The Gray House

I took out another cigarette. Started flipping the pages of The Glass Key to shake off the mood, and fell into it without even noticing. Caught myself finishing the fourth cigarette and decided that I smoked too much. Took stock of my reserves. I still had sixteen left. I thought that if someone were to come in right now, to bring in lunch, for example, he’d immediately know that I’d been smoking. And would take away everything. So I left three cigarettes out, preemptive sacrifices to a possible search, shoved the rest back into the jacket, and more or less covered the stashes with the lining. Then I tidied up a bit, spread out the jacket again under myself, and took out the second photo.

A bunch of kids on the steps of the back porch. Standing, sitting, hanging off the railing. It must have been a hot day. Faces in splotches of sun and shade.

I managed to recognize most of the faces. First of them—Black, of course. The heavy gaze, the blond bangs, the square jaw. All there. He looked a bit less imposing and a bit more round faced, and, if anything, even more morose than now.

Then I found Humpback, Elephant from the Third, and Rabbit from the Sixth. Rabbit hadn’t changed at all. Humpback was disguised by motorcycle goggles and was hugging a crossbow. Elephant towered above everyone, a smiling mountain, like a scaled Kewpie doll, with a rubber giraffe peeking out of the pocket of his overalls.

This was turning out to be an exciting activity.

The next one was Blind. He was barefoot, crouching in the corner of the shot so that half of his head was out of the frame. The top button of his shirt came down almost to his navel, and his hair hung lower than the end of his nose. If he were to stand up, the hem of the checkered shirt would have fallen below his knees. I thought it strange that the counselors allowed him to go around the House dressed like that.

I looked for Sphinx but couldn’t locate him.

There was Beauty, a tender angel; he was playing dead, draped over the railing. And Solomon, from the Second. Not yet the fat Rat he became, but already quite a plump young of the species.

Then I saw Lary and laughed out loud, choking on smoke. Awkward, big-eared, spindly Lary. He was standing with one leg proudly set apart, displaying the knee scraped myriad times, and no one, not even the sunniest romantic, would dare drone about “happy childhood” looking at this picture, because it was clearly impossible to have both a happy childhood and a nose like his. An owner of a matching nose, and bugged-out eyes to boot, was standing next to Lary. Obviously Horse from the Third. Of all the people in the photograph, Lary’s visage took the cake. I even felt something resembling tenderness toward him. Cruel was the life of little Bandar-Logs. And that made them grow up hostile. And suffering from claustrophobia. And stuttering. Because no one loved them. Because they weren’t smart, they weren’t handsome, they weren’t even cute. Lary and Horse were the last ones I could recognize. And Sphinx was still nowhere to be seen.

The two identical fair-haired guys in identical striped vests kept tormenting me. And a boy in front, with a perfectly spherical head, also was somehow familiar. I kept turning the picture this way and that, trying to match the faces to various inhabitants of the House, but wasn’t able to place five of them. Finally I grew tired of this and just looked at the picture.

It was a wild, ragtag gang. Dirty, shaggy. They all probably had worms. You couldn’t make them behave no matter how you tried, but at least no one was making a face. They wanted to look presentable, even though they could probably guess it wasn’t working.

Protective amulets and all that other crap worn around the neck was all the rage, even back then. I counted sixteen pouches, plus talons, teeth, and bones, in bunches and separately; bolts, nuts, nails, rabbit feet, and a wide assortment of tails. Lary and Horse preferred their protection shiny and clanking. Elephant was bedecked in little bells, while the blond twins wore keys. My gaze registered those keys and it finally dawned on me.

I closed my eyes for a second and looked again.

Of course! The cold, round, staring eyes, the hooked noses . . . Little Vultures! So alike that I wouldn’t even venture to guess which of them was the real one.

I wondered where the second one went. Immediately came a thought that even one was plenty, but I chased it away, ashamed, as I remembered the perpetual mourning of the Third.

It could be that Birds were not in mourning for Vulture’s lost twin. That they just liked black. Honestly, I didn’t really want to know. But in any case, Vulture had no twin brother in the House anymore, and thinking that it was good that he didn’t was a foul thing to do.

I put the photograph back and took out the first one again. Looked at it. Then lay back and stared at the ceiling.