House of Windows

by John Langan

  During that time, as I was watching Demi strip naked yet again—as if her body could make us forget the compete lack of anything resembling a coherent script—and Robert Duvall off among the Indians—because someone had seen Dances with Wolves one too many times—I'm not sure whether I was aware of the house. In retrospect, it seems I must have been. Things were accelerating—I didn't know it sitting there on the couch, but Roger and I had less than twenty-four hours before our drama played itself out. The fat lady wasn't on stage yet, but she was practicing her scales in the wings. For as engaged as I was with the film—and that was pretty engaged; you know how involved you can become with something you actively despise—I must have registered the house's shifting. How could I not have?

  The subtle changes I had sensed during my swoon the previous week had become more overt. The places where I had felt the house thinning were now thinned, opening directly onto the long tunnels I'd sensed on the other side of them. What was more, the rest of the house was also thinning. I mean, every last wall was yielding itself to an opening, to another of the tunnels that felt as if they'd been made of emptiness. It was as if, on the level where this stuff made its impression, the house as house was being replaced by the house as conjunction, as crossroads for all these long, blank corridors—if you'd tried to draw what was happening, you'd have come up with some kind of cubist conglomeration of tubes running in and out of one another. The house around me had converged with the house I'd seen when I lost the baby, all those doorways. No matter how incensed I was, yet again, by the battle between the Puritans and the Indians, I must have felt the house disappearing around me.

  Rising from the couch, however, as the credits rolled, all I was interested in was going to bed. No surprise—the day's excitement had left me drained. There was a second when I thought I might have felt something—when my connection to the house might have flashed across my skin, and those cold corridors rippled over me—but, if the shiver I gave wasn't the result of fatigue, its cause was nowhere near as intense as what I'd been through that afternoon—really, as my normal awareness of the house—so I chalked it up to exhaustion. I closed up shop downstairs, and headed to bed, the movie's ending, which subverts everything the book stands for, burning in my mind. I wondered if anyone had written an article responding to the film—scratch that, I wondered how many articles had been written in response to the film. I pushed open the bedroom door, and to my surprise found Roger already there, in bed and fast asleep, snoring quietly. One day back from the Cape, and our routine had reasserted itself so strongly I had been expecting to be long unconscious before Roger slipped into bed beside me. Our continuing argument notwithstanding, I was less unhappy to find him here than I would have expected.

  Had anyone asked, I would have said I hadn't the slightest intention of leaving the bed for Roger's nightly sleepwalk. I hadn't the night before, and he'd been fine. I needed rest, and although the sight of him under the covers had given my heart an unexpectedly pleasant lift, I was still pretty pissed at him. When the mattress shifted at three, however, and I swam up out of my dreams, my anger was slow to follow. It didn't catch up with me until I had pursued Roger down the stairs and out the front door.

  Summer night or not, it was cold. The damp grass shocked my feet, and I wished I'd taken a sweatshirt with me. The breath steamed from my mouth. My teeth chattered. This is what you get, my anger told me as it arrived. You could be warm in bed right now.

  I could have been, but my curiosity had awakened, too, and for the time being, it hurried me after Roger. He was striding around the house to my left, taking big, exaggerated steps like a kid playing at being an adult. He completed three and a quarter circuits of the house, counterclockwise, at a pace just short of a run, then stood, panting white clouds. As I approached him, I saw his face shining with sweat. He was shivering, too. The air was colder still; although I was warm from having played Roger's version of ring-around-the-house, I could feel the heat emptying from the air. Grass crunched under my feet, brittle with—yes—frost. Roger was staring intently at the stretch of lawn behind the house. It's a relatively narrow strip that ends in a line of tall, skinny pine trees. I wasn't sure what we were doing here, what this spot's connection to Ted was. I supposed the two of them could have practiced throwing or batting the baseball here. With the house's enormous south lawn available to them, though, it was hard to see why they would've chosen this place. I tried to follow Roger's gaze. Nothing.

