No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  Once or twice in the last four days, usually after several drinks, Owen would embrace his son with gruff affection, a crooked hug or beery kiss that would bring a cautious smile to the boy’s face before Owen lost interest and drifted back to whatever he was watching on TV. Then the boy would sit with him on the couch or on the floor, watching Owen with a child’s clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, loving his father but never fully trusting him.

  Scott pulled into the driveway and parked, rousing Owen with the silence where the sound of the engine had been. “Thanks for dinner, bro,” he muttered, climbing out and ambling up the walkway to their parents’ house. Scott and Henry followed, the boy looking as if he wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure what. In the living room, Scott heard the TV switch on, followed by the scrunch of compressed couch springs and, seconds later, the rumble of deeply sedated snoring.

  “You want to come upstairs and help me pack?” Scott asked, and Henry responded by following him up to the sewing room, installing himself on the single bed with his legs dangling off the end. Something was on his mind: something that took a moment to find its way out.

  “Was Grandpa crazy?” Henry asked. “When he died?”

  “He had a disease that made him forget a lot of things.”

  “Alzheimer’s?”

  “Right.” At first, Scott had been floored by his nephew’s capacity to seize on a name or concept upon hearing it only once; now he simply accepted it as part of some inexplicable cosmic whim. “People with Alzheimer’s can’t really take care of themselves. They’ll walk away and forget where they live or forget to take their medication.”

  “My dad says Grandpa used to cry a lot.”

  Scott paused to weigh his answer. “I think it’s been hard for him since your grandma died. He probably spent a lot of time feeling frustrated and confused. It’s hard to understand, even for grown-ups, but there are times when it’s better to let go of life and find some kind of peace—even if it makes the people around you sad.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Henry was looking past him, at the laptop on the sewing table. “Do you have any games on your computer?”

  “I might.” In fact, the same day he’d booked his flight to New Hampshire for the funeral, Scott had gone to Best Buy and purchased a dozen games designed for elementary-age kids, patiently installing them on the computer’s C drive, one after another. Henry found one that he liked, something about hunting robot sharks from a speedboat, and sat down to play.

  At ten o’clock, yawning, he slipped down from the chair and lay down on the air mattress where Scott had spent the last few restless nights. Within moments, he’d rolled onto his stomach and was breathing deeply into the pillow, one arm flung up above his head. Scott slipped Henry’s sneakers from his feet and drew the blanket up over his shoulders, paused, and after a moment, bent down and kissed the boy’s cheek just above a dried ketchup streak.

  At length, he found himself picking up the manuscript with his father’s name on it, scowling more at the existence of the pages than at what they might actually convey. He opened the drawer of the sewing table, brought out a pair of his mother’s old pinking shears, and snipped the twine. The sheets of paper, long bound together, were released with an almost audible sigh.

  Peeling back the title page, Scott glanced at the first typewritten lines:

  Chapter 1

  From the outside, the house appeared completely normal.

  My father wrote those words, he thought, a low-wattage tremor running down to his fingertips. Without realizing it, he’d already continued reading:

  They had followed the dirt road at least a mile through the woods to get here, and Faircloth hadn’t gotten a good look at it until the real estate agent stopped to open the iron gates. It was a tired old relic from some other time, smooth where it should have been angular, angular where it should’ve been smooth, at least a hundred years old, with sprawling wings and dormers and porticoes that seemed to have been added on as afterthoughts. There was nothing beautiful about it. But it was in his price range, which by itself made it exceptional.

  The interior, however, was where it all changed.

  The real estate man stood back, letting Faircloth wander into the foyer, where something caught his eye.

  “These corners,” Faircloth said, pointing.

  The agent smiled in anticipation of the question. “Yes?”

  “They’re all rounded.” Faircloth squinted up where the walls and ceiling came together, not in sharp angles but in edgeless curves. He looked down at the floor. It, too, blended into the walls without any definitive line of demarcation.

  “Most people don’t notice that right away,” the agent said. “You’re a very observant man, Mr. Faircloth.”

  Faircloth, who didn’t consider himself particularly observant but recognized a salesman’s flattery when he heard it, continued to inspect the rooms.

  “Look all you want,” the agent said. “You won’t find a single true angle or straight line in the place–an eccentricity of the original designer. The effect is quite singular. If you get out a carpenter’s level, you’ll discover that the walls and ceilings, even the windowsills and doorways, all have a slight inward curve. Hence the name of the property.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Round House.”

  Faircloth snorted. Entering the dining room, he found himself standing in front of a doorway that seemed to have no place in that particular spot. He paused in front of it, resting his hand on the brass handle, and that was where he stopped. Despite the August heat wave, which this afternoon had brought the temperature throughout this part of New Hampshire well above ninety degrees, the handle felt ice-cold.

  “What’s this?” Faircloth asked.

  The real estate man didn’t answer immediately. Perhaps he’d been woolgathering and needed a moment to catch up. “That? Another closet, I suppose. I haven’t looked in it myself.”

