point, “Who invented the weather-control spell, and when and where?” and she named some wizard that had lived two hundred years ago.
“Awesome!” Devi exclaimed, finally breaking his silence. “You can control the weather here?”
“Why don’t you explain to Devi about weather control, Zindla?” Pasyala said.
“Um, all right,” Zindla said. “So they don’t control the weather around here. They use it along the coast, to prevent storms that would cause shipwrecks, and in the most fertile farming areas, but not in the inland cities. It’s because it works by shifting the storms or rain from one place or time to another, and it takes a lot of wizards working together. So you can make it rain more when you need it in the farm country, but that makes it rain less in other places, and you can make it rain less when they’re bringing in the harvest, but then we get rain in the cities. And the storms are worse out at sea than they used to be, but they get sort of toned down when they get close to the coast, unless they’re so big they break the weather-control spell.”
“Very good,” Pasyala said. “Now... what problems were the reforms in the hundred and twelfth year of the Republic supposed to solve?”
When the lesson was over, Syuna and Zindla went downstairs to work in the shop for a while, Pasyala continued working on Devi’s new gown, and Devi went back to reading his book. But after he’d finished another story, he went over and watched Pasyala sewing together the pieces she’d measured and cut out of a large piece of cloth. It was interesting; he’d never seen anybody make an article of clothing that big before, though his Grandma Woolcombe knitted scarves and hats.
“Do you want me to show you how to sew?” Pasyala asked. “Or has your mother already shown you?”
“No,” Devi said at first. “Girls do sewing and knitting and stuff.” But then he reflected: People go into other worlds to learn valuable lessons and have adventures and stuff. The portal made me a girl, so maybe it wants me to learn about girl stuff before it will let me go home and be a boy again? “I guess I’m a girl now, so I can learn how to sew and stuff.”
“I would offer to teach you if you were a boy, too,” Pasyala said. “Here, watch how I do this...”
A few hours later, Zindla came upstairs. “There’s a wizard here to look at the cabinet, and he wants to talk to you, Devi.”
“All right,” Devi said. She got up and went downstairs with her.
Tyemba was behind the counter in front of the store. In the furniture aisle there was a man almost as old as Devi’s Grandpa Woolcombe, lighter-skinned than Zindla’s family, with grey hair that still had some brown strands in it. He wasn’t wearing ornaments in his hair like Tyemba or Nidlaya did. Syuna was talking with him.
Devi noticed that the cabinet had a new, much larger label. Instead of “Strong unknown enchantment... 35,000 crowns”, it said “Interdimensional portal. Details available on request. To be auctioned on the sixteenth of Tuspir.”
“This is Kashpur,” Syuna said, in that language that the secretary at Nidlaya’s office spoke, bending down and looking Devi in the eye. “He’s interested in buying the cabinet, and he thinks he might be able to get it to open a portal to your home again. He wants to ask you a few questions. If you don’t feel comfortable answering some of them, just say so.”
“All right,” Devi said, and looked up at the old man. He looked like he wasn’t used to dealing with kids. After clearing his throat, he asked Devi a bunch of questions about her home world, what she was like before the portal transformed her, and how she’d discovered and gone through the portal in her bedroom mural, much as Nidlaya had done. He wanted to know what time of night it had been, which Devi couldn’t tell him because she hadn’t noticed the clock when she got up to go to the bathroom, and what time of year it was; Devi told her the date, which came out as “the eleventh of Skapush”. Devi was pretty sure they used a different calendar back home, but that was the only way she could think of it now.
After a while, Syuna said: “I think that’s enough. You can come back and ask more questions if you think of more later.”
“Very well, ma’am. I think I shall.” He bowed to her and went out.
“You think he might buy the cabinet?” Devi asked in a small voice.
“Maybe. There are a lot of other people who might buy it — Nidlaya, for instance. He sounded interested. And it’s only a day since I posted those letters to our best customers about the cabinet.”
“Would I have to go and live with him, or whoever buys it?”
“If you want to stay with us, you can. You can wait until the buyer tells us they’ve figured out how to work it, and then go over there — Tyemba or I will go with you — and go home through it.”
Several more wizards wanted to look at the cabinet and talk to Devi in the next few days, but after three days, Syuna took her down to the office one morning after Zindla’s lessons and got her to help her write out a list of answers to all the questions the various wizards had asked. She used a magic box to make a bunch of copies of each page, and when they were done, they went through and matched up pages from each stack and folded them up. After that, wizards kept coming to look at the cabinet, but most of them were satisfied with the answers in those papers, and didn’t need to talk to Devi. Then a few days later, Syuna told her she should start hanging out in the furniture aisle when she wasn’t busy with something else. “The portal might open again at any time,” she said. “Sumshar and Kashpur both think so. But they said it probably won’t open again for a month or more, at least not by itself, so don’t tire yourself out. And whatever you do, don’t sit on any of the other furniture — if you get tired of standing, go upstairs to the sofa or Zindla’s bed.”
Since all the other furniture had mysterious enchantments on it, Devi took that warning to heart. She started going downstairs with the rest of the family after Zindla’s lessons, and standing around in the furniture aisle. When customers came and looked at stuff on that aisle, she was supposed to go away and leave them alone. Once Devi woke up in the middle of the night to pee, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so she went downstairs and watched the cabinet for a while to see if it would open. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go home yet, and she doubted the portal would open yet until something more interesting and adventurous had happened. But she was starting to get a little homesick, even though she liked Zindla and her family, especially her grandma. And she wanted to see more of this world, but so far she’d hardly seen anything beyond this shop — they wouldn’t let her go out by herself, and having been made into a little girl, she was a little frightened of going out alone in this big city.
She sat on the floor, watching the cabinet, thinking deep thoughts, until she fell asleep. Zindla found her there the next morning, leaning back against the “Thinking chair (175,000 crowns)”.
After that, Devi thought that if the portal had opened up in the middle of the night, and if she’d gone through it prematurely in a fit of homesickness, Zindla and her family would worry about her. They might guess the truth, but they’d also wonder if she’d left the shop and gotten lost in the city, perhaps kidnapped by people who wanted little kids for those nefarious purposes that Mom and Dad vaguely alluded to when warning Davey and Amy to stick close to them when they went downtown.
So she asked Syuna for some paper, and wrote out a note — in pencil; their pencils were twice as big around as the pencils back home, and looked funny, but they were easier to use than their pens — saying:
“The portal opened up and I went through it. Don’t worry about me. — Devi Plata.”
After that, she kept the note in her pocket whenever she was going to be hanging out around the portal, day or night. She sometimes went down there in the middle of the night for an hour or so, until she got sleepy, but she didn’t fall asleep beside it again. She was still wondering how she was supposed to have her adventure when she was so little. Maybe she’d stay here for years, like the kings and queens in Narnia, and grow up before going home? The Narnia books only talked about a few of their adventures, but if they lived in Narnia for years and years, they must have had some boring times, too.
Pasyala finished the first of Devi’s new gowns the day after Kashpur came to look at the cabinet and talk to Devi. She made two more over the following days. By then, Devi had been paying attention to her sewing for long enough that she let Devi sew the pockets onto the last gown. The seams were crooked, but the pockets were capacious, and that was what mattered.
Zindla’s family followed the same routine for several days after Devi’s arrival, except that some days Tyemba taught Zindla’s lessons while Syuna opened the shop, and they covered different subjects on different days. Then one morning there were no lessons after breakfast, and nobody opened the shop. Everybody got dressed in their nicest clothes, and packed up food that didn’t need cooking in a couple of baskets, and went to church. It was a short bus ride in the opposite direction from the way Devi and Tyemba had gone to see Nidlaya.
The church service was kind of long, and even more boring and confusing than the services back home — more than half of it was in a language Devi didn’t know, and suspected Zindla at least didn’t know very well — but Devi tried to pay attention because she thought she was supposed to learn something from it, like what other religions were like, and because it was the only the second break in routine since she’d arrived.
After church, they went to a nearby park and had a picnic. There were a lot of benches in the park, and after a fair bit of walking they found two adjacent ones that weren’t occupied, enough for everyone to sit down, if a bit crowded. Devi didn’t recognize all the kinds of trees in the park, though admittedly she didn’t know the names of all the trees back home either.
“Well, Devi,” Syuna said after they’d finished eating, “what do you want to do for the rest of the day? Would you like to ride the buses around and see more of the city, or stay here and explore the park for a few hours, or what? You’re our guest, so we’ll let you decide.”
“Is there anything really cool in the park we haven’t already seen?” Devi asked. “Like carnivorous plants or something?”
“No,” Zindla said, “I mean, there are some interesting things. There’s a flower clock in the west garden, and fountains with statues, but no carnivorous plants. Do you have them in your world?”
“I’ve read about them, but I’ve never seen any. They don’t grow where I live.”
“We have them in our world too, Zindla,” Tyemba said, “but they don’t grow around here either. They grow in the swampy southern country. They eat insects, not big animals — do the ones in your world eat animals, Devi?”
“No, just insects, I think. I’m not sure.”
So, after walking a little way and seeing a couple of fountains with statues pouring or vomiting or peeing water, which made Devi giggle, they left the park and rode a bus back toward home. Pasyala got out when they got to the stop closest to the shop and apartment, and the rest of them went on past that stop a bunch of blocks east, then changed buses and rode north to a big square that allowed only pedestrian traffic, no vehicles. It had a big statue in the middle, a man on horseback, and smaller statues of men and women around the four corners. Big fancy buildings with domes and short spires, none as tall as the building Nidlaya’s office was in, were on all sides of the square.
“That’s the Wizards' Court,” Tyemba said, pointing at one of the buildings, “and that’s the National Court, and the Prime Minister’s offices, and the Parliament.”
“What does the Wizards' Court do?” Devi asked.
“They judge wizards who are accused of crimes, and ordinary people accused of crimes committed using magic talismans. Like if someone used magic to steal or cheat somebody, they’d be tried there. And over there, that tall building behind it, is part of the Wizards' Academy. I went there, but only for a year; I don’t have enough power to make it worthwhile learning advanced spells. Back when it was built, you couldn’t build buildings that tall without magic, but now we can build them up to twelve stories without magic, and nearly forty stories with magic.”
Devi wanted to go inside and see some of those buildings, but unless you had business there, they wouldn’t let you inside. Not like back home, where Devi’s third grade class had gone on a tour of the state capitol. Oh, well.
From there they took another bus to a church; it was built in the same style as the church near the shop they’d gone to that morning, but a lot bigger. They went in and walked around it, quietly, looking at a lot of pictures and statues. Devi wanted to ask questions, but they wouldn’t let her talk until they’d left and were waiting for the bus.
They got back to the shop and went upstairs, where Pasyala had supper ready.
As she was getting ready for bed, Devi wondered if any time at all was passing back home. Surely not much.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Zindla liked having a little girl around, even if she was older than she looked, and used to be a boy. Seeing her cousins and other children who lived in the neighborhood, she’d sometimes regretted being an only child, and now she felt like she almost knew what it was like to have a little sister. Devi was so enthusiastic and curious about everything; having her around was like seeing everything for the first time.
part 6 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When Amy went downstairs to pour some cereal and eat, Davey wasn’t up yet. That wasn’t too unusual. When Mom and Dad got up and made coffee, he still wasn’t up. That was a little more so. Then Carson came downstairs, and it was past nine, and Davey still hadn’t shown up.
“Is Davey up yet?” Mom asked Carson.
“I don’t know,” Carson said, sleepily pulling a frozen waffle out of the freezer.
“What about go wake him up, if he’s still asleep,” Dad said.
Carson said, “Lemme get this in the toaster first.”
“I’ll do it,” Amy volunteered, and went upstairs. Carson might be mean about waking Davey up, dragging him out of bed or throwing water on him or something. Waking up when you were still sleepy wasn’t going to be any fun anyway, but Amy could probably make it less bad.
She knocked gently on his door and said, just a little louder than normal, “Hey, Davey, Dad says it’s time to get up.”
No answer. She opened the door a crack, stuck her head in, and repeated the message louder. Still nothing. In fact...
She went over to Davey’s bed. He wasn’t in it.
“Davey, where are you?” she called out. She crossed the hall to the bathroom — it was empty. She checked her room and Carson’s room. And their closets. Then she went back to Davey’s room and checked the closet there, too.
Probably he’d been in the bathroom while she was checking his room, and he’d gone downstairs before she checked the bathroom...?
She went downstairs. “Um, hey... did Davey come downstairs while I was up there looking for him?”
Mom and Dad glanced at each other. “No,” Dad said with a hard expression. “You couldn’t find him?”
“He wasn’t in his bedroom, or in the bathroom, or anywhere else I looked for him.”
“Carson, come with me — we’re going to check the yard and treehouse. Amanda, what about you and Amy search the rest of the house?” Dad said. He and Carson moved toward the back door.
Mom and Amy searched the downstairs and the basement thoroughly, calling out “Davey! Where are you?” now and then, and then searched the upstairs again, and the attic.
“The outside doors were locked and bolted,” Dad said. “He couldn’t have left the house unless he took a key with him to lock the door afterward. Did he take his key? Or are any of the other keys missing?”
“I’ll check,” Carson said and moved to the kitchen drawer where they kept an extra key.
Amy said, “I’ll look and see if he took his key,” and went upstairs. As she went she heard Mom say “None of the windows were open, and most of them were latched from the inside.”
Amy checked Davey’s dresser and found his house key and wallet. Then she checked her own room and Carson’s. Her key was on her dresser. Carson’s wasn’t, but when she talked to him, he said he would check on it, and later told her it was where he normally kept it.
After that, they all sat down and compared notes. When they were pretty sure they’d searched everywhere in the house and yard, Mom and Dad started calling the neighbors to ask if they’d seen him (even though it seemed he couldn’t have left the house).
Twenty minutes later they called the police.
Zindla liked having a little girl around, even if she was older than she looked, and used to be a boy. Seeing her cousins and other children who lived in the neighborhood, she’d sometimes regretted being an only child, and now she felt like she almost knew what it was like to have a little sister. Devi was so enthusiastic and curious about everything; having her around was like seeing everything for the first time. Sometimes it did get a little tiresome, answering her basic questions about things even a child her age native to Zindla’s world would know, but on the other hand, she was an endless fount of information about her own world, which probably made up for it.
Now, though, more than a week after her arrival, it seemed like Devi’s enthusiasm was starting to flag. Zindla thought she was getting homesick. This supposition was confirmed one night when they laid down to sleep. Devi settled down well enough at first, but Zindla still hadn’t fallen asleep when she heard Devi sob quietly.
“Devi? Are you all right?”
“Sure,” Devi said.
“You can tell me what you’re crying about,” Zindla said. “I won’t tell anybody.”
“I miss Mom and Dad, and my sister, and even my brother. I know I’m supposed to have an adventure first, but I really want to go home.”
“Shhh, it will be all right. One of the wizards who’s coming to see the cabinet will figure out how it works and you can go home. Meanwhile, do you want me to be your sister?”
Devi sniffled. “That would be nice.”
Zindla thought of something. “Do you want to be my little sister or my little brother?”
“...Could I be your brother? I know I’m a girl right now, but...”
“Sure, that’s fine. We can get some hair ornaments for you to wear, and I’ll make you a red gown. I don’t know if Father and Mother will like it, but I’ll talk to them.”
Devi laughed. “Back home it’s girls who wear stuff in their hair. And blue is a boy color. Only girls wear pale red like the robe your Dad was wearing today.” He paused. “Back home we have a special word for pale red, but I guess your language doesn’t.”
“I think dyers and painters have special words for a bunch of different shades of colors, but I’m not sure... Do you want to wear stuff that boys here wear, or stuff that boys from your world wear?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess the portal turned me into a girl so I’d learn what it’s like to be a girl, so maybe I’m supposed to wear girl clothes while I’m here?”
“Do you think the portal is alive? I’ve never heard of a talisman that could think for itself. Except — well, I hate to think Tirishkun bound a dead person’s soul into the cabinet... that’s been illegal since before the Republic was founded.”
“I don’t know. I’ve read several stories about kids who go through portals into other worlds, but none of them ever changed like this. Mostly they just learned to speak the other world’s language all at once.”
“Well, think about it and decide what you want to do. Let’s get some sleep for now, and talk about it some more tomorrow, all right?”
“Sure,” Devi said. Zindla stroked her — his — hair, and put her arm around him. She wasn’t sure which of them fell asleep first.
Devi thought about what Zindla had said. It still felt kind of weird being a girl, but maybe she was supposed to get over that and learn more about what it was like? And maybe there was some lesson she was supposed to have learned the first time he was five, so he had to go back and be five again. That would fit with the stories about kids going to other worlds he’d read.
But what Zindla said made sense, too. The talismans they had here — the magic furniture and jewelry and stuff, and their trains and buses and cars and elevators — were just like the machines back home. They couldn’t think for themselves. Maybe the portal opened up into Devi’s bedroom not because he needed to have adventures in another world and learn a lesson from being a little girl, but because it was broken and doing things it wasn’t supposed to. Like when Mom’s computer kept freezing up and had to be rebooted a couple of times a day. If that was it, there was no particular need to act like a girl or learn girl stuff. And no use in trying to have an adventure. He should just try to get home.
So if he was going to be a boy, would he be a boy like back home or a boy like they had here? Maybe he could ask Zindla or Pasyala to make him some trousers, but he was pretty sure trousers were a lot harder to make than gowns, and he didn’t want to impose on his hosts. Mom and Dad said when you were a guest at somebody’s house, you took what they offered you and didn’t ask for something else. — But Zindla had offered to make him some clothes in boy colors... which apparently included pale red, here. Weird. But not the weirdest thing about this place by a long shot.
So, after thinking about it for a while, he told Zindla after breakfast and lessons that he wanted a pale red gown, and something in his hair. She nodded and said she’d start on it after she was done with her chores for the afternoon. Devi went downstairs with her to the shop and hung out by the cabinet until lunchtime.
There were fewer wizards coming to look at the cabinet now, and not all of them still wanted to talk to Devi after they’d read the FAQ that Devi and Syuna had written. But the ones who did had deeper questions to ask about Devi’s world, and he couldn’t always answer them. He thought some of them were skeptical about his claim to really be a boy, or at least to have been a boy before he came here. They asked him the same questions in different ways, like they were trying to trick him into contradicting himself. Syuna cut them off when they got like that.
“That’s enough questions for now,” she’d say. “The poor child is tired and needs her afternoon nap.” Devi was a little resentful of being called “poor child,” but he was glad sometimes to get away from the wizards' suspicious questioning.
The following week it was raining when they went to church, so they didn’t picnic afterward, but went to a restaurant. It served a different kind of food, blander than what Pasyala or Tyemba cooked at the apartment, but spicier than most of what Devi’s mom cooked back home, noodles with a selection of sauces you could pour over them. By then Zindla had finished Devi’s pale red gown — it was good enough, though not as neatly cut and sewn as the blue and purple ones Pasyala had made — and had bought a couple of hair sticks for him with her allowance. Devi felt better knowing the strangers at church and in the restaurant looked at him and saw a little boy. Maybe he looked a little girlish, but obviously he must be a boy or he wouldn’t be dressed like that, right?
Devi and Pasyala hardly ever left the shop except when they went to church, but Syuna or Tyemba sometimes went out during the day, and came back with new merchandise for the shop, or groceries; sometimes they took Zindla with them. From what Devi overheard, it seemed they were going to estate sales and moving sales and stuff. Devi asked Syuna a couple of times if he could go with her to one of these sales, just to get out and see something besides the shop, but Syuna said he should stick around and keep an eye on the cabinet, in case it opened up again.
The pangs of homesickness came and went. Some days it was really bad, and Devi had to find a quiet place to cry, so Zindla and the others wouldn’t know how sad he was. Most days it wasn’t so bad, but Devi was still about ready to give up on adventure and go home — if the portal would ever open. He remembered one of the wizards saying it would probably take a month or more.
He read through all of Zindla’s storybooks from when she was a child, sitting cross-legged in the furniture aisle of the shop. When a customer came along who wanted to look at furniture, he got up and went into the back office for a while; then he returned to his post.
Toward the end of the month leading up to the auction, at supper one night, Syuna said, “It is time to begin planning for Zindla’s fourteenth birthday.”
“When is it?” Devi asked.
“A little over a month from now,” Zindla said, “the nineteenth of Hankirta.”
“Oh. Well, early happy birthday, if I wind up going home before then.”
“Thank you,” Zindla said, looking bemused.
“As I was saying,” Syuna said, “we need to make plans. After worship tomorrow, I will speak to someone about scheduling your coming of age ceremony, and reserving a room for the party afterwards.”
Devi was curious, and wanted to ask what this coming of age ceremony entailed, but he got the impression Syuna wasn’t happy with him interrupting, so he stayed quiet and listened.
“You and I must have new robes for the ceremony,” she continued. “Mother, can you make them?”
“Of course,” Pasyala said. “What about Devi?”
“That is an interesting problem,” Syuna said. “Besides the fact that she may be going home before the ceremony, there is the question of whether she is a girl. Devi, we’ve indulged you in your whim of wearing a boy’s gown and hair-ornaments, but if you wish to take a sister’s part in the ceremony, you will have to dress as a girl.”
Devi thought about that for a moment. If he was really here to learn about being a girl, then participating in that ceremony would probably be part of it. Or even if he were just here to learn about other cultures and religions. “Sure,” he said. “That will be fine.”
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“The winner of the auction must promise to allow Devi to go home through the portal as soon as they figure out how the cabinet works.”
part 7 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Some of the wizards who’d come to examine the cabinet placed their initial bids in person; others mailed them in a few days later. Four days before the auction, Syuna sent a letter to everyone who had placed a bid, informing them of the high bid — 655,000 crowns. Those who were willing to bid more were invited to the live auction on the sixteenth of Tuspir, at an hour past noon.
The day of the auction arrived. After lunch, Syuna made sure Devi was wearing her best girlish gown, and led her downstairs with Zindla following. Three people had arrived for the auction, and were talking with Tyemba and each other at the front counter; a fourth rushed in just as Syuna, Devi and Zindla arrived, puffing for breath and saying “I’m not late, am I?”
“You’re on time; we were just about to start,” Syuna said. She led them to the furniture aisle; it was crowded, but with only four bidders she thought they could manage.
The four bidders were Kashpur, Nidlaya, Sumshar, and Hanshi, another Stasa woman; Syuna didn’t know her as well as the others. Before starting the bidding, Syuna said: “I know all of you have examined the cabinet, and most of you have talked with Devi, the child from the other world.” She gestured toward Devi, who was standing at her side, looking apprehensive. “My daughter Zindla saw the portal just before it closed. Do any of you wish to ask further questions of Devi or Zindla before we start the bidding?”
No one did.
“Very well. Let me remind you of the conditions I set in my first letter, and add one more. The winner of the auction must promise to allow Devi to go home through the portal as soon as they figure out how the cabinet works. They must also promise that, if they do not discover the workings of the cabinet within a year, they must allow other researchers access to it, and to their research notes on the cabinet; that if they sell the cabinet before Devi returns to her own world, they must impose these same conditions on the purchaser, and the same if they give the cabinet away, rent or lend it out, or leave it to someone in their will. Do you all agree?”
They all did.
“Very well. The bidding starts at 655,000 crowns. Am I bid 660,000...?”
Hanshi dropped out of the bidding at 750,000. Nidlaya dropped out at 900,000. When the bidding passed a million, Syuna allowed herself a slight smile. This one sale was going to pay their rent for months to come. It wasn’t every month that they sold one of the big-ticket items, and this would be the second-most expensive thing she had ever sold. And to think she’d only paid 15,000 crowns for it at Tirishkun’s estate sale!
...Most expensive thing, she amended, when the bidding passed 1,300,000. Finally Kashpur bid 1,400,000, and Sumshar turned to him and said, “Congratulations, Kashpur. Let me know if you want any help figuring it out.”