  I did a double take. Nothing was right. He was looking into solid blackness. Where you should have been able to see the silhouettes of a dozen pine trees, the distant lights of cars moving along 32 winking among their branches, there was unbroken dark. At first, I assumed it was because of the hour. There must be a lull in traffic; the businesses along the road must be closed. Including the all-night gas station? That wasn't right. There should have been some light visible. But no—about five yards from Roger and me, the lawn was truncated by blackness like denser night. That was the source of the cold. The grass nearest it wasn't frosted; it was frozen, locked in ice. The line of dark reached straight up from the ground. I craned my head back, and I couldn't see the stars in that part of the sky. It was as if someone had hung a giant curtain behind the house. I'd been more scared this afternoon, laboring to breathe through whatever had covered my mouth, and the mountains looming over the house had been more starkly impressive, overpowering—all the same, facing such pure blackness was unnerving. I don't know how you feel about being in the dark—I mean total darkness, the absolute absence of light. I guess some people are okay with it, but the mere thought of it makes my heart race, the back of my neck prickle. I drew closer to Roger.

  Without taking his eyes off the black curtain, he said, "There it is."

  No reply came to me. Roger didn't wait for one. He said, "It's something, isn't it?"

  I couldn't help myself. I said, "What is it?"

  He didn't answer right away, and I assumed he hadn't heard me. I could feel the darkness, out beyond the edges of my senses, the way you'd feel a feather flutter by the air it sent toward your skin. My impression of it as a curtain had been on target. It was huge, but it was also thin, so thin it was barely there. There was something beyond—a space like another room in the house—

  "It's mine," Roger said.

  "What?"

  "Me."

  "You're yours?" Why does dream logic have to sound like an old Abbot and Costello routine?

  "It's mine."

  "Oh," I said, "you mean this." I don't know why I pointed.

  "Me."

  "It's yours and it's you."

  "Where's my boy?"

  "Ted?"

  "We're supposed to work on his slider." He paused. "He never comes to see me, anymore."

  I didn't know where the conversation, such as it was, had just gone. I said, "Ted?"

  He turned to me. His gaze was blind. "Do you know my boy?"

  "Not really."

  "He used to be so good." Roger sighed. "We used to have such a time together. Not anymore." He shook his head.

  "What happened to him?"

  "He died."

  On impulse, I asked, "How did he die?"

  "I locked him away. Threw away the key, as they say. Then he died."

  "And he's still locked away?"

  Roger didn't answer. I looked away from him, and the darkness moved, belled forward and fell back on itself as if a breeze had passed along it. In that movement, I thought I saw a shape—I couldn't tell if it was on the blackness, or behind it. It was—I dropped my eyes as fear made my stomach clench. It was Ted—no mistaking him.

  Roger shrugged. "I have to assume. He won't tell me anything. He won't speak to me at all."

  The briefest glance I could manage showed Ted more definite. I wanted to flee, run back inside, but my legs wouldn't do what I told them. Through chattering teeth, I said, "Roger, Ted—"

  Suddenly, Roger was shouting. "Where is he? What have you done with him? Wh
ere is my little boy? Where is my little boy? Where is my little boy?"

  I thought he'd wake himself. He didn't. I lurched forward, grabbed his arms, and shook him. "Roger!" I said. "Wake up, Roger, wake up. It's just a dream. It's just a dream."

  There was a long moment during which he continued shouting, "Where is my little boy?" I threw my arms around him, repeating, "It's just a dream; it's just a dream." His body was electric. I was afraid he'd keep shouting till my ears bled—that, or one of the neighbors called the cops. Then, in mid-yell, his voice fell off and he relaxed against me. I kept on with my "It's just a dream," until I heard him saying, "Veronica? What? Are we outside?"

  "You were sleepwalking," I said into his chest.

  "I was—why are you holding onto me? What happened?"

  "You were upset."

  "Upset—over what?"

  "Ted."

  He tensed. "What about Ted?"

