The Gray House полностью

He knew then that he’d never be able to explain. The danger was not in ignorance. It was in the word itself. The word “Outsides” that they had stripped of its former meaning and pressed into their service. They had decided that House was House, and Outsides was a thing apart, instead of being something that contained the House in it. But no one had understood. No one had felt anything even when looking at the blackened windows. It was only he who became scared when they had sprung the trap, taking away his ability to look at that which they refused to see. Elk was smart, but even he had never understood them. The poor kids, they were hard done by . . . Elk had believed that. And the graduation of the window tormentors hadn’t taught him anything either, even though in the days before their exit the House had been saturated with sticky horror, making Ralph gasp in its noxious fumes. He had already wanted to run even then, but he kept hoping that as soon as those seniors were gone everything would change, the others would be different. It even worked for a while. A very short while, as the next batch was still too little to fight reality seriously. Then it turned out that they were just as good at it as their predecessors, maybe even better, and all he had left was to watch them and wait. He insisted that they were given too much freedom, but anytime he mentioned this he got the “unfortunate children” reply, and those words made him wince, just as they themselves winced when they heard something like that. So he watched and waited.

Waited until they grew up, molding themselves and their territory. Until they reached the age of leaving. Their predecessors had tried to throttle the passage of time in their own way: twelve suicide attempts, five of them successful. These had simply dragged everything around them into the maelstrom of their exit. That vortex had claimed Elk as well, even as he still thought of them as harmless children. It was possible he had understood something, but by then it was already too late.

Ralph often wondered what had been going through Elk’s mind in those last moments, if he had time to think about anything at all. They had just brushed him aside like a grain of sand, a piece of debris that for some reason clung to them as they ran. They didn’t mean it, they loved him, to the extent they were capable of love. It’s just that they didn’t care. When their personal Apocalypse had struck, one counselor was of no consequence. No one could have stopped them, not two, or three.

Had he survived that night, he would have understood what I figured out long before then. The world into which they are thrown once they turn eighteen does not exist for them. So if they have to leave, it is imperative that they destroy it for everyone else too.

That graduation left behind a blood-soaked void so horrible that it frightened everyone. Even those who had no direct connection to the House. The management had been replaced, and once it had been, all the teachers and counselors left. All except Ralph. He stayed. And getting to know the new principal, a man very far removed from humanistic ideals, proved the deciding factor. Those who had not run away after the June events rushed for the exits after the first talk with the principal. Ralph was convinced that this time everything was going to be different. That he would be able to do everything in his power to stop them when the time came. He had that opportunity now, knowing that there was no one who would interfere with him by playing the “poor little kids” card.