“I doubt that will be necessary,” Kashpur said.
Sumshar left the shop, and Kashpur came into the back office with Syuna. They sat down at the desk, and she set the contract before him; he read through it silently.
After he signed it, he said: “You may wish to consider sending Devi to live with me. I am reasonably sure I can send her home eventually, either by getting the portal to open on demand or by accurately predicting when it will open. But I can probably do so sooner if she is on hand while I am experimenting with it than if she is living halfway across the city.”
“How do you mean?”
“There will probably be one or more partial successes before I discover the full workings of the cabinet. Instances where the portal opens for a few minutes or hours, but then won’t open again for some time. If Devi is in the next room when that happens, I can call her and send her through right away. If she is here... the portal will almost certainly have closed by the time I can get word to you.”
“That is something to consider. But I wonder how you will handle having a small child in the house. She is more mature than most five-year-olds, true, but still a child, and you have never had children.”
“No, but my housekeeper, Tashni, has had four — they are all grown now, but she knows how to handle children. I will put Devi in her charge.”
“Perhaps so. We will discuss it and speak with you soon. When will you take delivery of the cabinet?”
“I will send some men with a truck tomorrow morning.”
“Very well. I will send you a letter tomorrow letting you know what we decide.”
When Syuna, Zindla and Tyemba came upstairs for supper that night, Devi asked, “How long do you think it will take Kashpur to figure out the cabinet?”
“That is something we must discuss,” Syuna said, “but let’s sit down to eat first.”
“I thought you had it figured out already?” Zindla teased; “it will open after you’ve had an adventure, right?”
“Maybe,” Devi said, scowling at her. “It would be easier to go on an adventure if I didn’t look like a five-year-old.”
“Even ten is too young for adventures,” Tyemba said. “And the city is no place for them.”
After supper, when Pasyala was getting the pastries out of the oven, Syuna said: “Devi, I spoke with Kashpur about the cabinet. He suggested that you might get home considerably sooner if you go to live with him while he is studying it.”
“Leave here?” Devi wasn’t sure he liked Kashpur well enough to live with him. But going to live with a wizard — well, a more powerful wizard, not like Pasyala and Tyemba — could be the way to the adventure that had eluded him so far.
“It might be for the best. Kashpur said that he will probably have some partial successes before he completely figures out how to make the cabinet work on demand. It might open for a few minutes here and there at unpredictable intervals, you know — and if you’re living in his apartment, you can just run right through it when he calls you. But if you’re here... it will probably close again by the time he sends us word, and maybe he won’t be able to make it open whenever he wants for months to come.”
“I guess so,” Devi said. “I’ll miss you, though.”
“We can come visit you, or you can visit us,” Zindla said. “And you’re still invited to my coming of age ceremony.”
“Thank you.”
The next day, two burly men came to the shop in a small truck, rolled a little wheeled platform into the store, and lifted the cabinet onto it. Then they took it out to the truck and drove away. Syuna told Devi she had sent Kashpur a letter, and expected he would send for him soon.
Indeed, the very next day Devi was sitting at the dining table listening to Zindla and Syuna doing math — it was geometry, more advanced than what Devi was doing in school back home, but not completely over his head — when Tyemba came upstairs.
“Kashpur is here for you, Devi,” he said.
Devi suddenly had second thoughts about this. He wanted to cry at the thought of going away from Zindla and her family. But crying would be like the little girl he appeared to be, not the going-into-fifth-grade boy he really was. He put a brave face on and nodded. “I’ll miss you guys,” he said.
“I’ll miss you too, Devi,” Zindla said, and hugged him. “I’ll come visit as often as I can.”
He went and got the bag he already had ready with the Transformers pajamas he’d arrived in and all the clothes Zindla and Pasyala had made for him, and followed Tyemba downstairs, where Kashpur was waiting with a woman not much younger than him. His wife, Devi wondered? She was darker skinned than him, but with facial features more like most of the people Devi had seen in the city than like Zindla’s family or the people at their church.
“Good morning, Devi,” Kashpur said. “This is my housekeeper, Tashni. She will be taking care of you while I research the cabinet and figure out how to send you home.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Devi said, remembering his manners.
“My, you’re a well-spoken child,” Tashni said. “But, master Kashpur, I thought you’d said the child was a girl?”
“She says she was a boy originally,” Tyemba said, “and turned into a girl when she came through the portal. We’ve been letting her wear boys' gowns and hair ornaments.”
“Ah, I see,” Tashni said, nodding sagely. “I’m sure the master will put you right again, poor child.”
“We shall see,” Kashpur said. “If you’re quite ready?”
They took a taxi across the city to Kashpur’s building. Kashpur’s apartment took up the entire top floor of the building, with an office next to the elevator, and a garden on the roof. Tashni showed Devi around the place, which was much fancier than Tyemba and Syuna’s apartment.
“This is awesome,” Devi said, looking out across the city from the arbor in the garden.
“It is right pretty, isn’t it? Master Kashpur says you’re from another world; do they have cities like this there?”
“I think we’ve got taller buildings back home,” Devi said. “I don’t know how many feet tall they are, but the tallest are over a hundred stories.”
“Ah, you must have some powerful wizards then.”
“No, we haven’t got any wizards at all.”
“Go on!”
“It’s true,” Devi insisted.
After they went downstairs, Kashpur introduced Devi to Sashtun, his intern, who’d been out running errands while Tashni was giving Devi the tour.
“You mean he’s like your apprentice?” Devi asked.
“More like a journeyman,” Kashpur said, “if you must use archaic terms. He has completed his studies at the Academy and now is getting practical experience in talisman-crafting under my direction. Obey him as you would me or Tashni.”
“Yes, sir,” Devi said.
Sashtun was by far the closest one to Devi’s age in the household, but that wasn’t saying much — he was at least twice Devi’s real age, and four or five times the age he appeared to be, and didn’t have much time for a little boy. Or girl, or whatever.
As at Syuna and Tyemba’s shop, Devi spent much of his time sitting and watching the cabinet to see if the portal would open. It was set up in the middle of a room, surrounded by a circle drawn on the floor in black; the walls were lined with cluttered shelves, and there were a couple of chairs, one of which Devi sat in while he watched. Kashpur strictly warned him not to touch anything except the chair he was given to sit in. “Or this bell,” he said, pointing it out. “If the portal opens and I’m not in the room, ring the bell before you go through it.”
But day after day went by and the portal still didn’t open. Some days Kashpur was too busy with other work to look at the cabinet. Other days, usually in the afternoon or evening, he would go into the cabinet room — sometimes alone, sometimes with Sashtun — and work spells on the cabinet, trying to figure out how to make it work. At these times Devi wasn’t allowed to watch, but was sent into the next room to wait. “If you hear the bell ring, come running,” Kashpur said. But the bell didn’t ring.
During mealtimes, if Kashpur and Sashtun weren’t engrossed in talk about their work, they would often ask Devi questions about his home world. There were a lot of questions Devi wasn’t quite sure about, or had no idea about, but he could answer a lot of them.
One afternoon — Devi had lost count of the days since he left the shop — Zindla, Syuna, and Tyemba came to visit. Devi wasn’t allowed to go up to the roof garden except when an adult came with him, and Kashpur, Sashtun and Tashni were usually too busy, so he was glad to go up there with Zindla and her parents, accompanied by Kashpur and Sashtun.
“You have a great view here,” Zindla exclaimed, and Tyemba said: “It’s even taller than the Rashna Building, isn’t it?” It seemed strange to hear them speaking Stasari instead of Zyuni, the language they spoke at home.
“By almost thirty feet,” Kashpur said. “No spellbreakers are allowed in the building or the buildings on either side, lest they damage the spells that keep it standing.”
“I wouldn’t like to live in a building like this,” Syuna said. “If the spells on our lights or stove or plumbing broke down, we’d be inconvenienced. If the spells on the walls of this building broke down, we’d all be killed.”
Devi started to worry. She hadn’t realized the building was so unsafe. But if it really were dangerous, Kashpur and the others wouldn’t want to live here either, would they? Indeed, Kashpur went on to argue that the building was perfectly safe.
“Keeping spellbreakers out is a precaution,” he said, “but even if a spellbreaker entered the building, he’d have a hard time doing more than black out the lights. The spells that hold the building up are worked deep into the walls, and a spellbreaker would have to cut into the walls and touch the wires and threads between them to damage the building. Long before that, the building security people would drag him away or kill him.”
Devi remembered Tyemba taking him to a spellbreaker that first day after Nidlaya had been unable to detect any transformation spell on him. He’d later read something about them, or nulls as they were sometimes called, in Zindla’s storybooks and histories. They were people who were kind of the opposite of wizards; they weakened or broke spells by touching them.
“Then why not allow spellbreakers into the building,” Devi asked, “if they can’t hurt anything?”
“Well, they can’t knock the building down, but a strong one could put out the lights or make the elevator stop working,” said Sashtun. “They’re better off living in their own neighborhoods where they can do things their own way, without magic.”
That made Devi feel uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure why.
When Zindla and her family were about to go, Zindla gave Devi a small bag. “I brought you another book,” she said. “I thought maybe Kashpur might not have a lot of books good for someone your age.”
“Thanks,” Devi said, opening the bag and seeing another storybook by the same author as two of the books he’d read when he was living with them. He impulsively hugged Zindla — around the waist, because he could hardly reach her shoulders.
“Don’t forget my birthday,” she said, and looked at her mother significantly.
“I won’t,” Devi said. Syuna stepped forward and gave him another bag she’d been carrying.
“This is your gown for Zindla’s coming-of-age ceremony. You must not wear it until that morning; don’t put it on until after breakfast, lest you spill something on it.”
“All right. Thank you.” Devi peeked inside the bag, and saw that the gown was green and long-sleeved.
“I’ll come by to pick you up early that morning,” Tyemba said, “and bring you to the church. Zindla and her mother and grandmother will be going straight there, first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll look forward to it.” He sure would. Things weren’t the most exciting at Zindla’s apartment, once the novelty of being in another world had worn off, but they were even more boring here. You would think living with a powerful wizard would be interesting, but Devi never got to watch him cast spells, and although the apartment had more magical conveniences than Zindla’s family’s home — hot running water, for instance — he’d soon gotten used to them.
After Zindla and her family left, Devi went back to the room with the cabinet and sat down with the book Zindla had given him. He read almost a quarter of it before bedtime.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Devi woke to find Tashni shaking him gently. “I’ve got your breakfast ready, miss,” she said. She couldn’t seem to understand that Devi was a boy... and today, anyway, Devi needed to be a girl for Zindla’s ceremony.
part 8 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sashtun turned away from his project in frustration. He’d been trying to enchant a necklace to compel its wearer to tell the truth. It was a moderately complicated spell, one that wasn’t easy to cast directly on a person, and he was having trouble getting it to combine with the talisman-spell so as to enchant the necklace.
“Are you busy?” Kashpur said, poking his head into Sashtun’s workroom.
“Sort of,” Sashtun said. “I should take a break, I’m not making progress on this.”
“You’ll get it,” Kashpur assured him. “You just need more practice. — Come, I want your help with something.”
They went to the room where Kashpur stored the cabinet that was supposed to open a portal to another world, and some other experiments that he worked on when not busy with paying jobs. The little girl, Devi, was sitting there with her nose in a book. Would she even notice if the portal opened suddenly?
“Devi, I’ll need you to wait in the other room,” Kashpur said. “Come quickly if you hear the bell.”
“Sure,” Devi said, hopping down from the chair and going out, her thumb marking her place.
“I have another theory to test,” Kashpur said as he closed the door behind Devi. “I’ll trace the threads of the enchantment while you cast an amplifying spell.”
So they started doing that. The amplifying spell was pretty basic, and Sashtun had mastered it in his second year at the Academy. He sustained it while Kashpur stared at the cabinet with a frown, moving his fingers in the air, tracing the pattern of the enchantment, which became more visibly obvious while Sashtun kept his spell going.
Then a couple of things happened almost at once. Kashpur said “Aha!” and made a grasping motion. The shelves of the cabinet vanished, and in their place a well-furnished bedrooom appeared. The design of the furniture was unfamiliar, harsh straight lines and flat surfaces rather than the carved ornamentation Sashtun was used to. At the far end of the room, perhaps ten to twelve feet away, was a window showing sunlight.
Without letting go of his amplification spell, Sashtun grabbed the bell from the table and rang it furiously. But a moment later, the bedroom vanished and the shelves reappeared. A moment after that, the door flew open and Devi rushed in.
“Did you get it open...?” she asked, then looked at the cabinet and sighed in disappointment.
“We had it,” Kashpur said, “but it closed again before you arrived.”
“Maybe you should let me hang out in here while you work your spells?” Devi said hopefully. “So next time I can just jump through it before it closes.”
“No,” Kashpur said. “I think if it is closing so quickly and without warning, it is not safe for you to go through. What if it closed while you were halfway through?”
“Oh,” Devi said, aghast. “That would be horrible.”
“Yes. I apologize for the false alarm. Go wait in the other room, and we’ll call you if we can get it to stay open for more than a few seconds.”
But though they worked on it until past time for supper, they couldn’t get it to open again for even a moment.
Devi woke to find Tashni shaking him gently. “I’ve got your breakfast ready, miss,” she said. She couldn’t seem to understand that Devi was a boy... and today, anyway, Devi needed to be a girl for Zindla’s ceremony. “Tyemba said he’d be coming early to escort you to his daughter’s birthday feast, and that’s today.”
“All right,” Devi said, rubbing her eyes. “I’m up.” She followed Tashni to the kitchen and ate — something like oatmeal, with dried fruit in it that was sort of like raisins but bigger. She liked the food Pasyala cooked better, even though it had taken some getting used to at first. After eating, she got dressed in the green gown Syuna had brought her, and her best blue-green shoes.
After dressing up as a girl, Devi had to wait in the vestibule by the elevator for a while before Tyemba arrived. The elevator door opened and Tyemba stepped out.
“Ah, good, you’re ready to go?”
“Yes,” Devi said, hopping up and going to the elevator. They both went in and Tyemba told the elevator operator to go back to the ground floor.
They took a couple of buses to the church. Tyemba led her around the side of the church to an alternate entrance and knocked.
“Who is it?” called a muffled voice.
“It’s Tyemba with little Devi.” Devi bristled at the word “little,” but didn’t complain.
The door opened and Pasyala looked out. “Oh, good. Come on in, Devi. Tyemba, you can wait out front.”
“Of course.”
Devi followed Pasyala inside and she closed the door behind her. They went through a little vestibule into a room beyond it where Zindla was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a group of women. Syuna was sitting directly across from her. Pasyala led Devi over and sat down on a bench along with some other older women, and whispered to Devi that she was to sit on the floor behind Syuna and to her left. Devi did as she was told, and watched and listened.
Unlike the worship services Devi had heard in the church, this coming of age ceremony was almost all in Zyuni, the everyday language that Zindla and her family spoke at home. The priestess, a woman a little younger than Pasyala, sat between Zindla and Syuna and a little to the side, and asked Zindla questions, which she answered. Then, after a couple of dozen questions and answers, the priestess started on a long prayer, which everyone else except Devi joined in on near the end.
Then the priestess rubbed a little oil on Zindla’s cheeks and forehead, and said another, shorter prayer, and they all got up and walked out. Devi followed close after Syuna. Soon the priestess, Zindla, Syuna, Pasyala and Devi were standing up on the raised platform in the front of the church, while the other women who had been been present at the private ceremony went down to the benches and sat with their menfolk, who had already gathered to watch the public part of the ceremony.
This part went on for much longer, and included some parts that were in the church language they used during a large part of the worship services, so Devi wasn’t always sure what was going on. She got tired of standing beside Syuna for so long, but managed to mostly stand still.
Near the end, Tyemba came up and stood beside Syuna, and took part in the end of the ceremony.
Afterward, they all went from the sanctuary to a hall adjoining it, where they ate a big dinner and partied for the rest of the day. There was dancing, and everyone of both sexes wanted to dance with Zindla. She danced once with Devi, too, though Devi didn’t know how to dance.
For a while Devi played with some kids near her apparent age who seemed to be Zindla’s cousins. Later, when she got tired, she sat down near Pasyala and rested, chatting with the old woman.
“When you go home,” Pasyala asked, “how many years is it till your manhood ceremony? Or do your people do coming of age ceremonies for both boys and girls?”
“I don’t think we do this kind of thing at home,” Devi said. “My brother’s older than Zindla, and they never did anything like that ceremony this morning for him.”
“Not for girls either? I know the Stasa have coming of age ceremonies only for boys, for some strange reason, and theirs aren’t as elaborate as ours are for both sexes.”
“I don’t think so.”
“So when are you considered an adult?”
“I think it’s eighteen? Or maybe twenty-one — I know it’s a long way off, anyway.”
“My goodness, that is old.” Devi thought Pasyala was joking with her, but it was hard to tell. “But you don’t have any ceremony to mark turning eighteen or twenty-one?”
“Well, we have birthday parties,” and she told her about her last couple of birthday parties, and Amy and Carson’s birthday parties, and her parents' birthday parties.
“So these parties can be more or less elaborate, and they tend to be more elaborate for children than for adults? I suppose that makes sense. And I suppose important birthdays like eighteen have fancier parties?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do your people — oh, it’s time.”
“Time for what?” Devi asked. She looked around and saw that Tyemba, Syuna, and Zindla were mounting a dais along with two older people and a boy about Carson’s age. She’d seen him dancing with Zindla early on, and again not long ago. The musicians stopped playing.
“My good friends!” Syuna called out. “Temzi and I request your attention. Our children have something to say.” The hubbub of conversation died down and there was near-silence. Then the young man and Zindla turned to face each other, both of them looking nervous.
“Temzi-lan Myanda,” Zindla said, “will you marry me on this day a year from now?”
“Syuna-lan Zindla, I would be honored to become part of your family,” said Myanda. They each clasped both of the other’s hands.
Devi’s jaw dropped as the crowd started cheering. She remembered Syuna and Zindla talking about Zindla marrying a wizard so the family could keep the magic shop going, but she’d had the impression — or perhaps only made the assumption — that it was a distant prospect. Not a mere year away, just after Zindla turned fifteen.
The musicians started playing again as Myanda and Zindla descended from the dais, and the crowd cleared a space for them to dance again. Then others joined in the dance, and when it was over, the party started to break up, first a few people leaving and then more and more.
Devi didn’t get a chance to talk with Zindla until the party was nearly over. When hardly anyone was left except for Zindla and Myanda’s families and a few friends who were helping them put away the folding chairs and mop the floor, Devi went up to Zindla and said: “I didn’t know you were getting married so soon... people don’t get married that young where I’m from.”
“How old are they when they get married?”
Devi shrugged. “My parents were twenty-two when they got married.”
“Wow, that’s pretty old to get married,” said Myanda. “They told me you’re from another world?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of like this one, only there’s no magic, and we’ve got smoother streets, and our cars make a different kind of noise, and —”
“Devi, are you ready to go back to Kashpur’s place?” asked Tyemba.
“I guess,” Devi said, disappointed that she hadn’t had more time to talk with Zindla. “I’d like to visit a little longer, though.”
“You can,” Tyemba said. “But — well, I don’t want you to miss your chance to go home if the cabinet should open a portal suddenly.”
“Yeah... I guess I’d better go. It was nice to see you, Zindla. Nice to meet you, Myanda.”
“You too, squirt,” said Myanda, and Zindla shot him a reproving glance.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
She jumped out of the bath, hastily threw on a robe, and rushed to the room where the portal-cabinet was stored, carrying a towel. She was overjoyed to see the portal still open as she entered the room.
part 9 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Days passed, and then weeks. Zindla and her family came to visit a couple of times, and they invited Devi to come to their house as well; Myanda was having dinner with them, too, but he left after a while, and Devi was able to visit with Zindla by themselves for an hour or so before Tyemba escorted her back to Kashpur’s apartment.
After Zindla’s coming-of-age ceremony, Devi had started thinking of herself more as a girl. She was enjoying learning girl things from Tashni, as she had from Pasyala and Zindla. She figured this was why she’d been sent here, to learn what it was like to be a girl, so she could be a better brother for Amy when she went back home and became a big boy again. There were still days when he felt like a boy and missed his big boy body, but they came less often as the days passed.
Several times, Kashpur and Sashtun managed to get the portal open for just a moment, but Kashpur judged that it wasn’t safe for Devi to try to go home until they could get it to stay open for a while longer. Then one evening, almost three months after Devi had arrived in this world, she was taking a bath when she heard the bell ring.
She jumped out of the bath, hastily threw on a robe, and rushed to the room where the portal-cabinet was stored, carrying a towel. She was overjoyed to see the portal still open as she entered the room.
“Ah,” said Sashtun with a grin. “Bad timing, eh?”
“Is it safe for me to go home?”
“I think so,” Kashpur said. “We didn’t ring the bell until we’d already had it open for more than a minute. I want Sashtun to go with you. If I can keep the portal open long enough, he’ll come home after a few minutes. Otherwise, he will be your guest until I can get the portal open again, which shouldn’t be too long. Go! Don’t waste any time!”
Devi rushed through into her old bedroom, still carrying the towel. He felt his body change as he crossed the threshold. Everything seemed to be the same as before — it was night, and the full moon was shining in the window. The bathrobe that had come down nearly to her ankles came barely to his knees now, and it was tight in the shoulders. He was still pretty wet. “See, Sashtun, it’s like I said, no time passed here while I was gone.” But something nagged at him... He hadn’t seen a nighttime scene with a full moon when the portal had opened for a second or two a few weeks ago. He turned and saw Sashtun.
The portal had changed him, too. She was now a woman, older than Davey’s mom, but a lot younger than his grandmothers, and her clothes didn’t fit her well, though they weren’t as bad as Davey’s Transformers pajamas had been when he arrived in Zindla’s world. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, but Davey thought her skin and hair were the same colors as his. She was touching herself in places you weren’t supposed to touch yourself in front of other people, and looking around the room curiously. She turned around and looked back through the portal, which was still open on Kashpur’s workshop. “The portal’s changed me too,” she said, seeming startled at the sound of her own voice. “I’ll look around for a few minutes, and come back soon if I can.”
Kashpur looked puzzled, and said something they couldn’t understand. He sounded farther away than he looked.
“I think he’s speaking Stasari,” Sashtun said, “but I can’t understand it anymore now that I speak your English.”
So they tiptoed out of Davey’s bedroom. “That’s my brother Carson’s bedroom,” Davey whispered, “and my sister Amy’s, and our bathroom... and here’s the stairs. Mom and Dad’s bedroom is downstairs, and the kitchen and living room and stuff.”
They went downstairs, Davey warning Sashtun to skip the creaky steps, and he showed her the rest of the house — except his parents' bedroom, obviously. When he turned on the light in the living room, and got a clearer look at Sashtun’s face, he thought she looked kind of like some pictures of his Grandma Platt when she was younger, and kind of like if Mom had a big sister. Like Devi had looked like Zindla’s little sister for the last three months. They returned upstairs and saw that Amy’s bedroom door was open, and there was a light visible under the bathroom door.
A moment later, they heard the toilet flush.
“Was that —?” Sashtun started to ask, and Davey whispered “My sister Amy’s in the bathroom. If you want to meet her, you can —”
“I’d better get back and report,” Sashtun said, and started into Davey’s bedroom.
Davey started to follow her, but just then, the bathroom door opened. Amy blinked sleepily at him for a moment and then shouted “Davey!” and threw her arms around him, hugging him tight. “Where were you?” she sobbed. “We were so worried... Oh! Who’s that?”
“That’s Sashtun,” Davey explained. “She helped me get home... I guess it wasn’t just a few minutes here, then.”
“What are you talking about? And why are you wearing a wet robe?”
