Authors: Tim Pratt
“H. P. Lovecraft wrote that the most merciful thing about the human mind is its inability to correlate all its contents,” I said, leaning against a counter. “I don’t think I’ve got a chance in hell of correlating all the contents of this
house
.”
“If the house is a reflection of Mr. Grace’s mental state, it suggests a certain amount of disorganization, I’ll grant you that.” He opened a door on a space the size of a walk-in closet or a dorm room. “Here’s the pantry—beans, rice, sugar, flour, canned goods, cereal, granola bars…” He shrugged. “I didn’t know what you’d want. The bottom shelf is all stuff that belonged to your—well, uncle or grandpa or whatever Mr. Grace was—that hasn’t expired yet. As far as I can tell. A lot of the labels are in Japanese or other languages, I don’t know what. He had interesting tastes.”
I leaned back against the counter and stretched my arms over my head, working out some of the ten thousand kinks from the long trip. “That’s fine. I’ve always been adventurous.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then made a weird face—like he’d bitten into something sour while simultaneously having a negative epiphany—and shook his head. When he did speak, he was brusque, and he didn’t make eye contact. “Bedrooms are upstairs—the master bedroom is the second door on the right, just off the landing.” He glanced at his watch. “I should get back to the office.” He took out a business card, then scrawled a number on the back and handed it over. “That’s my cell. As I said, Mr. Grace paid us to make sure you got settled, so don’t hesitate if you need anything. Let me know when you’d like me to show you around the property.”
I walked him back to the front door, though he left so fast, it was more like I chased him. He was totally professional when he shook my hand good-bye, but I still wondered why he’d gone from cheerful-helpful-guy to busy-lawyer-on-the-go. Maybe he’d just finally caught a whiff of my piquant combination of road sweat and fast-food residue. Or more likely he’d realized I wasn’t going to sell the place right away, giving him a cut of the profits to handle the business, and in the absence of a financial incentive he could only feign friendliness for so long.
Too bad. He was cute, and I’d enjoyed his company even in my road-weary state, but I wasn’t so desperate for a friend in this place that I’d bother trying to win over someone who felt the need to flee my presence.
Once he was gone I locked the door, as festooned with dead bolts and chains as the most paranoid inner-city Chicago apartment dweller’s. I found all the hardware very comforting. Intellectually, I knew I was less likely to be serial-killed in a place this rural and remote than in a city full of potential predators, but I’ve seen enough horror movies to have a healthy irrational fear of cannibal redneck zombies just the same.
Besides: I didn’t need to be serial-killed. A one-off murder would be just as bad.
The stairs were steep and narrow, and led to a small landing with a rickety-looking wooden railing protecting me from an accidental plunge to the living room below. Beyond that was a long hallway lined with more doors than a hotel corridor. The door to the master bedroom was standing open, and any reasonable person in my condition would have wandered in and collapsed on the first bed-shaped object she encountered, but I was feeling weirdly buzzed and wired—my place, mine!—so I figured I’d check out the other rooms first.
I rattled doorknobs, but most of them were locked, and two of the three that did open were just undifferentiated junk rooms, crammed with boxes and sewing equipment and dressmaker’s mannequins and unicycles and bundled-up volleyball nets; the other was a small bathroom. Why have locks on all these interior doors anyway? My dead benefactor had been the paranoid type, apparently. If we were related by blood, I hoped getting squirrelly in old age wasn’t genetic.
Through diligent effort and the process of elimination with my key ring, I managed to get all five of the remaining doors unlocked: three bedrooms with actual beds in them (buried in heaps of junk), and another two jumbled storage rooms. The window in one of the bedrooms was blocked off, offering a view of blank plywood—presumably one of the additions to the house I hadn’t explored yet had been built right across the window.
Classy.
Satisfied that there were neither treasure chests nor lurking monsters in the vicinity, I went to check out the master bedroom. The space was huge, almost as large as the living room, dominated by a great four-poster bed with intricately carved columns. Of course the room was cluttered, but not as badly as the rest of the house—there was even a bedside table that held nothing but a lamp, an empty glass, and the kind of wristwatch that probably cost more than my entire college education. A massive dark wardrobe dominated one wall—the kind of thing that looked like it ought to lead to a world full of talking beavers and guys with goat hooves instead of feet—to the right of a window that let in the late afternoon summer sunlight. There was an armchair, throne-like and covered in purple velvet, and next to that, something taller than me, draped in a white sheet, leaning against the wall opposite the bed.
