The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

IT COMES AND GOES Robert Silverberg

The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things relevant to your personal welfare; you screen out everything else as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

It’s a very ordinary house, 30 or 40 years old, a cheap, one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery, with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered around it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

All the houses around here look much the same; there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses, adding up to an ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable; aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move up and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually, there’s no reason you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others—except for Walnut, where the shops are—are just for filler.

I know how to get from my place to the white house with the screen door—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now, I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

The house will stay here for five or six days at a time and then, one morning, I’ll come out and the lot will be vacant, and so it remains for ten days or two weeks. And then there it is again. You’d think people would notice that, you’d think they’d talk; but they’re all keeping their heads down, I guess. I keep my head down, too, but I can’t help noticing things. In that sense, I don’t belong in this part of town. In most other senses, I guess I do, because, after all, this is where I am.

The first time I saw the house was on a drizzly Monday morning on the cusp of winter and spring. I remember that it was a Monday because people were going to work and I wasn’t, and that was still a new concept for me. I remember that it was on the cusp of winter and spring because there were still some curling trails of dirty snow on the north side of the street, left over from an early-March storm, but the forsythia and crocuses were blooming in the gardens on the south side. I was walking down to the grocery on Walnut Street to pick up the morning paper. Daily walking, rain or shine, is very important to me; it’s part of my recovery regimen, and I was going for the paper because I was still into studying the help-wanted ads at that time. As I made my way down Spruce Street (or maybe it was Pine Street), some movement in a doorway across the way caught my eye, and I glanced up and over.

A flash of flesh it was.

A woman, turning in the doorway.

A naked woman, so it seemed. I had just a quick side glimpse, fuzzed and blurred by the screen door and the gray light of the cloudy morning, but I was sure I saw gleaming golden flesh: a bare shoulder, a sinuous hip, a long stretch of haunch and thigh and butt and calf, maybe a bit of bright pubic fleece also. And then she was gone, leaving incandescent tracks on my mind.

I stopped right on a dime and stood staring toward the darkness of the doorway, waiting to see if she’d reappear. Hoping that she would. Praying that she would, actually. It wasn’t because I was in such desperate need of a free show but because I wanted her to have been real. Not simply a hallucination. I was clean that morning and had been for a month and a half, ever since the seventh of February, and I didn’t want to think that I was still having hallucinations.

The doorway stayed dark. She didn’t reappear.

Of course not. She couldn’t reappear, because she had never been there in the first place. What I had seen had been an illusion. How could she possibly have been real? Real women around here don’t flash their bare butts in front of doorways at nine in the morning on cold drizzly days, and they don’t have hips and thighs and legs like that.

But I let myself off the hook. After all, I was clean. Why borrow trouble? It had been a trick of the light, I told myself. Or maybe, maybe, a curious fluke of my overwrought mind. An odd mental prank. But, in any case, nothing to take seriously, nothing symptomatic of significant cerebral decline or collapse.

I went on down to the Walnut Street grocery and bought that morning’s PostStar and looked through the classified ads for the one that said:

It wasn’t there. Somehow, it never was.

On my way home, I thought I’d give the white house on the corner a lot a second glance, just in case something else of interest was showing. The house wasn’t there, either.

My name is Tom and I am chemically dependent.

My name is Tom and I am chemically dependent.

My name is Tom and I am chemically dependent.

I tell you that three times because what I tell you three times is true. If anything at all is true about me, that much is. It is also true that I am 40 years old, that I have had successful careers in advertising, public relations, mail-order promotion and several other word-oriented professions. Each of those successful careers came to an unsuccessful end. I have written three novels and a bunch of short stories, too. And, between the ages of 29 and 39, I consumed a quantity of cocaine, marijuana, acid, uppers, downers, reds, whites, purples and assorted other items of the underground pharmacopoeia that normal people would find hard to believe. I used some things that normal people have never heard of, too. I suppose I would have gone on to other drugs not yet invented, once they became available, because there was always some new kind of high to seek, or some new sort of low to avoid, et cetera, et cetera, and the way to do it, I had learned, was through chemistry. On my 40th birthday, I finally took the necessary step, which was to admit that drugs were a monster too strong for me to grapple with and that my life had become unmanageable. And that I was willing to turn to a Power that is stronger than I am, stronger even than the drug monster, and humbly ask that power to restore me to sanity and to help me defend myself against my enemy.

