No Place Like Home

  No Place Like Home

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  For Jim, whose Michigan has different monsters

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1928

  All told, it took Jonathan Healy and Frances Brown more than three months to make the journey from Tempe, Arizona to Buckley Township, Michigan. After four train rides—each of them more harrowing than the last, culminating in a passenger car filled with basilisks which caused them both to swear off train travel for the foreseeable future—countless hours spent in the saddle, and an unfortunate number of dodgy boarding houses, motels, and spare rooms, Jonathan was more than ready to be home.

  Fran was another story. She might as well have been born on horseback for all the concern she’d shown about the stretches between towns, and while she didn’t exactly enjoy the trains, they were at least entertaining. She’d been supplementing their diet with rabbits, squirrels, and even an old buck jackalope, which tasted like the sweetest venison either of them had ever had. She would have been perfectly happy to keep going well past the Michigan state borders, maybe all the way to Maine, where the ocean hit the shoreline, and none of the people who lived there really quite believed that Arizona existed.

  The last day of their journey found Jonathan up bright and early, tearing down the camp they’d made along the edge of the Manistee Forest. The horses were grazing nearby. Fran sat up in her bedroll, squinting at him.

  “City boy, you’d better have a damn good reason for clattering around while the sun’s still thinking about going back to bed, or I’m going to seriously reconsider the wisdom of letting you live,” she said dourly.

  The mice, who had begun setting their daily calendar by Fran’s threats, cheered. For once, Jonathan didn’t shush them. Instead, he turned away from the cart he’d been packing with their luggage and beamed at her.

  “It’s a beautiful day! There’s some cold rabbit from last night’s supper, and I left you the heel of the bread. That way you can make a sandwich to eat while we ride, if you like.” Jonathan turned back to the cart. “We’re about three hours’ ride outside of Buckley, two if we don’t spare the horses.”

  “Then why didn’t we ride through last night?” asked Fran, suddenly wary. The mice were still cheering. She looked down at them and frowned. “Hush, you. I’m trying to talk to Johnny.”

  The mice stopped cheering, falling into reverential silence.

  Like all Healys, Jonathan had long since grown attuned to the silence of the mice. He turned to face Fran, trying to ignore the fact that she was rumpled and sleepy-eyed and wrapped in a blanket, and said, with as much propriety as he could manage, “It’s no secret between us that I’m eager to be home. This isn’t my preferred style of travel. I enjoy hot showers and beds I am familiar with. But I would have to be blind to have missed the fact that I was taking you into an entirely alien environment. It seemed best to let you get a good night’s sleep before I introduced you to my parents.”

  “Could’ve told me last night that was what you were doing,” said Fran, trying to sound grumpy. She didn’t entirely succeed. The relief of hearing that Jonathan had stopped on her account—that he’d thought enough of her to stop and let her rest—was too strong.

  “Would you have allowed me this small act of chivalry, or would you have insisted that we push through?” Jonathan asked. He smiled a little. “You’ve learned a great deal about me during this trip. I’m afraid the learning goes both ways, Frances Brown.”

  “Look away, you,” Fran said, suddenly abrupt. “I need to get dressed and freshen up if we’re going to go off and meet your folks.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Jonathan. He grinned as he turned his back on her and resumed packing their belongings.

  He was almost home again. And Frances Brown had never been further away from home in her life.

  Buckley Township, Michigan, was an odd combination of built up and wild in 1928, like they were still feeling out the shape of the space, and were in no real hurry to mature into anything resembling a city. Fran didn’t quite realize when they crossed the Township limits; there were no markers or paved streets to greet them on the route that they were taking, just the same gravel paths that had been their escorts since they arrived in Michigan. Then she realized that the incidence of pasture fencing and distant barns was getting higher by the minute, which was a sure sign of civilization. She glanced at Jonathan. He was sitting higher and easier in the saddle than she’d ever seen him, a small smile on his face that made him look reasonably handsome, if you were into skinny city boys.

