Jared came down the steps after work one morning to find his mother's basement was now a cave. It contained a lake he could never ford without drowning. He surveyed the topography with a nod. Hm. He would have gasped, but his mother died last week, which already emptied his emotions. Behind Jared climbed the stairs, like yesterday. Everything in front of him splashed. A breeze breathed towards him.

The ceiling drew his attention like a display of jewelry in a shop. Above were sparkles. Below was enough water to sink an automobile. There Jared stood, pondering it. A stalactite concealed much of the boat, but he could see the sails poke out as the craft drifted towards him. A woman straight out of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" steered it while sitting. No one rode with her. He waved to her with an expression he nearly had forgotten - a grin. The woman reminded him of a sapling reawakening in March, both in figure and coloring, and wore a headset clipped to the side of her face. He wondered if she could provide answers or a lift to the other side. She gazed at him with a mixture of calm and astonishment, like she didn't expect it but felt she could accept and handle it. Neither spoke.

The second boat, a rowboat, surprised both of them. The rower wore an eye patch, bandanna, beard, and cutlass. He also seemed to be suffering from jaundice, and pupil dilated as he observed the two. Muscles coiled out from his undershirt as he raised a gun. The woman raised two guns.

Maybe scurvy was the pirate's malady, to judge by the state of his teeth. "April Showers, you know things would improve if you just gave in and died."

"You do not convince me," the woman replied, voice lofting through the air. "I will allow that the exit from the cave has disappeared."

"What have you done to the basement?" Jared asked, his words trembling.

"It might not have been her, kid. But the balance of the Seasons is broken, which means portals. Haha, mortals too." He hawked and spat into the water, not taking the guns off 'April Showers'.

"Just let me leave, and no harm will come to you." She had a mouth the shape of Cupid's bow, hair that reached her waist, and eyes like kaleidoscopes. "How does a rogue such as you come to know the lore? Though you still don't know my name."

Jared realized she was distracting the pirate as a tendril sprouted from his boat, curling up around him without touching him. Other tendrils joined it, going from ivy to vines Tarzan could swing from. Finally the pirate did notice. "Hey!" Then he fired.

The vine closest to his arm jerked it to the side, so the bullet grazed 'April's' shoulder and then continued on. Free from such encumbrances, she struck the pirate thrice. He fell into the water, his blood giving it a new color.

She stumbled in pain, Jared catching her before she hit the ground. His mouth formed words before they passed through his brain. "If I clean the wound and bandage it, will you explain to me what's going on? Don't worry; my name's Jared and I'm a nurse." Instincts to heal infirmity trumped all paranoia.

"My name is Lynne," she murmured through her teeth, leading on his arm as they walked up the steps. He noticed her feet never touched the ground, for a flower always sprang up to cushion her steps. "I am Spring."

The psychologist saw the homeless lady sleeping on this street two days ago. Not much to go on in terms of psychopathology: muttering, gesticulating, and pushing a jittery-jattery shopping cart full of sealed paper bags. If she discovered anything illegal in there, she would have to turn her over to the police. Minnesota had just passed a new act: all of the homeless needed psychiatric evaluation, and were either to be placed in shelters or in hospitals.

After half an hour waiting inside her car - even with the heat turned up the psychologist could feel her body fluids crystallizing - the homeless lady stumbled past. She was a little over five feet tall, dressed in a long gray cloak with a hood, like skins of rats all sewn together. A buttoned flap hid her mouth and nose. All were streaked with musty green, rusty brown, and gusty red stains. Had she been involved in violence?

Trying to act casual, the psychologist stepped out of her car and quietly followed the homeless lady. There wasn't anyone else around, and she needed there to be in case they had an altercation, so she simply tried not to lose her until she walked out to a larger street.

The psychologist saw her spot a patch of spilled oil, iridescent in the chilled morning light. She bent down and touched it, then rooted deep in the folds of her clothes, producing a match. Striking it, she set the oil aflame and warmed her hands by it. From sickly poison came crackling freshness. She gave the psychologist what might have been a coy glance, then rattled forward. The psychologist noticed that she had eyes so dark it looked like she had no irises, merely huge pupils. As if the homeless lady could see more than the psychologist could.

The psychologist enjoyed the brief burst of heat from the burning sidewalk, but worried about it hurting someone, so she smothered it with some mud. Ugh, but this made her new gloves dirty.

The homeless lady resumed muttering, and by straining her ears the psychologist could make out some words. "My life will be forever autumn," repeated several times.

When she got closer, the psychologist asked, "Could I have a word with you?"

"One gets sick of apples after a while," the homeless lady said.

"Miss, I would like to help you."

"Death is not the worst thing. Not wanting to live is." Her voice lilted through the air, with a slight accent, Scottish perhaps.

"I'm with an organization that can get you a place to stay, and medicine to make you feel better, and help with whatever you need." The psychologist didn't like this. She was walking towards a darker, narrower alley.

"Hist!" she declared at the mouth of the alley. She touched her palms to each other, and then placed them pointing out, as if touching an invisible wall. The psychologist failed to notice, but mechanically followed.

The first thing she observed was that it felt twenty degrees warmer. The sky above was blue with only a few wisps of clouds, exhalations of the beyond. Then she saw the trees...

Trees?

They had gold and crimson leaves, and shot up at least eighty feet tall. Great spiral staircases of brass led to their tops. Buildings of brick and wood clustered about them, sharing the space, and the air smelled of cider.

About two hundred people gazed in their direction, some on horseback. For a moment the psychologist reddened, but then she realized they were looking at the homeless lady. She had flung off her ragged coat, revealing a burgundy velvet tunic and supple leggings. Her short hair was a midnight cloud of darkness, curling around her face. Upon her forehead rested a circlet of gold.

