Then, fifteen minutes in, the scene shifted from southern slums to the woods. The trees cleared to reveal another house, this one imposingly huge, sprawling up ahead. Scott had time to think: Wait a second, that looks like—
He didn’t finish the thought. The air inside Colette McGuire’s living room had changed, become thinner, as if the oxygen content had unexpectedly plummeted. Scott was already feeling a little unsteady, and what he saw on-screen now heightened his sensory disorientation to such an alarming degree that he wondered if he was really seeing it at all. The last time he’d felt this profoundly deranged was the endless afternoon that he’d endured his mother’s funeral, when he’d rammed his skull into a wall afterward just to clear his head. Now he thought the amount of self-inflicted pain that it would take to achieve those same results might very well kill him.
In front of them, Round House blazed to life on the movie screen.
GREAT-UNCLE BUTCH’S handheld camera traveled up the front steps and into the entryway. The music and voice-over narration had crackled away to white noise, leaving only the occasional scrape or scuff of footsteps as the camera moved into the main hallway; otherwise, the sound track was just a hiss. Scott stared at the screen as the corridor straightened out in front of him. It went back, on and on, ending in a tiny window covered in semitransparent curtains with a radiator underneath it.
When Colette touched his shoulder, he jumped.
“You all right?” she asked.
His voice was thin, reedy. “Is this still the same movie?”
“This is the movie.”
Scott thought about the blueprints he’d found, of the image of one house swallowing another. There was the same feeling here, as if his great-uncle’s movie had captured some hidden depths to the house, secret, compartmentalized space behind the walls.
This is it, he thought. This is his version of The Black Wing.
The camera wandered onward seemingly at random, its disembodied eye trolling the round emptiness in almost total silence. It passed through two small rooms, into the kitchen, lingering on an iron skillet where it dangled from a hook. Then it pirouetted almost drunkenly around, entered another doorway, and went up a flight of stairs and down the second-floor hallway, lined with closed doors on either side. Who, Scott wondered, was controlling the camera? Presumably his great-uncle Butch, but what if it wasn’t? What if the camera came upon Butch himself standing in one of these rooms, his great-uncle turning around and staring back at it in black horror? What if the face belonged to Scott himself?
Of course, he couldn’t have been in the movie; he’d never set foot in the house until a few weeks ago. He forced his eyes to remain on the screen. The last door on the right led to more stairs, and the camera went down again, moving through the corridor and to the right. It had been tilting ever so slightly, but now the tilt had become more severe, giving everything a slanted, off-kilter angle. At the end of the hall, it turned into one of the rooms.
It was the dining room: Scott’s workroom.
He felt as if he’d never seen it from this direction before. The smooth, bare walls looked angry somehow, pulsing with a cold, indefinable hatefulness, and although the room was empty, he could feel the presence of something within the space, growing in strength like a static electrical charge. It reminded him of a high school science experiment he’d once done involving a pair of steel plates, oppositely charged, a current growing between them, invisible but undeniably powerful, ominous in its silence.
But it wasn’t totally silent, Scott realized. If he listened, beneath the whir of the projector, he thought he heard music crackling on the sound track again, warbling and anachronistic:
We don’t want the bacon,
We don’t want the bacon…
Scott frowned. The old World War I music, faint as it was, didn’t seem to be coming from the projector at all but out of the screen itself. He took a step toward it, cocking his head, and stared. Suddenly, a low black shape shot past the camera, too fast to be seen.
“Did you see that?” He leaped back, squinting through the tunnel of light, toward Colette. “What was that thing?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded numb, dreaming.
“Can you rewind it?”
She fumbled with the knobs on the projector. Both the music he thought he’d heard and the projector’s noise were replaced by a louder, more urgent clatter, and the image on the screen froze, stuttering slightly, showing a plain white wall. Colette twisted another switch, and the footage began to roll backward with a swaggering, exaggerated slowness.
On-screen, the black shape emerged from the shadows on the left, changing positions in between every individual frame. Of course it is, Scott thought. That was what gave the illusion of movement, the persistence of vision. Except now, watching the same scene in reverse, he somehow felt as if the black shape were actually moving in gaps between frames, as if it were alive somehow within the darkened confines of the film, the parts that they couldn’t see.
“Wait,” he said. “Hold it there.”
“It keeps slipping.”
“You have to be careful. If you pause it too long in front of the bulb, the footage starts to get too hot.”
“Wait. I think I’ve got it.” She stopped the film again, and he approached the screen, staring at the shape. Pinned down into stillness, it had become even more indistinct, a murky smudge, not even a shape anymore but just a shadow.
Except, he realized, the shape wasn’t really black.
It was blue.
SONIA HADN’T BEEN OUT to the McGuire house in sixteen years. She told herself it was because there wasn’t anything else out here for miles and thus no reason to make what was a long and inconvenient trip through otherwise empty country. But the truth was—
Never mind the truth.
But it was too late for that now. The memory came whether she wanted it to or not.
