The Gray House

EPILOGUE

TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

The Man with the Crow

No one could say he had it easy. In the bed of his pickup truck there were twelve little mattresses, a box with clean baby clothes, a bag with the dirty ones, another bag, this one with disposable utensils, a boombox lashed to the side with wire, and eleven kids, aged one to three. At least he got lucky with Rat Fairy. She drove while he busied himself in the back with the children, and sometimes spelled him for a short time in this capacity, so he could get some sleep. Not too often, because it meant that the truck wasn’t moving. She looked more like an evil enchantress than a good fairy, but she was neither evil nor good, she was just fulfilling the task she had been charged with.

With the children he was also lucky. They were all smarter than their age, and almost all of them endured the trip quietly and patiently. But they still would get carsick from time to time, they needed to eat and drink, many were not toilet-trained yet, those who were still couldn’t do it sometimes in the shaking truck bed, and no matter how he tried, each day it became harder and harder for him.

People who saw this strange family were surprised that many of the children were of the same age while not being twins, and that none of them looked like their father. Also suspicious was the father’s relative youthfulness, the crow ensconced on his shoulder, and the wide-brimmed black hat adorned with a ring of the yellowed skulls of some small animal.

“Gypsies, I’ll bet,” they said, glowering. “And the kids are stolen.”

“They are not all mine,” he would explain self-consciously, when the questions became particularly probing. “Half of them are my sister’s.”

And he pointed at the raven-haired girl behind the wheel. She chain-smoked, resting her sharp elbow on the edge of the window, and her shoulder featured an unusual tattoo: a scowling rat. As soon as people had a good look at it, even the most inquisitive of them thought it best to walk away, and the questions tended to end abruptly.

The truck rolled around seemingly without purpose, but Rat Fairy did, in fact, constantly check the map. Some houses were marked on it with a red cross. They tried to reach them at dawn and without disturbing the neighbors. Each time they were met there, usually by a man and a woman, but sometimes only by women and once by a single man. A brief hushed conversation ensued, one of the children would be transferred from the truck to the house, and they left as quietly as they came. Other houses were marked with green crosses. These they visited openly, at any time of day or night, and picked up boxes of baby food.

And even though there were fewer and fewer children, they grew more and more tired, and their journey became more arduous. They started forgetting days and dates, talked less and less, confused the kids they’d already fed with the ones who were still hungry. Twice Rat Fairy lost her way, making the quest longer by many hours.

Still, when it came the time to part with the last child, he started crying. Rat Fairy slapped him on the back.

“Oh, come on. You’ll have your own someday.”

She wasn’t really evil, it was just that there were things she had no way of understanding.

The Waitress

Every night when her shift ended, about half past eight, she would go out into the backyard of the café carrying the scraps for the cats. She distributed them between two paper plates, leaned with her back against the deck railing and simply stood there, resting or maybe dreaming, until it became dark. The cats strolled around. Gray cats did it invisibly, of course, black-and-whites were half-visible. She stood there, also almost invisible except for the apron and the lace cap, hands tucked under her armpits, and waited. “The twilight is the crack between the worlds.” She’d picked up this phrase in some book, back when she still had time to read. She no longer remembered what happened in that book or who wrote it, but this phrase alone stuck in her mind. The crack between the worlds, she kept thinking, staring into the deepening blue dusk. Here. Now. When it became too dark to distinguish the shape of the lilac bush near the fence, five feet from the deck, she went back. Feeling rested and full of energy, as if the half hour she spent doing nothing cleansed her of the tiredness, the kitchen reek, and the kitchen gossip.

Because of that strange habit, the other kitchen girls started calling her Princess. Some days, when she returned to the kitchen for her bag before leaving, she heard them talking about her.

“You’d think she would run back to the child, right? But no, first she needs to nip out back for an hour, day in and day out. Some mother, is what I’m saying. If you ask me, I wouldn’t let people like her within a mile of children.”

“She must be doing this because she doesn’t like taking care of the baby. I have no idea who she dumps the poor thing on while she’s here.”

Sometimes the woman who was relieving her shift would chime in.

“Ah, but have you looked at that baby? I’d like to see you rushing back to something like that. He’s got this huge head, and a mouth full of teeth. Eight months, my eye! He gives me the willies, he does. And she wouldn’t even call him by name. Tubby this and Tubby that. And he’s not that fat, really.”

“Maybe his daddy was tubby.”

“Whatever he was, must’ve been a scary sight if the kid’s taking after him.”

“Not after her, surely. She might be all speckled like a quail’s egg, but she is kinda cute for that.”

She didn’t pay attention to any of that talk. She couldn’t afford to make a scene and lose the job. And it didn’t hurt her that much anyway. Tubby was a perfect child. Not a beauty, maybe, but very clever, and he could already say at least half a dozen words. He patiently waited for her to come back from the afternoon shift, gnawing on the biscuits she’d leave him for lunch and playing with the stuffed dinosaur. The neighbors never once complained about him crying. He didn’t need a nurse. He knew how to wait. They both knew, because that was the only thing they did. Together and separately, while playing, working, making dinner and eating it, in the crib, and around the back of the café, even in their dreams.

Their father, also the Beautiful Prince from the Not-Here, looking at the same time like the faded dinosaur with button eyes (the way Tubby imagined him) and like the small sprig of jasmine growing in a pot on her windowsill, was going to find them sooner or later, if not today then tomorrow, they only had to wait for him. And when he did, they wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the price of diapers, or the vicious gossip, or any of the small inconveniences of life, because he would take them with him to his fairy land, where everything would be different. So they waited.

The Three-Fingered Man in Black

He took residence in the abandoned three-story house, the one that spawned insistent rumors of being haunted. It was some time before people noticed. The house was out of the way, and the new tenant did not turn the lights on, did not advertise his presence in any way. At first they took him for a drifter. But drifters aren’t usually clean shaven, dressed in suits, or in the habit of buying a week’s worth of groceries. When it became clear that the man was in the house to stay, they sent a committee made of residents of the nearby houses to clarify the situation. It was a small town, and foreigners here were usually met with suspicion.

The man amiably received the committee and politely refused to answer most of their questions. Some things they did manage to find out, though.

The owner of the house—yes, it turned out that he did exist—had hired this man to look after the property. The man showed them the papers, and the papers were all in order, even though no one could remember a time when the haunted house had been owned by anybody, and the owner’s signature looked strange indeed, resembling as it did a fat spider. One of the neighbors, a retired lawyer, assured them that there appeared to have been nothing unlawful here. The man in the black suit said that he was going to remain in the house until he received further instructions from the owner. There wasn’t anything they could say against that, and the committee departed, unsatisfied but with the general feeling of having done their duty.

The house had always been a strange place, so it surprised no one that its owner signed papers with a spider and sent people to guard his property when there wasn’t much left of it that hadn’t crumbled to dust.

The new occupant of the old house lay low for some time, and then one day this surly young woman in leather came to visit him astride a motorcycle, scaring the neighborhood cats half to death. She brought a small fair-haired girl, offloaded her, and roared away immediately. This event turned the people completely against the man. Even his single-father status could do nothing to endear him to the neighbors. Besides, the girl was an exceptionally unpleasant child.