Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Mouse gets out of the car and goes up to the cottage. There’s no answer to her knock on the front door, and she can’t remember which stone the key is hidden under. She walks around the side of the cottage. Here she finds a clue to what Andrew may have come back for: the broken bracing planks have all been cleared away, and those planks that are still intact have been set back up, spaced evenly to conceal the fact that there are fewer of them now. Chief Bradley will probably still notice, but without the debris lying around he’ll have a hard time figuring out what happened.

  Mouse continues around to the back door, which is unlocked. Inside, the cottage is dead quiet—strong circumstantial evidence that nobody’s home. She takes a look around anyway. Andrew is not in the kitchen, the pantry, the living room, or anywhere in the ground-floor bedroom that can be seen from the doorway. Mouse goes to the attic door next. She pokes her head in the stairwell and listens; there’s no sound, not even the chittering of squirrels. Andrew could still be up there, lying comatose on the cot again, but if he is, he’s on his own; not even a promise of fresh water could get Mouse to climb these stairs alone.

  Water. The kitchen sink is right behind her; she opens both taps, but not a drop comes out. She makes a second check of the pantry, searching for beverages this time. Many of the glass jars contain vegetables or fruits preserved in liquid, but Mouse isn’t desperate enough to drink vinegar or heavy syrup. As for the canned goods, it’s obvious from the selection that Andrew’s mother made a lot of soups and stews: there’s an entire shelf stocked with nothing but salted beef broth, salted chicken broth, and condensed clam chowder.

  She returns to the sink and looks out the window at the backyard, just in case someone’s come by and installed a fountain in the last two minutes. No one has, but there is something else that’s different: the footpath gate is hanging open.

  The gate was closed when she and Andrew were here earlier today. Mouse tries to remember whether it was still closed when she came around the side of the cottage just now, but she can’t recall.

  Mouse stares at the footpath, and envisions the lake at the other end of it. About half a mile, Andrew said. She does not really want to go down there, but her options are limited. It’s a much longer hike back to Seven Lakes, and she’s not going to find Andrew or her car keys in town.

  The woods beyond the gate are dense and shadowy; Mouse walks quickly. Soon enough she glimpses the lake through the trees up ahead. Even from a distance the water looks inviting; Mouse speeds up to a jog, and nearly goes tumbling when the path takes a final unexpected dip.

  Quarry Lake is pretty much the way Andrew described it from his—or the Witness’s—memory. A few things are different: there are no big shrubs at the end of the footpath, and the “island” at the Lake’s center is even smaller than Andrew made it sound, really just a tip of rubble sticking up above the surface of the water.

  The lake is certainly deep and cold—and the water is delicious. Mouse cups her hands and scoops up mouthful after mouthful, until her stomach starts to cramp in protest. She pauses then, breathing hard, and becomes aware of a figure standing in the periphery of her vision.

  “Hello, Penny,” Andrew says.

  Mouse, her voice restored, lets out a healthy squeak and falls over.

  “Penny…” Andrew says. He holds up his hands reassuringly……and right in the middle of the gesture changes his mind, deciding not to bother.

  “Forget it,” he says. “You aren’t worth the effort.”

  Mouse looks up at him and blinks. “Andrew?” she says.

  He doesn’t bother to correct her, just stares at her contemptuously until she figures it out.

  “No,” Mouse says. She rises slowly to her feet. “Not you. You can’t—”

  “Can’t what?” says Gideon. “Can’t be out? And why’s that, exactly? Because Andrew’s brave and true? Because he doesn’t run away from his responsibilities?” He laughs. “Andrew’s not even real, Mouse.”

  “He is real!” Mouse protests. “He, he is brave.”

