Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Back in the room, I thought about taking a quick shower, but reluctantly decided against it. First things first. I explained to Penny what I was going to do.

  “So you’ll be unconscious again?” she said.

  I nodded. “It’ll look like I’m sleeping,” I said. “And you can shake me awake, if there’s an emergency, but it may take me a few seconds to wake up.”

  “What if somebody else wakes up instead?” Penny asked. “What if he wakes up?”

  “That shouldn’t happen.”

  She just looked at me.

  “Right,” I said. “Right…” I searched the room for something pointy and sharp, but not too sharp; in the drawer of the nightstand, alongside a Bible and a Book of Mormon, I found a letter opener. “Here,” I said, offering it to her. “If Gideon does show up, just wave this at him…”

  Penny blinked. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Maledicta said. “You want me to fucking stab you?”

  “Not stab,” I said. “You wouldn’t actually have to use it, just show it to him. Threaten to, to poke him with it…”

  “Poke him with it,” said Maledicta. “Tell you what, why don’t I bust out the fucking window and threaten to poke him with a piece of that?”

  “Oh-kay,” I said, “maybe this isn’t such a good idea…”

  She blinked again. “No,” Penny said, “no, I’m sorry, it’s all right. I’ll do it.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted her to, now. “You don’t have to, Penny. If you’re not comfortable staying in here while I—”

  “It’s all right. Give me the letter opener.”

  I gave it to her, not without a trace of reluctance. “Just…be careful,” I said. “Maybe, if Gideon does show up, maybe the best thing would be to step back and let him go.”

  Penny didn’t say anything to that, just sat in the chair, holding the letter opener awkwardly in her fist.

  I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  Going inside was much harder than it usually is. When I went to step out of the body, I encountered resistance; it was like trying to back through a tunnel that had been packed with cotton. But I concentrated, and pushed, until finally something gave; and then I was down, in a landscape so changed that I thought I’d stumbled into the wrong geography.

  The mist which ordinarily shrouded Coventry had thickened into fog and boiled over, obliterating the lake and much of the lakebank; a thinner but still substantial haze extended as far as the encircling forest, turning the trees into shadowy silhouettes. Standing on the hill where the column of light touches down, I couldn’t see the house.

  “Father?” I called, the haze swallowing my words. “Adam?…Anybody?”

  There was no answer, but I heard a sound like muffled hammering in the distance. I moved towards it, and found myself at the house.

  It was in shambles. It was still standing, but it looked like it had been picked up and dropped from a height: the grounds around were littered with sprung boards, broken glass, and cracked shingles. The pulpit, as I’d expected, was totally gone, torn away; the door that had connected it to the second-floor gallery was boarded over with heavy planks.

  My father stood on the front lawn, surveying the damage. When he noticed me standing beside him, his reaction was surprisingly subdued. “Andrew,” he said. “So you’re awake, finally.”

  “Yes,” I said, thrown by his demeanor. “Since just a little while ago. I…I’m back in control of the body, too.”

  “And where is the body?” he asked, in a tone of voice that suggested he wasn’t all that interested. “A long way from Autumn Creek, I’m guessing.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re in South Dakota. It’s Thursday.” I waited for him to react; when he didn’t, I blurted out: “I’m really sorry about getting drunk.”

  “Yes, you should be.” His brow contracted, and I thought he was going to let me have it; but then his anger just dissipated. “Well, I suppose it’s my failure too.”

  “Aren’t you…don’t you want to yell at me?”

  He shook his head, smiling his disappointment. “There’s not much point. You know it was wrong; you knew it was wrong before you did it; and it’s not the first time it’s happened. But you did it anyway.”

  “Well I didn’t think this would happen, or—”

  Still smiling: “Why did you imagine I forbade it, Andrew? Did you think I was just trying to keep you from having a good time?”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I guess I didn’t think, at all.” I hung my head, but after a moment, when he still didn’t yell at me, I looked back up at the house. “What happened here?”

  “It was a lot like an earthquake,” my father said, “only the sky shook, too. And then the mist on the lake…well, you can see what happened with the mist.”

  “Is everyone else OK? Where are they?”

  “The Witnesses are inside, in the nursery. The others…are around. I’ve been trying to get them together for a meeting, but they keep scattering, wandering off into the fog.” He was silent for a few seconds. Then he said: “South Dakota?”

  “Yes. Near Rapid City.”

  “And Penny Driver is with you?”

  “Yes. How did you know? Have you been—”

  “Watching? No. Since the pulpit blew away, I haven’t been able to get more than vague impressions from outside; I knew we were traveling, but not much more. I haven’t been able to get out, either, except once, and even then only partway. The body was in the back seat of Penny’s car, and we were driving on a highway at night.”

  “The Morse code message. That was you.”

  He nodded. “Stupid of me, really—I should have tried signaling for a pen or a pencil instead. Not that there would have been time for that…I’d barely made contact when somebody kicked me out. Who was that, by the way? Who’s been controlling the body? Do you know?”

  “Not really.” I gave him a very abbreviated summary of what Penny had told me about the journey from Autumn Creek to the Badlands.

