Get in Trouble: Stories

Two Houses

Wake up, wake up.

Portia is having a birthday party. The party will start without you. Wake up, Gwenda. Wake up. Hurry, hurry.

Soft music. The smell of warm bread. She could have been back home, how many houses ago? In her childhood bed, her mother downstairs baking bread.

The last sleeper in the spaceship House of Secrets opened her eyes, crept from her narrow bed. She rose up, or fell, into the chamber.

The chamber, too, was narrow and small, a honeycombed cell. Soft pink light, invisible drawers, chamber and beds, all of them empty. The astronaut Gwenda stretched out her arms, rubbed at her scalp. Her hair had grown out again. Sometimes she imagined a berth crammed with masses of hair. Centuries passing beneath the strangling weight.

Now there was the smell of old books. A library. Maureen was in her head with her, looking at books. Monitoring her heart rate, the dilation of her pupils. Maureen was the ship, the House and the keeper of all its Secrets. A spirit of the air; a soothing subliminal hum; an alchemical sequence of smells and emanations.

Gwenda inhaled. Stretched again, slowly somersaulted. Arcane chemical processes began within her blood, her nervous system.

This is how it was aboard the spaceship House of Secrets. You slept and you woke up and you slept again. You might sleep for a year, for five years. There were six astronauts. Sometimes others were already awake. Sometimes you spent days, a few weeks alone. Except you were never really alone. Maureen was always there. She was there with you sleeping and waking. She was inside you, too.

Everyone is waiting for you in the Great Room. There’s roasted carp. A chocolate cake.

“A tidal smell,” Gwenda said, trying to place it. “Mangrove trees and the sea caught in a hundred places at their roots. I spent a summer in a place like that.”

You arrived with one boy and you left with another.

“So I did,” Gwenda said. “I’d forgotten. It was such a long time ago.”

A hundred years.

“That long!” Gwenda said.

Not long at all.

“No,” Gwenda said. “Not long at all.” She touched her hair. “I’ve been asleep…”

Seven years this time.

“Seven years,” Gwenda said.

A citrus smell. Lime trees. Other smells, pleasant ones, ones that belonged to Mei and Sullivan and Aune and Portia. Sisi. All of their body chemistries adjusted for harmonious relationships. They were, of necessity, a convivial group.

Gwenda threw off her long sleep. Sank toward the curve of the bulkhead, pressing on a drawer. It swung open and in she went to make her toilet, to be poked and prodded and injected, lathered and sluiced. She rid herself of the new growth of hair, the fine down on her arms and legs.

So slow, so slow, Maureen fretted. Let me get rid of it for you. For good.

“One day,” Gwenda said. She opened up her log, checked the charts on her guinea pigs, her carp.

This is why you are last again. You dawdle, Gwenda. You refuse to be sensible in the matter of personal grooming. Everyone is waiting for you. You’re missing all of the fun.

“Aune has asked for a Finnish disco or a Finnish sauna or the northern lights. Sullivan is playing with dogs. Mei is chatting up movie stars or famous composers, and Portia is being outrageous. There are waterfalls or redwood trees or dolphins,” Gwenda said.

Cherry blossoms. The Westminster dog show. 2009. The Sus sex Spaniel Ch. Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee wins. Sisi is hoping you will hurry. She wants to tell you something.

“Well,” Gwenda said. “I’d better hurry, then.”

Maureen went before and after, down Corridor One. Lights flicked on, then off again so that the corridor fell away behind Gwenda in darkness. Was Maureen the golden light ahead or the darkness that followed behind? Carp swam in the glassy walls.

Then she was in the Galley and the Great Room was just above her. Long-limbed Sisi poked her head through the glory hole. “New tattoo?”

It was an old joke.

Head to toes, Gwenda was covered in ink. There was a Dürer and a Doré; two Chinese dragons and a Celtic cross; the Queen of Diamonds torn in eight pieces by wolves; a girl on a playground rocket; the Statue of Liberty and the state flag of Illinois; passages from Lewis Carroll and the Book of Revelations and a hundred other books; a hundred other marvels. There was the spaceship House of Secrets on the back of Gwenda’s right hand, and its sister, House of Mystery, on her left.

