House of Windows

by John Langan

  I saw it, too, saw and felt it. All over my body, my nerve endings flared, my skin shrieked, as if a blast of arctic air had poured over me. My leg trumpeted new pain. Even as I gripped the edge of the altar, digging both hands into it to reassure myself that this was not real—vision or hallucination, it was not happening—I was aware of the thing across the cell, felt its coils scraping against one another, as if my nerves ran out to it. Up to that point, I had viewed what was playing out in front of me as a kind of mind-movie, my unusually vivid imagination of a possible past. What I was experiencing now was no memory—it was present. It wasn't that I'd gone back in time—it was more that to see this thing in the past was to see it in the present, if that makes any sense. I'd thought that I was beyond being afraid—that my capacity for fear had been exhausted, tapped out—but terror jolted me. I no longer wanted this vision. Whatever insights it promised, I could live without. I stood—

  And was standing in the cell. The pavilion had vanished. Frantic, I looked around. There was Ted in the cell across the hall, lying with his back to me. There was the door to the police station. "Help!" I screamed. "Help me!"

  Nothing happened. Ted didn't leap off his bunk. No cop rushed through the door. I turned to Roger and reached out my hand to him. My fingers pressed against his shoulder, but he gave no sign he felt the contact. "Roger!" I shouted. "Roger!" He didn't hear me. He continued to stare at the shape in the shadows, one hand pressed to his chest. "Ted!" I shouted, "Ted! Can you hear me?" Ted stirred. I screamed his name again. He didn't respond.

  All the while, there was the thing in the corner, watching me. When it was clear that neither Ted nor Roger could hear or see me—that, for all practical purposes, I was a ghost—I turned to look at it. In the act of turning, as I saw the thing out of the corner of my eye, I had a momentary impression of crazy geometry, impossible angles—and then it was gone, replaced by the great eye.

  The thing speaks, its voice a whisper that seems to well up inside Roger, from someplace down deep in him, past the pain squatting on his chest. It isn't his voice—isn't any voice he's ever heard—but it's maddeningly familiar. I heard it crawling around the cell walls, and recognized it as the voice that had issued from Roger during his last sleepwalk at Belvedere House. It says, "You know what you are asking."

  Roger understands it's talking about the curse. He nods. When this brings no response, he says, "Yes." If Ted hears him, he gives no sign.

  "Much is required," the voice says. "What do you offer?"

  "What is it you want?" Roger has to force each syllable out.

  "Blood," the whisper says. "Pain."

  "This," Roger says, raising his right hand from its place over his struggling heart, "here—you want pain, take it."

  The voice inhales with what could be pleasure. The heavy coils shift with a sound like concrete scraping on concrete. The eye bobs ever so slightly. "Sweet," the voice sighs, "but not enough."

  Black spots dance at the edge of Roger's vision. His head is light. He thinks, What am I doing? My son—what am I doing? What is all this? Despite the pain wracking his body, the distant fear at the thing on the other side of the cell, the anger is there to answer in its voice like the roar of a burning house. "Retribution," it says. Roger nods, yes, of course, and says, "Anything—take whatever you need. Whatever you need."

  The door to the holding area clangs open, more light floods in ahead of the police officer bringing Roger and Ted their nominal breakfasts. In an instant, the shadows, and what they held, are gone, washed away by sunlight.

  There I was, back under the pavilion, standing in front of the altar. When I saw the fog hanging heavy before me, the rows of seats barely visible through it, my legs almost deserted me. I thought I was going over on my ass, then I caught myself. My knees would not stop shaking, so I stood in place and concentrated on maintaining my balance. Although I had escaped the vision, I wasn't free of it. I knew what happened next—it was there in my memory, a parting gift from the thing in the shadows. I had had enough of this story, of all of it—to say I was sick of it was an understatement—but even as I was gauging how nauseated it made me, I was watching this particular chapter play itself out.

  With the shadows' departure, the pain in Roger's chest leaves, as well. He hasn't realized how hard he's been bracing himself against it until it isn't there. Then it's like yanking away a support from a sagging wall. He collapses onto his bunk. The police officer, who's given Ted his cup of instant coffee and shrinkwrapped donut, turns in time to see Roger slump backwards. "Hey," he says, "you okay in there?" Roger doesn't answer, so the cop says, "Hey—hey grandpa. You all right?"

  The "grandpa" does the trick, spurring Roger up onto his elbows. "I am fine, thank you," he says. His mouth is dry. Behind the cop, Ted doesn't look at him.

  Roger accepts the undersized cup of bitter coffee and the donut that's already started to melt in the cop's hand, smearing chocolate across its plastic wrapper. As he eats the kind of breakfast he hasn't enjoyed since he was an undergraduate, he stares over at Ted, who has finished his meal and is seated on his bunk, gazing up at the ceiling, very deliberately ignoring his father. Roger is aware of the space in his chest that the pain occupied. He can't believe it's actually gone, and he entertains the momentary thought that it didn't vanish, it crescendoed, stopping his heart, and what he's living now is some kind of last-minute fantasy his brain has conjured to protect itself from its own incipient end. A fantasy that includes chocolate all over my fingers? he thinks.