I live now in a small, furnished room in a small town so dull you can’t remember the names of the streets. I belong to the program and I go to meeting three or four times a week and I tell people whose surnames I don’t know about my faults (which I freely admit) and my virtues (which I do have), and about my one great weakness. Then they tell me about theirs.

My name is Tom and I am chemically dependent.

I’ve been doing pretty well since the seventh of February.

Hallucinations were one thing I didn’t need in this time of recovery. I had already had my share.

I didn’t realize at that point that the house had vanished. People don’t customarily think in terms of houses vanishing, not if their heads are screwed on right, and, as I have just pointed out, I had a vested interest in believing that, as of the seventh of February, my head was screwed on right and it was going to stay that way.

No, what I thought was simply that I must have gone to the grocery by way of one street and come home by way of another. Since I was clean and had been so for a month and a half, there was no other rational explanation.

I went home and made some phone calls to potential employers, with the usual result. I watched some television. If you’ve never stayed home on a weekday morning, you can’t imagine what television is like at that time of day, most of it. After a while, I found myself tuning to the home shopping channel for the sheer excitement of it.

I thought about the flash of flesh in the screen doorway.

I thought about the effect that a nice little line of white powder laid out on a mirror would create in me, too. You don’t ever stop thinking about things like that, the look of mirrors and the technique of creating little white lines on them and the taste you get in your nostrils and the effect that the substance has. Especially the effect of the substance. You don’t banish that from your mind, quite the contrary, and when you aren’t thinking about the taste in your nostrils or the effect of the substance, you’re thinking about weird peripheral things, like the shape of the mirror. Believe me, you are.

It rained for three or four days, miserable, nonstop rain, and I didn’t do much of anything. Then finally I went outdoors again, a right and a right and look across to the left, and there was the white house, bright in the spring sunshine. Very casually, I glanced over at it. No flashes of flesh this time.

I saw something much stranger, though. A rolled-up copy of the morning paper was lying on the lawn of a house with brown shingles next door. A dog was sniffing around it, a goofy-faced nondescript white mutt with long legs and a black head. Abruptly, the dog scooped up the paper in its jaws, as dogs will do, and turned and trotted around to the front of the white house.

The screen door opened a little way. I didn’t see anybody opening it. It remained ajar. The wooden door behind it seemed to be open, also.

The dog stood there, looking around, shaking its head from side to side. It seemed bewildered. As I watched, it dropped the paper and began to pant, its tongue hanging out as if this were the middle of July and not the end of March. Then it picked up the paper again, bending for it in an oddly rigid, robotic way. It raised its head and turned and stared right at me, almost as if it were asking me to help it. Its eyes were glassy and its ears were standing up and twitching. Its back was arched like a cat’s. Its tail rose straight up behind it. I heard low rusty-sounding growls.

Then, abruptly, it visibly relaxed. It lowered its ears and a look of something like relief came into its eyes and its posture again became that of a good old droopy dog. It wriggled its shoulders almost playfully. Wagged its tail. And went galloping through the screen door, bounding and prancing in that dumb way dogs have, holding the newspaper high. The door closed behind it.

I stayed around for a while. The door stayed closed. The dog didn’t come out.

I wondered which I would rather believe: that I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in or that I had imagined I had seen a door open itself and let a dog in?

Then there was the cat event. This was a day or two later.

The cat was a lop-eared ginger tom. 1 had seen it around before. I like cats. I liked this one especially. He was a survivor, a street-smart guy. I hoped to learn a thing or two from him.

He was on the lawn of the white house. The screen door was ajar again. The cat was staring toward it and he looked absolutely outraged.

His fur was standing out half a mile and his tail was lashing like a whip and his ears were flattened back against his head. He was hissing and growling at the same time, and the growl was that eerie, banshee moan that reminds you what jungle creatures cats still are. He was quivering as if he had electrodes in him. I saw muscles violently rippling along his flanks and great convulsive shivers running the length of his spine.

