Devil House

by John Darnielle

You move in. Devil House. You move into Devil House.

Each instance of this effect further distorts our overall field of view, our sense of who we really are.

Prior to the renovation, it had been officially standing empty since 1986. Nobody had lived inside Devil House since forever.

My mother used to tease me about this: “Hide the antiques, Chandler’s home”—but keepsakes are just memory-prompts, and you don’t really need them if you have a good memory. Mine is excellent.

There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective. “Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes. I’m sure of this now. Live and learn.

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 no matter what, I have to get my hands dirty. It matters whose air I’m breathing.

I have combed every inch of the ground where something dreadful happened some years back, and it is time now for me to tell the story I was sent here to tell. I don’t want to do this, and I’m not going to do this.

No fate but the one chosen lightly; no destiny but the present moment.

People who’re lucky enough to be from such places sometimes lose sight of the blessing.

Why, then, did you defend your domain, such small holdings, with lethal force?

You know these stories probably aren’t true: but you also know that you’ve sawn through more bone today than the hacksaw from the gardener’s shed might otherwise have been thought capable of splitting, hoisted more weight than anyone might have guessed your slight frame could bear. It has not been enough. They find you at the shore.

People are awful, even when they’re not trying to be.

Murder seldom inspires much lasting interest beyond the houses it strikes. You used to have to really work at it to make a name for yourself. But this is a new era. Americans have been more or less glued to their televisions since the Tet Offensive; that was four years ago now, and nightly drama coming out of the nation’s capital has only intensified the bond between average people and their screens.

Anger passes. Disappointment vibrates.

These flat stones whose jagged path arrives at Devil House’s odd, unnecessary porch suggest that, in its final guise, it finally succeeded in reverting to its original form: a place where people gathered, and ate, and slept, and lived. The vision that came, briefly, to possess it—this was no innovation. It was a return, a retracing, a rebirth. A radical, not to say new, form of excavation.

But you have to wonder what they felt, looking out through the worn patches in the painted-over windows: whether they sensed that they’d brought back something from a past no one remembered, to sit impudently in the light for a short while, proud to be itself once more, a shelter again at last.

But 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.

Now came to this abode while that the days of this compagnye were yet grene, this noble knight ALEX, known to both Sir Derrick and Sir Seth from schole; and the wise in whiche he arrivèd ther, a wonder was for to tell. For inside the howse, on that day, passing their noontide in gode earnest as had been their wyl lo these passing days, stood noone oother thanne Sir Derrick and Sir Seth, busy upon the errands that semed mete to them.

WHY

We, who do goe through your world somewhat unknown, are within; and behold, we too have a tale.

A monster, a specter, a fiend. A ghost. A devil. 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.

The fortress that this place became in the days following the demise of Monster Adult X was a moment in time, and its destruction, when it came, was total.

The other side of the coin, however, never seemed to merit much thought from his classmates: the comfort of living in a place you’d always known, the ease of knowing your parameters.

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

Angela felt like a parishioner in the wrong church.

It’s the chance that there’s something inside that might leave a mark on you. You’d be even more scared if you knew what it was.

the life and works of Gorboniaw map Morydd, known more generally as Gorbonianus, but called, by Geoffrey, in his History of the Kings of Britain,

Wtf

Thus was Gorbonian made glad in his grief; but within him, his heart grew hard, a-wondering at the wickedness of men.

Evelyn Gates’s corpse boasted twenty-nine discreet insults.

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?

Like all legends, it felt eternal to me, as non-negotiable as the scenery: the hills, the missions, the coastline, the White Witch.

The sense I get from these paragraphs is that your pain, in defiance of time, is still fresh: that it still wields the capacity to wound you, or that it feels that way.

And you felt trapped, a rat in a maze unable to turn around and retrace your steps, wishing for a gloved hand to lift you out and set you back down at the entrance, and three weeks and a few similar visits later—I took my time. It just wasn’t enough, you wrote—you were a family again, in the apartment a mile and a half across town.

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.

A CAVE I will never, ever get out of, you said: your exact words.

But what was he supposed to do, when it was you, you who had made the mess and couldn’t pull yourself out of it, you who seemed to have given up on life, you who couldn’t find the strength to shield him from the rancid world Michael had made of your home.

Most of their features were once new—this is California—but to me they still smack of the eternal.

this is among my most vivid recollections of Milpitas, of its sidewalks and rounded curbs in grey concrete, the secluded feel of its neighborhoods imparting just the right air for wondering whether a thing had happened this way, or that way, or some third way not yet imagined, or perhaps not at all.

It would be fair to characterize me as a collector of paperweights that haven’t yet learned their function.

Satellites are sad bodies, ever beholden to the larger planets from whose shadows they spend half their existence emerging.