Page 23 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Alice comes home. No matter how hard it is, no matter what it costs her, Alice comes home.”

—Laura Campbell

Standing on a backcountry road in Buckley Township, Michigan, at long last

WHAT THE HELL IS wrong with that house?” demanded Sally, gesturing toward the old Parrish place with her spear, like she thought the house might be some sort of terrible monster she could square off against if she just tried hard enough.

The house did not oblige her by getting up to attack, but sat there in its horrifying splendor. I smiled.

“That, my friend, is home.”

“Does it look like that on purpose?”

“No, we think it’s cursed.”

Sally blinked. “Cursed.”

“Yup.”

“But you live there, voluntarily.”

“Semi.”

The old Parrish place was a fairly classic example of middle-American farm architecture turned gothic and just a little menacing. The windows seemed to follow people as they moved, watching them with an oddly malicious expression. Houses shouldn’t be able to look malicious, and yet this one did. Three stories tall, or maybe more, depending on the light, with a decrepit wraparound porch that was sturdier than it looked, thanks to both my own efforts and Cynthia keeping an eye on the place when I was out of town, and painted the leprous gray-green of rotting flesh, it was not the sort of place anyone should really be glad to see.

I had never been happier to see a house in my entire life.

The porch swing was rocking gently back and forth, meaning our appearance had startled a few of the local tailypo, who liked to curl up there when there weren’t any strangers around. Good. They needed to see us sooner than later. I hefted the hamper Phoebe had given us with one hand, my other arm still wrapped firmly around Thomas, keeping him from toppling over.

He’d woken up about ten minutes after Phoebe finished delivering her tincture, but had remained groggy and only half-present since then, with the bleary gaze and slightly slurred speech of a man who’d had far too much to drink. I was just grateful that Helen had been able to open her doorway this close to the house.

Thomas managed to stay on his feet as we crossed the street, and with Sally on his other side, we were able to make it up the porch. I eased him onto the porch swing as my backpack cheered uproariously, the mice rejoicing in their return to one of the places they recognized as home.

Sally watched warily as I shrugged out of my pack, putting both it and the hamper next to Thomas, and moved to the rail, where I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled, high and shrill and piercing. Sally winced.

“What, the mice aren’t loud enough, you have to break my eardrums on your own?”

“Not quite,” I said. The bushes rustled. “See, the man who lived here before us axe-murdered his entire family as a sacrifice to a swamp god he swore was talking to him. We’ve never been able to find any proof the swamp god existed, but most ghosts don’t like the house, and it may be because of whatever convinced him he should make hamburger out of his wife and kids. The Covenant bought it sight unseen when they decided to banish Thomas to the hinterlands in order to get him out from underfoot.”

The fact that they hadn’t bothered to scout the area before sending Thomas here made it so much easier to convince their strike team that they’d wiped us all out, back when they finally came to clean up their little mess. That was, oh, forty-five years ago at this point, and the sting of it was still fresh. I whistled again. The rustling in the bushes got louder.

This time, I stepped back, not repeating my whistle, and gestured for Sally to keep quiet. She blinked but held her tongue. A few seconds later, half a dozen long-tailed, stripy bodies burst out of the bushes and swarmed onto the railing, chittering.

They looked like ring-tailed lemurs if they had been designed by someone trying to spin a toy line out of the idea of plush toys whose tails could double as boas, bondage devices, and rappelling lines. Their bodies were a little more than a foot and a half in length, while their tails hit five feet, easily. The smallest wrapped its tail defensively around itself, forming a cocoon of stacked stripy rings that covered its entire head. They had masks, like lemurs, or raccoons, and clever little hands, and all of them were staring at me.

“Sally, meet the tailypo,” I said. The mice cheered. Sally stared.

“Tailypo,” she said, finally. “Like the ghost story you tell on Girl Scout campouts. That tailypo?”

“I’ve heard the story, and they’re nowhere near that vicious most of the time, although I don’t recommend cutting their tails off to test the theory. Especially because the house conspiracy is mine, in that nebulous way that things which don’t belong to you can be yours, and I’d be upset if someone hurt them.”

Sally gave me a sidelong look. She seemed to have a near-infinite repertoire of ways to look at me like I’d just said something ridiculous. “Conspiracy?”

“It’s the collective noun,” I said. “A group of fish is a school, a group of geese is a gaggle, and a group of lemurs is a conspiracy.”

“So they’re lemurs?”

“Sort of. We call them the American lemur, and we’re pretty sure they’re primates—not a lot of good phylogeny when it comes to creatures science doesn’t admit exist.” One of the tailypo made a chirring sound. I whistled softly. “The tailypo got labeled folklore pretty early on in European colonization, and no one managed to convince the people who were putting things in ‘real’ or ‘not real’ boxes that they needed to be put in the ‘real’ one. Didn’t help that the Covenant of St. George labeled them too ridiculous to exist, and did their best to make sure no one who saw a live one told anybody about it.”