You both sit there in the quiet for a while and you wonder where Sweet James’s voice has gone. The room is stilled of his presence.
“Why are you here?” Audrey asks you then, quietly.
“Sweet James sent me to get water to put out the fire in Rita’s stove. Said if I did he’d . . . well—let me come farther in here. Whenever I wanted,” you whisper, shameful, your cheeks heating up.
“He’ll never change.” Audrey shakes her head. “He’s a sly one. You know, once you’re in here, far enough, he can’t do anything. This place charges you up. Makes you strong and strange. He and I were friends once—if you could call whatever it was we were doing friendship. I hear echoes of him in some of the rooms, every so often. Old fool.”
A bright green streak runs through you, sharp jealousy. You knew. You just knew there were other girls. The fondness in her tone enrages you and you swallow hard as she continues.
“He promised me the world in exchange for my time, pieces of my life, pieces of me and Rita. He knew all our secrets, and when he had his fill, in I came, and I never turned back. There’s so much in here. It goes on for a hundred thousand miles. Time feels strange. I haven’t talked to anyone in a little while: I don’t bump into other travelers often. In fact, you’re the first one I’ve met who knows his name.”
“Other travelers?” you ask.
“Yes, heaps and heaps of them around. They’ve come in through different cuts in the world from all over—different places, different times and tragedies. Some turn sets of rooms into towns, settle down and build worlds that look just like the worlds they came from. That’s not for me. I left for a reason, and if Rita wasn’t coming, I was going it by myself. I’m a lone wolf.” She winks at you, her smile bright. Too bright.
She’s got a vulpine quality to her, a mischief that you are at once attracted to and profoundly envious of. She makes you feel huge and at first that had been in your favor, but now her delicacy feels like a taunt. She’s been as close to that great paper owl as you. He made you big and strong like a lion but must have made her small and sharp like a diamond. She’s gotten what you want. You have a thousand questions, but they are dulled against the nausea of jealousy.
“You don’t think Rita would . . . would come, do you?” A flash of desperation colors Audrey’s question.
“She didn’t come with you back then?”
Audrey sighed. “She nearly did. She would love this. She would love this, and we’d have a life here. But we argued and the door in the neon room closed and—that was that.”
“What age were—are you?”
“I was—am—seventeen. My body isn’t reacting the same way it would back there. Nothing is the same here. God, she’d love it. She’d love it.” Audrey shook her head and wiped a few persistent tears from her face. “I don’t mean to be crying. I haven’t cried in forever. I just, I’ve been so far from her for so long. I wonder if she remembers me at all.”
You sit silently for a bit, together. The mug is still in Audrey’s hands, and you’re reluctant to ask for it back, but you came here on a mission and it’s the only cup you have. You’re waiting for Sweet James’s whisper to roll down on you at any time. You’re waiting for that suck of gravity to pull you back through the door you came in, but there’s nothing. None of his pull in the air.
“Why don’t you come back with me?” you offer, despite yourself. “I’m sure Rita would be happy to see you.”
Audrey flinches. “I can’t go back there. There’s no room for girls like me back home. I don’t fit there.”
“Girls like you?”
“Yeah. Like me.” She thrusts the mug at you and stands up, all her vulnerability evaporated. “Go back to your mission. This won’t be the last time we meet. Next time, bring me some cigarettes, won’t you?”
She turns on her heel then and strides back to the door she came from, opens it, and steps through into the blackness. It slams shut behind her. Just like that. Alone again, an empty cup in your hand. You sit with it awhile before standing and going back to the cold tub, dunking the mug into the icy water, then leaving. Your head spins all the while.
Goodbye, room of baths. Goodbye, corridor of moths. Goodbye, neon water.
hello, bevan.
Hello, Sweet James.
Chapter
Fourteen
The man in the office looked up from his desk. A caged canary peeped, some pages rustled, and Audrey leant against the door, panting. The man regarded her breathlessness, the new sweat on her brow.