I tugged the drop cloth down, revealing a mirror at least seven feet high and five feet wide, with an elaborate frame topped by an intricately carved, life-size depiction of a lion’s head, though its left ear was chipped off and its jaws grotesquely extended so that it seemed the vastness of the mirror was the big cat’s gaping mouth.
Not wanting to sit up in bed and catch sight of my reflection and have a half-asleep home-invasion freak-out, I covered the mirror again. I didn’t touch the glass.
If I had, I would have figured out what I was really dealing with a little earlier, maybe.
I switched on the lamp and sat on the bed. The mattress was soft and the blankets smelled clean, so I flopped onto my back. I took out my phone, not expecting much, but I actually got service—which was weird, since the phone still utterly failed to display GPS coordinates, like the property was in stealth mode or something. Maybe Mr. Grace worked for the CIA and this was a safe house. (No, I didn’t really think I was living in a techno-thriller. Though that would have been simpler, in some ways.)
I called Mom and Dad. They’d been a little skeptical about the whole “long-lost relative” thing, but they were supportive about my desire to check things out, and happy to hear I’d arrived safely. They offered to come out and help me “take care of things” again—by which they meant sell the place and take the money and run—and I declined politely. Again. I was on an adventure, damn it. I wasn’t ready to be all responsible and practical just yet. I had a magical house in the forest and I was going to witch it up a little.
I called my best friend, Charlie, but he didn’t answer—he was probably either getting ready for a night on the town or sleeping all day to recover from the last one. I left a message: “Charlie. You ass. You should have come with me. You would not believe this place. You could make found-object sculptures for the rest of your life with just the crap in the living room.”
I hung up and felt a sudden stab of terrible loneliness, which was either exhaustion or perspective. Either way I put a pillow over my face and fell asleep in seconds.
I hate dream sequences in novels and movies and stuff. They’re either so surreal they’re pointless, or the symbolism is so heavy-handed it’s an insult to your intelligence. It’s like the artist is yelling,
“Here is my theme, let me show you it!”
But I did have a dream in that bed, and unlike most dreams, it didn’t fade from my mind when I woke. In fact, it’s stayed with me ever since.
I dreamed of seeing myself, but I was all in black and white and kind of grainy, like old movie footage. There was me as a baby, on my back, waving my arms and babbling. Me, a little older, at a playground, on a swing, laughing. Older still, sitting on pavement by a fallen-over bicycle, clutching a bloody knee. Then, faster, snippets: first day of kindergarten, first soccer game, first trip on an airplane, first time snorkeling in Hawaii, first school dance, first kiss with a boy, first road trip with friends, first kiss with a girl, first day of college, firsts firsts firsts. One frame, just a fraction of a moment, was me, sitting at the desk in Trey’s office, writing things down on a piece of paper.
I woke, gasping, and sat up. I was disoriented because my own face was looking at me, and for a minute I wasn’t sure who I
was
—I couldn’t tell where my insides began and the outside ended—and then I realized it was just the mirror: the drop cloth had fallen off, and I was seeing my own reflection. I groaned and picked up my phone: 3:37 in the morning. I switched off the bedside lamp and rolled over and slept. This time, I had no dreams worth mentioning.
The next morning I braved the downstairs bathroom. The water pressure was actually
too
good, like being sprayed by a fire hose, and the only temperature settings the balky knobs seemed to allow were freezing and scalding, but by the end of the ordeal I was entirely awake, at least. I made coffee and ate a granola bar while I wandered around trying to figure out how to get to the rest of the house.
And there was obviously a lot more
to
the house, but it became apparent there was a “You can’t get there from here” situation going on, and I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe some of the additions could only be entered through exterior doors, and didn’t connect from the inside at all? That was a crazy way to build a house, but I had no evidence for Archibald Grace’s sanity. I’d have to go outside and poke around.
In addition to that conundrum, there was one ground-floor door I couldn’t open, a narrow one squeezed into a corner of the kitchen. It was secured with a large and rusty padlock, and none of the keys on my ring would open it. Probably led to the room where old Archibald kept his severed-head collection. Oh well. Nothing a pair of bolt cutters wouldn’t fix, once I got around to it.