“Hey, easy does it, fellow!” I told the cat. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, guy?

What was the matter was that his legs seemed to want to move toward the house and his brain didn’t. He was struggling every step of the way. The house was calling him, I thought suddenly, astonishing myself with the idea. As it had called the dog. You call a dog long enough and eventually its instincts take command and he comes, whether it feels like it or not. But you can’t make a cat do a fucking thing against its will, not without a struggle. There was a struggle going on now. I stood there and watched it and I felt real uneasiness.

The cat lost.

He fought with truly desperate fury, but he kept moving closer to the door all the same. He managed to hold back for a moment just as he reached the first step, and I thought he was going to succeed in breaking loose from whatever was pulling him. But then his muscles stopped quivering, his fur went back to where it belonged and his whole body slackened perceptibly; and he crept across the threshold in a pathetic, beaten-looking way.

At my meeting that night I wanted to ask the others if they knew anything about the white house with the screen door. They had all grown up in this place; I had lived here only a couple of months. Maybe the white house had a reputation for weirdness. But I wasn’t sure which street it was on, and a round-faced man named Eddie had had a close escape from some sinsemilla after an ugly fight with his wife and needed to talk about that. When that was over, we all sat around the table and discussed the high school basketball play-offs. High school basketball is a big thing in this part of the state. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Do you mind if I change the subject, fellows? Because I saw a house a few blocks from here gobble up a dog and then a cat like it was a roach motel.” They’d think I had slipped into abusing illicit substances again and they’d rally round like crazy to help me get steady once more.

I went back there a few days later and couldn’t find the house. Just an empty lot with grizzled brown, late-winter grass, no paved pathway, no steps, no garbage can, nothing. This time, I knew I hadn’t accidentally gone up some other street. The house next to the white house was still there, the brown-shingled one where the dog had found the newspaper. But the white house was gone.

What the hell? A house that comes and goes?

Sweat came flooding out all over me. Was it possible to have hallucinations in such convincing detail when I had been clean for a couple of months? When you’re using, you tend to hallucinate, because the heavy user tends to get about six hours of sleep a week—not a night, but a week—and the sleeplessness goes to work on you sooner or later, and you start seeing bugs on the wall, rats on the floor, people who aren’t there watching you through a spy hole in the ceiling that also isn’t there. But I was getting plenty of sleep these days, and even so, look what was happening. First I was frightened and then I was angry. I didn’t deserve this. If the house weren’t a hallucination, and I didn’t seriously think it was, then what was it? I was working hard at putting my life back together and I was entitled to have reality stay real around me.

Easy, I thought. Easy. You’re not entitled to anything, fellow. But you’ll be OK, so long as you recognize that nobody requires you to be able to explain mysteries beyond your understanding. Just go easy, take things as they come, and stay cool, stay cool, stay cool.

The house came back four days later.

I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about it at meetings, even though that probably would have been a good idea. I had no problem at all with admitting publicly that I was a drug abuser, far from it. At least not in a room filled with others of my kind. But standing up and telling everyone that I was crazy was something else entirely.

Things got even more bizarre. One afternoon, I was out in front of the house and a kid’s tricycle came rolling down the street all by itself, as though pulled by an invisible cord. It rolled right past me and turned the corner and I watched it traverse the path and go up the steps of the white house and disappear inside. Some sort of magnetic pull? Radio waves?

Half a minute later, the owner of the tricycle came huffing along, a chubby boy of about five, in blue leggings. “My bike!” he was yelling. “My bike!” I imagined him running up the path and disappearing into the house, too, like the dog, the cat and the tricycle. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t just grab him and hold him, either, not in an era when a grown man who simply smiles at a kid in the street is likely to get booked. So, I did the next best thing and planted myself at the head of the path leading across the white house’s lawn. The kid banged into my shins and fell down. I looked up the block and saw a woman coming, his aunt, maybe, or his grandmother. It seemed safe to help the kid up, so I did. Then I smiled at her and said, “He really ought to look where he’s going.”

“My bike!” the boy wailed. “Where’s my bike?”

The woman looked at me and said, “Did you see someone take the child’s tricycle?”

