Devil House

by John Darnielle

The past is charming and safe when you’re skittering around on its surface. It’s a nice place to linger a moment before seeking the lower depths.

But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.

Tell a two-year-old you’re going to feed a make-believe candy bar to his teddy bear. Half an hour later you’ll still both be there, feeding a bear whose appetite never diminishes, and who demands, over and above his candy rations, ever-increasing supplies: of apples from imaginary orchards, of oats from bottomless feed bags, of carrots pulled fresh from the living room carpet. Spend an afternoon at this kind of play and you’ll remember the carrots at the day’s end. You may even smell them when you close your eyes. There is ample space in the brain for several worlds to occupy at once.

Most parents are unprepared for the time to let go; even if they’ve managed to find time and space to contemplate the arrival of the moment, it seems to come too soon.

It’s easier to rely on familiar things when you’re describing something different than to imagine a context whose parameters require faith, and vision. It’s a sure bet that when people see the easy way across such differences, they will take it.

Dame Angela, in the stillness of her heart, did rue upon the fickleness of time, whose hand grew stronger with each passing day, for which no remedy seemed apparent.

“People already know what they want to believe,” he offers, returning wholly to his comfort zone; I feel almost like I’m watching a ghost reenter a body. “I see this even in my daily errands here, when it’s busy. People want me to tell them about pirates, but I know that if I told them what pirates were really like, it would ruin their day.”

You remembered discovering that it wasn’t too expensive to take Jesse to see a movie at the Fremont Theater, and doing that when you could: the westerns, the musicals, The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Sitting in the dark with your son, watching a movie and eating popcorn: these were precious memories for you, pearls of incalculable price. When the horror of his final hours on this earth came for you in the middle of the night, as it still did after all these years, you turned to these memories for comfort, and knew you had done what you could to make his life a good one.

That was the problem with my book, you said. Everything about it was real except for the people, who could only be one way for me because I had a story to tell, but the story was bigger than that, and the people were real, not characters in a movie whose lives were only important when they were doing something awful.

“Does this belong to your son?” Detective Haeny asked, and you put your hand over your mouth and screamed through your fingers, and felt, in that moment, like the best possibility available to you would be to just keep screaming and never stop, to produce a scream so great that it enveloped and consumed the evidence bag, and the officer holding it out to you, and the land, and the sea, and the sky, to scream and scream until the screaming somehow killed you; because, if you stopped, worse things than any of these would be waiting out there in the quiet, the rapidly gathering quiet that palpably stood ready to open up for you like a dark, endless cave from which you would never be free.

You learn to find the stories you need.