  “Compared to you, maybe. But it doesn’t matter how brave he acts; he was born out of fear and weakness, and in the end that’s all he really is: fear and weakness. Aaron’s fear.” Gideon is grinning as he says this, showing teeth, but his hands make little trembling movements of suppressed rage. “Aaron! Bad enough he steals my life, gives away my property, and tries to keep me bottled up like a goddamn genie! But after all that, to turn around and just…abdicate, like he didn’t even want it himself…Ah!” For a moment he’s so mad he can’t speak. “You have no idea, the frustration…but weakness is weakness. It was just a matter of biding my time, waiting for the right moment.”

  Mouse doesn’t say anything to this, but Gideon suddenly glares at her as if she’d contradicted him. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You’re thinking I already got out once before and couldn’t hold it. You’re thinking I may keep the body for a day or even a week, but eventually Andrew will rally.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Well fuck you, Mouse!” He stoops and snatches up a rock; Mouse flinches, but rather than throw it at her he skims it out over the lake. It’s a weak toss, and the rock only skips a couple of times before sinking; Gideon, seeming pleased rather than dissatisfied by this, watches as the splash-ripples spread across the lake’s surface and begin to fade. Then he says: “Andrew won’t be back. I wasn’t really ready, before. But this time I put him down properly.”

  “So what…what happens now?” says Mouse.

  “I told you what happens now: I’m selling the cottage to Chief Bradley. Once I’ve got my money—all of it—I’m going to get the hell out of here. Go somewhere new, and start living the life I was meant to live.”

  “You know I’m not going to help you.”

  Gideon laughs at her. “You think I need your help? Here…” He fishes her car keys out of his pocket and tosses them at her feet. “Go ahead, take off. Go back to Seattle. Get yourself some therapy. Hah!”

  Surprised, Mouse picks up the keys.

  “What?” says Gideon. “Were you expecting me to hold you prisoner or something?”

  Actually, yes, she was expecting something like that.

  “Why would I want to?” he says. “I’m not afraid of you, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  Mouse isn’t so sure about that—she seems to recall doing a pretty good job of stopping Gideon the last time he was out—but her look of skepticism gets him laughing again.

  “What?” he challenges her. “What do you think you can do? Report me to the police for stealing Andrew’s body? I’d love to see you try to explain that one to Jimmy Cahill. Or Chief Bradley—try telling him he can’t have the cottage after all, because he’s dealing with the wrong Andy Gage now. Even if you could get him to believe that, do you think he’d care?”

  Mouse closes her hand around the keys. “You still need a ride to Chief Bradley’s house tonight.”

  “Not really. I could walk there if I had to—I used to go for long hikes around here all the time. But I won’t have to walk. You’ll take me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “I think you will. You don’t believe me when I tell you Andrew isn’t coming back. You think he is, and until you think otherwise, you’re going to want to stay close to me. And that means when it’s time to go to Chief Bradley’s, you’re either going to have to drive me there, or follow me in your car at four miles an hour—if I’m nice enough to hike along the roadside.” He shrugs. “I think you’ll give me the lift.”

  Mouse would like to walk away now, to prove him wrong. Unfortunately he’s not wrong.

  “Still here?” Gideon says smugly, scanning the ground for another skipping stone.

  Mouse decides to change the subject: “Tell me about Xavier,” she says.

  Gideon smiles, like he’s been expecting this, too. “What about him?”

  “The first time I asked you about X
avier you said he was a tool. But you never said what for.”

  “You want to know if I called him out to kill the stepfather?” He laughs. “‘Xavier the Exterminator’: is that what he seems like to you?”

  “No,” says Mouse. “But he doesn’t seem like much of a lawyer, either.”

  “He isn’t much of one. Real lawyers cost money, and I didn’t have any to waste. That was the whole point.”

  “You wanted money from the stepfather.”

  “I wanted money,” Gideon says. “The stepfather seemed like an easy person to get it from.”

  “So you made a lawyer, to sue him. To blackmail him.”

  “Xavier was going to give him a choice. Paying me was one of the choices.”

