House of Windows

by John Langan

  "And?" I breathed.

  "There was no one there. She'd only come for a moment, to tell me to pull up my socks and start behaving. From that day on, I was a much better girl."

  "Did you ever see your grandma again?" I asked.

  "No," she said. "She was the only ghost I ever saw, but see her I did. Your Great-aunt Eleanor—that's Grandma's younger sister—she said she saw Grandma Jane several times. I don't want you to worry though, darling. You're not going to see any ghosts."

  "You did," I said.

  "Yes, but I was being very bad. You're a good girl."

  "Was Great-aunt Eleanor bad?"

  Grandma smiled. "Your Great-aunt Eleanor was a lot of things. Don't worry about her."

  That was that. Until everything with Roger, I'd never been part of anything even remotely supernatural, much less felt or seen a ghost. At Penrose, I had known a couple of people who told strange stories. There was this one girl from Long Island who talked about a haunted campground. All the counselors were supposed to have killed the campers while they slept. But you heard those when we were sitting around at two a.m. drinking and trying to freak each other out. Even that story, though—it was pretty straightforward. Apparently, there was a spot on the road leading out to the former camp where, if you drove past early in the morning, your car would stall. You had to be there at something like quarter-to-five, which, of course, was the time local legend had assigned to the massacre. No matter what you did, your car would not restart for a solid ten minutes, which was how long it had taken the counselors to slaughter every last kid. If you stepped out of your car to check the engine, you'd notice that your doors were covered in the undersized handprints of children. No one stayed out of their car to see what came next.

  I never really believed the story. The handprints were a nice touch, but when I asked the girl who told it if it was true—this was a couple of days later, when our respective hangovers had long since subsided—she got very offended and walked away from me, which I took as a tacit confession she'd invented the whole thing. I was at a couple more parties where she repeated it, and the specifics remained pretty consistent, but I'd already written it off as fabrication. Later, I wasn't so sure, and wondered if she'd walked away because she was insulted at my questioning her honesty. I don't always put things in the nicest way.

  The point I'm trying to make is—you could say these stories, and a few more besides, are like templates. Most ghost stories you hear fall into one of these two categories: either a single, relatively unambiguous sighting and/or occurrence, or a repeated action. The picture dances and Grandma sees her grandmother giving her that look, "Shape up," or the one hundredth car stalls at the exact same spot and time and little handprints decorate it. I know it sounds contradictory to talk about the paranormal having rules, or tendencies. But you don't run into people telling the kind of story that Roger and I were in.

  We had a series of events that didn't fit the available models of supernatural experience. There was one more thing, however, and that was my grandmother's connecting the apparition of a ghost to how good or bad you were. Yes, I know it was a ploy to insure I behaved myself—and boy, did it work; no kid walked straighter and narrower than I did—at the same time, Grandma's story appeared to give the connection some weight. And here was Roger, who by his own admission had done a bad thing, had rejected his only son. Maybe it was all the Hawthorne I'd assimilated, but I was increasingly convinced that what we were undergoing was the end result of Roger's—Hawthorne would have called it his sin, and I didn't know that that word didn't fit. Roger's words—his curse had broken something—I don't know how to phrase it—they'd knocked things out of alignment, seriously out of alignment, and now we were paying the price for it. He had asked for blood to drink, and it would only be so long before it was served up for him, steaming hot in a glass with a jagged edge.

  I realize this sounds like so much magical thinking. I'm sure that's what Dr. Hawkins would have diagnosed. Later that night, after we'd put away the dishes and gone through to the living room to watch TV, I laughed at the thought that here I was, back from my trip to the psychiatrist's, not only supporting Roger's ideas, but adding fuel to the fire. What else could I do? Even if I had been a good enough liar to fool Roger—which I wasn't—how had there been enough time for me to recover from what I'd seen outside the kitchen windows and invent a compelling lie? If I'd thought there was any substance to Dr. Hawkins's analysis, I guess I would have made the attempt. Telling him was proof that I had chosen to go along with him, no matter where we were headed.

  The next week I spent in a state of high expectation. Not only did the house still tingle there at the edge of my skin, ever-ready to race from whisper to roar; now, it threatened to open to another space, to a place I could see. For three or four days, I was catching things out of the corners of my eyes—standing off to one side or the other, climbing a staircase, flashing past a window. I jumped every time, and, naturally, when I whipped my head around to look at them, there was nothing there. I kept Roger updated, but these apparitions owed their existence more to stress than the supernatural, since they wavered in and out of existence without any change in my sensation of the house.