“Afraid I can’t say, ma’am,” I replied, shrugging my most amiable shrug. “I was coming around the corner, and there was the boy running full tilt into me. But I didn’t see any tricycle.” What else was I going to tell her? I saw it go up the steps and into the house by itself?

She gave me a troubled glance. But obviously I didn’t have the tricycle in my coat pocket and I guess I don’t look like the sort of man who specializes in stealing things from little children.

A dog. A cat. A tricycle.

I turned and walked away. Up Maple to Juniper, and down Juniper to Beech, and left on Beech onto Chestnut. Or maybe it was up Oak to Sycamore and then on to Locust and Hickory. Maple, Oak, Chestnut, Hickory—what difference did it make? They were all alike.

I doubled back eventually and got to the house just in time to see a boy of about 14 wearing a green-and-yellow jersey come trotting down the street, tossing a football from hand to hand. As he went past the white house, the screen door swung open and the inner door swung back and the kid halted, turned and very neatly threw the football through, a nice high, tight arc.

The doors closed.

The kid stood stock-still in the street, staring at his hand as if he had never seen it before. He looked stunned.

Then, after a moment, he broke out of his stasis and started up the path to the house. I wanted to call out to him to keep away, but I couldn’t get any sound out and I wasn’t sure what I could say to him, anyway.

He rang the doorbell. Waited.

I held my breath.

The door started to open again. Trying to warn him, I managed to make a little scratchy, choking sort of sound.

But the kid didn’t go in. He stood for a moment, peering inside and then he turned and ran, across the lawn, over the hedges and down the street.

What had he seen?

I ran after him. “Hey, kid! Kid, wait!”

He was going so fast, I couldn’t believe it. I was a pretty good runner in my time, too. But my time was some time ago.

Instead of going to the meeting that night, I went to scout out the house. Under cover of darkness, I crept around it in the shrubbery like your basic Peeping Tom, trying to peer through the windows.

Was I scared? Utterly shitless, yes. Wouldn’t you be?

Did I want a hit? Don’t be naive. I always want a hit, and not just one. I certainly wanted a good jolt right now. It would give me fantastic energy, it would give me sublime confidence, it would give me the unshakable savoir-faire of Sherlock Holmes himself. But I wouldn’t have stopped at one little line. My name is Tom and I am chemically dependent.

What did I see? I saw a woman, very likely the same one I had caught that quick glimpse of in the doorway that first drizzly Monday morning. I got only quick glimpses now. She was moving around from room to room, so that I didn’t have a chance to see her clearly, but what I saw was plenty impressive. Tall, blonde, sleek—that much was certain. She wore a floor-length red robe made of some glossy, metallic fabric that fell about her in a kind of liquid shimmer. Her movements were graceful and elegant. There didn’t seem to be anything in the way of furniture inside, just some cartons and crates, which she was carrying back and forth. Stranger and stranger. I didn’t see the cat or the dog or the tricycle.

I scrabbled around from window to window for maybe half an hour, hoping for a good look at her. I was moving with what I thought was real skill, keeping low, staying down behind the lilacs or whatever, rising cautiously toward window-sill level for each quick peek. I suppose I might have been visible from the street, but the night was moonless and people don’t generally go out strolling around here after dark.

There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house. And for about 15 minutes, I didn’t see her, either. Maybe she was in the shower, maybe she had gone to bed.

I was tempted to ring the bell. But what for? What would I say to her if she answered? What was I doing here in the first place?

I crept backward through the shrubbery, thinking it was time to leave. And, then, there she was, framed in a window, looking straight out at me.

Smiling. Beckoning.

Come hither, Tommy boy.

I thought about the cat. I thought about the dog. I began to shake.

Like the kid with the football, I turned and ran, desperately sprinting through the quiet streets in an overwhelming excess of unreasoning terror.

I was getting to the point where I thought it might be calming to have a little hit. In the old days, the first line always settled me down. It lifted the burden, it soothed the pain, it answered the questions. It made laying out a second line very easy. The second suggested the third, the third required the fourth, the fourth demanded the fifth—and so on, all day and all night without hindrance, chasing that wondrous high that never really comes back again, right on to pallor, indifference, insomnia, vomiting, weight loss, falling hair, bleeding nostrils, sunken eyeballs, palpitations, paranoia, outpourings of gibberish, empty bank accounts, hallucinations, impotence, the shakes, the shivers, the queebles, the collywobbles and all the rest.

