The Gray House полностью

We were down in the basement, Sphinx and I, diving into the strata of crusted papers held together with wire. Some had almost disintegrated, others survived intact, but all of them, every little scrap, reeked of damp—as if they had absorbed miles and miles of swamps. It was a pleasure to dig. There was only one other person who shared this passion for clawing the House’s past out of its most secret nooks, and that was Sphinx. For the rest of them even the most precious finds from the basement were disgusting junk. But Sphinx . . .

“Oh, wow,” he whispered, holding a bundle of yellowed invoices. “Jackpot.”

We pored over them, trembling with anticipation, just to add another tiny detail to the picture that was invisible to everyone except us two.

Cloth, gray.

And the children of the House of old dressed up in gray uniforms.

Wool, skeins.

And Sisters Mary and Ursula, each on her own stool, started clicking the knitting needles, one sister per dortoir, one stool per sister, and woolen socks, hanging lower and lower, snaked out of the hands roughened by incessant washing and cooking.

Step by step, scrap by scrap, we reconstructed the House. That House. We knew how the rooms looked, knew what its occupants did, and not even M. A.’s passion for stretching the stores of apples long into the winter could hide from us. Why would she insist on that? We didn’t know. But we burrowed into the contents of that basement like two insane moles. From 1870 to the last graduating class. Throughout our research we lugged to the dorm reams of what Wolf termed “hopeless garbage,” with Lary serving as the muscle. The previous graduating class was the only part of it all that interested the pack. I compiled two scrapbooks out of the most fascinating documents, and then we cooled a bit on the whole excavation enterprise.

So now it falls on me to tell Smoker about Mother Ann. I almost have to laugh, because it’s impossible to explain without explaining what the House was back then. I continue to deliberate whether I should try, while my mouth keeps running on autopilot. At some point even I myself become curious: What’s that I’ve been babbling about all this time?

“To get on her good side you had to be very God-fearing, and know a lot of ancient texts by heart, mostly the ones that are impossible to remember, and when she was dying in her bed she made the sisters bring all the linens in the House to her room and counted and recounted them. But then she was already not right in the head. And when she died and her assistant became the principal, they said they saw the ghost of Mother Ann going from dorm to dorm, checking, counting, and rechecking, in other words, not resting in peace at all.”

Smoker blinks and frowns. It takes him some time, because he’s busy, but I notice it anyway.

“What? You don’t believe me? Sphinx, tell him!”

“It’s true,” Sphinx says. “It was exactly the way Tabaqui’s telling it.”

“How can you know that?”

“We know everything. Anything and everything that is the House!”

I deliberately don’t mention the basement, but my bragging suddenly rings true. I sense this truth and marvel at it. There. That’s what we were looking for. For everything that is the House. There comes a time in the life of everyone to start asking who their great-grandfather was and to listen to the family lore, so Sphinx and I descended into the basement and told the musty tales to ourselves. I shiver. We became too much a part of this place—and it, of us. It’s almost as though we had created it. There was nothing in the basement where it mentioned the ghost restlessly roaming the rooms looking for linens to count.

That night I finally manage to escape into the hallway. Under the pretext of going to dinner, but most likely because Sphinx got bored guarding me. No girls in sight, and my dragon looks really tiny from below, barely visible. The eye glistens, but to distinguish the details you’d have to be a giant. On the other hand, the stains from the overturned paint can are quite readily visible. One might even say eminently visible. I drive over them on purpose, to declare my involvement.