Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Lost confidence in us. We weren't watching the guy closely enough. That's how she put it. And something about the climate here being unhealthy. A stunning woman. Hard to argue with her. I didn't even try.”

“Did she take him home?”

“I don't know. None of my business. I never asked.”

“She could have switched schools... If this one wasn't good enough for her.”

Near the canteen they were greeted by a piercing bell. Ralph couldn't help wincing. Shark looked at him disdainfully, like a crusty captain might look at a former sailor long out of practice.

“You've gone weak,” he observed. “Weak and lazy. And here's me holding you up as an example to the youth.”

Still grumbling, he mounted the stairs. Ralph stood there on the landing for a while, watching him go, and then returned to the hallway.

The Sixth was never quiet. Even when all of them were silent, a trained ear could still catch a kind of buzzing, the hum of a spinning engine hidden in the walls. That invisible swarm.

The voices died down as he entered. Hounds spit on the cigarettes, extinguishing them, cascaded down from the windowsills, rolled back toward the chairs, and attempted to switch on the silence. This enabled him to hear the droning: the susurration of their thoughts that never quieted down, since there were always too many of them in this place. The song of the Sixth. They wore bright colors—not quite at the Rat level, but close—assaulting the eye with the splashes of scarlet shirts and emerald-green sweaters. But the walls of the classroom exuded a dull grayish sheen, trapping them in an impenetrable airtight rectangle, so that the windows started to seem like crude drawings stuck on the gray substance.

As soon as he closed the door behind him, he felt how stifling this vacuum was, robbing him of breath and movement. The ceiling hung too low over his head, while the walls moved slowly inward, flowing into the floor and pressing on him with a rubbery colorlessness. They can engulf you completely, trap you like an insect, and then when the next visitor comes you’ll already just be a part of the decoration, a mural indistinguishable from the rest of them, a stuffed specimen of the Sixth.

“I want to speak with the new Leader,” he said. Waited until the bout of coughing from those who choked on the smoke subsided and added, “Or with whoever considers himself to be one.”

They shifted and looked down. All of them in leather dog collars—store bought and handmade, with studs and rivets or decorated with beads. He knew the answer even before anyone spoke. There was no Leader. The Leader of the Sixth was the only one of them not obligated to wear this token of belonging to the pack. Only he could walk around with his neck open. Of course, a collar could have been serving as a kind of disguise, hiding a Leader who didn't wish to be exposed to outsiders. But not a single Hound even glanced at another, no one became a momentary center of attention. There was no one among them who had taken the place of the late Pompey.

They cringed and studied their hands, as if ashamed of something. What of? That they can't find anyone to rise above the others? Their headlessness? Their loss?

“There is no Leader,” someone in the back offered. “Haven't elected him yet.”

“When did Pompey die?” Ralph asked.

“A month ago,” long-faced, bespectacled Laurus said. “A little less than a month.”

“And no elections yet?”

Hounds crouched, exposing the backs of their heads, trying to hide something disgraceful, something that pained them. The quiet hum in the walls grew in intensity. The walls advanced on Ralph, shielding the Sixth, but before the slippery curtain closed in on him ...

The lamps behind the wire mesh spilling yellow light. The glistening green lake of oily paint, then a scream... A dark silhouette writhing on the floor, spraying blood ...

Then the walls took over, blotting out the flying shards of the vision, discoloring and erasing them. Ralph had seen enough to understand that whatever happened to Pompey, they were all there, the entire pack, and the memory of what they saw, the bitter taste of it still in their mouths, was poisoning their existence. He was now carrying their pain and their fear—of whom, he could not yet see. They were too closed, too resistant to his attempt to understand more fully.

Every pack was built like a ladder. On every step a living soul. If the top step broke, the next one became the top. A headless pyramid immediately grew a new head. This happened everywhere and always, excluding Pheasants, of course. Every pack had not only a first, but also a second. Even Birds, with Vulture being an enormous distance, seventeen unoccupied rungs at least, above everyone else—even Birds had Lizard, ready to take the place of the Leader should anything happen to him. The only way for this order to be broken was to have someone from way below usurp the power. But then he became the Leader himself. The fact that neither of these things had happened with Hounds pointed to a third possibility. And whatever it was, it had nothing in common with the first two. Ralph hadn't the slightest idea what it could be. I wonder what the gym has to do with all this?

“Curious,” he said.

He only realized how long he'd been standing there thinking about all of this when he saw the darkness outside the windows and felt that the pack had been exhausted by his presence. The more nervous gnawed at their fingers and made faces. The wheelers fidgeted quietly, bringing their sallow faces together. The engine in the walls buzzed in fits and starts. Everything around him was completely gray. The Sixth was stuck in its protective fence, they all now looked as if they were drowning—or had long ago drowned—in a fish tank that hadn't been cleaned in the last million years.

Ralph went out without saying a word. The Sixth's relieved exhalation was cut off from him by the door slamming back. It was immediately pushed open again, and the pale visage of Bandar-Log Zit appeared in the crack as he traced Ralph's steps.

Between the Sixth's classroom and their bedrooms Ralph moved slowly, reading the walls. Sloughing away the fresh writings like the skin off an onion, revealing old ones, smeared and by now barely visible. Dogs' heads with collars. The appeal to the “members of the umpire committee” to assemble in the yard on Saturday night. He squinted. There it is. A cat with a human head, crossed out with red paint. A black triangle with a hole through it. An eye inside a spiral, covered in jagged notches. All of them new. Not less than a month old. He looked again to make sure he saw what he saw. The meaning of these symbols was no harder for him to read than his own nick. The cat was Sphinx. The triangle, Black. The spiral with the eye, Blind. All three signs had been used for target practice. That was no coincidence.

Blind was crouching in front of Ralph's office, tracing invisible circles on the floorboards with his finger. His long black hair fell over his eyes. The knees peeked out of the ripped jeans. He raised his head when he heard the steps. An emaciated figure with colorless eyes, faceless and devoid of a discernible age, like a drifter who had long forgotten the date of his birth. At the same time as he was standing up, he was also getting younger and younger with lightning speed, and when Ralph reached him he was met by a mere boy.

Anyone would have written this off as a trick of light in a dimly lit corridor, a mirage that disappeared when seen up close. Anyone but Ralph.

“Hi,” Ralph said, unlocking the door.

“Hello.”

Ralph let him in and followed.

Blind froze once inside. Ralph had to fight the urge to take him by the hand and lead him to the chair or the sofa. He's blind, helpless in unfamiliar surroundings, and look at that oversized sweater, the sleeves going down to the tips of his fingers, and those holes at the knees . He closed his eyes, trying to evict the insidious image out of his head. This is the master of the House in front of you, you dummy!