I did finally discover one path deeper into the house: in a corner of the living room, a heavy black drape hung down, and when I pushed it aside, surprise! I found a doorway in the form of a ragged rectangle cut into the wall, leading to a hall narrowed by dark wooden bookcases lining both sides. I felt around for a light switch and found one, a low-wattage bulb on the ceiling casting dusty shadows on the hall. I pressed inward and onward, and the short corridor led into a series of rooms carpeted with patchwork remnants. These added-on rooms were mostly windowless and strangely proportioned, with sharply slanting ceilings and bizarre alcoves, stuffed with draped furniture and freestanding shelves. You could play hide-and-seek in here and die of starvation before anyone came close to finding you.
I wound along the person-wide path through the overstuffed shelves, heaps of disorganized junk, and occasional neat collections of objects clearly treasured—one room contained a glass case full of arrowheads, another full of fossils, and a third full of thimbles, of all things.
Then I pushed through the last door, and blinked at the sudden onslaught of sunlight. The room was large, roughly rectangular, entirely empty, and walled in glass, with ample skylights in the ceiling as well. A solarium—and a nice change from the dark, dingy rooms that led here. I was in the back of the house, and the backyard was a long gently sloping expanse of overgrown meadow, with a dilapidated gazebo and a big rock-lined fire pit surrounded by fallen-log seats, and eventually, more dark woods. There were no trees in the immediate vicinity, though, and every scrap of available light filtered through the glass, making even the dust motes glow. The floor was pale hardwood, polished to a mellow glow.
That’s when I decided to stay.
Because that room would be the perfect artist’s studio. If I was going to keep on stubbornly trying to create art good enough to show anyone besides my parents and Charlie, at least this was a beautiful place to start failing.
My parents always taught me to think things through. My mom used to say, “Don’t be afraid of leaping—but take a look at where you’re going to land first.” So I ran through it all in my head. There was enough money in the inheritance to pay my student loans and other expenses for a year plus, especially since I didn’t have to pay rent. I had all the seclusion I could eat out here, no distractions, and no noise, either literal or psychological. It could be a break from my life, to focus on my life’s work. I could watch the seasons wheel past, cool summer to spectacular fall to snowy winter to spring thaw. I could see how the light moved through this room for a year.
And if, after that year, I still hadn’t managed to create any work I felt was worth two craps in a bucket…I’d take my dad up on that introduction to his curator friend and get a job working behind the scenes at a museum. There were lots of museums in Chicago, and I knew my parents would be delighted. Nothing wrong with that kind of life. It just wasn’t the life I wanted, where instead of working with art, I
made
it. Here was my chance to see if I could make my dreams intersect with reality, without starving in the process.
I needed to get that cashier’s check in the bank, so I decided to go into town. I figured I’d stop by the lawyers’ office to sign whatever and see if they had any more keys, maybe something that would open that rusty lock.
I made my way back to the main part of the house. When I opened the front door to leave, I found a sun-browned young woman in a yellow sundress and a big floppy hat standing on my porch, holding a basket full of flowers. “Hi!” She waved with the frantic enthusiasm of a little kid watching a parade go by, the numerous bracelets on her wrist jingling. “I’m Melinda. You must be my new neighbor!”
“Oh. Hi, I’m Bekah. I didn’t realize I had any neigh…”
“Do you mind if I come in?”
I blinked. Neighborliness is one thing, but…“I was just headed out, actually—”
Melinda covered her mouth like she’d witnessed a scene of terrible horror. I revised my sense of her age, moving it up a bit. The wide eyes and big smile and high-energy demeanor made her seem younger, but now that I had time to observe her more, I thought she was probably closer to her fifties than her twenties. “Of course! You’re just getting settled in, don’t mind me, we’ll catch up another time. I knew Mr. Grace, oh, for years, but I didn’t know him
well
, you know, just to say hello. I’m his closest neighbor, and I was always willing to lend a hand but he never needed it, he was pretty spry right up until the end.” She thrust the basket toward me, and I took it from her in self-defense. “Here, fresh flowers will brighten up the place. If you ever get lonesome or want a local guide, you just come see me, I’m in the cottage on the other side of the woods out back. Bye, Bekah! I’m sure we’ll be great friends!” She pretty much skipped down the steps and vanished around the side of the house.