Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  “No,” Eddie said.

  Harry pulled the hat pin out of his collar and inspected his brother’s arm. “You’re doing great, Little Eddie. You’re stronger than anybody in your whole class-—you’re probably stronger than the whole rest of the school.” He turned Eddie’s arm so that the palm was up and the white forearm, lightly traced by small blue veins, faced him.

  Harry delicately ran the point of the hatpin down Eddie’s pale, veined forearm. The pinpoint left a narrow chalk-white scratch in its wake. For a moment Harry felt the floor of the attic sway beneath his feet; then he closed his eyes and jabbed the hatpin into Little Eddie’s skin as hard as he could.

  He opened his eyes. The floor was still swaying beneath him. From Little Eddie’s lower arm protruded six inches of the eight-inch hat pin, the mother-of-pearl head glistening softly in the light from the overhead bulb. A drop of blood the size of a watermelon seed stood on Eddie’s skin. Harry moved back to his chair and sat down heavily. “Do you feel anything?”

  “No,” Eddie said again in that surprisingly deep voice.

  Harry stared at the hat pin embedded in Eddie’s arm. The oval drop of blood lengthened itself out against the white skin and began slowly to ooze toward Eddie’s wrist. Harry watched it advance across the pale underside of Eddie’s forearm. Finally he stood up and returned to Eddie’s side. The elongated drop of blood had ceased moving. Harry bent over and twanged the hat pin. Eddie could feel nothing. Harry put his thumb and forefinger on the glistening head of the pin. His face was so hot he might have been standing before an open fire. He pushed the pin a further half-inch into Eddie’s arm, and another small quantity of blood welled up from the base. The pin seemed to be moving in Harry’s grasp, pulsing back and forth as if it were breathing.

  “Okay,” Harry said. “Okay.”

  He tightened his hold on the pin and pulled. It slipped easily from the wound. Harry held the hat pin before his face just as a doctor holds up a thermometer to read a temperature. He had imagined that the entire bottom section of the shaft would be painted with red, but saw that only a single winding glutinous streak of blood adhered to the pin. For a dizzy second he though of slipping the end of the pin in his mouth and sucking it clean.

  He thought: Maybe in another life I was Lepke Buchalter.

  He pulled his handkerchief, a filthy square of red paisley, from his front pocket and wiped the streak of blood from the shaft of the pin. Then he leaned over and gently wiped the red smear from Little Eddie’s underarm. Harry refolded the handkerchief so the blood would not show, wiped sweat from his face, and shoved the grubby cloth back into his pocket.

  “That was good, Eddie. Now we’re going to do something a little bit different.”

  He knelt down beside his brother and lifted Eddie’s nearly weightless, delicately veined arm. “You still can’t feel a thing in this arm, Eddie, it’s completely numb. It’s sound asleep and it won’t wake up until I tell it to.” Harry repositioned himself in order to hold himself steady while he knelt, and put the point of the hat pin nearly flat against Eddie’s arm. He pushed it forward far enough to raise a wrinkle of flesh. The point of the hat pin dug into Eddie’s skin but did not break it. Harry pushed harder, and the hat pin raised the little bulge of skin by a small but appreciable amount.

  Skin was a lot tougher to break through than anyone imagined.

  The pin was beginning to hurt his fingers, so Harry opened his hand and positioned the head against the base of his middle finger. Grimacing, he pushed his hand against the pin. The point of the pin popped through the wrinkle.

  “Eddie, you’re made out of beer cans,” Harry said, and tugged the head of the pin backward. The wrinkle flattened out. Now Harry could shove the pin forward again sliding the shaft deeper and deeper under the surface of Little Eddie’s skin. He could see the raised line of the hat pin marching down his brother’s arm, looking as prominent as the damage done to a cartoon lawn by a cartoon rabbit. When the mother-or-pearl head was perhaps three inches from the entry hole, Harry pushed it down into Little Eddie’s flesh, thus raising the point of the pin. He gave the head a sharp jab, and the point appeared at the end of the ridge in Eddies’ skin, poking through a tiny smear of blood. Harry shoved the pin in further. Now it showed about an inch and a half of gray metal at either end.

