The Gray House

The polite boy said nothing but nodded matter-of-factly and went ahead. Ralph, bone tired, tagged along behind. The candle was half-gone. His fingers no longer felt the burns.

At length he was brought to a surprisingly cozy room and put in a high-backed chair. There he was provided with a splendid candlestick, a pill for the headache, and a glass of water. Afraid that he might fall asleep, Ralph rushed to explain the purpose of his visit.

“I am a stoolie,” he said, peeling the flows of dried wax from his fingers. “A snitch. And I am tattling. Betraying my own. Exposing the evil plots of the Outsides.”

This revelation was received with sympathy.

Ralph, inspired by the reception, told everything he knew about Godmother.

“Vulture needs to be warned,” he said, concluding the confession. “Tell him he’s in danger.”

The hospitable owners of the cozy room promised Ralph that they would do just that.

Ralph remembered nothing about his way back.

When he woke up he was on his own couch. His insides were burning and his bladder threatened to burst, but there was, surprisingly, no trace of a headache. He shuffled to the bathroom and relieved himself, staring in horror at the wax-encrusted trousers. The shirt wasn’t much better. He washed his face, did his best to scrape the wax off the glove and the shoes, then changed and went out. He needed to get to Shark first, before Godmother had her way with him.

Shark was in a state of total stupefaction. Godmother was nowhere to be seen.

“I came to make a statement,” Ralph said.

“Your statement is just the thing I need right now. Have a look at this,” Shark said, passing Ralph a sheet of paper. “Like it?”

It was Godmother’s resignation letter, citing “family circumstances.” Ralph stared at the looping signature under today’s date and shuddered, like from a sudden burst of cold wind.

“When did she bring it?”

“She didn’t!” Shark roared, jumping up. “No one in this whole damn dump can be bothered to actually bring me something in person! At least she had the decency to take it as far as my office. And staple it to the door! How sweet of her, don’t you agree? Because I know some people who couldn’t manage even that!”

Shark dashed about the office, frantically kicking the furniture.

“Who do you all take me for? Your elderly deaf granny? Family circumstances, all right, great! But coming in and explaining what the hell happened—oh, no, that’s not how we do things! We’re in such a hurry we barely have the time to write this!”

The door opened a crack and Raptor peeked in. He read the situation correctly and realized that the best strategy for him at this time would be to vanish. Ralph waited it out while Shark’s ire peaked and then he said, “Has anyone seen her today?”

“Not me,” Shark grunted. “And I don’t give a damn about what anyone else saw!”

He stopped and finally had a better look at Ralph’s appearance.

“What’s this, a tropical safari? I’ve had it up to here with Sheriff and his polos, and now you come strolling in here in sneakers? We have a dress code, you know. A suit! Trousers, button-down shirt, jacket! And a tie! All right, I’m not going to insist on the jacket when it’s this hot, but jeans and a tee—that’s too much. You’re going to be the death of me, all of you!”

“My trousers are slightly ruined at the moment. With wax,” Ralph admitted. “And the shoes too.”

Shark shot a mad look at him and crashed in the armchair.

“The death!” he repeated and closed his eyes.

Ralph decided that he’d better go.

He saw that Shark was in the throes of panic. Godmother’s exit he interpreted as her running away in fear, and the fact that she chose this particular moment for it—that what she feared was the graduation. Shark himself dreaded the graduation so much that no other possible explanation would even occur to him.

Ralph didn’t believe in the urgent departure either, but his doubts were of a different nature. What did they do to her was the principal question on his mind. That it was something they did he had no doubt, but what was it? What could make Godmother abandon the House?

In the duty room it was Sheep’s shift. She was sitting there alone, thumbing through a magazine instead of her customary knitting. Ralph’s question about Godmother set her eyes blinking.

“A letter of resignation? Can’t be! Well, no, I haven’t seen her today, but her shift is not until two and she never comes down before that. The letter must be someone’s idea of a silly joke.”

By three o’clock Ralph had established that no one in the House had seen Godmother that day.

Not on the third floor, not on the second, and not in the yard. Her room was cleaned out, her car disappeared from its place in the garage, and there was not a single thing left in the duty room that could have belonged to her.

Exactly when, in the course of the few hours, she managed to wipe every trace of her presence from the House and leave without anyone noticing remained a mystery.