House of Windows

by John Langan

  "No thanks," I said, folding the receipt and sliding it into my purse.

  "Are you sure?"

  "No," I said.

  "Veronica," Dr. Hawkins said, "I don't want you to misinterpret this, but the dead are fearsome. I'm not talking about floating white sheets. I'm talking about the losses that score themselves on us. They are greedy. They are always hungry. They will take whatever you have to give them and it won't be enough. It will never be enough. I lost my sister to leukemia twenty years ago and it still grieves me. You cannot make the dead happy. You cannot achieve any kind of mystical understanding with them. Those things are the province of movies and bad self-help books. I'm sorry to speak in metaphors, but I hope my point is plain enough. You have to leave the dead to themselves, and attend to your life."

  "And when the dead won't let you do that?" I asked.

  "That's why we have therapy," she said.

  That and a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, I thought on the walk home. With the exception of her remarks about the dead at the very end there, Dr. Hawkins hadn't said anything very surprising or interesting. I mean, you hardly needed an MD to connect the scenario Roger had described to his need to resolve his own, no-doubt-still-conflicted emotions. Nor did it require much subtlety of thought to recognize the role my guilt must be playing in my actions. When you came right down to it, you didn't have to have a higher degree to assert that the dead are implacable; though this was an interesting enough idea for me to give Dr. Hawkins credit for it. I know, I know. If I was so unhappy with her, why did I bother? Why did I sit through the entire session? Mostly, it was so I could tell myself I had given this option its full chance. Depending on what was going to happen next, I didn't want to think, "Oh, if only I'd talked to someone about everything." Now, I had spoken with a professional, found her advice pretty useless, and could move on.

  Understand, I didn't doubt the importance of either Roger's or my guilt in what was occurring. I just didn't think that was all there was to it. Having brooded on Roger's version of events for the last three days, I still wasn't sure what my opinion of it was. It made sense, but only if you were willing to accept its premises, which I wasn't certain I was. After all, it was possible to the point of probable that Thomas Belvedere had undergone something during the summer he'd lived in the house. Granted, it was a dead-end as far as specific information went, but that didn't rule it out completely. Who knew what had happened in the house over the years—the decades? It had been an apartment house for college students, for crying out tears, in the sixties. And who was Roger to say there was nothing in my life to explain what we'd been going through? I'd lost a child, too. Who was to say it wasn't that spirit trying to speak to us? Given everything that had passed between him and Roger—between him and me—Ted did make a certain sense, more than that lost child and more than the house. Yet I couldn't shake the conviction that Roger's explanation was radically incomplete, that at the very root of things he'd missed something important. I wouldn't say I shared Dr. Hawkins's pessimism about the dead, not exactly, but—there was Roger staring into space, saying, "You are an embarrassment and a disgrace." "I disown you; I cast you from me."

  Of course, it never occurred to me that Roger's account might sound incomplete because he was deliberately leaving something out—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

  My walk had brought me to the very edge of the house's lawn. I stopped there and stood gazing up at the huge structure I was already thinking of as home, this enormous space where some of my life's most important moments had taken place. Not many, granted, and certainly not as many as for Roger, to be sure, but enough that I was connected to it, too. Uncomfortably so. Standing there watching the late afternoon sky, a riot of white clouds and bronze sunlight, reflected in the house's windows, I thought of Roger, jogging or walking past, pausing here to let his gaze wander, until he was seeing not only the physical house, but the temporal one, the structure where his memories of Ted lived.

  A car passed behind me, honked its horn. I jumped and looked around. It was Lamar, the minister at the Dutch Reformed Church, in his Saturn. I returned his wave and watched him continue down the street to his residence beside the church. Fortunately, it was too far away for him to ask me what I was doing, because I didn't have a good response. Fantasizing about my husband's fantasizing? I wondered if Dr. Hawkins would drive past the house on her way home, and what she'd think of me standing here staring up at it: if she'd leap out of her car and try to administer on-the-spot emergency therapy. What's that joke? Insanity doesn't run in our family—it gallops? I went inside.

  Moving around the kitchen, though, opening the fridge to see what if anything we could have for dinner, which wasn't much, mostly cartons of half-eaten fried rice and orange chicken—I swear, the Chinese take-out place must've had our pictures on their "customers-of-the-year" wall—anyway, even as I was trying to determine if we had the ingredients for a red curry, I was thinking of Roger. You've seen the house's kitchen, haven't you? It's all windows, makes it ten degrees colder than the rest of the place, especially in the winter. From the counter, I could look out across the lawn to where I'd been standing five minutes earlier. Roger had left the house for only one of his walks during the last three weeks—the first or second night after I'd joined him researching the Mutual Weirdness. He'd been gone for hours, wandering the nighttime streets of the town. I could almost picture him standing where I just had. There would have been no moon, no light on inside except for a small lamp in the library. The house would have been in shadow—in places, its edges hard to find. In a way it never had before, the house would have seemed larger to him tonight, as if all that shadow had added to its bulk, made it more massive. Roger would have jammed his hands in his pockets and blown his breath out in a half-whistle—one of the things he did when he was particularly annoyed, a hold-over from the childhood where he hadn't dared express his feelings openly. To think that this place, of all places, should have become foreign to him, the house that he had restored with his own hands, the site of his best scholarship, the location of his family, of his son, of Ted.