  “Feel anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  Harry jiggled the head of the pin,, and a bubble of blood walked out of the entry wound and began to slide down Eddie’s arm. Harry sat down on the attic floor beside Eddie and regarded his work. His mind seemed pleasantly empty of thought, filled only with a variety of sensations. He felt but could not hear a buzzing in his head, and a blurry film seemed to cover his eyes. He breathed through his mouth. The long pin stuck through Little Eddie’s arm looked monstrous seen one way; seen another, it was sheerly beautiful. Skin, blood, and metal. Harry had never seen anything like it before. He reached out and twisted the pin, causing another little blood-snail to crawl from the exit wound. Harry saw all this as if through smudgy glasses, but he did not mind. He knew the blurriness was only mental. He touched the head of the pin again and moved it from side to side. A little more blood leaked from both punctures. Then Harry shoved the pin in, partially withdrew it so that the point nearly disappeared back into Eddie’s arm, moved it forward again; and went on like this, back and forth, back and forth as if he were sewing his brother up, for some time.

  Finally he withdrew the pin from Eddie’s arm. Two long streaks of blood had nearly reached his brother’s wrist. Harry ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, blinked, and discovered that his vision had cleared.

  He wondered how long he and Eddie had been in the attic. It could have been hours. He could not quite remember what had happened before he had slid the hat pin into Eddie’s skin. Now his blurriness really was mental, not visual. A loud uncomfortable pulse beat in his temples. Again he wiped the blood from Eddie’s arm. Then he stood on wobbling knees and returned to his chair.

  “How’s your arm feel, Eddie?”

  “Numb,” Eddie said in his gravelly sleepy voice.

  “The numbness is going away now. Very very slowly. You are beginning to feel your arm again, and it feels very good. There is no pain. It feels like the sun was shining on it all afternoon. It’s strong and healthy. Feeling is coming back into your arm, and you can move your fingers and everything.”

  When he had finished speaking Harry leaned back against the chair and closed his eyes. He rubbed his forehead with his hand and wiped the moisture off on his shirt.

  “How does your arm feel?” he said without opening his eyes.

  “Good.”

  “That’s great, Little Eddie.” Harry flattened his palms against his flushed face, wiped his cheeks, and opened his eyes.

  I can do this every night, he thought. I can bring Little Eddie up here every single night, at least until school starts.

  “Eddie, you’re getting stronger and stronger every day. This is really helping you. And the more we do it the stronger you’ll get. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you,” Eddie said.

  “We’re almost done for tonight. There’s just one more thing I want to try. But you have to be really deep asleep for this to work. So I want you to go deeper and deeper, as deep as you can go. Relax, and now you are really deep asleep, deep deep, and relaxed and ready and feeling good.”

  Little Eddie sat sprawled in his chair with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Two tiny dark spots of blood stood out like mosquito bites on his lower right forearm.

  “When I talk to you, Eddie, you’re slowly getting younger and younger, you’re going backward in time, so now you’re not nine years old anymore, you’re eight, it’s last year and you’re in the third grade, and now you’re seven, and now you’re six years old…and now you’re five, Eddie, and it’s the day of your fifth birthday. You’re five years old today, Little Eddie. How old are you?”

  “I�
�m five.” To Harry’s surprised pleasure, Little Eddie’s voice actually seemed younger, as did his hunched posture in the chair.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Not good. I hate my present. It’s terrible. Dad got it, and Mom says it should never be allowed in the house because it’s just junk. I wish I wouldn’t ever have to have birthdays, they’re so terrible. I’m gonna cry.”

  His face contracted. Harry tried to remember what Eddie had gotten for his fifth birthday, but could not—he caught only a dim memory of shame and disappointment. “What’s your present, Eddie?”

  In a teary voice, Eddie said, “A radio. But it’s busted and Mom says it looks like it came from the junkyard. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t even wanna see it.”

  Yes, Harry thought, yes, yes, yes. He could remember. On Little Eddie’s fifth birthday, Edgar Beevers had produced a yellow plastic radio which even Harry had seen was astoundingly ugly. The dial was cracked, and it was marked here and there with brown circular scablike marks where someone had mashed out cigarettes on it.

