House of Windows

by John Langan

  House of Windows

  by

  John Langan

  Table of Contents

  HOUSE OF WINDOWS

  John Langan

  House of Windows © 2009 by John Langan

  This edition of House of Windows © 2009 by Night Shade Books

  Jacket art © 2009 by Santiago Caruso

  Jacket design by Michael Gin

  Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-59780-152-2

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Fiona

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote the first draft of this novel in the tiny laundry room of the house my wife and I were living in with our then-infant son. Like all new parents, we were stressed and sleepless. Yet every morning, for anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half to two hours, sometimes, Fiona occupied David while I worked on adding one more page of legal paper to the pile on my wobbly desk. Then, when the manuscript was done, typed, and printed, she read it and commented on it, twice. At the time, I don't think I was as profoundly grateful for all of that as I should have been. But without my wife, this book wouldn't be here, so thanks, love.

  Once the novel was done, it was read by a lot of people, including my younger brother Rob, John Joseph Adams, Keith Badowski, and Helen Pilinovsky, all of whom offered support and encouragement at times it was very much needed. The first section of the novel benefited from the careful critical attention of the Wallkill (Zombie) Writers Workshop, composed of Brett Cox, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Roseda Molina, Veronica Schanoes, and Robert Waugh (whose wife, Kappa, was very patient with the lot of us); because of their ruthless counsel, this book contains 50 percent less semicolons.

  I began this novel as a break from another I was writing; when I realized that what I had thought was a novella was in fact going to become a novel, my agent, Ginger Clark, fearlessly went along with what was in fact a profound change in the game plan. Ginger has championed this book from the get-go, and she's a good part of the reason you're reading these words now.

  This book had a hard time finding a home: the genre people weren't happy with all the literary stuff; the literary people weren't happy with all the genre stuff. Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books read the novel, understood and appreciated what I was trying to do in it, and acquired it. To say I'm grateful is an understatement, especially since Night Shade is also responsible for publishing work by such fine writers as Laird Barron, Graham Joyce, Joel Lane, and Lucius Shepard. It's nice company to find yourself in. I also owe Ross Lockhart a debt for putting up with my insane demands.

  My family—my sons Nick and David, my Mom, my siblings, siblings-in-law, hordes of nieces and nephews—have supported me in a multitude of ways great and small. I've benefited from the friendship of Laird Barron, Mike Cisco, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay. The last few years, I've been the beneficiary of kindnesses from a number of more established writers: Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, and Lucius Shepard among them; I'm happy to acknowledge them here.

  Finally, there's you, whoever you may be, who have allowed me your time and attention, both of which, I know, are never in great supply. You make a novel like this possible, and I'm grateful to you for it. Now, take my hand and I'll try to offer you something worthy of what you've offered me.

  The figure of my sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door. In my own rooms, too, with which she had never been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were still alive and had been often there.

  —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  So, pursuing the one course of thought, he had the one relentless monster still before him. All things looked black, and cold, and deadly upon him, and he on them. He found a likeness to his misfortune everywhere. There was a remorseless triumph going on about him, and it galled and stung him in his pride and jealousy, whatever form it took: though most of all when it divided with him the love and memory of his lost boy.

  —Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

  Prelude:

  A Face Just Out of View

  Everyone asks me what I 'think' happened to Roger," said Veronica Croydon, "and if I don't supply them with an answer immediately, they're only too happy to offer their own. Could he have had a heart attack while he was out for one of his walks? As if the police hadn't thought of that already, and there hadn't been that enormous search for him in the woods off Founders. And as if, because he was sixty-five, his heart was a ticking time-bomb. If not a heart attack, then it's a stroke or something similar, an aneurysm. As if Roger didn't run five miles every day; as if he didn't have the body of a forty-year-old. Trust me, I know." She raised her hands from the sink, and passed me a plate.

  Taking it into the dishtowel, I said, "Surely you can understand—"

  "That people assume I wore him out?"