I didn’t go for the hit. I went to a meeting instead, jittery and perplexed. I said I was wrestling with a mystery. I didn’t say what it was. Let them fill in the blanks, anything they felt like. Even without the details, they’d know something of what I was going through.

They, too, were wrestling with mysteries. Otherwise, what were they doing there?

The house was gone for two weeks. I checked for it every day. Spring had arrived in full force before it returned. Trees turned green, plants were blooming, the air grew warm and soft.

The woman was back, too, the blonde. I never failed to see her now, every time I went by, and I went by every day. It was as if she knew I was coming. Sometimes she was at the window, but usually she was standing just inside the screen door. Some days she dressed in the red slinky robe, some days in a green one. She had a few other outfits, too, all of them classy but somewhat oddly designed—shoulders too wide, the cut too narrow. Once—incredibly, unforgettably—she came to the door in nothing at all but her own sleek skin and stood for a moment on splendid display, framed perfectly in the doorway, sunlight glinting off her lovely body.

She was always smiling. She must have known I was the one who had been peeping that night and it didn’t seem to bother her. The look on her face said, Let’s get to know each other a little better, shall we? Always that warm, beckoning smile. Sometimes, she’d give me a little come-on-in flick of her finger tips.

Not on your life, sister. Not on your life.

But I couldn’t stop coming by. The house, the woman, the mystery—all pulled me like a magnet.

By now, I had two theories. The simple one was that she was lonely, horny, bored, looking for distraction. Maybe it excited her to be playing these games with me. In this quiet little town, where the chief cause of death surely must be boredom, she liked to live dangerously.

Too simple, much too simple. Why would a woman who looked like she did be living a lonely, horny life? Why would she be in this kind of town in the first place? The theory didn’t account for the comings and goings of the house. Or for what I had seen happen to the cat, the dog, the tricycle, the boy with the football. The dog had returned—the day I was given the full frontal show, it was sitting on the step just below the screen door, next to an old orange mug that someone had left sitting there—but it never went more than a couple of yards from the house, and it moved in a weird, lobotomized way. There had been no further signs of the cat or the tricycle.

Which led to my other theory, the roach motel theory.

The house comes from the future, I told myself. They’re studying the late 20th Century and they want to collect artifacts. So every now and then, they send this time machine disguised as a little white-stucco house here, and it scoops up toys, pets, newspapers, whatever it can grab. Most likely, they aren’t really looking for cats or dogs, but they takes what they gets. And now they’re trying to catch an actual live 20th Century man. Trolling for him the way you’d troll for catfish, except that you’d use a beautiful woman—sometimes naked—as the bait.

A crazy idea? Sure. But I couldn’t come up with a saner one.

Ten days into spring and the house was gone again. When it came back about a week later, the woman didn’t seem to be with it. They were giving her some time off, maybe. They still seemed interested in luring me inside. I’d come by and take up my position by the curb, and the door would quietly swing open, though no one was visible inside. And it would stay open, waiting for me to traipse up the walk and go in.

It was a temptation. I felt it pulling on me harder and harder every day, as my own here-and-now, real-life, everyday options looked bleaker and bleaker. I wasn’t finding a new job. I wasn’t making useful contacts. My money, not much to begin with, was running out. All I had was the program and the people who were part of it here, and though they were fine enough people, they weren’t the kind I could get really close to in any way not having to do with the program.

So why not go up that path and into the house? Even if they were to sweep me up and take me off to the year 2999, and even if I were never heard from again, what would I have to lose? A drab life in a furnished room in a nowhere town, living on the last of my dwindling savings, while I dreamed of white powder and purple pills and went to meetings at which a bunch of victims of the same miserable malady struggled constantly to keep their leaky boats from sinking? Wherever I would go would be better than that. Perhaps incredibly better.

