House of Windows

by John Langan

  From the other side of that doorway, Roger walked into the room. I was so surprised I said, "Roger!" before I knew what I was doing.

  He didn't respond, and I saw that he had changed into different clothes. When I'd seen him ten minutes ago, he'd been wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and loafers; now, he was dressed in a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, black slacks, and black shoes. Head down, he crossed the room to the radio and began to fiddle with its dial.

  Yelling, "Do you hear me? You do not walk away from me when I am talking to you!" Ted charged through the same doorway, rattling the photos on the piano as he passed.

  I screamed and tried to turn, ready to take off back up the corridor at my back, but there, out of the corner of my eye, was a shape in the dimness—a figure that, even obscured, made me close my eyes and pull my head away. Ted was still behind me—but paused, caught in the same clogged air that held me. What was in front of me—

  For one thing, there was nothing wrong with this Ted's appearance. His face was flushed, but it had been red the first time I'd seen him standing outside the apartment door. His speech was thick, his gait unsteady, but he appeared as alive and healthy as he ever had. His clothes were the mirror image of Roger's, except that his pants were held up by suspenders, and a badly knotted black tie flattened against his shirt. He caught Roger by the arm and spun him around so hard that Roger almost fell over. "Are you deaf?" Ted said. "Is there something wrong with your ears?"

  Roger said, "I just came in to warm up the radio for you."

  "Well, isn't that thoughtful?" Ted pushed Roger, who staggered backwards, his hip striking the corner of the radio. "If I want to listen to the Goddamned radio, I believe I am capable of switching it on myself."

  Roger's head shot up, his mouth tight with pain, his eyes furious. Ted's shoulders registered his surprise. "Would you look at this?" he said. "That appears to be a spark of rebellion I see lighting up your face. Is that true? Am I watching you in the act of breaking the Fourth Commandment? Are you going against the word of God Himself? Do you not remember what the Bible says? Is that possible?" He punctuated each question by stabbing his index finger against Roger's chest. "Exodus chapter 20, verse 12: 'Honor thy father and mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.' What part of that don't you understand? Huh? What part? Huh? Huh?" The index finger stabbed like the needle of a sewing machine. Roger tried to cover his chest with his arms. Ted flung them away and continued jabbing him.

  Before Ted could catch him, Roger ducked under his arms and ran to the doorway. Ted overbalanced, driving his finger into the radio with a crack. "Son of a bitch!" he shouted, drawing his hand to his chest and then waving it about like a flag. He wheeled to face Roger, who cringed where he was. "I cannot believe I have lived to see this day," Ted said, shaking his hand. "First you walk away from your father while he is talking to you, and then," he held up his hand, "you raise your fist against him."

  "I didn't," Roger said.

  "Is there no end?" Ted said, throwing back his head as if appealing to a sympathetic God for his answer. He brought his hands to his throat and began unknotting his tie, wincing when he moved his injured finger. Once the tie was loose, he threaded it out from under his collar and tossed it onto the closer armchair. Next he reached his hands to his shoulders, slid his thumbs under his suspenders, and eased them down, drawing his arms up through them as he did.

  Roger was a study in terror, his face pale as china, his back hunched, his knees bent.

  Ted finished pulling his shirt out of his pants and said, "I may not be able to make you respect me as a father—it's a sad, sad day, and Almighty God will hold you to account for breaking one of His Commandments, you can be sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hellfire waiting for you, and a whole host of devils waiting to try their pitchforks on you. No, I would not be surprised in the least. You may not respect me as a father, but you will respect me as a man. Even crippled by treachery, I reckon I can show you a thing or two. Come on, then. You think you're so much better than me—let's see."

  Roger's hands were up, palms out. "Pa, I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything."

  "It's too late for sorry," Ted said. "Sorry is a train that left the station a long time ago."

  "No, Pa," Roger said, "no."

