Velveteen vs. The Seasons Read online

  “You’re not doing anything to me,” said Yelena. She took Torrey’s hands and squeezed them, firmly. “I’m doing it to myself. If you have to run to avoid being taken, then I am going to run with you. I love you. You matter more to me than what they want to call me in the papers. And if staying a superhero would mean letting them take you, fuck heroism. I’ll be a villain any day.”

  Torrey bit her lip, a tear escaping to run down her cheek before she pulled back, turning her face away. “I know,” she said, in a careful voice, “I know that you have never been reluctant to love me because of my origins. I’ve always considered myself doubly blessed, to have found and lost a version of you, only to find another who could see fit not to be jealous of herself. You are my miracle. But please, consider what you’re offering me. A reputation, once besmirched, can never be truly clean again.”

  “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.” The Super Patriots, Inc. had run a decades-long smear campaign against Velveteen. They had painted her as a drop-out and a waste and finally as a dangerous supervillain. They had been doing it to protect themselves, and in their process, they had lain the groundwork that was now being used to justify every abuse of power in the book. If there were only two animuses in the world at the time of Supermodel’s defeat, and they were both bad, how could it be wrong to put more controls in place to keep things like that from happening? If Vel hadn’t been treated the way she had been, more people might have seen her for the hero that she was, and this might not have been happening.

  But it was happening. All the regret in the world wasn’t going to change that. Carefully, Yelena said, “My girl and my best friend have both been supervillains. I can handle a few stains on my reputation if it means I get to stay with you.”

  Torrey turned back to her, searching her face for a moment before she asked, very seriously, “Do we have time to make one last use of our bedchamber before we flee into the unending night?”

  “Yeah, we do,” said Yelena, and reached for her. “And then, I have the perfect first act of villainy.”

  “What’s that?”

  Yelena told her.

  Torrey smiled.

  *

  Sunrise chased the shadows from the front of the police station. Sleepy-eyed cops lingered on the steps, some heading home after a long night’s work, others preparing for a long day of protecting and serving. None of them batted an eye when Polychrome and Victory Anna walked by. The two women made no effort to hide themselves. They were familiar here, part of the extended family of Portland law enforcement. It was better if they came in openly, and didn’t make a fuss. Less chance of someone getting in their way and getting hurt.

  The cells designed to hold superpowered prisoners were protected by a special door, thick enough for a bank vault, meant to be proof against all attempts at access. Polychrome and Victory Anna stopped when they reached it.

  “This is it,” said Victory Anna. “This is your last chance to back out.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Polychrome. She produced a slim phone from under the sash that circled her waist, breaking up her outline and concealing the lumps of her pockets. “My last chance came and went a long time ago. Get to work.”

  Victory Anna smiled, and pulled out her lock picks.

  *

  Governor Celia Morgan was at breakfast in her home, eating a waffle and watching her sister read the paper, when her phone rang. She checked the caller ID, then picked up. “Polychrome. I wondered when I’d be hearing from you. I want you to know that it wasn’t my idea.”

  Jennifer looked up, suddenly alert. Governor Morgan waved for her to be still.

  “I understand,” she said finally. “No, really, I do. It’s the same choice I might have made, if our situations were reversed. Was anyone hurt?” A pause. “That’s good. Thank you for being so careful. And thank you for letting me know. I genuinely do appreciate it. I’m sorry you’ve been forced into this situation. I won’t try to call you back.” She hung up and looked at her phone for a long moment before holding it out toward Jennifer.

  “Celia?” said Jennifer, warily.

  “It seems I’ve had an accident and destroyed my phone,” said Celia calmly. “I can’t imagine how it happened.”

  “What a pity,” said Jennifer. She took the phone, looking at it quizzically for a moment. All the dust and dirt that had collected on the keys flowed together into a thin stream of particles that wormed under the edge of the screen. The phone threw off some surprisingly bright sparks and went dead. “I don’t think it can be fixed.”