But, of course, I didn’t know that the shining visitors from the future would sweep me off to an astounding new existence in the year 2999. That was only my own nutty guess, my wild fantasy. Anything at all might happen to me if I passed through that doorway. Anything. It was a kind of Russian roulette, and I didn’t even know the odds against me.

One day, I taped a piece of paper to a rubber ball from the five-and-dime and tossed it through the opened door. On it I had written these questions:

I waited for an answering note to come bouncing out. But none ever did.

The house went away. The house came back. The woman still wasn’t there. Nobody else seemed to be, either. But the door swung open expectantly for me, seemingly of its own accord. I would stand and stare, making no move, and after a time, it would close again.

I bought another ball and threw another message through the door.

The house went away again and stayed away a long while—nearly a month this time—so that I began to think it would never come back (and then that it had actually never been there at all). There were days when I didn’t even bother to walk past the vacant lot where I had seen it.

Then I did, and it was there, and the woman was in the doorway smiling, and she said, “Come on in and visit me, sailor?”

She was wearing something gauzy and she was leaning against the doorframe with her hand on her hip. Her voice was a soft, throaty contralto. It all felt like a scene out of a Forties movie. Maybe it was; maybe they had been studying up.

“First, you tell me who you are, all right? And where you come from.”

“Don’t you want to have a good time with me, pal?”

Damn right I do. I felt it in my groin, my pounding chest, my knees.

I moistened my lips. I thought of the way the house had reeled in that angry, snarling cat. How it had pulled that tricycle up the stairs. I felt it pulling on me. But I must have more ability to fight back than a cat. Or a tricycle.

I said, “There’s a lot I need to know first. ”

“Come on in and I’ll tell you everything.” Softly. Huskily. Irresistibly. Almost irresistibly.

“Tell me first. Come out here and talk to me.”

She winked and shook her head. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Studying old movies, all right. She closed the door in my face.

What they hammer into you in the program is that you may think you’re pretty tough, but in fact, when you’ve added up all the debts and credits, the truth is you aren’t as strong as you like to pretend you are. You’re too weak not to reach for some sort of drug when you feel a little edgy or a little low; it’s only after you admit how weak you are and turn elsewhere for help that you can begin to find the strength you need.

I had found that strength. I hadn’t done any sort of stuff on the seventh of February, or the eighth or the ninth. One day at a time, I wasn’t doing any drugs, and by now that one day at a time added up to four months and 11 days, and when tomorrow came around I would add another day to the string, and I was beginning to feel fairly confident I could keep going that way for the rest of my life.

But the house was something else again. I was starting to see it as a magic gateway to God knows where, just as drugs had once been for me. It came and went, and the woman smiled and beckoned and offered throaty invitations, and I recognized that I had let myself become obsessed with it and couldn’t keep away from it, and the next time the house came back there was a good chance that I’d go sauntering up the path and through the door.

Which was crazy.

I hadn’t put myself through this whole ordeal of recovery just for the sake of waltzing through a different magic gateway, had I? Especially when I didn’t have the slightest idea of what might lie on the far side.

I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and decided that the safest and smartest thing to do was to get out of here. I would move to some other town that didn’t have houses that came and went, or languid, naked blondes standing in doorways inviting me to step inside. So one drowsy July morning I bought a bus ticket to a town 40 miles from where I’d been living. It was about the same size and had a similar name and looked just about as dull; and on the street behind the lone movie theater I found a house that had a furnished room sign stuck in its lawn and rented a place very much like the one I had (except that the rent was ten dollars more a month). Then I went around to the local program headquarters—I had already checked with my own to make sure they had one here, you can bet on that—and picked up the schedule of meeting hours.

Done. Safe. A clean break.

I’d never see that white house again.

I’d never see her again.

I’d never face that mysterious doorway and never feel the pull it exerted.

And, as I told myself all that, the pain of irrevocable loss rose up inside me and hit me from within, and I thought I was going to fall down.

I was in the bus depot then, waiting to catch the bus going back, so I could pack my suitcase and settle things with my landlady and say goodbye to my friends, such as they were, in the program. I looked around and there she was, standing stark-naked in the doorway of the baggage room, smiling at me in that beckoning way of hers.

Not really. It was a different woman, and she wasn’t blonde, and she was wearing a bus-company uniform, and she wasn’t even looking at me.