  Although maybe that wasn’t the best name for him anymore, if this was where he’d come from. Buckley was all fields and farms, at least so far, and if there was a city skyline to be seen, it was thus far obscured by the trees.

  The mice were asleep again, lulled by the gentle rocking of the luggage cart. Fran found their silence a little unnerving. After the number of things she’d heard them celebrate since leaving Tempe, she would have expected the return to Buckley to be something worth cheering over.

  Jonathan glanced toward her and said, “My family lives on the edge of town, where we don’t have to worry as much about nosy neighbors taking an interest in things that aren’t any of their business. We can go into downtown later, when you’ve had time to get acclimated.”

  “There’s a downtown?” asked Fran, dubiously. “Is it three houses built close enough together to make a windbreak?”

  “No, it’s a proper downtown, with shops and banks and a quite nice library where Father works,” said Jonathan. He was laughing. Fran couldn’t remember having heard him sound that…happy before. “Really, we’re very civilized here in Michigan. We don’t keep the heat turned up to ‘broil’ at all times, for example, which puts us well ahead of Arizona.”

  Fran snorted. “Mind your manners, city boy. I won’t insult where you come from if you won’t insult where I come from.”

  “It’s a deal,” said Jonathan. “Now come on; let’s get off the main road before someone sees us.”

  Fran looked down at the wide gravel road that they were riding along. “This is the main road?” she asked, bemused.

  “This way!” Jonathan urged his bay gelding into a faster trot as he guided the horse through a gap in the nearest pasture fence. Apparently, “off the main road” meant abandoning roads entirely. The cart that he was dragging bumped and shuddered along the uneven ground.

  “City boys,” muttered Fran disgustedly. She patted Rabbit on the side of his neck. The big stallion snorted, sounding very much like his mistress had only a few moments before. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go catch up to the big, dumb monster-hunter before he gets out of sight.” Rabbit snorted again and took off running. Fran laughed, unable to help herself, and together, they charged through the green fields of Buckley toward their destination.

  If Buckley hadn’t been what Fran expected, the Healy homestead was even less true to the image she’d constructed for herself. It was easily three floors high, painted an unobtrusive brown with green trim, and seemed almost to blend into the trees that surrounded it. There was a large barn, and a smaller outbuilding, both equally surrounded by the trees. A beaming, gray-haired woman in blue jeans and a flannel shirt was coming down the porch steps as Fran reached the hard-packed dirt drive in front of the house. Jonathan was already there, sliding down from his horse, only wincing a little as he hit the ground.

  “Johnny!” said the woman, before sweeping him into a tight hug. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes? And me, worried sick when you didn’t make it back here weeks ago!” Her accent was like nothing Fran had ever heard before, half-British dandy and half-something that managed to be gritty and soft at the same time.

 
“Hello, Mother,” said Jonathan, and hugged the woman back. “We ran into a little trouble along the way. Boundary imps and basilisks and the like.”

  “You must be exhausted! And you smell of road, Johnny, you need to get yourself cleaned up.” The woman—Jonathan’s mother, Enid—pushed him out to arm’s-length, giving him a critical once-over. “You’re too thin, and your hair wants cutting. And where did you get this horse? Jonathan Healy, did you steal a horse?” She sounded pleased by the idea.

  “Only in the sense that I liberated it from a formerly hell-bound train after boundary imps ate its original owner. He’s a quite good horse. Not knowing his original name, I’ve been calling him ‘Railroad,’ after where I got him. He seems to like it well enough.” The bay gelding dropped his head and began passively cropping the grass at the edge of the driveway.

  “Well, then, I suppose we have a horse now, haven’t we?” Enid abruptly let go of her son and wheeled on Fran, who was still sitting astride Rabbit. Fran did her best to keep her head up as the older woman’s eyes swept over her, somehow managing to make a quick glance feel like a thorough inspection. Finally, Enid said, “If you’d come down from there, I’ll be glad to shake your hand and thank you for getting our Johnny home in one piece. We all know he hasn’t the sense God gave to the little green apples. He’d have got swept up in studying something’s teeth, and not considered that the something was still attached to them.”

