Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The squat cylinder in the shortened pajamas lays siege to the stairs to the third floor. He is searching. Searching for that miraculous, wondrous being—lithe and fair haired, so pleasant to be next to. Tubby knows that it's still here, inside the House. And that the place to search for it is where the stairs lead. He's never been up there, so it follows that it's exactly where the being could and should be located. Tubby's inner voice has never steered him wrong, and now it urges him forward. Wheezing softly, he conquers the steps one by one.

The feeble flame of an alcohol burner flares up in the teachers’ bathroom. Shaking from both fear and cramps in his stomach, Butterfly is holding a spoon over it. Butterfly is all bones, sickly pale and covered in warts. A rubber mat protects his skinny buttocks from touching the freezing tiles. The open neck of his sweater reveals a meager chest hung with amulets and strings of garlic. Butterfly is nervous—about the dripping faucets, the imagined steps and whispers. He cringes from the damp and shields the burner from the drafts with his body. He has a cold. He also has diarrhea. Constantly shuttling to one of the stalls and back is too time-consuming, so he decides to move inside a stall with the entire setup, including the rubber mat, the burner, and a roll of toilet paper. He closes the door, throws on the hook, and feels safer, shielded from the dangers of this night.

It's stifling inside Vulture's tent. And as if it wasn't hot and cramped enough, there's also incense burning in two bowls. It makes Smoker's head spin. The strings of lights flash on and off. Smoker already regrets having joined the company inside the tent. It's too small to fit five. Tabaqui, on the other hand, is completely happy and content. He sips some indescribable swill from a coffee cup and regales Vulture with tales of people they've met on the way here, even though they haven't in fact met anyone. Smoker starts nodding off.

“Hey, wake up,” Dearest whispers. “What are you having? Pretty Flower? Steps? Night Terrors?”

“Anything but Terrors,” Smoker says. The proximity to Vulture is terrifying enough. They are separated by Jackal, but still, he could reach out and touch Great Bird should he wish to. “Do you have any coffee?”

“Alas, no coffee.”

Smoker is handed a cup. He takes a gulp of something so bitter and astringent that his jaws immediately lock up. He chokes on saliva, unable to either swallow the vile liquid or spit it out. Tabaqui slaps him on the back. The rest are watching with interest. The lights keep blinking.

“There, there,” Vulture says with concern. “You really shouldn't jump straight on everything you're being offered, kiddo. A little taste is often enough.”

Smoker takes out a handkerchief and wipes off the tears.

“Horrible stuff,” he says when he's able to pry apart his locked teeth.

For some reason Tabaqui puts on dark glasses.

Crookshank clambers out to the bank and sits down under the pole marking the largest cluster of underwater stones. The river was kind to him the previous several days, and he's expecting his good luck to continue. Yesterday it brought him a tire, three bottles with messages, and an empty gourd decorated with triangular markings. What's in store for today? Crookshank throws in the line and waits.

In the moonlit grass on the opposite bank a huge white elephant grazes, covered with a striped blanket. Must have run away from its masters. The elephant worries Crookshank because it can use its trunk to fish the floating treasure out of the river, and then he'd have to somehow get to the other side and claim it back. And it's a very big elephant. What if I tamed it? It can reach a lot of stuff with that trunk. Would be very useful—to have my very own Elephant. That's even better than a live dog. Excited by these thoughts, Crookshank puts the fishing gear aside. But the elephant is already trampling away, its wide back flashing in the brush. And the river is carrying something dark. It fetches against the largest stone and gets stuck there, bobbing in the current. Crookshank grabs the net. He's hoping fervently that it isn't a dead dog again. The dragonflies dart too low over the water, interfering with his aim. He swats several with a towel and eats them distractedly.

Saara lives in the swamp. He is alone there except for the frogs, the singers of clear songs. He sings too when the moon is out, and his songs are beautiful. That is all he knows about himself. Saara's pale skin is wrapped tightly around his bones, mosquitoes never alight on him, knowing him to be poisonous. His lips are ghostly white. When he sings, the song distorts the whole of his face and his eyes go almost blind. His fingers tease and tear the grass, he trembles, shaken by his own voice, and he waits. The song always brings him visitors. The smallest of them sink into the mud before they can reach him.

Sixteen Dogheads sit in the grotto in a circle around a crate, illuminated by three torches and three Chinese lanterns. The seventeenth is standing on the crate. He is addressing them, slowly rotating a snow-white bone above his head. The speech flows over the sharp-eared heads and out the hole in the ceiling, up toward the twinkling stars. Dogheads listen, yawning and loudly biting out fleas.

“We seem to be confusing meters and kilometers,” one whispers to another. “Do you think this might have a global significance? What's your opinion?”

“I can only see the moon,” his neighbor offers cryptically. “They say that the staff still had plenty of meat left on it before he snatched it.”

The youngest, in a copper collar, suddenly breaks into a howl, head upraised.

“Death to the traitors! Death!”

They bite his flanks to quiet him down.

The white bone shines, mesmerizing them.

The changeling dances merrily on the pile of fallen leaves collected here by stomper birds for their mating fair. The pile is ruined. The changeling laughs. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, a mouse bolts from under the leaves and scampers away, but the changeling is upon it in two short leaps.

“Quick, quick, go bite a tick,” he murmurs as he digs a shallow hole to bury the remains of the meal.

A sweet song reaches his ears. The changeling perks up and rushes toward the voice without hesitation. He bounds through the Forest like an arrow, but stops once his paws meet the sticky swamp mud. He shakes it off in disgust. The singing grows more urgent. It calls him into the swamp. To go or not to go? The changeling comes to a decision and rolls on the ground growling. One more turn, and one more. He rises up to a human height, yawns, and plunges into the heart of the swamp, treading carefully on the tussocks. The nocturnal dragonflies dart into his face. The singing keeps getting even more sweet, loud, and seductive.

The hunters grunt as they run. The loose ends of their headbands slap them on their backs. They run single file, one, two, three of them, noisily, scaring away the wildlife. The noise is deliberate. The one they're hunting will take fright and betray himself. That's when the pursuit will commence. The real hunt, the one they've dreamed about for so long. So they run, huffing, pounding the dirt with their boots. In fact, they too are frightened. But their quarry is not supposed to know that.

Back in Vulture's tent, Smoker finally is able to stop coughing and choking on saliva, but doesn't have time to appreciate it because almost instantly something happens to his vision. The objects around him momentarily lose clarity and float out of focus, and when they return to their familiar shapes it turns out that they have been assembled from myriad tiny colorful shards, like a bright minute puzzle. The faces of those sitting next to him undergo the same transformation. Everything is now composed of shining dots. They blink in and out and even slough off in places, and where they do there's nothingness behind them. Smoker realizes that he's going to see them all extinguished and that he just had the true nature of the universe revealed to him, which means that his life is most likely about to end.