  “Good,” said Celia fiercely. “That was Polychrome. She wanted to let me know that she and Victory Anna had broken the young technopath they caught yesterday out of prison, and that the three of them were now officially on the run. I’ll need to report them as supervillains. By now, I’d be surprised if they hadn’t crossed state lines.” Her hand was shaking as she reached for her coffee. She forced herself to complete the gesture. She was going to need the caffeine.

  “I see,” said Jennifer. “It’s really too bad I was off on a training exercise when you heard about this. I might have been able to stop them if they hadn’t been given such a good head start.”

  “Yes,” said Celia, before taking a sip of her coffee. It was too hot; it scalded her lips. “It’s too bad.”

  “I thought…” Jennifer stopped, gathering her thoughts, and tried again: “I thought things were supposed to get better after we got rid of The Super Patriots, Inc. I thought we were going to have a world where people were allowed to just be people, and no one had to fight, and no one had to die. Where we could be happy.”

  “Sometimes I forget that you’re the idealistic one,” said Celia. She took another sip of her coffee, staring off into space. “Do you think an hour will be long enough to wait?”

  “The phone’s dead,” said Jennifer. “No one can reach you until you move.”

  “That’s good. Thank you, dear. Well.” Celia stood, still holding her mug in one hand. “I suppose I should get dressed. It’s going to be a very long day.”

  Velveteen opened her eyes to find herself staring up into the rafters of a house that should probably have been condemned five minutes after it was built, just to prevent this inevitable future. The wood was dark with water damage and mold, rotted cleanly through in spots. Thick, filthy cobwebs covered the entire edifice. Velveteen was more than reasonably sure that they were holding the whole place up. Clean the house, watch it fall down around your ears.

  This was the Autumn country. There was no place else that it could be. The slant of the roof and the single small, round window, like a ship’s porthole, told her that she was probably in the attic of this particular haunted house, which made sense; attics were where the broken toys went. She had visited Autumn before, usually in the custody of Halloween, which was the season’s dominant holiday. She knew their sense of humor.

  Breathing slowly and evenly, so as to keep herself from freaking out, Velveteen lifted her hand off the bed and raised it to the level of her eyes. As she had expected, she no longer had skin in the human sense; instead, she had threadbare brown velvet, patched with swaths of brighter fabric. One of her fingers was gone. Not missing: gone, leaving her with a four-fingered hand that would have been easier for a seamstress to stitch together. Her arm was more of the same.

  Despite the apparent lack of bones, she didn’t feel floppy or formless as she sat up and examined herself further. Her tail was attached to her ass, naturally, a tuft of cotton fluff that she couldn’t see, but presumed would be distressingly white. Speaking of her ass, it, like the rest of her, was sewn out of the same material as her hand, and arm, and costume. She was, for all intents and purposes, anatomically incorrect.

  “Even fucking Santa Claus left me with a goddamn vagina, you autumnal pervs,” she muttered, and stood, casting around until she found a cloth-shrouded shape that could be taken for a full-length mirror, if she cocked her head and squinted. Walking was more difficult than it
normally was, but easier than it should have been, considering that she was now an ungodly combination of a scarecrow and a life-sized creepy doll. After being made of ice and rooted to the earth, it was getting easier to roll with the punches.

  The mirror showed her what she was expecting to see: her own face, somehow rendered perfectly in cloth and canvas, crowned with a pair of brown velvet ears lined in pink satin. They had wire inside to keep them upright. When she bent them, it didn’t hurt. When she pulled them, it did. There were rules to being a living doll, apparently, and she was going to need to learn them as she went. Halloween would never be kind enough to supply her with an instruction manual.

  Velveteen sighed, lowering her hands. “Fucked-up times way too many to count,” she said bleakly, looking at her reflection. Last season. Last temptation. She could do this. She had to do this.

  If she could survive one more season, she could go home.

