The House Next Door, Chapter Two

How Mini-Flash Juniper made it, she would never know. All she knew was that she somehow did.

The landing was a square outspread before her, bookcases stretching to the ceiling, and several doors leading off. Some of these were closed, but the one to her immediate right was gateway to a blaze of golden-red sunset which the corner at the foot of the stairs had cut out. It measured a brilliant panel on the rug which spanned the old board floor, and within the bounds of its fiery angles Flashsatsumas sat, his back to Mini-Flash Juniper. He was wearing his containment-suit, as he hadn’t been when she saw him last, and the books he’d talked about were stacked before him.

Such a seating-arrangement suited Juniper down to the ground. Her legs were still wobbly as she made her way over, and both hands primly clutched her pleats fast about her. This wasn’t intended as a warning to Flashsatsumas, for she hesitated not to sit cross-legged on the carpet, facing him and his reading-matter. Now with her gaze aimed back at the stair-rail, Mini-Flash Juniper was capable of keeping an eye on the window, and that was the point. It was true that one significant hurdle had been surmounted, but much remained to be wary about.

Flashsatsumas smiled, and funnily enough he looked just like himself. From all that Mini-Flash Juniper had been able to gather thus far, she supposed it must be reading-time. So she put on her glasses, took the topmost of the large hardback books, and opened it to the dusty glow.

Juniper looked, and fell in love. The contents were not Earthling script, but pictures, comics like the one she worked on in Nottingham. And what technique! The minute she returned, she was going to take out her graphite and gouache and make copies of those delineations, shade for shade and stipple for stipple. Of course, they’d be much better if only she could draw, but that insufficiency wasn’t going to change and Juniper knew she had to stop making it an excuse.

Yet it wasn’t even the ravishing artwork that took her breath away the most. There was something else within the pages which meant even more.

“Katie changes her clothes in public like me,” Mini-Flash Juniper whispered.

She’d thought she was the only one. That was when Juniper knew she’d been right to pursue this vision. That was when she knew it had been worth every risk.

“Read on,” invited Flashsatsumas.

So Mini-Flash Juniper did, until the dying sun wrought only reddish tint and no illumination on the rug’s soft pile, and then when even this deep ruby shade had been succeeded by colourless gloom Juniper continued, until there was truly no light left to read by. She was a quick study, and had made fair progress stratum by stratum from the summit of her strange oracle. Yet for all that Juniper had taken on this afternoon, she had known from the start that nothing was going to change her first impression.

“I like Katie best,” she declared, shutting the last book with a satisfied snap.

Full night had fallen by now, and Flashsatsumas was merely a shape picked out by what ambience lingered. Juniper could no longer descry what expression he was wearing.

“These books came from the boy next door,” issued softly from him.

For the second time that day, Mini-Flash Juniper started.

“It’s not appropriate you should know about that,” she began, tremulous. “And that’s not about what we’re doing here, it’s about not making people feel uncomfortable, regardless of where they are, and…”

Flashsatsumas waited until her protestations had lapsed. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.

“An Intelligentsor vision isn’t always to be taken literally,” he reminded her. “Your last one wasn’t. Yes, a boy did live next door to The Four Heroes, or at any rate he was a boy when Nottingham was created. But that meant he was scarcely one at all anymore by the time Flashtease lived here. He too was quite a bit younger then than the leadership figure in Nottingham you know. So this neighbour noticed Flashtease was the only boy of that age at this house, and feeling he might be lonely, brought him these old comic books which he himself had grown out of.”

All this Juniper absorbed in wonder.

“Then,” she ventured to Flashsatsumas’s silhouette. “Then, he was…kind?”

Her reading-glasses were still on. Juniper pawed them distractedly from her cheeks, and there in the window the house next door was etched black and sharp before the stars.

A barrier.

Mini-Flash Juniper began to breathe.

Thighs shaking anew she rose slowly to her feet, and felt her fair hair tumble heedlessly about her bowed head to her shoulders. Hitching her stockings was no more than a reflex when she was wearing these Earth-clothes, but this time forefingers and thumbs refused to release the nylon, tugging it instead ever upward, and inward, until Juniper’s wrists were crumpling her skirt up around her middle and the tops of both hands nestled snugly alongside leg-elastic. Her teeth sought her lower lip and snared it, pensive.

