Devil House

by John Darnielle

THERE ARE PLENTY OF TOWNS everywhere, I guess, whose reputations beyond their borders, if they have any at all, reside in single instances of popular misrepresentation or outright caricature. I try to be sensitive to this dynamic—The Music Man is all that millions of people will ever know about Iowa. Each instance of this effect further distorts our overall field of view, our sense of who we really are.

any given moment is loaded. You have to look hard at all the details of a scene before it changes on you. There may come a day when all you’ve got left are the notes you took: maybe a photograph or two, if you’re lucky.

keepsakes are just memory-prompts, and you don’t really need them if you have a good memory. Mine is excellent.

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.

I call this the proximity effect: the closer you get to the past, the less believable its particulars seem.

California has a way of erasing its own history; I’m told that the place where Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse is a law office now.

This is a necessary dynamic for us to function in the world: we can’t always be referring back to a table of which opinions we already know we have, which questions we consider already answered. 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.

I try to honor the dead in my books. It’s one of the things, I hope, that sets me apart a little from my partners in true crime. When I read what others write about places where the unthinkable became real, the focus always seems off to me. Victims spend their entire time in the spotlight just waiting for the fatal blow, on a conveyor belt that leads to the guillotine: I pity their fates, but it’s hard to grieve for them, because the treadmill on which they ran feels specifically designed to kill them.

In your life, the rhythm of these little routines is like the gentle path of a ditch creek: predictable movement through unremarkable straits most days, but with enough small surprises in it to make it feel worthy of the space it takes up.

It’s in the nature of the news cycle to untangle knots and to cast the duller threads aside: to simplify a narrative so that readers can take in a few details, confirm opinions they probably already held, and move on at minimal cost to themselves.

Collectors are curators: they arrange their finds with a specific purpose in mind, even if it’s only, Look how much of this stuff I have all to myself.

When you live alone, no matter how lovingly you decorate your space, you come to rely on the things that serve you best. This coffee cup, that spoon, this rustic beige bowl that’s a little heavier than the others.

Teaching high school means facing daily reminders of the exact distance between your present-day station and the days of your youth. Some people get a little bitter about it.

someone would have needed to explore the foggy territory of your unremembered daydreams, and these aren’t the avenues people pursue in the wake of a catastrophe. One thing seldom asked of those on whom disaster has laid its hand is what their future plans were before the flood.

for me, the sticking point, the thing I’d want to talk about except that I don’t know how, is what to do about the people you can’t get close to because they’re completely gone. The conversations no one ever heard, the events you have to imagine, the unknown thing you have to bring to life and present as something real that came and went and left a small mark on the world.

Over time, as the storage space needed for vast troves of memory shrank to microscopic sizes, the detail available to data hounds has become almost obsessively minute: behaviors too trivial to recount are lovingly enumerated. Every transaction locked, every point of contact recorded. There was a time, now hard to imagine, when you had to rely largely on self-reporting to know what people were up to. For this reason, the dead from the distant past—even if you frame “distant” at fairly close range; even if the ever-advancing present seems, each year, to exist at further remove from the days that gave it birth—tend to look, in the mind’s eye, like ghosts who don’t know they’re dead yet. The impressions they left on the world, great or small, seem to outline a prophecy, one consisting of hunches you can’t verify and stories largely woven from inference and innuendo. Even once you’ve collated as much real evidence as you can collect, the ends they met enshroud and obscure their remembered figures, as if gathered, rumpled at the shoulders, like a cloak.

Remembering that children are older than you think they are is one of the most reliable errands of parenthood, and one of the hardest.

She settled into the comfort of her daylight self, its ease and familiarity helping last night’s work slide into the acceptable context of the preterit. Even when we don’t find ourselves doing something wild, we sort out several selves along the line as we’re becoming the people we will be. It’s a constant, half-conscious process.

there’s a considerable distance between the things we’re called to bear witness to and the things we’d prefer to see.

All the stuff you have, the story you’re going to get from it is different from the one I know. From the one we all knew. From the one you’re probably going to tell no matter how hard you try to tell the real one. All this stuff, to me, is something only a few people can understand, and some of them, maybe all of them, aren’t even the same people they were back then, you know? It’s like this stuff can only really be seen by people who’ve already seen it.”

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.” I don’t quite follow you, I say. “Well, you know, Treasure Island,” he says. “Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder, the push and pull of good and evil, the romance of the high seas. The integrity of the thief, all that stuff. Whereas if there were even one photograph of the aftermath of a real pirate raid on a ship, you know, it’d turn your stomach. There’s a reason they hung pirates without a trial.”

