House of Windows

by John Langan

  I'm not sure how much of my decision to enter and then to remain in the pavilion owed itself to the place's religious past. Yes, it had been site of prayer services, but I had no idea if it still was. Had I read that it was used for more secular activities these days, for concerts, lectures, readings? Maybe. I didn't know if Methodists consecrated these kinds of places, the way Catholics do when they build a church. I didn't know if such a thing would make the least difference to Ted—because while I was at or near the center of a continuing supernatural experience, it wasn't the supernatural you heard about at Sunday mass. To be honest—this is going to sound strange—what drew me to the pavilion and kept me there was that it reminded me of Belvedere House. Yes, the very place I'd been trying to escape. The resemblance was hard to pin down. Mostly, it lay in the way the two buildings gave this profound feeling of occupying space. Sitting on the altar, I felt—not safer, no, not protected—I felt calm, as if I didn't have to keep struggling so hard to keep myself functioning—as if I could catch my breath.

  Wispy patches of fog congregated in the aisles, hovered over seats, drifted across the floor in front of me. Small clouds meandered around the inside of the roof, tinted by the weak light pushing through the stained-glass windows up there. The clouds almost seemed to circle the roof, which reminded me of the carousel I'd been on an hour ago. An hour. God, it might have been a month. The memory of the carousel brought with it the sensation of the ride spinning ever faster as I tried to maintain my seat on my horse. I put my hands out to either side of me to steady myself. Obviously, what I'd been through on the carousel was connected to the diner and therefore to everything else. In coming to the Vineyard, we—I hadn't gotten away from anything. In the space of sixty minutes, the island had gone from a haven to something approaching a trap. The feeling I'd had ever since this weirdness had erupted into our lives, the suspicion that there was more to it than Roger was letting on—that it was in some way sinister—had been confirmed. Ted was actively hostile, if not outright malevolent.

  What I couldn't understand was, why me? Yes, I was the woman his father had left his mother for—I was sure that Ted wouldn't have seen that their marriage had been over for years before I came on the scene—but that was Roger's decision, not mine. He'd had the fight with Roger at the apartment, but that was hardly my fault. I'd been the one who pleaded the two of them out of anything more than a stern lecture by the judge. I'd called on September 11 to find out if Ted was okay. He was the one who'd hung up on me. Since his death, I'd put Roger's photos of Ted throughout the house. I'd left Ted's childhood room alone. I was not the one to blame, here. You couldn't say that Roger had been unaffected by Ted's death—not if you'd seen his office; not if you'd trailed around the house after him in the wee small hours of the morning—but everything he'd underwent had flowed from the inside out, from the guilt and regret choking his psyche. What I had been through came the opposite route, from the outside in, and it made no sense.

  Even if I'd misinterpreted Ted's actions, which I was sure I hadn't but which was possible, he was dangerous. Another look at his face—his true face, which I was still not-remembering—a second glimpse might be more than my mind could recover from. I had thought that distance was the answer, that in leaving Belvedere House behind, we'd leave Ted with it. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Whatever role the house had played in all of this, it was glaringly obvious that Ted wasn't tied to it. Almost the opposite—the farther away from it we went, the more dramatic his actions became. I could elect to follow Roger's lead, let Ted complete whatever plan he'd set in motion—but there was enough wrong with that course of action for me not to consider it seriously. I was pretty sure that Ted's plan was not focused on sentimental reconciliation. Given the amount of attention I'd received already, there seemed a distinct possibility that I was intended to suffer. Again, I could be mistaken. Roger might be Ted's intended target, but so far I was the one taking the fire, and there was a real possibility of me winding up as collateral damage.