  "No," I said; although I supposed there was sufficient truth to her statement. Veronica Croydon had begun her relationship with her eventual husband as a graduate student; she had been more than three decades Roger's junior—closer to four—younger than the son of his first marriage. "No," I repeated, setting the plate in the cupboard, "I was thinking that heart attacks happen at every age."

  "Maybe," Veronica said, "but I doubt it. If you could hear their voices, the way they drop an octave, as if they're broaching a delicate topic—the details of our sex life, which they are, indirectly. They sound so greedy.

  "Not that those people are the worst," she continued, handing me another plate. "That would have to be the ones who look me straight in the eye and declare that Roger 'obviously' left me for someone else. About seventy percent are in favor of him returning to Joanne; the remaining thirty think it was someone even younger. As if Roger and Joanne hadn't been over for years before I ever met him; as if she didn't do her best to make us miserable once we were together, even though they were basically divorced and leading separate lives. Have you met her? Have you seen her? Of course you have. Why would Roger want to exchange me for that? And someone younger? Please—as if that's all our relationship was, Roger living out a dirty old man's secret fantasy."

  All of these possibilities had occurred to me and Ann, my wife; I believe they must have occurred to everyone in the English department at SUNY Huguenot, to anyone who had known Roger Croydon. Hearing them from Veronica's lips, however, I felt myself accused. In the immediate aftermath of Roger's disappearance; in the subsequent year and a half; we hadn't communicated with Veronica, hadn't sat down at the computer to send an e-mail, much less written a card or letter or picked up the phone to call her. We hadn't talked to her, but we had talked about her, to each other and to our friends, discussing the various scenarios she had enumerated along with other, more fanciful explanations for her husband's disappearance. He'd joined a cult; he'd run afoul of drug dealers; he'd lost his mind and been secretly institutionalized. Such discussions had been a de facto party game for months, and whatever twinge of distaste I might have felt had not prohibited me from joining in. That Veronica was not, had never been, the easiest of people to get along with—that it was easier to talk about her than it was to talk to her—suddenly seemed the thinnest of excuses. Placing the plate on top of its fellows, I said, "It's just that Roger's behavior had been so .
. . erratic. Since Ted was killed."

  At the mention of her late stepson's name, Veronica paused, her arms submerged in soapy dishwater up to the elbows, her gaze focused on the window directly over the sink. Night and the kitchen lights had transformed the window into a mirror, and all she could be staring at was her reflection: longish red hair pulled back into a ponytail, angular cheeks carefully made up (though it had been only the six of us and the baby for dinner), brown eyes greened by colored contacts, ears hung with dangling earrings that terminated in small, circular mirrors. Her mouth, lipsticked muted red, pursed, and she said, "Ted."

  "I didn't mean—"

  Veronica waved me to silence, showering suds across the counter. "I know," she said. "It was real. It happened. And yes, it did send Roger around the bend." She laughed humorlessly. "You have no idea how far it sent him." She turned, and I was shocked to see tears spilling from her eyes. "Everyone asks me what I 'think' happened to Roger," she said, "and the thing is, I know what happened to him."

  "What?" Stunned, I stood there, while Veronica wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffed, and resumed dishwashing. That she knew what had befallen her husband, yet, as far as I knew, had said nothing of it to the police or anyone else was . . . was incredible. Only when she held out the last plate to me without looking and it slipped from her fingers, so that I had to leap forward to catch it from smashing on the tiled floor, did I find my voice. Holding the plate in both hands, I said, "You know?"

  "I do."

  "But," I gestured with the plate. "Why haven't you told anyone?"

  Veronica went to pass me a handful of cutlery. Seeing that I had not finished with the plate, she returned the knives and forks to the sink, took a breath, and said, "Because it's impossible. What happened to Roger is impossible."

  "I don't understand," I said, finally setting the plate down and closing the cupboard door. "If you know where Roger is—"

  "Roger's dead. He died two years ago."

