Chapter 8: The House

The rain had come down out of the sheets it had held all night. It fell steady now, and the gutter over the porch ran and broke, ran and broke, and Elliot lay on his stomach with one leg off the mattress and his face in a pillow he had sweated through.

He lay on the near side of sleep and listened to the house make its noise. The gutter. Water coming down off the roof and breaking apart on the porch boards. The pipes in the wall knocking once, and then holding still.

Then his mother’s voice.

It came down the hall through his door, pitched low, which was worse than shouting.

“—is it a ghost. Is that what I’m supposed to call it? A ghost?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I am keeping it down.”

A chair leg scraped on the kitchen floor and did not scrape back.

“Should we call the Wardens?” she said.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Somebody ought to—“

“The Wardens write everything down.” His father’s voice had gravel in it. “Everything, Lorraine. Every word out of your mouth goes into a book with a number on it, and once it’s in the book it doesn’t come out again. We call them and this stops being ours and starts being theirs, and we go where they put us. Is that what you want? Is that?”

Nothing came back for a while. The pipes went quiet, and the kitchen got quieter than it had been, and he could hear the rain in the gutters all the way down the block.

“Then who do we call? Gerald. Who do we call?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody.” She let it sit there. Then: “What if it isn’t him?”

“It’s him. I looked at him. You looked at him.”

“What if it isn’t.” Her voice snagged and held and went on anyway. “What if it’s a Calamity. What if something came back in his body and it’s in that room right now, wearing him, saying goodnight to us, asking whether we’re going to bed—“

“Stop.”

“We have to do something.”

“I’m going to go look at it,” he said. “With my own eyes. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Look at what? It’s dark out and it’s been raining since—“

“Where we buried it. I’m going to go look at where we buried it.”

Then the coat coming off the hook by the door. The heavy one, the black oilskin that hung there all winter and smelled of tar. Then the front door, and the rain loud in the frame, and the rain shut off when the door shut.

Two sets of feet on the porch, then on the walk, then on the pavement, going away together, one of them coming down hard on the second step.

Then the gutter. Then the pipes.

Elliot got his hands under himself and pushed. The mattress took the push and gave nothing back. His arms came out from under him and his mouth opened, and the cut on his forehead pulled where his face had been pressed into the pillow. There was a dried line of blood across the back of his right hand.

“Mom.”

Maybe he said it. What came out of him was a breath with no word in it.

She had said his body. Something came back in his body. It went past him and he let it. She was a woman in a kitchen at this hour saying the worst thing she could think of to keep her husband in the house, and what she was afraid of was out where they had buried it, in the ground, in the rain, and that was where the two of them were going now with their own eyes. Whatever they had carried out of this house and put under the dirt, they would rather stand over it in the dark than sit in the same building with it. He had that much of it. The rest he would get out of them in the morning.

He’d pick his moment and ask, and watch which way his father’s face went, and then he’d know how much of this he was going to have to fix. He was tired, and the tired had a weight in it, and he was still working out what he’d say to them when the room got long and quiet, and the gutter went far away, and then he stopped.

Clack.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

Light hit him in the face, white and hot, and he had an arm up before he had a thought.

He was standing.

He didn’t remember standing up. Under his feet the floor was wood. Old wood, wide boards with gaps between them, worn pale down the middle where a hundred years of people had walked and dark everywhere else. He was breathing hard.

He looked at his arms. They were red.

He was wearing the red coat. He had dropped it on the hall floor before he went to bed, and it was on him now, heavy across the shoulders, the collar wet against his neck.

He looked up. A long way up ran a pipe, and clamped to the pipe were lamps, and out of one of them came the light that had him. It came down in a hard column and stopped at the floor. Inside the column the air was full of something turning over, dust or dust-colored smoke. The lamp had barn doors on it and a gel in the frame that had burned brown at the corners. He could hear it. He could smell it, hot metal and old dust cooking.

Behind him the light found a hem, a scalloped edge of heavy cloth, and then ran out of things to find. It was a curtain. Black, and hanging still.

He tilted his head back at the pipe. Iron pipe, bolted together, none of it new.

He had spent his working life in rooms like this one. He had stood on a thousand stages and told actors where to stand, and told a lighting guy to bring the blue in a beat later and take the house down to nothing at “ashes,” and he had done all of it from the back row of an empty theater at ten in the morning with a paper cup of coffee going cold on the seat beside him.

So his first thought was easy. He was back in a theater. Whatever else had happened, he knew what to do in a theater, and the last thing he remembered was the pillow.