“I’ll explain,” he said, “but come look...” He took her hand and drew her into his bedroom, flipping on the light switch as he entered.
But the portal was closed. Sashtun stood staring at it, her mouth open.
“It seems I must impose on your hospitality for a time,” she said. “Hopefully not long.”
“What do you mean?” Amy said. “Where have you been all these months, Davey?”
“How many months was it?”
“What do you mean? It’s been six months —”
“Aww, man, I missed Halloween and Christmas!”
“Where have you been?”
“Another world,” he said, “where time doesn’t pass as fast. I guess it’s kind of reverse Narnia. It was only about three months for me over there. And —” He saw Amy’s incredulous expression, and turned to Sashtun. “Back me up, okay?”
“It’s true,” Sashtun said. “I’m still getting used to this... and it looks like I may be stuck here, stuck like this, for a while. Hopefully not as long as Davey was stuck in my world.”
Amy was sobbing again. Davey hugged her. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I’m sorry I was gone so long. I didn’t think time was passing back here, or not much, but even if I’d known, I couldn’t have done anything about it. Kashpur and Sashtun only just got the portal working again.”
“I’m crying 'cause my brother’s gone crazy,” she said, “I just got you back from wherever you went and they’re going to take you away to a mental hospital or something.”
“It’s okay,” he said, feeling hurt. “I won’t tell anybody else, so they won’t think I’m crazy. But I thought you’d believe me, at least.”
“Do you mind if I use your restroom?” Sashtun said.
“Sure, go ahead,” Davey said. Sashtun slipped out of the bedroom and into the bathroom and closed the door.
“Who is that lady, really? Did she kidnap you and stuff?”
“No, I told you, she helped me get back home. When she’s at home, she’s a guy, younger than Uncle Rob but older than Carson. He’s like an intern or journeyman to this old wizard who figured out how to get me home again. And when I was over there —” He paused, blushing, and decided to tell her. “I was a girl. A little girl, about four or five. I guess I should have expected that the portal would turn Sashtun into an older lady...”
Amy was still staring at him incredulously. “Mom and Dad are gonna freak,” she said. “We’ve got to get rid of her before they wake up. Is her car out front?”
“She doesn’t have a car,” Davey said. “They live in a big city, where they’ve got so many buses and trains that most people don’t need cars. Anyway, we didn’t drive here. Why don’t you believe me?”
Amy went to the window and looked out. “I don’t see another car...”
“I told you!”
Amy sighed. “Tell me about it from the beginning. I’m still not sure I believe you, but... the way you disappeared was pretty weird, with all the windows latched and the doors bolted and no keys missing.”
“That’s cause the portal is right here in my bedroom...”
They sat down on Davey’s bed and he told her most of what had happened to him, glossing over his gender confusion during his stay in the other world. He wanted to talk to her about that, too, but he didn’t want Sashtun listening in; she came back from the bathroom, looking pale, about halfway through his story. She stood leaning against the wall by the door, chiming in a little here and there as Davey got to the part of his story where he was living with Kashpur, Sashtun, and Tashni.
“...And then I was taking a bath before going to bed, and I heard the bell ring, so I jumped out, threw a robe on and ran... That’s why I’m still wet, I’ve been too busy to do anything about it.”
Amy reached out and touched Davey’s damp, tangled hair. He finished his story in a few more sentences and then said, “Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know.” She looked doubtfully at Sashtun. “I think... we should wake Mom and Dad up and let them know you’re home.”
“Do you think they’ll think I’m crazy?”
“I... maybe. I guess they might. Um, ma’am, do you have anything you can prove this with?”
Sashtun shrugged. “I don’t suppose my clothes really prove anything, do they? I brought some things with me, but I don’t know if they’ll work in your world, since Davey told us that you don’t have wizards or magic here.”
“Let me see...” Amy began, and then said: “No, let’s wake Mom and Dad up first.”
“Okay,” Davey said. “Sashtun, what about if you wait here while Amy and me go wake up Mom and Dad? And I want to change into dry pajamas first.”
“All right,” Sashtun said. “If the portal opens again in the next few minutes, though, I might be gone when you get back. But more likely it will take a day or two — two day to four days here, if the difference in time rate is consistent.”
Amy gave him an odd look, and then she left the room. Davey had been in such a rush that he’d left his Transformers pajamas in Kashpur’s apartment, so he took a set of pajamas from the drawer and went to the bathroom, where he quickly dried off and changed, finding to his surprise that the pajamas were a little tight, and then went downstairs to find Amy knocking hard on Mom and Dad’s bedroom door. She kept knocking until Mom’s sleepy voice called out “What’s wrong?... I’ll be there in a minute.” They waited by the door until their mom opened it, blinked a couple of times, and cried “Davey!” She grabbed him and hugged him harder than anyone had hugged him in years, and started sobbing. Davey realized he was crying, too.
That noise woke Dad up, even though he was a heavier sleeper than Mom, and before long, he was joining the group hug. He had the presence of mind to say “Where have you been? What happened to you?” after just a few seconds of hugging, though.
Davey started to say something, but Amy interrupted. “That’s a long story. There’s a lady upstairs that Davey says helped him get home.”
“Upstairs?” Mom said with a frown. “Is Carson...?”
“He’s still asleep,” Amy said.
A moment later they were all walking upstairs, Mom and Dad peppering Davey with questions, to all of which he said: “I’ll explain in a minute.” They got to his bedroom, and not surprisingly (at least to Davey), Sashtun was still there, sitting on the edge of Davey’s bed. She stood up when the others walked in.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Platt,” Sashtun said. “I’m Sashtun...”
“Thank you for getting Davey home,” Mom said. “Where has he been? What happened?”
“I went through a doorway to another world!” Davey said excitedly, forgetting his promise to Amy not to tell anyone but her. “And I was only there for three months, but Amy told me it was longer for y’all. And Sashtun helped me get home. She’s a wizard, her and her master Kashpur.”
“Quiet, Davey, this isn’t the time for games,” Dad said. “Ma’am... I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”
“Sashtun,” she said. “He’s telling the truth, though I’m not sure if we can prove it, now that the door has closed again. I’m afraid I’ll have to impose on your hospitality until it opens. Hopefully in a lot less than six months this time, since Kashpur and I have figured out a lot more about it now, but — I can’t be sure.” She looked uncomfortable, Davey realized, and he remembered how he’d felt when he first realized he’d changed into a little girl. It must be just as bad for Sashtun to change into an old woman. It was probably sort of okay when it was just her and Davey, but dealing with Davey’s parents and having them treat her like an old woman... it was kind of like Zindla’s family treating Davey like a little girl.
Davey’s parents stared at her. “You’re joking,” Mom said, and Dad added: “What are you talking about? Start from the beginning.”
“Do you want me to start or her?” Davey asked.
“If you’re ready to tell the truth and stop playing games,” Dad said, turning to him.
“But it’s not a game!” Davey cried in frustration.
“It’s not,” Sashtun said. “I first heard about Davey when my employer told me he had bought an enchanted cabinet and it would be delivered the next day...” She started explaining everything from her perspective, but didn’t get far before Davey’s parents interrupted her again.
“Just listen to her, please,” Amy pleaded. “Let’s wait and see what she says.”
“What she’s said so far is ridiculous,” Mom said.
“It’s all true, but she left out a bunch of stuff,” Davey said. “Sashtun, show them the stuff in your bag.”
“All right,” Sashtun said. She pulled a few things out of her bag and handed them to Mom, Dad, and Amy.
Davey looked at them. There were two books and a couple of pieces of jewelry, a necklace and a pendant. The pendant stone was carved to look like a cat’s head. Mom turned the pendant over in her hand, while Dad looked at one of the books and Amy at the other.
“What language is this?” Dad asked.
“Stasari... it’s my native language,” Sashtun said. “But — when I came through, the portal made me able to speak English, like it made Davey able to speak Stasari when he came to my world. And it seems I can’t read or speak Stasari any more... so much for getting some reading done while I wait for Kashpur to reopen the portal.”
“Convenient,” Dad said. “And what is that jewelry supposed to prove?”
“If it works here — which I doubt, based on what Davey said about your world — the necklace would compel the wearer to tell the exact truth as they know it. The pendant is a tool I might be able to use to analyze the portal from this end — but again, I don’t know if it will work. Do one of y’all want to put on the necklace and test it?”
Mom slipped the necklace over her head and said “The moon landing was a hoax. I have seventeen houses and thirty-seven cars. I believe every word you’ve said. — Yeah, it works perfectly,” she snarked.
“Damn,” Sashtun said. “Pretty much what I expected, really, but I realize it doesn’t help.”
“I guess,” Dad said slowly, turning toward Mom, “you and your colleagues could analyze these books and figure out if they’re in a real, unknown language or if it’s just nonsense, or a cipher for a known language. Hmm...”
“You don’t believe her, do you?” Mom asked.
“Not exactly, but... remember how Davey disappeared with all the doors bolted and the windows latched? And no keys missing?”
“Yeah. That was weird, but this so-called explanation is just ridiculous.”
Just then Carson walked in, yawning and saying “What’s going — Davey!”
“Hi, Carson,” Davey said, and went over and hugged him. He’d really missed him, too, though not as much as Amy or Mom or Dad.
“Who’s that?” Carson asked.
“My name is Sashtun,” she said. “I helped your brother get home.”
“Thanks. A lot. I mean, we thought we’d lost him for good.” His voice was more emotional than Davey had heard it in a long time.
“I’m glad to see you too,” Davey said, and let go of his brother.
“I think,” Dad said, “that you kids had better go back to bed. Go to bed, in Davey’s case — and your mother and I will talk some more with, ah, Sashtun downstairs.”
“You don’t want to hear more about what happened to me?” Davey asked.
“In the morning. It’s a school night — although, depending on... never mind. We’ll talk about it more at breakfast.”
So Davey and his siblings had to go to bed. Mom and Dad hugged him one more time before they went downstairs with Sashtun, and Amy hugged him again before she went to her room. It took him a while to go to sleep, and he watched the place where the portal would appear, just in case it opened again and he had to run downstairs and tell Sashtun.
If you want to read the whole novel without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my huge ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“But why would Davey back up her story? Or why would she back up his, if it’s not true? I’m having a hard time believing it, but I’m having an even harder time figuring out why they would both tell such a far-fetched lie.”
part 10 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The strange woman followed them downstairs and took a seat in the easy chair Carson offered her. Carson and Amanda took the sofa. She still had the pieces of jewelry Sashtun had offered as evidence of her coming from another world, while Carson had the books printed in some strange writing system. He wasn’t a linguist like Amanda, but he knew a little about languages, and he didn’t recognize this writing system; it definitely wasn’t Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean — not that he could read any of those, but he knew them when he saw them, and if it were any of a dozen more obscure ones, Amanda would have recognized it.
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” Sashtun asked after they’d sat there in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. “Or ask me questions?”
“I think we can listen to the rest of it,” Carson said. “Just pick up where you left off.”
“All right,” Sashtun said. “Well, a few days after the movers brought the cabinet, after Kashpur and I had started studying it, Davey moved in with us. I didn’t have much to do with her — I mean him. Tashni, Kashpur’s housekeeper, watched over Davey and took care of — his needs. We had him sitting in the room where we kept the cabinet for much of the day, mostly reading, and watching it to see if the portal opened on its own, like it had that first time.
“When we had time between paying jobs, Kashpur and I worked on the cabinet, trying to figure out how it worked and how to get it to open a portal on command. It’s a really complicated enchantment, and it took us a long time to get a handle on it — we still don’t know all of its ins and outs, as proved by the fact that Kashpur couldn’t get it to stay open for as long as he expected, and wasn’t able to reopen it immediately. Probably it needs to recharge, but I don’t know how long that will take.
“Anyway, after Davey had been with us almost two months, we got the portal open this evening, and rang the bell to call Davey. I think sh— he’d been in the bath; he ran in in a damp robe, water dripping from his hair, and went through the portal, and I grabbed my go bag and followed. I was — well, I was pretty shocked, even though we’d suspected — I changed into a woman. An older woman. How old would you say I look?”
“Uh... late thirties, early forties?” Amanda guessed. Carson thought she was being generous.
“I would have said older, but, yeah, something like that,” Sashtun said. “I was twenty-three last birthday. And while Davey was in my world, as I said before, he was — or looked like — a girl about four or five years old. A Zyuneban, to be specific — it’s probably because the family who owned the shop with the cabinet was Zyuneban.”
“What’s Zyuneban?” Carson asked.
“Oh — it’s an ethnic group, like the Stasa or the Zhevru. Do you — no, of course you wouldn’t have the same ethnic groups, any more than the same languages... it’s a strange enough coincidence that you’re human.”
“No, I’ve never heard any of any of those,” Carson said. “Go on.” The woman’s clothes didn’t really fit her; they were loose in the shoulders and too tight across the chest, she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra, and the pants had room in the crotch for something that wasn’t there. That was a tiny point in her favor, but could easily be faked if she was hoaxing them for some reason.
But why? If she’d kidnapped Davey, or was involved with the people who’d kidnapped him, why bring him home with such a far-fetched story? For that matter, if she’d rescued him from his kidnappers, or found him after he’d escaped from them, why come up with such a story?
“Well,” she said, “Davey showed me around briefly, and then I said I’d go back through — but when I returned to Davey’s bedroom, the portal was closed. I stayed there and waited by it in case Kashpur got it open again right away, and Davey’s sister woke up and we talked for a couple of minutes before she said she would go and wake you up. And that’s all of it, at least at a high level — I could go back and fill in more detail, if you’ve got questions.”
While Carson was thinking about possible questions, Amanda said: “I just — you realize how hard this is to believe? None of the evidence you’ve shown us would be that hard to fake.”
“I realize that. Davey had an advantage, coming to our world, in that someone saw the portal into his bedroom before it closed. And the owners of the shop already knew the cabinet was enchanted, they just didn’t know how. But — if you think Davey was kidnapped by someone in your world, and I’m lying, what would my motive be for this particular lie? Something so unlikely?”
Amanda didn’t say anything right away. “I’d like to hear more about your world,” Carson said. “What’s it like there? About how many wizards do you have relative to your total population?”
Amanda started to object: “What good would more details on this hoax do us?”
“The more we ask, the more chances she has to contradict herself,” Carson said.
“I don’t think we need contradictions to disprove it when the basic premise is so unbelievable. — Thank you for bringing our son home, ma’am, but I think we have to ask you to leave now.”
“Oh,” Sashtun said, her face falling. “Then — could you please direct me to some place where I can sell gold and jewelry? I’ll need some of your local money to pay for a place to stay, and food, and so forth until you get more evidence of the portal and let me know when I can come back.”
“Why would we —” Amanda began, but Carson put a hand on her arm.
“I think we can do that,” he said. “It’s the least we can do for bringing Davey home. I’ll look up where the nearest gold-buying place is. But you don’t want to go there now; they wouldn’t be open. And it’s a really long walk, I’m sure, and I don’t want to drive you there when I haven’t had a good night’s sleep.”
“You think they walked here?” Amanda said.
“If she’s telling a story like this, and it’s not true, she wouldn’t make an obvious mistake like parking her car where we could see it from the house, anyway. She wouldn’t admit to having a car nearby. Or, conceivably, she had an accomplice drop her off here. But why would Davey back up her story? Or why would she back up his, if it’s not true? I’m having a hard time believing it, but I’m having an even harder time figuring out why they would both tell such a far-fetched lie.”
“That’s true. I don’t understand it either.”
“And there’s the question of how they got quietly into the house. Davey’s key was on his dresser when he disappeared, and none of our other keys went missing then or since. So why not listen to more of what she’s got to say?”
Amanda furrowed her brow and didn’t answer. Sashtun said: “Well, as for your question earlier, if you define ‘wizard’ in the broadest sense, about one person in a hundred and sixty is a wizard. But many of them can just barely sense magic. The ones who can actually cast spells are fewer, and the ones who have enough power to benefit from an advanced magical education are fewer still. The numbers are similar but a bit smaller for nulls, people who can weaken or break spells — about one in two hundred in the widest sense, one in a thousand or less for the more powerful ones.”
“Tell us more about this — uh, Kashpur — he’s your employer?”
“Yes, I’ve been working as his intern for almost a year now...” Carson continued asking her questions without catching her in any contradiction for some time; Amanda pitched in with a question now and then, and he thought her skepticism might be eroding slightly.
Maybe.
At last Carson caught himself yawning. “We’d better get back to bed soon. Amanda, I think it makes sense to let her sleep on the sofa; I can drive her to the gold-buying place in the morning.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Amanda said. “Let’s talk.” They went into their bedroom and Amanda continued in a low voice: “What if she robs us blind as soon as we’re sound asleep?”
“If she’s running a scam of some kind, it’s a long-term one,” Carson said. “Bringing Davey back to get into our confidence? But if we assume she’s the person who kidnapped Davey, or more likely is connected to those people without Davey knowing it — they could have robbed us the night Davey was taken. But nothing was missing except Davey. And feeding and caring for Davey for six months seems like a lot of unnecessary prep for a mere burglary. If she starts trying to finagle our bank account numbers out of us, we’ll know something’s fishy, but...”
“Yeah. I don’t know what her deal is, but you’re right, it’s not burglary. All right.”
Carson stepped back into the living room and said, “You’re welcome to spend the night on the sofa there. I can get you some blankets; just give me a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you,” Sashtun said. “What time of night is it, anyway? It was about an hour after sunset when we went through, but it seems to be later here.”
“One forty-seven a.m.,” Carson said, having glanced at the clock in the bedroom while he was talking with Amanda. “Do you know what that means?”
Sashtun furrowed her brow. “Ah... almost two hours after midnight?”
“Right. Well, I need to be at work at nine, and we’ll need to leave by eight if I’m going to drop you off at a gold-buying place on the way. It might not be open yet when we arrive; you might need to wait a while.”
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Davey said. “Are you going to believe me? Mom and Dad didn’t.”
“I promise I’ll listen,” Dr. Menendez said.
part 11 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sashtun lay awake for a long while after Carson the elder brought him a couple of blankets and a pillow. He felt strange and wrong, and no one here except Davey believed him, although he thought Carson was open to the possibility he might be telling the truth, if only because he couldn’t figure out why Sashtun might say such things if they weren’t true. After he started hearing snoring from Carson and Amanda’s bedroom, he slipped a hand inside his shirt, and then his pants, and felt his new female parts. He was too revolted to masturbate; he just felt the need to ground himself, to remind himself that this was real and not a nightmare.
He’d been so skeptical of Davey’s story when they first met; he’d claimed to have been changed into a little girl by the portal, and to have remained that way for over a month in defiance of all that wizards thought they understood about transformation spells. Now Davey was his natural sex and age again, and Sashtun was a middle-aged woman — or simply old, to give it a blunter name. He could hardly wait until the portal opened again and he could return home, to be a young man again.
But if he couldn’t convince the Platts to let him stay here, he would never return. Kashpur might open the portal as often as he liked; if Sashtun were staying in a lodging house a mile away, or more likely several miles, as it seemed that Davey’s family lived in a sparsely-populated suburb, he couldn’t possibly be notified of the portal opening in time to get here. Not unless Kashpur was able to get the portal to stay open far longer than before, which might not be possible. And who knew how long the money from the gold and jewels would hold out, buying lodging and food here? He knew from what Davey had said that they were valuable here, but a child, even a ten-year-old, was an unreliable source for the relative values and costs of things.
Finally, after worrying over this for a considerable time, he fell asleep. He woke to the sounds of clattering dishes coming from the kitchen. He got up and found Davey’s sister Amy eating some sort of tiny cakes floating in milk.
“Good morning,” she said. “Thanks again for bringing Davey home.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Do you believe us? That Davey went to another world, and that I’m a native of that world?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “It sounds really cool if it’s true. But —” she said, and shrugged. “It also sounds kind of crazy.”
Sashtun sighed. “I think your father might believe me now, but I’m not sure. Your mother is sure I’m lying, but can’t explain why. I wish I could prove it.” He yawned. “What time is it?”
In response, Amy only pointed at something. Sashtun followed her finger and saw glowing green numbers on a black panel — 6:45. So... about five hours since he’d lain down, much less since he’d fallen asleep. Davey had said their hours here were one twenty-fourth of a day, and had estimated that a day in his world was roughly the same as a day back home. He sighed. “Could I please get a bowl of whatever you’re having?”
“Sure,” Amy said. “The box is right here, and the milk is in the fridge. Spoons are in that drawer,” she said, pointing, “and bowls in that cabinet.”
Sashtun foraged as directed and managed to put together a bowl of what Amy told him was called “cereal.” It was sweet and crunchy, more like a dessert than a breakfast food. He hadn’t been eating long when Amanda came in, giving Sashtun a cautious look, and poured herself a cup of something darker than tea.
“Do you want some?” she asked.
“Some what?” Sashtun asked. “Amy helped me get some, uh, ‘cereal.’”
“Some coffee?”
“It’s stuff Mom and Dad drink to help them wake up in the morning,” Amy supplied. “Kids aren’t supposed to drink it because it’ll stunt our growth or something.”
Sashtun paused. If it was unhealthy for children, might it be of dubious value to adults as well? And yet he did need help waking up more. Well, one cup couldn’t hurt. “Yes, please.”
Amanda poured another cup. “How do you like it?”
“What do you mean?” She hadn’t tasted any yet, how could she know?
Amanda stared at him. “Black or with sugar or milk...? Never mind, you can get that yourself.” She slid the cup across the table at Sashtun. “I’m going to have some yogurt and a banana; let me know if you want some.”
“I think this will fill me up for now,” Sashtun said. He didn’t want to impose on his hosts more than necessary. He might, if he could persuade them to it, need to stay with them for days or weeks.
The “coffee” was extremely bitter, and Sashtun realized why Amanda had asked if he wanted sugar or milk with it. He poured a bit of milk in, stirred it with the spoon he was eating her cereal with, and tried it again; better. He didn’t feel more awake yet, but perhaps by the time he finished the cup...
Carson the elder and Davey came in a while later, followed by Carson the younger. Carson the elder had already dressed for work. When Davey came downstairs, his parents and sister started grilling him about his experiences in Sashtun’s world. They seemed to be hoping to find some contradiction or inconsistency in what he said, or between his account and Sashtun’s. Natural enough, if they’d never heard of a real portal to another world. They were rare enough in Sashtun’s world; there were stories of wizards under the last dynasty of the old empire making them, and rumors that wizards across the sea in Qonimu had done so, but nothing more recent, closer at hand or reliable until this cabinet had turned up in Tirishkun’s estate sale. And perhaps Tirishkun had never been able to get it to work consistently enough to announce his discovery; he’d let it gather dust until he died... unless, as Kashpur and Sashtun hoped, he’d been working on it when he died, and simply hadn’t had time to get it working consistently.
“How much magic did you see while you were there?” Amy asked.
“Well,” Davey said, “besides the portal, and the cars and elevators, not a lot. I mean, there was a lot of magic stuff in the shop, but I wasn’t supposed to use it. Now and then I saw Syuna or Tyemba demonstrating how something worked to one of the customers. And Nidlaya and Kashpur did spells on me to try to turn me back into a boy, but they didn’t work.”
“Tell us more about the cars,” Carson said. “You said the engines didn’t make any noise, but how do you know they ran on magic and not electricity?”
“Because Tyemba said so, and because why would you put an electric engine in a wooden car and run it on cobblestones? And in Zindla’s and Kashpur’s apartments, there weren’t any wires connecting the lamps to the wall, and no electrical outlets.”
Sashtun had mostly kept quiet, just nodding and saying “Yes, that’s right,” now and then. At this point he said “We know what electricity is, but we can’t do much useful with it, like you apparently can.”
Carson glanced at her, and then said to Davey, “Did you see a lot of metal things there? Or were most things made of wood and stone?”