To look at it one way, she mustn’t.

Yet it had been so, so long since Limb Four.

And that house, which had frightened her, but which she had since discovered bore no relation to the source of her fears. How it interposed itself between the far-off twinkling distance of her origins, and everything that was there, including the inflictor of her interminable wait.

Here, he couldn’t reach her after all.

Not with the home of a kind boy between her and him.

Mini-Flash Juniper had found at last the place where she was allowed to.

She moved to the bedroom door adjacent to that which had admitted the light. “Where are you going?” asked Flashsatsumas.

Now he sounded like his old self too. The wisdom of Intelligentsor was fast receding before first gender timidity and unrest.

“Mini-Flash Juniper, please,” she heard him add.

Juniper didn’t understand the anxiety in his tone, and really, she wasn’t in much of a mood just now to try.

“Don’t,” Flashsatsumas implored her. “I’m not here, but I’m here.”

If there was one thing Mini-Flash Juniper didn’t have time for, it was more double-talk. She grasped the door-handle.

“I’ve got to find Katie, Flashsatsumas,” were her only words.

She closed the door behind her and stood with her back to it, palms upon the paintwork, feeling the other half of the handle dig in.

It wasn’t absolutely disagreeable.

A long room lay before her, so far as she could tell, for it was in darkness but for an amber parallelogram which streetlights were throwing on the wall. These slanting lines bisected the corner of a framed painting or print, and hinted at a shadowy valley between two beds.

All hers.

4-H-N was worried. Something was wrong.

The real Flashsatsumas, trussed in his underwear and serving as the portal’s power-source, had started to murmur and stir as one distressed.

“What are you up to, Jenny?” muttered 4-H-N, poring over her readout-screens but finding little help there.

Katie swung through skies of timeless colour-tint clouds etched in half-tone, her zip-line gripped in one fist, rooftops teetering beneath her tingly toes. She had a hijacked double-decker bus to save and Mini-Flash Juniper was sharing each breath of the altitudinous winter welkin. One cheek nuzzled coverlet fabric as she pushed her hips, burying busy knuckles deeper and deeper in the soft down.

Robin.

Oh Robin.

Her Christmas pudding. Her sage and onion stuffing-ball.

Back home 4-H-N had seen hot-water pipes and known they were about to burst. The scanners were jabbering incomprehensible alerts about enmeshing and entanglement. With helpless hands she banged every button which might do something to compensate, but still the cacophony from Flashsatsumas’s clamps was rising to that register above which was surely nothing but release.

Mini-Flash Juniper, panting with parted lips, smelling straggles of her own damp hair, crooked an index finger in the snug warm hollow beneath her.

That double-decker had ranged long enough.

Time for Katie to net this game.

Mini-Flash Robin’s wide mouth –

And before a gawping dismayed 4-H-N, the portal began to explode.

Hesitation wasn’t an option. Shouts and moans and sobbing execrations were the least of what Flashsatsumas was sending her way from his harness. So 4-H-N sprinted for the heart of the maelstrom, bobbing and weaving, thanking the two moons for netball practice. Those lurid arcs looked equal to scything her in half. Even as it was, when 4-H-N seat-dropped skidding to the deck she felt her ponytail take a frazzle which ten sonic showers wouldn’t straighten.

Sorting out the ride-up incurred by such a slide was going to be a comparable adventure, but at least it brought 4-H-N to where she had to be.

Shutdown main systems. Open emergency valve. Divert.

What Flashsatsumas had left to thrash out vented harmlessly into space.

4-H-N was left with the sizzly smell of burned-out circuits starting to cool, and one boy’s postclimactic shudders amid otherwise resounding hush.

Mini-Flash Juniper reappeared, looking rather pink for such an ivory girl.

“Really fun visit, Jen,” 4-H-N declared. “Let’s do it again sometime.”

“I’m free tomorrow?” said Flashsatsumas hopefully.

THE END