  Turning the handle, Faircloth opened the door and looked inside. At first, he had been sure that what he would find would be a closet, with an empty metal bar and a few forgotten wire hangers, some old newspaper laid across an upper shelf, or maybe just another small, rounded-off room.

  But it wasn’t a closet.

  And it wasn’t a room.

  Opening up in front of him on the other side of the door was a long, narrow hallway with black walls and a black ceiling. It appeared to go straight back, perhaps twenty feet or farther, before ending resolutely with a plain black wall. There were no wall sconces or fixtures in the hall, but with the natural sunlight streaming through the dining room to his back, he could see quite well that the hallway in front of him had no doors or windows either, that it just ran its course and stopped.

  “That’s strange,” the real estate man said, from immediately behind him, and Faircloth jumped and looked back, feeling silly at his startled reaction.

  “What?”

  “You don’t even notice it from the outside.”

  Without bothering to reply, Faircloth stepped into the hallway, sure that he’d overlooked a closed window or doorway in there upon first glance. A hallway without windows or lights was poor planning; a hallway without doors simply didn’t make sense, even in a place as decidedly eccentric as Round House.

  But there were no doors. He walked the length of the wing, running his fingers along the smooth walls, wondering if the previous owners had sealed the doors shut and plastered over them, but he felt nothing. It was almost as if the entire addition had been built for the sole purpose of being shut off, walled away from the rest of the sad old house.

  I’ll read just a little further, Scott thought, in the silence of the sewing room, and I’ll go to bed. He flipped the page, his eyes already moving over the words he found there.

  IT WAS FOUR THIRTY IN THE MORNING when Scott turned the last page of his father’s manuscript. He laid it aside and stood up to stretch, squeezing the pins and needles from his legs, bent down to pick up Henry,
and carried the boy back to his own bed without really thinking about what he was doing. In every significant way, he was still engulfed in the world of his father’s story.

  Set in 1944, The Black Wing told the story of Karl Faircloth, a shell-shocked soldier sent home early from Europe, put to work in his ailing father’s machine shop, and engaged to Maureen, a teller at the local mercantile bank. Scraping together what little money he’s saved, Faircloth decides to buy a home for himself and his new bride, the old house in the woods outside of town. Round House—with its queasy lack of angularity and its peculiar hidden wing, the long, black vestibule containing no doors and no windows—seems the only affordable option.

  Faircloth and his wife haven’t been living long in Round House when they begin hearing strange noises coming from the shuttered wing off the dining room. Sometimes it sounds like a scratching noise, like an animal trying to get out. Other times it sounds like whimpering. Upon investigation, the couple discovers that the corridor has grown both longer than before and rounder. After a night of quarreling and heavy drinking, they find themselves lost in it like two children in a fairy tale, simultaneously giggling and frightened. Uncertainty has begun to pluck at the strings of their marriage in other ways as well. Faircloth is convinced that Maureen is having an affair with a loan officer from the bank, and his drinking gets worse, compounding his jealousy and catalyzing into a speechless, suffocating rage. With their domestic life disintegrating around them, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the windowless corridor and the soft, irregular scratching noises that emanate from it while he lies awake in their marriage bed, the room spinning, waiting for his wife to come home.

  One night, waiting for Maureen to come home, Faircloth drinks himself to the brink of oblivion, staggers to his old footlocker, and unwraps the Luger he smuggled home from Germany, stolen off the body of a dead German soldier. He is sitting at the dining room table loading bullets into the clip when the hallway door clicks and swings open, releasing a gasp of violently cold air. Faircloth shivers and looks up.

  That was where the story ended.

  At first, Scott was sure there must have been some mistake. For a moment, despite the lateness of the hour, he actually considered going back out to the shed with a flashlight and nosing around for the rest of it. What stopped him wasn’t the inconvenience of putting his shoes back on and getting cobwebs on his face but the awareness, the implacable certainty, that there were no more pages. For whatever reason, he knew that this was where his father had stopped.

  That was when he lost his mind.

  The thought threw a jolt through him. It implied that the manuscript was recent, something generated in the final years, as the old man’s dementia had taken root in the floorboards of his psyche. It seemed impossible. Almost as unsettling was the fact that he’d written this at all—after all, he was Frank Mast, the town electrician, a stoic man with a purely utilitarian view of language.

  And then there was the other thing.

  His father’s book—what there was of it—was good. Damn good. The pain inside it felt urgent, white-hot, and inevitable, as if sprung from a wound in the old man’s side. The situation it described felt real, an honest attempt to exorcise demons from a mind driven mad by guilt.

  Scott had gone to college to be a writer. Back then, he had sat through countless writing workshops, had endured whole reams of terrible prose, his own and others’; he had hung out in coffee shops with his computer, tapping and tinkering away without ever completing anything of substance. His sketches evoked unhappiness in detail without any particular point of reference, the malaise of characters smoking and drinking too much while waiting around for something to happen. Rarely, if ever, had they become actual stories—like his would-be fiction career, they were never completed, only abandoned.

