Escape from Farstead House
by Jules
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The two enter Lucia’s parlor, where the china hutch is now installed. The room is furnished in dusky rose and dark, heavy furniture. Moonlight shines through windows curtained with webs. Lucia, like her spiders, tends toward the nocturnal. She sips tea from Great Aunt Melda’s good china. It belongs to her anyway, not to Cassie.
“Is there more out there?” she asks mildly.
Knock looks guilty, but Lucia doesn’t scold him. “All we’ll do if we leave here, is enter someone else’s fight. We’ll be outsiders instead of willing our own property. As it is, I fill the very corners and walls my cousin Jasper seeks to manipulate. I know where they’re going before he does.” She holds up her hand. A spider perches between her finger and thumb. Its body is glossy, its legs fine as hairs. “Where else could we do that? We belong at Farstead House.”
Wrzeszcz tries again. “You could go build your own house. It’d be all yours and you could have as many spiders as you want.”
“Where did you say you were going?” Lucia asks sweetly. She knows the answer already, thanks to her spiders in the walls.
Wrzeszcz answers falteringly, “My... my family’s old place,”
“Even though they’re devious?” asks Lucia.
Wrzeszcz clears his throat. “Were, when I last saw them.”
“Even still, you return,” says Lucia. “I’ll bet you’ve been trying to leave since you were young. You’re that kind.”
Wrzeszcz nods.
Lucia continues, “And I’ll bet you walked through their footsteps every day since you tried to leave them. We know our own. So no. My half-cousin won’t leave, as much as he complains. He knows better. So do you.”
Wrzeszcz looks uncomfortable. Eventually, Lucia relents and breaks the silence. “You can talk to the dead?”
“I have an invention that allows others to do that,” Wrzeszcz says carefully.
“I want to speak to my Great Aunt Melda,” says Lucia.
Lucia watches with interest as Wrzeszcz brings out his evening-being device and tunes it. Then odd crescents and lozenges fill her vision. They are the deep greens and oranges of a sunset sky, transparent enough to see the shapes of her parlor furniture behind them. A sigh escapes Lucia’s lips. These colors make her heart yearn beyond her ribcage. The past is so close she can touch it.
The shapes come together into an image Lucia has seen many times, but is much richer than the old pictures. Great Aunt Melda wears much the same style of dress as Lucia does now. A cameo brooch surrounded with onyx stones glitters from her throat. Lucia touches the high collar of her own dress and finds the same brooch. Melda weighs Lucia and finds her satisfactory. Lucia is the true scion of the family, carrying on Melda’s true legacy. After all, her great-grandfather Bertie’s side were the ones who spent half a fortune on preserving her health.
The vision fades. Lucia picks up her teacup for a satisfied sip. “You should leave Farstead House now. Don’t let Jasper keep you. He will, you know.”
“I can always walk out of here,” says Wrzeszcz.
Lucia meets Wrzeszcz’s smile with one of her own. “Oh, you’ll leave the building anytime you please. But Jasper will direct you and your old car to an out place. You’ll get there in the late afternoon, just in time for supper, you understand, and to stay the night. They’ll send you to another. You might get out eventually. But maybe you’ll meet someone you like and settle down.”
Wrzeszcz’s eyes widen. He looks at Knock, who nods.
“You won’t do that?” Wrzeszcz asks. “You’re the one who took down the road signs.”
Lucia shakes her head slowly, so that her jet bead earrings do not swing. “Jasper brought you to his side first. I’ve got nothing to gain by keeping you. I’ll send Knock to guide you to Highway L out to Gatitane. You need to hurry, though. Jasper and the rest will be up to start chores soon.”
When Knock and Wrzeszcz stand there looking at her, she flicks her hand at them. “Go!”
From there, Lucia gets news after the fact, from her spiders. The two start out walking quietly, then briskly, then running when they realize that Jasper is cutting off their exit. Knock picks up his feet and sprints. He sucks in his belly so he can squeeze through the closing passage. Wrzeszcz is slower, burdened by the carpet bag of inventions he cannot bear to leave. He falls against the oak panels of the wall. By the time he gets to the passage out, it is no more than a crack.
Jasper is more cunning than Lucia gave him credit for. The passage is so dark the spiders sense rather than see Wrzeszcz stagger along the wall. They skitter in alarm as he spreads his hands across the walls, feeling up and down for an exit. Lucia’s spiders in the walls report back to her: their homes have shifted. The hall is closed in. It has turned into a box. Or a cage. The human inside it seems distressed, they tell her.