  "Never mind."

  "What do you mean? What about Ted? What was I so upset about?"

  "Roger," I said, "you don't want to know."

  Taking me by the shoulders, he pushed me away. Still holding onto me, he said, "I want to know."

  I glanced at the place where the black curtain had hung. Of course, it was gone. The fear that had transfixed me was gone, too, elbowed aside by anger. "Why?" I said. "So you can throw up your hands, tell me it isn't true, and run back inside? So you can tell me I don't know what I'm talking about? Forget it, Roger." I pulled free of him and started back around the house.

  He caught up to me inside the front door. "Veronica."

  "I'm going to bed," I said. "It's ridiculously late."

  "Don't," he said. "Don't be so angry with me. I'm only trying—"

  "I don't know what you're trying to do," I said, spinning to face him. "You certainly aren't trying to find a way out of this for any of us. You hide up there on the third floor all day, and you know what's wrong—you know what's behind all this—and you know what you have to do, too. But you don't—you wait. Why? Because you're embarrassed—you don't want to admit that you did anything so terrible, so despicable. Well here's a newsflash, Roger: I already know. I already know the depths to which you sunk. There's no point in trying to hide it from me, because I saw it—I saw it firsthand. Which means the only person you're trying to deceive is yourself."

  "Wait—"

  "Do you want to know what you said to me outside? Do you really? You said that you locked Ted away and threw away the key. What do you suppose that means? You're the esteemed literary critic—you're the one with all the books and articles—how do you interpret that statement? What's its symbolic content?"

  "I cannot talk to you when you're like this," Roger said.

  "Whatever." This time, I was the one who stormed off.

  I wasn't expecting Roger to return to bed. I was reasonably sure I'd hear him pass the door on his way up to his office. It's never too early to indulge your obsessions, right? Five minutes after I turned off the light, though, the door opened. Roger came into the room and settled beside me. Trying to make a point, I knew, which woke the anger that had decided to call it a night right up again. Who knew if Roger was going to sleep? There was no way I was, and how much do you want to bet that was his intention?

  If sleep wasn't for me, however, I wasn't going to leave the bed. I could lie here quietly as long as Roger could—longer, with the anger fueling me. The delights of marriage. You know, years ago—I must have been about thirteen—I asked my mother and father what they thought the secret of a successful marriage was. I can't remember why; I think it was for a school project. Anyway, I put the question to the two of them over dinner one night. Right away, Dad said, "Compromise—then give in and do what your mother wants," which made her purse her lips and say, "Honestly."

  Mom took longer to respond. When she did, she said, "Don't go to bed angry with one another. No matter how long it takes, stay up and work it out." Dad grunted in surprise and said, "I change my mind. What your mother just said." Lying next to Roger—who either ceased pretending to sleep or had developed a remarkable ability to mimic a snore—I thought about that advice. In the beginning, Roger and I had never gone to bed angry—I mean, there were a few times we hadn't exactly been speaking to one another, but that had been over things like the relative merits of Norman Mailer. Not that those debates weren't important—because they are; I hate people who say, It's all just words, what does it matter?—but compared to what we were in the midst of now, the pros and cons of Ancient Evenings seemed a tad less weighty. The past couple of days—if we went to sleep at the same time, we were as likely as not to be in the middle of an argument—of what I supposed was The Argument. Granted, my parents had done their fair share of going to bed angry—you could tell because one or the other of them slept on the living room couch—to be honest, after they'd had a particularly bitter argument, I used to think it was a race—surreptitious, of course—to see who could make it to the couch first. Mom's advice sounded great, but was sometimes hard to practice.

  However nasty the fights between Mom and Dad, though, I'd never felt the same gap between them that yawned between Roger and me. I suppose you could say that I wouldn't have been aware of that kind of distance between my parents—I was too young—but we were pretty tightly knit, even after I morphed into the teenager from hell, and I picked up on a lot. There are moments in every marriage—every relationship—where you realize you aren't going to be able to come to agreement on something; you're going to have to try to move past whatever it is. But this—I didn't know what I—we were going to do about this.

