Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  The herd moved very slightly apart: now the males had noticed him, and were watching to see what he would do. Bunting knew that if he got off the horse and stood in the sun for a few minutes the males would walk up to him and stand beside him and find on him the smell of every place he had ever been in his life. Then the ones who liked those smells would stay around him and the rest would wander off a little way. That was what buffalo did, and it was fine if you could stand their own smell.

  Bunting cocked his rifle, and one big male raised his head and shook it, as if trying to get rid of a bad dream.

  Bunting kept Shorty moving on a diagonal line toward the middle of the herd, and the buffalo began moving apart very slowly.

  The big male who had been watching seemed to come all the way out of his dream, and started ambling toward him. Bunting was something like ten yards from the big male, and twenty yards from most of the rest of the herd. It wasn’t too bad: it could have been better, but it would do.

  Bunting raised his rifle and aimed it at the center of the big male’s forehead. The buffalo instantly stopped moving and uttered a deep sound of alarm that made the entire herd ripple. A single electrical impulse seemed to pass through all the animals ranged out before Bunting. Bunting squeezed the trigger, and the rifle made a flat cracking sound that instantly spread to all parts of the long grassy plain, and the big male went down on his front knees and then collapsed onto his side.

  The rest of the herd exploded. Buffalo ran toward the hill and scattered across the plain. Bunting kicked Shorty into action and rode into their midst, shooting as he went. Two others fell instantly, then a third around whose body Shorty wheeled. Two of the fastest buffalos had reached the hill, and Bunting aimed and fired and brought them down. He reloaded as a line of panicked buffalo swung away from the hill and bolted deeper into the meadow. The leader fell and rolled, and Shorty carried Bunting up alongside the second in line. Bunting shot the second buffalo in the eye, and it shuddered and fell. He swiveled in the saddle and brought down two more that were pounding toward the opposite end of the endless meadow.

  By now the grass was spattered with blood, and the air had become thick with the screams of dying animals and the buzzing of flies. Bunting’s own hands were spotted with blood, and long smears of blood covered his chaps. He fired until the rifle was empty, and then he reloaded and fired again as Shorty charged and separated the stampeding buffalo, and in the end he thought that only a few of the fastest animals had escaped. Dead and dying buffalo like huge sacks of dark brown wool lay all over the meadow, males and females. A few infant buffalos who had been trampled in the panic lay here and there in the tall grass.

  Bunting swung himself off Shorty and went moving among the prone buffalos, slitting open the bellies of the dead. A great rush of purple and silver entrails fell out of the dead buffalos’ body cavities, and Bunting’s arms grew caked with drying blood. At last he came to a young female that was struggling to get onto its feet. He took one of the baby bottles from its holster, put the barrel behind the animal’s ear, and pulled the trigger. The female jerked forward and slammed its dripping muzzle into the grass. Bunting sliced open its belly.

  He skinned the female, then moved to another. He managed to skin four of the buffalo, a third of all he had killed, before it grew too dark to work. His arms and shoulders ached from tearing the thick flesh away from the animals’ fatty hides. The entire meadow reeked of blood and death. Bunting built a small fire and unrolled his pack beside it and lay down to doze until morning.

  Then the meadow and the night and the piles of dead animals slid away into nothingness, into white space, and Bunting’s head jerked up. He was lying in his bed, and there was no fire, and for a moment he did not understand why he could not see the sky. A close, stuffy odor, the odor of himself and his room, surrounded him. Bunting looked back at the book and saw that he had reached the end of a chapter. He shook his head, rubbed his face, and took in that he was wearing a shirt, a tie, the trousers to a good suit.

  More than three hours had passed since he had picked up Buffalo Hunter. He had been reading, and what he had read was a single chapter of a novel by Luke short. The chapter had seemed incomparably more real than his own life. Now Bunting regarded the book as though it were a bomb, a secret weapon—it had stolen him out of the world. While he had been in the book, he had been more purely alive than at any other time during the day.