  “Mother!” protested Jonathan.

  “Don’t talk back at me, you know it’s true,” said Enid implacably. She raised an eyebrow at Fran, who hadn’t moved. “Well? Don’t you want to shake my hand?”

  Fran slid off her horse so fast that only a lifetime spent trick riding saved her from a twisted ankle. “No, ma’am,” she said. “I mean, yes, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.” She stuck out her hand.

  “I’m Enid Healy, Johnny’s mother. Do you have a name, or should we just call you ‘the girl who brought Johnny home’?” asked Enid, taking Fran’s hand. Her grip was stronger than Fran had expected, and her fingers were calloused in a familiar way: this woman, with her fluffy gray-blonde hair and her piercing blue eyes, was a shooter.

  “I—” Fran began, and froze, not sure how to continue.

  “This is Frances Brown, Mother,” said Jonathan. “She was the star attraction of the Campbell Family Circus, and as that was rather comprehensively shut down by my activities in Arizona, I thought it meet to bring her home with me so that you could thank her properly for saving my life.”

  “By ‘comprehensively shut down,’ I think he means that the man who ran the show fetched up dead after we killed his giant snake-cat,” said Fran, finally reclaiming her hand from Enid. “You can call me Fran, ma’am, or Frannie, if that suits you better. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “By ‘snake-cat,’ do you mean the North American Questing Beast?” asked Enid, half-turning to Jonathan for confirmation. He nodded. “It’s a gorgeous specimen. Johnny, I think you’ll be pleased with what your father’s been able to do, preservation-wise.”

  Jonathan nodded, looking briefly downtrodden. “I truly hoped that our trip would be short enough for me to assist in the taxidermy,” he said. “Ah, well. Not all things are meant to be.”

  “We’ve saved all the organs, and the venom glands, which are quite impressive. I think we can learn a great deal about Questing Beasts in general from the study of this one. Maybe next time, you can bring it back alive?” Enid winked, making it clear that she was kidding.

  Jonathan still shuddered. “Thank you, Mother, but no. Do you mind if I show Fran where we can stable the horses for the time being?”

  “Not at all; that’ll give me time to prepare one of the guest rooms for her,” said Enid. “I’ll lay out some towels for you, so the both of you can get cleaned up before dinner. We have indoor plumbing, dear,” she added, as an aside to Fran. “We had it installed last winter, by a charming gentleman from the municipal water who owed us a favor.”

  “Swamp hags are overly fond of septic systems,” said Jonathan darkly.

  Fran just blinked.

  Taking pity, Enid smiled at the girl. “I’ll let you two be for now,” she said. “Johnny, it’s good to have you home. I’m sure your father will be delighted to see you. I’ll put a cottage pie up for dinner, just to celebrate.” She kissed her son on the cheek and she was gone, hurrying back up the porch steps so quickly that the dust was still swirling from her footsteps when the door slammed shut behind her.

  Fran looked uneasily toward Jonathan. “Your mother’s nothing like I expected,” she said.

  “Splendid, isn’t she?” Jonathan smiled. “Let’s go stable the horses before we wake up the mice.” He unhitched the wagon from Railroad as he looked around at the trees that surrounded the house, looking for all the world like wolves crouching over their prey. His smile widened. “God, it’s good to be home.”

  There was nothing Fran could say to that, and so she didn’t say anything at all. She just took Rabbit’s lead, and followed Jonathan to the barn.

  “You sure they’ll be all right in there?” asked Fran, as they walked across the wide yard back to the house. She couldn’t stop herself from glancing nervously back at the barn. Rabbit and Railroad had their own stalls, with clean water, fresh hay, and a substantial serving of oats. That wasn’t what was making her so uneasy.

