No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  IN THE END, Owen had just started walking, trying to find his way back to the road on his own. He went on like that for what felt like hours, staggering, sometimes falling when the snow got too deep, forcing himself to stand up and move forward until every bit of energy was gone. He was tired, lost, out of breath, out of options, out of hope.

  Finally he just sat down in the snow, felt how it conformed to the weight and contours of his body, accepting him without question as if it had been waiting here all along. Somewhere in the world, he guessed every person’s death was written down for him, waiting to be discovered, and here he’d found his. He’d heard that freezing to death was like falling asleep, that you could just close your eyes and fade out. For the first time ever, he looked back at his life and didn’t feel so bad. He only wished that he had a piece of paper and pen to leave a note for Henry. What would he write? Sorry? Be good? I love you? I tried my best? All of those things felt true to him now, but he’d never bothered to live up to any of them back when he had a chance, so how much better were they than a bunch of self-pitying drunkard’s lies? Better that he couldn’t leave any note at all—better still that Henry just forgot he’d ever existed.

  His eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and sitting there, staring into the night, he noticed a clearing up ahead. Faint yellow lights spilled over the snowy plain, the same ones he’d seen earlier, and Owen realized what it was.

  A house.

  He stood, having to expend real effort to dislodge himself from the snow and start on his way to the house. Not just any house, but a sprawling fortress that expanded both up and out, as if it had eaten a hole in the surrounding woods and landscape and grown fatter out here all by itself. Owen began walking hastily toward it, invigorated by the promise of survival. All the lights were turned on, and now he could see clearly in what was left of the night.

  As he approached the rear of the structure, he felt his foot skidding forward and realized that what he’d initially taken for a clearing was actually a frozen pond. The ice was solid—it didn’t make the slightest creak or crack as he hurried over it. Parts of the pond were actually bare, a gleaming sweep of onyx along the opposite shore. On the other side, he climbed up the embankment and stopped.

  A big, empty house in the middle of nowhere with all the lights turned on, Owen thought, and the fear that he’d experienced earlier that night came rumbling back through him, bigger this time.

  But he was freezing. He needed a place to get warm. And if he could get inside and find some way to make contact with the outside world, get back to Henry and make an escape from here, from this town, from this whole side of the world …

  He stalked around the outside of the house as quickly as possible, but it still took an excruciatingly long time to reach the front porch, the snow-covered steps—footprints, half full of snow, someone had been here recently—and up to the door. Owen didn’t bother knocking. He turned the knob and stepped inside.

  “Hello?” he shouted. “Anybody home?”

  The entryway stared back at him, gaping and silent and absolutely still. From the first glance, he saw there was something seasick and wrong about the whole thing, and he squinted up at the corners, trying to find out where the wall ended and the ceiling began. Or, for that matter, how you knew you were in the hallway instead of one of the closets. All the spaces oozed together in a blurry nightmare of foolish formlessness. It felt like a drunken hallucination, but Owen knew drunkenness, and even without reaching out to touch it, he knew that this was real.

  He closed the door behind him, the door latch resonating throughout the first floor, and looked around. Even from here, he could tell that the rest of the bizarre house would be large and elaborate. Hallways ran in every direction, ending in doorways that only seemed to communicate with more corridors, farther back. And that was just the first floor.

  But it was all somehow familiar. Had he been out here before? For a party, a long time ago, or maybe some construction job?

  “Hello?” he repeated, and the word sounded strange, hanging in the air all by itself. “Anybody home?” His earlier intuition that the house was empty now felt like a certainty. It was as if it had been laid out here just to wait for him. He moved deeper into the foyer, still shivering, wondering why he didn’t feel warmer. He listened for the sound of a furnace but heard nothing. There was a main staircase up ahead and some old sheets of paper spilled out on the floor in front of it with drawings on them. Blueprints. The rest of the foyer and the corridors had been cleaned out as if by thieves, and that made them feel even larger.

  Owen slowed down and shuddered. He’d inadvertently stepped into an invisible cloud of foul air, so ripe and contaminated that it almost felt warmer than the air that surrounded it. Up on his right was a door leading to what looked like, from the gaudy chandelier that hung above it, some kind of dining room, but—

  He spun around and looked back in the direction of the front door. A sudden sensation as if something had moved behind him, very close to him, made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. But there was nothing in the foyer, nothing in the hall, nothing anywhere, except …

  Well, there was just nothing, that was all.

  For the next half hour, he walked the house, upstairs and down. He went as far up as the third floor until it unraveled his nerves too severely and he had to quit. Occasionally he caught another whiff of the bad smell, but it always drifted past him and was pulled away again in a matter of seconds, as if manipulated by some complex circulatory system. Once, up on the third floor, right before coming back down, he had heard very faintly the sound of some old music playing from inside one of the walls, like a scratchy old gramophone wound up and left playing. That had been when he’d turned around and gone back down.