  Either Veronica was playing an unpleasant joke on me, or her words were meant to express some oblique truth. Ted had been killed in Afghanistan two years ago; perhaps that was what she meant.

  After a pause, she said, "Pretty nuts, huh?"

  I decided to risk honesty. "I don't think I understand."

  "No," Veronica said, handing me a bundle of silverware, "you wouldn't." While I dried the cutlery and set it in its drawer, she added, "Don't feel bad. No one would understand. Well, it's not so much no one would understand; it's more no one would believe. And I can imagine what they'd say. There's been enough talk about me already. The last thing I need is everyone looking at me and saying, 'Oh, there goes crazy Veronica. Did you hear what she said happened to her husband?'" She gave me the remainder of the silverware and released the water from the sink. Rinsing her hands, she asked, "Is there any wine left?"

  "There's a little white in the fridge."

  "Great." As she retrieved a glass from the cabinet and sought out the wine, I finished my duties as dish-dryer and hung up the dishtowel. "I guess I'll turn in," I said, turning to the stairs.

  "Hey!" Veronica said. "Where are you going?"

  "To bed," I said. "It was a long drive here, and Robbie's been a bit restless, lately—he's still teething—so I want to be there in case he wakes up."

  "Come on," Veronica said. "Don't go up yet. Stay and have a glass of wine."

  "Thanks," I said, "but I'm not much for wine. My stomach—"

  "Have a glass of water, then. I can't believe everyone's gone to sleep. It's barely nine o'clock."

  "Everyone's had a long day," I said. "There is cable—"

  "I don't want to watch TV. I want someone to talk to."

  I was on the verge of answering that there was a phone, too, but something in Veronica's tone, a plaintive undercurrent, made me hesitate. Noticing this, she said, "Tell you what: stay up with me for a little while and I'll tell you what I meant just now. I'll tell you what happened to Roger. You write those weird stories, don't you? Then you have to hear this. It's right up your alley."

  "I'm sorry?" I wasn't sure what was more confusing: the offhand, breezy way in which Veronica had offered a story that not five minutes past she had insisted she would never disclose—a story that could only be unhappy—or the fact that she was offering it to me, here and now. We were not even friendly acquaintances; my offer to dry the dishes had been put forth before I knew she would be washing them. If I had talked to her while we performed our respective duties, it was out of generic civility. It was hard to believe that my infrequent responses to her nearly continuous monologue could have earned me the right to hear her story.

  Apparently, however, that was the case. "I said I'd tell you what happened to Roger. It's been a year and a half, and I'm wondering if I need to tell someone about it, regardless of what they'll think. It's like—are you Catholic?"

  "Episcopalian."

  "Do you guys have Confession?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay. It's like, I need to Confess, you know? Not that I did anything wrong—I just have to say what took place out loud. I have to hear myself say it to someone else."

  "Fair enough," I said, "but why me? Couldn't Addie—"

  "Addie would think I had lost my mind," Veronica said. "You probably will, too, but she's one of the only friends I have left, and I couldn't stand that. If you think I'm nuts, it's no big deal. Basically, you're in the right place at the right time."

  "Aren't you concerned I'll tell someone?" I asked.

  "You could," Veronica said. "But I'm asking you not to."

  "All right," I said, after reflecting that, sitting in the living room, we'd be directly beneath Ann's and my bedroom. If Robbie cried, I'd be able to hear him and run up the stairs before he'd worked himself up too much. "If you're sure—"

  "Don't worry," Veronica said, "you won't believe what I'm going to tell you, anyway." Carrying the bottle of wine in one hand, her glass of it in the other, she led the way from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. While I seated myself in the rocking chair, she set the bottle and glass on the low coffee table in front of the overstuffed blue-and-white-striped couch. For a moment, Veronica gazed at the windows over the couch, then, turning to me, said, "Tell you what. Before I start this story, I'm going to take a quick shower. To unwind, you know? Don't go anywhere. I'll be right back." Without waiting, she headed for the downstairs bathroom, on the other side of the stairs. A moment later, I heard the bathroom door shut.

