Escape from Farstead House
by Jules
part 1
A knock at the door echoes hollow through the big old farmhouse known as Farstead House.
Today, Jasper is able to access the front door. It isn’t always that way. Last week, Lucia’s webs had made the foyer impassable. Just yesterday Jasper’s moving walls cleared away the webs. Lucia’s side of the family will have to use the side door, at least for now.
Jasper looks through the screen door at the newcomer, waiting for him to introduce himself. The newcomer’s features don’t resemble those of Jasper’s family or anyone in the surrounding sprawl of gravel roads related to them. He looks like a long way off. He looks like new eyes. He’s younger than Jasper by at least a decade and is dressed in black dusted grey by the gravel dust. He’s got a carpet-bag and a car that is just about done.
Eventually the man on the veranda speaks up. “Do you know the way to Gatitane?”
“You don’t say it like that,” says Jasper, because it is true.
After a silence, the man tries again: “Ga...tee...tan?”
Jasper nods. He pushes the screen door open and gestures for the newcomer to enter. He sees indecision on the newcomer’s face.
The man doesn’t look around for other places to go. He doesn’t have to. He’s been out there. Been out there for a while. This late in the day, there’s isn’t anywhere else to go. There are winding stretches of pale gravel roads that sometimes cross, without anything as formal as right angles. There used to be signs marking the roads in double letters: EE, FF.
“Lucia’s side of the family took down the road signs,” says Jasper. “You either know where you are or you don’t.”
“I don’t,” says the newcomer.
Jasper nods. The man finally steps inside. The shade of Farstead House claims him. Jasper extends one hand to shake and introduces himself. The newcomer returns the handshake, saying, “It is good to meet you, Jasper Farstead,” and giving the improbable name of Wrzeszcz.
“If that’s what you want to be called,” says Jasper, dubious.
They make their way past the outroom. Jasper checks Wrzeszcz, who is about to step past a red chalk line crossing the hallway. “That’s Lucia’s side.”
“Lucia?” Wrzeszcz is mystified.
“My cousin,” says Jasper darkly. “Anything outlined in red was willed to her.”
Fortunately, Jasper recently recreated a stairway to the second floor last week. He and his side of the family refused to use the web ladder Lucia had maintained for part of last month to get around the lack of a stairway, even though the web ladder had been on neutral ground. She’d said she was only helping to spite him.
The stairs are narrow. There are framed pictures all the way up. They show a stern woman with her hair scraped back from her head into a bun. She wears a dress with a high collar, brooch and a row of jet buttons down the front. Jasper catches Wrzeszcz looking at them.
“Aunt Melda.”
“So many?”
“It’s persistent.” This stairway has been recreated and extended many times during their family’s discord. Something about this particular black-and-white photograph of Great Aunt Melda has caught and spread up and down the stairs’ length.
Jasper tries not to use elements of this stairway for anything else, because the picture might range through different parts of the house, as well. “Everyone loved Great Aunt Melda. She practically raised our great-grandparents, though she was their sister. This is a little much, though.”
Wrzeszcz voices agreement, looking at increasingly distorted versions of the photograph. The one he’s looking at now has clusters of eyes.
They pass through a hallway where little Egger runs a single metal roller skate back and forth over the carpet. Egger gets up and joins them as they take a side-stair leading to the breakfast room. The door is the width of a large cabinet. They have to squeeze through.
Jasper’s Uncle Egbert sits sipping his last cup of coffee for the day. “C’mere,” Egbert tells his grandson. Egger climbs onto his lap. He folds his paper to the table. It’s yesterday’s, marked September 16th, 1956. “Who’s this?”
Jasper is silent, not trusting himself with the pronunciation. Wrzeszcz repeats his name.
“What’re you doing here?” asks Egbert.
Wrzeszcz explains that he is an inventor. He is on his way back to his family’s home, to file patents for his machines. He indicates his carpet-bag.
They are all aware of Knock’s glittering black eyes on them from across the kitchen table. Knock is on Lucia’s side of the family, however, and they aren’t speaking to him. There is a thick double line of chalk across the kitchen floor: red lines on Lucia’s side, blue lines on Jasper’s. The table used to migrate across the parquet under Jasper’s influence — moving the floor westward — until Lucia’s webs anchored it to the opposing wall. There the table is and there it stays. Same with the chairs on her side. It’s useless for Jasper to waste concentration on trying to bring them to his side of the chalk lines now.
It was good luck, or bad, that not one but two members of the same family got rare sparks: Jasper moves structures, Lucia spins webs.
The wall of cabinets is neutral ground, outlined in yellow chalk. The old clay dishes belong to both sides.
“I been down at the Old Crabapple Place,” Uncle Egbert begins.
“Crabapples haven’t lived there in twenty years,” Jasper reminds him. “It’s the Edelson place. We’ve got a better claim than they do now.”
Across the kitchen, Knock’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t believe it. He’d say Lucia’s double cousin married into that family. No one acknowledges him.
