Devil House

by John Darnielle

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

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. But

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.

wonder if anybody who’s never been trusted with any kind of responsibility can understand how it must have felt to be Seth in that moment—to be part of a mechanism that would afford a friend shelter, to have even partial responsibility for a space of comfort and relief. To provide safe harbor for a comrade in need.

see him leading Alex to the arcade to help him find a place to sleep, and I want to tell him: Seth, in this moment, you are exactly who you think you are—a helper, a minister almost. The keys to the fortress are yours; in the right light, to the weary traveler, the luster of their gleam is almost holy. But of course I can’t tell Seth that. I can only hope he had a brief glimmering of it when the moment came, a sense of how sweet the face of the one who lowers the drawbridge appears to the one whose need for passage to the castle, for a home within its walls, has become critical.