“Follow her,” he said, and went back to his notes.
Audrey steadied herself, her palm damp on the handle of the door. After all this time, another girl who had come in through Sweet James. And it wasn’t Rita. What was Rita doing? Letting some stranger have access to their owl, her owl—letting her all the way in here, not even having the nerve to come in herself? Was Rita still that spineless?
Long seconds passed, the canary chirping like a tiny feathered clock, and the man at the desk looked over his shoulder again.
“If you don’t move now, you’ll lose your chance.”
His eyes scared her terribly, they were leaden with too much knowledge. He was never wrong. She gritted her teeth and nodded firmly, then ducked out of the office and back into the bathing chamber, her feet padding along the tiles quicker than her heartbeat.
Audrey O’Driscoll knew herself well: after the years she had spent alone, she seldom surprised herself anymore. Her perception, reactions, her courage—they had all been tested in the strange, endless landscapes she had sacrificed everything for. But, of all the things she had seen in these corridors, of all the forests and fields and cities and hotel rooms and caves and casinos, she had never felt like she did at the sight of the girl holding Rita’s cup. That was new. It turned her pulse to voltage.
The moth corridor blustered around Audrey as she dashed. She had not gone this way in a very long time. She hissed at the papery little creeps to keep away, but they gathered, in front of the door to the neon room, blocking her way. They giggled in a choir, their thousands of together-voices replying, “What do you think you’re doing back here?”
“None of your business!” Audrey barked, batting the handful that flitted around her away. “Let me through. Now.”
The moths tittered again. “So be it. The yellow-haired girl was very pretty, wasn’t she?” and they came apart, revealing the door ahead. She opened it and stepped into the neon wet room, the room that had woken up her hunger in the first place. God, the smell of it brought the hair on the back of her neck on end and the door on the next wall ahead rippled a tease. It hung open ever so slightly.
“I know you’re in here, sweet thing.” Audrey’s voice shook despite her attempt to keep it steady and confident. “Come talk to me. I’m lonesome.”
The wall in front of her trembled again, but that deep and terrible voice she hadn’t heard in so long did not answer her. She knew she should turn around and walk away, but something in her, something old and impulsive, drew her forward to the door she had not stepped through in years, so many that she wasn’t sure she could count them. She placed a hand on the warm surface and pushed.
Chapter
Fifteen
The clock rolls four. The house is silent as you creep into the kitchen, alight and trembling, the mug of water clasped in your hands. The room is amber lit from the stove. The fire rumbles in that low growling way it always does, seeming louder in the night.
Your bare feet pad softly on the floor, chilly, each step a commitment to your cause, each footfall a departure from consequence. This will give you what you want. You kneel down in front of it, opening the door, the rush of heat on your face. You are transfixed a moment, the flames seeming so small in the night, untended since Rita went to bed. They always falter near morning, hungry for breakfast to grow big again, to enact whatever it was they did over the architecture of the house—whatever kept Sweet James from his fullest form. It would be
his house soon.
You look into the flames for what kind of man he would be for you, try to imagine his body there in the red and gold. You try not to wonder about what Rita will say when she comes down to wet, smoking ash. Or about the shudder that will take the house when all this strange protection falls. About how it will feel never to be able to take this back. The mug is still cold in your hand. What will it feel like when he gets loose of his confines? You are afraid, and thrilled. A wildness new.
You tip the mug of water from the other world into the fire,19 and foul smoke rises and the fire hisses. There shouldn’t have been enough water to extinguish it, but the elements are no longer just water and flame, cold and heat. They are opposites, older and stranger than both.
In the grate among the turf ash lies a bundle of cards, barely charred, but wet now. You consider reaching in for them, drawing one for your own. A flash of a tower rises and falls before your eyes like a bright, bad camera flash, and you turn from the ruin. Your knees click a little as you stand, and you feel your way in the dark toward the table. Rita’s cigarettes sit there. You pluck one from the pack and put it to your lips, delicious celebration: that’s what Rita gets for telling people what they can and can’t do, what they can and can’t have.