Davey thought for a moment. “Yeah, most of the buildings looked like they were wood or stone. But some of the bigger ones might have been concrete. Syuna’s store and apartment were wood, anyway — I’m not sure about Kashpur’s apartment building, I think it was concrete?”
“How many stories was it?”
“Thirty-five. They said they used magic to make the walls stronger; I think the tallest they can build without magic is around ten or twelve stories.”
“That’s right,” said Sashtun.
This went on for a while longer. At last, Carson said: “Well, I need to get to work. Carson and Amy, you’ll take the bus as usual. Don’t tell anyone at school about Davey or Sashtun yet.”
Amanda said “Davey, I’m taking the day off work. We’ll drop off Sashtun at the gold-buying place, and I’ll take you to the doctor, and then take you to school and meet with your teachers about making up the last six months of work. I’m afraid you may have to repeat a grade, but I hope we can avoid that.”
Davey nodded. “Why the doctor? Do you still think I’m crazy?”
Amanda flinched. “I don’t know, honey. I hope not. The doctors are going to help us find out.”
“I don’t see how,” Davey said, sulking. “You all met Sashtun and you don’t believe her; why would the doctor believe me when Sashtun isn’t around to back me up?”
Amanda shrugged helplessly. “We need to make sure you’re okay after you’ve been away for so long. You missed your checkup, so you’re past due for that even if...” She swallowed. “Even if you’re okay.” She turned to Sashtun and said: “You can have your shower after the kids and me.”
“All right.”
Davey took his shower after Amy and Carson had theirs. Then he showed Sashtun how to fiddle with the knobs to get the water the right temperature, and left her to take a shower — Mom didn’t seem to believe that Sashtun needed help with it, but Davey explained that they didn’t have showers in the other world, and only took baths a couple of times a week.
“Are you going to lend her some clothes?” Davey said when he came out of the bathroom and Sashtun closed the door behind him. “When I lived with Zindla and her family, they borrowed some clothes from Zindla’s cousins that sort of fit me, and then they sewed me a couple of outfits from scratch.”
“I don’t think anything I have would fit her,” Mom said. “She’s too tall. And I’m sure she’s got plenty of clothes of her own somewhere, and she’s just wearing those weird men’s clothes to sell this story.”
Davey stamped in frustration. “Why don’t you believe us?” He felt he was on the verge of tears, but he wasn’t going to cry, not now that he was a boy again.
“Don’t you understand, Davey? It’s just — it’s so weird, and you don’t have any proof. You disappear and come back and you expect us to believe that story without any proof, and you won’t —” She broke off, knelt, and hugged Davey again. She’d been doing that a lot, four times so far this morning and twice last night by Davey’s count. It was nice at first, but it was starting to get old. “I’m sorry, but I can’t believe something so impossible without proof.”
“She showed you the books —”
“Have you ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript? We can look it up together later — only believe me, the books are no proof. There are several books in strange writing systems that nobody can read here in our world, and nobody assumes they’re from another dimension.”
“Oh,” Davey said. “Then I guess we’ll just have to wait until the portal opens again. Kashpur will be trying to get it open as often as he can so he can bring Sashtun home.”
“If —” Mom hesitated. “If you see it open again, yell and I’ll come run and look at it. But for now we need to get ready. I don’t think they’ll put you in classes right away after we meet with the principal, but you’d better get your calculator and some notebooks and pencils together just in case they do.”
So Davey went and got ready, and a little while later they and Sashtun left the house. They first went to a strip mall where there was a store that said WE BUY GOLD. On the way, Sashtun asked a lot of questions, like where could she go from there to find a place to stay, and how many dollars should she expect to pay for a place to stay or a meal so she didn’t get overcharged, and how she could get in contact with them again to see if Kashpur had gotten the portal working again? Mom gave her begrudging answers, and Davey tore a page out of one of his notebooks and wrote down their address and Mom and Dad’s phone numbers to give it to her.
After they dropped off Sashtun, they went to the pediatrician’s office. They had a long wait, because, Mom said, they were fitting Davey in specially when they didn’t have an appointment ahead of time. After a couple of hours, in which Davey read through both of the issues of Boys' Life in the waiting room and started reading a book that was written for kids a lot younger than him, they were called back. First Megan the nurse checked his temperature and blood pressure and stuff, and then Megan left and Dr. Menendez came in.
Dr. Menendez smiled and said, “It’s so good to see you again, Davey. When your mother told me you’d gone missing, I was... upset. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Davey said. “Are you going to believe me? Mom and Dad didn’t.”
“I promise I’ll listen,” Dr. Menendez said. “I won’t ask questions until you’re done talking, if you like.”
“Okay.” So Davey started at the beginning, with the previous owner of the house and her murals. Mom interrupted some early on, but Dr. Menendez asked her not to, and she kept quiet after that. Dr. Menendez did as he’d promised and didn’t say or ask anything until Davey got to the end, when he gave their address and phone numbers to Sashtun just before they dropped her off at the gold-buying place.
Then Dr. Menendez started asking questions, like Amy had done last night, like Mom and Dad had done this morning. Davey answered them, at least the ones he could. There were a lot of questions he couldn’t answer, though, because he’d spent almost all his time in Zindla’s or Kashpur’s apartment and hadn’t seen all that much of the city they lived in, much less the rest of the world.
Then he started Davey’s usual checkup, listening to his heart and lungs and tapping his knees with the little hammer, and a lot of other stuff that Davey couldn’t remember him doing before. He had Davey take off his clothes and examined him all over before he got dressed again.
Then he said, “I’m going to talk with your mother for a few minutes, okay, Davey? Would you like a lollipop or a peppermint?”
“A peppermint, please.”
He gave Davey a peppermint from the jar, and then slipped out into the hallway with Davey’s mom.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“And even if his story is untrue, it’s not necessarily a sign of mental illness in children his age to make up strange stories. So I’ll refer you to a child psychiatrist, but I suggest you keep an open mind and check that mural in Davey’s bedroom from time to time to see if it exhibits any... strange behavior.”
part 12 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sashtun looked after Amanda’s car as it disappeared down the road, then straightened his shoulders and went into the shop with the strange name. Were many shops named with terse complete sentences here? Most of the others he’d seen had short, cryptic names, which didn’t say anything about what they sold. Probably from the names of their proprietors or founders; they must assume everyone knew who they were and what their business was. And maybe the colors of the signs and the ornamentation of the buildings were significant in some heraldic way? He’d wanted to ask Davey or Amanda about them, but there were other more urgent questions to ask, and they’d had only a short drive to get to the WE BUY GOLD shop.
There was a man behind the counter, with features similar to those of his new body and hair a little darker; he was younger than Kashpur, but older than his new body and a lot older than his real body. He smiled politely and said, “May I help you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I need money. I’d like to sell some gold.”
“Let’s see it.”
He didn’t show him everything he’d brought. After he knew his way around this world better, if he ended up staying for months like Davey had done in his world, he might learn how to get a better price for the rest of his gold and jewels. But for now, it seemed like a good idea to sell just one of the gold bars he’d brought, find a place to stay, and buy some food.
The man did various tests on the gold bar to ensure it was real gold and determine its purity, and then asked him how he would like to be paid.
“You mean, what form of money?” he asked, perplexed.
“Yes,” he said. “Cash or check?”
“Ah. Cash, I think. Wouldn’t I need money to travel to the bank to cash or deposit the check? My friend told me that you don’t have a free bus service here, only taxis.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s right. There’s a county bus service, but you have to schedule a ride in advance and it’s... cheaper than a taxi, I guess, but not free.” He looked at her closely. “Where are you from?”
“A long way off,” he said. There was no sense in trying to explain; if Davey’s family hadn’t believed it, with the little bit of evidence they’d seen, there was no chance he would with no evidence at all. “Can you pay cash?”
“I can give you five hundred in cash and the rest as a check,” he said. “Will that do?”
“That will do.” He could use some of the cash to get a ride to a bank and cash the check.
Once he had the money, five crisp pieces of rag paper with ornate designs including a portrait of a stout old man and the number “100” in the corners on one side, and a check for $1,172.18, he asked the man how he could get the county bus or a taxi. “You said you have to schedule a ride?” he asked. “They don’t have regular stops?”
“I’m not sure — I never take the bus myself. I have a friend who does, sometimes; I could look it up...”
He did something with a machine, looking at a flat black box and tapping buttons with letters painted on them on another box. Sashtun wondered which of the machines Davey had described this was: a phone? A computer? A television? There was so much he wanted to know, but he remembered how annoying Davey’s hundreds of questions had been, so many basic questions about things that even a child should already know, and he wanted to avoid wearing out his welcome.
“You can call the county bus and have them pick you up within an hour or so,” the man said. “They’ll take you anywhere in the county for five dollars.”
Three hundred rides, with the money he’d already gotten for the first bar of gold. But how much would he need for lodging and food? And how much did it cost to use a “phone” or a “computer”? Would he need to buy them or could he rent their use? Were there places he could use one for free?
“Thank you. How do I call them?”
The man wrote down a ten-digit number on a slip of paper and handed it to Sashtun.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t know how to use this. Assume I know nothing.”
He looked at Sashtun and said: “You’ve never used a phone? Where are you from, lady?”
Amanda stepped into the hall with Dr. Menendez. “Well?”
“There are no physical signs of abuse,” he said. “As for his story...”
“Are you going to refer him to a psychiatrist or a neurologist or what?”
“Tell me something about this woman he mentioned, Sashtun. He said she spent the night at your house and you dropped her off at a gold buying place this morning?”
“Yes, that’s right. We woke up in the middle of the night and there was Davey, and he introduced us to this woman, who was upstairs sitting on Davey’s bed... and then they told us this fantastic story.”
“The woman corroborated Davey’s story?”
“Yes.”
“Did she exhibit any signs of mental illness, other than this story she told? Incoherent speech, facial tics, anything like that?”
“...No. Except she was wearing a man’s shirt and pants, with no bra. They weren’t typical American clothes, but I can’t place what other culture they might be from. Her accent was urban southern, though — I’d bet she’s from no farther away than North Carolina, and more likely suburban Atlanta. Don’t tell me you believe them?”
“I don’t, not without more evidence. But it all seems very odd. Except for the strangeness of the story, I don’t see any signs of mental or neurological illness in Davey. His reflexes and coordination are fine, and his story is coherent and consistent. It seems incredible that it could be true, but I can’t conceive why that woman would lie and back up Davey’s strange story. And even if his story is untrue, it’s not necessarily a sign of mental illness in children his age to make up strange stories. So I’ll refer you to a child psychiatrist, but I suggest you keep an open mind and check that mural in Davey’s bedroom from time to time to see if it exhibits any... strange behavior.”
“Do you think it’s okay for him to go back to school now, or should we wait until the psychiatrist clears him?”
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t go back to school. He’s already missed quite enough.”
“Thank you.”
After a great many questions and answers, Sashtun left the gold-buying shop and went to one of the other shops in the building, where he bought a phone and had the proprietor show him how to use it. He wrote down his new “phone number” and called Carson to give him the number.
He then called the county bus phone number and asked them to pick him up and give him a ride to somewhere he could stay. The woman on the other end insisted that she had to have a specific destination in mind, the name of a building or an address. Since Sashtun knew nothing about the city he found himself in, or the nearby cities, he had no way of knowing where exactly he wanted to go. He tried to explain that, and the woman recommended looking it up “on the Internet.” Davey had mentioned that during their mealtime colloquies about the differences between the two worlds, but Sashtun couldn’t remember much about it at the moment.
So, after frustratedly thanking the woman on the other end, he ended the call, and asked the proprietor of the phone shop how he could use the Internet to look up places to stay. After a moment’s further thought, he asked if he could look up places to eat the same way. Another bewildering lesson followed, but it seemed he could use the phone he had already bought to do so, which was a comfort; he was afraid he would have to buy another machine. A few minutes later, after writing down the address of a hotel that seemed to be nearby, and within walking distance of some places to eat, he called the county bus service and asked to be carried to that address.
After they left Dr. Menendez’s office, Davey and his mom went out to the car and drove over to the school. “We’re early,” his mom announced. “I’m going to make a call.”
She called a number from a sheet of paper Dr. Menendez' secretary had given her, and from what Davey overheard, she seemed to be making an appointment for him. With who, he didn’t know, but he could guess. He sighed loudly and resumed drawing in his notebook.
“...Is that the earliest I can get?... Thank you... Yes, that would be better, although — no, I understand... thank you. Goodbye.”
“So when am I going to see the psychologist?” Davey asked.
“A psychiatrist, and it won’t be until next Thursday.”
“What day is it today again?”
“Tuesday. February 13. You were gone for over six months, Davey,” she added, her voice trembling. Suddenly she reached over and hugged him again, causing his pencil to skid across the paper and ruin his drawing — not that it was going so great anyway.
“I missed you, Mom,” he said quietly. “I wish you’d believe me.”
They got out and went into the school office, and waited for a while in the lobby before someone was ready to see them. Davey had never met the principal or assistant principal of this school, having moved here in the summer and disappeared into Zindla’s world less than a month later, so he wasn’t sure at first who they were meeting with.
His mom talked with whoever it was, telling them how Davey had been missing at the start of the school year, and had just returned home. She claimed that he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, which, when he thought about it, made sense. After the way Mom, Dad, and Dr. Menendez had reacted, he didn’t think he’d be telling any more grownups about it. And no kids, either, not until he made some new friends he trusted as much as his old friends back in Marietta. Or more. He’d have to trust them a lot to tell them what had happened to him... His wandering thoughts were called back when the person Mom was meeting with (he still wasn’t sure what their position was) spoke to him.
“Do you feel like taking some tests this afternoon, Davey?” she asked. “Or would you like to come back and do it in a day or two?”
“What kind of tests?”
“To decide what grade you’ll be in, and what particular classes. We need to know how much you already know before we decide what to teach you next.”
“That makes sense, I guess. Sure.”
He’d had lessons while he was living with Zindla’s family, but obviously the history wouldn’t do him any good here, and the math Zindla had been studying was more advanced than the fourth grade math he’d studied, but their symbols for numbers, multiplication, division and so forth were all different. And their science and magic were obviously different... really, not much of those lessons had prepared him for fifth grade in an American school. He’d had lessons from Tashni, too, but mostly home economics — girl stuff. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that now.
A little later, the lady who’d been talking to Mom brought them to an empty room with some kid-size desks and gave him some papers. “Fill them out at your own speed,” she said. “And let me know when you’re done.”
“I’m going to go run some errands, okay, Davey?” Mom said. “I should be back by the time you’re done with the placement tests.”
“Okay, Mom. Bye.”
He wondered what was happening back at Kashpur’s apartment. Was he getting the portal open, only to find nobody at home in Davey’s house? Would he go through the portal, or send Tashni through? Davey hoped not. If the portal made people older going this way, Kashpur would be super old, maybe twice as old as Davey’s grandma. Maybe too old to stand up and walk. Hopefully he’d noticed how old Sashtun looked, back when they stood in Davey’s bedroom and looked back through the portal at Kashpur.
Sashtun collapsed onto the bed of his hotel room in exhaustion. It had only been a few hours since he’d left Davey’s house, but a very stressful few hours after an inadequate night’s sleep. Nobody seemed to believe that he could possible be as ignorant of this world as he seemed, while being perfectly fluent in the local language, and he kept having to probe deeper with more questions in order to understand the answers to his previous questions. Not many people had the patience for these long conversations, though he’d gotten lucky with a couple of unusually patient people at WE BUY GOLD and the phone store. And finding out how much this hotel room cost, relative to the money he’d gotten, was the latest and worst stressor.
He’d run out of money in less than a month and a half, unless he got significantly more money for his gold next time. That was just allowing for the hotel and a bus to take him to Davey’s house every few days, and he’d need food as well. At some point, he’d have to pay more to make his phone keep working — sometime later in the evening he needed to study the papers and booklet that the phone store proprietor had given him, to make sure he understood it. Not to mention food... he wanted to compare the prices of the various restaurants in walking distance to make sure his money went as far as possible. And try to use his phone, or ask questions of the hotel clerk, to figure out if there was a food market nearby where he could buy food to eat here in the room. And clothes — he needed things that fit his new woman’s body, two or three outfits at least. He remembered Davey saying that people in his world showered and wore different clothes every day.
But all that could wait until later. He lay still for a while, then forced himself to get up and undress, so his clothes wouldn’t be too rumpled tomorrow when he went out to buy more. Or later tonight, more likely, to eat at a nearby restaurant. Once naked, he walked into the bathroom and looked at himself again, taking a long careful look — not like the hasty glance at himself he’d had last night in Davey’s bathroom mirror, or the panicked denial he’d felt when he’d seen himself while bathing this morning. He’d showered with his eyes closed for the most part. Now she forced herself to look, and take in what she saw. This was her, until and unless Kashpur got the portal to open again regularly.
First it would have to open at a time when Amy, Carson the younger, or one of their parents could see it in operation, she thought as she walked back into the other room and got into bed. Then, perhaps, Sashtun would be allowed to move in with them, and be ready to go through the portal whenever it opened again, at a moment’s notice... perhaps she could borrow Davey’s bedroom for the nonce, and Davey could sleep with his brother, or on the sofa? It seemed like a major imposition, unguestly behavior, and yet it would maximize the chances of her being able to go home as soon as possible, and minimize the time she would have to impose on their hospitality.
Time enough for that later. She was finally able to relax enough to sleep. When she woke, she was hungry; she got dressed, ran wet fingers through her hair, and walked to the nearest of the restaurants the hotel clerk had mentioned.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
He didn’t dare go through it himself. He’d seen how Devi grew into a ten-year-old boy and Sashtun aged into a woman into her forties; if he went through, he could be well over a hundred, too feeble to walk back through under his — or her — own power, and prone to dying of old age at any moment.
part 13 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When the portal closed by itself after less than five minutes, and Sashtun hadn’t returned, Kashpur tried to open it again right away, with no success. Undoubtedly the cabinet needed to recharge. Letting it do so from the ambient magic might take too long, perhaps a month or more, so he cast a spell to funnel additional magic to it, allowing it to recharge much faster, and went about other business, going to bed not long after.
The following morning before breakfast, he tried to open the portal. It didn’t work. It did work when he tried again during a free moment in the afternoon, but it didn’t stay open long, and he didn’t see anyone in the room on the other side of the portal.
He didn’t dare go through it himself. He’d seen how Devi grew into a ten-year-old boy and Sashtun aged into a woman into her forties; if he went through, he could be well over a hundred, too feeble to walk back through under his — or her — own power, and prone to dying of old age at any moment.
He kept casting the spell for recharging talismans faster, and opening the portal once a day at different times, for two more days before he finally saw someone on the other side — the boy that Devi had grown into. The boy looked at the portal in astonishment, then shouted something brief in that language that he and Sashtun had spoken after passing through before, and ran out of view of the portal to the right. Kashpur kept the portal open and waited. A few minutes later, when he began to think he couldn’t keep it open much longer, a girl a little older than Devi — Devi’s new age, or rather his original age when he was at home — came in view of the portal and gawked at him, then waved her hand a little and said something, just a couple of syllables. Then Devi returned with a man and woman in their late thirties or early forties. The man said something in a flat tone, the woman said something softer, barely audible, and Devi spoke up excitedly. The man shouted a single syllable and grasped Devi’s wrist — and the portal closed.
Where was Sashtun?
After Davey finished the placement tests, he found that there were a couple of police officers who wanted to talk to him. He told them the same thing Mom had told the school administration lady — that he couldn’t remember anything from the night he’d disappeared until the night he returned. He was tired of grown-ups not believing him, and he was afraid if he told them even part of the truth, they’d want to question Sashtun, and they might arrest her for kidnapping (and probably being an illegal immigrant, because even if they didn’t believe she was from another world, she didn’t have any ID to prove she was a citizen of the U.S.). They kept asking the same questions in different ways, and Davey kept giving the same answer. After they were done, Mom took him home.
“I got a call from Sashtun this morning,” Dad said when they gathered for supper that night. “And another one a few hours later. She said she’d sold some of her gold, bought a cell phone, and paid for a hotel room. She’s staying at the Quality Inn on Thornton Road, and said I should call her back after I see the portal open.”
“I’ll holler as soon as I see it open,” Davey said. “But I don’t think she can get here fast enough to go home before it closes. How far is the Quality Inn?”
“Not too far, I guess. Four or five miles, maybe?” Dad said. “But calling for a county bus or taxi and waiting for it to show up... yeah. I don’t know.”
“If she’s really from another world that doesn’t have cell phones,” Mom said, “how did she figure it out so fast?”
“She said she got the guy who sold her the phone to show her how to use it,” Dad said. “But she sounded pretty frustrated.”
“We’ll see,” Mom said, and she told Dad, Carson and Amy about Davey’s doctor appointment and placement tests at school. “They say he’d better repeat the last few months of fourth grade, and start fifth grade in the fall. But he can go ahead and take fifth grade math classes.” Davey hung his head, ashamed of his performance, although he knew logically that it didn’t make sense. He’d missed months of school; of course he wouldn’t be ready to jump in with the other fifth graders now.
Davey spent as much time in his bedroom as he could, sitting and drawing, reading, or playing a handheld game so that he could see the portal out of the corner of his eye, but he was necessarily asleep, at school, eating or in the bathroom for much of the day. He asked Mom and Dad if he could take his meals in his bedroom, but they said no. Amy sat and watched the portal with him a lot for the first couple of days, asking him more questions about his time in the other world, but then seemed to get bored.
School was frustrating. The lessons he was repeating weren’t all that long ago for him, and he didn’t know any of the kids, who were about a year younger than him. Having enrolled in the middle of February, it was hard to make friends. Of course, it probably would have been just as hard if he were in fifth grade, it being a new school for him. He hadn’t told anybody at school that he’d been missing for six months, much less where he’d been during that time, but somehow the rumor had spread from one of the office staff or teachers, and all the kids seemed to know about it. Kids kept coming up to him and asking him where he’d been, whether he’d been kidnapped, if his kidnappers had made him do various horrible things... He always claimed he couldn’t remember, though he was tempted at times to tell them the truth.
Amanda paused in her work at her desk. One of the books Sashtun had loaned them was spread out before her, and a legal pad with a makeshift spreadsheet ruled on it next to that. She’d already done some basic sniff tests like checking that there were a few common words that appeared many times, and verifying that there were more short words than long ones. Now she was calculating the frequency of each glyph, both in general and in specific positions — at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Fortunately, the language was printed with spaces between what she assumed were intended to be thought of as words by the hoaxers. She’d identified only eighteen distinct glyphs that occurred at least once in the page and a half she’d gotten through, and based on what she’d seen so far, she was guessing at least one of them was a punctuation mark. Probably at least a couple of others were punctuation, too, which would make this a language with a smaller than average phoneme inventory, like Hawaiian... she would intuitively have expected a hoaxer to go the other way, as most of the conlangs she’d seen had much larger phoneme inventories, but maybe they’d just gotten tired of designing glyphs that were going to be meaningless anyway. On the other hand, if it was a real language... it pretty much had to be an alphabet or abjad, not a syllabary or logographic system.
She didn’t have exact numbers yet, just groups of little tick marks in each cell of the spreadsheet that she hadn’t counted and replaced with Arabic numerals yet, but she could already see at a glance that it had roughly naturalistic letter frequencies. One letter occurred more often than any other, and it was the most common in the middle or end of words, but didn’t occur at all at the beginnings of words, suggesting either a vowel in a language where syllables couldn’t begin with a vowel, or a consonant that wasn’t permitted at the beginning of a syllable, like “ng” in English, in an abjad where vowels were unwritten, like Hebrew. Various other glyphs had staggered frequencies, though even the scarcest occurred several times in the page and a half of glyphs she’d counted — not surprising in a language with so few glyphs.
