The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  Someone searching for a place to sleep sneaks down the ante-Crossroads stretch of the hallway. Someone pale and large-eyed, with patchy rust-colored hair.

  Red is frightened. Asleep or awake, day or night. He’s dreading and waiting. He gnaws down the caps of his pens and chews up the filter ends of his cigarettes. He thinks and considers. This has got to end at some point. Plump Solomon, and Squib with his face red from the burn. They keep scaring him with their meaningful sniggers. Their smirks, their glances and winks. Squib, Solomon, and Don. The rest of them are submerged in the electronic ocean of sound. They float in it, swaying on the spot when they stand and jerking to the beat when they lie down, and they don’t care about anything that is not coming from the earphones plugged into the thundering emptiness.

  They are always hostile, always hungry, always covered in spots from the sweets they consume to cheat hunger. They dye their hair and alter their pants with multicolored patches. Red is hopelessly older. Not in years, but in questions he asks himself. Young Rats are not concerned about tomorrow. Their life begins and ends today. It is today they need that extra piece of toast, it’s today they need that new song, it’s today they need to take the only thing that’s on their mind and scrawl it in huge letters on the bathroom wall. Rats suffer from constipation but they’d still eat anything anytime. And fight over food. And over who sleeps where. And after the fight is over they’d listen to more music and eat again, with even more delight.

  With all their complaints they come to Red. With the most painful zits and abscesses they come to Red. Busted Walkmans, drained batteries, lost possessions—they all come to Red. Except Squib, Solomon, and Don. Those three despise him. With each day their whispers become louder, laughs more insolent, conversations more hushed. They keep him constantly terrified, relishing the effect immensely. Red wanders at night, sleeps in uncomfortable places, and dreams of slitting the throats of all three, one after the other. Sometimes he twists open all faucets in the bathroom and plugs all drains. Then takes a shower in his clothes and leaves, the squelching sneakers parting the waters. He goes to the card players. He plays, dripping water on the cards. The players don’t say anything, because he’s a Leader.

  The outfit Red has chosen for tonight’s stroll is completely black. Only the white sneakers flash in the dark as he goes, two bright spots betraying his presence. A sleeping bag dangles off his shoulder. It’s blue with yellow dots. Red is looking for a secluded corner where he could sleep, wrapped in the warm cocoon. He stops at the Crossroads. Elephant is moving through the space, barely illuminated by the moonlight, inspecting the windowsills. Red watches him. Then puts the sleeping bag down, sits on it, and lights a cigarette. And waits. Patiently waits.

  Four card players are cooped up in Vulture’s tent. It’s cramped inside. Every awkward movement makes the canvas shudder and the multicolored lights sway under the triangular roof. Shuffle’s collar is bristling with dull spikes. There’s a trail of blood down his cheek from a scratched boil. He touches his finger to the spot and examines it.

  “Not that damn thing again!”

  “Got anything to drink?” Noble says, rubbing his eyes, tired of the lightbulb rainbows.

  Dearest is swishing something hastily in a tin cup.

  “Soon, very soon, dearest. In the meantime there’s plain water, if you’d like.”

  He hands Noble a flask. Noble drinks and returns it. Dearest sighs mournfully. The cigarette in Vulture’s teeth drops down a column of ash, showering the blanket in sparks. Crickets chirp in the speakers of the boombox.

  Smoker and Tabaqui drive down the dark corridor. Suddenly a red cone flashes in front of them. It becomes blue the next moment. Then yellow. After cycling through six different colors, the cone blinks off, and it’s dark again.

  “What’s that?” Smoker whispers.

  “Vulture’s tent,” Tabaqui says.

  They drive closer. Now the tent is shining and twinkling in every color at once, and it’s possible to hear voices from inside it. The entrance flap is pushed open and someone crawls out on all fours.

  “Hey,” says the someone as he bumps into them. “I’m bailing out. Wanna play?”

  “Hey, Shuffle,” Tabaqui calls back, turning to Smoker and handing him the backpack. “Listen, my friend, could you manage hanging around here by yourself for a bit? I need to talk to the guys, if you don’t mind.”

