The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  (SHRUB)

  SECOND

  RATS

  —

  RED

  SOLOMON

  SQUIB

  DON

  VIKING

  (CORPSE)

  (ZEBRA)

  HYBRID

  MONKEY

  MICROBE

  TERMITE

  SUMAC

  PORCUPINE

  CARRION

  RINGER

  TINY

  WHITEBELLY

  GREENERY

  (DAWDLER)

  AS OF BOOK TWO

  SIXTH

  HOUNDS

  —

  CROOK

  (OWL)

  GNOME

  (SHUFFLE)

  LAURUS

  WOOLLY

  RABBIT

  ZIT

  TRITON

  SLEEPY

  GENEPOOL

  DEALWITHIT

  SPLUTTER

  HEADLIGHT

  HASTEWASTE

  EARS

  NUTTER

  RICKSHAW

  BAGMAN

  CRAB

  (FLIPPER)

  FIRST

  PHEASANTS

  —

  GIN

  PROFESSOR

  BITER

  GHOUL

  STRAW

  STICKS

  BRICKS

  (CRYBABY)

  GYPS

  HAMSTER

  KIT

  BOOGER

  CUPCAKE

  SNIFFLE

  (PIDDLER)

  LEGEND

  —

  (PARENTHESES):

  JUMPERS

  BOLD:

  STRIDERS

  RALPH

  A SIDEWAYS GLANCE AT GRAFFITI

  He went up the stairs and entered the hallway, certain that he was not going to see anyone there. The canteen buzzed with voices, coming through to him muted, like a bee swarm humming in an old hollow tree. When it is inside the hollow, and you’re outside, and you haven’t yet realized what that hum is, there, in the tree, and what are those strange spots darting around you, and once you do realize you’re already at a full run . . . He walked slowly, the duffel bag weighting down his shoulder. Open doors revealed the empty classrooms, laying fallow before the last period. The doors here could sometimes open so suddenly as to deliver a good smack on the forehead, so he’d long ago acquired the habit of walking on the other side, the one that used to have windows, keeping his distance from the doors. He remembered it and almost laughed at that thought.

  Thirteen years. Enough time to blaze a trail, had the floorboards underfoot been something else, had they been earth and grass. A wide and permanent trail. His own. Like a deer might make. Or an . . .

  This place used to have windows. There was much more light in the hallway. No one would have even considered boarding them up if not for the writings. The windowpanes were completely covered with them. They would cover the entire surface with scribbles and ugly drawings, and as soon as the windows were washed or replaced, the whole thing repeated itself. The windows never had a full day when they looked presentable. And it only happened in this hallway. The first floor never had windows looking out on the street, and the third housed too many counselors. He remembered it well, how one time, after the windowpanes were once again replaced (hoping against hope that this time they would finally see reason, except that had never happened), they simply slathered black paint all over the new, squeaky-clean glass. He remembered his feeling that morning, when he first saw the disgusting black-framed rectangles. It was the feeling of dread, the horror of the dawning recognition—he understood what those windows represented to them, literally demanding this barbaric treatment. At the next general meeting he voted for the windows to be eliminated.

  It was not childish pranks. Oh, it looked that way at first, but even then there were signs—they never did anything like that in dorms and classes. Seeing the blacked-out glass, he realized to what degree his charges were afraid of those windows and how much they hated them. Windows into the Outsides.

  He was now walking on the side that formerly had windows. This made the hallway a little too dark, but he doubted anyone in the House remembered that it had not always been so.

  The windows debacle taught him a lot. He was young then, and he wanted to share his apprehension with somebody. Somebody who was older and more experienced. He wouldn’t think of doing that now, but back then it had seemed like a good idea. So he did it, once, for the first and the last time ever. After that he never talked about things he felt.

  They shielded themselves from the side that was looking out to the street. The other one, the yard side, did not bother them, even though it seemed to open up to the Outsides just the same. But the yard and the houses visible from there and the vacant lot and everything around it they had already accepted, included in their world. There was no need to surround the yard with a concrete fence, the other houses worked fine in that capacity. There was nothing like that on the street side. They are trying to erase everything. Those were his words. He remembered saying them, even though it had happened long ago. Everything except themselves and their own domain. They refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything that is not the House. This is dangerous. Elk laughed and said that he was imagining things.

  They know perfectly well what the Outsides is and how it looks. They go to camps every summer. They enjoy watching movies.

  He knew then that he’d never be able to explain. The danger was not in ignorance. It was in the word itself. The word “Outsides” that they had stripped of its former meaning and pressed into their service. They had decided that House was House, and Outsides was a thing apart, instead of being something that contained the House in it. But no one had understood. No one had felt anything even when looking at the blackened windows. It was only he who became scared when they had sprung the trap, taking away his ability to look at that which they refused to see. Elk was smart, but even he had never understood them. The poor kids, they were hard done by . . . Elk had believed that. And the graduation of the window tormentors hadn’t taught him anything either, even though in the days before their exit the House had been saturated with sticky horror, making Ralph gasp in its noxious fumes. He had already wanted to run even then, but he kept hoping that as soon as those seniors were gone everything would change, the others would be different. It even worked for a while. A very short while, as the next batch was still too little to fight reality seriously. Then it turned out that they were just as good at it as their predecessors, maybe even better, and all he had left was to watch them and wait. He insisted that they were given too much freedom, but anytime he mentioned this he got the “unfortunate children” reply, and those words made him wince, just as they themselves winced when they heard something like that. So he watched and waited.