  He lay down on the mattress, shut his eyes, and slept hard, without dreams. Daylight woke him, and he glanced at the clock and saw it was almost nine. He had a noon flight out of Manchester, ninety minutes from here. Scott brushed his teeth and showered, bundled up his clothes, and, at the last moment, grabbed the stack of manuscript pages and stuffed it into his suitcase, zipping it up like a thief, and then took it out again and looked at it, feeling ridiculous. The manuscript wasn’t his. But he wanted to take it.

  Gathering the pile of pages in his arms, he started downstairs, rounded the corner, and saw the woman standing in the kitchen.

  “Hello?” she said. “Anybody home?”

  She wore a black sweater and form-fitting jeans and was holding a large cake pan. Scott was immediately struck with the feeling of having seen her somewhere before. She had significant brown eyes—city eyes, was his first thought—that appeared to be simultaneously guileless and guarded against any potential fiber of ill will.

  Only then did he realize who she was.

  “Sonia?”

  “Hi, Scott.”

  “Hi. Wow.” He stood there blinking, waiting for words to come, and realized he was going to have to go searching for them. “It’s great to see you.”

  “You too.”

  “I didn’t hear you down here.” His lips were tingling weirdly and felt disconnected from his face, as if he’d just taken a bite of some extravagantly hot pepper.

  “I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind. The door was unlocked.”

  Now they felt numb, as if the pepper had been poisoned. “No,” he said, “that’s fine.” When, he wondered, was this going to stop feeling unreal? “How have you been?”

  “Good.”

  “You look great.”

  It might not have been the right thing to say, perhaps too superficial given the circumstances. She stood there for a moment watching him carefully, as if the compliment had been some kind of clumsy negotiating tactic.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Sonia said. “I heard—”

  “Thanks.”

  “We weren’t able to make it to the service, unfortunately. Dad’s doctors have him on permanent bed rest these days. You remember my dad.”

  “Sure,” Scott said, still feeling vaguely like a subpar actor who had wandered out onstage without first reading the scene. He was beginning to realize that the disconnected feeling wasn’t going away anytime soon.

  “He’s got end-stage lung cancer, and there’s not much time left. You must know how hard that is.” She drew in a breath and held it, most likely auditioning possible things to say and approving none of them. “Anyhow, look, I don’t mean to bring you down, especially not now; you’ve got a lot on your mind already. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I just think it is so unnerving, watching your parents become … childlike again.”

  “I didn’t really know my father all that well.” He’d never said anything like that out loud—never even consciously thought it—yet here it was anyway, this unspeakable confession, unable to be retracted. “After my mom died, everything else … It all sort of happened while I was away doing other things.” His hands were restless, moving up to cover his arms. “I could’ve checked in with him, picked up the phone, got on a plane, but I never seemed to find the time.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Would you—” He realized he ought to at least look at her cake, but he literally couldn’t drag his eyes away from her face. “I was just about to make coffee. Do you want some?”

  “Sure.”

  From the living room, a floorboard squeaked like a nail being pried from a rusty pipe. Another creak followed—a whole chorus of them, in fact—as if some giant of unreasonable bulk were challenging the tensile strength of the floor itself, and Owen came around the corner in his T-shirt and jeans, scratching under one arm and wincing at the light. His face was pouched and swollen and seemed to hang in irregular bags of flesh from the oversized box of his skull. “Better make an extra pot.”

  “Owen, you remember Sonia Graham.”

  Owen chuckled; Scott looked at her for an explanation. He wasn’t aware of how effortlessly this c
ame back to him, silently glancing at her with the expectation that the message would arrive intact. And, of course, it did.

  “I tend bar at Fusco’s,” Sonia said. “Three nights a week. That’s how I found out you were back in town.”

  “Fusco’s?” Scott frowned. “We were just there last night.”

  “That was my night off. Lisa told me you came in.” Sonia fired a sidelong glance at Owen. “Your brother must’ve neglected to mention you were back in town.”

  “Hey, I figured everybody knew that Hallmark boy was back,” Owen said with an overtly florid gesture. “He’s the talk of the town.”

  Sonia cocked an eyebrow. “Hallmark boy?”

  “It’s a long story,” Scott said.

  “Scott’s a grown-up,” Owen muttered. “He can take care of himself. Just like you.” And then, with real interest: “What you got there?”

  “Chocolate cake,” Sonia said, holding out the pan.

  “Fuckin’ A.” Owen nodded, the hungover smile on his whiskered face looking real, and Scott remembered, as if realizing it for the first time, how Sonia Graham could have that effect on people, tricking them into exposing their finer qualities, whether they intended to or not. “Save me a piece, I’ll be right back.”

  Sonia smiled. “You better hurry.”

  Owen trudged up the stairs, and a moment later, Scott heard him chatting with Henry, who must have been up in their old bedroom, reading the tattered comic books that he’d found in a box under the bed. In the meantime, he was aware that he had been left alone with Sonia, neither one of them knowing quite what to say until her eyes settled on the stack of pages lying on the table.