Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Here Vulture got distracted describing the various properties of magic hills and spent a lot of time telling us about what happened to those unfortunate enough to end up under them. Those who got lost like that could become old in an instant, or crumble to dust, or get back their youth and good looks, could turn into an animal, a plant, or even something that didn't exist in nature, but whatever it was, the process was irreversible. Even if they were to cast off the spells of the magic hill, they'd never be able to return to their former selves.

Vulture's tale was interrupted by R One. For some reason he urgently needed to know what the old hag looked like.

Vulture said she was hideously ugly.

“And then?” R One said. “I mean, now?”

Vulture said he had no idea. “But they say she looks about four years old, at most.”

“Who is ‘they’?” R One shot up.

“The dwarves,” Vulture said, and the tone of his voice was so icy that it was clear he wasn't in the mood to answer any more questions.

R One got the message and went silent. But the old man who Lary said was the guard perked up instead. He giggled and inquired if there were any dwarves in the audience.

No one answered him.

That was the end of the tale. Either Vulture took offense at being interrupted, or there really wasn't anything else he wanted to say.

The next speaker turned out to be Black. I was surprised, because as far as I knew he'd never participated in Fairy Tale Nights. I was even more surprised at the tale itself. It didn't sound very fairy, and I suspected that it wasn't a tale at all. Black talked about the Outsides. About his adventures there. He told us how he, assisted by Rat, or rather Rat with his assistance, because he was more of a silent member of their partnership, swiped an old crumbling bus from the back of the garage of a nearby school. And that right now the bus was standing in the vacant lot next to the House, hidden under the trash, and waiting. What exactly it was waiting for, Black did not elaborate, but it wasn't hard to guess.

While I was wrapping my head around this information, R One went to the stepladder and asked Black if he knew that to drive anything anywhere in the Outsides required a driver's license. And that a bus full of underage hoodlums without a single piece of identification among them would be stopped in very short order.

Black said that he was aware of it.

Would he be aware, then, R One continued, that a stolen vehicle had most likely been reported as such to the police, and that even if it were to be repainted, someone would still be bound to recognize it.

Black said that he was aware of that also.

“Then what the hell are you trying to pull?” R One screamed. “Or do you think that the slammer is a nice place for getting acquainted with the Outsides?”

Needle hugged Mermaid and started to sniffle quietly. I couldn't see in the dark who it was crowding R One, but apparently they were asking him to sit back down. Black said that he was just telling a tale.

R One said that he was tired of people screwing with his head.

Tabaqui again asked him to sit down and behave himself.

I couldn't quite see if Ralph did sit down or remained standing.

“So... ,” Black said and paused, as if afraid he'd get interrupted again. “In the fairy tales it is customary to have fairies and things like that. My tale may not be very interesting and stuff, but it does have a fairy. Two of them, actually, and also two more... What do you call guy fairies? I mean, they all have driver's licenses and they offered to help ...”

Everyone applauded. I got to thinking who those four fairies were and why would they want to help Black, and the longer I thought about it the less I liked it. Because there wasn't anywhere they could've appeared except from the Outsides, and I had it on good authority that even if selfless fairies had ever existed there, they'd long gone extinct.

I wanted to discuss this with Black, but it had to wait until the break. In the meantime Tabaqui mounted the stepladder for an announcement.

“Not everyone may be fully aware of the rules,” he shouted. “Which is why I would like to reiterate them, just in case. Anyone present is allowed to ask the narrator a question. One question! Preferably at the end, without interrupting the tale. Statements are also acceptable, but not encouraged. Speaking out of turn is completely prohibited! As is moving about! There will be breaks for that. Anyone found in violation of these rules will be henceforth shown the door, without regard to the laws of hospitality! Am I clear?”

As his monologue progressed, Tabaqui was screaming louder and louder, and swinging back and forth on the stepladder wider and wider, so at the end of it he barely managed to hold on. He was making much more noise than Ralph had, but no one thought of it as a violation of rules.

I couldn't keep my thoughts away from the bus and how all those jokes about it turned out to not be jokes. And also about how furious R One was. He could easily get it into his head that I'd known the truth all along and purposely wrote gibberish in the diary to keep him guessing. I was so occupied by this that I missed the beginning of Noble's tale.

It too was not a fairytale. Noble was telling us about living in some small town, what he did there and how he was trying to make some money. It was clear that he'd invented this out of whole cloth, but at the same time I had this gnawing feeling that he was in fact relating something that really happened. It was only the ending that did turn magical, and that suddenly and way over the top, as if Noble got tired of straining his imagination deciding how he was going to get his character out of the bind he'd put him into. There even was an appearance by Blind there, contrived and inappropriate, in my opinion.

Next was Shuffle's turn. He played more than he talked, and his tale was along the same lines as Noble's. There was also a small town and small gigs for money. It sounded quite a bit more lively, but that simply could be because he got to perform his entire catalogue. Spliced it into the narrative.

After Shuffle's tale, Tabaqui finally declared a break. I thought that it would mean turning on the wall lamps, but no such luck. Everyone remained seated in the dark, so I didn't dare leave the bed. Black moved somewhere, I couldn't see him anymore from where I was. Tabaqui switched on the boombox. All around me people droned and whispered, discussing what they'd heard. We had a plate of sandwiches passed from below; I took one and passed it to Lary.

“Wicked. Just wicked,” Lary muttered. “Did you hear that, huh? I mean, I get it, but I mean, just straight out like that ...”

I said I didn't know about how straight that was, but I personally preferred the stories from the last Fairy Tale Night. They were more fairy.

“Exactly,” Lary mumbled, chomping on the sandwich. “That's exactly what I'm talking about.”

“So how is tonight wicked, then?” I said.

“Right, that's how. For this very reason.”

I decided not to waste any more time with him and asked Mermaid and Needle what they thought about all this.

“Nothing,” Needle squeaked. And in case I didn't get it the first time, repeated: “Nothing, nothing, nothing ...”

“I liked Noble's tale,” Mermaid said dreamily. “So beautiful.”

I could not see the expression on her face, but I could imagine it in detail.

“Blackwood ...”

“What was that?” I said.

“Blackwood. That was the name of the town. Did you forget already?”

It could be that Noble had mentioned it. Probably at the beginning, when I wasn't paying attention. In any case, there wasn't anything beautiful about the place the way he described it, apart from that name.