The Gray House

The boy lowered his head onto his end of the pillow and tried to go back to sleep. The joy that had been overflowing inside him was not going away. He pressed his palm against his heart, as if probing it through the skin. Cradling it.

He did not know yet that this feeling would stay with him for a very long time. It would become less sharp, almost mundane, but at times would strike him again with the same unexpected force, like a soft blow, making him gasp in wonderment, filling his eyes with tears and his soul with delight. He also didn’t know that he and his twin were now and forever different from each other. That he would always look older. “More corrupt,” Black Ralph would say. When the boy overheard that, he wouldn’t be offended. That would be another new feature of his character—nothing much would be able to offend him anymore.

THE ENCOUNTER

Room number twenty-four is under a reign of terror since early morning. It is not the cheeriest of rooms even under normal circumstances. All the wheelers who did not leave for the summer have been living in it, the seniors and the juniors together. There aren’t that many of them, only six, but the two nurses who remained in the House have been running ragged taking care of this bunch.

The seniors are beset with the ailments that prevented them from going, racked with envy of those who did go, and tormented by their own petty needs, by the fact that they have been deprived of the familiar dorms and sent to the room that was considered cursed because its windows were looking out into the street instead of the yard, the way they were supposed to in decent dorms. And also by the necessity to share this room, unpleasant as it is by itself, with the juniors. The presence of juniors is what irks them the worst. Especially one of the juniors.

The juniors suffer from all of that too, but unlike the seniors they don’t have anyone at whom they can vent their frustration.

All six of them are terror professionals in their own right, but none can compare to Stinker, can’t even come close. Stinker is in a category of one. His aptitude for terror is otherworldly. He is a peerless prodigy, capable of dealing death for a mere sideways glance, in lieu of a smack upside the head. Moreover, the death would leave him above any suspicion, and be visited upon the victim by means of cutting-edge technology, utilizing the latest inventions, including his own, implemented meticulously and lovingly, by weapons such as the world has never seen, based on his unique research in the fields of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, with side trips into history and biology. Stinker is an expert in all these fields, but his grades are still poor, because he has no time to parade his knowledge before the teachers. There are things infinitely more important that demand his attention. The seniors never pick on Stinker. They never say anything bad about him at all, even in private. Listening devices are Stinker’s specialty, and he is constantly at work refining and perfecting them.

Scolding and punishing him is something that’s reserved exclusively for the nurses. “There is something motherly about it,” Stinker likes to say. “Something warm, fuzzy, and creepily nostalgic.” It’s been noticed that the older and homelier the nurse, the more he is prone to using this phrase.

Such is Stinker, a living horror all of nine years old.

Which is why, when one unfortunate morning he shakes everyone awake before dawn and proceeds to tear apart the room, preparing for the Event, no one dares to say a word.

Stinker does not deign to explain himself. He constructs a watchtower. The table, pushed against the window, serves as its base. On the table he mounts several pillows and the tripod for the spyglass, then installs himself, surrounded by cookies, binoculars, party poppers, and tissues. The two juniors dutifully paint letters on the white canvas stitched together from a cut-up sheet. Stinker leans down from his post at regular intervals, evaluates their progress, and exhorts them to work faster. The seniors flee the room in an attempt to get some rest.

Breakfast is served to Stinker directly at his post. The nurses, spooked by his increasing nervousness, attach the finished Welcome! sign to the window and wheel the juniors away to scrub the paint off them.

Stinker frets, more and more as the time passes. By midday he becomes dangerously sullen. The nurses bring out the smelling salts and disappear in the bowels of the House with the terrified juniors in tow. Seniors return and watch Stinker with increasing curiosity. He distributes the party poppers and orders them to be shot out of the window at his command. The seniors prepare. Judging by Stinker’s defeated look the Event has not happened, and is increasingly unlikely to happen, so when they suddenly hear his hysterical “Fire!” two of them simply drop the poppers, and only one reflexively pulls on the string.