  Talking about all of this in this way—it makes it sound as if I were sitting there on the altar, calmly weighing my options, which was anything but the case. It was more tides—tidal waves of emotion rising and falling within me. Resentment gave way to confusion, which gave way to fear. If we couldn't escape Ted, then we had no choice but to return to Huguenot and deal with him. We—I, because I knew Roger wouldn't take part in anything that might jeopardize his fantasy. And dealing with Ted, how was I going to do that? Hire an exorcist? I didn't think you could hire one—it's not as if they advertise in the yellow pages—and didn't they deal with demons? It was my impression that the Church tried to be less Medieval about these sorts of things, and any request for an exorcism on my part was more likely to be met with a recommendation for counseling. I didn't think I'd have any more luck with other denominations. The ones that would take you seriously would be the same ones you wouldn't have any faith in. You could picture some variety of the televangelist stomping through Belvedere House in his powder-blue suit, one hand clutching his Bible, the other raised, his face red and sweating as he called out for the unclean spirit to depart in the name of Jesus, which he would pronounce, "Jeeeee—zuss," as if it were the correct answer to the big question at the end of a game show. No thank you. I would prefer not to.

  That left trying to address the root cause of the problem, namely, Roger's curse. It was like some kind of Freudian nightmare, the all-powerful father condemns the rebellious son and his words are so powerful they follow the son into the afterlife. There's this Kafka story—the title slips my mind, but it's about a young man whose father tells him what a failure he is and passes a death-sentence on him, so the son goes and drowns himself in the river. We seemed to be dealing with the Hollywood version of that story, suitably expanded and adapted for an American audience. I still had trouble with the idea that a few words spoken in anger could have such profound consequences, so physical—metaphysical an effect. I mean, words don't mean anything, isn't that what we believe these days? They're just a self-contained, self-referential sign-system. You're a writer, maybe you think differently, but I doubt you believe language has magic power.

  There was more fog inside the pavilion. It rolled down the stairs, flowed in among the seats, pooled along the floor in front of the altar. The interior of the tent was becoming less distinct. I heard the words of the curse tumbling one after the other. If there was a secret to understanding what was going on, it had to lie in the time between when the cops had dragged Roger and Ted out into the early-morning dark and when I'd seen them later that day.

  I could picture Roger sitting in the holding cell at the Huguenot police station. His eyes still burn from the pepper spray. He's given up fighting the tears that wash down his face; although he continues to wipe his running nose every few minutes with a wad of toilet paper. It's been less than an hour since he and Ted were brought in, processed, and locked across the holding area from one another—but enough time has passed that he should have calmed down. He hasn't. His heart still pounds as if the cell doors might spring open any moment and set him and Ted loose for round two. With each breath he inhales, pain stabs his right side. He knows Ted has bruised or broken ribs there, but he's so high on adrenaline he doesn't care—his only concern is that he did some damage of his own. If Ted broke two of his ribs, he hopes he broke four of Ted's. His left hip and the left side of his back feel as if a sledgehammer pounded them, a sharp surface pain laid over a deeper ache—pretty much his entire body feels as if someone's taken a meat tenderizer to it with great enthusiasm.

  Roger doesn't care, which is only partially due to the adrenaline. Most of his lack of caring is due to anger. He is enveloped in it. He has been angry before—with Ted, especially. All those previous occasions, however, every last one of them, have been different. No matter how angry Roger has felt, he's always restrained himself, always been careful to release just enough to make his displeasure known, and contained the rest. He's bottled it, the way
his father told him to when he was eight years old, as if his anger were some kind of volatile gas frothing inside a glass jug. If Roger's life were a house, then the rooms marked "TED" are full of shelves, and those shelves are crowded with glass bottles stoppered against their own contents. This time, however, at the very moment Roger was trying to contain his anger, when he attempted to close the door on Ted and his grandstanding, he failed. Ted forced the door open, stepped inside, and Roger, whose hand had been poised over the latest bottle's neck, threw the cork away.

