House of Windows

by John Langan

  "It wasn't."

  "Can you talk about it?"

  "He's—" I paused. "He's bad, Roger."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Ted is—he's different—changed."

  "How so?"

  "I can't describe it. I can't even remember it. I don't want to remember it. He isn't—he isn't something you could look at. I'm sorry—I don't know how to describe him."

  "I don't understand. Is he disfigured? Is it his injuries?"

  "No, not exactly—I mean, he's been injured—I'm pretty sure that's why he looks like—"

  "Like what?"

  "Like nothing human."

  "Nothing—are you sure it was Ted?"

  "Yes—I saw his—I saw what he used to look like first, then I saw him as he is now." I was struggling not to confront the memory head-on—even as I was realizing that part of it had already—not faded, exactly; it was more as if part of it hadn't taken, as if my mind hadn't been equipped to hold onto everything I'd seen—which didn't mean that what was left wasn't enough to start me screaming all over again.

  "As he is now," Roger said. He was being deliberately obtuse.

  "His eyes are glass," I said. "Glass, or something like glass. He can't close them. The skin around them is—stretched, tortured. He's being tortured—he's in torment." I swallowed some of my drink.

  "No," Roger said.

  "Yes."

  "No, I am sorry, I understand you have undergone some type of disturbing experience today, but that was not Ted you saw. You are mistaken." His lips were trembling.

  "Roger—"

  "I need a walk," he said, springing up from his seat. He took the bottle of Scotch, ignored the soda water, and set off away from me at a brisk pace. My own glass still in hand, I stood and gave chase.

  He circled the house and started up the driveway, almost falling when his foot struck a clump of sand that gave beneath him. Arms flailing, he caught himself in time and continued his trek. At the end of the driveway, he halted, turning his head from side to side long enough for me almost to catch up to him, then turned left into the cemetery. I called, "Roger—Roger, wait." His head jerked at the sound of his name, but he continued walking. He strode straight through the cemetery. When he reached the far side of it, he turned right and started walking around it. Like some kind of idiot, I followed him the entire time, despite the fact that, after one circuit of the graves, the burn on my leg was shouting with pain. I should have sat and waited for him, but I was afraid he'd leave the graveyard, head into the woods surrounding it, and I wouldn't be able to find him. We circled that cemetery three times, until Roger stopped, panting, and turned to wait for me. "That wasn't Ted," he said when I was standing next to him. "Not my boy."

  "It's the curse," I said, breathing a bit heavily myself. "It's what you said to him the last time you saw him."

  "What?"

  "In the parking lot in front of Village Hall," I said, "you cursed Ted. You disowned him, remember? 'I disown you; I cast you from me.'"

  "Don't be absurd," Roger said, but something flickered across his eyes.

  "You cursed him," I said, "and it worked." Understanding rushed through me. "That's why he isn't haunting you—not directly. You cut your ties with him—you cut him off completely. He can't reach you—not like he can reach me—because you shut the door on him."

  "This is ridiculous," Roger said. "Are you quite through?"

  "Roger," I said, "I know what happened in the cell. I know about the deal you made."

  Fear, shame, and anger hovered over Roger's face, already scarlet from the combination of alcohol and his circuits of the cemetery. "Deal?"

  "With the thing in the corner. The eye in the shadows."

  "I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to."

  "It offered to make the curse you had come up with for Ted real, to make it work."

  "Really?" Roger said. He tried to smile. The effect was hideous.

  "You asked it what it wanted. It told you, 'Blood and pain.'"

  He flinched at those three words, and any lingering doubts I might have had about what I'd seen were put to rest. He said, "So you're saying I made a pact with the devil during my time in the holding cell?"

  "You made a deal with something," I said. "I don't know what."

  "I see. And did I sign this agreement in blood, promise away my immortal soul?"

  "You offered it the heart attack that had already started. That wasn't enough, so you offered it whatever else it wanted—anything, including the child I was carrying. Which it took. You offered it Ted for its amusement."

  "Is that what this is about? You blame me for the miscarriage?"

  "That isn't the point, Roger."

  "Oh, I should say it is. It's obvious your losing the baby affected you more deeply than I was aware, in response to which you've invented a scenario that paints me as responsible for it. I had no idea you had been so traumatized."

  "This isn't about me," I said. "It's about you in that jail cell trading away whatever it took for you to have your revenge."

  "I had no idea your resentment of me ran this deep."

  "Come off it," I said. "Are you telling me you didn't spend hours and hours coming up with that curse?"

  "I planned my rebuke to Ted, yes. I was angry. This gave me a way to channel that anger. Should I not have been angry at him for showing up at our doorstep at three in the morning to yell at his father? Should I have thanked him for attacking me?"

  "What about your heart attack? When did that begin?"

  "I became convinced that I was in fact undergoing a heart attack during the time it took me to walk away from Ted to the car that following day."

  "That was the first of it? There was nothing before?"

