Devil House

by John Darnielle

Mom had a habit of pointing out whenever the occasion arose, we owned the house we lived in free and clear: her pride in the matter so evident, whenever it came up, that it made imagining kings further back in the bracket a little harder still.

There was a gentle, blurry quality to the scene. I relaxed into it. You get susceptible to environments when you don’t keep much company.

You have no spell of invisibility to cast. You are nobody’s witch.

We’re disappointed you’d try to keep secrets from us, they would say—that would be Dad’s word, delivered slowly and with resonance handed down over generations: disappointed. His mother would be angry, but anger was different. Anger passes. Disappointment vibrates.

There’s something appealing about being a visitor. The whole world’s a new thrill.

He understood, because he felt it, too, sometimes; the planet all parents occupied seemed to be growing ever more remote.

And then there were the voices that were easiest to amplify, because their ranges were familiar from similar stories around the country. The kids are out of control. They grow up faster and bigger than they did in our day. They lack the moral grounding of generations past.

“The burden of the story they don’t want to tell.”

IT 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.