“We didn’t used to worry about the out-places in my day,” Egbert sighs. “It was just Farstead House.”
“Blame Lucia; she’s forward-thinking. We have to be, too, or else she’ll surround us,” snaps Jasper.
Knock grins across his wide face. That and the way his arms curve in front of him on the table remind Jasper of a complacent toad. A toad with long, raggedy hair.
“Anyways, I been down there,” Egbert says. “They say—”
A shout from the parlor. Jasper recognizes his sister Cassie’s voice. “They’re taking the hutch!”
“How can they be taking the hutch?” Uncle Egbert demands, launching up from his chair. Egger makes a four-point landing and skitters up the side-stairs. Knock takes the red-chalked way straight back into the recesses of the house while Jasper, Egbert and Wrzeszcz have to go through a hallway angled to one side that dog-legs back. Egbert uses his cane to slash away dry curtains of web that festoon the upper part of the hall.
They burst into the parlor and find Cassie standing helplessly by. “It was the triplets,” she says, but they are already gone.
Jasper doesn’t have to ask how. It is apparent to him now. Over a slow, chess-game period of months, Lucia’s webs had made the opposite entryway to the parlor so impassable that Jasper had just slid the door over. He’d had to move one of the parlor walls to make room. In doing so — damn her cleverness — he’d exposed red chalk lines on the edge of the parlor, making it possible for the triplets to sneak in and abscond with the china hutch before Jasper realized his mistake and fixed the room again.
“She’s been planning this for a year,” Jasper spits. He runs his hand across his crew-cut.
Cassie shakes her head. “It’ll be years before we get it back, if we ever do.”
“You have a family house, Wrzeszcz?” Egbert asks.
“I left it when I was fifteen,” Wrzeszcz tells him. “Bad scene.”
“They devious?” asks Jasper.
“Yes.”
“Not devious like this,” says Egbert.
“Not like this, no,” Wrzeszcz admits.
“Damn right,” growls Jasper.
“She’ll be using that good china for everyday,” Cassie moans. “Great Aunt Melda would be furious.”
From beyond the red chalk line, Knock finally speaks. “Old Auntie Melda’s still playing you’ns against each other, and you’ns wasn’t even born then.” He ducks beneath a curtain of web and disappears.
“You think it’s funny?” Cassie yells after him. Her hands are balled into fists.
“Knock’s a step-cousin,” grumbles Egbert. “Doesn’t really belong here at the House, except Lucia’s side of the family didn’t have as many children as ours. Her great-grandma Tilda dragged in everyone she could to keep up the numbers. It shows.”
It does. Knock uses the record player for Buddy Holly and Hank Williams. “Cacophony,” Jasper calls it. Those people plug in guitars like toasters.
In the presence of the newcomer, it occurs to Jasper to muse on when their family became divided into Jasper and Lucia’s sides, rather than Great Grandma Tilda and Great Uncle Bertie’s sides. Neither Tilda nor Bertie had been alive when Jasper and Lucia were born, but Tilda’s versus Bertie’s sides carried on the fight for generations.
Then, as teenagers on opposite sides of the chalk, Jasper and his cousin Lucia had discovered their sparkle: their abilities to web and to warp. Since then everyone has referred to them as the real powers in the household. It is on them to parse Aunt Melda’s will, written in chalk throughout Farstead House.
It is dinnertime. “Stay,” Jasper tells Wrzeszcz. He wants to see an outsider’s reaction to Lucia and her side of the family. Wrzeszcz looks like he’s about to make an excuse to go until he gets a whiff of fresh rolls and spicy fried chicken.
The dining room table is well filled on both sides. The executors of the will hadn’t ruined the wood, thank goodness; they’d just drawn blue and red chalk down the middle of the table. There had been a few years when Jasper’s side of the family almost lost the table to Lucia’s machinations, but they’d managed to save it. The result is now that no one can sit at the head or the foot of the table. Instead, Jasper’s father sits nearest the head on his side. He’s a widower, so Lucia’s grandmother sits at the opposite, near the foot.
Jasper and Lucia sit as far apart from one another as tradition allows. Still, he can see her clearly and knows Wrzeszcz can, as well. While Jasper favors a crew-cut, plain white T-shirt and blue jeans, Lucia favors floor-length dresses in the style of her grandmother and jet beads passed down a hundred years from Melda through Tilda. She’s practiced walking in the old-fashioned dresses so she appears to glide. Her hair shines, parted in soft wings to either side of her head in the style of the late 1800s.
This is the time when family comes together, of course. They don’t break tradition. Conversations go on around the table with both sides acknowledging one another. The young fry went on a day trip to the store for groceries and are full of gossip. Lucia doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to. Neither does Jasper. Egger and the other children are asked about school. No one mentions the china hutch.
“You might as well stay the night,” Jasper tells their guest.
* * *
The children are sent to bed. Jasper, Egbert and the others watch the news on the black-and-white television deep in his territory. There aren’t enough chairs, thanks to a skirmish last decade, so Wrzeszcz sits cross-legged on the floor in his black jeans and jacket. The television knob clunks heavily from one channel to the other. They adjust the antennae until the warbling picture comes clear.