Sixteen years ago, the day before she and Scott were supposed to go to Senior Prom, she had been driving these exact same hills in her father’s old lopsided panel truck (EARL GRAHAM—JUNK ’N’ MORE!) with a load of rolled newspapers. Her father had always let her borrow the truck every day after school, and she’d drive out to the Globe’s regional distribution center, a warehouse twelve miles away, pick up her papers, and drive back, stuffing the plastic paper tubes all along the way until she’d reached the McGuire mansion. It was one of her last stops, and in winter it was always dark by the time she got to it. She’d been pulling off to the side of the road, paper in hand, when she’d noticed the Mast family Country Squire station wagon parked in the McGuires’ driveway.
Sonia had recognized the station wagon instantly. Technically it belonged to Scott’s mother, but it was the vehicle that Scott always ended up using if he needed a car to rent videos or pick her up for a date. In fact, she and Scott had spent several hours wrestling around its backseat just two days earlier, exploring the mysteries of the universe in the dark along the shore of Clayton Lake. There was nothing remotely flashy or cool about the station wagon, with its sparkly Epcot bumper sticker, broken dome light, and fake wood-grain side panels; the only spectacular thing about it was what happened between them in the backseat, there in the dark.
The sight of it there, in front of the McGuire compound, caught her off guard more than she could possibly have articulated. She remembered jamming down the brakes of her father’s truck, newspaper still in hand, and the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as her gaze rose up, almost involuntarily, to the light in the second-floor window. She remembered what she’d seen up there.
That can’t be him, she’d thought. But of course it had been. Up in the lighted window of Colette McGuire’s bedroom, without so much as a drawn shade to obstruct the view, had been the unforgettable sight of Scott, presumably on his knees, eyes closed, in front of Colette, who was lifting her breasts up into his waiting mouth.
Dropping the McGuires’ newspaper on the road in front of the
box, Sonia had hit the gas pedal of her father’s truck and peeled away. She couldn’t remember the thoughts racing through her head at the time, but she didn’t think it was due to her faulty memory or some suppression of painful events. Looking back on that moment, she didn’t believe she had actually been thinking anything, but simply reacting, putting as much distance between herself and what she’d seen as humanly possible.
Now, almost two decades later, she was back driving through the snow on this same country road, just a glorified extension of the McGuire driveway. And there—perhaps illustrating her own life’s insatiable appetite for redundancy—was the rental car that Scott had been driving, parked in front of Colette’s convertible.
For a moment, Sonia couldn’t do anything but sit there and try to digest it. It was exactly like sixteen years ago. Seeing this car now only made her realize how little she’d changed since then, an emotionally deadening thought, yet one she was powerless to suppress. What good was growing up, she wondered, supposedly moving forward with your life, having new experiences, if the person you thought you’d become was just a set of Sunday clothes that hardly covered up the desperate, needy adolescent you thought you’d left behind?
The voice of reason, the one that had told her to stay in law school, the one that advised her to steer clear of Scott once she’d heard he was back in town—the one, in other words, she never listened to—told her not to stop here. She got out of her Corolla and walked through the snow-swirling dark toward the main house, half expecting motion-activated lights at any second. They didn’t come; there were no alarms or barking dogs or threats to mobilize private security guards. If nothing else, the McGuire family still thought it was invulnerable.
What are you going to do, knock on the front door?
Twenty yards from the porch, she veered right, grasping her way along the outer perimeter, stumbling a little on the low fence that surrounded some kind of overrun garden. Snowflakes clumped in her hair and eyelashes, rendering vision sticky and unreliable. She saw a flickering yellow light hazing in the bushes surrounding a tall window. Shoving her way through the brush, she put her face to the frosty glass and stood there shivering, feeling her hands already starting to go numb. On the other side of the window, the curtains were divided just enough for her to get a glimpse inside.
At first, Sonia didn’t understand what she was looking at. Scott and Colette stood in the living room in front of a movie screen. Scott was pointing at something; Colette was just staring at it. The image on the screen twitched and skipped, pinned imperfectly into place, a giant, dying moth trapped on top of a bare bulb. From her place outside the window, Sonia saw a room with the figure of a girl in a blue dress. Behind her was a man in a dark suit, his arm on her shoulder. The girl was smiling. Watching the scene unfold, Sonia realized there was something familiar about the room itself, the doorways and the high ceilings, the curves, and after a moment, she realized what it was. The man and the girl on the movie screen were standing in a room in Round House. But why was Scott here watching movies about it in Colette’s living room?
Sonia’s curiosity faded beneath a kind of dawning horror. There was something wrong with the girl’s face—it seemed to be melting from the inside. Still smiling, the girl turned her head and looked up at the tall man in the black suit. At that exact moment, the man’s eyes flashed up from the movie screen, staring directly out the window at Sonia with an unmistakable air of absolute recognition, a grin spreading over his face.
He sees me out here, her mind babbled. He sees me outside the window, and he knows I can see him—
Her cell phone gave a brief buzz. She jumped, knocking her elbow against the glass.