You flick the lighter, plastic and white in your trembling hand—you wish you weren’t shaking, but you are—and the tiny dancing flame sparks up for a second, then dies. You try it again, a catch, a spark, a tiny fire that disappears before you can ignite your victory treat. Your skin goose pimples; a low roll of nausea follows, like dread. The air drops in temperature again. On your bare limbs it almost stings.
The walls groan and a reek of something rotting creeps into the air. You feel sick but underneath the sick you feel huge, tilting, that tower behind your eyes becomes your body. Sweet James is free now, crawling from where the holy heat had kept him contained. It creaks low and deep, the walls, the pipes of the place unmistakably laughing. That bad nectar, you love it.
The house lurches and you fall to your knees, a bruising crack against the kitchen tiles, your knuckles stinging from impact on the floor as you clench Rita’s smoking tools, unable to let them go. The whole world leans askew20 and Sweet James laughs again and a laugh rises up out of you, too. The air from your mouth turns vapor, cloud in the air. The cold is biting, and good.
Bobby knew what was happening before he even opened his eyes, pupils pyramid now, furious. He was curled up, a ball of cat at Rita’s feet. The slowness of her breath told him she was still asleep, but the cold would rouse her, if not the poison in the air. He leapt silently to the floor, wound across the heaps of books there, and nudged the door open with the tip of his nose. Out into the hallway, he stalked, noiseless, full of rage.
Rossa had sauntered to the bathroom to pee. He’d been wide-awake all night, held hostage by the sensation of having forgotten something important, his tongue chasing the weird hollow in the back of his gum. He was torn for at least half an hour between the soft warmth of his bed and the discomfort of needing desperately to relieve himself, and ultimately his body won out over the bed. He padded down the corridor past Rita’s room, past Mae’s room, past the door to the hot press—past another door. And another. The bathroom was along here someplace, surely? Across from that awful radiator he’d fainted beside. He hated walking around this house in the dark. He didn’t trust it. Bleary-eyed from lying with his eyes half closed, he felt like the night and the house had teamed together and were playing tricks on him.
There, a radiator on one side of the hallway, a door on the other. He opened it up and no—that wasn’t the bathroom at all. Another linen closet? How many did the old woman need? He took his phone out of his pajama pocket and shone a light into the nook and immediately wished he hadn’t.
It was a narrow closet, but rather than neatly pressed stacks of linen and towels, each shelf was crowded with statues of young women shrouded in blue, eyes red, faces numbed by sorrow. Statues of the Virgin Mary huddled together, casting long shadows around their little kingdom as Rossa shone his digital light upon them, staring, staring until some will rose up in him and he slammed the closet closed and flung his back against it, as though his sapling strength might be able to hold these statues in. How had he never noticed that door before? Why were there so many statutes?
Maybe his eyes had been fooling him. The radiator wasn’t at all facing this new, slim door. It was a little way up the hallway—and the bathroom door was open enough that Rossa could be sure of his destination. He scurried up and slammed the light switch outside the bathroom door. The light glared, an assault on his retinas, but a safe one at least. He locked the door behind him, unlocked it, then locked it again. Doubly sure. The blanch of the tiles felt clean and safe and familiar, though every time he blinked Rossa could still see the white outlines of the virgin figurines.
After relieving himself, Rossa washed his hands in the steep old square sink—but the warm water wouldn’t run. Both taps gushed water so cold it stung his hands. The house was normally so tepid, almost clammy: Rossa did not like this. None of this. He’d get back to bed—make sure he didn’t open the Mary closet again—and put his head under the covers where he would be safe and warm, where he could get his heart to stop pounding, his ears to stop ringing.
Or he would have, if the door hadn’t suddenly stopped being a door and instead shifted darkly into something else. If the bathroom floor hadn’t tilted slightly and the light hadn’t bent so hard that oily shadows spilled from the sink, the toilet, the bath. Rossa for sure would have been back in bed in no time if he wasn’t trapped not only by the house gone wrong, but by a paralysis that began to creep up his body like cold, wet tendrils, pinning him in place. All he could feel was the cold bleed of fear.