  “Everything in the barn aside from the horses is dead, I promise.”

  And that was the problem. Most of the barn, with the exception of a few open stalls at the front, was packed to the gills with taxidermy. Not just the normal sort, either; Fran wasn’t overly fond of men who thought that shooting bears and then stuffing them so they looked like fierce killers was a good idea, but at least that was normal. No, this was all jackalopes and deer without actual skins and things that looked like someone had mashed a chicken and a Gila monster together just for fun. If that was the local definition of “fun,” she wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it.

  “It’s not right, having that much dead stuff in with the horses,” Fran said.

  “We haven’t had horses here for quite some time, so the barn’s been largely repurposed as storage space, I’m afraid,” said Jonathan. “We can’t clear out all the taxidermy, but we can probably move some of it, if it truly bothers the horses.”

  Fran considered for a moment before she asked, “When you say ‘move some of it,’ you mean into the house, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes.” They had reached the luggage cart. Jonathan bent to take one of the handles. Without being asked, Fran did the same. “Those are important scientific specimens. Some of them represent creatures that haven’t been seen in decades. Generations, even. They have to be preserved.”

  “You know, for someone who says he’s fond of monsters when they’re alive, you sure do keep a lot of dead ones around.”

  “We didn’t kill them all ourselves,” said Jonathan. He stopped in front of the porch, since the cart couldn’t exactly roll up the steps. “We didn’t even kill most of them. Sadly, much of what we learn, we learn from the dead. The biological sciences are disciplines largely built on graves.”

  “That’s morbid, city boy,” said Fran, picking up her suitcase.

  “I never claimed not to be.” Jonathan picked up his own case, opening the top to reveal the curled up forms of the sleeping Aeslin mice. “Wake up, you lot. We’re home.”

  One of the mice raised its head, yawning broadly before squeaking, “Truly?”

  “Truly. Now get everyone up. I’ll be taking you to the attic in a little bit.” Jonathan closed the case and picked it up. Muffled cheering began seeping from inside. “All right, then. In we go.”

  Fran took a deep breath. “After you,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t hear the quaver in her voice. She squared her shoulders like she was about to step into the center ring of the circus, and let Jonathan lead her into the house.

  The interior of the Healy House was even
less what Fran had expected. She couldn’t have said exactly what she was expecting, but this tidy, lived-in front room wasn’t it. The floor was wood, worn smooth by years of footsteps and only covered at the center of the room by a braided rag rug. The couch and two chairs both looked like they’d been repaired several times, and bookshelves lined every bit of available wall that wasn’t taken up with smaller pieces of taxidermy or carefully hung weapons. Fran looked around for a moment, aware that Jonathan was waiting for her reaction.

  Finally, she said, “You don’t get much company out here, do you?”

  “We’ve done our best to discourage visitors,” he said, sounding relieved. “We always wind up packing away half the front parlor when we know someone is coming by. Come on; I’ll show you to your room.” Case still in his hand, he started up the stairs. Fran swallowed her heart, which seemed to have climbed all the way up into her throat, and started after him.

  The banister was as smooth as the wood of the carousel horses back at the carnival, which had been carved with so much love, and oiled by so many hands, that they would never leave a splinter in an unsuspecting finger. Fran clenched it more tightly than necessary as climbed the stairs, feeling more out of her element with every step she took. This wasn’t where she was supposed to be. This wasn’t where she belonged. But this was where she was, and really, what choice did she have? She’d left Arizona with a man she barely knew, all because he looked at a monster and saw a miracle—a miracle that was about to eat them, but a miracle all the same. The talking mice didn’t hurt. How could she have stayed behind, when there were things like this in the world?

  And at the same time…she and Jonathan had been through months and months of travel, living in a world made of trains and barns and boarding houses. It wasn’t so different from the life she’d always known. All that was missing was the greasepaint. But this was different. This was a house that seemed to have grown out of the forest around it, packed full of the ideas and ideals of a family she wasn’t part of.