  He tumbles out of Mustang and speedily crawls inside the tent.

  Shuffle’s flashlight runs away, jumping from side to side. Smoker is alone. He listens to the voices coming from the tent and waits for Tabaqui until he runs out of patience. He drives closer, pulls out the brake, and slides down. Then he lifts the flap.

  “Hey. Can I come in too?”

  Beauty and Doll are kissing on the stairs. The trash can next to them and the cigarette butts strewn about concern them not at all. A pocket radio buzzes softly under Doll’s sweater. They devour each other with fevered mouths, opening wide like hungry chicks. Their kisses are passionate, interminable, and painful. From time to time they let go of each other and rest, touching their foreheads and furtively wiping their wet mouths. Their lips are swollen and sore. They only know how to kiss. Or maybe they don’t even know that.

  The squat cylinder in the shortened pajamas lays siege to the stairs to the third floor. He is searching. Searching for that miraculous, wondrous being—lithe and fair haired, so pleasant to be next to. Tubby knows that it’s still here, inside the House. And that the place to search for it is where the stairs lead. He’s never been up there, so it follows that it’s exactly where the being could and should be located. Tubby’s inner voice has never steered him wrong, and now it urges him forward. Wheezing softly, he conquers the steps one by one.

  The feeble flame of an alcohol burner flares up in the teachers’ bathroom. Shaking from both fear and cramps in his stomach, Butterfly is holding a spoon over it. Butterfly is all bones, sickly pale and covered in warts. A rubber mat protects his skinny buttocks from touching the freezing tiles. The open neck of his sweater reveals a meager chest hung with amulets and strings of garlic. Butterfly is nervous—about the dripping faucets, the imagined steps and whispers. He cringes from the damp and shields the burner from the drafts with his body. He has a cold. He also has diarrhea. Constantly shuttling to one of the stalls and back is too time-consuming, so he decides to move inside a stall with the entire setup, including the rubber mat, the burner, and a roll of toilet paper. He closes the door, throws on the hook, and feels safer, shielded from the dangers of this night.

  It’s stifling inside Vulture’s tent. And as if it wasn’t hot and cramped enough, there’s also incense burning in two bowls. It makes Smoker’s head spin. The strings of lights flash on and off. Smoker already regrets having joined the company inside the tent. It’s too small to fit five. Tabaqui, on the other hand, is completely happy and content. He sips some indescribable swill from a coffee cup and regales Vulture with tales of people they’ve met on the way here, even though they haven’t in fact met anyone. Smoker starts nodding off.

  “Hey, wake up,” Dearest whispers. “What are you having? Pretty Flower? Steps? Night Terrors?”

  “Anything but Terrors,” Smoker says. The proximity to Vulture is terrifying enough. They are separated by Jackal, but still, he could reach out and touch Great Bird should he wish to. “Do you have any coffee?”

  “Alas, no coffee.”

  Smoker is handed a cup. He takes a gulp of something so bitter and astringent that his jaws immediately lock up. He chokes on saliva, unable to either swallow the vile liquid or spit it out. Tabaqui slaps him on the back. The rest are watching with interest. The lights keep blinking.

  “There, there,” Vulture says with concern. “You really shouldn’t jump straight on everything you’re being offered, kiddo. A little taste is often enough.”

  Smoker takes out a handkerchief and wipes off the tears.

  “Horrible stuff,” he says when he’s abl
e to pry apart his locked teeth.

  For some reason Tabaqui puts on dark glasses.

  Crookshank clambers out to the bank and sits down under the pole marking the largest cluster of underwater stones. The river was kind to him the previous several days, and he’s expecting his good luck to continue. Yesterday it brought him a tire, three bottles with messages, and an empty gourd decorated with triangular markings. What’s in store for today? Crookshank throws in the line and waits.

