The Gray House полностью

The leaf grows until it blocks out the room. Each vein in it is the size of a tree, the soft fuzz covering it is a wild meadow. Sphinx, in a green cloak with translucent wings, is swinging his legs at the edge of the emerald savanna.

“See? That was easy. No reason to be scared.”

“Is this where we are going to live now? Forever?”

The leaf trembles, echoing with distant thunder.

“What was that?”

“That? Oh, that’s elephants running,” Sphinx says, waving the long antennae growing right above his eyes. “Running . . . running . . .”

“That’s right, sonny,” Father says, putting his hand on Smoker’s knee. They are back on the living-room sofa, Mother and Brother are next to him. “You see, sometimes they just run through here, minding their own business.”

Smoker stares at the enormous print of an elephant’s foot on the brownish carpet.

The trapdoor to the House’s attic lifts up, creaking. Blind squeezes into the opening, then places the hatch back without getting off his knees. The hatch has a large iron ring on top, and nothing on the bottom—it’s Blind’s personal entrance. He shakes the dust out of his clothes and creeps along the attic, treading softly on the floorboards. There are five steps from the trapdoor to the chair, but somehow only four and a half the other way. He knows that the old chair with the busted seat is waiting for him in the exact same place he left it. No one else ever comes here. Just him and Arachne. She hangs in the corner—tiny, almost invisible. Pretending to be dead. Blind lowers himself onto the edge of the busted seat and takes the flute from under his sweater.

“Listen, Arachne,” he says into space. “This is for you only.”

It’s quiet. The attic is the quietest place in the world. Then the sound streaming from under Blind’s fingers, plangent and trembling, fills it up. Blind does not know yet what he wants. It has to be a kind of web. Arachne’s webbed trap—enormous and all-encompassing for her, imperceptible for everyone else. Something that is at the same time the snare, the House, and the entire world. Blind plays. He has the whole night ahead of him. He follows familiar tunes. Humpback makes them beautiful, but Blind leaves them dry and frayed at the edges. He can only make beautiful things that are fully his own. Chasing that feeling, he does not notice the steps of the night going past, it walks through the attic and through him, dragging his songs away. Arachne grows bigger and bigger. She fills the corner and spills out from it; the silver web envelops the attic. Blind and Arachne, now enormous, are in the center of it.

Arachne trembles, and her trap trembles with her, the translucent spider harp strung from the ceiling to the floor. Blind senses its vibration, hears its chiming, Arachne’s innumerable eyes burrow into his face and hands, burning them, and he smiles. He knows that he’s doing it right. Not completely yet, but very close.

The two of them play together. Then they are three, the wind joining in with the song of the flues. Then four, welcoming a cat’s gray shadow.

Blind cuts the song short. Arachne shrinks back into the dusty corner, no bigger than a fingernail again. The cat flees into the crack in the floor. Only the wind, completely unhinged, continues wailing, rattling the flues, knocking on the skylight, tugging at the window frames . . . The glass erupts and tumbles inside, coating the floorboards in snowy dust.

Blind, barefoot, calmly walks over the shards to the window. He thrusts his arm through the middle of the ring of glass knives, takes a handful of snow from the roof—it’s soft and fluffy under the hardened crust—and drinks it.

“I am drinking the clouds and the frozen rain. The soot of the streets and the sparrow’s footsteps. What are you having, Arachne?”