  "No?" Ted said. "You're still contradicting me? Boy, the Devil has gotten into you and taken hold something powerful."

  "Stop," Roger said. "That isn't what I meant. I'm sorry, Pa, truly."

  Left hand curled into a fist, Ted strode toward Roger, who was crying, his cheeks shining with tears, his mouth open in anguish, his entire body trembling. He dropped to the floor as Ted drew near him, sheltering his head beneath his arms as if Ted were the atomic bomb he'd been warned about in school.

  Standing over him, Ted said, "Well, what's this? It appears Satan isn't quite so big as all that. It appears Satan fears the wrath of a righteous man." He nudged Roger with his shoe. "Get up, Satan. Get up and take what's coming to you."

  "I'm sorry, Pa," Roger sobbed. "Honest I am."

  "I swear before the Throne of the Living God," Ted said, kicking Roger now, "if you don't stand on your own two feet like a man, I will kick the living shit out of you. Get up. I won't say it again."

  Groaning with dread, Roger stood. "Sorry, Pa."

  "Shut up," Ted said. "Boy, if you're going to act the part of the big man, you'd best be prepared to play the role to the bitter end." His left hand whipped up and around. Crack.

  Roger's head rocked back, his legs wobbled, and he collapsed, his nose and mouth scarlet. Ted's right foot lashed out. Roger yelped as it connected with his left leg, high on the outside. Ted kicked him again, on the shin, again, in the stomach. Roger screamed. His face was wet with tears, snot, blood. His white shirt was decorated with red spots and splatters. "You might have done better than that," Ted said. "Still, I expect that's chased the Devil out of you for a time. Now you know, boy. You know what's waiting for you if you feel like wearing a man's clothes before you're ready for them. And that was with my good hand incapacitated. You think about that. You ponder what the old man might've done if he'd had the use of both his hands. You hear me?"

  "Yes, sir," Roger mumbled through crushed lips.

  At my back, Ted pushed forward through the thickened air like a swimmer forcing his way upstream. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my heart surged, my ears popped, and before I knew what I was doing I was running across the living room, the air around me once more fluid. The other Ted said to Roger, "Now get up and go wash your face." Despite my urgency, I gave both figures a wide berth. Neither spared a glance in my direction. My destination was the doorway behind them. I spared a last look at Roger—at this Roger—who scrambled to his feet, his nose obviously broken and leaking more blood, his face drawn with fear.

  Then I was in the next room, for a second time caught on the threshold by what felt like an enormous sheet of clear plastic. In front of me was the dining room. Or, a kind of minimalist approximation of a dining room. Except for a tall lamp standing off to the right, the room was unlit. A card table occupied center-stage. Seated on folding chairs to either side of it, Roger and Ted faced each other. Three more folding chairs—all empty—crowded the table's far side. As they had been in the previous room, Roger and Ted were dressed alike, this time in workshirts, jeans, and boots. The card table was stacked with dishes and cutlery. I was—my head swam at the sight of the two of them. Obviously, I wasn't—well, I wasn't in Kansas, anymore, but I'd just left these two in the other room. If I hadn't felt Ted making his way towards me, striding against air that refused to yield for him as it had for me, I'd have ducked my head back out for another look.

  There was no time. My nerves were trying to tear themselves out of my skin. It looked as if there was an opening in the wall across from me. I pushed, my ears popped, and I was through to the room. Circling the table, I hurried across the floor. Roger picked up the topmost plate
from the pile and held it out to Ted, asking, "May I have some bread?" "Certainly," Ted replied, extending his right hand over the dish. One blink, his hand was empty, miming the act of passing a slice of bread. The next, it was full of a snake, coiling around Ted's wrist, twisting its head back and forth in the air, hissing at Roger—who stared calmly as it dropped from Ted's hand to his plate. The plate tilted as the snake slapped it; Roger had to maneuver to keep the snake from sliding off onto the table. I don't know much about reptiles, but this was not a garden snake. It was blue-black, its back covered in electric green loops. Once it was secure on Roger's plate, it wasted no time. It slid up his arm, raising its head as it went, and when it reached his shoulder, opened its mouth and drove its fangs into his head, behind his left eye. Roger didn't flinch, sitting calmly as the snake's venom pumped into him, the rest of it wrapping around his neck like a hideous scarf.