  Bunting could not keep himself from testing the book again. His mouth was dry, and his heart was thumping hard enough nearly to shake the bed. He picked up the book and sucked cognac, for courage, from the little pink bottle. The book opened in his hand to the words chapter three. He looked down to the first line of print, saw the words “The sun awakened him…” and in an instant he was lying on a bed of thick grass beside a low, smoky fire. His horse whickered softly. The sun, already warm, slanted into his eyes and dazzled him, and he threw off his blanket and got to his feet. His hips ached. A thick mat of flies covered the heaps of entrails, dark blood glistened on the grass, and Bunting closed his eyes and wrenched himself out of the page and back into his own body. He was breathing hard. The world of the book still seemed to be present, just out of sight, calling to him.

  Hurriedly he put the book on the seat of his chair and stood up. The room swayed twice, right to left, left to right, and Bunting put out his hand to steady himself. He had been lost in the book for only a few hours, but now it felt like he had spent an entire night asleep in a bloody meadow, keeping uneasy watch over a slaughtered herd. He turned the book over so that its cover was face down on the chair and carried the bottle to the counter. He refilled it with cognac and took two large swallows before screwing the nipple back on.

  What had happened to him was both deeply disturbing and powerfully, seductively pleasurable. It was as if he had traveled backward in time, gone into a different body and a different life, and there lived at a pitch of responsiveness and openness not available to him in his real, daily life. In fact, it had felt far more real than his “real” life. Bunting began to tremble again, remembering the clarity and freshness of the air, the touch of Shorty’s coarse hair against his legs, the way the big male buffalo had come slowly toward him as the others began to stir apart—in that world, everything had possessed consequence. No detail was wasted because every detail overflowed with meaning.

  He sucked the cognac into his mouth, troubled by something else that had just occurred to him.

  Bunting had read The Buffalo Hunter three or four times before— he had a small shelf of Western and mystery novels, and he read them over and over. What troubled him was that there was no slaughter of buffalos in The Buffalo Hunter. Bunting could remember— vaguely, without any particularity—a few scenes in which the hunter rode down buffalos and killed them, but none in which he massacred great numbers and waded through their bloody entrails.

  Bunting let the bottle hang from the nipple in his teeth and looked around his cramped, disorderly little room. For a moment— less than that, for an almost imperceptible fraction of a second—his familiar squalor seemed almost to tremble with promise, like the lips of one on the verge of telling a story. Bunting had the sense of some unimaginable anticipation, and then it was gone, so quickly it barely had time to leave behind the trace of an astonished curiosity.

  He wondered if he dared go back to The Buffalo Hunter, and then knew he could not resist it. He would give himself a few more hours’ reading, then pull himself out of the book and make sure he got enough sleep.

  Bunting took off the rest of his clothes and hung up the excellent suit. He brushed his teeth and ran hot water over the dishes in the sink to discourage the roaches. Then he turned off the overhead light and the other lamp and got into bed. His heart was beating fast again: it was he who trembled with an almost sexual anticipation: and he licked his lips and took the book off the crowded seat of the chair. He nestled into the sheets and folded his pillow. Then at last Bunting opened the book once again
.

  FIVE

  When the white spaces came he held himself in suspension as he turned the page and in this way went without a break from waking in the morning and skinning the buffalos and rigging a sledge to drag them behind Shorty to selling them to a hide broker and being ambushed and nearly killed for his money. Bunting was thrown in jail and escaped, found Shorty tethered in a feedlot, and spent two nights sleeping in the open. He got a job as a ranch hand and overheard enough to learn that the hide broker ran the town: after that Bunting shot a man in a gunfight, escaped arrest again, stole his hides back from a locked warehouse, killed two more men in a gunfight, faced down the crooked broker, and was offered and refused the position of town sheriff. He rode out of the town back toward the freedom he needed, and two days later he was looking again across a wide plain toward grazing buffalo. Shorty began trotting toward them, moving at an angle that would take him past the top of the herd. Bunting patted the extra shells in the pockets of his sheepskin vest and slowly drew the rifle from its sheath. A muscle twitched in Shorty’s flank. A shaggy female buffalo cocked her head and regarded Bunting without alarm. Something was coming to an end, Bunting knew, some way of life, some ordained, flawless narrative of what it meant to be alive at this moment. A cold breeze carried the strong aroma of buffalo toward him, and the sheer beauty and Tightness—a formal Tightness, inescapable and exact—of who and where he was went through Bunting like music, and as he sailed off into the final, the most charged and pregnant white space he could no longer keep himself from weeping.