  “Only Xavier came too late. Chief Bradley was already there.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” Gideon says, irked. “If Mr. Useless hadn’t gotten lost in the woods, we’d have been there first.”

  “So it’s true, then. It was that same night. What Xavier said about the blood on the living-room floor—that was the accident. He saw it.”

  “It was the night the stepfather died, yeah. Talk about the world’s worst timing. I don’t know about any accident, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gideon plunks another stone in the lake, not even trying to skip it this time. “You understand,” he says, “I wasn’t exactly there. Xavier’s the one who went up to the cottage; I wasn’t looking when he looked in the window. But I did overhear some things, before he panicked and ran off. What’s the official story? The stepfather tripped over a coffee table?”

  “…and cut himself.” Mouse blinks. “That’s not what happened?”

  “Well I don’t know,” says Gideon, enjoying her reaction. “Could be he was just delirious from all that blood loss. But it seems kind of strange to beg a coffee table for mercy, don’t you think?”

  I was dead.

  That in itself didn’t concern me much. I’d never been afraid of death. Of dying, yes; of a painful end, or a premature one—important things left undone—definitely. But the thought of actually being dead held no particular terror for me. I remembered the moment of my birth, and having come out of the dark, it seemed only right that I should eventually return there. The scary parts were all in-between.

  So being dead didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the way it didn’t bother me. In the no-place of oblivion, there aren’t supposed to be emotions; the time to be comfortable with your death is before it happens, not after. How was it I still had feelings on the subject?

  And as long as I was asking questions: how come I could still see? In the dark there is, by definition, nothing to look at. But here—wherever here was—there was something: though what the something was, exactly, was hard to say.

  A labyrinth, maybe: a symmetrical maze of raised and tightly winding pathways, divided down the middle by an especially deep trench. It was gray, which made me think of Coventry, but the layout seemed far too convoluted, unless Gideon was once again trying to discourage visitors.

  I was suspended above it, looking down, unable to move. That last part at least seemed appropriate: when you’re dead, you shouldn’t be able to move. As for the rest, though…

  I thought back over my death, trying to work out where and how the process might have gone wrong. Gideon had dropped me into the lake from a great height, and I’d struck the surface with tremendous force—I could only hope the house hadn’t been swept away by the tsunami that surely resulted. The impact alone had nearly killed me; I was already deep underwater by the time I came to my senses, and then there was nothing I could do but drown, my soul twirling like a bent propeller in the cold currents, spiraling downwards.

  It wasn’t physical, or metaphysical, damage that kept me from saving myself (though I thought I had a good idea now what it would feel like to break my back jumping off a bridge). It was despair: the certain knowledge that I had failed. Not just this latest failure, this sneak attack that I should have seen coming. All my failures: every inadequacy, misstep, and fuckup of my short life, all concentrated into a single self-revelation, like a weighted chain that bound me. You’ll learn, my father was always saying, and I had, one last lesson: I was useless. Useless.

  And so I drowned. It was a relief to finally reach the lake bottom, to slide down past the weeds and sink into the muck that is not muck, last light going out as my soul was sucked back into the void to be unmade. All over now, all finished. Nothing left to do but disappear.

  Wait. Wait.

  Yes, that was it: that was where the death scene had started to unravel: right at the point where I did. For my soul didn’t just dissolve uniformly into nothing; it came apart in stages, layers of identity peeling away, paring me down towards nonexistence. Only it never got that far, because the part of Andrew that was feeling sorry for himself, that welcomed dissolution, was among the first bits to be discarded. Once that distraction had been sloughed off, the Andrew that remained—the core Andrew who was thinking these thoughts even now—was no longer willing to give up so easily. Couldn’t give up: because his job wasn’t finished yet. That Andrew clung stubbornly to his Purpose, and held what was left of his soul together even as it continued to sink, down into…

  Oh.

  Oh, of course.

