Devil House

by John Darnielle

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?