They passed through another door. Shellane was too groggy to register much about the room beyond, but he caught sight of a hearth in which a roaring fire had been built, and though he realized he was not the most reliable of witnesses at the moment, he could have sworn he saw tiny homunculi playing in the flames, hopping from log to log. Grace was speaking urgently, the words unintelligible, but he had the impression that she was pleading. Another room. His head had cleared to a degree, but his vision was still impaired—or so he assumed. Then he recognized that the indistinctness of the large shadowy figure sitting cross-legged in a corner was due not to any failure of his eyesight, but rather to the fact that its black substance was in a state of flux. A muffled shouting issued from the figure, and as Shellane was hauled past it, he saw that the whirling black stuff was a filmy shell encasing a human form, and further saw a man’s face within the shell, pain contorting his features. At the next door the tallest of the uglies again manipulated a little patch of ridges in the wood. Shellane felt a perverse satisfaction in knowing that he had been right about the doors.
The room into which the creature then dragged him was small, the ceiling so low that the uglies had to walk in a half-crouch, with a gabled roof and a shuttered window that extended up from the floor. Shellane was left to lie beside the window and, when one of the uglies threw the shutters open onto a foggy darkness, he saw a huge black fist jutting from the boards directly below and realized where he must be. He was past fighting. His ribs ached, his left knee throbbed, and his mind worked sluggishly. Even when a rope was placed around his neck, he could not rouse himself, but only wondered how they were going to pass his body through the fist, a question answered when another of the uglies pressed a finger to a ridged patch beside the window and, with terrible slowness, the fist uncurled as if to welcome him. Grace let out a shriek. He turned on his back and spotted her at the door. Two of their captors were fondling her roughly, grabbing her breasts and buttocks. He started to tell her something, but forgot what he had been going to say. It became irrelevant as a foot nudged him out the window.
He dropped only a foot or so, but the rope choked him and his feet kicked against the boards. In reflex, he grabbed the rope, tried to haul himself back up; but he was being lowered and made no progress. Overhead, the uglies were framed by the window, one embracing a still-struggling Grace, whose face was pressed into its chest, and the biggest paying out the rope. It was all chaotic, a delirium. His vision darkened, and he felt a tremendous heat inside his skull. His right foot bumped against the half-curled hand, and then he was inside it, waist-deep in its loose grip. He caught at its upper edge, levering himself up with his elbows, refusing to be lowered any farther. The surface of the uppermost finger was crusted with brownish stains. He puzzled over them, wondering what they might be. That question was answered as the hand began to close into a fist and he understood that some who’d had the misfortune to happen onto the house while alive had chosen to be crushed rather than hanged. Gasping for air, his throat constricted, he looked up to Grace, not seeking help but dimly moved to find her. The figures above were joined in a wobbling dance, pushing one another to gain a better view of the proceedings, communicating in grunts and growls and screams. And then the smallest of the four, the shrillest, flung herself at the tallest, clawing at its eyes. The rope came uncoiling down toward Shellane. He released his grip on the hand, allowing himself to fall, this due to a sympathetic reaction to the rope’s fall as much as to his vague comprehension that by doing so he would not hang. His head struck the first joint of the fist’s little finger, and he dropped the last few feet, landing on his back with a jolting impact.
He did not black out, and the recognition that he was free penetrated the confused clutter of his thoughts. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pushed up to a standing position and began a limping retreat. Grace screamed at him to run, and he threw himself forward with his shoulders, dragging his left leg, moving blindly through the fog. He knew she must still be struggling with the uglies, or else they would be on him—his pace was much too slow to outrun them—and this spurred him to limp faster. There was nothing he could do for her, yet this pragmatic view did not sit well with him and every step he took sparked feelings of shame and inadequacy. Wincing whenever he planted his left foot, he kept on going until, after only a little while, he heard the wind sighing in the spruce and water lightly slapping the shore, and realized that he was safe, an infinity removed from certain lesser demons and their rickety black hell, and utterly alone.
Once he had bandaged his wounds, believing that Grace would not return to the cabin, that she was lodged in a cell filled with burning light or enduring some crueler punishment, Shellane spent the remainder of the night hoping he was wrong. Whatever pain she was experiencing, he was to blame—he had insinuated himself into a situation that he had not fully grasped, and as a result he had caused her situation, already bleak, to worsen. Staying at the house would have served no purpose, yet he felt he had breached a bond implicit to the relationship, and he castigated himself for having abandoned her. The hours stretched and he understood once again how frail and attenuated his attachment to life had become. Without Grace, without the renewal of passion she had inspired, he could not conceive of going on as before, preparing a new identity, finding a new hiding place. What could any place offer him apart from the fundamentals of survival? And what good were they without a reason to survive? As it grew increasingly clear that she would not return, he sat at the table breeding a dull fog of thought, illuminated now and then by fits of memory. Her face, her laugh, her moods. Yet those memories did not brighten him. All the ordinary instances of her person that shone so extraordinarily bright in his mind were grayed with doubt. He knew almost nothing about her and he suspected that if he were capable of analysis, he might discover that the things he knew were dross not gold, and that she was not in the least extraordinary. She simply seemed to fit a shape in his brain, to be unreasonably perfect in some essential yet incomprehensible way. Something had been ripped out of him. Some scrap of spirit necessary for existence. Every part of his body labored. Heart slogging, lungs heaving. He felt himself the center of a howling absence.
To distract himself, he wrote lists. Long lists, this time, comprised chiefly of supposition. His knowledge of the house was limited, but he was certain about the doors—the uglies were able, thanks to their strength, to depress the ridged patches on the walls with their fingers and thus program their destination. Though pointless to do so, he could not keep from speculating on the nature of the place and the apparent infinity of locations to which it was, in some unfathomable way, connected. It was hard to accept that the afterlife possessed an instrumentality. Back when he was a believer, his notion of heaven had been diffuse, his vision of hell informed by comic books. Spindly crags and bleak promontories atop which the greater demons perched, peering into the fires where their minions oversaw the barbecue of souls. The house was at odds with both conceptions, but now he had no choice other than to believe that beyond death lay a limitless and intricate plenum whose character was infinitely various, heavens and hells and everything in-between. It was similar to the Tibetan view—souls attracted to destinations that accorded with what they had cherished in life, be it virtuous or injurious. Unlikely, though, that Tibetan cosmology had any analog to the black house. If he found himself trapped in the house, he thought, he’d study the way the uglies manipulated the doors, then devise a mechanism that would allow him to exert more force when pushing…