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“Oh, my God, Levi, you look so stupid !”
Oswald Baskerville looked up from his homework to see his little sister, Lacie, kneeling over the back of the couch and heckling their guardian, Levi. Levi was the current head of the Baskerville family—codenamed “Glen” in the family’s slightly more illegal activities—and he had the honor (or perhaps dishonor) of raising Lacie and Oswald, because Oswald was going to be the next Glen, and Oswald never went anywhere without Lacie, a thin undercurrent of anxiety running through him and telling him that if he turned his back, left her alone for too long, she would vanish into the aether, die and never, ever come back. In a year and a half, this anxiety would be justified: Lacie would be diagnosed with cancer, Stage III, and her death would become a far more real thing to fear. For now, though, it was mostly irrational, and Levi had been giving Oswald shit about it since he was six.
Levi was currently strutting into the living room dressed like a Regency-era dandy, complete with two pocket watches on his waist, which he was twirling around as Lacie laughed at him. She was eleven, and in the fifth grade, but already as mean as any middle schooler, which went a very long way towards warding off anyone who tried to bully Oswald: it was well known, in their school, that Lacie would destroy anyone who tried. Currently she was turning these tricks of cruelty towards Levi, who seemed completely unbothered by it and was peacocking even more in response.
“What are you wearing?” Oswald asked.
“Funny you should ask!” said Levi. “Clothes.”
Oswald sighed and turned back to his math assignment as Lacie continued mocking Levi until he had twirled, laughing, out the door, and then Lacie dropped back down to sit and said, “I’m gonna steal those pocket watches and sell them for drug money.”
“You will not,” said Oswald.
“Will so!”
“Where would you even find drugs?”
“Kevin in class 5-A says you can buy them from the eighth graders in the bathrooms after school sometimes.”
Oswald reflected on this. “I am an eighth grader, and I don’t know anything about buying or selling drugs.”
“Maybe you just don’t know the right people.”
“I know Levi,” said Oswald. “Levi sells drugs.”
“Really!” said Lacie. “Which ones?!”
“Some kind of weird mushrooms that we are absolutely not to touch until we’re adults or he’s out of town and someone else is watching us so he isn’t liable.”
“I’m gonna touch them.”
“You will not.”
“I’m gonna steal them and give them to Kevin, and he’s gonna give me a cut of the profits when he sells them.”
“You don’t know where Levi keeps them. You didn’t even know he had them until I told you.”
“So what?” said Lacie. “I can find them. Ten bucks says I can find them.”
“Ten bucks says Levi finds you looking for them before you find them.”
“You can’t tell Levi. Don’t be a snitch, Nii-sama,” Lacie commanded.
“I’m not a snitch,” said Oswald. “I just know that Levi doesn’t want us to touch the drugs he sells, that’s all. So probably he keeps an eye on them.”
“Levi never keeps an eye on anything, ” said Lacie. “He'd lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his neck. He won’t notice me looking for his drugs.”
“Levi keeps an eye on everything, he’s just good at making it look like he’s looking somewhere else,” said Oswald.
“You’re just being paranoid again, Nii-sama,” said Lacie. She jumped up from the couch. “I’m going to go looking now. Say goodbye to your ten dollars!”
“Say goodbye to your nine o’clock bedtime,” said Oswald, “because as soon as Levi catches you trying to steal drugs you’re going to be going to sleep at six .”
“Six to nine,” said Lacie, “nice!”
“That doesn’t even make any sense !”
Lacie’s quest to find out where Levi kept his psychedelic mushrooms did not bear much fruit—or rather, much fungi—but she did manage to steal one of his shiny new pocketwatches about two days later, and came out to where Oswald was attempting to teach himself Danish at the kitchen table, twirling it around her fingers.
“Nii-sama!” she sang out. “Look what I got!”
Oswald looked. “A pocketwatch. Who are you going to sell it to?”
“Dunno yet.” Lacie twirled it a bit more. “I like it, though. Maybe I’ll keep it. You could get the other one, then we’d have matching.”
“I’m not going to steal from Levi, Lacie.”
“Why not?” said Lacie. “It’s fun. I do it all the time. And he never misses anything anyways.”
“You don’t know that,” said Oswald. “Maybe he’s just letting you keep them because he’s raising us, and if we get on his nerves too much he’ll take it all back and kick us out.”
“Then we just kill him and puppet his corpse around and do whatever we want,” said Lacie. “Don’t worry so much, Nii-sama.”
“Corpses decay, we couldn’t do that for more than a week.”
“If we tanned him into leather—”
“I do enough of that sunbathing already,” said Levi, who had been arrested for indecent exposure six times and counting. “Plotting my death again, are we, kids?”
“No,” said Oswald.
“If we were really planning on killing you you wouldn’t ever hear about it,” said Lacie, spinning Levi’s pocketwatch around her fingers faster. “By the way, what’s the password to your safe?”
“Six-nine-four-two-zero-six-nine,” Levi said immediately. “Wouldn’t recommend going in there, though, I just keep evidence in there and it would be a bad idea if you messed it up. It’s all bloody and stuff, and I wouldn’t want you kids getting arrested for murder or assault or whatever. You’re a bit young for a criminal record. On the subject of criminal activities, Lacie, would you mind giving me my pocketwatch back?”
“What do you mean your pocketwatch?” said Lacie. “This is mine. Always has been.”
“You called it ‘stupid’ just two days ago, Lacie.”
“Yeah, ‘cause things on you always look stupid, Levi!”
“Come on,” said Levi. “Don’t talk to your daddy like that!”
“Stop calling yourself ‘daddy’, Levi, it’s weird,” said Oswald, thirteen and world-weary.
“I hate it when the two of you gang up on me like this,” said Levi. “Oh, cruel world, what did I ever do to deserve this treatment?”
“Called yourself ‘daddy’,” said Oswald, and Lacie nodded along, Levi’s pocketwatch in her hands spinning, spinning, spinning.
“Oswald, hey, Oswald,” said Levi. “I won’t call myself daddy again today if you get me my pocketwatch back from Lacie.”
Oswald was a middle schooler, thirteen, in eighth grade. The siren song of schadenfreude was not one that he could resist—not one that he would even consider resisting. He lunged for his sister—she yanked backwards, the watch in her hands spinning faster on its chain—Oswald’s head collided with the watch, hard, and he yelped as he jerked backwards, hands flying up to a red mark that would, in a few hours time, become a proper goose’s egg—
And then, suddenly, Oswald stopped making any noise at all, frozen in his chair at the kitchen table, eyes staring sightlessly ahead as he remembered.
Oswald remembered a different life, a different Baskervilles, a different way of being Glen—Oswald remembered a city plunging into an Abyss, and looking away from a best friend’s madness, and claims that Lacie wanted the world to be destroyed—Oswald remembered a pocketwatch that was a music box that contained a song that he wrote and Lacie added lyrics to, and nieces who shared a body, and Levi’s betrayal, Levi hitting on and impregnating Lacie—Oswald remembered Jack Vessalius and his fake smiles, and killing Lacie in a ritual one cold winter’s day, and learning a hundred years that she had died for nothing, for no reason other than the fact that evil gods couldn’t control her—
Oswald Baskerville doubled over, hyperventilating, memories of a life that was his and wasn’t coursing through his brain, as Lacie grabbed his arms and said, “Don’t tell Levi don’t tell Levi you’re okay I didn’t even hit you that hard you’re okay,” and Levi laughed at him, and Oswald grabbed at his little sister’s warm, living hands and squeezed tightly and tried to breathe, and wondered what it all could mean.