  "Is that enough?" Ted asked.

  "Plenty, thanks," Roger said, as a stream of blood escaped the snake's mouth and dribbled down his face.

  I'd shouted when the snake appeared, a second time when it struck Roger. I do not like snakes, and the appearance of one sent me around the room that much faster. All the same, seeing it latched onto Roger like an oversized leech, I had to fight the urge to run over to him and try to pull it off. I think I already knew that it wasn't really Roger sitting at the table—or, it wasn't the Roger who'd chased down the stairs after Ted. This was Roger from years—decades ago. But that didn't make the sight of the four-foot snake looped around his neck any less horrifying.

  Footsteps thumped on the floor to my rear. Ted was gaining. I ran the rest of the distance to the door, only to realize I'd been mistaken. There wasn't any opening here, just a black rectangle painted on the wall. In the half-light of the room, I'd mistaken part of the backdrop for an actual exit. Panic stabbed me. My hands shot out, racing over the wall in search of a way out. My left hand brushed the doorway, and it shifted, rippled. In a second, I had torn aside the heavy drape on which the black rectangle had been painted and run through it to the opening it concealed. Another hallway stretched in front of me, this one full of doors—some open, some closed—set on either side. Each door was flanked by a pair of tiny glass lamps in which candles danced weakly. I sprinted ahead, throwing the curtain back in hopes of tangling Ted.

  There was a door—open, the room beyond lit—at the far end of the hall. I aimed for that. To my right, my left, doors flashed by. I caught scenes—pieces of scenes. Hand trembling madly, Roger held out a butter knife as Ted stalked toward him, murder in his eyes. Ted lay on an undersized bed, smoking a cigarette and looking bored while Roger sat on the end of the bed and read an invisible book out loud to him. One room—I wasn't sure, because it was too confusing, but I could have sworn I saw Roger standing in front of the homemade map in his office, two men looking over his shoulders—only, they were both Roger, too, except that one was wearing a baggy black coat over a loose white shirt, the other a blue morning coat over a gray vest and white shirt around whose high collar an oversized gray bowtie had been tied.

  The room at the end of the hall was in front of me. I was so focused on finding the next door that it was all I could see—there, in the wall to the left, a varnished plank of wood whose doorknob had been polished to a brassy shine. I entered and crossed the space easily, my hand closing on that doorknob before the room's other contents registered. Or maybe I should say, its inhabitants. Two figures stood at the center of what was otherwise a plain box of a room. One I knew right away. Standing with her hand on the shoulder of a young girl was my grandma, looking exactly as she had when she'd babysat me when I was younger, green cardigan over a white mock-turtleneck, jeans, the plain white sneakers she called tennis shoes and I thought of as grandma-sneakers. The half-glasses she was constantly losing track of hung, as they always had, from a cheap chain around her neck. Her hair—she was a redhead, too, right up until she died; her hair never went yellow, the way it does for most redheads as they age—her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place with a dozen different hairpins and barrettes. Her face was the one part of her that was different, and that not by much. It was made-up—so far as I knew, not a day in her life went by that my grandma didn't at least wear lipstick, even if she was staying at home. It wasn't obviously disfigured or anything. No, it was that her face was drawn, pale, her features fighting a losing battle against great pain.

  Seeing her stopped me where I was. For what couldn't have been more than one, maybe two seconds, but that felt like hours, everything else—the fear churning my gut, Ted's presence raging against my nerves, the feel of the house, (which I haven't said anything about)—all that was on hold. Seeing her stunned me—and it was her, not another trick. The air was heavy with Jean Naté, her favorite perfume, which she always wore too much of. What registered as shock was a knot of emotions, love, and grief, and fear, and something else, something like awe.

