The Gray House

SMOKER

(CONTINUED)

Vulture’s story was the first. It was about a witch. An old and disgusting witch, and all she dreamed of was dancing on the graves of all her relatives. Only a brief dance like this, performed once every few years at best, would make her happy. Nothing else ever brought joy to her life. But in order to be able to do her dance and be joyful even for a moment the witch needed to take great pains, because people didn’t just drop dead all by themselves, and unless they were helped along she herself might not live long enough to celebrate the dance she yearned for. With time, the witch accumulated so many exquisite ways of sending her closest relatives to a better world that she easily could have published a bestselling book on the subject. As the years went by and the witch grew older there were fewer and fewer relatives left, until finally it all came down to one single grandson. With him she had to work really hard. He was hiding underground, in the caves of the dwarves, and it was a very dangerous place, so dangerous that even witches never risked going there. But this one did, so strong was her desire to do one last dance on a fresh grave. And so she followed her grandson into the dwarf caves, but got lost there. Dwarves lured her under the magic hill, where time flowed backward, and the evil hag turned into a small girl.

Here Vulture got distracted describing the various properties of magic hills and spent a lot of time telling us about what happened to those unfortunate enough to end up under them. Those who got lost like that could become old in an instant, or crumble to dust, or get back their youth and good looks, could turn into an animal, a plant, or even something that didn’t exist in nature, but whatever it was, the process was irreversible. Even if they were to cast off the spells of the magic hill, they’d never be able to return to their former selves.

Vulture’s tale was interrupted by R One. For some reason he urgently needed to know what the old hag looked like.

Vulture said she was hideously ugly.

“And then?” R One said. “I mean, now?”

Vulture said he had no idea. “But they say she looks about four years old, at most.”

“Who is ‘they’?” R One shot up.

“The dwarves,” Vulture said, and the tone of his voice was so icy that it was clear he wasn’t in the mood to answer any more questions.

R One got the message and went silent. But the old man who Lary said was the guard perked up instead. He giggled and inquired if there were any dwarves in the audience.

No one answered him.

That was the end of the tale. Either Vulture took offense at being interrupted, or there really wasn’t anything else he wanted to say.

The next speaker turned out to be Black. I was surprised, because as far as I knew he’d never participated in Fairy Tale Nights. I was even more surprised at the tale itself. It didn’t sound very fairy, and I suspected that it wasn’t a tale at all. Black talked about the Outsides. About his adventures there. He told us how he, assisted by Rat, or rather Rat with his assistance, because he was more of a silent member of their partnership, swiped an old crumbling bus from the back of the garage of a nearby school. And that right now the bus was standing in the vacant lot next to the House, hidden under the trash, and waiting. What exactly it was waiting for, Black did not elaborate, but it wasn’t hard to guess.

While I was wrapping my head around this information, R One went to the stepladder and asked Black if he knew that to drive anything anywhere in the Outsides required a driver’s license. And that a bus full of underage hoodlums without a single piece of identification among them would be stopped in very short order.

Black said that he was aware of it.

Would he be aware, then, R One continued, that a stolen vehicle had most likely been reported as such to the police, and that even if it were to be repainted, someone would still be bound to recognize it.

Black said that he was aware of that also.

“Then what the hell are you trying to pull?” R One screamed. “Or do you think that the slammer is a nice place for getting acquainted with the Outsides?”

Needle hugged Mermaid and started to sniffle quietly. I couldn’t see in the dark who it was crowding R One, but apparently they were asking him to sit back down. Black said that he was just telling a tale.

R One said that he was tired of people screwing with his head.

Tabaqui again asked him to sit down and behave himself.

I couldn’t quite see if Ralph did sit down or remained standing.

“So . . . ,” Black said and paused, as if afraid he’d get interrupted again. “In the fairy tales it is customary to have fairies and things like that. My tale may not be very interesting and stuff, but it does have a fairy. Two of them, actually, and also two more . . . What do you call guy fairies? I mean, they all have driver’s licenses and they offered to help . . .”

Everyone applauded. I got to thinking who those four fairies were and why would they want to help Black, and the longer I thought about it the less I liked it. Because there wasn’t anywhere they could’ve appeared except from the Outsides, and I had it on good authority that even if selfless fairies had ever existed there, they’d long gone extinct.

I wanted to discuss this with Black, but it had to wait until the break. In the meantime Tabaqui mounted the stepladder for an announcement.

“Not everyone may be fully aware of the rules,” he shouted. “Which is why I would like to reiterate them, just in case. Anyone present is allowed to ask the narrator a question. One question! Preferably at the end, without interrupting the tale. Statements are also acceptable, but not encouraged. Speaking out of turn is completely prohibited! As is moving about! There will be breaks for that. Anyone found in violation of these rules will be henceforth shown the door, without regard to the laws of hospitality! Am I clear?”

