Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“Wait,” Mei said. “The other house had burned down?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on this scratchy tan plaid couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’ We’d known each other for four days. I said, ‘You mean back at that gorgeous house? Or you mean here?’ He said, ‘I mean here.’

“I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to explain.’ And so he did, and now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

“This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

“You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure that I know how to tell it.”

“Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia prompted.

“Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a ranch house, and they moved in. Liam’s just a baby, practically. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the cupboard. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead Liam’s mummy is allowed to have a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the artist has got it set up so that it only plays shows that were current in the early nineties in the U.S., which was the last time that this house was occupied.

“And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains, the kind that fade but don’t ever come out.

“But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which is clearly meant for a boy maybe a year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones, that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a stain here, in the corner, under the window.

“And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms, as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom, with two beds in it. Lots of boring girls’ clothes, and a diary, which Liam doesn’t see any point in reading. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

“Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom here, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain on it that goes right through the comforter, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up through the mattress.”

“I think I’m beginning to see the shape of this story,” Gwenda says.

“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both of them for part of the day. The rest of the day she spends volunteering at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks, the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons, and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI , and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom, and the stain in the master bedroom, and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the plaid sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room, and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother, because lately when he tries to talk to her, all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still kind of a jerk.

“The kids in the school who beat Liam up remind him a little of his uncle. His uncle has shown him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he’s told Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high school kid went nuts and killed his whole family with a hammer in the middle of the night. And this artist, his idea was based on what rich Americans used to do at the turn of the last century, which was buy up some impoverished U.K. family’s castle and have it brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. And if there was some history, if there was supposed to be a ghost, they paid even more money.

“So that was idea number one, to reverse all of that. But then he had an even bigger idea, idea number two, which was, What’s a haunted house? How can you buy one? If you transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost (or ghosts, in this case) come with it, if you put it back together again exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, then why can’t you build your own from scratch, with the right ingredients? And idea number three, forget the ghosts: Can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, will the experience be any different for them? Will they still be haunted?”

“You are blowing my mind,” Portia said. “No, really. I don’t know if I like this story.”

“I’m with Portia,” Aune said. “It isn’t a good story. Not for us, not here.”

“Let her finish it,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to be worse if she doesn’t finish it. Which house were they living in?”

“Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both of the houses. He said he never knew which was which. The artist was the only one who had that piece of information. He even used blood to re-create the stains. Cow blood, I think. So I guess this is another story with cows in it, Maureen.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story as quick as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it in a fit of religious mania. Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older, and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case, it didn’t do much good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”