Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The classes drift by silently, not involving me in any way. Rain is drumming on the windowpanes. The gray ribbons of the raindrops snake down the glass. So sleepy. I catch myself dozing off with my eyes open, and I even see something like a dream.

A dimly lit passage through subterranean corridors. There's a window ahead of me. A dull, flyspecked rectangle of whitewashed glass. Wolf is sitting on the sill. With his back to me. He has on his old patterned sweater with holes in the elbows.

“Wolf!” I call to him.

He turns around and looks at me. The familiar white scar over the lip. His lips don't move, but I hear his voice.

“This mouse hanged itself under the pillow in my hole,” he whispers.

I'm shaken awake by Skank's yelp and see her round, piggy eyes right in front of my face. She looks frantic.

“Where is the mouse?” she demands in a shaky voice, directing the end of the pointer at my nose. “Where is it?”

Then I'm thrown out and therefore free to do as I please. Or, rather, as I do not please. I have to go to the Sepulcher. I swing by the dorm in hopes of finding the remains of Smoker's feast, but there is nothing but crumbs left, so I slink away, defeated. The corridor rolls by, refusing to tell me anything new. Well, maybe it does, but I float through it like in a vacuum, deaf and blind to its pronouncements. I am pleasantly surprised that this turned out to be possible after all. This goes on until I reach the Sepulcher. Here I shake off the fog. Beyond this threshold is a domain that does not suffer being trod upon in this state of almost terminal exhaustion. The Sepulcher demands an appearance of vim and vigor. Even if you’re already a corpse.

The hallway is immaculately clean and blindingly white. And soaked in this horrible mediciney smell. I am intercepted by two female Spiders rolling out on the glistening floor.

“What's this? On whose authority? Get out!”

And my unrecognizably plaintive voice pleads, “Just for a moment. A teacher sent me. It's very important.”

“To the head of the department!”

A plump index finger directing me farther down the corridor.

My tail is sweeping the floor, my lips are stretched in an obsequious grin. I take off again.

The Spider queens stare suspiciously. A person like me is only to their liking when he's bound, suspended from the ceiling, and stuck all over with wires and tubes. To better suck out his blood. An armless creature running free is a disgrace, verging on a crime. In my mind I give them the finger. My rakes are not capable of that feat, of course. The rest of the way I take at a trot.

Janus's office. Jan is the nicest, most conscientious Spider there is. I love him dearly, but our relationship has soured a bit lately, so I'm worried. I rap the rake against the frosted-glass door and push it open a bit.

“May I?”

“Oh, it's you.” He swivels around in his chair. A long-faced, big-eared graying ginger with an amazing smile that he rarely lets out. That's why he's called Janus. He's two different people depending on whether he's smiling. “Come in, don't stand there.”

I enter. His office is not as white as the rest of the Sepulcher. You could almost imagine you were somewhere else. Leopard's drawings in thin wooden frames on the walls. Janus's office is the only place in the House where you can still see them in a civilized environment. Yes, whatever remains on the walls is closer, more accessible, and all around more fun, but a wall is a wall, it's hard to preserve things on it in exactly the state they were meant to be when created. Especially if they do go ahead with that renovation, painting over everything everywhere—then the drawings will be lost forever. Only these will be left. These, and the ones I have stashed away. Here, all we have are the spiderwebs and the trees. The largest sheet shows a gloomy white spider, its face unmistakably that of Janus. It's hanging forlornly from a thread in the middle of a tattered web. There aren't many people who'd hang a portrait like that in their office. But Janus did. He hung it, and the others, even though they all reek of the hatred Leopard had for the Sepulcher. I approach the glass-covered white desk.

“Can I see Noble?”

Janus doesn't answer. I can see he's set against it. But he's never going to say “Get out” straight off. That's not his way.

“Who was it you had a scrap with? Come here, let's have a look at you.” Jan pulls out a desk drawer and starts rummaging in it. “I said come here. Do you enjoy this?”

“Enjoy what?”

“Fighting. Hitting someone in the face with your feet.”

He finally fishes out something and dumps it on the table. A white-and-cyan package of surgical tape.

“That grimy thing over your eye, it needs to be changed.”

Jan gets up, puts me in the swiveling chair, and peels off the strip of Band-Aid on my forehead. I see that it really is on the grimy side. It's not the end of the world, of course, but I need to be nice to Janus, so I sit quietly and allow him to do whatever he thinks has to be done.

“Now you see,” he mutters, picking over my wounds, “he needs to be by himself for a while. People do need that sometimes. You understand that, don't you?”

I do. And he's right. But let him explain this to Alexander. To Blind. To all of them.

“I understand.”

“Good. Go back to your group and tell the guys not to send anybody else. Later, maybe. But not now. Principal's orders.”

I shudder. “Why? He usually doesn't interfere with your business.”

Janus is purposefully looking at the landscape beyond his window.

“He doesn't, and then again he does. In extreme cases.”

I feel sick. That's a death sentence. I look at Janus and see him suddenly pull away from me, himself, his desk, and then the whole room, growing smaller, more and more indistinct. The walls glide past, carrying him farther and farther from me, while the pictures seem to grow and crowd me, the webs on them hanging from the ceiling to the floor in nightmarish distorted polygons. I close my eyes, but this only compounds the horror, because I start hearing voices. The barely perceptible whispers of those who got tangled in the web and perished here. Leopard. Shadow. This is a terrifying place. The worst in the whole House. It stinks of death, regardless of how well scrubbed and polished they keep it.

Someone is shaking me so hard my teeth are clattering. I see Janus's face right in front of me. The web is gone.

“What's going on?” he asks. “Are you all right?”

“don't do this,” I say.

He lets me go and straightens up.

“You can't do this.”

Janus shakes his head.

“It's not my decision anymore. I am really sorry. What's happening to you?”

What's happening to me? The Sepulcher is happening to me, which is peanuts compared to what lies in store for Noble.

“My apologies. This place gets to me very badly.”

He pours water into a glass and gives it to me. I drink it out of his hands, completely forgetting about the rakes.

“This place?” he asks. “This particular place?”

“You know exactly what I'm talking about.”

“Yes, I think so. It's those weird superstitions of yours. Are you completely sure you're not sick?”

I don't answer. There is no one here who can be completely sure about it. If anybody, a Spider should know this. Janus looks down and bites his lip. He is terminally curious. I don't have to wait long for the questions to start. He takes cigarettes out of the drawer and I realize that there might be more questions than I thought. Jan sits down on the edge of the desk.

“Where does this angst come from?” he asks. “Why? I see it too often to just dismiss it out of hand. When people start breaking out in a cold sweat in this very office ...” He looks around, as if making sure that this is indeed still his office. “I'd like to know the reasons for it. I could understand if this were only happening to you. I‘d just refer you to a specialist and that would be the end of the problem.” He puffs on his cigarette, observing me closely. “You can answer or not, it's your choice.”