Every House Is Haunted (39 page)

They were blinking.

“God . . .” he muttered.

Eyes. He was looking at eyes. Thousands of them.

And they were looking back at him.

Ryerson screamed and threw himself away from the window. He bounced off the side of a stall and collapsed on the floor, sobbing. He was vaguely aware of a buzzing sound coming from the window. It was growing steadily louder.

He wiped his eyes and saw blood on his hands. He went over to one of the mirrors and squinted at his reflection. Tiny rivulets of blood were trickling from the corners of his eyes.

He turned on the hot and cold faucets full blast and flushed his eyes. Bloody water splashed the sink, the mirror. He looked at his eyes again. The bleeding had stopped, but it looked like he had gone a week without sleep.

The buzzing was very loud now. It sounded like a hive of extremely large and extremely pissed off bees. The cut on his arm bled freely, but he didn’t have time to take care of it now. He’d patch himself up after he got out of this fucked up jazz club.
If
he got out. He still had to find an exit.

Exit.

The emergency exit.

He burst out of the men’s room and ran briskly across the room. He didn’t look up at the VIP lounge, skirting the stairs and the table where he had sat with Jonathan Marchand. Jonathan was gone, but that didn’t matter anymore. He had done his job like the well-paid puppy dog he was. Getting out of this place was all that mattered now. Being able to look in the mirror and not see blood pouring out of his eyes was high on his list, too.

He weaved through the crowd to the emergency exit. The sign over the door had changed again. Now it said
BURN
. It could have said
DISCO INFERNO
for all Ryerson cared. He was getting out. He put his hands on the push-bar, relishing its cool, firm reality. Then he slammed the door open and stepped out into a wall of mist. It was like the atmosphere in Al Azif, only much denser. And yellow. Ryerson could barely see his hands in front of his face.

The door snapped shut behind him, and he jumped. He took a breath, then let it out. His hands cut smoothly through the mist, up and down, side to side. There was nothing within his reach. He took a few tentative steps forward, arms outstretched.

He turned right and tried moving in that direction. A minute passed. Then five. It was hard to tell how far he had come. He had lost all sense of distance and direction. He considered backtracking to the fire-door, but wasn’t sure he could find it again. He thought he heard something up ahead. Something that might have been a voice.

He allowed himself to walk a little faster. He looked down to see how his feet were doing, but couldn’t see anything past his belt buckle. The sound of his shoes slapping the ground was distant, almost dreamlike.

Gradually, the mist began to clear. He stopped moving when he saw it was actually flowing past him, as if propelled by a strong breeze. Ryerson didn’t feel anything, but the voice was getting louder and clearer.

He started moving forward again, expecting to see the mouth of the alleyway opening onto some side-street. Instead he saw faces. Lots of faces. They seemed to be staring up at him, as though the ground up ahead slanted downward at an abrupt angle.

His shoes made an abrupt clomping sound on ground that was unmistakably wooden. The mist was gone, and Ryerson realized he was back in Al Azif. On stage. Under the spotlight.

He looked out at the crowd. Jonathan Marchand was in the VIP lounge, sitting next to the goat-woman. She held a cigarette in an ebony holder and was staring at Ryerson through the rising smoke.

The crowd waited. Ryerson thought of the eyes outside the men’s room window, the one that looked out on some unimaginable border. Someone started tapping their foot, which was joined by the snapping of the black man’s fingers. The crowd broke into applause that became a loud buzzing. Ryerson looked up into the spotlight, feeling its putrid glow on his face, and waited for the show to begin.

It begins with fire and it ends with fire.

I step out of the smoke. A man rushes toward me. He takes my hand and leads me away from a burning building. He is the first.

He passes me off to another man who helps me into an ambulance. He is the second.

A woman in the back of the ambulance puts a plastic mask over my face. She is the third.

I am taken to a hospital.

After that I lose count.

I spend the night in the hospital. I visit a lot of rooms.

In the morning the doctor comes to see me. She asks if I remember anything yet. I shake my head. She says it will all come back to me in time. I smile.

A nurse comes in with breakfast. He says he hopes I like scrambled eggs. I smile. The doctor is writing on my chart. Then she stops and looks at the nurse. She drops the chart and leaps onto his back, sinking her teeth into his neck.

I smile.

I leave the hospital shortly thereafter. No one notices I am gone. They have bigger problems to deal with.

I wander around the city. I have never been in one before. I meet a man in ragged clothes. He lives in a cardboard box. He says the city has done this to him. He holds out his hand and asks me for help.

I help him.

I go back to the building. All that remains is a crown of smoke-stained bricks. I go inside and find the charred remains of a table. Before it was a table it was a piece of wood. Before that a log. Before that a tree in a deep northern forest.

My home.

The next day I find a man on the steps of my building. He is eating a human arm.

He says he can’t help himself. He is hungry. So very hungry.

I wonder how he found me. Then I recognize him.

He is the first.

I meet a lot of people over the next few weeks. Some of them come to me. They see me in dreams.

Some people don’t like me. They say they know me. They say they know what I really am. They try to stay away from me, but the city is being closed off.

One man tries to kill me. He sneaks into my building one night and puts his hands around my throat. I do the same to him.

He goes away hungry.

The people outside the city call me different things.

They call me a virus. They call me a myth. They call me a terrorist. They call me mass hysteria.

They tell the people still in the city to stay indoors. They tell them not to leave.

People attempting to leave the city are being shot.

I spend my days walking around the city. The streets are filled with bones. I touch many people. They collect the bones and use them to rebuild my home.

I smile.