  Waited until they grew up, molding themselves and their territory. Until they reached the age of leaving. Their predecessors had tried to throttle the passage of time in their own way: twelve suicide attempts, five of them successful. These had simply dragged everything around them into the maelstrom of their exit. That vortex had claimed Elk as well, even as he still thought of them as harmless children. It was possible he had understood something, but by then it was already too late.

  Ralph often wondered what had been going through Elk’s mind in those last moments, if he had time to think about anything at all. They had just brushed him aside like a grain of sand, a piece of debris that for some reason clung to them as they ran. They didn’t mean it, they loved him, to the extent they were capable of love. It’s just that they didn’t care. When their personal Apocalypse had struck, one counselor was of no consequence. No one could have stopped them, not two, or three.

  Had he survived that night, he would have understood what I figured out long before then. The world into which they are thrown once they turn eighteen does not exist for them. So if they have to leave, it is imperative that they destroy it for ever
yone else too.

  That graduation left behind a blood-soaked void so horrible that it frightened everyone. Even those who had no direct connection to the House. The management had been replaced, and once it had been, all the teachers and counselors left. All except Ralph. He stayed. And getting to know the new principal, a man very far removed from humanistic ideals, proved the deciding factor. Those who had not run away after the June events rushed for the exits after the first talk with the principal. Ralph was convinced that this time everything was going to be different. That he would be able to do everything in his power to stop them when the time came. He had that opportunity now, knowing that there was no one who would interfere with him by playing the “poor little kids” card.

  He watched them from the very beginning, and he began to see the ways in which they were changing even before the transformation started happening. He took the Third and the Fourth, the strangest and the most dangerous, even though it was silly back then to think of them this way. He waited for a long time, not knowing what he was waiting for, until finally he noticed it: something was out of place in their rooms. The rooms were somehow different from others. And as the rooms changed, so too did their inhabitants. The change was subtle, untraceable for any but the most sensitive observer; it had to be felt on the skin, inhaled with the air, and there had been times when weeks passed before he was able to really once again enter the place they were creating for themselves, creating by imperceptibly transforming the one that actually existed. With time he became better and better at it, and then, to his horror, he noticed that this domain, this invisible world, was not immune to incursions from other, completely random people. There could be only one explanation: this world came to exist on its own, or was on the threshold of existence. That’s when he ran. But even as he was running, he knew that he would be back, to see this through, to watch the credits, to find out how it ended this time. He had accepted that there was nothing he could do to stop whatever was going to happen, he just needed to know what happened. Because even while he was learning from those who came before, they were learning too, and much faster. They wouldn’t need to paint over the windows. He was sure that they only had to convince themselves that the windows weren’t there. And then, likely as not, the windows would cease to exist.

  The Crossroads piano was glinting, unsheathed. He stepped on a piece of tape, a red snake curled underfoot. He was treading the middle of the hallway now. Still his own trail . . . The three letters R jumped out at him from the wall. Bold as a signature, as a badge of his presence.

  He froze. His name wasn’t Ralph at all. This nickname, name-nick, he’d hated from the moment he got it. Precisely because it was a name. He’d much prefer to be called Shaggy, or Pansy, whatever, if only it sounded like a nick instead of a name that could be mistaken for his own. So naturally, because of this, of his loathing of “Ralph,” it had stuck to him for this long, outliving all of his previous designations. Those who had christened him had left, and then those who had been squirts when it happened had left as well, and now the ones who hadn’t even been there back then were grown up, and still he remained Ralph. Or just a letter, a capital letter with a number. The letter was even worse. But it was the only way they wrote him up on the walls, and even talking among themselves it came up more and more often, the loathsome nick being made uglier by the even more loathsome abbreviation.

  He stopped in front of the door that didn’t have a number on it, with the glass transom on top. Here one more R, done in soap on the glass, greeted him. He slammed the door behind him and thus rid himself of his own nick until the next time he needed to go out into the hallway. This was both his office and his bedroom. He was the only counselor who spent nights on the second floor. Shark firmly believed that it constituted a colossal sacrifice on his part, and Ralph did nothing to suggest to him otherwise. It was enough to mention in passing, “I am at my post at all hours,” and he received everything he wanted, right away.