  "I had some indication while I was in my cell, I admit, but I understand that's not uncommon."

  "And what did you see while you were in the middle of your 'indication'?"

  "Honestly," Roger said, "this is too much. I am not to blame here. I am not the villain. I'm trying to help Ted. If I had wanted to condemn him to some manner of eternal torment, why would I be working so hard to help him escape it?"

  "Guilt," I said. "At some point—I don't know when; maybe when Ted was killed, maybe before, maybe after—you realized what you'd done and regretted it. Given the chance to make amends, you leapt at it."

  "You've certainly thought this through. I presume my guilt is what has kept me from revealing any of this to you previously."

  "Guilt and doubt. I'm guessing you've convinced yourself it was a hallucination brought on by the stress of what felt like a heart attack. Because if it were true, if you did strike a bargain with something to curse your son—well, what does that say about you?"

  "How have you arrived at this—this story? Is it my sleepwalking? Have you decided that a change in my nightly routine must indicate a troubled conscience?"

  "I saw it."

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "After I saw Ted—after I ran out of the restaurant, I ended up at the pavilion, where you found me. While I was there, I had—I had a vision. I saw you that night in the cell. I saw you start to have a heart attack, and I watched that thing—the eye—appear to you. It was right after sunrise."

  Roger drank directly from the bottle this time, a slug that would have done any undergraduate proud. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "This is incredible. Let me see if I understand the situation. You undergo an obviously traumatic experience as we are eating—I refuse to believe that you saw Ted, but whatever it was, it was sufficiently severe to propel you out the front door and through the streets of Oak Bluffs. During this time—while you are in this state, you have a 'vision,' which portrays me as a villain and which you immediately accept at face value. Not once, from what you've indicated so far, does it occur to you that your vision might be less than accurate, that under the stress of the moment you would be as prone to invention as anyone."

  "Why, Roger? Why would I make up
something like this?"

  "As I've said, it's obvious you hold me responsible for the miscarriage. Perhaps you believe my confrontation with Ted at the apartment placed too great a strain on you. Since we've returned to the house, you've suffered a couple of disturbing incidents. It's no secret you're under stress, Veronica. Why else are we here? Have you forgotten your collapse on the stairs? Apparently you've been closer to the breaking point than I was aware. Earlier today, you—you reached that point, and in its aftermath, put together a scenario that combines the events of the last few months into a coherent whole."

  "So you can accept that your dead son is calling out to you from the bardo—you can even accept that he's reached out to me—but what I saw in the pavilion is a hallucination."

  "It isn't true."

  "I walked around in it. I was there. I tried to get out of it and I couldn't. I saw you on your bunk; I saw the thing in the corner—I felt it. The same way I can feel the house, I could feel it."

  "Funny. I remember a great deal about the hours I spent in that cell—it being my first experience with incarceration—yet I don't recall seeing you there."

  "I wasn't there—I mean, it was like I was invisible."

  "I see. Or, I didn't, which I gather you would say proves your very point."

  "All right. There's nothing I can say to convince you I saw this."

  "I've no doubt you saw it. It simply did not happen."

  "Same difference. I can't convince you, which is ironic, because why should I have to convince you of something you've done? Forget that. There's something you can do to show me I'm wrong."

  "Which is?"

  "Lift the curse. Rescind it; take it back; say you never meant it."

  "I have expressed my regret at my words to Ted."

  "That isn't the same thing as renouncing your words. You know that."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "If it's ridiculous, what's the big deal? Lift the curse."

  "This is rapidly moving from the ridiculous to the offensive."

  "Oh?"

  "You cannot be serious."

  "And yet I am."

  "I do not need to humor you. You come to me with these baseless accusations—you accuse me of—what you accuse me of would be monstrous if it weren't so absurd."

  "You're stalling," I said. "I'm your wife. Indulge me. If this'll help me with all the stress I've been under, shouldn't you do it immediately?"

  "You're mocking me."

  "Not at all. I'm giving you the chance to prove me wrong—I'm asking you to. All you have to do is break the curse. Take Ted back. Say you're father and son again. Lift his banishment."

  Roger glared at me. His knuckles were white around the Scotch bottle. I was surprised it didn't break in his grip. He licked his lips. "No," he said, "no."

  "No what?"

  "I will not, as you put it, lift the curse. There was no curse. There were only words, spoken in anger—great anger, yes, but only words. To say that they meant any more than they did would be dishonest—and though I regret having expressed myself so harshly, I do not regret the emotion that prompted me to do so. My feelings were completely justified—however incensed he may have been by receiving the wedding announcement you sent, Ted had no business behaving the way he did. If I didn't raise him well enough to know that, common decency should have told him. Ted brought my words on himself."

  "What about the thing in the cell? Did he bring that on himself?"

  "There was no thing in the cell. There was only me and my anger."

  "Why do you think he hasn't appeared to you? Why do you think I've been at the center of this?"

