Archive of Our Own ^beta

Books stood one by the next on a shelf, a string of beautifully bound hardcovers, shelf upon shelf of them, bookcase after bookcase, the would-be pride of any private collection.  Works on philosophy, the loss- and treachery-steeped complete works of William Shakespeare, treatises of physics and topology.  Classics from antiquity through the Renaissance and on through modern day.

A paw drew lazily across several bindings, stopping at last at one piece that stood out most singularly.  Well used and careworn, though still fighting the good fight, it was clear that the book had seen better days.

Withdrawing it from its snug place, nestled there happily — or at least unobtrusively — between its cohorts, Snoopy looked at it, considering.

Walking back to the sofa, he paused and sighed, as if tired and unsure, then sat.

It was quiet in this room, cozy and snug, the warm and slow ticking of a clock the only sound, but at this moment it seemed as if eternity itself weighed heavily upon all.

'It is said “That the house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose... because domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium.”

'Well, I don't know about all of that, but is it so in practice? Moreover: even in granting this, can we indeed then go on to suppose that it necessarily grants peace, and is not instead only an oubliette of one's own devise, its alluring and arguably even beguiling form belying its unintended and presumably unforeseen function?'

Snoopy set down the book before him, pensive and casting a long look into the sunset and breeze-driven grass beyond the window.

'Perhaps the choicest of pithy summations might be to quote King Richard the Second, by way of the bard: “I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends....” — but I leave it to you, dear friends, to judge of the cast to follow who is weighed and who is measured, and who among them might be found wanting. But think upon it carefully: not all is always so simple a matter to discern.'

The book sat there on the drawing room coffee table, askew in a shadow, its title indiscernible, a sense of the forlorn about it, forgotten by all.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Lightning flashed and thunder bellowed as the little red wagon trundled onward along a dark and stormy road.

Up in the hills, under a blue sky, Doctor Alphonse Mephesto returned from transit with an unseen, unsensed hitchhiker from the Netherbyss.  No young intern, he, nor were his facilities as paltry as those that City Hospital offered.

Meanwhile, Snoopy had been in the mood for something sweet.  He might have gone a little overboard, though.  The bread was thick toasted sesame seed-sprinkled slabs with generous knobs of salted butter and jam, the fish course trout narsharab with a side of small-cubed turnip and apple slices (Granny Smith — to balance with the sweetness of the meats' sauces — cored, quartered, and sliced into medium-thin disc segments) and simmered in white grape juice.

Lucy had stared down at her plate, her meal staring back at her.

She had fussed about that.

She had fussed about the sweetness of the balsamic-fig-date sauce with the duck, not yet having tasted it with the shredded brioche stuffing with highlights of apple cider, apricot, prune, cranberry, crushed chestnut, and giblets — a separate dish entirely, the ducks themselves being stuffed with orange wedges, sliced onions, sage, butternut squash, and just a few slices of pear — cooked with champagne and white vermouth in a pot that had been buttered half of an inch thick before filling and heating.

She had fussed about the duck meat clashing with the red wined shepherd's pie-stuffed Yorkshire pudding set with clarified butter, and accompanied by a Guinness-and-cream-based Portobello and Vidalia brown gravy from veal stock with just the right touch of fresh coarse-ground black pepper in the back, and sides of peas and pickled cucumber spears.

And of course, she had fussed about the pork pies.

'Gauche, being lamb-based, but not so far from the mark as to call your guess utterly and irredeemably incorrect,' Snoopy had replied, his left-handed assessment scoring more cuttingly than his absent-minded effort might merit, he being rather more concerned with enjoying his dinner than with entertaining her ways.

That faded immediately though, her eye glinting as she caught sight of the cinnamon and raisin pound cake waiting with glazed pecans and cashews adorning it, the coffee already dripping away in Snoopy's specially commissioned slow-espresso machine and adding its own delightful scent to the evening meal, sweetened condensed milk awaiting the steam to come, with muscovado to complement it all.

“Lucy, could you please stop being such a complete and utter fussbudget ?” Charlie Brown asked, practically begging, well aware that they were all there only at Snoopy's sufferance and so driven to risk incurring her wrath.

Linus cleared his throat, sure that his observation would be met poorly, “Has anyone else noticed that every time that we stop anywhere on a dark and stormy night, things go horribly badly soon thereafter? Are such stops really necessary? We might be better off just keeping to ourselves.”

His mind was on his ring again.

The patterns had changed, and that seemed to signal some new adventure, and those were never a good thing.

“I've noticed that you like to use big words like 'thereafter ' unnecessarily,” Lucy retorted, “which reminds me, speaking of necessities: Snoopy, the main bathroom is out of toilet paper again.”