  *

  The exact relationship between the Seasonal Lands and what they call the “Calendar Country” is a matter of some debate in academic circles, where it is believed that a better understanding of the Seasonal Lands will lead to a better understanding of the world in which we live. If the Seasonal Lands were created by the needs of the Calendar Country, what created the Calendar Country? Are the worlds symbiotic, or are the Seasonal Lands magical parasites, drawing sustenance from the flesh of a universe they have no business intruding upon? The conversation has been going for years, but became both louder and more vicious after the fall of The Super Patriots, Inc., which had previously controlled much of the dialog surrounding the origins and impacts of superhuman abilities.

  If the Seasonal Lands are symbiotic, runs one argument, then it stands to reason that it is within the public interest to keep them healthy and well-supplied with the heroes they require to remain stable. The records of Velveteen’s childhood encounters with the residents of Halloween, combined with the documented powers and careers of Trick and Treat, both known to have originated in the Autumn, makes a compelling argument for this position. Without a strong connection between the Seasonal Lands and the Calendar Country, it seems likely that both worlds would suffer.

  According to the other school of thought, which holds that the Seasonal Lands are parasitic, and do not give anything the Calendar Country cannot survive without, the suffering that would follow a severing of that bond would actually be the process of our reality healing, recovering a measure of its equilibrium and beginning to return to normal. Yes, it would hurt, and yes, people would probably pay the price for cutting that tether, but in the end, our world would be healthier for it. All that they need is someone willing to wield the knife.

  Thus far, neither school of thought has been in a position to put their theories to the test, something which may well have prevented their academic disagreements from escalating to outright warfare. “When you have someone using a mechanical breathing device, and someone else swearing that it’s killing the patient, what do you do?” asked one scholar, who elected not to be named. “You can leave them connected, and maybe it’s making them sick and maybe it’s not, but at least you know they’re going to live. Or you can unplug the whole thing, and pray that the person who says they’ll be better off is right. If they’re not, and the patient dies, it’s not like you can bring them back to life by plugging them back in.”

  More interesting is the theory that the Seasonal Lands, by tying mankind to a world where myth and reality are indistinguishable, are fully responsible for the existence of magical heroes, even those whose powers do not manifest in any clearly time-related way. The Princess, Dame Fortuna, and Jolly Roger are all unique in their manifestations, but they are all, in some way, metaphor made flesh. Without the Seasonal Lands to continually remind mankind that metaphor is sometimes another way of saying “the thing that’s about to kick your teeth in,” would these heroes be able to exist at all? Would breaking the tether strip them of their powers? Would it strip all superhumans of their powers? Perhaps these abilities are a byproduct of the connection between our universe and these smaller ones, whether they be symbiotic or parasitic.

  And more, would the loss of all superhuman abilities truly be as bad a thing as it might initially appear? By reducing the human population to a single power level—none to speak of—we might finally create a level playing field, and stop the fighting once and for all.

  Until the connection between the Seasonal Lands and the Calendar Country is broken, there is no way to say for sure. Still, people wonder; the discussion continues.

  *

  The room where Velveteen had awakened was empty of anything that could have better prepared her for whatever was going to come next. The closet door creaked ominously, but there were no weapons inside. There were claw marks in the wood under the bed. No monster, though. Finally, Velveteen was forced to admit that she needed to leave the room if she wanted to find out what was going on.

  “Look at it this way,” she muttered to herself, turning toward the door. “This is Halloween. Halloween has always been the land of assholes. It’s not like they can break your heart the way Christmas did.” Somehow, when she said it like that, it didn’t feel as encouraging as she had hoped. Halloween couldn’t break her heart, but that didn’t mean it was going to be kind to her. None of the seasons had been. Why should this one start?

  The door moaned like a thing possessed when she opened it, revealing a second-floor hallway cordoned off from the empty air by a rotten-looking bannister. A flight of stairs descended from the hall’s far end, the distance between her and them choked with cobwebs. Velveteen wrinkled her nose and started walking.