She took a sip of coffee and thought about it. Did she need to count another half-page or more of glyphs before doing the math? She already had what she needed to know that this wasn’t a weak point in Sashtun’s story, something to point at and prove to Davey that she knew he was lying and would he please tell her what had really happened. If it was randomly generated, somebody with good knowledge of natural language statistics had put a lot of thought into the program that generated the text to be printed — not to mention the graphic design and what seemed to her like a decent replication of nineteenth-century printing techniques, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to share the book with someone who could verify that. How would she explain where it came from? They’d been telling everyone except Dr. Menendez that Davey couldn’t remember where he’d been all those months.
So there wasn’t any point in analyzing the text further for now. If it was a real language, or even a meaningful conlang, there was no chance of ever figuring out what it meant without a bilingual text or any illustrations except those cryptic geometric diagrams. She’d have to admit defeat for now... and wonder what the point of such an elaborate hoax was, and whether it might not be...
Saturday afternoon, Davey and Dad went to see Grandma Platt. Usually, Grandma came to see them, because there was more room for everybody at their house — even their old, smaller house — than in Grandma’s apartment. But Carson had basketball practice, and Mom had promised Amy a mother-daughter outing back before Davey reappeared. So it was just Davey and Dad. Grandma hugged him every bit as hard as Mom or Dad had when he’d shown up again. As Dad had instructed him, he didn’t tell Grandma where he’d been all those months, just that he couldn’t remember.
Sunday morning, they went to a church he didn’t remember going to before. Back in the summer, just after they’d moved, they’d gone to a different church every Sunday, trying to find a place that suited them like their old church that was just around the corner from their old house. By now, of course, they’d picked one and everybody there knew Mom and Dad and Carson and Amy, and nobody knew Davey, but they’d heard about how he’d tragically went missing for months... It was a real hassle to tell them over and over that he couldn’t remember what happened to him. He didn’t like to tell lies at church, but Mom had said not to tell anybody outside the family, except the doctors, what had really happened.
And then, late Sunday afternoon, while Carson was away visiting a friend from school, but everyone else was home, Davey was sitting in bed reading when the portal opened. He jumped up and yelled “Mom! Dad! Come look!”, waved excitedly at Kashpur, and ran out of the room. He found Mom and Dad in the living room watching TV; it was loud enough they probably hadn’t heard him.
“It’s open! The portal, I mean! I could see Kashpur standing there working the spell to keep it open... Come on, come on!”
First Dad and then Mom got up and followed him up the stairs. Davey took the stairs two at a time, and from the clatter behind him, he thought Dad might be doing the same. Amy was in his room looking into the portal, but not touching it — good idea, wouldn’t want her missing the last few months of sixth grade. Or even just a few days of school.
“You were right, Davey,” Dad said. Mom mumbled something Davey couldn’t quite understand.
“Yeah! You believe me now! But we have to tell Kashpur where Sashtun is, and he can’t understand us talking in English, so I’ll just step over there where I can speak Stasari and —”
“No!” Dad yelled, and grabbed Davey’s wrist. “If —” And then the portal closed, and the mural was intact again, showing the horse and buggy off in the distance beyond the gate of the villa.
Mom sat down on Davey’s bed and put her head in her hands. Dad sat down beside her and put his arms around her. “I’ll call Sashtun,” he said. “And give her a ride over here, I guess... don’t you think that makes sense, Amanda?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Davey,” Mom said. “Yes, of course Sashtun can stay here while she waits for that thing to open again.”
Davey impulsively hugged her, and she hugged back, hard.
Dad got out his cellphone and called Sashtun, but it rang and rang and finally went to voicemail. “Hi, uh, Sashtun,” he said, “this is Carson Platt. The portal opened again — I’m sorry we doubted you and Davey, but... anyway, it closed again after just a few minutes, but if you want to come over and stay here until it opens again, you can. Give me a call back,” and he reminded her of his phone number.
“Are you sure she knows how to check voicemail?” Amy asked.
“No... I’m surprised, now, that she was able to figure out how to use a phone at all. I’ll try again in a little while. And then drive over to the Quality Inn.”
“Maybe her cellphone battery is dead or something?” Davey suggested. “She probably doesn’t know that much yet about how to use cellphones, so she might have forgotten to charge it.”
“Yeah, or it might have rung and she didn’t know what part of the screen to touch to answer it.” Dad looked up the main number for the Quality Inn, called, and asked for room 249. Again, it rang for a while with no answer.
“She might be out,” he said. “Eating supper or something. She told me when she called me before that she’d picked that hotel because it had several restaurants in walking distance. I’ll wait an hour, then call again, and go over there if I can’t get her.”
“Can I come with you?” Davey asked.
“Sure.”
“Can I come?” Amy asked.
“Why not?”
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
After supper, when she returned to her hotel, she felt so lonely that she broke down and decided to call Carson or Amanda, even at the risk of annoying them. Perhaps she could ask them to let her speak with Davey? But when she got out her phone and tried to use it, nothing happened.
part 14 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
On the second day of Sashtun’s stay at the hotel, she walked to one of the nearby restaurants, a different one than she’d eaten at the previous evening, for breakfast. Then she called the county bus service and asked them to pick her up and take her to a store where she could buy clothes. Again, the person on the other end wanted a specific address or the name of a particular store, which Sashtun couldn’t give her. She hung up and asked some of the people in the restaurant if they could recommend a nearby store to buy clothes from.
It turned out that there was an enormous general store within walking distance of the restaurants and hotel, so she didn’t call the bus dispatcher back, but set out walking south along the busy road. She had less than half a mile to go before she reached the store. The store was huge and sold a bewildering variety of things, many of which she’d never heard of, but the section with clothing was big and easy to spot from the entrance. She was soon able to identify the employees of the store, who wore a distinctive vest with the store’s sigil, and asked one of the women to help her find things.
“Sure, honey,” the woman said. “What are your sizes?”
“Uh... I’m not sure.” She was only vaguely aware of the units of measurement they used here, and had no idea what her new body’s shape was in those units.
“Lost some weight recently, huh? I can measure you.”
So she did, stretching a measuring tape around and along Sashtun at various points, and then recommending a set of sizes of clothes to try on. Sashtun explored the racks of clothing and found that most of them had a little tag sewn into the collar or waist indicating the size. Even after learning her sizes, she wasn’t sure what units they were denominated in.
She took several articles of clothing to the dressing rooms, along with underwear and bras, and tried them on. Only a fraction of the ones nominally in her size actually fit her, but after a few hours of trial and error, she had three suits of clothes to take back to the hotel. She walked out of the store wearing a blouse and trousers similar to those she’d seen other women wearing at the restaurant or in the store. She dropped off her purchases, and her old male clothes, in her hotel room, undressed and rested a little while, and then went out to eat again.
She should make her money stretch further by buying food to keep in the room and eat. It would have to be less expensive than eating at the nearby restaurants every time. The store she’d just been to seemed to have a food section, though she’d been so tired after trying on dozens of outfits to find a handful that fit her that she hadn’t felt like buying any.
The next day after breakfast, she looked up banks and found the nearest, then called the county bus and asked them to take her there. She tried to cash the check the WE BUY GOLD proprietor had given her, and the teller suggested opening a checking account instead; after debating with herself for a few moments, Sashtun agreed. However, the teller asked for identification to prove she was the “Sashtun Kusnar” named on the check, and she had to admit she had no such papers. She was stymied; she would have to sell another bar of gold, and insist on getting the full price in cash this time.
She got the county bus to take her directly to the Walmart south of her hotel, and bought groceries — mostly fruit, as well as an assortment of prepackaged foods she wasn’t familiar with but which turned out to be pretty tasty, when she got them back to the hotel and opened them. She also bought a couple of books, one a history of one of this world’s wars, one a novel.
She thought about calling Carson and asking if the portal had opened, but decided against it. No use bothering him when he still wasn’t sure if she was who she said she was, or if the portal were real. He would undoubtedly call when the portal opened again, which might not be for weeks — or even months, in the worst case.
That evening, she ate from the fruit and packaged crackers she’d bought, and again for breakfast the next day. She spent much of the day trying to read the history, but the bewildering array of unfamiliar names, and the background information that the author assumed any educated person would have, made it hard to make headway. The novel wasn’t much better; the narrative conventions of this culture were strange, seemingly preferring to dive right into action and explain who the characters were later if at all. Maybe next time she went to the store, she would look for a children’s book. In the evening, she walked to one of the nearby restaurants again.
After supper, when she returned to her hotel, she felt so lonely that she broke down and decided to call Carson or Amanda, even at the risk of annoying them. Perhaps she could ask them to let her speak with Davey? But when she got out her phone and tried to use it, nothing happened. Pushing the button on the side didn’t make the screen light up. She got out the papers and booklet that had come with it and started studying them, but she was missing too much context; the writers assumed too much about what she knew.
She continued her study of those papers the following day. There was another little tool that had come with the phone, which she’d never unwrapped — the phone store proprietor had said something about it, but faced with such a flood of new information, she’d absorbed only a tiny fraction of it. She opened it and found it consisted of a black boxy shape with metal prongs coming out of it, and a long cord that trailed off in another small metal prong. Trial and error showed that the small prong would connect neatly to a slot in the side of the phone, but what about the other end? After a while, she gave up on it and went back to trying to read. The novel made a little more sense this time, thought there was still much that she didn’t understand.
The next day, after paying the hotel clerk for one more day — her last day before she would need to sell more gold — she looked at the phone and the cord she’d attached to it again while she ate a breakfast of apples and “Cheetos”, strangely flavored crackers that came in various amorphous shapes. Suddenly, her mind connected the prongs on the end of the boxy black thing with the slots at the base of the lamp by the bed. She tested it, and found that not only did the prongs fit neatly into the slots, but the phone screen lit up! It wasn’t usable, as yet; it didn’t respond to the touch-commands that the phone store proprietor had taught her, but she figured that might come in time.
She went out to eat some hours later, finding that the restaurant where she had eaten the delicious roasted chicken wrapped in bread was closed, but the others were open. She ate while reading a few more pages from the novel, and returned to her hotel room not long before the sun set. She examined the phone to see if it was usable yet. It didn’t respond right away, but some trial and error with the buttons got it to do something, and after a minute or so, it was back to displaying the same options that it normally did. She could call Carson or Amanda by typing in one of those numbers on the slip of paper Davey had given her.
But should she? She was lonely, but she knew that annoying them would not make them more likely to believe her, if they doubted her and Davey’s story. She decided to wait another day or two, and went back to reading.
She had scarcely been reading for a quarter of an hour when there came a knock at the door. She set the book aside, went to the door, and opened it. The maid had already come to clean the room earlier...
She opened the door, and there were Davey, his father, and his sister. Unexpected tears welled up in her eyes. “Did it open?” she asked, barely able to make her voice function.
“Yeah,” Davey said, and hugged her. “You can go home soon! And for now, you can come live with us!”
On the way back home, they talked about sleeping arrangements.
“She can stay in my room,” Davey offered. “And I could sleep on the sofa downstairs.”
“Or you could share your brother’s room?” Dad suggested.
“Nah,” Davey said. “I’d rather have my own bed, even if it’s a sofa. Carson will get grumpy if you make him share his bed with me.”
“That’s probably true,” Dad said, “but I won’t stand for him taking it out on you.”
“Thank you for giving up your room to me,” Sashtun said. She was sitting up front with Dad.
“You’re welcome.”
Then Dad wanted to know how she’d been doing, taking care of herself without their help in this unfamiliar world. “I’m sorry we didn’t help more,” he said. “But it was so hard to believe —”
“I understand,” Sashtun said. “Some parts of Davey’s story were hard to believe at first, too.” She told them about the guy at the WE BUY GOLD place and the guy at the phone store, who’d helped her a lot, and how she’d gotten advice from people eating at Chick-Fil-A and the staff at Walmart, and how she’d tried to open a bank account and deposit a check, but couldn’t do it without a driver’s license and so forth.
It didn’t take long for them to get home, and Mom had supper ready for them when they arrived. They sat down to supper, and even though Sashtun had just gotten back to her hotel room from a restaurant when they went to see her, she ate a little too, and told Mom it was the best food she’d eaten in days.
Then Davey went to his room and got a bunch of his school stuff, and the book he was reading and a couple of other books he wanted to read soon, and his handheld game system, and drawing pads, and sleeping bag, and took them down and piled them up on the end table next to the sofa. Sashtun unpacked her stuff in Davey’s room; she didn’t have a lot, but she’d bought some clothes, snack food, and books at Walmart.
Davey hummed happily as he got ready for bed that night, after Mom and Dad finished watching their boring TV show. If Kashpur was able to open the portal every six days, or maybe a bit more often, maybe he could go visit Zindla and her family for Spring break? And some or all of his family could go with him and meet his friends, and see more of that world. Zindla coming to visit him here might be weird; she’d be a guy almost as old as Uncle Rob, wouldn’t she? But not really too weird, he decided. He’d invite her. If nothing else, maybe he could step into the other world for a few minutes sometime and write a short note to Zindla and her family.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“We can sell it as a retirement package,” Carson said. “An eighty-year-old man might think it’s worth the... inconvenience of becoming a woman if he can be forty again.”
part 15 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
“You heading back upstairs to watch the portal?” Carson asked Monday morning, after taking one last sip of his coffee. Sashtun nodded. “Well, I’ll see you tonight. If the portal opens while we’re away, leave us a note saying where you went, I guess.”
“I suppose it may not open for several days. Thank you again for hosting me, and thank you, Davey, for giving up your bedroom.”
“N’prblm,” Davey mumbled through a mouthful of cereal.
Sashtun went upstairs, used the restroom again, and sat down on Davey’s bed to wait. She had her books, which she still hadn’t finished — they were taking a long time to read because there was so much she didn’t understand. She was starting to get used to the strange narrative conventions, but she remembered her passing thought about trying a children’s book, and decided to look at the things on Davey’s shelf.
Hours passed. She read a good part of one of Davey’s novels, finding it easier to understand than the adult novel she’d bought, though not easy, and ate some of the crackers she’d bought a few days earlier. She went to the restroom, returned to the bedroom and read some more.
The portal didn’t open.
Hours more passed. She finished that short children’s novel and picked up a book about wildlife, read a few chapters of it, and snacked some more. Many though not all of the creatures described in the book were found in her world, too.
After three or four chapters, her thoughts turned to the possibility of importing and exporting information. With the way the cabinet changed people’s language along with their bodies, there was no use in sending books across. It wasn’t obvious how someone from her world could ever learn English, except by visiting Earth — and then, of course, forgetting it when they went home. So there was no way to convey information between worlds except in in people’s minds. Or perhaps drawings and diagrams, if the machines they described weren’t so complicated as to need captions indicating what the parts were made of?
If she read and memorized a short story — or a nonfiction book about how televisions or phones work — could she then write it down in Stasari after returning home?
Then Davey came home from school; she could hear pounding footsteps on the stairs as he approached, and then a moment later, he came into the room. (She had left the door open.)
“I guess it didn’t open?”
“No.”
“Yeah, it took Kashpur six days last time, so maybe it will be the same again. That would be, um, Saturday.”
“Perhaps so.”
“Tomorrow you can borrow my games,” Davey said. “I’ll show you how to play tonight, and it will give you something to do while you wait besides read.”
“Thank you,” Sashtun said. “You’re here alone? How much longer before your parents come home?”
“Mom gets home not long after Carson and Amy. Then Dad an hour or two later, depending on work stuff.”
“I see.”
“I guess I’d better do my homework now,” Davey said, “so I can help you with the games later.” He went to the restroom and then downstairs again. Sashtun kept watching the space where the portal would open.
Amy got home a little later, soon followed by the younger Carson. Each briefly said hi to Sashtun when they arrived. Then Amanda came, and asked how Sashtun had been doing.
“Pretty well, thank you. I just stayed in the room reading and watching the portal, except for occasional trips to the bathroom.”
“And the kitchen?”
“No... I just ate some of the food I’d bought.”
“Feel free to eat whatever we’ve got in the kitchen when you’re here by yourself. Ah... I guess I should show you how to use the microwave, shouldn’t I? And maybe the other stuff too...”
“Thank you.”
So she followed Amanda downstairs and had a crash course in the use of the microwave oven, the stove, and the regular oven. The stove and oven were pretty similar to what they used back home, although Sashtun had never had occasion to cook his own food — at home, his mother’s servants had done the cooking; at the wizards' academy, the kitchen staff; and at Kashpur’s house, Tashni. The microwave, as strange and wonderful as it seemed, was actually the simplest and safest to use if you remembered a couple of basic rules, like not using plastic or metal dishes. Amanda pointed out some things in the freezer and refrigerator that she could heat up in the microwave.
By the time this lesson was done, Carson the elder had come home from work, and they started cooking supper. Sashtun watched and learned, and was able to help a little.
During supper, everyone had more questions for Sashtun (and Davey) about her world. She answered them as best she could. The conversation drifted then to the portal itself and how to use it.
“I suppose if we can convince people the portal is real, we could do a tourism thing,” Carson said. “Or trade, importing and exporting things... that wouldn’t require convincing people the portal is real, but it would require coming up with a cover story for the IRS about where we’re getting the things we sell, and what we’re doing with the things we buy here to export to your world.”
“That would mean moving out of our house, finding another place to live, and running the business here,” Amanda said. “I’m not sure I want to do that.”
“Tourism from my world to yours is unlikely to be popular,” Sashtun said, “with the doubling in age and the change of sex... from your world to mine, the halving in age is less of a disadvantage, but the change of sex is still a problem.”
“We can sell it as a retirement package,” Carson said. “An eighty-year-old man might think it’s worth the... inconvenience of becoming a woman if he can be forty again.”
“Do you think that’s what the old lady who lived here and disappeared did?” Amy asked. Everyone else was quiet for a moment.
“It’s possible,” Carson said.
“What’s this about?” Sashtun asked.
“The lady who used to live here,” Davey said. “I told you about her, right? She painted the murals in my room and Amy’s and Carson’s. And there used to be murals in the living room and Mom and Dad’s room, but Dad painted over them. They were pretty cool. At least the one in the living room was, I never saw the one in Mom and Dad’s room. Anyway, she disappeared and her children couldn’t sell the house until she’d been missing for seven years. I know I told you and Kashpur about that.”
“I’m not sure you did.”
“Oh. Maybe I just told Zindla and her family.”
“Well,” Sashtun said thoughtfully, “when I get home, I’ll inquire into the history of Tirishkun — that’s the wizard who made the cabinet,” she added for the benefit of everyone except Davey. “See if there was a man associated with him who appeared with no clear antecedents around... how many years ago was this?”
“I’m not sure,” Carson said, “but I can try to find out. Talk to the real estate agent we bought the house through and ask him how long the house was on the market before we bought it, and so forth. I seem to recall it had been on the market for at least a few months when we bought it, and the previous owner had been missing for seven years before that... and maybe her children spent some time cleaning and renovating it after she was declared dead and before it went on the market. I’ll try to find out.”
“If you can learn that before I go home, it would be useful in pinning down the dates,” Sashtun said. “We know time passes roughly twice as fast here as in my world, and hopefully after some tests in the next few weeks, we can measure that more precisely. And then divide the amount of time since the previous owner disappeared by two, or whatever factor it may turn out to be.”
During his lunch break the next day, Carson looked up the phone number of the realtor they’d bought the house through. He’d never met the previous owners, except briefly at closing, since they lived out of state and dealt with him through their realtor and lawyer.
After talking to the receptionist for a minute, he got the realtor, and said, “Mark, hi, this is Carson Platt — my wife and I bought the big house on Goodman Road a few months ago, remember...? Yeah. No, no problems with it. I just had a question for the previous owners, or maybe you could point me to something in the public records, maybe the newspapers, and not bother them... Yeah... The owner before last, the one the previous owners inherited from, when did she disappear? Okay, thanks... Talk to you later.”
That evening at supper, he told Sashtun that he’d started making inquiries about the woman who used to live in the house. She thanked him.
“Have you talked to Tanya’s parents?” Amy asked. “They might remember when she disappeared.”
“Tanya?”
“Tanya Epping, one of the girls who lives across the road, three houses down,” said Carson Jr.
“I don’t think I’ve met her or her parents yet,” Carson said. The kids all seemed to know the neighbors better than he or Amanda did.
“Do any of you know their phone number?” They didn’t. “Well, it seems a bit late to drop by this evening... maybe tomorrow after work, before supper. Sometime soon, anyway, if I don’t learn what I need to know from the realtor sooner.”
But when he got home from work the next day, Sashtun was gone.
Kashpur opened the portal again the next day after seeing Devi and the people he thought were probably his sister and parents. He saw the boy Devi again, and with him was the middle-aged woman that Sashtun had become — they were sitting side by side on the bed, looking at something in Sashtun’s hands. Kashpur spoke up, calling “Sashtun!” — he didn’t think she would understand anything more than her name. They looked up and saw the open portal; then, after a moment of open-mouthed astonishment, the boy gave a cheer, and the woman thrust the thing into his hands, grabbed a cloth bag — the same bag that Sashtun had taken with him — and rushed through the portal, stumbling on the threshold as he, transformed once more into his old self, stepped down from the cabinet to the floor.
“I’m so glad to have my own body again,” he said, patting himself down in a downright indecent way. He turned and waved to Devi, then turned back to Kashpur and said, “I’ve got so much to tell you. What day is it? What time of day?”
“The seventeenth of Kantusma, not long after the second bell of night.”
“And how long do you think you can keep the portal open?”
“Not long — another couple of minutes, probably.”
“I won’t go through again, then. I thought I might step through and tell Devi how much time passed has passed here, so his father and mother can know when to expect the portal to open again, but...” He turned so he could see both Kashpur and the portal. It was still open, but Kashpur wasn’t tweaking it any longer, so it would probably close soon.
“Well, come sit down in the parlor and tell me all about it. How long was it for you?”
“Around eight days. It was around midnight on the day I arrived, and late afternoon on the day I returned. I’ll tell you about it, but I’d like to change clothes first.”
“Oh, of course.” He was wearing a loose blouse and a pair of trousers apparently designed for a woman, which were far too tight in the crotch for him, and he was already kicking off his shoes.
Kashpur met Sashtun in the parlor a few minutes later, and called Tashni, who was overjoyed to see Sashtun again. She brought them refreshments and Sashtun started to tell his story.
Kashpur listened closely and asked questions. He learned much, though there were many things that he still didn’t understand. When Sashtun told him about the phone he had bought, he asked to see it.
“It probably won’t work in our world,” Sashtun cautioned him, fishing it out of his bag. “The talismans I brought with me didn’t work in Devi’s world... Huh.”
The flat polished surface of the phone lit up in bright colors when Sashtun touched a little knob on the side. But the writing system it used was strange to them both; Sashtun no longer knew the language he had known on the other side, Devi’s native language. And after a few minutes of experimentation, they were unable to get it to do anything useful; it just made different displays of colored lights when Sashtun ran his finger along the surface or tapped on different parts of it, or sometimes little chirping or clicking noises. “The main purpose was to let you talk to people at a distance,” he said. “Like a speech talisman, but apparently they’re cheap enough that almost every adult has one, and even the children of some families. And unlike a speech talisman, this thing can let you talk to anyone else who has one — they aren’t made in matching pairs, any of them can talk to any other. I only used it to speak with a few people, actually... Devi’s father, Karsan, and the dispatchers for the bus. But that’s what I was told.”
Later, after telling the rest of his story, Sashtun dumped out the contents of his bag on the table and they went over them one by one. Two changes of women’s clothing, in bright colors and fine fabrics; two books with brightly colored covers, apparently in the same strange writing system as the lit-up surface of the phone; a couple of boxes and bags of packaged food; a little black box with a black cord extending out of it, which Sashtun said was used for recharging the phone; the remaining gold bars and jewels Sashtun hadn’t sold, and the paper currency and coins he had left after selling one of the gold bars and spending a good deal of money on his hotel, food, and clothes.
