The Gray House

“Want to come with me? That’s an invitation,” she said.

“Is that permitted?”

Grasshopper seriously doubted that he would be allowed as far as his room’s door, after everything that happened.

“It’s not. But no one will say a word. You’ll see. Coming?”

They went out into the shining white corridor of the Sepulcher, which muffled their steps. The frosted-glass doors were opening and closing. Seniors in pajamas lounged in chairs, flipping through colorful magazines. Nurses flew from one room to another like snowballs. Grasshopper was following Ginger, expecting that at any moment someone would shout at him, but no one did. Nobody asked them anything. They walked and, alongside them, their reflections appeared and disappeared in the mirror sides of the cabinets lining the wall, one after the other. Blue pajamas and white ones. And the fire of her hair flaming up and extinguishing itself as they passed.

It’s as if we have vanished, Grasshopper thought, astounded. We’re walking, but we’re not. No one sees us or hears us. This red-haired girl has put a spell on the entire Sepulcher.

Snow still fell outside the windows. They turned down another corridor, where the floor was shiny, and went to the very last door.

“Here we are.”

Ginger pushed the door.

The room was really tiny. Three beds, strewn with clothes. Fully developed piles of magazines, notebooks, paper, brushes, and jars of paint. Drawings adorned the walls, and a green budgie jumped up and down excitedly in its wire cage. The room resembled Stuffage and even smelled like Stuffage. Grasshopper stepped on some orange peel and stopped, a little embarrassed. Ginger jumped onto one of the beds at a run, shook away her slippers, swept off the trash, and introduced her mate.

“This is Death.”

A handsome boy with a mop-top haircut smiled and nodded at him.

“Hi,” he said.

Grasshopper startled when he heard the nick.

“So you must be . . .”

Death nodded again, still smiling.

“Have a seat, will you,” Ginger called, pushing another pile off the bed. “You can stare at him later, we have time.”

Grasshopper sat down next to her. He knew about Ginger’s friend. Death was the boy who never left the Sepulcher. The counselors, when talking among themselves, always said that he wasn’t “long for this world.” Death was a bed case. He never walked. He never even used a wheelchair. He’d lived in the Sepulcher since time immemorial, and Grasshopper always imagined this permanent resident to be greenish-pale, almost like a corpse. There was no other way to imagine someone who hadn’t been long for this world for so many years now. But Death turned out to be a small, tender boy, with eyes occupying a good half of his face, and long dark-red hair that looked varnished. Grasshopper was staring at him while Ginger was picking cards off the blanket.

“Wanna play?” she asked.

She and Grasshopper climbed onto Death’s bed.

For the next hour they became fortune-tellers. They prophesied to each other happy futures and all wishes coming true. Then the cards went flying to the floor and Ginger pulled up her pajama top and showed Grasshopper the tattoo she had on her stomach. The tattoo was made with a ballpoint pen and already a bit smeared, but one could still recognize something vaguely eagle-like, with a human head.

“What’s that?” Grasshopper asked.

“I don’t know,” Ginger said. “Death thinks it’s a harpy. I was shooting for a gryphon, actually. What do you think?”

“Could have been worse,” Grasshopper said politely.

Ginger sighed and wiped the fuzzy parts off with her finger.

“It had been,” she admitted. “The previous couple of times. Honestly? A great artist I’m not.”

They sat in silence for a while. Death was fiddling with an orange. Grasshopper was searching for a topic to discuss.

“Is it true there are ghosts here, in Sepulcher?” he asked.

Ginger rolled her eyes.

“You mean White? He’s never a ghost. He’s just a halfwit. Which is not to say that there aren’t. Except they don’t walk into people’s rooms mumbling nonsense, the way they tell it in your Stuffage.”

“What do they do, then?” Grasshopper said.

Ginger directed a demanding look toward Death.

“What do they do, Death?”

“Nothing much,” he said shyly. “They just walk the corridors sometimes. You’d be lucky to notice them, really. They’re very quiet. And very beautiful. And White is the opposite of that. He ran in once when it was dark, stumbled, made this awful racket, and then started howling like a dog. I almost died I was so scared.”

“White was one of the seniors,” Ginger explained. “He would stick two lit cigarettes in his nose, wrap himself in a sheet, and sneak around scaring kids. They caught him and sent him away somewhere. He was really nuts.”

Grasshopper imagined a really nuts, sinister senior in a sheet and looked at Death with a newfound respect.