Devil House

by John Darnielle

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.