'Third floor down, west wing, second storage room on the left,' he replied; then, after a moment's consideration, wondered Or was that the second floor, east wing, third storage room on the right...? but it was too late, Lucy having already gone off in search of it.

That had all been before the storm had hit and they had had to move on.

Now, with no other shelter in sight, nor any such remotely as promising as this along all of the weary miles preceding it, the doghouse pulled into the driveway.

The man who answered the door — the doctor or professor, clearly, given his doctor-y professor-y white robe, the bright mustard-yellow flower-bedecked Hawaiʻian shirt beneath it notwithstanding — was vibrant and full of life, jovial, welcoming, boisterous, filling every space with his presence, but without overshadowing others in the process, instead drawing them out easily and inviting them in with his open warmth.  He was also a shoe-in as a Marlon Brando Look-Alike.

“Well, I see nothing unusual at all about a group of eight year olds traveling on their own and suddenly showing up on my doorstep. Welcome! Welcome, one and all! Won't you please come inside? You're just in time to see my great experiment's success!” he announced, throwing open his arms, his voice a similarly dry and not-quite-wispy near sound-alike for Marlon Brando's, “Oh, but where are my manners, honestly? I haven't even introduced myself! I am Doctor Mephesto.”

He paused for a moment, a startled and ill-at-ease look on his face as he pointed disbelievingly, his voice a little faint and shaking, “What — what is that?”

Charlie Brown turned, looking around to see what in the world he could possibly mean.

“That! Right there; don't you see it?” the doctor pressed, worrying that he was losing his mind.

“Oh. That's... a hand. She's been following us everywhere. We keep hoping that if we all ignore her, then she'll just go away eventually. Don't worry though, she's harmless... well, mostly harmless — she is a little evil, piling a bunch of whipped cream in your hand while you sleep and then tickling your nose, or replacing the sugar with salt,” Charlie Brown explained.

The Little Red-Haired Girl's hand stood on its wrist and wiggled its fingers in a friendly fashion to the doctor, looked back and forth at the others, then looked back down at the floor as if feeling rejected, and looking every bit the part of a sock puppet minus the sock.

“She? Right. Yes, of course. A... sensible... course of — look, is that really a.... No, never mind. I don't want to know,” the doctor said, shaking his head in a careful attempt to put it all out of his mind, “Yes, well... come in, come in!”

He turned slowly, quite in contrast to the energy of his personality, almost as if his joints were stiff, his very bones aching.

They passed through a spacious foyer and on into a grand room that seemed to function solely as a central junction, doors and arched doorways leading off in every direction, and two sets of gently curving stairs that led to entirely separate wings, with a balcony-hall encircling the whole.

Stuck in a corner, collecting dust, abandoned by even the spiders, was a small, old photograph of him and what the Peanuts gang took to be his wife together, not terribly well-heeled, but seemingly happy, he all smiles and she... well, she also present.

A more recent, very large and well-lit painting of his wife, her fur coat, her diamond earrings, a tray of bonbons beside her.

Charlie Brown cocked his head at the latter, puzzled and uncomfortable.  Was there some sense of hauteur, or was it only his imagination?

“Ahh, yes,” the doctor said, seemingly having read Charlie Brown's mind and smiling wistfully, “All of that and more. Anything to see her happy.”

Past this was a selfie of wife and presumably daughter at some fair or something, a festive carnival atmosphere evident in the background.

More photos of their daughter encouraged to learn and pursue whatever she wished to study, one course after another.

Photos of his wife and daughter together, all over the world, their increasing affluence evident with each new picture.  Clad identically, the girl was the very spitting image of her mother.

Linus couldn't help thinking that the wife looked smug, completely self-satisfied.

“Alphonse, why is there a dog in here? Do you have any idea how creepy that is?” came a woman's voice, “It could have rabies! Haven't you been watching the news? There's a new and virulent strain going around in some parts, and that dog might be a carrier.”

The gang turned at this intrusion, finding the wife standing there, a box of hazelnut chocolates in hand, her eyes taking them all in with a dismissive glance, yet seeming to pause only for a moment and then pass right over The Little Red-Haired Girl's hand as if it weren't there at all.

“Sarah, please, the storm. They—”

“That's right!” the daughter interjected in a huff, “There's a new strain of rabies making people go crazy, and that dog might have it. Don't you pay any attention to the news?”

“Grete—”

But they were gone, storming off to another room, an orange Toblerone between them.

“Well, I knew dog germs were bad!” Lucy scowled, “We should call the En-A-Es-A and have him quarantined.”

“Why would we quarantine him if there's no sign of sickness nor reason to suspect it? That would be like evacuating dead bodies. And who is the En-A-Es-A?” Linus asked.

“It's an initialism, like saying 'dur ' instead of 'doctor ',” she explained carefully.  Linus simply didn't understand a thing, but it became quite trying to explain everything to him all of the time.

