Page 56 of Seasonal Fears

He pulls away from the motel and starts for the McDonald’s. As they reach the parking lot, something tickles around the edge of his awareness. Not a Summer, exactly, but something adjacent; something he might be able to use.

Maybe he can give her something to do after all.

The House with the Clocks for Walls

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 14TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

Kim wasn’t kidding when she said they didn’t live far from the farmers’ market. Dodger leads them for about three and a half blocks before she turns down a tiny street that winds like a creek as it heads off into the hills. The houses are narrow and close together, but tall, with more of those high porches Harry noticed on the way in. Most of them are natural, stained wood, or else painted brown to match their neighbors. A few white and beige are mixed into their ranks, but on the whole, it’s a quietly dignified space.

Tim catches Harry studying one of the natural wood-colored houses and smirks. “People around here like to be harmonious,” he says. “They like to ‘vibe.’”

“We get that at home, too,” says Harry. “People don’t want to be landmarks. They want to fit in. I like the wood. My family’s in lumber, so it’s nice to see people respecting it for what it is, not trying to turn it into something it’s not.”

“So you appreciate a subtle paint job?” asks Kim, her voice a mirror of her brother’s smirk. “You like it when a house doesn’t stick out?”

“It depends on the house,” says Harry, starting to feel as if he’s walking into a trap. Melanie squeezes his hand, and he brightens. She’s not limping badly yet; that will probably concern him later, since he wants her to feel pain enough to be human, but right now, it means he’s not dragging his injured girlfriend through residential Berkeley, and it makes him feel better about what’s going on. “I mean, my grandparents live in a literal—What the fuck is that?”

“That” is one of the small Victorian-style houses he’s been seeing jammed in amongst the Queen Annes and the ranch houses ever since they crossed the city limits. It’s roughly the same size and era as most of its neighbors. It belongs here. And that’s where its similarity to the houses around it ends, because if there’s a color, it’s painted on this house. Every step in the stairs leading up to the porch is different, as is every board in the porch itself, and in the fence that surrounds the garden, which is a seasonally impossible riot of flowers that almost takes his breath away.

The window frames are neon. The windows themselves are patchworks of carnival glass, spattered with an assortment of suncatchers. Even the shingles are painted, no two touching in the same color range, much less the same actual color. Harry stops dead, pulling Melanie to a halt with him, and just stares.

There’s a car in the driveway, a reasonably new Mini Cooper, parked next to a much older VW van. The van has been painted in tie-dye swirls, as garish as the house. The Mini Cooper appears at a distance to have dodged the six-year-old’s fever dream that is everything around it, but from where they are now, Harry can see that the paint is designed to change colors depending on the angle it’s viewed from. The car, which looks like a calm, metallic blue, is actually a dozen colors in one.

Just the thought of it gives him a headache.

“What’s wrong?” asks Kim. “Doesn’t respect the wood? Sticks out too much?”

“It hurts my eyes,” says Melanie. “I think it hurts everyone’s eyes. It would hurt a mantis shrimp’s eyes. How is this allowed?”

“Turns out we’re at the intersection of three HOAs, and each of them has different rules, and we didn’t actually agree to abide by any of them,” says Dodger, taking a step back to join them. “The house pre-dates the HOAs, and that means we weren’t required to join up. So there’s nothing anyone can do to stop us.”

“Rules lawyer,” says Tim fondly.

“Yup,” says Dodger. “You would be too, if you had to live with my cuckoo-bananas brother in your head all the time.”

Tim and Kim exchange a glance, and Harry can’t help feeling like Dodger has just said something insensitively hurtful, although he can’t really imagine what it is. He frowns instead, and asks, “So this is your house?”

The woman in her veil of rainbows is far too tastefully dressed to have designed a home like this one, and she doesn’t have the look of someone who would spend enough time outdoors to have a garden like that. Her skin’s too pale, although she’s darker than Melanie; she’d burn to a crisp if she even tried it. Plus her hair clashes with at least half the fence, and she seems too self-possessed to have done that on purpose.

“Yup,” she says, sounding smug. “Bought it free and clear when the last owner passed away, gave Roger carte blanche with the exterior, as long as he didn’t try to control too much about the interior decorating. Which he didn’t, because he’s a great guy who doesn’t actually care whether the couch is placed at a forty-five-degree or forty-seven-degree angle.”

“Forty-seven won,” says Kim quietly, to Harry. “Forty-five had too many divisible factors.”

“Huh,” he says, for lack of anything else to contribute to the conversation. This doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense.

“Going through the garden may make you a little uncomfortable,” says Dodger to Jack and Melanie. “It’s mid-June there, and I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be awake come mid-June.”

“I’m Ascendant, not Incarnate,” says Jack. “I’ll be fine. Do you have another way in, that won’t drag the living Winter through the middle of June?”

“Wait,” says Harry, who suddenly wants to be in that garden with a longing verging on addiction, one that doesn’t leave much room in his body for anything else. “What do you mean, it’s mid-June in the garden? That doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be one time there and a different time somewhere else.”

“Go through the front gate and find out,” suggests Dodger. To Jack, she says, “We can take her in through the garage, if you’re really concerned, but if the coronation has only just started, she shouldn’t be far enough along for it to matter.”

“Mel’s a special case,” says Jack. “Her father took some notes from yours.”

Dodger’s eyes darken, pale gray turning stormy, in the kind of change that shouldn’t be possible. Harry notices, but doesn’t wonder about it the way he should; he’s already drifting toward the open gate in the multicolored fence around the garden, unable to resist the pull of the magical words “mid-June.” Melanie, her hand still in his, follows along, not resisting, even if she doesn’t seem to share his desire to see what’s in that garden.

The closer he gets, the less ridiculous Dodger’s claim seems. Some of these flowers can’t be thriving in February, no matter how mild the climate here is. It’s not possible. There’s a tomato plant in full flower, some of its branches already drooping with heavy green fruit, and the temperature is at least ten degrees warmer than it was on the sidewalk.