As his monologue progressed, Tabaqui was screaming louder and louder, and swinging back and forth on the stepladder wider and wider, so at the end of it he barely managed to hold on. He was making much more noise than Ralph had, but no one thought of it as a violation of rules.

I couldn’t keep my thoughts away from the bus and how all those jokes about it turned out to not be jokes. And also about how furious R One was. He could easily get it into his head that I’d known the truth all along and purposely wrote gibberish in the diary to keep him guessing. I was so occupied by this that I missed the beginning of Noble’s tale.

It too was not a fairytale. Noble was telling us about living in some small town, what he did there and how he was trying to make some money. It was clear that he’d invented this out of whole cloth, but at the same time I had this gnawing feeling that he was in fact relating something that really happened. It was only the ending that did turn magical, and that suddenly and way over the top, as if Noble got tired of straining his imagination deciding how he was going to get his character out of the bind he’d put him into. There even was an appearance by Blind there, contrived and inappropriate, in my opinion.

Next was Shuffle’s turn. He played more than he talked, and his tale was along the same lines as Noble’s. There was also a small town and small gigs for money. It sounded quite a bit more lively, but that simply could be because he got to perform his entire catalogue. Spliced it into the narrative.

After Shuffle’s tale, Tabaqui finally declared a break. I thought that it would mean turning on the wall lamps, but no such luck. Everyone remained seated in the dark, so I didn’t dare leave the bed. Black moved somewhere, I couldn’t see him anymore from where I was. Tabaqui switched on the boombox. All around me people droned and whispered, discussing what they’d heard. We had a plate of sandwiches passed from below; I took one and passed it to Lary.

“Wicked. Just wicked,” Lary muttered. “Did you hear that, huh? I mean, I get it, but I mean, just straight out like that . . .”

I said I didn’t know about how straight that was, but I personally preferred the stories from the last Fairy Tale Night. They were more fairy.

“Exactly,” Lary mumbled, chomping on the sandwich. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“So how is tonight wicked, then?” I said.

“Right, that’s how. For this very reason.”

I decided not to waste any more time with him and asked Mermaid and Needle what they thought about all this.

“Nothing,” Needle squeaked. And in case I didn’t get it the first time, repeated: “Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .”

“I liked Noble’s tale,” Mermaid said dreamily. “So beautiful.”

I could not see the expression on her face, but I could imagine it in detail.

“Blackwood . . .”

“What was that?” I said.

“Blackwood. That was the name of the town. Did you forget already?”

It could be that Noble had mentioned it. Probably at the beginning, when I wasn’t paying attention. In any case, there wasn’t anything beautiful about the place the way he described it, apart from that name.

“Los Angeles would be even cooler!” Lary chimed in.

“How did you like Black’s tale?”

I did it on purpose, calling it a tale when it wasn’t that at all. I wanted one of them to say it. But Mermaid just sighed, Needle mumbled that it was very nice, and Lary got to chomping even louder.

“Nice? You call that nice?”

Needle snuggled up to Lary, and instead of an answer they started kissing, even though Lary’s mouth most likely was still full of sandwich.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mermaid whispered. “It’s not that bad, really.”

I tried to explain to her what it was I didn’t like in this whole bus business. Mermaid listened very attentively and nodded in the right places, but I got the impression she was doing it only to humor me.

Tabaqui declared the break to be over, and all the thoughts about the bus went right out of my head, because the next to speak was the woman from the tent camp.

She must have been really uncomfortable to be doing this. She was barely audible, and she remained where she was instead of climbing the stepladder. Her story couldn’t be called a fairy tale even by someone who’s never heard a single fairy tale ever.

She told us about herself—fifty-seven, not married, no kids, no bad habits. She was a veterinarian by trade, working with cattle. She also rattled off a list of her various ailments. I didn’t catch all the names. She looked stout and healthy, so it was strange that she had so many things wrong with her. Then she told us how she became a member of this sect that coalesced around the Angel, and how happy she was there, how she realized that she had finally found her place in life, and how the Angel, who had the appearance of a tender youth, had cured her of all infirmities “with a single touch of his heavenly palm.”

Then she started talking about their weekly prayer meetings and all the other great things they got to do, and here her story started to grate on me, because she was now talking in a sonorous, not-quite-human voice, preaching almost, and stuff like that makes me gag, to be honest.

There was also this Holy Elder who was supposedly taking care of the Angel, and also, as I understood, of divesting the “blessed devout” of their money. Then he croaked, and that was the end of the good life. The Angel had been taken away by some “evil people” who claimed to be his parents, and the commune fell apart. But not completely, because some of them desired the continued communion so badly that they resolved to seek the Angel and free him from the evil clutches. It wasn’t easy. They were being persecuted, called “fanatics,” even arrested and involuntarily committed.