  I was sufficiently annoyed to stand up and cross to the foot of the stairs before curiosity made me pause. Never refuse a story: How often had I offered that as a maxim to my creative writing students? Here I was, being offered a narrative that promised the seed of a story, at minimum, possibly a novel, and I couldn't wait ten minutes for it? I returned to the rocking chair.

  This was not how I had anticipated spending tonight. Ann and I had made the five-hour journey from our home in Huguenot to our friends Harlow and Addie's vacation house on Cape Cod as a treat to ourselves—our variation on the spring break our students at SUNY were spending in Florida and Mexico—and because we'd wanted to introduce Robbie, our ten-month-old son, to the place that had come to mean so much to us, the house where the seeds of our marriage had been sown and to which we'd returned in the years since. We had known we'd be joined by our friend Leigh, escaping Manhattan for a long weekend, but we hadn't realized Veronica would be staying with us until we'd driven up the house's sandy driveway and seen her red Jetta parked in front of it. Veronica's presence was testament to Addie's unfailing generosity of spirit. After Veronica had replaced Roger Croydon's first wife—an affair that was a good deal more fraught and messy than Veronica had pretended—Addie had been the only one of Roger's former friends not to abandon him, and her loyalty had been sufficiently expansive to include the former student over whom he and Joanne were divorcing. Following Roger's disappearance, Addie had visited and had Veronica over to visit her and Harlow.
When I had remarked to her that doing so must count as some act of mercy—whether corporal or spiritual I wasn't sure—Addie had sighed and said, "Underneath it all, Veronica is really very sweet. She's just been through a lot. She refuses to talk about it right now, but it's clear that things between her and Roger had gotten very bad. From what I can gather, before he left, he was in the process of an extended breakdown, which she did her best to cope with, but which was too much for her. I think she blames herself for his leaving."

  While it was true that Veronica had compressed what should have been the experiences of twenty years into barely a quarter of that time, I was less inclined to Addie's charity. My aversion to Veronica wasn't rooted in any slight or wrong she had done me; to be honest, I hadn't known her well at any point. It was more basic than that. We had met during her first semester in the Master's program, at an English department party. I had spoken with Veronica briefly, and been struck by the fact that she was, literally and figuratively, overdressed for the occasion. Where the rest of the party-goers alternated among thirteen ways of appearing casual, Veronica had chosen a black cocktail dress, high heels, and a pearl necklace and earrings. Where the clusters of people around us complained about apathetic students and poor pay, Veronica's conversation with me had circled a line of Emily Dickinson's poetry she said she had been "contemplating": "There's a certain slant of light / Oppresses, like the heft of cathedral tunes." In the course of our brief discussion, Veronica had mentioned that she had graduated—magna cum laude—from Penrose College, where she had written her senior thesis on Dickinson and Hawthorne, and at first I had attributed her mannerisms to the lingering effects of four years spent on the other side of the Hudson, wandering ivied halls. When I considered the students and faculty from Penrose I'd encountered before Veronica, however, that notion dissipated. If anything, they were more proletarian than we at SUNY Huguenot, albeit in a more self-conscious and -satisfied way. It had occurred to me that Veronica—who at that point was still "this graduate student" to me—was carrying on her fantasy of what an English department faculty party should be, insisting that the rest of us conform to her vision. Later, when I had made a few acid remarks about her to Ann, my then-fiancée had given her a name: Veronica Dorian, and laughingly declared that I was just jealous to have discovered someone who was more of a snob than I was. Ann, who shared Addie's generous perspective and who had Veronica as a student in her Contemporary American Novel class, had agreed that Veronica was full of herself, but added that her remarks in class and written work showed genuine acuity of thought. "I am not a snob," I had replied, "I just have standards," and then changed the subject.