Sisi had a pair of old cowboy boots, and Aune an ivory cross on a chain. Sullivan had a copy of Moby-Dick; Portia had a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei had her knitting needles.

Gwenda had her tattoos. Astronauts on the Long Trip travel lightly.

Hands pulled Gwenda up and into the Great Room, patted her back, her shoulders, ran over her head. Here, feet had weight. There was a floor, and she stood on it. There was a table and on the table was a cake. Familiar faces grinned at her.

The music was very loud. Silky-coated dogs chased flower petals.

“Surprise!” Sisi said. “Happy birthday, Gwenda!”

“But it isn’t my birthday,” Gwenda said. “It’s Portia’s birthday.”

“The lie was small,” Maureen said.

“It was my idea,” Portia said. “My idea to throw you a surprise party.”

“Well,” Gwenda said. “I’m surprised.”

“Come on,” Maureen said. “Come and blow out your candles.”

The candles were not real, of course. But the cake was.

It was the usual sort of party. They all danced, the way you could only dance in micro gravity. It was all good fun. When dinner was ready, Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

Once there had been two ships. Standard practice, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience. Sister ships Seeker and Messenger, called House of Secrets and House of Mystery by their crews, left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059.

House of Secrets had seen her twin disappear in a wink, a blink. First there, then nowhere. That had been thirty years ago. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets.

Dinner was beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The experimental chickens were laying again, and so there were poached eggs, too, as well as the chocolate cake. Maureen increased gravity, because even fake beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “Look at that, will you?” she said. “Every now and then a girl likes to watch something fall.”

Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and archaea. “I made enough to get us lit,” she said. “Just a little lit. Because today is Gwenda’s birthday.”

“It was my birthday just a little while ago,” Portia said. “How old am I, anyway? Never mind, who’s counting.”

“To Portia,” Aune said. “Forever youngish.”

“To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said. “Getting closer every day. Not that much closer.”

“Here’s to all us Goldilockses. Here’s to a planet that’s just right.”

“To real gardens,” Aune said. “With real toads.”

“To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

“To our House of Secrets,” Mei said.

“To House of Mystery,” Sisi said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed Gwenda’s hand again. They drank.

“We didn’t get you anything, Gwenda,” Sullivan said.

“I don’t want anything,” Gwenda said.

“I do,” Portia said. “Stories! Ones I haven’t heard before.”

Sisi cleared her throat. “There’s just one thing,” she said. “We ought to tell Gwenda the one thing.”

“You’ll ruin her birthday,” Portia said.

“What?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

“It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “Nothing at all. Only the mind playing tricks. You know how it goes.”

“Maureen?” Gwenda said. “What’s going on?”

Maureen blew through the room, a vinegar breeze. “Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She performed several usual tasks and then asked me to bring up our immediate course. Twelve seconds later, I observed her heart rate had increased precipitously. When I asked her if something was wrong, she said, ‘Do you see it, too, Maureen?’ I asked Sisi to tell me what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘House of Mystery. Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi I had not seen it. We called back the visuals, but nothing was recorded there. I broadcast on all channels. No one answered. No one has seen House of Mystery in the intervening time.”

“Sisi?” Gwenda said.

“It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God I saw it. Like looking in a mirror. So near I could almost touch it.”

They all began to talk at once.

“Do you think—”

“Just a trick of the imagination—”

“It disappeared like that. Remember?” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t they come back again the same way?”

“No!” Portia said. She glared at them all. “I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash all this again. Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and we theorized and we rationalized and what difference did it make?”

“Portia?” Maureen said. “I will formulate something for you, if you are distraught.”

“No,” Portia said. “I don’t want anything. I’m fine.”

“It wasn’t really there,” Sisi said. “It wasn’t there and I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were fat-bodied tears on her lower eyelids. Gwenda reached out, lifted one away on her thumb.

“Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said.

“No,” Sisi said.

“But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Maureen sobers us up and we just climb that mountain again. Cheers.”

Mei said, “I’m just glad it wasn’t me who saw it. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We haven’t all been awake like this for so long. Let’s not fight.”

“No fighting,” Gwenda said. “No more gloom. For my birthday present, please.”