  The radio had long since been buried in the junk room, where it now lay beneath several geological layers of trash.

  “Okay, Eddie, you can forget the radio now, because you’re going backward again, you’re getting younger, you’re going backward through being four years old, and now you’re three.”

  He looked with interest at Little Eddie, whose entire demeanor had changed. From being tearfully unhappy, Eddie now demonstrated a self-sufficient good cheer Harry could not ever remember seeing in him. His arms were folded over his chest. He was smiling, and his eyes were bright and clear and childish.

  “What do you see?” Harry asked.

  “Mommy-ommy-om.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Mommy’s at her desk. She’s smoking and looking through her papers.” Eddie giggled. “Mommy looks funny. It looks like smoke is coming out of the top of her head.” Eddie ducked his chin and hid his smile behind a hand. “Mommy doesn’t see me. I can see her, but she doesn’t see me. Oh! Mommy works hard! She works hard at her desk!”

  Eddie’s smile abruptly left his face. His face froze for a second in a comic rubbery absence of expression; then his eyes widened in terror and his mouth went loose and wobbly.

  “What happened?” Harry’s mouth had gone dry. “No, Mommy!” Eddie wailed. “Don’t Mommy! I wasn’t spying, I wasn’t, I promise—” His words broke off into a screech. “NO, MOMMY! DON’T! DON’T, MOMMY!” Eddie jumped upward, sending his chair flying back, and ran blindly toward the rear of the attic. Harry’s head rang with Eddie’s screeches. He heard a sharp crack! of wood breaking, but only as a small part of all the noise Eddie was making as he charged around the attic. Eddie had run into a tangle of hanging dresses, spun around, enmeshing himself deeper in the dresses, and was now tearing himself away from the web of dresses, pulling some of them off the rack. A long-sleeved purple dress with an enormous lace collar had draped itself around Eddie like a ghostly dance partner, and another dress, of dull red velvet, snaked around his right leg. Eddie screamed again and yanked himself away from the tangle. The entire rack of clothes wobbled and then went over in a mad jangle of sound.

  “NO!” he screeched. “HELP!” Eddie ran straight into a big wooden beam marking off one of the eaves, bounced off, and came windmilling toward Harry. Harry knew his brother could not see him.

  “Eddie, stop,” he said, but Eddie was past hearing him. Harry tried to make Eddie stop by wrapping his arms around him, but Eddie slammed right into him, hitting Harry’s chest with a shoulder and knocking his head painfully against Harry’s chin; Harry’s arms closed on nothing and his eyes lost focus, and Eddie went crashing into the tilting mirror. The mirror yawned over sideways. Harry saw it tilt with dreamlike slowness toward the floor, then in an eyeblink drop and crash. Broken glass sprayed across the attic floor. “STOP!” Harry yelled. “STAND STILL, EDDIE!” Eddie came to rest. A ripped and dirty dress of dull red velvet still clung to his right leg. Blood oozed down his temple from an ugly cut above his eye. He was breathing hard, releasing air in little whimpering exhalations.

  “Holy shit,” Harry said, looking around at the attic. In only a few seconds Eddie had managed to create what looked at first like absolute devastation. Maryrose’s ancient dresses lay tangled in a heap of dusty fabrics from which wire hangers skeletally protruded; gray Eddie-sized footprints lay like a pattern over the muted explosion of colors the dresses now created. When the rack had gone over, it had knocked a section the size of a dinner plate out of a round wooden coffee table Maryrose had particularly prized for its being made from a single section of teak—“a single piece of teak, the rarest wood in all the world, all the way from Ceylon!” The much-prized mirror lay in hundred s of glittering pieces across the attic floor. With growing horror, Harry saw that the wooden frame had cracked like a bone, showing a bone-pale, shockingly white fracture in the expanse of dark stain.

  Harry’s blood tipped within his body, nearly tipping him with it, like the mirror. “Oh God oh God oh God.”

  He turned slowly around. Eddie stood blinking two feet to his side, wiping ineffectually at the blood running from his forehead and now covering most of his left cheek. He looked like an Indian in war paint—a defeated, lost Indian, for his eyes were dim and his head turned aimlessly from side to side.