The local news is mixed, some good, some bad. There’s been a lot of rain, resulting in possible flooding to the eastern alfalfa fields. The local high school football team triumphed over the next county over. The next game will be tougher, but at least this week, there is something to smile about.
The national news is less optimistic. Heroes with superpowers struggle against villains with the same. Now that the rare have assembled, they’re always battling back and forth. As if threats from within aren’t enough, the news reports on spies infiltrating from without. Enough of that.
“What do you invent?” Jasper asks Wrzeszcz.
“I’m glad you asked.” Wrzeszcz reaches into his carpet-bag and comes up with what he calls a juxtapositioner. It looks like a mechanical can-opener fraught with tiny gears and colored lenses.
“Well, what does it do?” Uncle Egbert huffs through his mustache.
“The juxtapositioner separates and joins elements,” Wrzeszcz explains. “Allow me to demonstrate.” He turns the handle. Metal gears twinkle. Colored glass flashes. The rag rug under the television falls into twisted knots of cloth. Egbert picks up a knot with his fingertips.
“That was Grandmother Dora’s work,” Jasper says, shocked and threatening.
“Worry not!” Wrzeszcz hastily turns the handle the other way, and the rags ravel back into the same oval-shaped rug that has lain on the parquet for generations.
Jasper re-evaluates the newcomer. This might be a marvel of technology, the next electric mixer or telephone, but he is willing to bet Wrzeszcz is sparkly. Not enough to wear a cape and fight the villains, but enough to make machines as improbable as his name. Wrzeszcz brings out a chrome globe on tripod legs that telescope out like television antennae.
“The evening-being device lets you talk to the dead.”
Jasper stares at the evening-being device. So do Egbert and the others in the room.
“Talk to them how?” Jasper asks.
“Want to try it?” asks Wrzeszcz.
“I want to talk to Great Aunt Melda,” says Jasper. Egbert and the others nod. They’d see what was what. Parse the will once and for all. Even Lucia will have to admit Jasper and his side are right.
Wrzeszcz turns a dial on the side of the globe. It is smaller than the one on the television and doesn’t clunk. Instead, there is a buzzing noise and a series of glassy clicks. Jasper sees floating colors on his eyes. They are rich and dark as the after-images from when he squints into strong sunlight: fiery oranges and unearthly purples and colors he does not have a name for. The colors disturb him. He nearly tells Wrzeszcz to shut his machine off.
Jasper hears Great Aunt Melda’s voice. He’s never heard it before, because she lived before he was even born, but he knows that’s who it is. He can see her dress with the row of jet buttons down the front. She is made of floating lozenges of non-colors but it’s unmistakably her.
Her voice comes from a distant past. “Jasper? You’re on Tilda’s side, aren’t you?”
Jasper clears his throat. He nods. He feels like a schoolboy called to the carpet.
Melda’s stern expression doesn’t change, but her tone softens. “I saw Tilda’s devotion in everything she did. Her kindness, her thoughtfulness. She and hers came to visit me every day.”
“Bertie’s side didn’t come every day,” Jasper agrees, relieved. This is the story he heard from when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and it is good to hear her confirm it.
“No, they did not,” Melda agrees. She tells him that Tilda’s side — Jasper’s side — are the true heirs to Farstead House. Her image fades. The evening-being device goes silent.
Jasper, Egbert and the rest can take their rest tonight, knowing that their zeal will be rewarded.
* * *
The spiders sing to Lucia every night while she wills webs into being:
We are the children of silk
We are the weavers of dreams
Our senses extend to the heavens
Blood flows in nurturing streams
The spiders believe Lucia is eternal. Generations upon generations of spiders have served her. They crawl inside walls. They cross the chalk lines that Lucia can’t cross. They hang in her webs. One of them reports which room Wrzeszcz is sleeping in. Easy enough to know; there is a web over half the window.
When he remembers to, Jasper moves the window along the wall so it sees daylight. When he does so, Lucia weaves a new web to close it off. The shutters with their heart-shaped embellishments have been replicated all across the outside of the house.
Lucia’s spiders guide Knock along passages to Wrzeszcz’s room. Knock can’t cross the chalk lines to go in and shake Wrzeszcz awake, but he can call.
Wrzeszcz picks up his carpet-bag and follows Knock. Lucia approves of this. The spiders are uninterested, of course. They don’t care about humans except to please her.
Knock mutters, “Takes twenty minutes to go through side-doors and web-tunnels where you should be able to walk into a room.” Then, “A hundred years from now, everybody’s dead and this doesn’t matter.”
“Why not just leave?” Wrzeszcz asks.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” says Knock. “Except the out-places, and Those Two are claiming those, too. I used to think if I married out I could get away from here, but soon they’ll be fighting across the whole county.”
“There’s more out there than the county,” says Wrzeszcz. “There’s a whole wide country going on, baby.”
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