All at once, Scott spun around and stared straight at her, his face bathed in the projector’s light. Sonia had no idea whether he’d seen her or not. She felt the muscles in her legs jump without orders from her brain.
She scrambled from the bushes and fled.
“WHAT?” COLETTE SAID. “What is it?”
“I heard something.” Scott yanked the drapes aside, using the opportunity to get control of his voice. When he’d heard that thump on the other side of the window, he’d been deathly afraid he was going to scream. As irrational as it was, the notion of Rosemary Carver standing outside in the snow, looking in at him, refused to go away. If anything, the sprawling white emptiness outside the window only intensified it.
“There’s nothing there,” Colette said.
Scott turned reluctantly back to the movie screen. The footage was beginning to melt against the projector’s bulb, the face of the girl in the blue dress contorting, blackening, stretching to become irregular and wrong. Behind her, the figure of her father appeared to elongate until the scene blistered into incoherence. Scott caught a puff of scorched celluloid drifting from the projector’s casing just before the picture dissolved in a black cauldron of bubbles.
“Oh shit,” Colette said with a high-pitched manic giggle. “It’s on fire.” She grabbed a blanket from the sofa and tossed it over the projector, where thin tendrils of smoke had already begun to rise. The projector fell over with a crash, swinging the beam up to the ceiling before it flickered and went black. The burst of activity shook Scott from his fugue, and he staggered sideways to find his balance against one of the tall brass lamps in the corner.
“I have to go.”
“Wait,” she said.
“Colette, I’m not going to—”
She covered his mouth with her lips and kissed him. Scott, caught openmouthed, felt her tongue sweep past his teeth, with the flavor of meat and milk. He drew back, not looking where he was going, only hoping he would be able to find the exit.
“Remember?”
“I’m sorry.” It didn’t sound like his voice at all, and he didn’t sound sorry. Somehow he managed to step over the projector and its cords, the table where it had been standing, circumnavigating furniture and lamps on his way out, wincing every step of the way.
“Where are you going?” Colette asked.
Scott turned and looked back at the darkened screen where he’d seen the last images of the house, knowing only that he had to return there.
It was calling him back.
SONIA DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER with the phone until she was back in her car and driving away from the McGuire house, the Corolla gobbling up icy asphalt, fishtailing all over the road. By then, it had stopped ringing. She hit MISSED CALLS, saw Red’s number pop up, and stabbed TALK. It didn’t even have a chance to ring before she heard Red’s voice, breathless on the other end.
“I found him,” Red said.
“Henry? Where?”
“The site.”
She frowned, talking louder than she had to. “What?”
“The construction site in town,” Red said, sounding exasperated. “The Bijou, the old theater, you know?”
Sonia was struggling to steer and balance the phone on her shoulder, not normally a difficult feat, but at the moment, it felt next to impossible. All around her, the winter wind boomed and roared, never going away completely. “What was he doing there?” Suddenly she remembered the trailer that stayed parked behind the chain-link, serving as the office for the project, and how Red once said he sometimes holed up there when he didn’t want to go home. He’d even tried to convince her to meet him there for a quickie one night. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s—” Red sounded flustered. “He’s fine. Just get here, okay?”
She did, putting the pedal down, disregarding the weather and the slippery roads. Through the flying snow, the storefronts of downtown leaped into her headlights like a series of flat, painted canvases. She shot past them and swung up in front of the remains of the theater, almost skidding out of control, and sprang out and ran along the chain-link fence looking for a way in. On the other side, under its fresh layer of white, the sagging husk of the theater looked like an arctic shipwreck. Over by the trailer, hinges squeaked and a rectangle of light swung open in the dark.
“It’s me,” she said. “How do I get through there?”
“Hold on.” He staggered down out of the trailer, wading through the drifts, and Sonia saw that he was carrying Henry in his arms, wrapped in a blanket. The boy was clutching a backpack. “There’s an opening off to your left.”
They met at the fence gate, and Red passed Henry over to her. “I was in the trailer going over some payroll stuff when I heard a noise. I found him over there…” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the theater. “He was curled up on the ground.”
“God.” Sonia looked at the boy’s face. It was filthy, bruised with ash and dirt, but she didn’t see any blood or sign of injury. His eyes were open, watching her, dusty orbs in the night.
“Hey, bud. You okay?”
Henry nodded, hugged his backpack closer, as if he feared she might take it from him.
“You shouldn’t have come out here,” Sonia said. “It’s very dangerous. We were worried about you.”
He blinked and nodded. “Where’s my daddy?”
Good fucking question, kid. Sonia felt a wasp of anger fly up from her stomach and plant its stinger in her throat. It didn’t matter what Owen had been through—the thought of him abandoning the boy in the truck on a snowy night was enough to make her want to call the police on him and find a better guardian for his son. Shifting the boy’s weight to her shoulder, she took out her cell phone and started dialing.
“Who are you calling now?” Red asked.
“Lonnie Mitchell.”
No Doors, No Windows Page 13
