The Gray House

“Ah, but have you looked at that baby? I’d like to see you rushing back to something like that. He’s got this huge head, and a mouth full of teeth. Eight months, my eye! He gives me the willies, he does. And she wouldn’t even call him by name. Tubby this and Tubby that. And he’s not that fat, really.”

“Maybe his daddy was tubby.”

“Whatever he was, must’ve been a scary sight if the kid’s taking after him.”

“Not after her, surely. She might be all speckled like a quail’s egg, but she is kinda cute for that.”

She didn’t pay attention to any of that talk. She couldn’t afford to make a scene and lose the job. And it didn’t hurt her that much anyway. Tubby was a perfect child. Not a beauty, maybe, but very clever, and he could already say at least half a dozen words. He patiently waited for her to come back from the afternoon shift, gnawing on the biscuits she’d leave him for lunch and playing with the stuffed dinosaur. The neighbors never once complained about him crying. He didn’t need a nurse. He knew how to wait. They both knew, because that was the only thing they did. Together and separately, while playing, working, making dinner and eating it, in the crib, and around the back of the café, even in their dreams.

Their father, also the Beautiful Prince from the Not-Here, looking at the same time like the faded dinosaur with button eyes (the way Tubby imagined him) and like the small sprig of jasmine growing in a pot on her windowsill, was going to find them sooner or later, if not today then tomorrow, they only had to wait for him. And when he did, they wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the price of diapers, or the vicious gossip, or any of the small inconveniences of life, because he would take them with him to his fairy land, where everything would be different. So they waited.

The Three-Fingered Man in Black

He took residence in the abandoned three-story house, the one that spawned insistent rumors of being haunted. It was some time before people noticed. The house was out of the way, and the new tenant did not turn the lights on, did not advertise his presence in any way. At first they took him for a drifter. But drifters aren’t usually clean shaven, dressed in suits, or in the habit of buying a week’s worth of groceries. When it became clear that the man was in the house to stay, they sent a committee made of residents of the nearby houses to clarify the situation. It was a small town, and foreigners here were usually met with suspicion.

The man amiably received the committee and politely refused to answer most of their questions. Some things they did manage to find out, though.

The owner of the house—yes, it turned out that he did exist—had hired this man to look after the property. The man showed them the papers, and the papers were all in order, even though no one could remember a time when the haunted house had been owned by anybody, and the owner’s signature looked strange indeed, resembling as it did a fat spider. One of the neighbors, a retired lawyer, assured them that there appeared to have been nothing unlawful here. The man in the black suit said that he was going to remain in the house until he received further instructions from the owner. There wasn’t anything they could say against that, and the committee departed, unsatisfied but with the general feeling of having done their duty.

The house had always been a strange place, so it surprised no one that its owner signed papers with a spider and sent people to guard his property when there wasn’t much left of it that hadn’t crumbled to dust.

The new occupant of the old house lay low for some time, and then one day this surly young woman in leather came to visit him astride a motorcycle, scaring the neighborhood cats half to death. She brought a small fair-haired girl, offloaded her, and roared away immediately. This event turned the people completely against the man. Even his single-father status could do nothing to endear him to the neighbors. Besides, the girl was an exceptionally unpleasant child.

BETWEEN THE WORLDS

Sphinx would take a room in the college dorm, tiny but private. He would spend the winter there, studying for the exams, and the winter would be the coldest in the last fifteen years. He would never find Mermaid. The address given by her parents would turn out to be nonexistent. Sphinx would visit everyone having the same last name as that strange family, then everyone with similar last names, and after two months of searching and asking would start to doubt if they hadn’t been a hallucination.