The Gray House полностью

He watched them from the very beginning, and he began to see the ways in which they were changing even before the transformation started happening. He took the Third and the Fourth, the strangest and the most dangerous, even though it was silly back then to think of them this way. He waited for a long time, not knowing what he was waiting for, until finally he noticed it: something was out of place in their rooms. The rooms were somehow different from others. And as the rooms changed, so too did their inhabitants. The change was subtle, untraceable for any but the most sensitive observer; it had to be felt on the skin, inhaled with the air, and there had been times when weeks passed before he was able to really once again enter the place they were creating for themselves, creating by imperceptibly transforming the one that actually existed. With time he became better and better at it, and then, to his horror, he noticed that this domain, this invisible world, was not immune to incursions from other, completely random people. There could be only one explanation: this world came to exist on its own, or was on the threshold of existence. That’s when he ran. But even as he was running, he knew that he would be back, to see this through, to watch the credits, to find out how it ended this time. He had accepted that there was nothing he could do to stop whatever was going to happen, he just needed to know what happened. Because even while he was learning from those who came before, they were learning too, and much faster. They wouldn’t need to paint over the windows. He was sure that they only had to convince themselves that the windows weren’t there. And then, likely as not, the windows would cease to exist.

The Crossroads piano was glinting, unsheathed. He stepped on a piece of tape, a red snake curled underfoot. He was treading the middle of the hallway now. Still his own trail . . . The three letters R jumped out at him from the wall. Bold as a signature, as a badge of his presence.

He froze. His name wasn’t Ralph at all. This nickname, name-nick, he’d hated from the moment he got it. Precisely because it was a name. He’d much prefer to be called Shaggy, or Pansy, whatever, if only it sounded like a nick instead of a name that could be mistaken for his own. So naturally, because of this, of his loathing of “Ralph,” it had stuck to him for this long, outliving all of his previous designations. Those who had christened him had left, and then those who had been squirts when it happened had left as well, and now the ones who hadn’t even been there back then were grown up, and still he remained Ralph. Or just a letter, a capital letter with a number. The letter was even worse. But it was the only way they wrote him up on the walls, and even talking among themselves it came up more and more often, the loathsome nick being made uglier by the even more loathsome abbreviation.

He stopped in front of the door that didn’t have a number on it, with the glass transom on top. Here one more R, done in soap on the glass, greeted him. He slammed the door behind him and thus rid himself of his own nick until the next time he needed to go out into the hallway. This was both his office and his bedroom. He was the only counselor who spent nights on the second floor. Shark firmly believed that it constituted a colossal sacrifice on his part, and Ralph did nothing to suggest to him otherwise. It was enough to mention in passing, “I am at my post at all hours,” and he received everything he wanted, right away.

Ralph made a point of maintaining the heroic image of selfless service, even though the fear of the second floor he saw in other counselors and in Shark himself almost made him laugh. You had to have an extremely hazy understanding of them, or rather none at all, to imagine that they would go busting into a room and sticking a knife into a counselor just because. Because they were generally wicked, or because they had nothing better to do. He guessed at the existence of the Law. No one told him anything about it, of course, but by observing certain patterns in their behavior he deduced not only that the Law existed, but even some of its tenets. One, for example, made teachers and counselors untouchable, and it protected him unswervingly. The exceptions to it could come raining down only in that fateful time, the two weeks before graduation.