  Bunting let the book fall from his hands, back in a shrunken and diminished world. He experienced a long moment of pure loss from which only tremendous hunger and certain physical urgencies imperfectly distracted him. He needed, with overpowering urgency, to get into the bathroom; his legs had fallen asleep, his neck ached, and his knees creaked with pain. When he finally sat down on the toilet he actually cried out—it was as if he had gone days without moving. He realized that he was incredibly thirsty, and as he sat, he forced his arms to move to the sink, take up the glass, fill it with water. He swallowed, and the water forced its way down his throat and into his chest, breaking passage for itself. The world of Shorty, the meadow of endless green, and the grazing buffalo was already swimming backward, like a long night’s dream. He was left behind in this littler, less eloquent world.

  He turned on his shower and stepped inside to soak away his pains.

  When he dried himself off, he realized that he had no proper idea of the time. Nor was he really certain of what day it was. He remembered seeing gray darkness outside his windows, so presumably it would soon be time to go to work—Bunting always awakened at the same time every day, seven-thirty, and had no need of an alarm: but suppose that he had read very late into the night, and had managed to get drunk, as on the night of his birthday: had he really just finished reading the book? Living in the book, as it actually seemed? That would mean that he had not slept at all, though it seemed to Bunting that he’d had the experience of sleeping, in gullies and in a little jail house, in a bunkhouse and a tavern’s back room and beside a fire in a wide meadow with millions of pinpoint stars overhead.

  He dressed in a fresh shirt, a glen plaid suit, and a pair of cracked, well-polished brown shoes. When he strapped on his watch, he saw that it was six-thirty. He had read all night long, or most of it: he supposed he must have slept now and then, and dreamed certain passages of the book. Hunger forced him out of his room as soon as he was dressed, although he was an hour early: Bunting supposed he could walk to work again and get there early enough to clean up everything from Monday. Now that he was no longer so stiff, his body and his mind both felt, beneath a lingering layer of tiredness like that after a session of strenuous exercise, refreshed and energetic.

  The light in the corridor seemed darker than it should have been, and in the lobby two teenage boys who had stayed up all night sucking on crack pipes and potting crimes shared a thin hand-rolled cigarette beside the dying fern. Bunting hurried past them to the street. It was surprisingly crowded. He had gone halfway to the diner before the fact of the crowd, the darkness, and the whole feeling of the city combined into the recognition that it was evening, not morning. An entire day had disappeared.

  Outside the diner, he bought a paper, looked at the date, and found that it was even worse than that. It was Thursday, not Tuesday: he had not left his apartment—not even his bed—for two and a half days. For something like sixty hours he had lived inside a book.

  Bunting went into the bright diner, and the man behind the cash register, who had seen him at least four mornings a week for the past ten years, gave him an odd, apprehensive look. For a second or two the counterman also seemed wary of him. Then the man recognized him, and his face relaxed. Bunting tried to smile, and realized that he was still showing the shock he had felt at the loss of those sixty hours. His smile felt like a mask.

  Bunting ordered a feta cheese omelette and a cup of coffee, and the counterman turned away toward the coffee machine. Headlines and rows of black print at Bunting’s elbow seemed to lift up from the surface of the folded newspaper and blare out at him; the whole dazzle of the restaurant surged and chimed, as if saying Wait for it, wait for it. but the counterman turned carrying a white cup brimming with black coffee, the ink sifted down into the paper, and the sense of promise and anticipation faded back into the general bright surface of things.