  A few feet from Eddie lay the chair in which he had been sitting. One of its thin curved wooden arms lay beside it, crudely severed. It looked like an insect’s leg, Harry thought, like a toy gun.

  For a moment Harry thought that his face too was red with blood. He wiped his hand over his forehead and looked at his glistening palm. It was only sweat. His heart beat like a bell. Beside him Eddie said, “Aaah…what…?” The injury to his head had brought him out of the trance.

  The dresses were ruined, stepped-on, tangled, torn. The mirror was broken. The table had been mutilated: Maryrose’s chair lay on its side like a murder victim, its severed arm ending in a bristle of snapped ligaments.

  “My head hurts” Eddie said in a weak, trembling voice. “What happened? Aaah! I’m all blood! I’m all blood, Harry!”

  “You’re all blood, you’re all blood?” Harry shouted at him. “Everything’s all blood, you dummy! Look around!” He did not recognize his own voice, which sounded high and tinny and seemed to be coming from somewhere else. Little Eddie took an aimless step away from him, and Harry wanted to fly at him, to pound his bloody head into a pancake, to destroy him, smash him.…

  Eddie held up his bloodstained palm and stared at it. He wiped it vaguely across the front of his T-shirt and took another wandering step. “I’m ascared, Harry,” his tiny voice uttered.

  “Look what you did!” Harry screamed. “You wrecked everything! Damn it! What do you think is going to happen to us?”

  “What’s Mom going to do?” Eddie asked in a voice only slightly above a whisper.

  “You don’t know?” Harry yelled. “You’re dead!”

  Eddie started to weep.

  Harry bunched his hands into fists and clamped his eyes shut. They were both dead, that was the real truth. Harry opened his eyes, which felt hot and oddly heavy, and stared at his sobbing, red-smeared, useless little brother. “Blue rose,” he said.

  10

  Little Eddie’s hands fell to his sides. His chin dropped, and his mouth fell open. Blood ran in a smooth wide band down the left side of his face, dipped under the line of his jaw, and continued on down his neck and into his T-shirt. Pooled blood in his left eyebrow dripped steadily onto the floor, as if from a faucet.

  “You are going deep asleep” Harry said. Where was the hat pin? He looked back to the single standing chair and saw the mother-of-pearl head glistening on the floor near it. “Your whole body is numb” He moved over to the pin, bent down, and picked it up. The metal shaft felt warm in his fingers. “You can feel no pain” He went back to Little Eddie. “Nothing can hurt you.” Harry’s breath seemed to be br
eathing itself, forcing itself into his throat in hot harsh shallow pants, then expelling itself out.

  “Did you hear me, Little Eddie?”

  In his gravelly, slow-moving hypnotized voice, Little Eddie said, “I heard you.”

  “And you can feel no pain.”

  “I can feel no pain.”

  Harry drew his arm back, the point of the hat pin extending forward from his fist, and then jerked his hand forward as hard as he could and stuck the pin into Eddie’s abdomen right through the blood-soaked T-shirt. He exhaled sharply, and tasted a sour misery on his breath.

  “You don’t feel a thing.”

  “I don’t feel a thing.”

  Harry opened his right hand and drove his palm against the head of the pin, hammering it in another few inches. Little Eddie looked like a voodoo doll. A kind of sparkling light surrounded him. Harry gripped the head of the pin with his thumb and forefinger and yanked it out. He held it up and inspected it. Glittering light surrounded the pin too. The long shaft was painted with blood. Harry slipped the point into his mouth and closed his lips around the warm metal.

  He saw himself, a man in another life, standing in a row with men like himself in a bleak gray landscape defined by barbed wire. Emaciated people in rags shuffled up toward them and spat on their clothes. The smells of dead flesh and of burning flesh hung in the air. Then the vision was gone, and Little Eddie stood before him again, surrounded by layers of glittering light.

  Harry grimaced or grinned, he could not have told the difference, and drove his long spike deep into Eddie’s stomach.

  Eddie uttered a small Oof.

  “You don’t feel anything, Eddie,” Harry whispered. “You feel good all over. You never felt better in your life.”

  “Never felt better in my life.”

  Harry slowly pulled out the pin and cleaned it with his fingers.