  “I don’t know any soul named Xavier,” my father said when I was finished. He gazed off into the mist, in the direction of the lake. “I suppose he could be new…”

  “I don’t think he is new. From what Penny told me, it sounded like he’d been to Michigan before, and that he’d…seen the stepfather.” I paused, realizing something. “But wait a minute—if that’s true, then you’d have to know him, wouldn’t you? I mean, wasn’t part of the whole process of building the house that you took an inventory of all the souls?”

  My father was gazing into the mist very intently now. “He said his last name was Reyes?”

  “Yes…I think so.”

  “That’s interesting,” my father said. “We knew a man named Oscar Reyes back in Michigan, when we were little. He ran a pest-control service in Seven Lakes.”

  “Pest control…you mean he was an exterminator?”

  My father nodded. “He’d come out to the house once a year to fumigate the kitchen. Also one time, our mother was having trouble with rabbits attacking her vegetable garden…” He trailed off, which was just as well; I didn’t think I wanted to hear about the rabbits.

  “What about the other soul?” I asked. “The one who wouldn’t give his name. Could it be Gideon?”

  “Gideon’s stuck on Coventry.”

  “I know he’s supposed to be,” I said, “but…” But if there were souls running loose in the geography that my father didn’t even know about, all bets were off.

  “Yes, but…” My father sighed. “I suppose we’d better go check on him.”

  “We?” I said.

  “This is your responsibility too. Come on.”

  We descended the path to the boat dock. Captain Marco waited there, keeping an eye on the ferryboat that was—or was supposed to be—the only means of passage to or from Coventry. Of course I knew even then that that wasn’t really true. The lake may appear to be a formidable obstacle, but what really kept Gideon confined was my father’s d
ominance of the geography; if that had slipped, a soul as willful as Gideon would have little trouble engineering an escape.

  The ferry, a flat-bottomed skiff, steadied itself in the water as we stepped aboard. My father rode up front, I sat in the middle, and Captain Marco stood in the stern, holding a long pole. The crossing was brief: Captain Marco pushed us away from the dock, which vanished almost instantly into the fog, and dipped the pole in the lake three times; then there was a shift, and the prow of the ferry bumped up against Coventry’s gray shore.

  Coventry Island, if it were real, would measure just an eighth of a mile from end to end, with a surface area of about ten acres. Within these small confines, my father had granted Gideon a modicum of autonomy, allowing him to build his own house. And so he did, continually: the last time my father had visited the island, Gideon’s home had been a wooden fishing lodge; the time before that, a lighthouse; and the time before that, a medieval keep. I’d only been to Coventry once before, myself, shortly after I was born, and on that occasion Gideon had gone all out, covering the whole island with a sprawling prison complex; after my father and I had patiently threaded our way through the maze of walls and security gates, he’d refused to speak with us, other than to call us both names.

  “What do you think it’ll be this time?” I asked, as we stepped out of the boat.

  My father wasn’t in a mood to guess. “We’ll see soon enough,” he said. We set off uphill towards the center of the island, where Gideon was most likely to be found.

  Here on the island the fog had thinned to mist again. It got thinner still with every step we took, until something amazing happened: the mist parted completely, revealing a tiny patch of blue sky—the only clear sky in the entire geography, as far as I could tell.

  From the open sky a soft light shone down on a meticulously crafted scene of ruin. Burned and broken stones were scattered in a ring around a circular foundation, as though a round tower had exploded from inside; I was reminded of my dream, in which Coventry had appeared as a bull’s-eye. At the center of the wreckage, seemingly unscathed by whatever force had destroyed the tower, a lone soul sat at a table, playing a game of checkers solitaire. The light glinted theatrically in his hair.

  “Gideon,” my father called, picking his way through the rubble ring. About halfway across he stopped, bent down, and pulled something from among the jumbled stones: a barred metal grille, like the kind you find in a jail cell window. The symbolism wasn’t hard to decipher. “Gideon!”

  Gideon bent forward over the checkerboard, and made a series of jumps—bang, bang, bang, bang, BANG!—that captured every remaining enemy piece. Grinning, he removed the opposition from the board, and kinged his own man.

  “Gideon.”

  “Good morning,” Gideon said, with a glance at the sky. “Something I can help you with?” As he turned to face us, I couldn’t help but stare; the resemblance between Gideon’s soul and Andy Gage’s body is so striking it’s scary. It’s no wonder, really, that he thinks he deserves to be in charge.

  Gideon’s grin widened when he noticed my reaction. “Well,” he said to my father, “I see you brought the little figment with you.”

  In response, my father tossed the metal grille on the table. It landed in the middle of the checkerboard, scattering Gideon’s pieces and decapitating his new king. Gideon started to laugh, but then my father snapped his fingers and the grille sprouted foot-long spikes in all directions, punching holes in the tabletop. Gideon cursed and jerked back, falling out of his chair.

  “Now that I’ve got your attention…” my father said. The spikes retracted; the grille disappeared.

  Gideon stood up slowly; he held his left hand in his right, rubbing at a sore spot just above the ball of his thumb. “Get out,” he seethed. “I don’t have anything to say to either of you.”