“Hmm,” Kashpur said. “I wonder if we could export and import things through the portal? Do you think Devi’s parents will cooperate with such a plan?”
“Possibly,” Sashtun said. “I discussed it with them. They were cautious about a plan that would involve running such a business out of their house — they thought they would need to buy another house to live in, rather than suffer our comings and goings through Devi’s bedroom at unusual hours. But they were open to it. They also mentioned the possibility of old people from their world coming to ours to retire, since people coming in this direction seem to be reduced in age.”
“Would you mind going through the portal again to discuss it further with them? You would probably have to stay there at least two days — I’ve been able to open it about once a day here, if I cast a spell to recharge it faster than normal. I know it can’t be comfortable being a forty-six year old woman, but —”
“But you can’t do it, of course, Master — you’d be dangerously old, and you might not make it back alive. And anyone mature enough to trust with the job would also be fairly old, and suffering from being the wrong sex — I suppose I’m as well suited for it as anyone, since I’ve already gotten over the shock of being a woman once, and I’m sure I can stand it again, knowing it’s temporary.”
“Good. I’ll send you through tomorrow afternoon.”
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“This is going to be Sashtun’s first-ever movie, kids. It needs to be something special. Not whatever new movie you’re burning to see. Everyone, what’s the best movie you’ve ever seen?”
part 16 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The next morning after breakfast, Kashpur sent both Sashtun and Tashni out to buy many small samples of the trade goods to be found in the city. Sashtun had to avoid anything enchanted, but that still left a bewildering variety of things to consider possibly exporting. He bought small swatches of many kinds of fabric, different kinds of paper, ink, paint, and dye, small bottles of dozens of spices, statuettes and ornaments of various materials, glazed pots and vases, enameled boxes, rings, bracelets, necklaces, combs, fruits and vegetables that Sashtun didn’t remember seeing for sale in the other world, and various small tools.
That evening, after an early supper, he and Kashpur went over the things he and Tashni had brought back, and selected enough samples to fill two bags, carefully wrapping the more fragile items in the swatches of fabric. Then Kashpur opened the portal; Sashtun hefted both bags and stepped through.
No one was in Davey’s room when she arrived. She put her bags down, then went downstairs and found the family at supper.
“Sashtun!” Davey cried, and jumped up from the table to run over and hug her. She wasn’t sure what to do with that; after a moment she put an arm around him as well, then let go.
“Hello, everyone,” she said. “I can leave now if it doesn’t suit for me to stay a couple of days, but I’d better hurry before the portal closes, or I could come back in two days, or four —”
Davey’s parents exchanged looks. “You can stay,” Amanda said.
“Thanks,” she said. “I brought a couple of bags of trade good samples. We can look over them when it’s convenient and figure out what you want to import.”
“Let’s talk about that after supper,” Carson said. “Serve yourself a plate and have a seat, if you like.”
“I just ate,” Sashtun said, pulling up a chair, “but I’ll sit with you... and maybe have a glass of tea.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve learned something,” Carson said as Sashtun sat down, “about the woman who used to live here. Apparently she disappeared just under eight years ago... I’ve got a newspaper article with the exact date; I’ll get it for you after supper.”
“Thank you,” Sashtun said.
“How long was it over there?” Amy asked.
“A bit less than a day. It was two hours after sunset when I returned home, and almost an hour after sunset the following day when I came back here.”
“And that worked out to a little over two days here,” Carson said. “Davey said you went home just before Amanda and I got home from work, though unfortunately he didn’t note the exact time.”
“Neither did I, I’m afraid,” Sashtun said. “But the last time I looked at the clock before the portal opened, I think it was around four... that was probably some time earlier. Davey was showing me his game and we got engrossed in it — it’s fortunate that we noticed the portal opening at all.”
Amy punched her brother in the arm.
“So what all did you do while you were home?” Amanda asked. Sashtun told them about it, which didn’t take long, and then asked them what they’d been doing.
After supper, Carson showed her a copy of an old newspaper article about the disappearance of the woman who had lived there eight years earlier. She had last been seen by one of her neighbors checking her mailbox on March 19. Both of her daughters had talked with her on the phone in the next few days, and had not noticed anything unusual in the way she spoke or what she said. Her conversation with her younger daughter on March 22 was the last time anyone heard from her. No one suspected anything was wrong for over a week; her daughters called her and left messages, but didn’t become concerned until several days passed and she didn’t return the calls. One called a neighbor and asked her to look in on her mother, and the neighbor got no answer when she rang the bell or knocked. Then the daughter, who lived in a distant city, called the local police, who broke into the house on April 4 and found no one at home, and the food in the refrigerator beginning to spoil.
“So,” Sashtun said thoughtfully, “let’s suppose she went through the portal sometime between March 22 and the next time one of her daughters tried to call her — probably a week later. Call it March 25. And today is...?”
“Friday, February 23.”
Sashtun had some knowledge of what order the months of this calendar came in, which seemed to come with knowledge of English as she came through the portal. She wasn’t sure how many days were in each month, though, so she needed Carson’s help to calculate the exact time since old Mrs. Carmichael disappeared: seven years, eleven months, and two days.
“I’ll tell Kashpur when I return home,” she said. “And we can measure the time difference between the sides more exactly as we make more trips back and forth. I brought a pocket watch this time, and I can compare the difference in times with the grandfather clock in Kashpur’s penthouse when I go back. So far we think time is about 2.1 times faster here than back home.”
“So that would be...” Carson typed some numbers into his computer, and said: “3.73 years. Assuming your years are the same length as ours. I’ll let you figure out how many months and days 0.73 years is.”
“Davey told us your year has 365 days in a typical year, with one more in leap years,” Sashtun said. “I don’t think we use the exact same formula for calculating leap years, but I’m pretty sure our years are basically the same length. And the moon, when I saw it out of my hotel window at night, looked like our moon back home, so I think our months are probably the same too.”
“We don’t base our calendar months on the moon’s orbit anymore, but yeah, it sounds like it.”
After that, they went over the trade goods for a while before going to bed. She also returned Davey’s old pajamas that he’d left in Kashpur’s apartment in his haste to return home.
The next day, Sashtun’s hosts didn’t have to go to work or school. She spent a good part of the morning, during and after breakfast, going over the rest of the trade goods with Carson and Amanda, ruling out a lot of things and picking a handful that they might be able to profitably import. Deciding what Kashpur and Sashtun could import to their world was just as hard.
“You can’t just import phones or computers and expect them to work,” Carson explained. “They need a whole infrastructure — electricity generation plants and wires to transmit the electricity to people’s homes, Internet and cell tower infrastructure so they can talk with each other.”
“Besides, when I’m at home, I can’t read English, or even your Arabic numerals,” Sashtun said. “So I wouldn’t be able to read the display, nor would our customers. But is there any simpler kind of machine your people make that doesn’t require being plugged in from time to time, or knowledge of English and Arabic numerals?”
“Yes, there are a number of machines that use replaceable batteries. You could import batteries along with the machines and replace them as needed...”
They discussed several kinds of machine, some of which were redundant with cheap, common magical talismans, but others which seemed likely to be useful.
Later in the day, the whole family took Sashtun out to show her more of their world. They drove for a considerable distance until they reached a bigger city, where they parked and walked around the downtown area for a while, visiting a museum and a couple of historical sites.
The next morning, her hosts were getting ready to go to church. Amanda asked Sashtun if she wanted to go with them.
“Of course,” Sashtun said. She wouldn’t turn down any opportunity to learn more about this world, though she half expected she might have to gently repulse some sort of attempt to convert her.
She showered after all of the children had taken their showers, and got dressed in one of the changes of women’s clothing she’d bought at Walmart. She was one of the last ones to finish getting ready.
On the way, Amanda said: “In case anyone asks who you are, we should probably come up with a name you can use, and some explanation for why you’re visiting with us.”
“I suppose you don’t want to tell people who I really am and where I came from?”
Carson said: “It would be hard to explain and impossible for most people to believe. We’ll have to tell people eventually, but now isn’t the time... What about ‘Sarah’? Would you mind answering to that?”
“It’s as good a name as any, I suppose.”
They drove a few miles to a boxy rectangular sort of building with little ornamentation, not much different from many of the others Sashtun had seen in this world. Once inside, they found seats in one of the back pews, which were cushioned on both seat and back, unlike the seating in churches back home.
In the few minutes between the time they arrived and the time the service started, several people came over and talked with them, and Amanda introduced Sashtun as her friend “Sarah” who was visiting them for a few days. The service started with a song, sung by the congregation and accompanied by a band, mostly playing string instruments; the most interesting thing to Sashtun was that the words to the song were displayed on a screen, similar to the television or Davey’s handheld game system, but far bigger. There was no musical notation displayed, however.
That song was succeeded by someone welcoming everyone to the service, in a way that seemed fairly informal to Sashtun, followed by a short prayer, three more songs, a longer prayer, another song, during which the ushers passed collection baskets, and then a sermon, which lasted about half an hour. It mostly dealt with the virtue of humility, but near the end, there was an abrupt topic shift: the call to conversion that Sashtun had half-expected. Then the congregation sang another song and it was over.
Afterward, the Platts spent more time socializing with various friends, but not very long, pleading that they were going to have lunch with their friend “Sarah” from out of town. They left a few minutes later, and Carson said, “We usually go out to eat after church on Sundays. Do you have any preference about what kind of food you want, Sashtun?”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t been here long enough or tried enough different things to know what else your world has to offer.” She tried to remember the names of all the restaurants she’d eaten at during her stay at the hotel, and listed them, then said: “I’d like to eat somewhere other than those, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, well, that won’t be hard. It sounds like you mostly ate at fast food places, and we usually go to one of the sit-down restaurants either at the expressway exit or in downtown Douglasville.”
The restaurant they finally went to served food a little similar to a Zhevru diner, with many of the dishes on the menu being marked with a little pepper symbol to indicate spiciness, and a predominance of rice and rice noodle-based dishes. Sashtun asked her hosts what they recommended, and ended up getting a noodle dish with chopped chicken and vegetables. During lunch, they talked more about plans for use of the portal. Carson and Amanda still weren’t sure they wanted to run an import-export business out of their home.
“But,” Carson said, “I’ve asked my mother to come visit next weekend. If we can time things so that you and Kashpur can open the portal while she’s here... well, she can go through and stay with you for a day or so and come back ready to tell her friends about our new, ah, retirement community. Maybe one or more of us can go with her — Amanda and I and the kids would like to come, if we can both get the following Monday off work on such short notice, and if your employer can host us or help us find a place to stay the night.”
“You think she might like to move to our world permanently?” Sashtun didn’t like getting older when she came through to this world, even more than she disliked being a woman, but she could see how a really old person would be willing to change sex if it were the price of a rejuvenation.
“Probably not,” Carson said. “But some of her older friends, maybe. And maybe some people they’ll refer to us in turn. There are a lot of details we still need to work out, though.”
“Letting old folks move to the other world permanently would require a lot less back and forth traffic than running an import-export business,” Amanda said, “but most of them will want to send letters to people in our world, at least, even if they never want to come for visits to avoid getting old and feeble again, and that would involve — well, I’m not sure what, since the portal doesn’t translate written documents, and the immigrants to your world wouldn’t know English anymore, right?”
“Somebody like Sashtun could memorize a letter and then come through and write it down,” Davey suggested. “Or one of us could memorize their relatives' letters and go through to write them down in Stasari for Kashpur to forward to the retired people.”
“That could work,” Amanda said, “but it might involve too much coming and going through the portal. I think we want to keep that to a minimum, if we’re going to keep living in the house. Otherwise we’d have to make Davey and Carson Jr. share a bedroom, and —”
“No way,” Carson Jr. said.
“— and we don’t want to do that,” Amanda said.
“I’ll talk to Kashpur about the timing when I go home,” Sashtun said. “What day and time do you think your mother would be ready to come over?”
“Let’s say Saturday morning about ten,” Carson said. “She lives in a retirement apartment up in Woodstock; I’d go pick her up and give her a ride here...”
They talked about the timing, and Sashtun figured out when that would be in terms of her world’s calendar and clock.
When they returned to the house, Sashtun’s hosts decided they had time to watch a “movie” before the portal would open again around suppertime. Carson the younger, Amy, and Davey all immediately suggested different movies, but Carson the elder said: “This is going to be Sashtun’s first-ever movie, kids. It needs to be something special. Not whatever new movie you’re burning to see. Everyone, what’s the best movie you’ve ever seen?”
Each of the kids and Amanda named a different movie. “Now,” said Carson, “which of those do you think Sashtun would have the easiest time understanding?”
They were all quiet for a bit, thinking. Carson Jr. said, “It needs to be something that doesn’t depend on knowing a lot about our history, I guess.”
“Or pop culture references,” Amanda said.
“And I think an older movie would be easier than a recent one. The way movies are filmed has changed a lot over time, and maybe a movie from a long time ago, that was made for audiences who didn’t all grow up watching movies, would be easier for Sashtun to get into than a modern movie with all the frequent jump cuts and shakycam and so forth.”
“Good point, Dad,” Carson Jr. said.
They discussed a different set of movies now, and finally decided on one titled The Most Dangerous Game. “This movie was made in 1932,” Carson said. “Over eighty years ago. Back then, its first audience included a lot of people who hadn’t grown up watching movies constantly from childhood. And it doesn’t need a lot of historical or cultural context, I hope. Anyway, if anything is puzzling you and you can’t make sense of it, say so and I’ll pause the movie and explain.”
They all sat down on the sofa and easy chairs, Davey turned off the light, and Carson started the movie. Sashtun was pleasantly surprised to find that she did understand the story, far better than the novel she’d read the first few chapters of during her first visit to this world. The monochromatic images were a little jarring at first, but she soon got used to them, and the elementality of the plot and characters appealed to her. There were probably nuances she wasn’t getting, perhaps the relations of the different nations or ethnic groups the characters came from, or the customs surrounding hunting in the different characters' cultures, but she was soon gripped by the story and forgot everything else, as she’d only felt a few times when seeing the best of stage plays or reading the best of novels. She forgot Carson’s offer to pause the movie and explain things.
When it was over, and Davey turned the lights on again, Carson said, “Well? What did you think?”
“That was amazing,” she said. “I think we could charge a lot of money for people to come over here and watch movies, if there are many of them as good as that, and — well, as accessible as that for people from my world.”
Carson grinned. “Maybe not. Let’s see how the retirement plan works out before we try that.”
They talked about the movie and about other movies Sashtun might want to see on future visits until it was almost time for the portal to open. Then Sashtun went upstairs and waited in Davey’s bedroom. Carson came with her; he wanted to see her go through.
They continued talking about for a few minutes until the portal opened. Sashtun said a hurried goodbye to Carson and and hurried through it. She had a lot to tell Kashpur about.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“We weren’t entirely truthful last weekend when we told you that Davey couldn’t remember what had happened during the months he was gone,” Carson said. “Davey told us where he’d been and what he’d done, but... until a few days ago, we didn’t believe him, because we didn’t have evidence, and his story seemed pretty far-fetched.”
part 17 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
We're finally getting into the part of the story that justifies the "mature subject" tag.
Sharon got a call from her son Carson, inviting her to come and spend the day with him and his wife and kids the following Saturday. In the course of the conversation, he also asked her if she had any special plans for Sunday or Monday; she didn’t realize the significance of that until later.
It wasn’t unusual for her to go over to Carson’s house. Sometimes he would drop in on her by himself or with one of the kids, but if she was going to visit with Amanda and all her grandchildren, their house had a lot more room than her retirement apartment, which started getting a little crowded when she had two visitors, and was uncomfortably so with five, especially if two of them were young children with a lot of energy to burn.
But Carson was particular about her spending the whole day with them, which was a little out of the ordinary. Not enough for her to be suspicious, of course. It wasn’t until after she and Carson got to the house that things got a litle odd. She noticed that Carson was checking the time pretty frequently, which wasn’t like him, and made her feel a little hurt. Then it seemed like everyone else was checking the time, too. Then, a little before ten, Carson and Amanda met each other’s eyes and Carson said, “It’s time.”
“Time for what?” Sharon asked.
“Let’s go upstairs, and we can show you soon... Here, I’ll take your arm.”
Sharon was glad to live in a place with no stairs, but she could still do them when she needed to. Everyone got up and followed her and Carson... to Davey’s room?
“What did you want to show me?”
“Have a seat,” Carson said. There was a straight-backed chair in the room, too big for Davey, which she suspected they’d moved up here just for her. Why? She sat down and the others sat down on the bed or stood leaning against the wall, while Davey sat in his child-sized chair.
“We weren’t entirely truthful last weekend when we told you that Davey couldn’t remember what had happened during the months he was gone,” Carson said. “Davey told us where he’d been and what he’d done, but... until a few days ago, we didn’t believe him, because we didn’t have evidence, and his story seemed pretty far-fetched. We told him he should tell everyone he didn’t remember, because the truth was too unbelievable.”
“What happened?” Sharon looked at Davey, who was on the edge of his seat. He took that as a cue and started telling the most unbelievable story... and yet Carson, Amanda and the older kids were confirming it with occasional nods.
And then, just as he was telling her how he’d gone to live with the old wizard who had bought the cabinet, the gateway in the mural suddenly changed into a view of a cluttered room beyond, with a man a few years younger than her in a tasseled red shirt and loose yellow trousers standing a few feet away, and a younger man, probably in his early twenties, beside him.
“Let’s go,” Carson said, and offered her his hand.
“I’m not too sure about this,” Carson Jr. muttered. Sharon was still in shock as she took Carson’s hand and stood up. Davey was already rushing through the doorway, followed closely by Amy — and as they stepped through, they changed, as Davey had described in his story. Both got shorter and smaller, and their clothes got baggy on them — she couldn’t tell if they’d changed sex, from behind and in such baggy clothes.
“We talked about this, Carson,” Amanda said to her oldest son. “We’re not leaving you here alone.” She took his hand, and he shook it off, but followed his mother through the portal.
Still dazed, but fascinated by the idea of being young again — and a man? What would that be like? — Sharon went through with Carson.
In their excitement, no one had thought to warn her about the step down. She stumbled a little on the threshold, and someone — a teenage girl wearing Carson’s clothes — caught her and steadied her. She felt so strange — all her joint pains were gone, and she thought she was taller, too, but it was hard to tell — everyone else seemed to be a different height, and she had nothing firm to compare herself to. The teenage girl who was wearing Karsan’s clothes was probably shorter than before; certainly the grandkids were. And that gawky, acne-scarred boy in the pantsuit must be Hamanta.
“Isn’t it awesome, Grandma?” the smallest child said. “Kashpur, this is my Mom, Dad, Grandma, and my brother Karsan and sister Ami.” So that must be Devi.
“We’re pleased to meet you,” the older man said. “I understand the transition and transformation can be a bit of a shock. I’ll show you to the guest rooms, if you like, and there should be loose clothes to fit everyone, more or less.”
“That would be lovely,” Sharun mumbled, shocked at her — his — deep bass voice. He followed the others through a door into a corridor and then to a series of doors to the guest bedrooms.
“We have three guest rooms,” the younger man — Sashtun? — said. “I suggest that Karsan the elder and Hamanta take one, the girl children one, and you, sir, and your grandson take the other.”
Grandson — he meant Ami. Sharun’s granddaughter, normally. Sharun could feel something between his legs, uncomfortably constrained by his panties; it was so strange... he hadn’t seen one of those since Alan died. “Are there, ah, mirrors?” he asked, startled again at the sound of his voice.
“Yes,” Sashtun said. “Here you go,” he added, opening one of the doors and gesturing inside.
Sharun went in, followed a few moments later by Ami, who had been hanging back, chattering in low voices with Devi.
“This is so weird and cool,” Ami said. “We’re boys now! I wish I wasn’t so little, though. Oh, well.”
“Let’s see,” Sharun said, looking around. There seemed to be some sort of robes hanging from a clothes-horse beside the large bed. “One of those looks like it might be your size, and one of the others will probably fit me.” He went over and picked them up, one by one, holding them beside him at neck level.
“Um, yeah. These clothes are too big on me.” Ami came over and picked up the smallest robe, then looked around. “I don’t see a bathroom to change clothes in, though.”
“See that folding screen over there? People used to go behind those things to change clothes back when they didn’t have indoor bathrooms. And even later, too... You can go behind that to change, and I’ll change out here.”
“All right.” Ami went over behind it, and as soon as he was out of sight, Sharun took a deep breath and started unbuttoning his blouse.
“Stay behind there until I say it’s okay,” he remembered to call out as he unhooked his empty bra. His chest was hairier than Alan’s used to be, coarse black hairs scattered around and going down in a narrower line past his belly-button and his waist.
“Okay,” Ami called out. “I’m done whenever you’re ready.”
“Wait a bit longer,” Sharun said. He pulled off his skirt, then braced himself and lowered the too-tight panties, unbinding and confronting the thing they’d constrained.
It was impossible to be sure, with the distance of years and the unfamiliar perspective, but he thought it might be bigger than Alan’s. That was a strange thought. There were other men before Alan, two in high school and one in college, but the most recent of them was almost fifty years ago — far too long to remember accurately.
He took the robe and the undergarment and went over to the full-length mirror, which was framed in bronze with bas-reliefs. Later on, he noticed the strange snake-like creatures with different animal heads intertwined that made up the bas-reliefs, and wondered if they really had animals like that here, but now he was focused on himself. He was pretty good-looking, about thirty or thirty-five. His hair was still the same length and styled almost exactly the same, but black, not his original blonde. His skin was approximately the same color, but all the liver spots and varicose veins were gone, and most of the wrinkles. His facial features were... kind of Asian? Not exactly, but definitely not like a male version of his original thirty-year-old self. He looked a bit like the men he’d seen earlier, their hosts — Kashpur and Sashtun.
“Are you done, Grandma?” Ami called, sounding a bit exasperated.
“Almost!” Sharun hastily got dressed and looked around for something to tie the robe with — it didn’t have built-in ties or buttons. He’d seen some wide strips of cloth that could be belts or scarves or something hanging on the clothes-horse... A little looking didn’t reveal anything more belt-like than that, and he tied one of them around his waist, then said: “Done.”
Ami came out, looking adorable. He was clearly a member of the same ethnic group as Sharun’s new body, and the others, not quite like anything Sharun was familiar with from Earth. His hair was still long and femininely styled, like Sharun’s, and his nails still had pink nail polish — it was only then that Sharun realized his own nails still had the coat of clear polish she’d applied a day or two ago.
“C’mon,” Ami said. “Let’s go see if everybody else is ready.”
“Wow,” said Karsan. She and Hamanta stood side by side in front of the full-length mirror in their guest bedroom. She’d seen once before how Sashtun had changed sex when crossing the threshold of the portal, and heard Devi talk a little about his experience of being a girl in the other world (though not that much, she now realized); but feeling it from the inside was something else completely.
“Wow is right, about you anyway,” Hamanta said. “I look even worse than I did when I was eighteen the first time. Apparently my acne would have been worse if I was a boy?”
“I’m not sure that’s it,” Karsan said. “You notice how we look like we’re from the same ethnic group as Kashpur and Sashtun? And when Sashtun came to our world, she looked like any white American — even a little like my mom when she was younger. I think we’re probably getting a mix of our own genetics with those of people from the area around the portal.”
“Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, let’s change clothes. I look ridiculous and you’re not much better.”
The clothes provided for them were loose robes, something like a kimono but less elaborately layered. Karsan tried to remember what Devi and Sashtun had said about color symbolism in the culture here, but not much was coming to mind.