  I barely noticed the girl on whose shoulder my grandmother's hand rested. She was little more than a head of red hair tied into a ponytail, denim jacket and jeans. Maybe six, maybe seven, but I wasn't especially interested. My tongue was flopping around my mouth like a fish out of water, trying to find something to say. "I love you." "I miss you." "Are you all right?" "What's happening?" "Help me"; all rushed through the door at the same moment and got stuck in it.

  The hallway to the room echoed with Ted's slow-motion progress, his boots striking the floor like distant thunder. His presence was a firestorm, scorching my mind. No time. There was no time. My cheeks were wet with tears I hadn't realized I'd been crying.

  My grandmother said, "Poor bunny. My poor, poor bunny. We must stay awake and see evil done just a little longer." Her voice was thick, as if she were speaking through a mouthful of dirt.

  "What?"

  "Poor bunny," she said. She tried to say something else. All that came out was a dry, choking sound.

  "I don't understand," I said. "Please, what do you mean?"

  Grandma's mouth opened and closed. Silence.

  The girl in front of her stepped forward and opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue. Wet with saliva, an oversized ring shone on it. I knew who she was: the girl from the carousel, the one who'd spurned my gift of the ring I'd taken, only to swipe it from the air when I dropped it in the bucket. What was she doing here, with my grandmother?

  Ted was about to enter the room. I said, "I love you," opened the door, and left them both.

  I was back in the house—our house, Belvedere House. The door snicked behind me and I was standing in the second-floor hallway, outside Roger's and my bedroom. The hall was dark, though not as absolutely so as it had been when Ted appeared. I could glance to either side and see the windows there. This was simply night. Roger was here, chasing shadows downstairs. I moved to the top of the first-floor stairs and shouted his name.

  No answer. I doubted he was—wherever I'd just been, but he could be outside. I started down the stairs, calling, "Roger!" as I went.

  You could hardly call the six seconds or so it took me to reach the first floor a respite—I hadn't heard the bedroom door open yet, but was sure it would any moment—but it gave me the briefest of opportunities to catch my breath. I wouldn't say I collected my thoughts—those had been burned and scattered by Ted's constant proximity—and my emotions were still reeling from my encounter with Grandma and the little girl—yet the pause was sufficient for me to be aware—more aware of the house. Maybe I should say of the house's absence. Once I'd plunged down the corridor behind the guest room closet, my sensation of the house, already changed, had changed more, the end of the series of transformations that had taken it from a solid, stable structure to an increasingly temporary and unstable arrangement of space; then from that shimmering instability to little more than the locus of dozens of passageways to who knew where; and now, from that common meeting-point to something entirely different. Not an organization of space, or the conjunction of other, organized s
paces—the house had lost all form, all pretensions to arrangement altogether. Fleeing through its hidden rooms, I had felt Belvedere House as a heaving sea washing against me, an Arctic ocean full of pieces of flaming wreckage. When I'd emerged back into the house proper, that feeling had come with me.

  I hesitated at the foot of the stairs, called for Roger. Still no answer. I checked the front parlor, the living room. Empty, the two of them, except for the moonlight pouring in over the furniture. It was the kind of light you get with a full moon, that pale, silver illumination. I hadn't realized we were due another full moon so soon. Hadn't the moon just been full? Yes, yes, it had. While we were on the Cape—I remembered it hanging just over the pines the first or second night we'd arrived. It didn't stay at full for more than three days—certainly not this long. What was going on? Did I have time for this? Obviously, it was part of Ted's end-game. Ted seemed to be holding his place inside our room; although, with these final changes to the house, it was almost impossible to be sure where everything and everyone were in it. Taking a deep breath, I crossed to the living room windows.