  Twenty years of anger rose up in Roger in a mushroom cloud. This was anger unlike any he'd known before, and by God did it feel good. What a relief, finally, to be able to surrender to it, not to have to pretend that it's all right, Ted had his reasons, no doubt he was at fault, too—his rage swept over and through him, annihilating everything in its path, spilling out the tips of his fingers, the top of his head. When he holds his hands up in front of him, he can almost see it flickering there, a white-hot flame that dances and leaps from his skin and does not consume it. The marvelous thing about this anger is that it doesn't go away. It doesn't subside and leave him feeling empty and ashamed. With two decades of fuel stacked up, it could burn for a long time, and with this newest offense—this showing up at the front door at three in the morning, heaping abuse not only on him, but on his wife—Ted's stepmother—calling her a slut—and then raising his hand to him, to his father, who never, never, never lifted his hand to deliver any of the blows his son so richly deserved, not once—with this outrage, the flame streaming from Roger might burn for as long as he has left to live.

  It was so hot, I could feel it, across the distance of months and miles. I had imagined Roger's activities plenty of times in the past—it's something I'm pretty good at. Maybe that means I should be a writer, too. It's hard to convey how vivid all this was—how real. I'd pictured detailed scenes before, but however elaborate they'd been, however absorbed in them I'd become, they were still internal; I was still watching them with my mind's eye. This—it was as if I were standing in the cell with Roger. I could smell the pepper spray clinging to him, the dried sweat underneath it. I could smell the pungent industrial cleaner that had been used to scrub down the cell, the reek of urine beneath that. I could hear Roger's labored breathing, the scrape of his sneakers on the floor. His thoughts—it wasn't that I could hear them, but—I knew what was burning in his mind, as if I could read the words written on him. I wasn't all the way there with him—the altar was solid and cool beneath me—but this was not your garden-variety daydream.

  Whatever self-satisfaction Roger feels in embracing his anger—and he luxuriates in it; he rolls around in it; he dives deep beneath its surface and surfaces grinning—it's not enough. After they were shut in their separate cells, he and Ted continued to hurl abuse at each other, but it was of the four-letter variety, too familiar to be more than a placeholder for their sentiments. This hadn't stopped either of them from stringing those curse words together in varied and even inventive combinations—until one of the police officers leaned his head in and told them that if the two of them didn't knock it off, he was going to pepper spray them again, which shut them up. Staring across the corridor at Ted, who's lying down on his cell's metal bunk, his back to Roger, Roger hears the echo of their insults and thinks that those aren't really curses. They're simply words we've been told are inappropriate, so that saying or hearing them gives a small charge. They don't carry any weight, those words, they don't do anything more than momentarily offend the sensibilities. Let's face it, when was the last time anyone was really and truly offended by someone swearing? Certainly Ted's stream of obscenities has rolled off Roger's back, as he assumes his torrent of abuse rolled off Ted's. None of it hurt Ted, and right now, that's what Roger wants more than anything. That is what his anger requires, for him to wound his son in such a way that Ted won't be able to shrug it off.

  If he were stronger, Roger might be able to count on breaking Ted's jaw. That would teach him to show up at his father's door at three in the morning, shooting off his mouth. He knows he doesn't have the strength, though, which makes his anger burn all the hotter. Physically speaking, in whatever terms you want—strength, speed, skill—Ted has the edge, for which Roger has suffered the consequences. The way things stand now, he is the one who'll take away the scars of their meeting, and this is intolerable.

  Which brings Roger back to the curse, to words with meaning. If there's one area where Roger's superiority to Ted remains unchallenged, it's words. He can put together a lethal sentence as quickly and efficiently as Ted strips, cleans, and assembles his M4. God knows there's enough raw material lying around for him to use—although he has to be careful. If he speaks for too long, Ted's eyes will glaze over and he'll have lost him; or Ted will start in with his own list of complaints; or he'll laugh and walk away. What Roger has in mind must be delivered economically and forcefully. He has to hit Ted hard and fast, has to drive the knife in deep, twist it, and leave Ted to extract it from his bloody gut.