  Ralph made a point of maintaining the heroic image of selfless service, even though the fear of the second floor he saw in other counselors and in Shark himself almost made him laugh. You had to have an extremely hazy understanding of them, or rather none at all, to imagine that they would go busting into a room and sticking a knife into a counselor just because. Because they were generally wicked, or because they had nothing better to do. He guessed at the existence of the Law. No one told him anything about it, of course, but by observing certain patterns in their behavior he deduced not only that the Law existed, but even some of its tenets. One, for example, made teachers and counselors untouchable, and it protected him unswervingly. The exceptions to it could come raining down only in that fateful time, the two weeks before graduation.

  So it was useless to think about that, much less fear it, and he wasn’t going to move to a different room now only because something could possibly happen in six months’ time. He’d already committed the biggest folly of all by returning. Compared to that, worrying about his personal safety would be ridiculous. And whatever else, he wasn’t about to spend his last months in the House in interminable conversations with Sheriff, or inebriated Raptor, who were both known to barge into any room on the third floor as if it were their own. Two bottles of beer were, in their opinion, reason enough to come for a visit, so once armed with those they didn’t even bother to knock. The counselors traditionally drank. They weren’t drunks, like Cases, they just drank. The difference was subtle and, admittedly, rather hard to notice at times, but they would all certainly take offense should someone have pointed that out to them. Cases were much harder to rattle. But there were some things even they resented. For starters, they didn’t like being called Cases.

  There weren’t many people in the House who knew that Ralph was the one who’d given Cases their name. He didn’t mean either their overall shapes or their mental state, as the common interpretations ran, but exactly cases, of bottles. Pinning a name on someone in the House was easy. All you had to do was walk out into the hallway at night, choose an appropriate place on the wall, scribble something on it, either illuminating your way with a flashlight or by touch, making sure that your entry did not stand out too much. It was going to be read anyway. The walls for them were the newspapers, the weekly magazines, the road signs, the advertising supplements, the communications office, and the museum of fine arts. All he had to do was put his word in and wait for it to have an effect. What happened next wasn’t up to him. The name could have been forgotten and painted over, or accepted and taken up. Ralph never felt himself younger and more alive than when he went prowling in the night armed with a can of spray paint. That was all you needed, a flashlight and spray paint. Once he moved to the second floor, the task became even easier, but then he was almost caught, twice in a row, and had to stop adding his two cents to the House names, fearing that sooner or later he would be discovered and unmasked. He did not want to undermine their trust in the walls, since he himself received much that was useful from the same source. It required only diligence in reading and deciphering their scribbles. The wall was his entrance into their world, a ticket without which the admission would have been completely impossible. He learned to grasp new messages at a glance, distinguishing them from the tapestry of the old ones, once he knew the lay of the land. He never stopped to look closer—that could arouse suspicion. One unfocused glance, and he carried a riddle with him until the time when he could decipher it at night in his room, at his leisure over a cup of tea, the way others spent their time on a crossword puzzle.

  Sometimes he succeeded, other times he didn’t, but he never despaired, because he knew that the next day would bring another crop of messages worthy of thinking over. One thing bugged him, though, the abundance of swearwords, since they also demanded careful reading in case they concealed something important. Once the House inhabitants started hitting puberty, he even had days when he regretted his habit of reading everything they put out on the walls. Later the swearing abated, excep
t around the Second, where it was still easy to drown in it.

  He wasn’t looking at the walls as he was walking down the corridor now. The intervening half a year changed the landscape to the point of unfamiliarity. He didn’t want to overload his brain on the very first day of his return, trying to peel away everything they’d added in six months—where the crop of a single night was sometimes more than enough. But he still could not shield himself from the proliferation of the R. The letters jumped out at him, outlined and separated from the common muddle that was snaking over itself in places where the concentration of words and drawings was highest.

  There might well have been intent behind this. But then, who was the target of it, he or they themselves? What was it supposed to be—a remembrance or a greeting? Something they were afraid they’d forget, or something they wanted to forget but couldn’t? He was gone, but at the same time he was still here. Never before had Ralph encountered the nicks of the dead written on the walls. They were never spoken of again, their things either distributed between the living or destroyed. Closing the gap, that’s what it was called. One night of mournful vigil and then every sign of the person’s existence was erased, especially from the walls. The same thing happened to those who left the domain of the House. They were convinced of the inevitable annihilation awaiting them in the Outsides. The departed were treated the same as the dead, while he’d managed to both move out and still remain embedded in the walls, by their own hands. They must have known he was going to be back. But how could they? How could they be so sure of something that he himself had doubted until the last moment?

  Ralph dropped the duffel on the floor and sat on the sofa. Of course they knew. And now I know that they knew. Even though I haven’t really studied the walls yet. They deliberately wrote it so that it caught the eye, so that once I was back I’d see immediately that they were waiting for me.

  I might even start acknowledging that they pulled me in, wrapped me in the spell of the letters. Start imagining them dancing around those writings, mumbling incantations and drawing magic sigils. Thinking that the only reason I returned was because they willed me to. I’ve only been here for a couple of minutes and the insanity is already setting in. Or maybe that’s what it takes, that anyone here needs to be at least a little mad? That this place does not tolerate those who aren’t?