The Gathering

The Traits

XXXII. The Evening Reconvening

Dinner was delayed while they absorbed the day's revelations. Sarah returned from her attic exploration. Sensing the charged atmosphere. Settling into a listening posture. Not demanding explanations.

Kash provided a full report on the Fischer visit. The grief. The transmissions. The encrypted files. The polaroid of the iridescent hand. Kamadan supplemented with technical details. The file structures that matched century-old Miskatonic archives. The timeline that proved preparation predated Fischer's involvement.

In return, Mia and Lora explained the interphase call. The text from David. The message about music and building and the house showing them.

When all the information was shared, they sat in silence. The kitchen clock ticked. Steam rose from reheated stew.

"So," Emma finally said, "to summarize."

She counted on her fingers.

"We were gathered by an unknown entity. Who has been watching us for years. Maybe decades. This entity influenced or manipulated K. Fischer into creating technological representations of us. Using grief as a conduit. The entity has prepared a house with personalized studios. Exists in adjacent space. Wants us to create music. One of us—"

She nodded to Mia.

"—has received communication from a dead husband. Suggesting that the music itself has agency or awareness. And we can still contact our original realities through sufficiently motivated communication attempts."

"That's an accurate summary," Alice agreed.

"I have a hypothesis," Emma continued. "Untested. Wrong, maybe. But consistent with available data."

"Please share," Kamadan said.

"We are nodes. Each of us exists at an intersection of unusual properties. Fae connections. Multi-phase awareness. Empathic sensitivity. Technological integration. Archival memory. Constructed identity. Separately, we are anomalies. Together, we may form a network. A system capable of functions that none of us could perform alone."

"Functions like what?"

"I don't know. But whoever built this house—whoever prepared our studios, whoever planted information in Fischer, whoever signs notes as a friend—they believe our collaboration will produce something significant. Something that requires all of our specific capabilities working in concert."

"Music as a means to an end," Mia said slowly. "Not just creation. But... construction. Building something through sound."

"The message said build first," Lora reminded them. "Then the house will show you."

"So we wait?" Kash asked. "We just... make music and see what happens?"

"We continue investigating," Emma corrected. "We analyze Fischer's files. We study the house's properties. We test the limits of interphase communication. We learn everything we can about who is doing this and why. But yes. We also create. Because whatever's coming, creation is part of how we prepare for it."

The kitchen settled into contemplative quiet. Sarah, who had remained silent throughout the discussion, finally spoke.

"I found something in the attic," she said. "A notebook. Addressed to no one I could identify. From a friend. It had a second line. In different ink. She doesn't know she's ready yet. Give it time."

Seven faces turned toward her.

"I think," Sarah continued, her voice steady, "the she might be me. There's a studio in the basement configured for a pianist. Blank sheet music on the stand. And I—"

She swallowed.

"I used to write songs. Before I stopped."

Mia reached across the table and took her hand. "Then maybe you're not just useful," she said. "Maybe you're one of us."

The evening continued into night. Dinner eventually prepared and consumed. Conversations branching and reconverging. Plans formed. Tasks assigned. Questions accumulated faster than answers.

But something had shifted. The disparate group of displaced individuals was becoming something else. A collective. A collaboration. A family that chose itself.

And somewhere—in whatever space David now occupied, in whatever phase the benefactor watched from, in whatever purpose drove the preparations—something waited for them to begin.

Don't stop playing, the message had said.

They had no intention of stopping.

XXXIII. The Evening's End

The Witch-house settled into nighttime quiet. Floorboards released the day's heat with soft pops. Doors closed along the corridor. Water ran in distant bathrooms. The old structure creaked and sighed, wood grain shifting around its occupants.

Mia and Lora had chosen adjacent rooms on the second floor—close enough to call out if needed, separate enough to process alone. They'd developed this pattern over decades of touring: together for performance, apart for recovery.

