“Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.
“Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe you grew up in a place where there was always a party going on, all the time, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or maybe just somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t sleep as well without that TV on. You can’t get to sleep. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”
“That’s sick,” Sullivan said.
“Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”
Mei said, “No, wait, go back. There’s got to be more than that!”
“Not really,” Sisi said. “No. Not much more. He’d brought a picnic dinner with us. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his childhood. Then he gave me the tour. Showed me all the stains where those people died. I kept looking out the window and the sun got lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”
They were all in that house now, flicking through those rooms, one after another. “Maureen?” Mei said. “Can you change it back?”
“Of course,” Maureen said. Once again there were the greyhounds, the garden, the fire, and the roses. Shadows slicked the flagstones, blotted and clung to the tapestries.
“Better,” Sisi said. “Thank you. You went and found it online, didn’t you, Maureen? That was exactly the way I remember it. I went outside to think and have a cigarette. Yeah, I know. Bad astronaut. But I still kind of wanted to sleep with this guy. Just once. So he was messed up, so what? Sometimes messed-up sex is the best. When I came back inside the house, I still hadn’t made up my mind. And then I made up my mind in a hurry. Because this guy? I went to look for him and he was down on the floor in that little boy’s bedroom. Under the window, okay? On top of that stain. He was rolling around on the floor. You know, the way cats do? He had this look on his face. Like when they get catnip. I got out of there in a hurry. Drove away in his Land Rover. The keys were still in the ignition. Left it at a transport café and hitched the rest of the way home and never saw him again.”
“You win,” Portia said. “I don’t know what you win, but you win. That guy of yours was wrong.”
“What about the artist? I mean, what he did,” Mei said. “That Liam guy would have been okay if it weren’t for what he did. Right? I mean it’s something to think about. Say we find some nice Goldilocks planet. If the conditions are suitable and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Did they come along with Aune? With us? Are they here now? If we tell Maureen to build a haunted house around us right now, does she have to make the ghosts? Or do they just show up?”
Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”
The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.
“Maureen!” Portia said. “Don’t you dare!”
Gwenda said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” Sisi said. “What are you saying?”
Gwenda looked at the others. Then Sisi again. Sisi stretched luxuriously, weightlessly. Gwenda thought of the stain on the carpet, the man rolling on it like a cat.
“Gwenda, my love. What are you trying to say?” Sisi said.
“I know a ghost story,” Maureen said. “I know one, after all. Do you want to hear it?”
Before anyone could answer, they were in the Great Room again, except they were outside it, too. They floated, somehow, in a great nothingness. But there was the table again with dinner upon it, where they had sat with one another.
The room grew darker and colder and the lost crew of the ship House of Mystery sat around the table.
That sister crew, those old friends, they looked up from their meal, from their conversation. They turned and regarded the crew of the ship House of Secrets. They wore dress uniforms, as if in celebration, but they were maimed by some catastrophe. They lifted their ruined hands and waved, smiling.
There was a smell of char and chemicals and icy rot that Gwenda almost knew.
And then it was her own friends around the table. Mei, Sullivan, Portia, Aune, Sisi. She saw herself sitting there, hacked almost in two. She got up, moved toward herself, then vanished.
The Great Room reshaped itself out of nothingness and horror. They were back in the English country house. The air was full of sour spray. Someone had thrown up. Someone else sobbed.
Aune said, “Maureen, that was unkind.”
Maureen said nothing. She went about the room like a ghost, coaxing the vomit into a ball.
“The hell was that?” Sisi said. “Maureen? What were you thinking? Gwenda? My darling?” She reached for Gwenda’s hand, but Gwenda pushed away.
She went forward in a great spasm, her arms extended to catch the wall. Going before her on the right hand, the ship House of Secrets, and on the left, House of Mystery.
She could no longer tell the one from the other.
Light
two men, one raised by wolves
The man at the bar on the stool beside her: bent like a hook over some item. A book, not a drink. A children’s book, dog-eared. When he noticed her stare, he grinned and said, “Got a light?” It was a Friday night, and The Splinter was full of men saying things. Some guy off in a booth was saying, for example, “Well, sure, you can be raised by wolves and lead a normal life but—”
She said, “I don’t smoke.”
The man straightened up. He said, “Not that kind of light. I mean a light. Do you have a light?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. And then because he was not bad looking, she said, “Sorry.”
“Stupid bitch,” he said. “Never mind.” He went back to his book. The pages were greasy and soft and torn; he had it open at a watercolor illustration of a boy and a girl standing in front of a dragon the size of a Volkswagen bus. The man had a pen. He’d drawn word bubbles coming out of the children’s mouths, and now he was writing in words. The children were saying—
The man snapped the book shut; it was a library book.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask why you’re defacing that book?”
“I don’t know, can you? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but why ask me?” the man said. Turning his back to her, he hunched over the picture book again.
Which was really too much. She had once been a child. She owned a library card. She opened up her shoulder bag and took a needle out of the travel sewing kit. She palmed the needle and then, after finishing off her Rum and Rum and Coke — a drink she’d invented in her twenties and was still very fond of — she jabbed the man in his left buttock. Very fast. Her hand was back in her lap and she was signaling the bartender for another drink when the man beside her howled and sat up. Now everyone was looking at him. He slid off his bar stool and hurried away, glancing back at her once in outrage.