  The red curry momentarily forgotten, I stood staring out at the lawn. Every last window in that kitchen had gone from late-afternoon sunlight to middle-of-the-night darkness. I've always had a vivid imagination, though, so I took what I was seeing as no cause for distress. I blinked and went to return to my cooking. The windows remained black, the kitchen dark. Startled, I looked up. The kitchen was surrounded by night. To my left, the dining room, to my right, the laundry room, glowed with sunlight. Between them, the kitchen surveyed moonless dark. Shadows flooded the yard. Overhead, stars dotted the sky. Holding onto the countertop, I shut my eyes and counted ten as slowly as I could. When I opened them, blackness continued to press in on me. I made a noise—half a laugh, half something else, a whimper or moan. I could not be seeing this. This had to be left over from my imagination of Roger. Unless it were some kind of drug flashback, which was unlikely, since the worst thing I'd ever done was pot and pot didn't give you flashbacks, did it? Or unless this was the first sign of a psychotic break. But if you thought you were having a psychotic break, didn't that mean you weren't? If the scene outside was a hallucination, it was a remarkably detailed one. The grass looked shorter, as if it had just been mown. The trees were late-October bare. The stars seemed different, off, rearranged into new groupings. Any fascination I might have felt was rapidly replaced by fear. I wasn't behind this; it was emanating from the same place that had produced all the other weirdness. I could feel the space on the other side of the windows, as if the house had gained another, huge room. The hair on my arms stood straight up. My mouth went dry. I let go of the countertop and walked over to the windows. I know. Why didn't I run into one of the other rooms, escape to where the sun was still shining? As I drew closer to them, I could feel cold pouring off the windows, freezing the air. This wasn't the cold you felt in the kitchen in winter. This was the kind of cold you read about in places lik
e Antarctica, cold that burns the air free of everything but itself. Shivering, I raised my right hand and touched one of the windowpanes. It was even colder than I'd thought, so cold it rushed through me like an electric shock. I cried out, jerking my hand back—

  And the scene outside vanished, replaced by late afternoon as if a giant slide projector had advanced a picture. Fingertips stinging the way they do when you scald them under the tap, I stared out over the lawn that wanted mowing, the trees heavy with leaves, the sun blazing as it sank towards the mountains, too bright after such heavy dark, the details it highlighted almost grotesque. In the space between me and the windows, the air was bitterly frigid, although the cold was running out of it like water draining from a tub. I stepped away from that fading chill. My leg struck a chair. I sat down on it.

  There were footsteps in the hallway, then Roger calling, "Honey? Is everything all right?" A moment later, he hurried into the kitchen. "I thought I heard—" He caught sight of me sitting by the windows and rushed over. "What is it?"

  I gestured at the windows. "Out there."

  "The yard?" Roger said. "What about it? Did you see someone out there?" He was halfway to his feet.

  "No," I said. "It wasn't—it changed."

  "Changed? The yard? How?"

  I exhaled. I could do this if I took the experience a little at a time. "It got dark."

  "Dark."

  "Like nighttime," I said. "It was night—night and cold."

  "You looked out the window and the lawn was dark."

  "Not just dark," I said. "I looked out there and it was the middle of the night. The grass, the trees, were different. Like I was seeing another time of year, fall, maybe, or winter. The stars were—I could see the stars and they weren't right. They were in different patterns. I could feel it, too—like another room. I went to the windows and touched them," I held up my right hand, showing Roger my fingertips red and raw. "It was freezing. That was when you heard me scream."

  Roger took my hand in his. "Good Lord," he said. "What happened next?"

  "It disappeared," I said. "Everything went back to normal."

  Leaning over, Roger raised my hand and gently kissed my fingertips. His lips burned ever-so-slightly, but I smiled weakly at the sentiment. Between kisses, he said, "Poor, poor dear."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Did you feel," Roger started to ask, stopped. "That is, could you tell—"

  "Was it Ted?" I completed his question. "I couldn't tell. There was just the sense that what was outside the house was also part of it. Not everything outside, only what I was seeing." Roger frowned—not an angry frown, but a concentration of his brows that made me ask, "What? What is it?"

  "Nothing," he said, then added, "Not nothing. I'm wondering about the timing of this."

  "The timing?"

  "Yes," he said. "What you saw lasted how long?"

  "A couple of minutes—if that."

  "Then I was already on my way downstairs when it began. I paused at the office door because I thought I might want to jot down one last idea, before deciding it could use a little more time to ripen. As I was descending the stairs to see about dinner, the kitchen underwent a change that I missed at most by seconds."

  "You think this was intended for you," I said.

  "The coincidence is striking. The kitchen was my destination."