Sisi nodded.

“Now that that’s settled,” Portia said, “bring up the lights again, Maureen, please? Take us somewhere new. I want something fancy. Something with history. An old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, bluebells, sheep, moors, detectives in deerstalkers, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know.”

“It isn’t your birthday,” Sullivan said.

“I don’t care,” Gwenda said, and Portia blew her a kiss.

That breeze ran up and down the room again. The table sank back into the floor. The curved walls receded, extruding furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They were in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. Tapestries hung on plaster walls, threadbare and musty. There were flagstones, blackened beams. A roaring fire. Through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

You could smell the cold rising off stones, a yew log upon the fire, the roses and the dust of centuries.

“Halfmark House,” Maureen said. “Built in 1508. Queen Elizabeth came here on a progress in 1575 that nearly bankrupted the Halfmark family. Churchill spent a weekend in December of 1942. There are many photos. It was once said to be the second-most haunted manor in England. There are three monks and a Grey Lady, a White Lady, a yellow fog, and a stag.”

“Exactly what I wanted,” Portia said. “To float around like a ghost in an old English manor. Turn the gravity off, Maureen.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

“Of course I am,” Portia said. “We all are.” She made a wheel of herself and rolled around the room. Hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

“Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

“Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

“No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen can provide the special effects.”

“I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my great-grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The Great Room grew darker until they were all only shadows, floating in shadow. Sisi wrapped an arm around Gwenda’s waist. Outside the great windows, the gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now you saw a neat little farm and rocky fields, sloping up toward the twilight bulk of a coniferous forest.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.

“At the time of this story my great-grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”

Outside the windows of Halfmark House, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.

“My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

“Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

“Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my great-grandmother, her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose, one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. Sullivan waved back.

“Creepy!” Portia said. “That was a good one. Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

“It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

“So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”

“I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”

“You could change things,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “Anyhow, it’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story my grandfather told me.”

The gardeners were outside the windows again. They were ghosts, too, Gwenda thought. They would come and go, always doing the same things. Was this what it had been like to be rich, looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible, practically ghosts — just like Maureen, really — for all the notice you had to take of them?

Never mind, they were all ghosts now.

She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. They floated just above the twitching silk ears of a greyhound. The sensation of heat from the fireplace furred one arm, one leg, burned pleasantly along one side of her face. If something happened, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, if a seam ruptured and they all went flying into space, could she and Sisi keep hold of each other? She resolved she would. She would keep hold.

Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They hunted the wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to a church on Sundays. There was a tornado.

Rain beat at the windows of Halfmark House. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.

After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were going to look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather, a young man at the time, went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was with the group that found the girl. A tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in two. She was crawling, dragging herself along the ground by her fingernails. There was nothing they could do for her and so she died while they watched.

“After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather only hunted in those woods a time or two. Then he never hunted there again. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

“Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was crawling through the ruptured dirt. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

The gardeners again with their terrible shears.

“No more old-people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”

Sullivan pushed himself up toward the whitewashed ceiling. “Don’t ask for ghost stories if you don’t want them, Portia,” he said.

“I know,” Portia said. “I know! I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good one, right?”

“Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

“That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

“Maybe it isn’t always bad?” Mei said. “Maybe there are well-adjusted ghosts? Happy ghosts?”

“I never saw the point,” Sullivan said. “I mean, they say ghosts appear as a warning. So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half? Don’t die?”

“I thought they were more like a memory,” Gwenda said. “Not really there at all. Just an echo recorded somehow and played back, what they did, what happened to them.”

Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts — the other Aune — they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. What would have happened then?”

“Nothing good,” Aune said.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “Seeing ghosts. That kind of thing.”

“Then Aune and I would be prone,” Sullivan said.

“Not me,” Sisi said. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. No. It wasn’t a ghost. What I saw. How could a ship be a ghost?”

“Don’t think about it now,” Mei said, imploring. “Let’s not tell any more ghost stories. Let’s have a gossip instead. Talk about back when we used to have sex lives.”

“No,” Gwenda said. “Let’s have one more ghost story. Just one, for my birthday. Maureen?”

That breeze licked at her ear. “Yes?”

“Do you know any ghost stories?”

Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

“No,” Gwenda said. “I want a real story.”

Portia said, “Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people, though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

“God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

Sisi said, “I have a story. It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Go on,” Gwenda said.

“Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a while.”

“A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi. Which one?”

We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. But here she is, here we are, all of us together. And what are they? Dead and buried. Ghosts! Every last one of them.

“I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi was saying. “This was during the period when they weren’t building new ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fund-raising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. Emphasis on the dress, little and slinky and black. I was supposed to be seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. I did a good enough job that they sent me over to meet a consortium of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one dude, Liam.

“Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this old family, lots of money and not a lot of supervision and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs, too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. She ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby. That was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile — imagine a place like this, okay? — and tried to make things good with her brother. Are you with me so far?”

“So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story,” Portia said.

“You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother were into collecting art. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the transatlantic exchange, the post-colonial relationship between England and the U.S., something like that. And what he did was he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the original London Bridge. This artist bought the suburban ranch house, circa 2000, and the furniture in it and everything else, down to the rolls of toilet paper and the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs and video so he would know exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to England, where he built it all again on Liam’s family’s estate. And, simultaneously, he had a second house built right beside it. This second house was an exact replica, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to the cans of soup on the shelves in the kitchen.”

“Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

“Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on shoes and booze and vacations for me and all of my friends.”

“Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank.

“This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

“Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

“Anyway, this double installation won some award. Got lots of attention. The whole point was that nobody knew which house was which. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother, the black sheep, came home. And her brother said to her, ‘I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation.’ Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

“This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

“Liam’s mother went away and talked to God about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

“How did she decide which house to live in?” Sullivan said.

“Good question,” Sisi said. “No idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, this South African girl with an American passport, dreadlocks, and cowboy boots, talking about how I was going to get in a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

“What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He had a nice round English butt. His hair wasn’t terrible. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him his mother was dead. His uncle was dead, too. They weren’t a lucky family. They had money instead of luck. The uncle had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

“We went out for dinner. We gave each other all the right kind of signals, and then we fooled around some and he said he wanted to take me up to his country house for the weekend. It sounded like fun. I guess I was picturing one of those little thatched cottages you see in detective shows. But it was like this instead.” Sisi gestured around. “Big old pile. Except with video screens in the corners showing mice eating each other and little kids eating cereal. Nice, right?

“He said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. We walked out about a mile through this typical South of England landscape and then suddenly we’re approaching this weather-beaten, rotting stucco house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a depopulated neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked better before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so. I think it always looked wrong.”

“Go back,” Mei said. “What happened to the other house?”

“I’ll get there in a bit,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on a rotting tan couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’

“I said to him, ‘Here?’ And he said, ‘Here is where I grew up. This is home.’ And now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

“This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

“You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure I know how to tell it.”

“Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia said.

“Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a house and they moved in. Liam’s just this little kid. A bit abnormal because of how they’d been living. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the kitchen. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead the mother has a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the installation artist set it up so it only plays shows that were current in the early oughts in the U.S., which was the last time the house was occupied.

“And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains.

“But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which seems to be set up for a boy maybe a year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a big stain here in the corner, under the window.

“And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom with twin beds. A stain in the closet. A really big one. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

“Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain that goes right through the duvet, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up through the mattress.”

“Uh oh,” Gwenda says. She thinks she’s beginning to see the shape of this story.

“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both houses. She also volunteers at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy. Maybe that’s why he liked me. Those boots.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom and the stain in the master bedroom and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. And in that other house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder — okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother because lately when he tries to talk to his mother all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it, either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still not all that nice. The only reason he’s nice to Liam is because Liam is his heir.

“His uncle has showed him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he tells Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high-school kid got up in the middle of the night and killed his whole family with a hammer. And this artist, his idea was based on something the robber barons did at the turn of the previous century, which was buy up castles abroad and have them brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. A lot of those castles were supposed to be haunted. Buying a castle with a ghost in it and moving it across the ocean? Why not? So that was idea number one, to flip that. But then he had idea number two, which was, what makes a haunted house? If you take it to pieces and transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost come with it if you put it back together exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, can you build your own haunted house from scratch if you re-create all of the pieces? And idea number three, forget the ghosts, can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, would they know which one was real and which one was ersatz? Would they see real ghosts in the real house? Imagine they saw ghosts in the fake one?”

