once truly broken, could never remember the way home. Crystal’s father had grown up in that same house; had known adventures and excitement in a world whose name he no longer knew. He would love his daughter all the more for having lost the same things he had lost. And her mother… she didn’t remember the talking horses or the magical wars or the young prince with webs between his fingers, not consciously, even if sometimes in the night she cried. Both of them knew that empty space more intimately than they could understand.
And none of them, not Crystal, not her parents, could hear the distant, thready sound of a giant spider—the Guardian of the Passage to the Beyond, the one who had guided and guarded a hundred generations of human children, nurtured them, loved them, and lost them all—weeping.
AN EMPTY HOUSE WITH MANY DOORS
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Michael Swanwick is the author of the novels
The television set is upside down. I need its company while I clean, but not its distraction. Sipping gingerly at a glass of wine, I vacuum the oriental rugs one-handed, with great care. Ah, Katherine, you’d be amazed the job I’ve done. The house has never been so clean.
I put the vacuum cleaner back in the closet. Cleanup takes next to no time at all since I eliminated all the unneeded furniture.
Rugs done, I’m about to get out the floor polish when it occurs to me that trash pickup is tomorrow. Humming, I roll up the carpets one by one, tie them with string, carry all three out to the curb. Then, since it’s no longer needed, I set the vacuum cleaner beside them.
Back in the house, the living room is all but empty, the dried and bleached bones of our life picked clean of meat and memories. One surviving chair, the television, and a collapsible tray I’ve used since discarding the dining room table. The oven timer goes off; the pot pies are ready. I get out the plate, knife and fork, slide out the pies, and throw away the foil roasting tray. I wipe the stove door with a damp rag, rinse the rag, wring it out and put it away. Pour myself another glass of wine.
The television gibbers and shouts at me as I eat. People hang upside down, like bats. They scuttle across the ceiling, smiling insanely. The news bimbo is chatting up the latest disaster, mouth an inverted crescent. Somebody in a woodpecker suit is bashing his head into the bed of a pickup truck, over and over again. Is all this supposed to mean something? Was it ever?
The wine in my glass is half-gone already. Making good time tonight. All of a sudden the bad feelings well up, like a gusher of misery. I squeeze my eyes shut, screwing my face tight, but somehow the tears seep through, and I’m sobbing. Crying uncontrollably, because while I’m still thinking about you, while I never do and never can stop thinking about you, it’s getting harder and harder to remember what you looked like. It’s going away from me. Oh Katherine, I’m losing your face!
No self pity. I won’t give in to it. I get out the mop and fill a bucket with warm water and ammonia detergent. Swabbing as hard as I can, I start to clean the floors. Until finally, it’s under control. I top off my glass, take a sip, feel the wine burning in my belly. Drinking like this will kill a man, sooner or later. Which is why I work at it so hard.
I’m teaching myself how to die.
If I don’t get some fresh air, I’ll pass out. If I pass out, I’ll drink less. Timing is all. I get my coat, walk out the door. Wibbledy-wobbledy, down the hill I go. Past the row houses and corner hoagie shops, the chocolate factory and the gas station, under the railroad bridge and along the canal, all the way down into Manayunk. The wine is buzzing in my head, but still the traitor brain dwells on you, a droning monologue on pain and loss and yearning. If only I’d kept you home that day. If only I’d only fucking only. Even I’m sick of hearing it. I lift up and above it, until conscious thought is just a drear mumble underfoot and I soar up godlike in the early evening air.
How you loved Manayunk, its old mill buildings, tumbledown collieries, and blue-collar residences. The yuppies have gentrified Main Street, but three blocks uphill from it the people haven’t changed a bit; still hard- headed, suspicious, good neighbors. I float through the narrow streets, to the strip of trendy little restaurants on Main. My head swells and balloons and my feet barely touch the ground. I pass through the happy evening crowd, attached to the earth by the most tenuous of tethers. I’d sever it if I could, and simply float away.
Then I see the man strangling in midair.
Nobody else can see him. They stride purposefully by, some even walking through the patch of congealed air that, darkly sparkling, contains his struggling figure.
He is twisting in slow agony on a frame of chrome bars, like a fly dying on a spider’s web. The outlines of his distorted body are prismatic at the edges, like a badly tuned video. He is drowning in dirty rainbows. His body is a cubist nightmare, torso shattered into overlapping planes, limbs scattered through nine dimensions. The head swings around, eyes multiplying and being swallowed up by flesh, and then there is a flash of desperate hope as he realizes I can see him. He reaches toward me, outflung arm spreading through a fan of possibilities. Caught in jellied air, dark and sparkling, his body shattered into strangely fractured planes.
Mouth opens in a silent scream, and through some form of sympathetic magic the faintest distant echoes of his pain sound a whispering screech of fingernails across the back of my skull.
I know a man who is drowning when I see one. People are scurrying about, some right through the man. They glance at me oddly, standing there, frozen on the sidewalk. I reach up and take his hand.
It
When I come to, I draw myself together, stand up. I haven’t moved, but the street is empty and dark. Must be late at night. Which is crazy, because people wouldn’t just leave me lying there. It’s not that kind of neighborhood. So why did they? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I stand up, and there, beside me, is the man’s corpse.
He’s dressed in a kind of white jumpsuit, with little high-tech crap scattered all over it. A badge on his chest with a fan of arrows branching out, diverging from a single point. I look at him. Dead, poor bastard, and nothing I can do about it.
I need another drink.
Home again, home again, trudge trudge trudge. As I approach the house, something is wrong, though. There are curtains in the windows, and orange light spills out. If I were a normal man, I’d be apprehensive, afraid, fearful of housebreakers and psychopaths. There’s nothing I’d be less likely to do than go inside.
I go inside.
Someone is rattling pans in the kitchen. Humming. “Is that you, love?”
I stand there, inside the living room, trembling with something more abject than fear. It’s the kind of curdling terror you might feel just before God walks into the room. No, I say to myself, don’t even think it.
You walk into the room.
“That didn’t take long,” you say, amused. “Was the store closed?” Then, seeing me clear, alarm touches your face, and you say “Johnny?”