“That... that's just not right in so many ways,” Linus objected, “Doctor is abbreviated 'dee-are ,' making it an abbreviation, but you don't pronounce it that way and it's not an initialism. An initialism would be something like 'F.B.I.,' where you pronounce the first letter of each word, except that there's no such thing as the 'En-A-Es-A,' only the 'N.S.A.,' which is another initialism; 'En-A-Es-A ' spells NASA, which you can and do pronounce as if it were a word, making that an acronym, but they don't have anything to do with plagues. Nor does the N.S.A.. And then there are anagrams, of course, where the letters of a word or sentence can be rearranged to spell another, as with 'silent ' and 'listen,' not to be confused with palindromes, where a word or sentence flip-flops in the middle, with each half spelling the other backward, as with 'Able was I, ere I saw Elba '.”

“Oh yeah?” she scoffed, “Well, you're an anachronism!”

“Come here. You need to watch this special bulletin! It's important. They're talking about the rabies,” Sarah's voice filtered in from the other room.

“That's right!” Grete's voice followed suit, “It's important! They're saying to seek shelter and stay inside because of this plague. You need to come here and watch this! We could all die!”

“Yes. Of course. I'll be there shortly,” he replied, then turned to the children, saying quietly with a wink, “but first, let me show you my work!”

As he worked the door to the basement laboratory, his wife called out once more.

“You need to stop losing yourself in your stupid pursuits, get a real hobby and join the real world!”

“That's right!” his daughter's voice chimed in, parroting her mother once more, “You need to get a real hobby and join the real world, and stop losing yourself in your stupid pursuits!”

“Cherry liqueur chocolates, Mini-Me?” Sarah's voice asked just as the door shut behind them.

He showed them around his lab, a little dispirited and moving more slowly and carefully than ever, the record player automatically beginning to play a song upon his entry.  The wall of computers, the telepods, his notes on the whiteboard and scattered around the desk.  It felt vibrant, or more accurately once-vibrant, the song's pained lament painting another and wholly sadder picture of emptiness.

“You see, children, the netherporter isn't some science fictional Star Trek teleportation thing, breaking down matter crudely and building it up again atom by atom, as if the soul were an irrelevant fancy and we but so many Lego pieces awaiting three dimensional printing in accordance with some temporary information file held in a volatile buffer. Nor is it a hyperspatial tunnel to bypass distance, nor some fanciful warp field to bend the laws of inertia and momentum. Not at all: this, my little friends, relies upon dropping back into the Netherbyss, a single point coterminous, as it were, with all points of space — and who knows, maybe time itself — such that one's location becomes smeared across them all, like an image reflected along a pane of glass held almost parallel to the line of sight, that image then occupying the glass's entire length rather than a simple one-to-one correspondence of aspect ratio, then snapping back into place at one's destination! But I needed a guinea pig with which to live-test the apparatus....”

He looked around at this, as if listening to some sound that only he could hear.

'We have a cat,' Snoopy offered.

Doctor Mephesto picked back up at this, answering a question that they hadn't asked.

“No, my little friends, I didn't see things: I had visions of them. The Netherbyss is a blind spot to all of one's senses, unmoored and unbounded, but oh, the sights that you'll see, if only you'll try!”

He broke into an unnerving laugh at this, some private joke told to him by the reality that lay beneath reality.

As he did, it began to rain fish and frogs outside.

“Sir? Have you looked at the weather lately? There seems to be a rather unusual storm coming,” Linus asked, his ring finger itching furiously as he watched the window.

“Yes... that's been happening a lot around here lately. Very strange, but clearly just some coincidental weather anomaly — a water spout somewhere, or perhaps a Mad Fishmonger; nothing to do with my experiments, of course.”

Perhaps it was the way that he stood, perhaps the lighting, perhaps only a trick of the eye, but something about him at that moment gave the appearance of an enormous insect of some sort, a fly perhaps, or a dung beetle, it was hard to say.

Noticing the gang's eyes upon him, and the way that they were edging away and clearly trying not to give the appearance of doing so, he felt the need to explain further.

“It seems that my body might be deteriorating in this world's physics,” he explained, “Exposure to the physics of the Netherbyss might have a certain minor side-effect, but I am sure that it will all work itself out in the end.”

Snoopy shook his head in wonder at this, 'You know, it's really none of my business what you do, but as a world famous orthopedic surgeon, I really think that you should have your condition looked at. That just can't be healthy.'

“But not to worry: at last, my work is done. It worked, I've proven it. It might need a few tweaks, some marketing, but it will mean the end of transportation logistics — planes, trains, automobiles, all of it gone in an instant, deader than the brachiosaurus. Just think of it, children: if an earthquake were to occur somewhere, doctors — experts from all around the world — could be there in minutes!”