“So which house were they living in?” Sullivan asked.

“Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both houses. He said he never knew which house was real. Which house was haunted. The artist was the only one with that piece of information.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story as quickly as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it. Maybe for religious reasons? Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or smoking pot, something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case it didn’t do any good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

“Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

“Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe you grew up in a place where there was always a party going on, all the time, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or maybe just somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t sleep as well without that TV on. You can’t get to sleep. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

“That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

Mei said, “No, wait, go back. There’s got to be more than that!”

“Not really,” Sisi said. “No. Not much more. He’d brought a picnic dinner with us. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his childhood. Then he gave me the tour. Showed me all the stains where those people died. I kept looking out the window and the sun got lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

They were all in that house now, flicking through those rooms, one after another. “Maureen?” Mei said. “Can you change it back?”

“Of course,” Maureen said. Once again there were the greyhounds, the garden, the fire, and the roses. Shadows slicked the flagstones, blotted and clung to the tapestries.

“Better,” Sisi said. “Thank you. You went and found it online, didn’t you, Maureen? That was exactly the way I remember it. I went outside to think and have a cigarette. Yeah, I know. Bad astronaut. But I still kind of wanted to sleep with this guy. Just once. So he was messed up, so what? Sometimes messed-up sex is the best. When I came back inside the house, I still hadn’t made up my mind. And then I made up my mind in a hurry. Because this guy? I went to look for him and he was down on the floor in that little boy’s bedroom. Under the window, okay? On top of that stain. He was rolling around on the floor. You know, the way cats do? He had this look on his face. Like when they get catnip. I got out of there in a hurry. Drove away in his Land Rover. The keys were still in the ignition. Left it at a transport café and hitched the rest of the way home and never saw him again.”

“You win,” Portia said. “I don’t know what you win, but you win. That guy of yours was wrong.”

“What about the artist? I mean, what he did,” Mei said. “That Liam guy would have been okay if it weren’t for what he did. Right? I mean it’s something to think about. Say we find some nice Goldilocks planet. If the conditions are suitable and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Did they come along with Aune? With us? Are they here now? If we tell Maureen to build a haunted house around us right now, does she have to make the ghosts? Or do they just show up?”

Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

“Maureen!” Portia said. “Don’t you dare!”

Gwenda said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

“Not really,” Sisi said. “What are you saying?”

Gwenda looked at the others. Then Sisi again. Sisi stretched luxuriously, weightlessly. Gwenda thought of the stain on the carpet, the man rolling on it like a cat.

“Gwenda, my love. What are you trying to say?” Sisi said.

“I know a ghost story,” Maureen said. “I know one, after all. Do you want to hear it?”

Before anyone could answer, they were in the Great Room again, except they were outside it, too. They floated, somehow, in a great nothingness. But there was the table again with dinner upon it, where they had sat with one another.

The room grew darker and colder and the lost crew of the ship House of Mystery sat around the table.

That sister crew, those old friends, they looked up from their meal, from their conversation. They turned and regarded the crew of the ship House of Secrets. They wore dress uniforms, as if in celebration, but they were maimed by some catastrophe. They lifted their ruined hands and waved, smiling.

There was a smell of char and chemicals and icy rot that Gwenda almost knew.

And then it was her own friends around the table. Mei, Sullivan, Portia, Aune, Sisi. She saw herself sitting there, hacked almost in two. She got up, moved toward herself, then vanished.

The Great Room reshaped itself out of nothingness and horror. They were back in the English country house. The air was full of sour spray. Someone had thrown up. Someone else sobbed.

Aune said, “Maureen, that was unkind.”

Maureen said nothing. She went about the room like a ghost, coaxing the vomit into a ball.

“The hell was that?” Sisi said. “Maureen? What were you thinking? Gwenda? My darling?” She reached for Gwenda’s hand, but Gwenda pushed away.

She went forward in a great spasm, her arms extended to catch the wall. Going before her on the right hand, the ship House of Secrets, and on the left, House of Mystery.

She could no longer tell the one from the other.