Shellane recalled the naked man who had pursued him in the woods. “You ever see them around the lake?”
“The uglies? Sometimes they follow me out, but they won’t go far from the house. They only follow a little ways.”
“Why’s it so difficult to get around inside the house?”
“It’s not difficult, it’s just you never know where the doors will take you. The house changes. You go through a door and it kind of sucks you in. Like…whoosh!, and you’re somewhere else. But you can’t retrace your steps. If you go back through the same door, you won’t wind up in the room you left. I try to figure it out, but it seems I never have enough energy. Or I’m too busy hiding from the uglies.”
“But you return here,” he said. “You learned how to do that.”
“That’s different. It’s not like I understand what I’m doing. I get a strong feeling that I have to leave, so I head for the nearest door, and when I step through I’m back at the lake. I think it’s the same for the others. At least I’ve been in rooms when people suddenly space out. They get a blank expression and then they take off.”
She tugged at him, drew him down beside her. He lay on his back, studying the water stains on the ceiling, appearing to map a rippled white country with a sketchily rendered brownish-orange coastline. His arm went about her, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Thinking about the house?”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“Maybe not.”
“But you’re going to do it anyway?”
“I’m good with problems. It’s what I did for a living.”
“I thought you were a thief.”
“I wasn’t a snatch-and-grab artist. I stole things that were hard to steal.”
A gust of wind shuddered the bedroom window, and coming out of nowhere, a hard rain slanted against the panes.
“When you pass through the doors,” he said, “you say it feels as if you’re being sucked in. Does anything else happen?”
“I get lights in my eyes. Like the sort that come when you’re hit in the head. And right after that, I’ll get a glimpse of other places. Just a flash. I can’t always tell what it is I’m seeing, but they don’t seem part of the house.”
“What makes you think the ugly ones know how to get around in the house?”
“Because whenever they take me with them, we always go the same places. They don’t display any uncertainty. They know exactly where they’re headed.”
“Do they do anything to the doors before opening them? Do they touch anything…maybe turn something, push something?”
She closed her eyes. “When I’m with them, I’m afraid. I don’t notice much.”
“You said there are about twenty of them?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What about the rest of you…How many?”
“The house is so big, it’s impossible to tell. A lot, though. I hardly ever see anyone I’ve seen before.”
“It doesn’t look all that big.”
“When you’re standing outside,” she said, “you don’t really get the picture.”
Shellane worried the problem, turning it this way and that, not trying to reach a conclusion, just familiarizing himself with it, as if he were getting accustomed to the weight and balance of a stone he was about to throw. He heard a rustling, saw that Grace had picked up the sheets of paper on which Broillard had scrawled his lyrics and was reading them.
“God, this is…” She made a disparaging sound. “Delusional.”
“He’s better when he writes about feelings he doesn’t have,” said Shellane. “Grandiose, beautiful feelings. He’s got no talent for honesty.”
“Not many do,” said Grace.
When she left that afternoon, he did not follow her, though he intended to follow her soon. That was the one path available to him if he was to help her, and helping her was all he wanted now. He sat at his computer and accessed treatises on the afterlife written from a variety of religious perspectives. He made notes and organized them into thematic sections. Then he wrote lists, the way he did before every score he’d ever planned. Not coherent lists, merely a random assortment of things he knew about the situation. Avenues worth exploring. Under the word “Grace” he wrote:
—becomes a real woman in my company
—can taste things, drink, but doesn’t eat
—lapses into ghostly state around others (once with me alone)
—endures a state of half-life at the house
—feels that there is something she’s supposed to do
—“knows” I can help her
He tapped the pen against the table, then added:
—is she telling me everything?
—if not, why?
—Duplicity? Fear? Something else?
It was not that he sensed duplicity in her, but her situation was of a kind that bred duplicity. Just like a convict, wouldn’t she be looking to play any angle in order to improve her lot? And wouldn’t that breed other forms of duplicity? It was not inconceivable that she might love him and at the same time be playing him.
Under the word “House” he wrote:
—In my Father’s house, many mansions…
—Philosophical speculations—particularized form of afterlife? For people who’ve given up. Who, failing to overcome problems, surrender to death. (Look up Limbo in Catholic dictionary)
—The uglies (men?). Demons. Instruments of God’s justice. Forget Christianity. What if the afterlife is an anarchy? Lots of feudal groups controlled by a variety of beings who can cross back and forth between planes of existence.
Science fiction, he thought; but then so was Jesus.
—A maze. Hallucination?
—Mutable reality?
—The doors. Core of the problem? Can they be manipulated?
He made several more notations under “House,” then began a new list under the heading “Me.”
—Have passed over into the afterlife once, maybe, twice if dream can be counted. Why?
He circled the word “Why”—it was an omnibus question. Why had he turned off the highway toward the lake? A whim? Had he been led? Was some ineffable force at work? Why had he, after years of caution, been moved to such drastic incaution? He wrote the word “Love” and then crossed it out. Love was the bait that had lured him, but he believed the hook was something else again.
The lists were skimpy. His preliminary lists for taking down a shopping mall bank had been far more substantial. This would be, he thought, very much like the job in upstate New York, the house with the subterranean maze. He’d have to case the place while attempting to survive it…if survival was possible. And maybe that was the answer to all the “Whys?”. He could feel his body preparing for danger, cooking up a fresh batch of adrenaline, putting an edge on his senses. It was the kick he’d always been a chump for, the thrill that writing songs could not provide, the seasoning he needed to become involved in the moment. He had caught the scent of danger, followed the scent to the lake, and there had taken it in his arms. Like Grace, for the first time in a very long while, he felt alive.
After waking, Grace liked to have a shower. It was not a cleanliness thing—at least so Shellane thought—as much as a retreat. He assumed that she must have taken a lot of showers when she was in the world, hiding from Broillard behind the spray, deriving comfort from her warm solitude. Shellane usually let her shower alone, but the next afternoon, he joined her and they made love with soapy abandon, her heels hooked behind his thighs, back pressed up against the thin metal wall, whose surface dimpled and popped when he thrust her against it. As they clung together afterward, he watched rivulets of water running over her shoulderblades toward the pale voluptuous curves of her ass, gleaming with a film of soap, dappled with bubbles. He saw nothing unusual to begin with—he wasn’t looking for anything. But then he realized that the streams of water were not flowing true, they were curving away from the small of her back, as if repelled by a force emanating from that spot. Curving away and then scattering into separate drops, and the drops skittering off around the swells of her hips. Fear brushed his mind with a feathery touch, a lover’s touch. Instead of recoiling, however, he moved his hand to cover the place that the water avoided, pressing his fingertips against the skin, and imagined that he felt a deep, slow pulse. This was the thing he most wanted, he thought. The seat of what he loved.