  Some of the items that he found in the upper rooms included a box of old clothes; a painting of the house; a thin book called By Dark Hands, apparently self-published, written by one of his relatives, Hubert Gosnold Mast; a box of children’s toys; and a box of rocks. Individually these items were random, even meaningless; taken together, they created an unsettling composite in Owen’s mind, as if, placed in one room, they might outline the shape of something best left unseen. He decided to come back down, bringing By Dark Hands with him. It felt as if he’d been up there forever, yet the darkness outside the windows was as thick and dense as ever—if anything, it felt even darker.

  Owen cracked open the book. The date stamped in the front was 1860, making the author at least his great-great-grandfather’s age. Or did it go even further back than that? It felt brittle, the binding almost falling apart in his hands, and the print was tiny, headache-inducing, the lines of type slanting crookedly to the edge of the page. Even as Owen flipped through the yellow-stained pages, he could feel them loosening in bunches, as if the whole thing were disintegrating. Owen tried to follow the story—something about a father looking for his daughter—and got hung up on the language.

  He flipped to the last page to read what was printed there:

  And when at last, long past the toll of midnight, he chanced to see the figure of the girl spat forth from that damned black place, the shunned house’s most infected spot, source of all his unease, the man knew that all of his waiting was not in vain; and he even smiled. For whether or not she might deign to rest her dark hand upon him, whether he might yet live to see the light of morning, he knew that he was destined to spend the rest of eternity within her cold embrace.

  He stood up then to ask his question: “What shall ye do to me now?”

  She only grinned at him with teeth that shone like daggers, grotesquely long, and he inclined to listen. But instead of her sweet voice, his ears received the lower intonations of a masculine one, its unfamiliar tone grating like small rocks against a millstone, its laughter rich and hungry. And as he turned to look

  Owen read it again. The book ended there, midsentence. It didn’t look as if any pages had been torn out. It just stopped.

  Ba
ck in the foyer, a child’s voice lisped incoherently behind him, from the area he’d thought might have been a dining room. Owen felt cattle prods go off from his spine, running the length of his legs.

  “Henry?”

  The muffled rumor of footsteps, moving toward him or away from him, he couldn’t tell. Owen ran back to their source, boots thumping, heart pounding. He arrived at the doorway of the dining room, took it all in at once—the air mattress, the laptop, the pages sprawled across the hardwood floor. Owen grabbed one of the pages and looked at it, a spray of words assaulting his eye.

  This is it, he thought. This is the house that Scott…

  He realized he was still carrying around the old book, the one he’d found upstairs. He looked back at the pages and the laptop. Finally his gaze arrived at the corner of the room and stopped. The closet door in the corner was wide open. Through it, he could see a ragged hole torn into the plaster, revealing a black corridor beneath.

  Owen stared at it.

  Something was in there.

  Something was breathing.

  “Henry?” Owen said, coming closer. “Is that you?” He felt his head turning slightly to one side, both hands half raised, as if in anticipation of a blow. “It’s Papa. I’m not mad. If you’re in there, just come out. Okay?”

  Nothing stirred. As Owen grew nearer, he became aware of how agonizingly deep the space on the other side went. It wasn’t just a hole in the wall; it was a hidden room, maybe even a whole hallway that had been covered up. The lyrics of the song went back through his head again, too quickly, something about a girl in blue.

  “Henry? I love you. Papa won’t leave you, Henry.”

  “Daddy?” a voice from inside asked.

  “I’m coming,” Owen said. “Daddy’s coming.” And he stepped through the hole.

  GETTING BACK TO THE WOODS wasn’t so easy. It was still snowing, and the roads had gotten worse.

  They parked at the side of the road, and Sonia started to get out.

  “What are you doing?” Scott asked.

  “I’m going with you.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Scott—”

  “Look,” he said, jabbing one finger at the yellow sheets of legal paper between the front seats of the car. “You read the letter. The curse is on my family. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  Sonia glared at him, red-eyed. “That thing, that spirit—whatever you want to call it—came into my house and killed my father.”

  “There’s nothing to be done. It’s unbreakable.”

  “If it’s so hopeless, why even bother?”

  “Because of Henry.”

  “You’re throwing yourself into this thing.” She sounded miserable and angry at the same time. “Just like your father and your grandfather and your great-uncle and every other idiotic man in your family, you’re going to end up just like them. Maybe if I come with you—”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “I’m calling the sheriff then. He’ll come out.”

  “Won’t matter.”

  Sonia looked out, in the direction of the house. “You don’t even know she’s out there.”

  Scott peered into the woods.

  “She’s out there,” he said.

  THERE WAS A FAINT CRUNCH of footsteps, and the woman brought the boy out of the woods. Cold daylight fell from the low gray sky. He was bundled in blankets, with thick mittens and warm boots on his feet, and he was no longer afraid.

  He was with his mother.

  She had told him everything on the way from Earl’s house. She spoke with the easy, effortless love of a mother who takes obvious pleasure in being with her son. In the back of her car, Henry listened, frightened at first, then dubious, and finally awestruck by the sheer wonder of what she was telling him. Now he felt the last of his doubt sliding away like a chill in a warm bath. From her purse she had shown him a baby photo of himself with her and told him how she’d watched him grow, loving him from a distance.