  My father made no move to leave. “Long sleeves,” he said, noting the billowy shirt that Gideon’s soul was clothed in. “That’s unusual.”

  “Get out,” Gideon repeated. “This is my island.”

  “It’s yours if you stay on it,” my father said. “I gave you a choice two years ago: this, or the pumpkin field. If you’ve changed your mind, I want to know now.”

  I shifted uncomfortably at this ugly threat. Gideon’s eyes flicked briefly in my direction, and the corner of his mouth twitched. But then my father said, “Well?” and Gideon’s attention switched back where it belonged.

  “I haven’t changed my mind about anything,” he said. “I know you’re having problems running your little playhouse, but that’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “It had better not. What do you know about a soul named Xavier?”

  “Who?”

  “Gideon…”

  “You’re the one in charge of the census. If you don’t know who he is, how am I supposed to?”

  “Gideon, I swear to you—”

  “I don’t know any soul named Xavier.”

  He did know who Xavier was; it was written all over his face. I was pretty sure too that he had been off the island, in the body, and that if he were to roll up his left sleeve we would see the wounds from the barbed wire. But my father didn’t force the issue. “All right,” he said. “But there had better not be any more trouble with Xavier…or with any other nameless souls.” He gave this warning a moment to sink in, then turned to go.

  “Has it occurred to you,” Gideon said, “that this may be a problem with honesty?”

  My father stopped.

  “I mean,” said Gideon, “a house built on a foundation of lies can’t be all that stable, can it?” He looked at me and smiled. “Aaron never has told you, has he?”

  “Told me what?”

  My father turned back around. “Gideon,” he warned.

  “Told me what?” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” Gideon chided my father. “You wouldn’t try to punish me for telling the truth, would you?”

  “What truth?” I said. “What’s he talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the big master plan,” Gideon said. “The one Aaron here cooked up with old Greyface. You still think you were a part of it, don’t you? But you weren’t.”

  “I don’t understand…‘Greyface’? You mean Dr. Grey?”

  “The one who just died. She and Aaron had it all worked out: tame the multitudes, put up the house, create a new front man—except that last bit wasn’t part of the original plan.”

  I shook my head, still not following.

  “He was supposed to run the body,” Gideon said, pointing at my father. “That was the plan.”

  “No.” I shook my head again. “No, that was supposed to be my job. My father was tired—”

  “We were all tired. But Aaron wanted to be in charge. And hey!”—Gideon held up his scarred left hand—“he proved he was tougher than I was…or at least more ruthless. But he was supposed to take charge of everything…only at the last minute, he decided he wasn’t really up to it. So he improvised, and called out a little helper…”

  I turned to my father. “Is that—that’s not true, is it?” My father didn’t answer; but from the way he looked at Gideon, and from the fact that Gideon did not spontaneously shrivel up and die, I realized that it might be true. “Father?”

  “Let’s go back to the house,” my father said.

  “Wait. Does that mean it is true?”

  “We’re not going to discuss this in front of him,” my father said. “Let’s go back to the house.” And he turned and walked off into the mist.

  “That’s right,” said Gideon, “go back to your playhouse!” Then, seeing that I was still there, he decided to sow one more seed of mischief. “Speaking of the house,” he said, “there’s something you can help me with. Do you happen to remember how many doors there are on the first floor?”

  “What?”

  “The first floor of Aaron’s playhouse. How many doors does it have?”

  “Three,” I said. “Front door and back door.�
�

  Gideon nodded. “Front door and back door…and that makes three, does it?”

  “Andrew!” my father called.

  “I…I’ve got to go,” I said, and started backing away. Gideon smirked at me.

  “That’s right, little figment,” he said, “you go on back to the playhouse with your father. But we’ll see each other again soon maybe, huh?” All at once he lunged forward, stamping his foot and throwing his arms wide as if to grab me. I fled, Gideon’s mocking laughter chasing me all the way back down to the shore.

  I rejoined my father aboard the ferryboat, and Captain Marco pushed off again. This time he didn’t take us straight across. Instead, sensing that my father and I had private matters to discuss, he took us out on the water, out of sight and earshot of both Coventry and the mainland, and stopped poling. We drifted in the fog.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It’s not all true,” my father replied.

  “Not all…then what part is true?”

  “Let’s start with the part that’s false,” my father said. “I didn’t ‘improvise.’ I didn’t call you out on the spur of the moment.”

  “Then what—”

  “There was more than one plan. Always. In therapy, Dr. Grey and I discussed a number of options for the final disposition. One plan, the one I personally favored, is the one you know about: I would run things inside, and create someone new—you—to run the body.”

  “The plan you favored,” I said. “But Dr. Grey didn’t?”

  “Dr. Grey felt…given the problems I’d had with Gideon trying to take over, she thought it would be better if I didn’t share authority with anyone. She wanted me to at least try running the body on my own. She always stressed that it was ultimately my decision, but that was what she recommended. And it is true,” he added, “that at the last session we ever had together, I did agree to try her plan. But then after she had her stroke, I rethought it, and changed my mind again.”

  “Did Dr. Eddington agree with you about changing your mind?”