Mia sat on the edge of her bed, still dressed. Her phone's screen cast blue light across the worn bedspread. The fabric smelled faintly of cedar and dust. David's message remained: Not yet. Soon. Build first. The house will show you. She had read it perhaps fifty times since receiving it. The words stayed fixed. The meaning did not emerge.

A soft knock at her door.

"It's open," Mia called, expecting Lora.

Emma Kraft stepped into the room. Her spine held its particular straightness—shoulders squared, chin level, hands positioned at her sides. In her right hand, she held her modified phone-scanner device. Its screen glowed pale green in the dim room.

"Mind me asking a question?" Emma's voice was carefully modulated.

Mia rose and opened the connecting door to Lora's room. Her sister appeared immediately, reading Mia's face with the fluency of six decades.

"Emma has something," Mia said.

The three women arranged themselves—Mia on the bed, Lora in the room's single chair. Emma remained standing. She had not been offered a seat and had not thought to take one. The radiator ticked as metal cooled.

"Sure," Lora said. "What's the rush?"

"I got the preliminary DNA study of 'a friend.'" Emma held up the device. Its screen displayed data visualizations—bars and graphs that meant nothing to either sister. "The analysis is incomplete—full results require equipment I don't have access to here—but I've identified enough markers to draw initial conclusions."

"And?" Mia prompted.

"Suffice it to say, it's not entirely human."

The words hung in the air. Mia's hands tightened on the bedspread's edge, fingers pressing into worn fabric. Cotton threads shifted under her grip.

"Meaning what, precisely?" Lora asked.

"Meaning close to human, but very weird. The genome contains sequences I can't find explanations for. Structures that don't appear in any population database. Markers that suggest—" Emma consulted her device. "Hybrid origin. Something that looks human, functions as human, but carries additional genetic material from a non-human source."

"Like what? Alien?" Mia's voice carried an edge.

"I don't have a classification. The additional sequences don't match anything in terrestrial biology as I understand it. But—" Emma looked up from her device, meeting Mia's eyes directly. "There's something else. The human component of the genome shows distant relationship markers. To you."

"To us?" Lora sat forward. "Both of us?"

"The markers are consistent with shared ancestry. Very distant—ten generations back, perhaps more. But the relationship exists. Whoever 'a friend' is, they share a common ancestor with the Wilds family line."

The room's radiator ticked. Mia's mind moved through genealogies she had never bothered to memorize—farm families intermarrying across generations, branches splitting and rejoining, the tangled roots of rural New England heritage. Her fingers had gone numb where they pressed into the bedspread.

"Ten generations," she said slowly. "That's... what? Three hundred years?"

"Approximately. Assuming standard generational intervals."

"So someone related to us, three centuries back, had a child with something not human. And that line continued. And now one of their descendants is orchestrating—" Mia gestured at the walls around them. "All of this."

"That's one interpretation," Emma agreed. "The data supports it."

Lora had gone still. Her hands rested flat on her thighs, fingers spread. The room smelled of old wood and dust and the faint metallic tang of Emma's device. "Emma. The non-human genetic material. Can you characterize it at all? Any distinguishing features?"

"Several anomalies. Unusual telomere structures suggesting extended cellular lifespan. Markers associated with enhanced sensory processing. Sequences that appear to affect neurological development in ways I can't fully interpret." Emma consulted her device again. "And one other thing. The mitochondrial DNA—the maternal line—shows the same unusual telomere patterns that I detected in both of you."

The sisters exchanged glances.

"You scanned us?" Mia asked.

"This morning. Non-invasively. I apologize for not requesting permission, but I needed baseline comparisons." Emma's tone carried no real contrition—she was stating facts, not offering apologies. "Your cellular degradation rates are approximately one-eighth of normal human aging. I attributed this to your Otherworld exposure. But now I wonder if the causality runs differently."

"What do you mean?"

"Perhaps you didn't acquire these traits in the Otherworld. Perhaps you were taken to the Otherworld because you already carried them. Latent markers from an ancestor who had... contact... with something not entirely human."