Page 58 of Seasonal Fears

The man is waiting there to meet him. He’s a tall, scrawny guy, with slightly overlong brown hair, streaked with white the same way Dodger’s is, and eyes that match and mirror Dodger’s behind the lenses of his own glasses, which are nowhere near as fashionable as Tim’s. He’s dressed like someone who was a middle-aged English professor by the time he turned sixteen, brown trousers, a white button-down shirt, and a brown wool cardigan with honest-to-God patched elbows. He’s a walking cliché, and he looks like he belongs on the porch of this technicolor nightmare house about as much as the house looks like it belongs to the neighborhood.

He scans Harry and dismisses him at the same time, turning his attention toward the gathering in the garden below. “You could have turned the summer off, you know,” he chides gently. “I can always plant more flowers.”

“Spoken like the man who just tells the universe what to do and doesn’t have to work for it,” Dodger replies. “It took me a long time to get those equations exactly right. I’m not taking them down just so strangers can walk across our yard more easily.”

“I think these are strawberry plants,” says Kim. “Growing right up through the middle of the path like they belong there. Oh, look. They’re putting out fruit now.”

“It took you five minutes,” says the man.

“That’s a long time!” objects Dodger. She reaches the top of the stairs, puts her hand on the man’s shoulder. Harry sees them together for the first time. If the eyes and the white streaks in their hair hadn’t been enough, their faces would have given the game away. They have the same bone structure, under all the natural differences created by their being two different people, two different genders, two different heights. They couldn’t have been anything but brother and sister. Even parent and child would have introduced too many genetic variables.

“Do you have a couch where I can set her down?” Harry asks, a little desperately. He doesn’t want to admit that she’s getting heavy, still feels a bit like that would be failing her, but she is, and he doesn’t want to drop her now. Not after getting her to the top of the stairs when he didn’t think he could. Not after running away from home when she said they had to.

Not ever.

“Oh, sure,” says the man. “Sorry about that. I live with barbarians now, and it’s done a number on my manners. Come on, this way.”

He gestures for Harry to follow as he turns and heads into the house. Harry does, Dodger behind him, grumbling about how some people come from uncivilized cities where it snows all the damn time and no one knows how to drive, and maybe they shouldn’t call decent mathematicians barbarians.

Harry is beginning to understand three things with terrible clarity. First, that these people don’t come with footnotes: they’re so accustomed to being themselves, whatever that means, that they no longer stop to explain anything. After several days of Jack’s clumsy attempts at explaining everything, that’s almost welcome. Second, that they’re essentially harmless, wrapped up in their own lives and hobbies and interests to such a degree that there isn’t room for much outside the tiny world they’ve crafted for themselves. He’s known adults like this before, teachers mostly, people who had decided having a passion for a profession was the same thing as having a personality. They’ve always seemed like useful cautionary tales to him, people whose choices are so obviously wrong that they make it easier to make better choices on his own.

Thirdly, and finally for now, that these are the most dangerous people he’s ever met in his life. They’re too calm, too casual about impossible things. For them, this is just the way the universe works, and if something contradicts that understanding, they’ll either change it or dispose of it, and he’s not sure which is worse. Even more, he’s not sure he’d have a choice if they decided one of those things had to happen.

The interior of the house is old-fashioned, dark and narrow, and contradictorily filled with light. None of the windows are anything other than clear, honest glass, and Harry pauses to blink at one of them, trying to reconcile the exterior with what he’s seeing now. These can’t be the same windows.

“Dodger lets me do whatever I want to the outside, but she says having rainbows on her whiteboards gives her headaches, and I’ve learned not to mess with her math.”

“Learned the hard way,” grumbles Dodger. “He lost gravity privileges for a week last time he distracted me while I was trying to work.”

The front door opens on a small dining area, with a table that has somehow managed to not attract any clutter apart from a lace table runner and a bowl of fruit. That may be the least realistic thing about this whole place. The man gestures for Harry to follow through the door on the other side, which deposits them in a living room like something out of a murder mystery, walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, seating consisting of a couch and two loveseats arrayed around a small fireplace. It should seem heavy and oppressive, like the furniture itself, all of which is clearly antique and made of heavy maple. Instead, it feels homey, lived-in, and alive in the calm, vital way of well-maintained wood. Harry ignores most of it, making a beeline for the couch, where he kneels and stretches Melanie carefully out atop the cushions.

She still isn’t moving. He places his hand against her chest, where he knows her heart is. (Harry got in trouble in eighth grade for lecturing a science teacher about human anatomy, when the man made the mistake of claiming the human heart was located inaccurately. He’d been simplifying for his younger audience. He hadn’t anticipated a boy who had all but decided to become a cardiothoracic surgeon solely for the purpose of saving his best friend’s life.) She still doesn’t move.

“Hey, Mel,” he says. “It’s winter again. You can wake up now. That weird lady from the farmers’ market took us home to meet her brother, and he’s going to help us figure out where we’re going next. But we can’t do that until you wake up, because I’ll be honest: if you don’t, I’m going to renounce this stupid crown before it causes me any more problems, and head home to apologize to my parents.”

Maybe “if you don’t stop being dead, I’m leaving” isn’t the best way to get his girlfriend to come back to life, but since when have they ever tried to do anything the best way? He takes his hand away and sits back on heels, waiting.

The traditional thing to do here would be to kiss her, but even though he has permission from her a hundred times over, that’s always felt a little weird to him, like crossing a line so obvious it shouldn’t even have to be drawn. So he just waits, as the others crowd into the room, Dodger and her brother—the threatened Roger, he assumes, and hopes they don’t have a third sibling named “Codger” or something—leaning against the wall with a calm self-assurance that he can’t help seeing as a little predatory. They know nothing in this place can hurt them, and so they don’t worry about it.

He gets the feeling they don’t worry about much of anything.

The teens from Starbucks are next, Tim and Kim, placing themselves to either side of Roger and Dodger, respectively, like they belong there. He can see the resemblance between them when they array themselves like that, despite the wide dissimilarity of their coloration and personal styles. They’re a family, two sets of twins from decades apart, and he envies them for their obvious comfort with each other and the general strangeness of the situation.

Jack comes into the room after them, and while she looks a little concerned by the sight of Melanie still motionless on the sofa, she doesn’t rush to her side, but hangs back near the door, leaving room for the next woman to step inside.

She’s shorter than Roger and Dodger, taller than Kim and Tim, with strawberry blonde hair half the girls at school would kill for, and a dusting of freckles across her nose. Saying her eyes are blue is like saying Mel is pale: technically true, but such an understatement that it verges on a lie. Her eyes are like the wings of those weird butterflies in South America, the ones that are dark and light at the same time, and there’s no way they’re natural. He stops looking at her. She’s giving him a headache.

“Why’s there a corpse on the couch?” asks the woman he doesn’t know. “It seems unhygienic.”

“Hello to you, too, Erin,” says Roger. “The corpse—”

“Melanie,” interjects Jack.

“—Melanie,” says Roger, smooth as anything, “is one of the Winter candidates. She’s trying for the crown, and she’s apparently entangled enough with her season that the shock of stepping into the summer Dodger made for my garden sort of, well…”

“Killed the shit out of her,” says Dodger.

“You have such a way with words, sis,” says Roger.