  "You forget, I saw Ted through the living room window. And I believe you were correct when you implied that the voice I heard in the carousel hall was his. I'm sorry, but you are hardly the center of these events. Close to it, perhaps, but not as close as I am."

  "Your sleepwalking?"

  Roger swallowed. "I do not know why I have been sleepwalking," he said, holding up a hand to forestall my answer. "If I were the victim of a guilty conscience, as I'm sure you would suggest, why would that conscience have left me alone once we departed the house? Is it on vacation, too? No doubt there is some psychological cause. I am not above admitting the effect—the considerable effect Ted's death has had on me. That, combined with returning to the house in which I raised him, is likely the root of my nightly excursions."

  "You don't believe that. I don't know what you believe, but that isn't it."

  "Once again, you're mistaken."

  I had run out of arguments. I stood there as Roger said, "It seems that this trip has done you more harm than good. I fear to open another can of worms, but I believe it would be best for you if we returned home sooner rather than later. Tomorrow?"

  We could have stayed a couple more days—we had paid for the house—but, really, what was the point? "Whatever you want," I said, and turned and walked back to the house.

  Roger didn't follow. In fact he didn't return to the house until almost midnight. I spent the hours between staring at the TV. PBS was showing a biography of Emily Dickinson I'd wanted to see for a while. Of course, it had to play when I had next to no interest in it. The conversation—confrontation with Roger was front and center in my mind. You know how it is after an argument. You replay it, listening to the other person's accusations and denials again and again, formulating the perfect response to them. That's what I do, anyway, what I did for hour after hour as nineteenth-century photographs were replaced by talking heads, who in turn gave way to footage of contemporary Amherst and its surroundings. I was so preoccupied with Roger's words—with his attempt to discount everything I'd had to say, to blame it all on my buried resentment toward him over the miscarriage—that I didn't hear most of what the documentary had to say. I recognized the rhythms of Dickinson's poetry at certain points, well-worn lines like, "Because I could not stop for Death," but the rest was a distant ebb and flow of sound.

  I was angry with Roger. Not as angry as I'd been in the pavilion—that had been the fury that comes with revelation, with discovering that your husband has done something stupid and terrible that's caused the two of you tremendous pain and difficulty. The anger now was a slow burn at being lied to when you both know you've got him dead to rights. It was anger at him trying to change the subject, shift the blame for what he'd done onto me. It was complemented by another anger, this one directed inwards, because he'd almost succeeded. Not really—I knew what I'd seen, felt, on the Vineyard, all of it—but he'd managed to sow sufficient doubt for me to have to weed it out of my thoughts. Maybe I had resented him for the miscarriage, for not being available to take care of me while it was happening, and afterward—for having fought with Ted—maybe I had held the stress of watching the two of them trash the apartment secretly responsible for my losing the baby. What about the curse, though? I hadn't imagined that. What about Roger's sleepwalking, or his office, for crying out tears? If it was all in my head, why wouldn't he just lift the curse? In the morning, we would return to Belvedere House and whatever awaited us there. Do I have to add I had no doubt it was going to be bad? If blood and pain had started this, then the odds looked pretty good for blood and pain being necessary to end it.

  On the TV, the actress who'd been chosen to read Dickinson's poetry said,

  "Doom is the house without a door-

  "'Tis entered from the sun-

  "And then the ladder's thrown away,

  "Because escape-is done—"

  Change "sun" to "son," I thought, and you've got that right.

  Roger didn't speak to me when he came in—still playing the part of the aggrieved innocent—he headed up to bed and was fast asleep by the time I decided to join him an hour later. I don't know what I was expecting that night. After everything I'd been through earlier in the day, not to mention the creeping weirdness of the days before, you would have thought I was entitled to a break. What I deserved, however, had very little to do with what act
ually happened to me. That had been one of the lessons of this whole drama. The more I was subject to, it seemed, the more not only could but would happen. So when Charlie Rose had been replaced by a film, The Haunting, and I decided to go upstairs because I was too tired to follow the plot, I anticipated—I don't know, Ted putting in another appearance in all his tortured glory, maybe letting me see him for longer this time, maybe reaching out and touching me with a hand wrapped in razor wire. Essentially alone in the house, the voices from the TV somehow small and echoing at the same time, I wasn't especially nervous, nor was I as I climbed into bed. I wasn't beyond fear; I wouldn't say that—every time I'd thought I was as frightened as I could be, I'd learned there was worse to come. It was more a case of being too worn out to be afraid of being afraid, if that makes sense. My mind was in better shape than it had been immediately after the wrecking ball that was Ted's true appearance had crashed into it. The various angers that had inhabited me had done a lot to repair the surface, prop up walls, repair holes, throw a tarp over the roof. Having my thoughts struck and repaired had evicted a lot of lesser concerns, like worrying about worrying. They'd return soon enough, no doubt, once the walls had been reinforced and the windows replaced, but for the time being, I was unconcerned—almost ready—for whatever the next stage of strangeness was to be.