  Wiping his hands on his bunk, he realizes what the voice he heard reminded him of: the house—he has the crazy notion that if the house could talk, that's what it would sound like. How bizarre. Already, he's writing off the thing in the shadows as a delusion brought on by the agony overloading his system, by his need for revenge. Of course, he doesn't think of what he has planned for Ted—he reviews the one hundred twenty-three words; yes, he still has them all—he doesn't see it as revenge. He tells himself it's justice, just desserts held back for years, for decades too long. His sudden brush with his mortality has not put things into perspective for Roger. If anything, it's sharpened his desire to wound Ted, to hurt him while he still can.

  All through the morning that follows, Roger keeps his words, his weapon, close to him and waits for the opportunity to present itself. It isn't there when the cop returns to take him and Ted—handcuffed—from the holding cell through the station to the village hall and the courtroom. It isn't there when I stand up and deliver my defense of father and son. It isn't there while the judge lectures him and Ted. By the time Roger is walking with me out into the parking lot, he's starting to wonder if the moment is going to come at all, if maybe it showed itself and he missed it.

  He and I are halfway to the car when he sees Ted walking towards him. Ted, whose face, he's pleased to note, shows a few bruises itself, and whose anger has eased into something else, into what might be grudging respect. Ted's guard is down. He is perfectly vulnerable. Roger pretends he doesn't notice him and continues toward the car. He feels Ted's hand grip his shoulder. He hears Ted say, "Wait," in that tone Roger still recognizes, the one that means, Okay, I screwed up. His chance is here. Roger says, "Take your hand off me," in a voice intended to stun Ted, a voice so harsh it almost surprises him. Ted's hand flies off Roger, who drives his weapon home.

  My legs calm enough for me to risk moving, I took three halting steps to the altar and leaned against it. I looked toward the entrances to the pavilion—where the entrances were supposed to be. In the fog, they were little more than white patches in a sea of whiteness.

  For the fifteen or twenty seconds Roger takes to speak, the three of us stand there as if we're having some kind of civilized discussion. Anyone watching us might think Roger is commenting on the weather—well, maybe not, since he's looking away from Ted as he talks to him—but any onlooker would in no way suspect what's being unleashed. To get at the emotional register of what Roger is doing, you have to reconfigure
the scene. You have to picture it all in terms of actions. When Ted grasps Roger's arm, Roger's free hand catches Ted's arm. The knife—that piece of sharpened bone, etched around with strange symbols—is in Roger's hand before either Ted or I can react. I'm raising my arm, opening my mouth to protest, when Roger stabs me in the belly, in the place where what could be our child floats in darkness. Even as I feel the knife, icicle cold, Roger has withdrawn it and turned it on himself, driving its bloody point into his chest, off-center so as to miss the breastbone. His grip on Ted slackens as he grunts with the pain, but there's no danger of Ted escaping. He's frozen with disbelief. As Roger tears the knife from himself, he pivots, pulling Ted to him while he brings the knife in and up. Ted's reflexes finally kick in, but it's too late. The knife is in him, Roger putting all his weight behind it and twisting it, first to the right, then the left, then releasing it. One hand fumbling for the blade buried in his gut, the other clutching Roger's arm, Ted drops to his knees. He never looks at Roger as he topples to the side. Swaying like a drunk, Roger gazes down at his son, a triumphant smile writing itself on his face—and collapses, falling in on himself like a building that's been demolished. This leaves me to lower myself to the ground carefully, and lay my head down. From above, the three of us make up the sides of a bloody triangle.

  I know, I know. Described this way, it's like the climax to an Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Oceans of blood, everybody dies, all you need is for Fortinbras to walk in and clean things up. In some ways, though, an over-the-top scenario like this gets at what was really happening in the parking lot that morning better than repeating what Roger said. At the risk of sounding perverse, I almost wish that my blood-soaked scene had been what happened. Right from the start, all of us would have understood what was going on—assuming any of us survived, that is.

  What I saw in the fog was—you want a word like revelation for it. Most of it was subtle, a matter of degrees of understanding. Obviously, Roger had been angry at Ted—I hadn't appreciated the extent of that anger. It was hard not to think about those stories he'd told me about his childhood, those anecdotes so full of rage. Roger hadn't traveled all that far from that bitter little boy. That was why he'd shared those memories with me—he'd been trying to account for his actions to himself. However successful he'd been at putting his pact with the thing in the shadows out of his mind in the short term, in the long term, he'd been unable to escape it. He'd been trying to explain why he'd done what he'd done to all of us, to Ted, to me, to himself. He'd been trying to explain why he'd given our child away.

  Because he had. In promising the thing that disclosed itself to him in his cell whatever it wanted, he'd allowed it to rip my womb open. My hand strayed over my belly. I didn't require any supernatural agency to be back in that hospital room, the floor cold against my cheek, my nostrils full of the smell of blood. The fog inside the pavilion had thickened, to the point the roof was lost above me, the entrances obscured. Really, the only thing I could see clearly was the first couple of rows of chairs in front of me, and even they were looking kind of faint. Fog had crept onto the altar with me, was eddying around my hips, spilling itself over the edge of the altar down to the floor in gray slow-motion. The feeling I'd had during my vision of Roger's deal with the thing in the corner had subsided, but my nerves still prickled. Fog flowed over my legs, climbed my chest and arms. The rows of chairs were vague rectangles. I had no desire to stay there, but I had even less to wander around. There was the practical concern of not being able to see where I was going, and the less practical one of what I might meet. What am I talking about? Given the circumstances, worrying about what was lurking in the fog was every bit as practical as worrying about tripping up the stairs.