"The Lady has returned!" shouted the people. They cheered and clapped. The psychologist noticed all seemed to be of the same ethnicity: swarthy, small, and dark-haired.

"I missed you all," the homeless lady declared. A man about her age rushed to her, and they embraced.

"What have you brought for us?" they clamored. "Does the other world have great gifts or great dangers?"

After kissing the young man, she pulled the brown paper off the packages in her cart that now seemed profoundly out of place. "Both. I have brought you some great gifts, and will tell you of the dangers soon."

She held up a sack and lifted out packets of seeds. "I have grains that will give us better yield in the perpetual harvests of Autumn." She spoke "autumn" with a capital A.

Then she extracted a huge pack filled with pill bottles. "They make magical elixirs that stop the causeless sorrow, save eyesight, and promote healthy bone growth."

"Thank you, dear Lady!" shouted many.

Then she showed them the newest Ti-83 calculators, the kind that ran on solar power. "I have learned how to use these tools, and they will help us manage accounts in the palace and the marketplace."

"Who is that?" the young man asked, finally spotting the psychologist.

She looked at her and smiled. "This woman wanted to cure me of madness. I thought she should learn something today."

"I-I-I'm so sorry," the psychologist stuttered. "I thought you were just a homeless lady."

"Of course I am the Homeless Lady," she said, with a trace of condescension. "In your world."

This strange woman who called herself Spring babbled as she lay on Jared's late mother's bed. It had to be the painkillers.

"Thank you for the help, Jared; my arm will feel like a piece of driftwood for a while...I have no idea who that pirate was, except that everyone who knows the lore of the Seasons is trying to kill us because the murderer of the Season becomes a new Season, which is not usually the case, but the balance has been upset: ordinarily we are immortal and have only one weakness, a different one for each Season, and a teenage girl shut the former Summer in a meat locker - he deserved it, the cradle-robbing womanizer, but this lands us in a pretty mess of wilted vegetation - and now there are three female Seasons - me, the girl, and Gwen, aka the Lady of Autumn (and the guy is Vincent of Winter), and we are mortal until it's a two to two ratio again, and meanwhile portals keep opening up between our world and Next Door - your world, I mean - and you're wasting your time salivating at me like that; I'm a lesbian."

Jared took a deep breath. "Was that all one sentence?"

Lynne Spring offered him a dandelion that had grown out of the bedspread when she lay down on it. She gave him a half-smile. "My problem is I don't know how to find Gwen now."

"Who's Gwen?"

She rolled her startlingly green eyes. "I just told you. She's Autumn. She's got a good head on her shoulders; she'll know what to do. I wish I could contact her."

"Do you have her phone number?"

"What's a phone?"

Jared touched her headset. "You're wearing one."

"Oh, you mean this device? It's magic. It connects me to the one I love."

"No, it's technology. You can get them at Verizon."

"Look, I'm a demigoddess, okay? Don't argue with me, or you'll be finding fuzzy blue caterpillars in your spaghetti for months to come." Her voice was like a brook in its clarity and purity; and like a brook, what it said made very little sense.

Pushing his glasses up his nose, Jared considered his options. Then he put a hand on her forehead to check for a fever. "I am having a most astonishing morning," he murmured.

"Tell me about it. I was trying to find the road to Autumn, but it turned into your basement steps. Now I really know the balance is upset. We'll start trying to be rational, and Next Door will start with the magical realism. The only way to Autumn through Next Door is Minneapolis."

Jared could hear his mother in his head telling him to offer the guest something to eat. His objections about the circumstances made imaginary-Mom cry. Feeling put-upon, he gathered up his First Aid kit and asked, "Are you hungry? I have tons of stuff left over from the wake."

Lynne stuck out her lower lip in a sympathetic pout. "Someone died?"

"My mother."

"Oh." She gave him a pat with her injured arm, then dropped it with an "eek" of pain. "I would love something, but I'm a vegan. Do you have anything that doesn't exploit animals?"

Slapping his hand to his forehead, Jared cried, "You just shot and killed a man."

"But he was trying to kill me. A dairy cow never did me any harm."

"I really hope Autumn is more on-the-ball than you are," Jared muttered, going to the kitchen.

Radcliff rolled over in bed. His coughs emerged from deep inside. Gwen put her arms around him, apologetic. He lived in Autumn for her sake. 'Twas always fog and crisp nights here. Oh dear, blood came up again. She tried to postpone the inevitable. She knew they'd have to leave. A man with tuberculosis needs Summer's touch. She sighed - then became frightened. She coughed too. She, an immortal, a Season, had coughed. This was very bad.

She needed to make it warmer around here, since the drink she had spilled in the night was now frozen. As she regarded it, a face appeared in the ice. Vincent. No one else had skin the color of a tooth cavity. Besides, he had that unfortunate diamond fetish, and no one else could afford a crown studded in them.

"Gwen, we have ourselves a situation," he said.

"Let me guess: someone killed Timmy."

"I won't be shedding many tears over it. Someone needed to put that boy down."

"Please tell me it was a male someone." She let loose another hacking spasm.

Vincent shook his head, and felt his spirits wither. Even he liked Gwen. "Obviously, the answer is no. We need to find that girl."

"You mustn't kill her."

"I can't. She'll be a Season now, and Summer too." He shivered. "It's not fair. You can meet your opposite, but I can't meet mine."

Gwen was pulling on her boots. "Yeah, yeah. I love to hear you whine, Vinnie, but I have a lover to heal and a girl to find. And you won't be sending anyone to kill her, either. Poor thing has probably no idea what she's wreaked." That idiot Timmy. The first thing a Season learned, the first thing, was to never put someone in a situation where killing you is self-defense.