  “Why didn’t you keep me the first time?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t myself then. Do you understand?”

  He shook his head.

  “The woman I used to be wasn’t prepared for motherhood. She had already lost one little boy. She thought she was ready for another one, but she was wrong.”

  “But you’re different now?”

  Colette smiled, pure, cold brilliance. “Completely.”

  She told him that from now on, their lives would be different, that the three of them would be together, she and Henry and Owen, the way they should have been from the beginning. She said she was sorry for hiding the truth from him for so long, but now she wanted to make it right.

  Suddenly, looking up into the clearing, the boy pointed and said, “What’s that?”

  “That?” Colette smiled. “Why, that’s our new house, dear.”

  Henry cocked his head. “It doesn’t look right.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s wrong.” He shook his head, twisting away from her. She released him, let him climb down into the snow, then bent forward to kiss his cheek.

  “Come inside, sweet boy. There’s somebody waiting for us.”

  Henry brightened a little. “My daddy?”

  “No,” Colette said. “Mine.”

  As she said that, Henry smelled something sour rising in the air, and he looked up at his mommy. She was different now. The neckline of her sweater looked as if it had been ripped open down the middle by a pair of ragged claws, and she had angry red scratches on her chest, as if some animal had been clawing at her, but the scratches were wide-set, a full finger-width apart. Her face was no longer patient or kind, but colorless, harsh, starved in every kind of way a person could be. Pain boiled in her face, making the muscles twitch and flex.

  “Mommy? Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him wanly. “I’m just tired.” Tears swam in her eyes. Somehow her pain only made Henry love her more. He wished with all his heart that there were something he could say to make her feel better, but somehow he knew that her problems, whatever they were, were insurmountable; they towered like a black city in front of both of them, a city under a curse. Yet at the same time, in a way he couldn’t explain, he did understand: He and his mommy were both trapped, somehow, by her father, the man-thing that awaited them inside.

  “We can run away,” he said.

  She picked him up and hugged him so hard he couldn’t breathe. More complicated feelings—pain, love, fear—broke through Henry like a kaleidoscope in patterns he couldn’t follow. A tiny fraction of the pain slipped from her face, and beneath it he saw the woman who had first come to pick him up from the house in the middle of the night.

  “Where would we go?” she whispered.

  “Mexico. We can get my daddy, and we can all go together. That man wouldn’t find us. It would be okay.”

  “Oh, honey.” He felt her shaking her head, and they were walking again, plunging through deep snow. Henry didn’t know what else to say. He wanted to be with her so much, but he had the feeling that she was doing this because she was scared and didn’t know how else to proceed. Sometimes his daddy had acted like this, and it always frightened him, because that meant no one was in charge. Henry remembered his father looking at him over a big pile of empty beer cans with a bleary, helpless look on his face, and it was always the worst feeling in the world knowing that no one was the parent, the protector, captain of the ship. Instead, they were all sailing blind in a tumultuous storm over which nobody had control. In his worst moments, Henry understood that this was how the balance of his life was going to be.

  She carried him the rest of the way into the house.

  OWEN SAW THE FLAMES from around the corner, an ulcerating orange blaze that sent shifting, uncertain shadows slithering up and down the length of the corridor. He could smell it too, the acrid stench of smoke, coal,
and hot iron all crowding the passageway, although it did almost nothing to get rid of the tremors. If something was burning back here, shouldn’t it at least generate some heat?

  Rounding the corner, he faltered and gaped through the half-open barred door at the chamber ahead. It was like a kind of subterranean barn with half walls dividing the space into separate stalls on either side. Beyond it, directly opposite him, an old-fashioned potbellied stove squatted like a fat man with an open wound, glowering back at him through its grate. Someone had lit a snarling fire, and for a moment, Owen stood hypnotized by the coals seething inside. But he saw no sign of the voice that had coaxed him this far, no trace of the child who had summoned him as father.

  “Henry?”

  He came closer to the stove, but the heat from within it was stingy, minimal, and provided only the faint illusion of warmth, less a fire than the humid breath of something exhaling its vapors onto his skin.

  Then he saw the tool bench.

  It was so much more than that, though. Never in his life had Owen come across anything like it, except in the horror movies of his childhood, movies he could no longer stand to watch. Saws, hammers, drills, spikes and axes, hatchets and wrenches, a dozen types of restraints; coils of thick rope, blood-stiffened, hung from wooden pegs. Great serrated scissors, blades a foot long and beaked like the mandibles of some enormous insect, held their own special place of honor. There was a bucket of water on the floor with leather whips dangling out of it like the tendrils of some wretched black plant. Iron rods with spikes attached and devices made of polished steel hooks sat next to several handmade leather masks with dozens of nails angled inward toward the wearer’s face. Small hand-shaped metal boxes filled with clamps and bolts to skewer and split muscle and bone lay carefully lined up across one side. At the bottom, he saw a piece of plywood modified to accommodate rawhide stirrups and a set of retractable brown-toothed clamps with rawhide straps and rusted buckles.