  Roger's words from his last sleepwalk sounded in my ears. "Words with meaning. Sharp. Razored. Barbed, tipped with slow-acting poison. That's what you need." The image I'd had of him as we drove up to the Cape, the picture of Roger as some kind of caveman carving a crude knife, returned with even greater detail. He'd use a sharpened rock to shape the piece of bone in his hand into sharpness, then something finer—a needle of some kind, maybe bone, as well—to scratch symbols, the same figures tattooed up and down his arms, across his face, into it. Not only is he going to hurt Ted physically, he's going to wound his spirit, his soul, whatever you want to call it.

  When he's finished, when he's sure that those eight sentences, those one hundred twenty-three words, are enough, are sufficient, Roger recites them quietly, his eyes closed. He's testing his weapon. Those first four sentences, they're the stab, the sharp blow in just above the navel. Wait a moment, then the next four, which are the twisting, first to the right, then the left, leaning on the grip with each twist. He can see Ted's eyes widening with shock. He can feel the hot blood running out over his fingers. Impatient for the moment to come, he's tempted to utter his sentences—his curse—then and there, to have as much time as possible to enjoy the spectacle of Ted's agony. He opens his mouth, hesitates. He can hear people moving around on the other side of the door to the holding area. How would it look if he started to deliver his carefully crafted condemnation, only to have it interrupted by some crewcut moron telling him to keep it down? He'd be ridiculous, a laughing-stock, and that he cannot risk. The right moment will present itself, he thinks, be patient.

  With as much devotion as any monk praying the rosary, Roger repeats the curse to himself. That white-hot flame pours from the tips of his fingers, the top of his head. He sits turning the knife over and over in his fiery hands, the fire hardening the weapon, making it shine. Dawn breaks, sending red-gold light through the holding area's small, high windows. The air glows, the way it does when the sun puts in its first appearance, and Roger's heart leaps in anticipation. As it does, he feels a pain—a new pain—burst in his chest and race out along his left arm. The words of the curse tumble from his mind, scattered by a new thought: heart attack. That's impossible, he thinks, and, as if in response, the pain sags.

  Good, he thinks, retrieving the curse, and then the pain announces itself a second time. It's as if a cinderblock has slammed against his chest. He gasps as the suddenness, the intensity of the pain pushes the cell away from him. He concentrates on the words, the one hundred twenty-three words, the eight sentences. While his left arm throbs and his chest presses in, Roger deliberately recites the curse, stubbornly ignoring the voice in his head telling him to call for help, for God's sake, there's a cop outside the door, the fire station is next door, they have an ambulance, call for help. "Not in front of the boy," he whispers through teeth soldered together by pain. He doesn't want to appear weak in front of Ted, doesn't want him to know he's scored such a substantial v
ictory.

  Sweat stands out on Roger's forehead. His teeth loosen and rattle as chill after chill runs through him. He clings to the curse, repeating it so quickly it's no longer separate words, just one long mass of sound punctuated by gasps as the pain drops a second cinderblock on him. If his eyes weren't already moist from the pepper spray, tears would have been squeezed out of them. As it is, his eyes send hot trails down his cheeks. The curse has lost much of its sense, has become half-words held together by almost words. Roger gazes up at the ceiling, panting, looks back down—

  And sees something. His heart is in too much pain to jump, his lungs too tight to draw in breath, but his eyes widen. There, in the corner of his cell below the high window streaming light, where the shadows have retreated—there, he sees what might be another shadow, except that it seems thicker, denser. Through his tear-smeared vision, he has the impression of an eye, a great eye like a dark mirror. There's more, something like thick coils stacked one on top of the other. He has the sensation of vastness. He isn't seeing all of this—he can't see all of it. If the cinderblocks weren't crushing his chest, if his arm didn't feel as if it were caught in a vise, he would be terrified. The only fear the pain will allow, however, is of the distant, intellectual variety, the I-must-be-afraid-because-I-should-be-afraid kind that has no practical effect. Roger continues to recite the curse—the string of sound it's become. He stares at the thing in the shadows. It's as if the shadows are a kind of window—no, it's as if the thing itself is the window.