  As for Roger, his project had entered a new phase. He had cleared every last book, every last paper from the table in the center of his office, and was in the process of constructing a scale model of the neighborhood in Kabul where Ted had been killed. He studied his maps of the city for a solid day before trying to reproduce them from memory, first on a legal pad, then, when he was confident he'd memorized the layout, on the tabletop in colored chalk. The streets were yellow, the positions of various buildings orange, blue, and green, the spot where Ted died red, a red circle. Having copied the map to his satisfaction, Roger started filling in the divisions on the table with plastic buildings he'd special-ordered from a war-gaming site. The majority of them were one or two stories high, plain, dun-colored buildings most of which, Roger said, were residential. The exception was a three-storey structure that Roger said had been a movie theater before the Taliban had come to power and banned everything. "This is the place," Roger said, tapping the toy theater with a pen. His reading glasses perched on top of his head. "This is the spot from which the reports agree the rocket-propelled grenade was launched." Once he'd placed the final building, plus a row of tiny plastic trees he'd bought from another online site, I thought he was finished. There wasn't much to say. He'd been thorough and exact.

  At the end of the week, when I wasn't leaping at every shadow anymore, a small, heavy package arrived for Roger via UPS. I signed for it, and brought it up to the office. When he saw the return address—Chicago—he said, "Finally!"

  "What is it?" I asked. He wouldn't tell me. "You'll have to see," was the best I could get.

  The package was a heavy cardboard box in which thirteen small figures had been carefully packed, individually bubblewrapped and then slotted into a styrofoam frame. Roger removed all the figures from the frame before unwrapping them, deliberately picking off the pieces of tape that sealed them into their plastic cocoons. What he uncovered were lead soldiers, each one no more than two inches high. They looked Afghan, like mujahidin. Each one was in his own pose, this one at attention, this one relaxed, this one with his gun ready to fire. They'd been painted with a remarkable attention to detail. No two were the same. Their coats and pants were faded, their tiny faces sunburned, their beards full. I couldn't tell for sure, but if I squinted, it looked as if there was writing on some of their guns.

  There was only one figure that wasn't a fighter, a model of an old man wearing a striped red and yellow robe. His hair and beard were white. I knew this was the man who'd run out to Ted's patrol, with whom Ted had been trying to talk when the RPG had found them both.

  "Aren't they something?" Roger said. "There's a fellow in Chicago, and this is what he does for a living. You fill out an extensive questionnaire, and then he procures the appropriate models and paints
them to your specifications. He has clients all over the world, as far away as Japan." He picked up one of the figures and studied it. "What care," he said. He did that with each of the models, held it up for inspection and pronounced it acceptable. The old man came last. As Roger examined it, his lip curled.

  Once he was satisfied with his purchase, Roger began placing the fighters on the table, arranging them first in a ragged line up the center of his scale-model street. "There had been rumors of Taliban holdouts at work in the city, possibly planning an attack on Karzai. Ted and his fellows were sent out to investigate."

  I was confused. "Wait a minute," I said. "Aren't these guys," I pointed to the mujahidin, "the Taliban?"

  "This is Ted's patrol."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. They were Special Forces, which means they tried to live in-country like the men they were supposed to be fighting with. Call it anthropological warfare. They grew beards, wore turbans, local dress. This was supposed to allow them greater freedom of movement."

  "Oh. Okay." I remembered the photo of Ted in Afghan dress, reading Dickens. "Go on."

  "They moved like this, close enough to hear each other's voices, but sufficiently spread-out to minimize the chances of more than one of them being hit at once." At the end of the street was the square, the movie theater to its left. Roger studied the figures, then started picking them up and transferring them to the open space. "They came to this square," he said, "and they proceeded into it. Had they suspected danger, they would have been more cautious, kept closer to the cover of the buildings. As it was, they knew of no reason not to walk straight across; although where the street emptied into the square, one man lingered. He might have seen something. From his spot, he might have been able to catch the movement at the top of the movie theater—he was scanning the space in front of him, the tops of the buildings as well as their windows and doors, and he might have been able to raise the alarm had it not been for the distraction of this man." Roger set the model of the old man down on the right-hand side of the square, at the entrance to an alley. "He comes running out, waving his hands and yelling," Roger slid the figure across the table. "Instantly, all eyes are on him—and all guns, too." He gave each of the soldiers a quarter-turn, so that they were facing the old man. His hand moved to the third soldier in line. "Ted approached him." Roger slid the model toward the figure of the old man, until they were practically touching. He'd positioned them inside the red circle he'd drawn on the table. "His gun was at the ready, but it is my impression he did not judge the man especially threatening, or he would have maintained his position in the line. The man was as dangerous as any sacrificial animal is. While Ted attempted to converse with him, the attack began."

  Roger pointed at the roof of the movie theater. "Its opening salvo was the rocket-propelled grenade, fired from here." He traced a line in the air from the theater roof to the figures of Ted and the old man. His finger hovered above them, then knocked them over. They clunked on the table. "This attack was followed by machine gun fire from several positions. Here," he touched a building beside the theater, "here," one across from it, "and here," a building between those two, opposite the place where the soldiers entered the square. "Obviously, the plan was to establish overlapping fields of fire, creating a killing zone. However, the assailants made a fatal error. Rather than positioning themselves on the rooftops of these buildings, like their friend with the RPG, they chose to fire from street-level, out of windows. I presume these men must have thought these stations would work to their advantage; they did not. Their positions significantly reduced each shooter's choice of targets and field of fire. While initially they succeeded in wounding two of the patrol," Roger touched a pair of figures near the line's center, "both were still able to use their weapons. The troops dropped to the ground, with the exception of this fellow," Roger pointed to the figure at the entrance to the square, "who had identified the theater roof as the source of the RPG and was firing upon it. He killed that assailant almost immediately. The others took longer."