Then he looked at the floor again. The theaters he had worked had better lights than this, and the fronts of their curtains were not black, and their floors did not give under a heel. Whatever this was, it was not a house he had ever worked.

He stepped left, out of the light.

A second beam came out of the dark and took him, and a board cracked under his heel.

He stepped back. The first light took him again.

Follow spot.

A follow spot is a light with a man on it. Somebody was up at the back of the house right now with a cue sheet and a set of handles, and doing it well, because the pick-up was clean and there was no lag in it.

Elliot turned around and looked for the booth. Then for the rail at the back of the house, the little cage hung under the balcony, the perch up beside the proscenium. There was no catwalk and no ladder and no rail for a man to stand at with his hands on the handles and sweat coming through his collar. Past the lip of the stage he could not see the house at all.

Which left one explanation, and it was a stupid one. He was asleep in his bed three feet from a rain-soaked window, and this was a dream with a good lighting plot in it.

He could work with a dream. He’d had dreams where the room was wrong.

“Hey,” he called. “Is anyone there?”

“…anyone there?”

“…there?”

A house that size takes a shout and eats it and gives it back flat. This one set his words down in front of him three times, each one softer than the last, and held the third a beat past where it should have let go.

He stood where he was and let his heart come down.

Then, at the front edge of the stage, where the prompt monitor sits on the lip of the deck, a screen lit up.

Black glass. Red characters.

[Audience Expectation: 29%]

He read it. He read it again. It didn’t change.

He walked down to the lip and crouched over it, and in the lower left corner, in smaller type, was the rest of it.

Do not let audience expectation fall below 20%. Below 20% the theater does not guarantee the performer’s safety.

He read that twice too. Then he looked up and out at where the seats had to be.

“What audience?” he said.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The dark came up off the seats.

Rows. Wooden seats on iron frames, hinged, the kind that fold up when you stand. They ran back from the stage in a rake, row after row after row, and the further back they went the more there were, and the back of the house was still dark.

The seats were full.

Elliot had stood in front of eleven hundred people at eight o’clock on a Saturday and known, from the quality of the silence, whether the show was going to work. He knew what a full house looked like.

He didn’t know what this was.

They were people-shaped. That was as far as he could get. They sat with their hands in their laps, settled back, heads up. He could not see a face. The light was on them and the light did not help. It came apart before it reached them and left him a suggestion of a head and a shoulder and a wrongness in the proportion he couldn’t put a finger on.

Then they opened their eyes, a few at a time down through the rows, and then more, and then the rest.

They were red. Red like the exit signs over a door.

He read the room. They had come in for a show and they meant to get one. Nothing was holding them in their seats. They could come up the steps at any time. They didn’t.

He turned his back on them and ran.

A stage has wings. On a working stage the wings are where everything lives. The fly rail, the power, the alarm, the fire door, two stagehands standing in the dark with a couch in their arms. He went stage left at a dead run and there was no wing there. There was plaster, and the plaster was cold, and his hands went flat against it and slid down it and found no seam and no handle and no door.

He came back across the stage at an angle and hit stage right, and it was a wall where there could not be a wall. He hit it once with the flat of his fist. It hurt, and it stayed a wall.

“All right,” he said.

He turned around.

The house had changed while he wasn’t looking. In every row, down into the dark the light couldn’t reach, the heads had come around. Hundreds of them, angled toward the stage, toward him, and they did not turn back. He walked to the right and the heads followed. He walked to the left and the heads came with him, all of them, slow, like a follow spot when the operator is paying attention and the actor does something stupid.

He looked at the screen.

[Audience Expectation: 30%]

The number had gone up while he ran.

“What kind of fucked-up dream is this,” he said.

He got a fold of his forearm between his thumbnail and his finger and pinched, hard. It hurt. Nothing changed. A dream gives you the idea of a pinch.

He did it again, and it hurt again, and the room was still there.

The screen cleared.

[Intermission is over. Please continue the performance.]

A bell rang.

It came from above the stage, up where the pipes went into the dark, two notes, bright and cheerful, the sound of a shop door on a good street in the afternoon.

The stage didn’t go dark. It came apart. It broke into squares and the squares slid off each other, and the dark came through the seams, and the boards went out from under him.

He was down with his cheek on cold wood and he couldn’t lift his head.

Behind him, the curtain was moving. He had never gone back and looked at it. That black wall across the back of the stage, black on black. It was drawing open, a hand’s width at a time, and the rings took the weight one at a time.

It was opening.