Lucia sets her china cup down in its saucer and frowns. Jasper has never crossed her this way before. What does he plan to do? Treat the man like a piece of furniture to be dragged into the recesses of Jasper’s territory? What happens after that? Only nastiness can come of this. Jasper probably hasn’t thought ahead enough to know that, but he is stubborn enough to keep going once he’s set his course. Lucia has to send Wrzeszcz away from here for both their good. She folds her fingers and rests her chin atop them, seeing her webs in her mind’s eye. They sparkle.
Making webs is slow. It takes Lucia a whole night to will a large one into being. She listens carefully to what the spiders have to say about Wrzeszcz’s odd little inventions. Perhaps... she works on dissolving the thick curtain of web across the window in the hallway that Jasper has closed off. There is no way she can clear the whole window before Jasper can move the window up to the next floor, but she can give Wrzeszcz a chance.
A finger of yellow moonlight from outside strikes Wrzeszcz’s face and he looks up. He scrambles to the window. He brings out the juxtapositioner from his carpet bag and twirls the handle. The hinges separate with a squeak. Wood un-joins from the frame. The pane of glass falls outward. Wind sucks at the curtain of web. Wrzeszcz tears the hole in the web wider with his hands, aided by Lucia melting her web away. He scrambles out the space where the window used to be, onto an eve. He glances back, quizzically, at the green shutters that have replicated in crooked rows across this side of the house.
Then Wrzeszcz looks outward and is just as puzzled. The roof is an uneven mass of shingled peaks and valleys headed down to the yard. There are little kitchens and bedrooms and reading rooms that are only a cubic foot in size now but will be full rooms in a few decades. Jasper’s life is a slow, limitless fountain that generates rooms and furniture and objects in a gentle but endless expansion.
For Wrzeszcz’s purposes and Lucia’s, too, this makes an escape route halfway between a hillside and a staircase. Wrzeszcz scrambles down the roofs of little rooms into the yard. Lucia loses track of him then. A spider would ride along with him if she asked it to, but if she never saw it again, she would never know what happened to it.
Anyway, Wrzeszcz is out of Farstead House. It’s up to him to get to Gititane and from there to his own family. If he gets caught by Jasper’s side on the grounds or the out places and hauled back here, he will be put somewhere in the recesses of Jasper’s territory. Lucia won’t be able to free him for years, if at all.
* * *
Knock is used to trudging. He regularly trudges along the property line, checking fences, never mind that it doesn’t matter. The skin on his hands is thick and callused. Knock knows Jasper thinks he’s lazy for the weight he carries, but he can swing an ax and split firewood. His legs are strong and he can walk all day if he has to, even with a duffel bag on his shoulder. Sweat rolls down under his hair to the collar of his shirt.
Jasper, a solid citizen of 1956, hates the length of Knock’s hair. Lucia thinks it is in keeping with the late 1800s. Knock shakes sweat off and walks faster, hoping to get a future where his every decision isn’t weighed in their balance.
For his entire life, Knock has trudged the house, the yard, the property, these roads. He has walked around and around them like an animal in a cage. That animal knows every stick and stone, every rut in the path it has worn with its own paws. It knows the bars around the limits. It knows the way the shadows of the bars fall at every time of day.
So no, it’s not the walking, it’s nerves. His stomach slides like he’s on a seesaw. He sees dust rising and hears an engine coming with it. It sounds like Cousin Kiddy’s blue beater. Knock would dive into the brush if there were any brush to dive into. The only place to go is a scummy ditch, but it won’t hide him.
“Maybe Kiddy won’t stop,” he thinks.
But the car rocks to a halt in a cloud of dust. Knock is terribly aware of the duffel bag he is holding. Maybe Kiddy would’ve believed Knock was out for a stroll partway across the county, without the bag. The seesaw in his stomach rises, and he thinks he might throw up.
“I’m not supposed to be out here. I’m supposed to be mouthy but spineless, lazy but a drudge.” Lucia is so used to her spider-eyes everywhere that she reacts badly when she comes up against things she doesn’t already know. Jasper has already proven what he’s capable of. Oh, Lucia and Jasper fight like cats in a bag over Farstead House, but they’ll be united in their belief that no one can leave.
“What am I doing?” Knock wonders. “What was the plan? Lucia was right. I can never get out.” Even out here on the silvery gravel road, he can feel the walls of Farstead House closing in. This whole county is her web. He can’t breathe with the closeness of it. Years of boredom and useless anger rise up to choke him. He has spent his short lifetime inhaling the dust of generations and the breath of a million spiders.
Dust swirls and settles. Instead of Cousin Kiddy’s sunburned face in the window, Knock sees Wrzeszcz’s.
“Are you leaving, too?” Wrzeszcz asks.
Knock is dizzy with relief. He throws his bag in the back and collapses into the passenger seat. Wrzeszcz slaps his hand. Cool. The countryside rolls by.
“I’m Enoch. Everyone calls me Knock.”