  I wouldn't have used as strong a word as "striking," but it was worth noting. I asked, "So what was the point?"

  "Why communicate with me in such a manner?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Why not rattle a photograph, or turn the TV on to a baseball game? Wouldn't either of those have been more direct? What's the message here?"

  Roger shook his head. "I can't say. Given that your vision was interrupted, perhaps there was more to come that would have explained what you saw. It could be you were seeing the place Ted is."

  "The bardo?"

  "It's possible."

  "Is that what it looks like?"

  "There aren't any photographs of it."

  "Well, I hope not," I said. "If it's cold enough to freeze the windows like that, how cold would it be for anyone walking around in it?"

  "All the more reason to help Ted depart it."

  No argument there. Roger stayed in the kitchen and helped me prepare the red curry and some jasmine rice. We ate a mostly silent dinner. Roger was disappointed to have missed the latest weirdness. You didn't have to be especially observant to read it in the half-hearted way he picked at his meal. He was never a huge fan of Thai food, but he usually made a better effort than this. Maybe he was thinking about the scene I'd described to him. I was.

  I wasn't interested in debating Roger's explanation, because I was still processing the experience, but I wasn't inclined to agree with him, either. If anything, Roger's account only underlined my feeling that there was more going on here than he recognized or was willing to recognize—underlined, and put in all caps and bold, besides. None of what we'd been involved with so far was what you'd expect from the situation Roger had come up with. Not that there's a guidebook for this stuff, but—look, when I was little, my grandma, my mother's mother, told me a story. She was watching me and we got to talking about ghosts. I don't remember what started the conversation, probably a story she told me. Grandma was a great one for stories, all the classics, and a whole book full of strange ones that I only ever heard from her. "The Boy Who Cheated the Sun"; "The Mirror's Dilemma"; "Veronica and the Hungry House." Obviously, she made up that last one for me. I think she invented them all. They were great, crazy. It's a shame she never wrote them down. She would have made a fortune.

  Anyway, after some story or another, I declared to Grandma that I, for one, did not believe in ghosts. She looked at me very seriously and asked me why I'd want to say a thing like that. Because ghosts were stupid, I said. After telling me not to call anything stupid, it wasn't a nice word, Grandma said that she believed in ghosts, which was kind of a shock. I was at the age where I was trying to figure out what was real in the stories I heard, and, in general, Grandma was pretty straightforward. She didn't say anything about Santa or the Easter Bunny, but I learned from her that the Tooth Fairy was Mom and Dad's generosity, and that leprechauns were festive decorations for St. Patrick's. So when she threw the weight of her opinion behind ghosts, they immediately gained substance.

  I wasn't willing to let it go at that, though; I asked her, "How come you believe in ghosts, Grandma? Did you ever see one?"

  She shook her head up and down. "Oh yes," she said, "I did." That admission alone was almost enough to make me wet my pants. I didn't want to ask any more—what I'd learned already would be enough to give me nightmares for years—but I couldn't help myself. In for a penny and all that. "What did the ghost look like?" I asked.

  "Oh, I shouldn't be telling you this," she said. "What will your mother say? Let's play a game, instead."

  "No," I said, stamping my foot. "I want to hear what the ghost looked like."

  "Temper," Grandma said, waving her finger, then, "I don't want to scare you."

  We were way past that, but I said, "I'm not scared, really. Tell me."

  "Please."

  "Please."

  "All right." I'm sure she must have known how scared I was. I think she realized that if she didn't tell me something definite, my imagination would run amok. She said, "When I was a girl your age, I was very close to my grandma, too. My daddy had gone to heaven, and Grandma Jane—that's what I called her—came over a lot to help us. We were great pals. And then, when I was a bit older, Grandma Jane got very sick and she went up to heaven, too."

  "You mean she died?"

  "Yes, darling, she died. I was very unhappy when she did, and I'm afraid I acted like a very bad girl for a little while."

  Grandma bad was an oxymoron. I asked, "What did you do?"

  "I wouldn't do what my mommy told me," she said, "and I would slam doors and run around the house and not say, 'Please,' or 'Thank you.' I was not v
ery nice at all.

  "One day," she went on, "I was an especially bad girl, so bad that I was sent to my room with no dinner. I screamed and I yelled and I jumped up and down on my bed and threw my toys all over the place."

  "Grandma," I said.

  "I know," she said. "There was a picture of Grandma Jane on my bureau, in front of the mirror. It was a picture from when she was a young woman. It was very old, and it was in a heavy frame made out of a metal called pewter, which looked like silver. While I was misbehaving, that picture started to shake—just a little at first, and then a lot. The picture shook and danced on my bureau and it made an awful racket as it did."

  "What did you do?"

  "I screamed," Grandma said, and laughed, which I thought was strange. "I screamed and sat down right there on my bed and watched that picture shake and fall over—bang!—on the bureau.

  "And that was when I saw her. I looked in my mirror, and there was my grandma, standing behind me wearing her favorite dress. She was not happy. One look at her face, and I could see how upset she was with me. I turned around to her—"