  My anger hadn't abated, but fatigue was stealing over me, anyway. At least I'd managed to fake sleep longer than Roger had. I saw that curtain of night in my mind's eye, saw the grass frozen into white angles in front of it. Beyond it, there had been—what? Space—like an enormous room—an auditorium on whose stage a production is about to commence. What play? A cross between A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, or maybe King Lear. Or Night of the Living Dead. The principle actor—well, I would be happy to miss his debut. The thing was—for all that this space had appeared across the yard from the house, the sensation I'd had was that it was another part of it. It was like—this isn't right, not exactly, but it was like that science experiment they have you do when you're a kid, when you put a pencil in a glass of water to study the angle of refraction. What had been on the other side of that blackness had been the house—or part of the house—refracted.

  When I consider that I fell asleep after one of that day's events, let alone all of them, it's hard to credit. Show me a giant wall of blackness now, or sudden mountains looming over the house, or let me feel as if I'm coated in some kind of film, and I'd be up for a day, maybe two—I guarantee it. It sounds glib to say you can get used to anything, but let's face it, you can—and what I'd seen and felt that day hadn't been the worst. One moment, I was floating on top of sleep; the next, I was diving down into it.

  It's difficult to convey just how normal the following day was. The calm before the storm, you could say—although the weather had been pretty rough already. The eye of the hurricane, then. When we should have been preparing for more wind and rain, we decided to go to the beach, so to speak. That isn't quite true. Throughout that day, I was aware of how still everything was. It was like one of those cheesy old movies where the explorers are going through the jungle, and one of them says, "I don't like it. It's quiet. Too quiet." I wouldn't go so far as to say I had a bad feeling about the silence—it was more a case of, I wasn't sure how to read it. By the time late afternoon rolled around and nothing had happened—I'd been in and out the house a couple of times, once to go to the post office and once to run to Shop Rite, and hadn't seen, heard, smelt, or felt anything even slightly unusual—by the time I was starting to plan dinner, the day's quiet had made me hope—not a lot—that maybe we might have reached the other side of everything. It was a hope that died almost immediately after its birth. Too much had
gone on—too much had been set in motion for it all to come to a halt just like that.

  In between my excursions, I'd found myself face to face, so to speak, with one of the photos of Ted I'd hung throughout the house—what seemed like a decade ago. It was in the laundry room, where I'd gone in an effort to make a dent in the mountain of dirty clothes heaped on the floor there. If I waited for Roger to get around to it, I'd be naked, and pretty soon at that, so I'd done my best to separate whites from colors and set the washer going. I hadn't brought a book to read while the machine chugged away, nor was there a magazine in easy reach. As I'd killed time debating whether I wanted to run up to the second floor, or go through to the living room and the delights of midday TV, I stumbled across the photograph.

  I'd forgotten I'd placed it here. At the sight of it, I sucked in my breath and drew back, blushing as if I'd been discovered spying. The picture was familiar. It was the one of Ted in Afghan dress, looking like the men he was supposed to be fighting, a book—Bleak House—open in his hands. Why I'd selected the laundry room for this photo, instead of, say, the wall outside Roger's office, was a mystery. I leaned in closer to study the picture—carefully, as if I didn't want to disturb it. Ted's face wore the concentrated expression of someone laboring over a difficult, but not unrewarding, task. How hard had reading Dickens been for him? Had he finished the book? The question hadn't occurred to me before. How would you find out the answer to such a thing? Would any of his friends know? Considering that photograph, studying it, it was possible to think of Ted as not unlike one of the returning students you get in Comp 1 or 2 sometimes—someone with a good ten or fifteen years on the average college freshman—someone who'd gone out to see what the world had to offer and now was ready for college. You had to admire someone trying to broaden his horizons—especially by reading Dickens, for God's sake. What had he written on the other side? "Even here, I can't escape this guy."