  Of course, whatever might be prowling the fog could also find its way to me, if I remained in one place. Hadn't I wanted to keep on the move? Well, yes, I had, but movement now seemed impossible. I was paralyzed—not literally, it was more that moving—that the idea of moving was too much, you know? I realized, yes, that if something lunged at me out of the fog, I would play the terrified heroine and run screaming up the aisle, no doubt falling several times on the way. Until that happened, however, until Ted or whatever that thing in Roger's cell had been found me, I was incapable of rousing myself from my spot on the altar. No matter that the chairs had been wiped away. No matter that, when I held my hands up, they looked washed-out, spectral. I closed my eyes for relief from all the whiteness. For a moment, it was as if I were back in Belvedere House. Not that there was any strange sensation, no. What I felt was much less tangible than that. It was a—sureness that, were I to open my eyes, I'd be looking out the living room windows onto Founders Street.

  When the hand closed on my arm, I wasn't surprised. I'd expected to be, but what I thought was, Of course. Then Roger's voice said, "Veronica."

  I opened my eyes, and there he was, one hand clasped on my arm to prevent me running away from him again. I could see him clearly. The fog was much less thick than it had seemed. His face was a study in concern, eyebrows slightly raised, eyes searching, lips open. "Honey," he said, "are you all right?"

  In all fairness, what else could he have said? All the same, I nearly burst out laughing. The man who had made a pact with I-didn't-know-what, had traded the life of one child so he could have revenge on the other, had condemned that other child to some variety of hell—this man, to whom I was married, was asking me if I was all right? He added, "Everything is fine, now, honey. I'm here, and everything is fine," and it was almost too much to bear. The sight of him standing there, inclined slightly toward me—I wasn't frightened of him—maybe I should have been, but I was more frightened for him—for us.

  That, and angry, deeply, deeply angry. My left arm, the one he wasn't holding, thrummed, and it was all I could do to keep it from leaping out and hitting him. I don't mean like I had in the diner, those frantic, convulsive slaps. I mean a roundhouse that would've snapped his head back. The accelerated course in sheer terror that had held me in its grip since the diner—since the carousel ride—was incinerated by the phosphorous burn that surged through me. The desire to hit him not once, but over and over again, to punch him, slap him, kick him, to bruise and break and bloody him, swept over me. I wanted to shout at him, tell him what a complete idiot he'd been, ask him if he had any idea what he'd done, what his little stunt in the cell had cost us, was costing us? At the very least, I wanted to tell him to take his damned hand off me.

  "Veronica?" Roger said, and I knew I wasn't going to yell at him, wasn't going to hit him. Part of it was the concern I heard in his voice; part of it was that I needed him to help me get off this island. I said, "I'm here, Roger."

  "Thank God," he said, releasing my arm so he could take me into a hug. I submitted, even managed to pat his back. "I was so worried," he said as he held me. "One minute, we were talking, the next, you were gone. I didn't know what had happened. I searched up and down that street for you. I went in every store. No one could tell me where you'd gone. I remembered the cottages, how much you'd admired them, and decided to check them. I almost ignored this place. Even when I looked in it, I could barely see you, with the fog."

  "You found me."

  "Are you all right?" Roger asked, holding me at arm's length and surveying me. "These aren't the same clothes—"

  "I bought new ones," I said. "The others were soaked."

  "Honey—you must understand—I did that—I had to—"

  "It's fine, Roger. Let's get out of here."

  We did. Within the hour, my great escape to Martha's Vineyard was at an end, and we were on the ferry back to Wood's Hole. On our way to the bus stop, we passed a plain, two-storey house, white with black trim, set at the other end of a brick walk bordered by bright yellow and purple wildflowers. Something about it tickled my memory, but I was more interested in departing the island as quickly as possible than in lingering over quaint houses. Roger was the one to stop. "What is it?" I said. "What's wrong?"

 
"Nothing," he said. "Don't you recognize where we are?"

  "No," I said, then I did. "Oh." This was the B&B we'd stayed in during our last, happier visit.

  "Shall we see if they have a room?"

  "What?" I turned to him. He wasn't joking—given the day's events, he couldn't have been thinking very clearly, but he was serious. If I said I wanted to stay here tonight, he was willing. My schemes for remaining on the island recurred to me, and for the second time that afternoon, black laughter bubbled at the back of my throat. Roger would stay here tonight because he thought there was a chance he would encounter Ted. He hadn't said a word about it to me during our walk out of the pavilion, through the maze of gingerbread houses, and back toward the bus stop, but you could practically see the idea floating over his skull. Although he didn't know the specifics of what I'd been through, he had no doubt it was connected to Ted.