  Bunting lifted the thick china cup. Its rim was chalky and abraded with use. He was at a counter where he had eaten a thousand meals; the people around him offered the combination of anonymity and familiarity that most represents safety in urban life; but Bunting wanted overwhelmingly to be in his crowded little room, flat on his unmade bed, with the nipple of a baby bottle clamped between his teeth and a book open in his hands. If there was a promised land— a Promised Land—he had lived in it from Monday night to Thursday evening.

  He was still in shock, and still frightened by the intensity of what had happened to him, but he knew more than anything else that he wanted to go back there.

  When his omelette came it was overcooked and too salty, but Bunting bolted it down so quickly he scarcely tasted it. “You were hungry,” the counterman said, and gave him his check without coming any nearer than he had to.

  Bunting came out of the restaurant into what at first looked like an utter darkness punctuated here and there by street lamps and the headlights of the cars streaming down upper Broadway. Red lights flashed off and on. A massive policeman motioned Bunting aside, away from some commotion in the middle of the sidewalk. Bunting glanced past him and saw a body curled on the pavement, another man lying almost serenely prone with his hands stapled into handcuffs. A sheet of smooth black liquid lay across half the sidewalk. The policeman moved toward him, and Bunting hurried away.

  More shocks, more disturbance—savage, pale faces came out of the dark, and cars sizzled past, honking. The red of the traffic lights burned into his eyes. All about him were creatures of another species, more animal, more instinctual,, more brutal than he. They walked past him, unnoticing, flaring their lips and showing their teeth. He heard steps behind him and imagined his own body limp on the pockmarked concrete, his empty wallet tossed into the pool of his blood. The footsteps accelerated, and a white frozen panic filled Bunting’s body. He stepped sideways, and a hand fell on his shoulder.

  Bunting jumped, and a deep voice said, “Just hold it, will you?”

  Bunting looked over his shoulder at a wide brutal face filled with black dots—little holes full of darkness—and a black mustache. He nearly fainted.

  “I just wanted to ask some questions, sir.”

  Bunting took in the uniform at the same time as he saw the amusement on the policeman’s face.

  “You came out of the diner, didn’t you, sir?”

  Bunting nodded.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “What?”

  “The shooting, sir. Did you see a
shooting?”

  Bunting was trembling. “I saw—” He stopped talking, having become aware that he had intended to say I saw myself shoot a man out west in a gunfight. He looked wildly back toward the diner. A dozen policemen stood around a roped-off area of the sidewalk, and red lights flashed and spun. “I really didn’t see anything at all. I barely saw—” He gestured toward the confusion.

  The man nodded wearily and folded his notebook with a contemptuous, disbelieving snap. “Yeah,” he said. “You have a good night, sir.”

  “I didn’t see—I didn’t—”

  The policeman had already turned away.

  On Bunting’s side of the avenue, the lobby of his bank offered access to their rows of cash machines; across it, the drugstore’s windows blared out light through a display of stuffed cartoon characters. A cardboard cutout of a girl in a bathing suit held a camera. Bunting watched the policeman go back to his colleagues. Before they could begin talking about him, he ducked into the bank and removed a hundred dollars from his checking account.

  When he came out again, he went to the corner, crossed the street without looking at the police cars lined up in front of the diner, and went into the drugstore. There he bought five tubes of epoxy glue and ninety dollars’ worth of baby bottles and nipples, enough to fill a large box. He carried this awkwardly back to his building, peering over the top to see where he was going.

  Bunting had to set down the box to push his button in the elevator, and again to let himself into his apartment. When he was finally safe inside his room, with the police bolt pushed back in front of the door, his lights on, and a colorful little Ama filled with vodka in his hand, he felt his true self returning to him, ragged and shredded from his nightmare on the streets. Except for the curious tingle of anticipation that had come to him in the diner, everything since being driven from his room by hunger had been like being attacked and beaten. Bunting could not even remember buying all the bottles and nipples, which had taken place in a tense, driven flurry.