  The gray labyrinth: I wasn’t above it, looking down; I was below it, looking up. It was a geography, the geography, only seen from the other side. I hadn’t drowned in the lake bottom; I’d just passed through, and come out underneath, in—

  “The antipodes,” a voice said.

  Antipodes, right, of course that’s what you’d call it; although, like the strata in the Badlands hill faces, I’d never actually seen an antipodes before. Not what I would have expected from the name. I wondered about the plural: what portion of what I was looking at constituted a single antipode?

  “I really shouldn’t be wasting time on word games.”

  Who was that speaking? I tried to turn towards the voice but still couldn’t move, which was frustrating now that I knew I wasn’t dead. Thinking that a little more substance might help, I gathered back some of the layers I’d shed on the way down here, and sure enough, as my soul recoalesced, I started to regain my mobility. But then the sense of failure came back too, threatening to paralyze me all over again.

  Fortunately, there was a solution for that: I reached up to the geography and smoothed out a rough spot on one of the gray ridges. As though an emotional volume control had been turned way down, the bad feeling diminished to a level where I could handle it.

  It was still there, though. I really had made some bad mistakes, and some very bad decisions, and I knew it. It would be a lot nicer not to know it. What if I were to grab hold of that gray ridge and pull it clean off?

  “I’d better not,” the voice said. “That’s exactly the sort of thing that got me into this mess in the first place.”

  I could turn around now, so I did. But there was nobody else there.

  Talking to myself. Typical.

  “Typical,” the voice agreed good-naturedly, as I turned back to the geography. “So now what?”

  “Simple,” I said. “I’ve got to get back up there.”

  “And how do I plan to do that? This isn’t like walking around the house, or even like trying to escape from Coventry. To come back from here, I need someone to call me out.”

  “My father…”

  “…probably thinks I’m gone for good. If Captain Marco tried to fish my soul out of the lake and couldn’t find anything—”

  “Well then, I’ll just have to do it myself.”

  Skeptically: “Call myself out? Is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But if there’s no one else to do it for me…” I reached up again, and taking hold of the whole geography for leverage, said: “My name is Andrew Gage.”

  —and then cold, cold shock as I burst once more from the lake bed, the weeds and dark water partin
g violently as I drew myself up.

  The surface of the lake as I broached it was wild with storm. The mist was all gone, blown away by the same wind that was whipping the water into a frenzy. The sky above was black with clouds, and it was raining, thundering too. I treaded water and bobbed among the whitecaps until a lightning flash revealed the nearest stretch of shore. It seemed a long way off, but I knew that was an illusion: I’d already come a lot farther. I started swimming.

  There was no one waiting for me on the lakebank this time. The boat dock and the pumpkin field were both deserted; Captain Marco’s ferryboat rode unattended in its moorings, and Silent Joe’s shovel leaned mutely against the pumpkin-field gate. At first glance it looked like the house might be deserted too: the pulpit was empty, and all the windows facing the lake had been shuttered. But looking more carefully, I could see light shining under the front door. I marched up the path, and without stopping to knock, let myself in.

  The house wasn’t empty; it was full. A meeting had been called: the long table was set up in the common room, and every chair but mine was occupied; above, in the gallery, the full complement of Witnesses was gathered behind the railing.

  All heads turned my way as I came in. Adam greeted my arrival with his usual insolent smirk, but every other soul at the table seemed stunned to see me. “Andrew!” my father cried, jumping to his feet.

  I should have said something—“Hi,” at least—but a sense of mission drove me now, and I went straight for the door under the stairs. The knob rattled beneath my grasp but still wouldn’t turn.

  I decided that wouldn’t do.

  “This door is not locked,” I said.

  The knob turned. The door opened, swinging inwards, and I stepped through onto a narrow landing. The landing and the flight of stairs that descended from it were festooned with cobwebs, and there was a layer of dust as thick as the one in the cottage attic. Visible in the dust were two distinct sets of footprints.