“I’ll take the orange one, I guess,” Hamanta said, starting to undress. Karsan found the sight of his bare chest strangely distracting. Had the portal changed their gender identities, their sexual orientations, or both? She’d never asked prying questions of Sashtun about his experience of becoming a woman while visiting their world; it hadn’t seemed polite. When Hamanta took off his pants and panties, she gasped and turned away after a moment, concentrating on her own undressing. She didn’t have any immediate desire to do anything sexual with Hamanta’s penis, but... she couldn’t easily stop thinking about it, either. It was a decent size, certainly no smaller than Karsan’s own when male, and uncircumcised. Would Hamanta want to have sex tonight? Would Karsan? They’d talked about the possibility, after they’d both succeeded in getting Monday off work and arranged for the kids to miss a day of school, but they’d agreed they’d wait and see how they felt after they got used to their new bodies for a few hours.
Karsan’s breasts were a little smaller than Hamanta’s original ones, she found when she got her shirt off. The left aureole was a little wider than the right. She took off her pants and briefs, and didn’t take time to look closely at her new lady bits before slipping on the panties Hamanta had discarded and the robe that Hamanta hadn’t claimed, light green with darker green hems.
She turned around and saw Hamanta wearing the orange robe. He was tying a sash or belt around his waist, so Karsan looked at the clothes horse again, found one, and tied it on.
“I don’t see any bras here,” Hamanta said, eyeing her critically and then shuffling through the things on the clothes-horse. “Maybe they haven’t invented them yet? You’d better borrow mine.”
“Oh. Yeah, it might help.” Karsan untied and took off the robe, then put on the bra Hamanta gave her, with some help. It was a little loose, even after Hamanta adjusted the straps, but better than no support at all. Maybe they could make money by exporting bras to this world. Or by “inventing” and patenting the bra, if they had a patent system here.
They tried on each of the pairs of slippers they found, and Karsan found one pair that almost fit her, but none of them were quite big enough for Hamanta. So he went barefoot for the moment.
“You look good,” Karsan said. She kind of wanted to kiss Hamanta, but was a little afraid of where that would lead. She compromised by taking his hand. Hamanta smiled and squeezed hers.
“Let’s go join the others,” he said.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“See,” Devi was saying, “a blue or green robe means you’re a girl, and yellow, orange or red means you’re a boy. At least for the Zyuneban. The Stasa have more complicated rules. And I guess we’re Stasa now, instead of Zyuneban like I was last time, so... anyway, pick whichever robe you feel like, if you can find one that fits you.”
part 18 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Karsan hated being a little girl, and hated how casual his little sister was about the whole thing. He hadn’t wanted to come here — going to another world had sounded kind of cool at first, but not if he had to give up his dick. It hadn’t helped when Ami made fun of him for being too scared to be a girl. Now that he was here, he hated it every bit as much as he’d expected.
“See,” Devi was saying, “a blue or green robe means you’re a girl, and yellow, orange or red means you’re a boy. At least for the Zyuneban. The Stasa have more complicated rules. And I guess we’re Stasa now, instead of Zyuneban like I was last time, so... anyway, pick whichever robe you feel like, if you can find one that fits you.” She was standing there naked while she jabbered, pulling different robes off the rack and holding them up to her neck while she talked. Karsan hadn’t taken off his clothes yet; he was dreading looking at the void between his legs. A glance at the cute little face in the mirror was bad enough.
Devi pulled on a pair of fluffy undergarments and a blue robe, which seemed masculine enough to Karsan, but... apparently that was a girl color here? Karsan finally yanked a yellow robe off the rack, then turned his back to Devi and started pulling off his clothes. He gritted his teeth as he pulled off his pants and saw the smooth, hairless nothing down there.
I’m not going to cry! I’m not really a girl! I just... sort of look like one right now.
No “sort of” about it, really, she realized as she passed in front of the mirror again after getting the robe on. It was a little too long, and dragged on the ground, but she didn’t want to try on the blue or green robes after Devi had told her they were girl colors here.
Unless she was pranking her, tricking her into wearing girl stuff?
“Come on, Karsan, it’s not that bad. We’ll be boys again tomorrow. Cheer up.”
That was a happy thought to hold onto.
They tried on different pairs of slippers until they found some that fit, and then went out into the corridor again. Devi led the way to a living room with a lot of fancy wooden furniture, where guy-Sashtun and the old guy were sitting, and there was a single large window that looked out on... wow. They were pretty high up, looking out over a city where most of the buildings were a lot shorter than this one.
“It’s good to see you again, Devi,” the old guy said. “And this is your brother — what was his name?”
It felt nice to have him use ‘he’.
“Karsan the younger,” Devi said. It didn’t sound quite right, but whatever, they weren’t even talking proper English here. “Our dad’s named Karsan the elder, and our mom is Hamanta. And our grandma is Sharun, and our sister is Ami.”
Speaking of which, Grandma and Ami came in just then. Kashpur and Sashtun greeted them again. Karsan, Ami and Devi were all a lot closer in age than they’d been before, little kids of maybe seven, six and five. It totally sucked. Grandma looked younger than Dad usually did, maybe about Uncle Rob’s age or even younger.
“Tashni will be serving lunch in a few minutes,” Kashpur said. “And after we discuss business, we can go out and show you the town.”
That might be cool. But it would involve going out in public as a girl. And he was missing basketball practice for this, too.
Mom and Dad came in just then, or should it be Dad and Mom? Mom had worse acne than Karsan had back home; Karsan felt bad for him. Dad was pretty hot, or so Karsan probably would have said when he had a dick. They looked about eighteen or twenty. Mom was wearing orange and Dad was wearing green. Did they deliberately pick those because they matched their new bodies, or did they not know that stuff Devi had said about girl and boy colors?
“How are you feeling, Mom?” Dad said to Grandma. “You look good. Is being young again worth the weirdness of being a man?”
“I don’t even know,” Grandma said. “I’m still reeling in shock... Devi hadn’t even finished telling me his story when that door opened in the wall, and...”
“We’ll let Devi and Kashpur tell you the rest of it, then, and then Hamanta and I will pick up where they leave off,” Dad said.
Just then a bell rang, and Kashpur and Sashtun stood up. “It’s time for lunch,” Kashpur said. “This way.”
They all followed him into a dining room, where there was a long table with plenty of chairs for everybody. A woman a few years younger than Grandma normally looked was bringing in another platter of food as they found seats. Karsan’s feet didn’t touch the floor once he got up into his seat, another frustrating reminder of how young he was now.
“Are there any mealtime customs we need to know about?” Dad asked. “Saying a prayer before eating, or anything?”
“No,” Kashpur said. “Nothing you need concern yourselves about for a short stay and a private meal like this. For public banquets, of course, there are small ceremonies before and after eating, and between courses, and some families follow those customs at dinner when they have guests, or at holiday dinners, but Sashtun and I rarely bother.”
So they dug in, and Devi, Kashpur, Sashtun, and Dad finished telling Grandma all about the events that had led up to this.
“So,” Karsan was saying to her mother, “we figured the people who could benefit most from this thing would be older people. Changing sex wouldn’t be so bad if it came with thirty or forty years of rejuvenation... and so we thought we’d invite you to come visit here with us. Eventually Hamanta’s parents, too, of course, but they live in Florida and you’re right across town...”
Hamanta wasn’t sure how he felt about being a man. It was so strange to be taller than Karsan, to feel he could dominate her... kind of scary, and exhilarating at the same time. He had an erection thinking about her. The idea of actually using that thing between his legs on his husband — his wife, for the moment — was weird, too weird for words, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He tried to focus on what Karsan and Sharun were saying.
“...sure about that. I mean, being young again is amazing, it’s so wonderful to be free of back pain and rheumatism. But I don’t know if I could get used to being a man... or if I should.”
“You don’t have to decide right away, Mom,” Karsan said. “You could go home, think about it a while, and maybe come back for a longer visit after clearing your schedule for a week or two. But I hope you will retire here eventually... I mean, you’ve probably got ten or even twenty more years in you, given how old Grandma lived to be, but I don’t want to lose you. You could come here and be young again, even if we have to visit you because you can’t come to us without getting old again.”
“I’ll think and pray about it,” Sharun said, and took another bite of the rice pilaf-like dish. Hamanta and Karsan had been experimenting with some of the spices Sashtun had brought over, since last weekend, and he could taste a couple of them here.
“My parents are even older,” Hamanta said after finishing a mouthful. “I hope I can get them to move here before too much longer.”
“It will be hard to say goodbye to all my friends,” Sharun said. “And harder to explain where I’m going and why I won’t be able to talk with them on Facebook or on the phone.”
“They could come here, too,” Karsan said. “We’ve been talking with Kashpur and Sashtun about the best way to use the portal, and we think that letting retirees immigrate here might be the best thing, rather than importing and exporting goods. There are obstacles to work around, but we figure someone could convert all their assets into gold, come through the portal, pay us and Kashpur a reasonable fee for the use of it, and then find a home here in the city. Or anywhere in the Inupara Republic, really. Sashtun tells us there are a lot of nice places immigrants could live, some of them pretty cheaply. The exchange rate’s pretty favorable — your retirement savings converted to gold and then to local financial instruments would let you buy a house or rent an apartment and live pretty well for about thirty years, out in the suburbs, or twenty here in the downtown area. And you’re young enough here to find work after a few months or a year of acclimation, and save most of your money for your second retirement.”
“I’d want to know more about this world before I come here,” Sharun said. “Or tell my friends about it and invite them to come with me.”
“We can answer any questions you have,” Kashpur said. “And after lunch, we’ll take you on a tour. We can start with the roof garden; it’s got a good view of this part of the city.”
Fortunately, Hamanta’s erection had subsided by the time they finished eating and went out. Hamanta wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been able to find shoes that fit right, and Kashpur promised they would get them fitted for shoes. First, they all went up a flight of stairs to the roof, and looked out over the city from a charming garden. They could only see a handful of buildings that were taller than this one, most of them to the east. To the west, there were a fair number of buildings of eight to twelve stories, a handful in the twenty to thirty-story range, and a lot of two or three-story buildings. The ones near enough to make out clearly generally had bas-reliefs on their facades and statues on their cornices.
“That’s the wizards' academy,” Devi said, pointing out a moderately tall building in the distance like an expert. “And that building with the dome and spire is their parliament building...”
“Did you go see it while you were staying here?” Hamanta asked.
“Just from the outside. They don’t let visitors in, like at the state capitol back home.”
“They do at certain times,” Kashpur said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think today is one of them. Perhaps on a future visit. We can leave whenever you are ready.”
So they walked downstairs to the penthouse apartment, and then through the living areas to an office and an elevator. It took several minutes to arrive, and when it did, there was a young woman sitting there, seemingly operating it, though she didn’t have any buttons or knobs or anything to work.
“How is she controlling it?” Hamanta asked Kashpur in a low voice after they were all crowded in and the elevator started to descend.
“With her mind,” Kashpur said. “She’s a wizard, and can manipulate the threads of the elevator control spell, though she’s probably not powerful enough to cast major spells of her own, or she wouldn’t be working as an elevator operator.”
Sashtun had said that wizards were about one in a hundred and sixty people here. How many of them were working menial jobs like this?
The elevator operator was wearing a form-fitting green top, unike Karsan, and Hamanta found his eyes wandering more than once to her breasts. He forced himself to pay attention to Karsan. Remember what her breasts looked like, when you saw them earlier. You’ll see them again later.
The elevator reached the ground floor after picking up a couple of more passengers, and they all filed out through the marble and bronze-encrusted lobby to the street.
In some ways, it looked like a photo of a street scene from a hundred years or so ago. But the cars were completely different, or should he say carriages? Some of them looked more like literally horseless carriages, big wooden boxes with large wooden wheels and outside seats in front and back as well as six or so inside seats. Others were smaller, nearer the size of an American car from the fifties or sixties, but still made of wood, and though just as ornate, obviously from a completely different artistic tradition.
“We’ll walk up to the corner,” Kashpur said, “and take a bus to the street of the cobblers, where we’ll get you measured for shoes. Then we’ll have things that fit you next time you visit. Meanwhile, we’ll show you the city — whatever you wish to see that we have time for.”
The bus, when it came, was something like a trolley without wires or tracks, having open sides and a few benches as well as poles and straps to hang onto. “Are the trolley and carriage drivers all minor wizards, like the elevator operator?” Karsan asked as the conductor folded down a set of stairs and they mounted the bus.
“Most of the trolley drivers, yes,” Kashpur said, “and some of the carriage drivers. But a few years ago we developed motive spells that can be controlled by anyone — well, anyone but a spellbreaker — by touching appropriate runes carved on a wall panel or table. There wouldn’t be nearly so many magical carriages without that, and the city wouldn’t have been able to forbid horses and donkeys within the city limits. The older types of elevator and trolley that require a wizard to operate them are being gradually replaced.”
Hamanta remembered Devi or Sashtun saying something about spellbreakers. They were the opposite of wizards, right?
They rode a couple of miles and then got off in a block full of shops in the ground levels of two and three-story buildings. These had more and larger windows than the skyscrapers they’d seen at first around Kashpur’s building.
Kashpur led them into one of the shops, which had several styles of shoe painted on the sign-board out front. There, they were each measured for shoes, and for those whose slippers didn’t fit at all, or hadn’t been able to squeeze into anything, Kashpur bought shoes in something closer to the right size. The shop didn’t have anywhere near the selection of shoes a shoe store back home would, but it had a few, mostly pairs that people had commissioned but then failed to pay for. “I’ll have shoes in an exact fit for you next time you visit,” he said, and then paused a moment and added: “At least, if you have the same body next time as this. We’ll have to test that. Devi is different from last time, but I think that can be explained by the different context in which the cabinet found itself.”
“Do you think we’d look different if you or Sashtun or Tashni weren’t home when we arrived?” Karsan said. “Or if a different group of people were at home or visiting in the apartments below yours?”
“Possibly,” Kashpur said. “I don’t know how far out the portal reaches in its survey of the people nearby to form the new bodies of travelers. I made inquiries about the shops on either side of the shop I bought the cabinet from. Zyuneban families live above both shops, and both had closed by the time Devi arrived, so there would be no customers to confuse the issue. Your house is some distance from the nearest house, I understand?”
“About two hundred yards,” Hamanta said.
“And are the family in that house of the same ethnic group as yourselves?”
“Yes, though there’s a black family in the next-closest house, about two hundred and fifty yards in another direction.”
“Then I think we can assume that the portal doesn’t look that far,” Sashtun said, “or they would have influenced my appearance — if they were at home when I arrived?”
“You came over twice and looked pretty much the same each time,” Hamanta said. “And if the Powells weren’t home the first time you came, they probably would have been the second time, or vice versa.”
Once Hamanta and Sharun had shoes that fit them, more or less, Kashpur asked if they wanted to have themselves measured for something other than the robes he’d provided, to have something closer fitting next time like shirts and trousers, or if they would rather spend the time seeing more of the city. After a stop at a tailor’s shop in a nearby street, they all got on another bus and went to another part of the city, one Devi had told them about, and which she’d pointed out from the roof garden. They saw the parliament house, the courthouses, the Wizards' Academy, the Athenaeum, a couple of churches or temples of some sort, and other public buildings, as well as statuary in granite, marble, and wood — the latter including living trees molded and sculpted over decades like large bonsai.
After a few hours of touring that district of the city, they returned to Kashpur’s building just before sunset.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“This is my mom and dad and grandma and my brother Karsan and my sister Ami,” Devi went on. “Everybody, this is Zindla and her mom Syuna. They run the shop where I first came to this world.”
part 19 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Not long after they got back from their tour of the city, Tashni announced that Kashpur’s guests had arrived, and showed in Syuna and Zindla to the parlor where they were sitting around and talking. Devi was excited to see them, but her face fell a little when she saw Zindla looking from one to the other of the children without a sign of recognition.
“Zindla, it’s me, Devi,” she said, jumping up from the sofa she was sharing with Ami and Karsan. “I look different because the cabinet’s in Kashpur’s apartment insead of your shop.”
“Devi!” Zindla cried, and knelt down and hugged her.
“This is my mom and dad and grandma and my brother Karsan and my sister Ami,” she went on. “Everybody, this is Zindla and her mom Syuna. They run the shop where I first came to this world.”
Syuna sat down between Kashpur and Grandma, and Zindla squeezed onto the sofa between Devi and Ami, and they talked until Tashni said supper was ready. Devi overheard snatches of Syuna’s conversation with Grandma while she talked with Zindla about what had happened to each of them since they saw each other last.
“I don’t really have any friends at school yet,” she said. “My family moved to a new school district just before I came over to your shop, and then six months passed in my world, and I joined the other kids more than halfway through the school year. So it’s hard to get to know people. I think people are talking about me behind my back, making weird guesses about what happened to me when I disappeared.”
“How do they know about that, if you weren’t going to that school before?”
“I don’t know, but I started overhearing rumors about it within a few days after I started school again.”
Zindla told her that she’d taken over more responsibilities in the shop since her coming of age ceremony; sometimes both her parents would go out at once and leave her in charge of the shop, and sometimes she and her fiancé Myanda would go together to an estate sale and decide whether any of the things for sale would be good to buy for the shop. “Myanda can see enchantments, like Father,” she said, “and even cast a few spells, and I can appraise things pretty well once I know how strong an enchantment something has.”
“Have you found anything weird like the cabinet yet?”
“No,” Zindla said with a laugh. “Things like that come along only once every decade or less. We’ve mostly been buying books and small talismans, things you can wear or put on a shelf; Mother and Father make the big purchases like furniture.”
Just then, Tashni called them to supper. Devi sat between Zindla and Ami, with Mom and Dad and Syuna across the table from them.
Sharun continued his conversation with Syuna as they sat down for supper. They had been talking about Devi and her stay with Syuna’s family a few months ago.
“...So Zindla sewed her a couple of gowns in boys' colors,” she continued. “And gave her a couple of hair ornaments like Zyuneban boys wear. And she went about dressed as a boy for some time, but I said she must wear girl’s clothes to Zindla’s coming of age ceremony, and she agreed. Later on, Kashpur wrote to me saying that she had stopped wearing her hair like a boy’s, and I see she is wearing a girl’s robe today.”
Sharun didn’t think of blue as a girl color, but things were clearly different here. He asked, “You said that Zyuneban men wear these hair ornaments, and I vaguely recall seeing a few men wearing them while we were out touring the city today; but I notice that Kashpur and Sashtun aren’t...?”
“Yes, Stasa dress differently. They have looser customs about what men and women wear or how they dress their hair; there are a few things only men or women wear, but a lot that they consider suitable for either.”
“I suppose, if I move here permanently, I would have to dress and act like a man to fit in.”
“You’d probably better. We indulged Devi in her whim of dressing like a boy, but if Kashpur hadn’t been able to get the cabinet working and she’d been stuck here, and we had adopted her, I think we would have to put our foot down and insist that she dress like a girl as she grew older.”
Sharun thanked God again that Devi had been able to return home, and prayed that nothing would go wrong with their return to Earth tomorrow morning. He wondered what it might have been like for Devi, growing up as a girl here; how long would it take her to get used to it? More to the point, how long would it take Sharun, at his more advanced age, to get used to being a man if he moved here permanently?
On the other hand, it would have to be easier to get used to being a man than to being really old and disabled. Already, at sixty-nine, she was more limited in what she could do than she was even five years ago. He couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck in a nursing home, or worse, bedridden for her last few years. He was pretty sure he would want to move here eventually — the question was, did he want to do it within the next few months? Or wait until old age started catching up to her more severely — until she needed knee or hip replacement, for instance? Or until her memory got noticeably worse? The problem with waiting that long was that she might not get the lost memories back when he emigrated over here. And her memory already wasn’t quite as good as it used to be; those little senior moments were happening more often.
Yes, even if he never got completely used to being a man, he was pretty sure he could put up with it a lot better than losing her memory and reason.
“I used to teach children,” Sharun said, after a few moments of quiet thought. “What we call third grade — children around eight or nine years old. Then, when I was thirty-eight, I moved into administration, and I was the principal of a school for children five to ten years old by the time I retired. I’m concerned about what I could do for a living if I moved here — do you think I could get a job teaching children here, after I live here long enough to learn the things I would need to teach, of course? Do you have restrictions on who can teach?”
“You’d have to ask someone else for details,” Syuna said. “We Zyuneban don’t participate in the Stasa schools; most of us teach our children at home, and some women operate small schools with up to ten pupils. We aren’t allowed to work on any larger scale, because... never mind, I don’t suppose you’re interested in that. But I do know that the Stasa schools employ both men and women as teachers.”
That was troubling. “I am,” he said. “Interested in why you can’t have schools with more than ten pupils, I mean.”
“Well,” Syuna said, “about eighty years ago, the Republic, after a campaign of training teachers and building schools in every village throughout the country, made elementary schooling compulsory for all children. It had already been widespread in the big cities for a while, but not enforced. But some ethnic minorities, including the Zyuneban, weren’t happy with the way the schools taught only in Stasa, and even punished children for speaking Zyuni or other languages among themselves at playtime. So we fought for over thirty years for the right to teach our own children in our own language, and this was the compromise that was reached; we can teach our children in Zyuni, but we can only operate small schools with a single teacher. And Zyuneban can’t teach in the Stasa schools, not that many would be interested in doing so.”
“I see,” Sharun said. “We have had similar troubles in my world... such as the government forcing Indian children to attend boarding schools and speak only English there. But we eventually resolved that in a better way, I think... with no such size restriction on the schools the Indians operate themselves.”
They talked about educational policy for a while longer, and Sashtun, sitting on Sharun’s other side, contributed something from his own experiences at different levels of schooling.
“I think you could find a post as a teacher,” he said, “after a suitable period of acclimation to our world. You would need to learn all the things that a child of our people needs to learn — but the portal seems to have already given you knowledge of our written language, including basic arithmetic notation. At least I found I could understand not only written English text, but numbers and certain arithmetical notation, when I visited your world. I think a motivated adult of your age could learn everything else you would need within three years; let’s say a year of reading and weekly meetings with a tutor, and then two years at a teachers' college. From what your son said, I think your savings brought over in gold from your world would pay your expenses for that period of time and more.”
This was starting to seem pretty feasible, then.
After supper, they all went into the parlor again and sat around talking for a while. But Karsan and Hamanta were mostly focused on each other’s unfamiliar but intriguing new selves. As soon as Syuna and Zindla left to go home, Hamanta said: “It’s been a long, tiring day. I think we’d better get to bed soon, too.”
“Of course,” Kashpur said. “Do you need Sashtun to show you to your room?”
“I think we can find it again,” Karsan said. “Mom, could you make sure the kids get to bed soon, too?”
“Of course,” her mother said in his baritone voice, much deeper than her father’s had ever been. “I have a few more things to ask Kashpur and Sashtun about... There’s a lot to consider if I’m going to think of moving here permanently.”
“Good night.” Karsan hugged each of her children before they left the parlor.
As they walked down the hall toward their guest bedroom, Hamanta took Karsan’s hand in his. Karsan smiled up at him and squeezed his hand. This was it. She hadn’t been sure when they first arrived, but over the past nine or ten hours, she’d gotten more comfortable with her new body — or at least less disconcerted by it — and more interested in Hamanta’s. She was ready now, and from the look on his face, so was Hamanta.
“So,” Hamanta said as he closed the door behind them, “do you want to, um —”
In answer, Karsan stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. He kissed back fervently, his tongue darting into her mouth, where she nibbled on it.
“So that’s a yes,” he said with a silly grin on his acne-scarred face.
“Yes!” Karsan exclaimed. She put one arm around his neck and pulled him toward her, and, feeling very daring, untied the sash of his robe with the other hand.
“Hang on a minute,” Hamanta said, breaking from the kiss. “My purse is over there by the bedside — let me get a condom.”
“Oh — right,” Karsan said, blood draining from her face as she realized how caught up in the moment she’d been. She stepped back and watched silently as Hamanta, his robe already flapping open, strode over to the bedside table and pulled the packet of condoms out of his purse.