  Roger's face was distant and drawn. "I've not yet established the precise order of events for the remainder of the battle. I am also unsure of the exact number of attackers. Five men were killed: the one who fired the RPG; one in each of these positions," Roger gestured to the buildings on either side of the square, "and two here," the remaining building. "But there may have been others who fled when they saw that their plan to assassinate an entire American patrol had gone awry. From the moment the grenade is launched, the fight lasts approximately sixteen minutes. It ends when two of the soldiers throw hand grenades at the last attackers, the two in the same spot. Anywhere from one to two minutes after that, the reinforcements the patrol had summoned at the beginning of the firefight arrive. They will spend the rest of the night going through every building in the immediate vicinity, taking away half a dozen men for questioning. Their interrogations will prove fruitless. No one will know anything.

  "As for Ted," Roger's gaze strayed to the red circle and the figures tipped over inside it. "During the first few moments of the attack, one of Ted's fellows crawls over to where he lies. He checks for a pulse, breathing, and finds neither. Subsequent examination by the Medical Examiner will conclude that Ted's death was instantaneous. All indications are that he never knew what happened to him. Nor did the man who ran out to him, the Judas goat." Roger's voice hardened. "That man makes me crave the existence of the hell of my childhood, for no other reason than that there be a place of sufficient and unending torture for him. No family came forth to claim him. He was buried in a pauper's grave. I would have been happy had he been left where he was, food for dogs."

  My ears were practically ringing from the stutter of machine guns, my eyes and nose stinging from the pungent gunpowder and charred flesh. I couldn't help noticing the figure Roger had selected to represent Ted. It wasn't the fighter standing at attention, or the one holding his gun casually. To stand in for his son, he had chosen a figure in a firing stance, its legs spread, its gun held up to its cheek. If you scrutinized its face—which I did, later, after Roger went down to order dinner and I said I had to use the bathroom—if you looked closely, you could see that the figure was sighting down the barrel of its gun, one eye closed, its brow lowered in concentration. Maybe the choice had been accidental, but when I thought about the care Roger had taken unsealing each soldier and positioning it on the table, I knew it hadn't. I could imagine Dr. Hawkins's diagnosis of his selection—of the whole set-up. Scanning her legal pad, she would say, "It's an obvious attempt by Roger to bring the circumstances of Ted's death under his control by reducing them to a size he can handle and distancing them through his use of the models. The figure Roger has picked to be Ted is ambiguous. It is dynamic, performing an action we associate with soldiers. It is also aggressive, hostile. Roger's selection of it reflects his own continued ambivalence about his relationship with Ted; the figure's aiming at him suggests Roger taking aim at himself, putting himself, so to speak, in the crosshairs." "You are a stranger to me." I replaced the soldier inside the red circle, next to the old man, the generic Afghan, and went downstairs to join Roger.

  Everything Roger was doing in his office—the research, the maps, now the model—you couldn't say any of it was making him happier, or more relaxed. Just the opposite: he was radioactive with stress; if there'd been a Geiger counter for tension, his readings would have bounced the needles right off the scale. Whatever room he was in, the air crackled. It must have been exhausting, to be wound that tight all the time. I couldn't understand how he kept going. I mean, they say your body can adjust to anything, but Good Lord. You would have thought that letting me in on what he was up to, sharing his ideas about Ted with me—and more importantly, me not laughing at him, me listening sympathetically, treating him seriously—you would have thought that would have taken the edge off his stress, dulled it, but no such luck. I was more and more sure that, for all his apparent openness, there was something Roger was keeping
back from me. In the days after he showed me the model, I asked him about it on a couple of occasions. "Honey," I said, "is there anything you haven't told me?" Each time, he gave the same answer, "No, nothing." If I persisted, pressed the matter, he turned defensive, snapped, "I believe I have answered your question," which, needless to say, only made my hunch stronger.

  If working in his office didn't alleviate his stress, what it allowed Roger was a way to focus that tension, direct this superabundance of nervous energy at a single point, knowing Ted's death as thoroughly as possible. It was dangerous, because Ted's death lay thick in the midst of volatile emotions Roger had yet to work through. Admitting his mistake in disowning Ted had been an important first step, but it had opened the door on a storehouse full of guilt, regret, and anger. By playing his attention over those feelings, he risked sending the whole structure up in flames.

  All the same, the long hours Roger spent laboring over who in Ted's patrol had taken aim at which of their attackers, what the order of their assailants' deaths had been, what the effects of a rocket-propelled grenade on the human body were—they made Roger seem together, coherent. The benefits of obsession, I suppose. I thought that, when he finally confronted Ted's death head-on, as the irreplaceable loss it was, that coherence would help him to do what he had called his work of mourning. Maybe Dr. Hawkins had been wrong. Maybe some good could come out of his time in his office.