We bury the things we need to say under a flood of narratives, counter-narratives, details, and clarifications. People slip hard truths into casually dropped interjections and conditional clauses.

What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?

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.

however insistent the demands of narrative and convention, there were things beyond and beneath those demands that were just as important, and perhaps more pressing, in the final analysis.

Nobody can know, you told me, what’s going on inside another person, even when they’re sitting there right in front of you. People have their ideas, and then there’s what’s real. It’s hard to get them to see the difference, especially when there are things you can’t talk about.

What would my work be like if I had to keep returning to the same story every time, I wondered. If, instead of hunting down sad places where people’s lives had been ruined, there was only the one place, a place where, every time I told the story again, there was some new thing to learn about it, some overlooked ripple or wrinkle or speck that fleshed out the details, that brought them more fully to life: but with the provision, present in the process, that nothing could help, nothing would change, no one would be unburdened, or healed, or made whole. My methods: How fine might their focus grow if they had but the one object, a moment and its consequences? And if I were somehow drawn inside that moment, me myself, not as an observer but as someone touched by it: What then? These moments are tidal in their force, I knew from long study: those unsteadied by their flow come to think of them as inevitabilities, as natural forces, energies whose actions can be resisted no more profitably than the rising of the sun. And still, sometimes, when they can’t sleep, those once visited by these moments ask themselves, bargaining for some vision of a second chance: What might I have done differently? Aren’t there infinite possibilities present in any given situation? What was I supposed to have done?

you didn’t want to dwell on this, you said, because this story wasn’t about you. When you said that, for the third or fourth time, I wished we could meet again, so that I could tell you that this story is about you: or that it’s also about you; that stories in which something ugly bursts out from the confines of its sac are necessarily about every person inside the blast area.

for me all the details were just part of my stupid story, something I did for money, or to show people how smart I was, or who really knows why, but for you the details were like markings on a blueprint, each of them indicating just how much there was to know about the space where you would have to live for the rest of your life, how many things there were to learn that nobody would ever want to learn and which would never leave you once you’d learned them, things which would give you nightmares, and headaches, and would train you to respond to stressful situations in ways that never helped, only hurt, learned responses that made everything worse and made you feel like your mind was your own worst enemy,

I closed my eyes and tried to picture you as you might look in the present day, older, greyer, a little closer to the end of a journey whose pleasures had been few and far between: and the face that came through in my efforts seemed real and alive to me, alive in a way I found somewhat frightening, since I spend most of my days imagining people who once lived and breathed squarely within the confines of the space where I sit and write. And I think I do a good job—I have a method—but this was different.

LIFE IS A PROCESS of forgetting: of moving old things out of the way to make room for new things, of holding faded blueprints up to light to see where vanished angles might be hiding, of recalculating wants and needs on the fly. It’s not that we become forgetful as we age, though that’s true, too. It’s that a million things will need to be forgotten along the way if our later forgetfulness is to have any meaning.

They repaved it at some point in my early years; I remember the day they did it, but I can only recall how the street looked afterward. The before-time is lost. I recognize all this now as mapmaking. Improvements and modifications come and go, and all terrain shifts; we reconfigure our coordinates. We make erasures to accommodate new data; these erasures are permanent.

There is, among the public, a perennial urge to believe the worst about the generation that will eventually replace them.

Seeing old friends address nagging questions about which we sometimes otherwise feel uneasy: Am I the same person I was when I was young? Are my earlier selves still safe somewhere inside me? Is there a thread somewhere that connects the past to the present, or is everything more chaotic than we’d like to think?

IS DISORIENTING to inhabit, even momentarily, any space that has played host to one or more primitive drafts of the self you’ve now become. There can be pleasure in this, as in a reunion. There might also be fear, dread, horror: soldiers seeing old barracks, freed convicts driving past the prison on their way to work. To have left a place once is to have left something behind; by staying away, you can have the question of whether you do or don’t want to see that thing again answered for you.

To gaze upon a childhood home through adult eyes is to engage in an act of disenchantment. Great doors grow small. Turrets vanish. Emblems fray. Even if the time spent within any given set of walls was, when the days are reckoned together, brief, it’s in the nature of childhood to gild all surfaces it touches, to magnify things. One should revisit such places only after having done some hard calculations: What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things? What are the chances we’ll regret the bargain later on?

Satellites are sad bodies, ever beholden to the larger planets from whose shadows they spend half their existence emerging. Their solitude has its own gravity.

it matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.