  In the moonlit grass on the opposite bank a huge white elephant grazes, covered with a striped blanket. Must have run away from its masters. The elephant worries Crookshank because it can use its trunk to fish the floating treasure out of the river, and then he’d have to somehow get to the other side and claim it back. And it’s a very big elephant. What if I tamed it? It can reach a lot of stuff with that trunk. Would be very useful—to have my very own Elephant. That’s even better than a live dog. Excited by these thoughts, Crookshank puts the fishing gear aside. But the elephant is already trampling away, its wide back flashing in the brush. And the river is carrying something dark. It fetches against the largest stone and gets stuck there, bobbing in the current. Crookshank grabs the net. He’s hoping fervently that it isn’t a dead dog again. The dragonflies dart too low over the water, interfering with his aim. He swats several with a towel and eats them distractedly.

  Saära lives in the swamp. He is alone there except for the frogs, the singers of clear songs. He sings too when the moon is out, and his songs are beautiful. That is all he knows about himself. Saära’s pale skin is wrapped tightly around his bones, mosquitoes never alight on him, knowing him to be poisonous. His lips are ghostly white. When he sings, the song distorts the whole of his face and his eyes go almost blind. His fingers tease and tear the grass, he trembles, shaken by his own voice, and he waits. The song always brings him visitors. The smallest of them sink into the mud before they can reach him.

  Sixteen Dogheads sit in the grotto in a circle around a crate, illuminated by three torches and three Chinese lanterns. The seventeenth is standing on the crate. He is addressing them, slowly rotating a snow-white bone above his head. The speech flows over the sharp-eared heads and out the hole in the ceiling, up toward the twinkling stars. Dogheads listen, yawning and loudly biting out fleas.

  “We seem to be confusing meters and kilometers,” one whispers to another. “Do you think this might have a global significance? What’s your opinion?”

  “I can only see the moon,” his neighbor offers cryptically. “They say that the staff still had plenty of meat left on it before he snatched it.”

  The youngest, in a copper collar, suddenly breaks into a howl, head upraised.

  “Death to the traitors! Death!”

  They bite his flanks to quiet him down.

  The white bone shines, mesmerizing them.

  The changeling dances merrily on the pile of fallen leaves collected here by stomper birds for their mating fair. The pile is ruined. The changeling laughs. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, a mouse bolts from under the leaves and scampers away, but the changeling is upon it in two short leaps.

  “Quick, quick, go bite a tick,” he murmurs as he digs a shallow hole to bury the remains of the meal.

  A sweet song reaches his ears. The changeling perks up and rushes toward the voice without hesitation. He bounds through the Forest like an arrow, but stops once his paws meet the sticky swamp mud. He shakes it off in disgust. The singing grows more urgent. It calls him into the swamp. To go or not to go? The changeling comes to a decision and rolls on the ground growling. One more turn, and one more. He rises up to a human height, yawns, and plunges into the heart of the swamp, treading carefully on the tussocks. The nocturnal dragonflies dart into his face. The singing keeps getting even more sweet, loud, and seductive.

  The hunters grunt as they run. The loose ends of their headbands slap them on their backs. They run single file, one, two, three of them, noisily, scaring away the wildlife. The noise is deliberate. The one they’re hunting will take fright and betray himself. That’s when the pursuit will commence. The real hunt, the one they’ve dreamed about for so long. So they run, huffing, pounding the dirt with their boots. In fact, they too are frightened. But their quarry is not supposed to know that.

  Back in Vulture’s tent, Smoker finally is able to stop coughing and choking on saliva, but doesn’t have time to appreciate it because almost instantly something happens to his vision. The objects around him momentarily lose clarity and float out of focus, and when they return to their familiar shapes it turns out that they have been assembled from myriad tiny colorful shards, like a bright minute puzzle. The faces of those sitting next to him undergo the same transformation. Everything is now composed of shining dots. They blink in and out and even slough off in places, and where they do there’s nothingness behind them. Smoker realizes that he’s going to see them all extinguished and that he just had the true nature of the universe revealed to him, which means that his life is most likely about to end.

  “World falling down,” he manages to utter.