Karsan had had a vasectomy after Devi was born. But they didn’t know if the portal would translate that into a non-functional female reproductive system. Some preliminary research online suggested that the organ corresponding to the vas deferens in women was merely vestigial, and removing or truncating it wouldn’t prevent conception; but on the other hand, the portal was capable of changing people’s brains so they spoke different languages, and matching the ethnicity of the people surrounding the destination end; it might understand the purpose of the vasectomy and translate it into a tubal ligation or something. Either way, there was no sense taking chances. Whether a pregnant woman would be passed through unchanged, or stuck in one world until she gave birth, they didn’t want to risk it. — Except that a few moments ago, Karsan hadn’t cared about the risk, or even thought about it.
“Do you want to help me get this on?” Hamanta said, tearing open a packet and breaking into Karsan’s morose thoughts.
“Sure,” she said, and walked over toward him, untying her own robe as she went.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
“You mean like when we get home?”
part 20 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Karsan watched his parents slip out of the parlor and practically gagged. It was obvious they weren’t really that tired or sleepy, they were just pretending to be so they could let Grandma babysit the kids and go have sex. Karsan didn’t mind his parents having sex normally; he wouldn’t exist otherwise. But he didn’t like to be reminded of it more often than absolutely necessary. And the idea of them doing it when they were in the wrong bodies was just — ecch.
Worse yet, his little-girl body really was getting sleepy much too early in the evening, though he was trying hard not to show it, having suppressed or hidden several yawns already. Devi and Ami weren’t trying as hard to hide theirs, but they were still chattering excitedly about the stuff they’d seen on their tour earlier, while Grandma talked with the wizards about what things were like here, where she could live and what she could do and what she would need to learn if she moved over here for good. Karsan hadn’t contributed much to either conversation. The tour had been kind of neat, he had to admit, more fun in some ways than some other vacations Mom and Dad had dragged them around on — if he could ignore the huge and unignorable fact that he was a little girl! Seeing adults look at him and his siblings and smile at the cuteness they couldn’t help radiating was enough to put a sour expression on his face every time, but he suspected that he only looked cuter when he scowled. Or perhaps “pouted” would be a more accurate word.
Finally, he startled awake suddenly, realizing he’d slumped over against Ami as he dozed off.
“I think it’s time for these little ones to go to bed,” Grandma said, his deep voice adding insult to injury by reminding Karsan of the voice he’d finally attained after years of sudden, embarrassing mid-sentence voice breaks. “Come on, kids. — Kashpur, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Of course,” Kashpur said. “Do you wish Tashni’s help?”
“I think — well, yes, maybe it would be better if she put the girls to bed. The boys who currently look like girls, I mean,” he added, seeing Karsan’s glare.
Karsan and his siblings got up and followed Grandma down the hall, while Kashpur rang a bell to summon his housekeeper. Grandma knelt down and hugged Karsan, then Devi.
“Do you need anything before you go to bed?” he asked.
“No,” Karsan said, but Devi blurted out “I need to go to the toilet,” and of course, that made Karsan realize he needed to go too. He’d probably been subconsciously ignoring it because she hated the way sitting down to pee made her feel. So Devi led the way toward one of the bathrooms and went in first, and Karsan waited for her.
Tashni found her waiting outside the bathroom door. “Is your brother or sister in the bathroom?”
“Yeah,” Karsan said. “I guess we’re going to bed after that,” and yawned.
“All right. I’ll help you get into nightclothes when you’re done.”
A few minutes later, they were in the guest room with Tashni. Devi stripped out of her robe without a blush and took the little nightgown that Tashni offered her, but Karsan stared defiantly at the housekeeper.
“I can change into that myself,” he said.
“Oh, all right,” Tashni said. “Here you go. Good night,” and she kissed Devi on the cheek, and made as if to kiss Karsan, but he ducked his head and avoided it. Tashni laughed and walked out.
“I’ll turn my back,” Devi volunteered, and after she did, Karsan changed into the nightgown. It wasn’t that much different from the robe he’d worn all day, but the fabric was thinner and it wasn’t dyed, just a plain greyish white. Devi was already climbing into bed and under the covers, and Karsan followed as soon as he tied the sash of his gown. Then Devi reached over and touched something on the bedside lamp, and it went dark.
After a few moments of quiet, Devi softly asked, “You’re still grumpy about all this, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Karsan said. “I wanted to stay home, go to basketball practice and hang out with Tyler and Austin... I should be old enough to stay by myself for a couple of days. Tyler’s parents left him at home when they went off for their anniversary.”
“Tyler has a big sister,” Devi pointed out with frustrating logic. “Maybe that’s why?”
“Maybe,” Karsan grudgingly admitted. “My point is, I’m old enough to take care of myself and not burn the house down or something, and I hate being a little girl, and I’ll be glad when we go home.”
“But wasn’t it neat, seeing all that stuff today?”
“Yeah, kind of. Some of it. The big bonsai trees they’d shaped like people and centaurs and stuff were cool. But —” He fell silent. Then: “Do you like being a little girl?”
“I hated it at first,” Devi said, “back when I first came here. But after a while I got used to it and now I kind of like it. And I’ve missed Zindla and her family since I came home, almost as much as I missed you and Ami and Mom and Dad while I was here. I wish Pasyala could have come to dinner, too — she’s Zindla’s grandma, she’s really nice. And Tyemba, that’s her daddy. Zindla’s, I mean, not Pasyala’s. Anyway. I like it here and I hope we come here on vacation again.”
“I think we probably will,” Karsan said. “It looked to me like Mom and Dad were having way too much fun. They’ll want to come back for a longer vacation in the summer.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
“You mean like when we get home?”
“Hah.”
Devi pestered him for a while longer, but Karsan refused to say anything. It was really kind of cute how Devi was almost eleven and still didn’t know what it meant when Mom and Dad were making eyes at each other. He didn’t want to spoil that.
Hamanta woke feeling very strange; it took him a few moments to remember where he was, that he was a man, and that — Karsan’s head and arm were sprawled across his chest. A little of her drool had gummed up his unfamiliar chest hair. He smiled and stroked her hair gently. A few minutes later, she stirred slightly and opened her eyes.
“Oh!” she gasped.
“Good morning,” he said softly. “How are you feeling?”
“Sore,” she admitted. “But I don’t regret last night,” she added hastily, seeming to see his alarm on his face.
“Now you know how I felt after our wedding night,” Hamanta said. “More or less. We’re both more experienced now, so I hope I didn’t — well. It was your first time in that body, so some soreness is inevitable, but I think I managed to minimize it.”
“Thanks. I don’t regret it. I just wonder if every time we visit this world, it’s going to feel like the first time?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hamanta said. “But on the bright side, you’d probably have to stay here for several weeks before you have a period.”
“Yeah, that’s probably all the compensation I need.”
They kissed, and one thing would have led to another if Karsan hadn’t said, “I need to go pee.”
“It wouldn’t hurt if I did, too.”
They got up, sponged off with the basin of cold water Tashni must have left in their room at some point, and got dressed. They found Ami waiting outside the guest bathroom.
“Good morning,” he said. “Karsan got in there before me.”
“Good morning,” Karsan said. “How did you and Grandma sleep?”
“Pretty okay, I guess.” He looked at them knowingly, but didn’t comment on their recent activities — which might have been audible in the room next door, Hamanta realized.
While he waited for the toilet, and half-listened to Karsan chat with Ami about what they’d seen the day before, Hamanta finally got around to something he’d been looking forward to ever since he’d realized that the portal was real: using his native speaker intuition to analyze the linguistic structure of Stasari. He knew that Devi had forgotten every word of the language itself when she came home, as Sashtun had when he was in Hamanta’s world, but he hoped that he would retain more if he consciously thought about it. Somehow, the shock of his new body, followed by the whirlwind tour of the city, had distracted him from the novelty of having a whole new language shoved into his cranium all at once as though he’d grown up speaking it, and of course he hadn’t had any quiet alone time to analyze the language except brief moments in the bathroom (which were the times his new body had distracted him most... until last night).
By the time Ami and Karsan had taken care of their urgent business, Sharun and Devi were also queued up to use the toilet. Just after Hamanta peed (still taking great pleasure in the novelty of standing up and aiming his stream this way and that in the bowl, but continuing to mull over Stasar’s split ergative as he did so), Tashni came down the hall and told them that breakfast would be ready soon.
They joined their hosts at breakfast, which consisted of flatbread with a mildly savory dipping sauce, some sort of oatmeal or porridge with dried fruit, and strips of roasted goat meat. Sharun spent most of breakfast talking further with Kashpur and Sashtun about Rishpara and the Inupara Republic, their customs, laws, school system, and economic conditions. It seemed he was seriously considering moving here permanently; Hamanta and Karsan asked some questions as well, and answered Kashpur and Sashtun’s questions in turn. Hamanta wasn’t so wrapped up in thinking about how different postpositions were used with different oblique cases that he didn’t notice that Karsan the younger was still sullen and dissatisfied, picking at her food. She wasn’t contributing to the adults‘ conversation, which he took pride in doing back home when they had guests over, nor to her younger siblings’ chat. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring him here. At fifteen, he could probably be trusted by himself for a couple of days... but after the tantrum he’d thrown when they broached the plan of all going over here and staying overnight, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea to give in to him. Hamanta and Karsan could discuss it further in private before their next opportunity to vacation over here.
Hopefully, Hamanta’s parents would be with them then. But getting them to the house in Douglasville would take some careful managing. Since moving to that retirement community in Florida, they’d only visited a handful of times in the last ten years, instead preferring to invite their children, in-laws and grandchildren to visit them. Hamanta and Karsan could simply tell them what was up, but would they believe it? Maybe if Sharun added his — her — corroboration...
After they’d all finished eating, the conversation turned to timing and scheduling. “I’d like to invite a few friends my age to come over and visit here with me,” Sharun said. “Sometime in the next few weeks or months. We’ll have to come and go at a time when Karsan and Hamanta are at home, but other than that, I hope we won’t need to disturb them much.”
“Maybe we can free up our schedules to visit for a day when Mom’s tour group comes over,” Karsan said, “but it’s too early to tell. I don’t have our schedules memorized; I need to look in my calendar to see when we’re available, and if I had it with me, I wouldn’t be able to read it.”
“My schedule is simpler, for the most part,” Sharun said. “But I’d have to be at home to look at my calendar and verify when I’d be free to come over here for a longer stay. And I’ll have to talk to people and see who I can persuade to come with me.”
“I understand,” Kashpur said. “Shall we plan for Sashtun to come over again in a few days and discuss the scheduling with you?”
“Next weekend,” Hamanta suggested. “It should be morning of the second day of the week back home by now; Sashtun could come over on the evening of the sixth day or morning of the seventh, let’s say...” They did the math and figured out how many days and hours that would be in this world.
And then they returned to their guest rooms and changed into the ill-fitting clothes they’d come over here in. Sharun in his skirt suit and the children in their far-too-big clothes looked especially ridiculous, but it was only for a few minutes. Soon they gathered in the room where the cabinet was stored, and Kashpur opened the portal.
“Hurry through,” Sashtun said. “I’ll see you in a few days.” Sharun was already walking through the portal; Hamanta and Karsan waited until their children were through before they followed.
Amanda’s breasts didn’t grow neatly into her bra, unfortunately; he’d put it on under his shirt, but apparently it had slipped out of position sometime before he stepped through the portal and changed back. The kids were having to adjust their clothes, too, and Sharon seemed to be having the same sort of problem with her bra, to judge from how she was discreetly trying to adjust it.
“I’m going to slip into the restroom and adjust my clothes,” she said, already trying to remember as much as she could of her analysis of Stasari. “Let’s talk in a few minutes.”
“Sure,” Carson said.
As Amanda was starting downstairs toward the master bathroom, Carson Jr. charged across the hall from Davey’s bedroom into his own and slammed the door behind him.
Later that evening, after they’d eaten supper and Carson had taken his mother home, and the kids were in all in bed, he and Amanda sat on the couch, half-watching the late news and talking in low voices.
“I really want to go back there sometime,” Amanda said. “Do you still feel the same way, now that you’ve got a little distance from it?”
“Yeah,” Carson said, thinking of last night with Amanda. They’d been like newlyweds again, rediscovering everything new about each other. “We’ll have to figure out when we can take time off again. And whether we want to take the kids next time, or ask Rob to take care of them for a few days in the summer.”
“I think we should consider letting Carson stay home, or stay with Rob, if we go there with Amy and Davey again,” Amanda said. “He was miserable the whole time, it seemed to me.”
“Yeah... I can’t blame him. I was half afraid I’d feel the same way about the transformation, that we all would, but he seems to have been the only one who kept feeling like that after the first hour or so. But... well, I’m okay with leaving him to watch the younger kids for a few hours while we go out to eat with friends, but I’m not sure he’s mature enough to be by himself for two days or more.”
“I’m not sure either. Maybe we need to put off our next extended trip to that world until he is ready. It shouldn’t be too long.”
“I meant to find time to talk with him alone, man to man, sometime today, but things got away from me. Maybe after school and work tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Let’s plan on that.”
The next day, after Carson got home from work, he went up to his oldest son’s room and knocked. “Carson?”
“Yeah?” came his muffled voice.
“Can we talk?”
The door opened. “Come in, I guess,” his son said, and gestured at the desk chair. He sat down on the bed, and Carson took the chair.
“I want to talk about what happened in Sashtun’s world,” he began. “You seem... pretty upset by it. I’m sorry I didn’t notice sooner that you were miserable there — I was distracted, but that’s no excuse.”
“I was a girl,” Carson Jr. said angrily. “What I can’t figure out is why you weren’t freaking out the whole time like I was.”
“I can’t explain it,” Carson said. “It was pretty weird at first, but... after a while, I managed to shift my focus and pay attention to the city our hosts were showing us.”
“And to Mom,” Carson Jr. said with a sarcastic tone. “I guess for you, being a girl temporarily while Mom is a guy could be pretty cool. But why should I be excited about being a little girl?”
“It’s not ideal,” Carson said. “But your mother and I hoped you could get past it and enjoy seeing the strange sights of Rishpara. Sashtun seemed to be doing okay when she was visiting here as a woman, at least after the first few hours, and when Davey told us about his stay there, he didn’t sound too upset about being a girl.”
“Davey’s practically a girl already,” Carson Jr. said sullenly. “And I don’t know about Sashtun, but at least she came over here as an adult, not a little kid.”
“That’s true. About Sashtun, I mean. I don’t want you talking about Davey like that. Are you saying that just because he was excited to return to the other world?”
“Yeah, mostly. He said he was freaking out when he first went there, but after a while he got used to it and liked it.”
“Did you consider that he might have just been excited to see his friends again?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think that was all.”
That was a troubling thought — but not any more troubling than what Carson himself had done when he was female and Amanda was male. He shook his head. “I’m not here to talk about Davey. How are you doing? Are you feeling okay now that we’re back home in our own bodies?”
“Yeah, no thanks to you and Mom.”
“I’m sorry. We couldn’t have known, and — well, we don’t think you’re quite ready to be home alone for two whole days.”
“Yeah, you said that last week when you told us we were going there. But I am old enough to take care of myself.”
“We’ll give you a chance to prove it. Leave you alone for longer and longer periods — but not when we’re in the other world, yet. When we’re just a phone call away.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Carson gave his son a fist-bump, and saying, “See you at supper,” left the room. He paused for a few moments at the head of the stairs, then turned and nudged Davey’s partly-open door.
“Knock knock,” he said.
“Hi, Dad,” Davey said. He was sitting at his desk and drawing — it looked like he might have been sketching some of the tree-sculptures they’d seen in the park near the parliament house.
“Hi yourself. I wanted to talk about... what we did in the other world.”
“Wasn’t it awesome? They have such a neat city. Sometime I want to go out in the country and see what it’s like, too. How soon do you think we can go back?”
“Whoa, slow down,” Carson said with a laugh. “We’ll have to talk with Sashtun next time she comes over, and see when it suits for your mother and I to take a few days off work, and when you kids are out of school... maybe Spring Break, but maybe not until summer. And... I don’t know... we might try to arrange for Carson to stay with somebody else. Uncle Rob, maybe, or Grandma and Grandpa Woolcombe in Florida. How did he seem to you while we were there?”
“She was grumpy all the time. Kind of like I was sometimes when I first went there, but a lot worse.”
“Yeah. What was that like for you? I — maybe I should have talked to you about this sooner...”
Davey talked more than Carson had ever heard him talk about discovering he was a little girl, being treated as a girl by Zindla and her family for a while until Zindla agreed to make him some clothes in boy colors, then switching back to girl clothes so he could participate in Zindla’s coming of age ceremony, and continuing to act more or less girly for the remainder of her stay in the other world. “I figured, maybe I went there so I could learn what it was like to be a girl, and be a better brother for Amy when I came home,” he finally said. “And now Amy knows what it’s like to be a boy, too! And you and Mom and Grandma... and... well, Carson, too, even if he was too grumpy to learn anything.”
Carson smiled broadly. “I’m proud of you, son. You’re very mature for your age.” He thought, but didn’t say, that he could wish his namesake were as mature for his age.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Since Devi didn’t come through the portal speaking Zyuni anymore, because the cabinet was in an apartment whose residents only spoke Stasari, Nidlaya had loaned her a language talisman, a gold necklace with a ruby pendant, which enabled her to speak and understand Zyuni.
part 21 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Devi woke and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, yawning for a few moments before she remembered where she was and what day it was. Then she jumped out of bed and ran to knock on her Grandma’s door. No, Grandpa’s — he wanted her to call him that now, because some of his new friends were confused when they heard his little grandchildren call him “Grandma.”
“Grandpa! Ami! Wake up, we need to get ready!”
It was Zindla and Myanda’s wedding day, and Devi didn’t want to be late. She and Ami had taken a few days off school and come over here to stay with Grandpa so they could go to the wedding. Mom and Dad were here, too, but staying in a nearby hotel, since Grandpa didn’t have that many guest rooms in his apartment. Karsan had stayed home; he had a new job and didn’t want to try to take vacation so soon after starting, or miss basketball practice. And he still didn’t like changing into a girl.
“I’m awake,” Grandpa called out. “I’ll be there directly.”
Devi wasted no more time, running back to her guest room and getting dressed. (She’d bathed the night before.) By the time she was ready, Grandpa and Ami were up and Grandpa was fixing breakfast. They got dressed after eating, and a few minutes later they were on their way.
Mom and Dad would join them in the vestibule of Zindla’s church, but by then, Devi had already gone in the back to meet up with Zindla, Syuna, Pasyala, and Zindla’s girl cousins who would make up the bridal party. Devi’s role was kind of like the flower girl or ringbearer in a wedding back home, something traditionally assigned to one of the bride or groom’s youngest relatives, except that the Zyuneban didn’t actually use wedding rings or scatter flowers in the aisle. Instead, Devi was assigned to carry an intricately carved ivory box that contained some of the ashes of Pasyala’s mother and grandmothers for several generations back, and set it on a pedestal on the dais just before Myanda’s little cousin Ksunya brought in a box with Myanda’s ancestors' ashes and set it on another pedestal. Then the rest of the bride and groom’s attendants filed in, more or less like a wedding back home, and then Myanda, and finally Zindla, looking resplendent in a long blue-green gown with white lacy trim at the collar, sleeves, and hem, and a high headdress.
Since Devi didn’t come through the portal speaking Zyuni anymore, because the cabinet was in an apartment whose residents only spoke Stasari, Nidlaya had loaned her a language talisman, a gold necklace with a ruby pendant, which enabled her to speak and understand Zyuni. What’s more, it let her understand the special church language they used for part of the service, too. Nidlaya didn’t have enough of them for Devi’s entire family, though, so Grandpa, Ami, and Devi’s mom were in the dark for most of the wedding; Nidlaya had given the only other Zyuni-language talisman he had to spare to Devi’s dad. Devi was pretty sure that she and Devi’s other relatives were passing the talisman around so they could all understand part of the ceremony. They all wanted to see Devi act as ashes-bearer in the wedding, although none were as close to Zindla’s family as Devi herself.
The ceremony went off beautifully, and soon everyone was eating, drinking, and dancing in the hall adjoining the sanctuary. Devi danced with Myanda’s ashes-bearer, Ksunya, a boy a couple of years older than her age while she was in this world, and with Myanda himself, as did all of Zindla’s attendants. With Zindla having so many people to dance with and to greet, though, Devi didn’t get to hang out with her much. She understood. They’d have time for that next time Devi came to visit.
Hours later, Devi and her family returned to Grandpa’s apartment, exhausted but happy. She and Dad had given their language talismans back to Nidlaya before they left the dance.
“You all are going home tomorrow?” Grandpa confirmed as they sat around in his living room, having changed out of their formal clothes.
“Yes,” Mom said. “We’ll swing by to pick up Ami and Devi right after breakfast, and do some sightseeing for a few hours. Getting to Kashpur’s penthouse at the third hour after noon should get us home in the early evening back home. The kids need to be back in school the next day.”
“I’ll look forward to when it’s summer back home and you can stay longer.”
“So do we,” Dad said, and Mom squeezed her hand. Devi was old enough now to know what that was about, though still young enough to be a little squicked out by it, as well as fascinated.
“Have you got any more retirees lined up to come through soon?”
“We’ve got two referrals that are thinking about it. At least one of them seems to be seriously winding up her affairs and getting ready to move; she says she’ll talk to us again after she manages to sell her house. They’re both friends of Karul Stinsun, who came through a couple of months ago, and they were at our house to watch her go through along with her daughters.”
“And witness that you weren’t scamming her,” Grandpa said with a laugh. “Karul got used to being a man pretty quickly, by the way — he brought a local Stasa woman as his date to our last American exiles meetup. A co-worker at his new job.”
“Good for him,” Mom said. “I wonder what his daughter and son-in-law will think of that when they come to visit him at Christmas?”
“So your cousins claim that their mother retired to a commune out west somewhere,” Detective Paul Blair said to the man across the desk from him, “but you’re not convinced?”
“They won’t tell me exactly where she went or how to contact her. They said she made a short list of people who were allowed to write to her or visit her, and I wasn’t on it, and the commune doesn’t have Internet or phone.”
“Hmm. You think it might be a cult of some kind?”
“It sounds like it, but... it doesn’t seem in character for Aunt Carol. She’s always been a staunch atheist, ever since she was a teenager; my mom and her argued about it as far back as I could remember, until Mom died a couple of years ago. And if anything, she ridiculed cults like that even more than she did Mom’s and Grandma and Grandpa’s Methodist beliefs, which she mostly kept quiet about except when they were provoking her... anyway. It just doesn’t seem like her. I didn’t even find out she was going until after she was gone. I had a pretty friendly visit with her the last time I was in Georgia, back in August, and then a few months later I noticed that her Facebook account had been deleted. I tried to call her and found out her phone had been disconnected. I asked my cousin Candace about it and that’s when I heard about this business. So I asked more questions, and wasn’t satisfied with the answers... Candace says she sold her house and some of her more valuable but not particularly sentimental possessions, and gave her and Nicole — that’s my other cousin, Aunt Carol’s younger daughter — a lot of stuff, and gave whatever her daughters didn’t want and she couldn’t sell to Goodwill. She apparently kept only a few personal belongings, family photos and things like that, to take with her to the commune. Again, that doesn’t sound like Aunt Carol.”
“You think your cousin is lying?”
“I don’t want to, but... it just doesn’t sound right. I guess it’s okay if Aunt Carol doesn’t want to see me or hear from me; I just want to know she’s okay, and that she hasn’t been scammed out of her life savings or worse.”
“All right. We’ll look into it, and let you know what we find out... if she really is okay and doesn’t want to be contacted, though, we won’t tell you where she is, just that she’s okay. Understand?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll need your cousins' contact information, and... let’s see... where did your aunt live before she sold the house? Do you know of any other friends who might be on this alleged short list of people allowed to contact her, or who might have had contact with her shortly before she left?”
The man started talking, and Detective Blair took notes.
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