  By the time she reached the stairs, the fabric of her skin was gray with grime and she was beginning to consider the virtues of taking a ride in the nearest washing machine. At least her feet hadn’t punched through the floor at any of the many rotten spots. She placed her hand on the bannister, only grimacing a little at the feeling of the wood squishing under her fingers, and descended into the foyer.

  There was no one there. That wasn’t really a surprise. The furniture seemed to be aesthetically inspired by a combination of the Addams Family and A Nightmare on Elm Street. That wasn’t a surprise either. Some of the dark patches on the floor looked like they could have started out in somebody’s veins. Velveteen wrinkled her nose and stepped around them, trying to get a feeling for the layout of the house. It was dark and oppressive. It didn’t feel like the sort of place where anybody actually lived.

  Probably because nobody did. Normally when she awoke in one of the many haunted houses that studded the Halloween portion of Autumn, either Hailey Ween—the current spirit of Halloween—or her sidekick, Scaredy Cat—the prior, somewhat more dangerous spirit of Halloween—would be waiting to tell her why she had been kidnapped this time. That hadn’t happened. Why?

  Because she hadn’t been kidnapped. She had come voluntarily. This was a test.

  “Fuck all you people and the horses you rode in on,” muttered Velveteen, and started for the front door. It was locked. The doorknob was shaped like a grinning jack-o-lantern. Velveteen narrowed her eyes and reached out with her mind, ordering the object to do her bidding. Its smile widened. The lock clicked; the knob turned; the door swung open.

  Velveteen stepped out onto the porch, and was wearily unsurprised to see that the house opened onto a graveyard filled with listing, moss-encrusted tombstones. Hailey and Scaredy were there, using a fallen tomb door as a picnic table. Their meal seemed to consist entirely of candy, Halloween-frosted cupcakes, and apple cider.

  Hailey was the first to notice her. The Halloween teen turned and grinned, showing teeth that were too white for someone on an all-candy diet and too sharp for someone who didn’t mean any harm. “There you are,” she said, voice smug. “I knew you’d find your way out.”

  “Pardon my French, but what the fuck are you talking about?” Velveteen folded her arms. “It’s not a maze in there.”

  “Because s
omeone didn’t want it to be,” said Scaredy. He looked like a little boy in a one-piece cat costume, the sort of kid who would swarm down the sidewalks on October thirty-first, pillowcase in hand and sugar on his mind. Only looking closer would reveal that the costume didn’t come off, and that his eyes were cat-slit and calculating. “Look behind you.”

  Velveteen didn’t move. “What are you playing at?”

  “We’re not playing at anything,” said Hailey. “You’re here voluntarily this time, remember? We don’t have to play games with you. We can just show you what we’ve got, and trust that you’ll see us for the superior season. Now take a look behind you.”

  Velveteen turned.

  The house was, as expected, towering and terrible, painted in peeling black paint and studded with cracked and broken windows, like blind eyes staring out on the uncaring world. But…when Velveteen squinted, she could see how all those attributes came together to form a single scowling face. The house had a face. And that meant…

  “It’s mine,” breathed Velveteen.

  “It is,” said Hailey. “It has a face. So does everything inside it, from the furniture on down. If you’ve ever wanted to play out some demented Beauty and the Beast enchanted castle fantasy, this is the place to do it. Everything here will do what you say. So when you wanted the house to let you out, it made itself simpler to make you happy.”

  “Wow.” Velveteen turned to face the pair. “I’m not that easy to buy, you know. A house of faces isn’t enough to get you on my good side.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m sure it can’t hurt,” said Hailey. “We want you to be happy and comfortable. We’re not going to turn you into snow or make you sleep in a meadow, or any of that bullshit. We’re going to show you that you’re part of the team.”

  Velveteen raised an eyebrow. She gestured to herself with one hand before saying, in the slow and careful tone of someone who was fighting very fucking hard not to lose her temper, “You turned me into a possessed Raggedy Ann doll from hell. That doesn’t say ‘part of the team.’ That says ‘still your plaything.’”