I knew that, actually. I wasn’t hallucinating. But I had wanted her to be the other one so badly that I imagined that I saw her. And I realized how deep the obsession had become.

I must have seen her 50 times during the ride back. Waving at me from the head of a country lane as the bus flashed by. Smiling at me from a bicycle going the other way. Riding in the back of a pickup truck bouncing along in front of us. Standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. Her image haunted me wherever I looked. I sat there shivering and sweating, seeing her beckoning in the doorway and watching that door closing and closing and closing again in my mind.

It was evening by the time the bus reached town. The wise thing would have been to take a shower and go to a meeting, but I went to the house instead, and there was someone standing outside, staring at the screen door.

He was about my age, a short guy with a good gut and tousled, reddish hair just beginning to fade into gray. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I had seen him at a meeting once or twice, perhaps. As I came by, he threw me an uneasy, guilty glance, as if he were up to something. His eyes were a pale blue, very bloodshot.

I went past him about ten paces, paused there, turned around.

“You waiting for someone?” I asked.

“I might be.”

“Someone who lives in there?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I was just wondering,” I said, “if you could tell me who lives in that house.” He shrugged as if he hadn’t quite heard me. The blue eyes turned chilly. I wanted to pick him up and throw him into the next county. The way he was looking at me, he probably felt the same way about me.

I said, “A woman lives there, right?”

“Fuck off, will you?”

“A blonde woman?”

“Fuck off, I said.”

Neither of us moved.

“Sometimes I come by here and I see a blonde woman in the window, or standing in the doorway,” I went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen her sometimes, too.”

He didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered almost involuntarily toward the house. I followed the motion and there she was, visible through the window with the green shutters to the right of the door. She was wearing one of her misty wraps, and her hair was shining like spun gold. She smiled. Gestured with a quick movement of her head.

Come on inside, why don’t you?

I almost did. Another five seconds, another three, and I would have trotted down that narrow, paved pathway as obediently as the dog that had the newspaper in his mouth. But I didn’t. I was still afraid of what might lie beyond. I froze in my tracks; and then the redheaded man started to move. He went past me and up the path. Like a sleepwalker, like a zombie.

“Hey—wait—”

I caught him by the arm. He swung around, furious, and we struggled for a moment and then he broke loose and clamped both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me with tremendous force into the shrubbery. I tripped over one of the pieces of odd metal junk that were always lying around near the door, and went sprawling on my face. When I got myself disentangled, it was just in time to see the redheaded man wrench the screen door open and run inside.

I heard the inner door slam.

And then the house disappeared.

It vanished like a pricked bubble, taking the shrubbery with it, the garbage cans and other junk as well, and I found myself kneeling on weeds in the midst of a vacant lot, trembling as if I had just had a stroke. After a moment or two, I got shakily to my feet and walked over to the place where the house had been. Nothing. Nothing. No trace. Gone as if it had never been there at all.

A couple of days later, I moved back to my old place. There didn’t seem much risk anymore, and I missed the place, the town, the guys at the meeting. It’s been months now, and no house. I rarely skip a day, going by the lot, but it remains empty. The memory of it, of her, haunts me. I look for the redheaded man, too, but I’ve never seen him. I described him once at a meeting and someone said, “Yeah, sounds like Ricky. He used to live around here.” Where was he now? Nobody had any idea. Neither do I.

Another time, I got brave enough to ask some of them if they had ever heard about a little white house that, well, sort of comes and goes. “Comes and goes?” they said. “What the hell does that mean?” I let the question drop.

I have a feeling that it was all some kind of a test, and I may have flunked it. I don’t mean that I’ve missed out on a terrific woman. She was only the bait; I know better than to think that she was real or that she ever could have been available for me if she were. But that sense of a new start—of another life, however weird, beyond the horizon—forever lost to me now, that’s what I’m talking about. And the pain runs deep.

But there’s always a second chance, isn’t there? They tell you that in the program, and I believe it. I have to. From time to time, I’ve left notes in the empty lot:

The house comes and goes, that I know. It’s gone now, but it’ll come again. I’m here. I’m watching. I’m waiting.