He began a round of raucous coughs at this.

“Perhaps the machine needs a little more work,” he admitted as the cough subsided, his throat now hot, his voice rasping, and he unable to shake the sense of someone, some... thing, hovering over his shoulder, standing beside him, passing nearby but just outside of his line of vision, “Perhaps it is instead this rabies variant that Sarah mentioned — yes, that's it, surely it is just this supposèd plague, and not my machine at all. I... I just need some rest is all. Just... a little rest....”

He was exhausted, but his work had borne its fruit, at last.  Now he would see his family provided for as well as he had ever dreamt to.

“...but I fear that my dearest Sarah has found a... well, let us say a 'special friend  ',” he explained, straining in pain over and for the right turn of phrase without explaining too much to the children, straining as well to find his voice, his throat parched, “an accountant with a handshake like limp broccoli and the personality of tepid dishwater.”

“We're leaving Alphonse. Don't get all creepy and follow us,” Sarah called down from above, three pumpkin spice chais in hand, with plenty of whipped cream, and a box of cinnamon doughnuts, en route to a family outing without him, looking forward with excitement to her new love.

No longer was she his, if ever she truly had been, and now she spurned him.

“That's right!” Grete added, “Don't be creepy and follow us. We're going to the movies with—” but she didn't finish her thought, a sharp look from Sarah warning her not to share unnecessary information with a stranger.

“I love you...” he whispered, but the acoustics of his laboratory betrayed him, and she'd heard him.

“That's really creeping me out, you know. Go get your own family,” Sarah said, turning away with Grete, to see to their future and her own happiness, though not quite leaving, waiting instead to see if he would indeed rally for his doubtlessly obnoxious attempt to get in one last word.

His own family, he wondered, he had thought that he had.

“That's right!” came Grete's inevitable chorus, “Go get your own family and stop being so creepy!”

He nodded, feeling empty.

Pointless.

Lock, stock, and teardrops, he reflected, chuckling bitterly.

His will at last broken, he slumped in his chair at the control console, his now-grey hand slipping unnoticed across the dials and switches.

Unnoticed, too, the machine began to power up, a quiet hum building in the background, the sending pod set to send the receiving pod... wherever it might go to.

Seeing him sitting there, dying of a broken heart, his body now a desiccated husk, they realized that they were free of him — his useless puttering, his inane chatter — and that their lives had so much brighter a future now that they were rid of him, their burden.

A circuit fried in the netherporter, flame climbing rapidly up the wall and through the cracks, the house sure to follow.

There was to be no sweet Esmeralda, no gourd of water from her girdle, to his degenerated form.

One last flickering portal opened from the machinery's dying spasms.  It was brief, but present long enough for all to see the hillside through it, the small glade on the far side of an ancient tree, and the axe that arced out of the periphery of the wobbly field as it crashed through Frieda's head and embedded itself wetly in the tree trunk.

His dying thought upon seeing this was Oh my, now that was terribly unfortunate.

Someday he would be gone.  That day had come for the poor girl with the naturally curly hair already, it seemed, but so too had it come for him, he knew.

Sarah could find pleasure in life now, unshackled of his constant demands, and Grete would be free forevermore of his influence, her stomach at last able to unknot.

How they had put up with him they had no idea, but they could now leave his corpse behind, never to look back nor think of him again, and never again would his shadow darken their lives.

As the house burned, its technological treasures, if treasures they were, and any age of marvels that they might otherwise have ushered in, unlike those treasures of the House of Usher, burned with it.

As they drove away, Charlie Brown shook his head in wonder, asking the silent room in general “What just happened? What was all of that? What did we just see? Were we even supposed to see... whatever that was?”

Linus turned away, disgusted, revolted, and saddened by all that they had witnessed.  Of all of the horrors that they had seen in the course of events since the Deadite incursion, this was by far the worst, in its way, and would likely remain so even against the unimaginable evils yet to come.  A zombie apocalypse might have been less horrifying, less inhuman.

Chimichangas tonight, Snoopy decided, eyes on the road as he headed south, Roanoke vaguely his general destination, using baked beans, I think. I suppose that I could fry up some potatoes and onions for the kids, along with some liver disguised under grease and flavored bread crumbs. Liven it all up a little with some panko...

He needed a pick-me-up — they all did — and he certainly wasn't in the mood for anything sweet that evening.

Nobody was.

Even Lucy had the good taste to reflect on matters.

Far behind them, the merest onion skin separating them, Doctor Mephesto was embraced by the Netherbyss, and in finding peace there and some measure of solace, so embraced it in turn.  What capricious spirits dwelt therein, and what further permutations of existence might stem in their skeins from that realm's unworldly emanations, were yet to be discovered — the Netherbyss, that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.