  This remark has a bizarre effect on the others sitting in the tent. The fireflies constituting their faces begin to roil and swarm furiously, reflecting complex and strong emotions. And then Smoker’s fears come true. Everything shatters. Tabaqui’s face holds on the longest, but it too crumbles, leaving behind only two inky blots—the dark lenses of his sunglasses. The black spots hang in the void for a moment and then, just as Smoker is on the verge of losing his mind, become the center of another world as it assembles quickly around them.

  A very bright, very sunny, very smelly one.

  The sun strokes Smoker’s back, pressing him down to the ground. It’s a pleasant sensation. Except there’s no ground visible. It’s covered with a thick layer of trash, greasy and loose to the touch. Yet, somehow, incredibly alluring. Smoker longs to dive in it, take in more and more of its smell, separating the layers of new scents until there, in the midst of it, a truly astounding aroma opens. Something is preventing him from giving in to this temptation. Must be the black glasses floating in midair. The sun turned them into two blinding flashes, but when Smoker approaches them he sees himself reflected: a pair of black white-breasted cats, one in each lens. He opens his mouth in astonishment and lets out a loud yelp. His reflections cry back at him mutely.

  “There he is!”

  One of the hunters stumbles. From high up in a tree, where the branches are thickest, someone’s fiery eyes are looking at them.

  “There he is! Up there!”

  The hunters, jostling each other, surround the tree.

  “Burn it? Or chop it down? Or maybe . . .”

  The creature hisses, feeling its way along the trunk. The hunters rattle the tree with the butts of their rifles. The tree groans. One of them passes his rifle to another and tries to climb up. The creature in the branches hisses even louder and then spits at him. The hunter crashes down, swearing. The creature giggles and coughs. Suddenly it cuts the laughter short and slithers down into the high grass.

  The hunters dash after it, screaming. The hard carapace and the fiery hair of their quarry recede in the distance.

  “After him!” the hunters yell, their boots thundering and splashing mud.

  The grass snails tumble down as they run past.

  “Get him! Tally-ho!”

  The one who got the acid in the eye shouts the loudest. The entire Forest seems to shake from their screams.

  Someone who has spent his whole life hiding in the hollow of a tree has been frightened by the commotion and the knocking. He digs in deeper into the rotted wood of his hideaway and uses the hook on the end of a stick to pull the food pouches closer, one by one. Each pouch, three layers of silky leaves cemented with his saliva, and the food in the middle, is priceless. It won’t do to leave them to chance. He allows one of them, the smallest, to remain exposed and even nudges it toward the opening, hoping that the invader finds it easily and
goes away, satisfied, without trying to sniff out the rest.

  Crookshank jumps up and down excitedly, peering into the river. “Please don’t let it be a dead dog, oh, please,” he begs, casting the net. The object is heavy and unwieldy. Huffing and sniffling from the effort, Crookshank pulls and pulls, until he manages to haul it completely out. He studies the river’s gift intently, then bounds up with a shout of joy. It’s a sleeping bag. A splendid sleeping bag, completely intact! It’s blue with yellow dots. Crookshank wrings the water out of it and hauls it away to dry in his safe place.

  White-lipped Saära winds down his song and lies in wait. Bare legs squelching in the mud. Closer. Closer. He stretches his neck.

  A human. Dirty white pants, dirty white sweater. Long hair the color of soot. Quite young. Not a youngling, but not an adult either. Saära crawls closer and jumps. His own scream catches up with him in the air as he twists and flops limply before his prey. Prey? Ha!

  Hoist with his own petard, how sad. Saära complains until the changeling interrupts.

  “Now cut it out.”

  Then he stops scratching at the ground and sits down in the middle of the mandala he scored into the pliant dirt with his claws.

  “Why,” he says, “do you walk into the trap like some common prey?”

  “Curious,” the changeling explains. “And beautiful. Sing another one.”

  Saära fumes silently. Singing for nothing? Not luring, not yearning? Shame, shame for evermore!

  “All right,” he says finally. “But only if you come down with me. And give me something valuable in return.”