The tiles around Rossa shone too bright then. Bone and teeth and viscera, he could swear the walls around him had turned feathered—white and dappled tawny. Beyond the screech of tinnitus in his ears, he could have sworn he heard low, bad laughter just before his knees gave way. He crouched on the floor. He closed his eyes tightly and listened to the rumbling laughter and found something in himself, beyond the freeze of fear: if this thing was evil, then he was good, and he must be able to overcome it. He just had to find the courage—he knew it was in there somewhere, but he couldn’t grasp it.
Laughter rose and rose as he crouched there, mocking, callous, terrible until it became words, the madness of a voice manifest from everywhere and nowhere at all.
what good is being good if you’re a coward, rossa?
Mae, down the hallway, dreamed of moths and mouths and in her sleep tucked the duvet close around her against the cold.
You pull yourself up from the floor to the table against a new, icy wind. You can barely catch your breath, but you can feel his presence, and strength floods you despite the chill. You willed him to appear. You have never wanted anything so badly. A man who was once an owl, with a deep voice. A man who knows you.
But when the door swings open, it is not James that barrels through: it is Bobby, and you are furious. He is huge and loping, his energy bigger and less orderly, monochrome but for the mustard gold of his eyes. Very almost a lion, you think, for a second, before the creature snarls.
What do you think you are doing? His voice comes down on you from everywhere, like the room itself is furious at you—like you betrayed the whole house.
“He asked me to. He wanted to get out, he promised me—”
Of course he did! Of course he did. Show yourself, James. Show yourself!
The floor quakes and the walls warp psychedelic and wrong and the snuffed-out old stove, with all its pipes and the hob and the fatness of the chimney, begins to worm and shift in the way that you know all too well. Oh, James. His laughter bellows as black iron and glass and wire become beak and eye and feather, as his body becomes the kitchen wall, the kitchen ceiling. He is huge, his face a stove, his wings spanning to cradle you and the table and Bobby, too—until Bobby roars
something cosmic and ferocious, leaving your ears ringing, and the owl shrinks back, ever so slightly. Two titans and you are just a child caught between them, out of your depth. You have made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Chapter
Sixteen
There was a stark little silhouette in the kitchen doorway.
“Sweet James and Bobby Dear, what do you think you’re doing to this child?”
Three pairs of eyes, all pupils triangular, flung toward Audrey O’Driscoll as her voice rose. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She was as strong, at least, as the bird and the cat now, she reminded herself, though here in this kitchen she felt no more than a teenage girl with one dead best friend and another . . . well—best friend who didn’t love her enough to run away with her.
She felt human for the first time in decades. It was awful.
Sweet James chuckled low and smug, and turned his furnace face to her, the house shuddering with his movement. i left the door cracked open, i knew you’d come. Audrey rolled her eyes. “Oh, I suppose you’re not in the slightest surprised to see me, are you?”
there are no surprises, said James the furnace.
I was wondering when you’d come back, said Bobby the lion.
Audrey walked into the kitchen, full of new machines and old tiles. Rita’s parents were long gone from here, she could feel it, sense from Sweet James that he had had something to do with it. And worse, in the deepest fibers of her, somewhere under her bones, she missed him and was glad to see him. He’d saved her. He’d given her a whole world.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Bevan said, her voice sudden and panicked and young. Audrey, James, and Bobby may have been living in a world without surprise, but Bevan most certainly was not.
Audrey looked at Bevan, the deep influence of the cat and owl all over her, and she was struck by the familiarity of it. A girl handing it all over to the beasts. Maybe she wanted freedom, too, or maybe something else, something bigger. She was a house for the monsters, herself. Audrey’s heart broke a little, and she extended a hand to Bevan. There could be hope for her, yet. She had a whole life ahead of her beyond this.
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