Her voice began trembling and gave out in some places, and I vividly imagined the man in fatigues clutching her shoulder, and her putting a hand over his and patting it comfortingly, like “it’s all right, I can handle it.” Sometimes my imagination runs out of control, but in this case I wasn’t even ashamed of it, they were so fake. It was as if they had invented themselves. Badly.

Long story short, they had found their Angel. Those who were the most fanatical. And as a reward for their fortitude and perseverance the two of them had been allowed to witness the Angel ascending to Heaven.

“Testify!” the man interrupted in a resonant baritone, making Mermaid startle.

“Wreathed in fire and light, the divine sword pierced the Heavens and returned as a falling star,” the woman explained. “Does this not prove that he was being sent to us, to those who followed him faithfully, so that he could lead us forth?”

She fell silent.

And everyone else kept silence too.

“Creepy,” Needle whispered.

I said nothing. Because it was. Creepy and scary. I finally put two and two together and got four. Understood who the angel was they were talking about. And why they’d pitched their camp against the fence of the House, and were now sitting on Alexander’s bed.

He worked as an Angel, and he got really fed up with it, Sphinx’s voice repeated in my head.

I realized that I was shaking. Because I’d been there, right there with him when he “ascended wreathed in fire and light.” If I’d known back then that this was the “divine sword piercing the Heavens,” I’d have probably shaved my head too and joined the Devout. I was pretty close to something like that anyway. It’s strange how quickly and easily this all had faded away from memory. Well, not really, just got hidden somewhere. Where normal people hide things they can’t explain, to try and preserve their sanity.

And one more thing I understood. That some people in here had it much harder than I. Because if it were me after whom the Devout came to make me lead them forth, I would’ve hanged myself straight off. Even if I were an angel.

I had a hard time getting into the next tales. I was listening, sure, but did not follow the plots. I tried. There was a lot hidden in those stories, they all had some kind of secret, even the most fantastic of them, I got that, but still I couldn’t listen to them with the same attention as the others did. It wasn’t just because of the shaved heads. I was too tired, and the darkness, stuffiness, and the smell of wax all combined to mold the tiredness into a kind of torpor. Some stories shared certain details, some involved the same characters, some seemed to happen in the same places. I guess it would have been exciting to trace all of those intricate connections, except for the drowsy lethargy that overtook me.

During the next break I decided to go sit somewhere else where it would be easier to breathe and harder to fall asleep, and made a stupid move—slipped down from the bed. Someone immediately squeezed into the space I had vacated, and I immediately regretted having done that. Crawling on the floor was impossibly difficult. In the places where no one was lying down someone would be sitting, and where no one was sitting there would be backpacks and more backpacks. The candles had burned down to almost nothing and gave out more smoke than light. I didn’t go two walker’s paces before landing in a plate of sandwiches, bumping my head into the bed leg, and bowling over Whitebelly, who was just climbing down from that same bed. Then someone stepped on me. I figured I’d better get up on the nearest bed before they trampled me, but there was no space on the nearest bed. It was occupied by Shuffle, his guitar, Owl (I think), and someone hiding behind a backpack.

That someone said, “Hey, what are you doing? It’s packed here.”

So I crawled on.

In the next three minutes I got stepped on about two dozen times, so by the time the break ended I was hurting all over. Thankfully, when Tabaqui declared the end of the break and everyone took their seats, someone lit the Chinese lantern. Just one, but that was enough to save me. I saw a place for me. It turned out that place was next to Vulture. No one ever chose to sit next to him, but I didn’t care anymore.

Angel told about an enchanted house that could move about. Ginger told another one about the same town Noble had been in, and about Noble himself in it.

Then for a while I wasn’t listening at all, because Noble squeezed in between me and Vulture and started whispering something in his ear, and then took off some bauble that was hanging around his neck and gave it to Vulture. And then Vulture, I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, Vulture burst out crying. I mean, if it were only my eyes I wouldn’t have believed them anyway, but I was sitting so close to him, and he sobbed so hard, that there could be no mistake. I didn’t know where to put myself. Then it got even worse, because he suddenly hugged Noble, still crying. And he was crying as if he couldn’t breathe. It was painful to listen to. Noble hugged him too, and held tight until Vulture calmed down, and he looked like he didn’t give a damn what anyone would think about them, because there was only one thing they could think if they saw something like this. I didn’t think anything of the sort, of course, but it upset me greatly that others certainly would. Lizard, and everyone else sitting close enough. I think I was so upset because I realized right away that what had just happened between Noble and Vulture was important, sad and joyful at the same time, something that couldn’t be expressed in words, that you could only laugh or cry about. The way Vulture was crying.