“Pleased to meet you. You tell me where to go.” They approach what used to be JJ and RR.
“How were you going to figure it out?” asks Knock.
“I was keeping the sun on my right and looking at what roads looked worn. If that didn’t work, something would open up. Always does.” Wrzeszcz grins at him. “And here you are.”
“Turn left,” says Knock. He knows every bend in this road. He sees the pinwheel shapes of the sprawling intersections in his dreams. Fence posts lean out toward the ditch, stretching barbed wire to strange angles. Not everyone cares about their fences the way Jasper and Lucia do.
“What’s got you headed to your family’s place?” Knock asks. “You said you’d wanted to get away from ’em.”
Wrzeszcz sighs. “They’re spirit-knockers and fortune-tellers. They attend the right parties and attach themselves to rich families. They live off the hope of the vulnerable. I left to make my own way.”
Knock tries to conceal his disappointment: “I thought your inventions were real.”
“They are!” says Wrzeszcz, stung. “The evening-being device brings beliefs, obsessions and biases out from inside the person. Relationships are the strongest and most revealing. It’s like humans are made of relationships.”
“Then I think it’d be a waste to go back,” says Knock. He folds his big arms across his chest. “Imagine having the ability to let people look at mental problems and emotional hang-ups and wasting it on something one step up from cold-reading.”
Wrzeszcz stares ahead. His face looks tight. Knock guesses his new friend has run up against the bars of his own cage. It is bigger than Knock’s but it’s there all the same. He guesses Lucia was right about Wrzeszcz’s history.
They glide by an overgrown driveway. Knock knows who lives there. They keep goats.
Wrzeszcz suddenly asks, “What happened with Farstead House, all those years ago?”
Knock rolls his eyes. “Old Auntie Melda was finally failing after years of leading the family. Her parents died young, and she basically raised her siblings. She was sharp as a tack but, physically, she wasn’t doing well.
Lucia’s side — well, Bertie’s side, then — put up money for her to get a nurse and to remodel the bathroom with handles and stuff like that. She claims that, without it, Aunt Melda would have been bedridden long before she was. It’s true, too. But my Tilda’s side — Jasper’s, now — they looked after her when the nurse couldn’t. They say maybe Bertie gave money but they gave their sweat and tears.
“So both sides believe they should get Farstead House. If you ask me, Melda didn’t help any. From what I know, she poisoned her siblings against each other so they both did think they were getting everything. Then she blamed their fighting on them. I wasn’t even there, and I can figure out what happened. Don’t need to talk to the dead to do it, neither.
“Melda’s will divided the house with all those lines. She said they’d have to live together until they learned to live together. So they all do. It’s been so long, God almighty.”
“Sounds like they deserve each other,” says Wrzeszcz.
“Yep. But I’m done. I’m out.” On impulse, Knock switches on the radio: a chrome-and-crystal contraption that Wrzeszcz had obviously installed in the old car. The first station plays the news, where the Tank and his team of caped heroes endlessly battle Unborn and his villains. “Nothing to do with me,” says Knock. “I’m not in it for heroes and villains or commies and capitalists.” The second plays orchestral music. “Boring.” The next plays Doggie in the Window. “This is drowning me.”
“Oh, but if you listen,” Wrzeszcz tells him, “You can hear the future from here.” He presses a green button grained like sugar candy.
“Really the future?” Knock is skeptical.
Wrzeszcz smiles. “An analogue of statistical possibilities for the person interacting with it. ‘The future’ sounds better, don’t you think?”
Knock hears voices through the speaker. It’s an interview with a famous mesmerist who has made a fortune off his inventions. He lives alone in a vast mansion which he is always expanding. “But what would you say to your detractors, who accuse you of—”
Knock frowns. He doesn’t like that future for his new friend. He adjusts the knob.
It’s still an interview, but it seems to be with a researcher into psychology. Working on a shoestring budget, this person has helped usher the field of psychology into an age of scientific study. He lives long term with his “good friend” in—.
Wrzeszcz reaches out and savagely switches the knob off. “I should have told you to push the button,” he mutters. There are spots of color on his cheeks.
“Highway L is on the other side of this hill,” Knock says. “Turn left, and you’ll get to Gatitane and, I guess, from there you’ll know the way back to your family’s place, wherever they are. You can join ’em, do what they do. Turn right, and the highway eventually goes across the state line to Canton. Canto n’s a college town. You can do what you want to do.” Knock leans back in his seat.
The old car noses to a halt just short of the blacktop. Gravel dust swirls, revealing and concealing. The wind blows through the open windows. Poplar leaves flutter. Wrzeszcz puts both hands on the wheel and turns it all the way to the side. He takes a deep breath, shifts the stick and pushes the accelerator into the future.
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
