The Gray House

Blind twanged the strings, very softly, Tabaqui whistled, Sphinx and Alexander just sat there silently. The morning refused to come.

I got tired of waiting for it and fell asleep, so I don’t know how long the others were able to endure this.

Shortly before dawn I awoke to the sounds of the flute coming from the hallway. Plaintive and repetitive. I opened my eyes, registered the deepening blueness of the sky, and went back to sleep. Right around that time someone also stroked my hair. Tousled it and went away. I would never know who it was.

Those who had left at the end of the night tried to do it quietly.

I was woken up by Sphinx.

“Get up,” he said. “Or you’ll miss graduation.”

It would have been less jarring if he’d set off an alarm clock by my ear. I sprang up.

“What? Already?”

The room was thoroughly trashed. It looked like that after every exciting night, though, so the mess was entirely expectable, but no less disgusting for that. And not a single soul in sight save for Sphinx and me.

“Have they all left?”

“They have,” Sphinx said, wearing a crooked smile. “And know what? You’ll have to help me, because there isn’t anyone else.”

He had these huge shadows under his eyes. They took up half of his face. He obviously hadn’t slept a single wink, otherwise his clothes would have been as rumpled as mine were. I’d fallen asleep on one of the mattresses they tossed on the floor, amidst my presents. Horse’s broom had left an imprint on my cheek, and I appeared to have crushed the flashlight that Humpback gave me. This made me very upset.

“You’ll glue it back later,” Sphinx said. “Just toss it in your bag, they’re going to take this place apart brick by brick.”

“Why?” I said.

I had trouble with coherent thinking that morning.

“Because,” Sphinx said.

I collected all the gifts and put them in my bag. The crushed flashlight I wrapped separately, hoping to mend it afterward somehow. Then I had to make coffee and do the tidying up, because Sphinx couldn’t do any of that without his prosthetics, and Alexander never showed up. Of course, it was not a proper cleaning, the way Alexander would have done it. I just stuffed the bulk of the trash in black plastic bags, smoothed out the crumpled blankets, and emptied the ashtrays. Only when we finished the coffee did I ask where all the others had gone. I had been reluctant to ask before, because there was something not quite right about us being completely alone.

“You’ll know soon enough,” he said.

And I did. Relatively soon. This knowledge still haunts me, often keeping me up at night. That, and also that I’ll never find out who tousled my hair before leaving. Every time I think about it I imagine different people doing it, so it was almost as if they all did it. Well, maybe Tubby wouldn’t be able to. Anyway, I only learned in the morning that there was another big group that had gone away. Who knows where? They had both left and stayed back. Neither dead nor alive. People would get to calling them Sleepers, but that would be a couple of years later, back then no one called them anything at all. There just wasn’t a word for what they were. They had all assembled in the Third for some reason.

“Probably because there were so many of them from the Third,” Sphinx said. “Six in all.”

I didn’t pay close attention to his words then.

There was no graduation that day. The parents did come, but no one was released. Some of the parents stayed, for support and also to keep an eye on the way we were interrogated. Thanks to them, and to Spider Ron, or we’d be in trouble. Sphinx was right about the House being taken apart brick by brick. They did almost exactly that. I don’t think there was a single object left that wasn’t probed, sniffed at, or disassembled. All drugs in the Sepulcher had been checked and rechecked, down to the last pill. On the second day a K-9 unit conducted a sweep of the House, with two German shepherds and a bloodhound. From the basement they extracted unfortunate Solomon. I only caught a glimpse of him, from a distance. Someone pudgy and filthy was marched down the first-floor corridor in handcuffs, loaded into a police van, and driven away. Then they unearthed human bones in the basement. I thought we’d be eaten alive, but luckily for us it soon turned out that the bones were more than a century old, and everyone promptly calmed down.

The interrogations went on. Two, three hours each day, sometimes more. Different people each time. Some were more interested in those who had disappeared, others in those who had turned into chrysalises. But it made no difference, we could not help them because we didn’t know much, and what we did know we could never say.