Houses Without Doors by Peter Straub
He was able to remember every single thing anyone had ever told him about Tommy Golz.
“Now you’re going to play a funny, funny game,” he said. “This is called the Tommy Golz game because it’s going to keep you safe from Mrs. Franken. Are you ready?” Harry carefully slid the pin into the fabric of his shirt collar, all the while watching Eddie’s slack blood-streaked person. Vibrating bands of light beat rhythmically and steadily about Eddie’s face.
“Ready,” Eddie said.
“I’m going to give you your instructions now, Little Eddie. Pay attention to everything I say and it’s all going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay—as long as you play the game exactly the way I tell you. Your understand, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
“Tell me what I just said.”
“Everything’s gonna be okay as long as I play the game exactly the way you tell me.” A dollop of blood slid off Eddie’s eyebrow and splashed onto his already soaked T-shirt.
“Good, Eddie. Now the first thing you do is fall down—not now, when I tell you. I’m going to give you all the instructions, and then I’m going to count backward from ten, and when I get to one, you’ll start playing the game. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So first you fall down, Little Eddie. You fall down real hard. Then comes the fun part of the game. You bang your head on the floor. You start to go crazy. You twitch, and you bang your hands and feet on the floor. You do that for a long time. I guess you do that until you count to about a hundred. You foam at the mouth, you twist all over the place. You get real stiff, and then you get real loose, and then you get real stiff, and then real loose again, and all this time you’re banging your head and your hands and feet on the floor, and you’re twisting all over the place. Then when you finish counting to a hundred in your head, you do the last thing. You swallow your tongue. And that’s the game. When you swallow your tongue you’re the winner. And then nothing bad can happen to you, and Mrs. Franken won’t be able to hurt you ever ever ever.”
Harry stopped talking. His hands were shaking. After a second he realized that his insides were shaking too. He raised his trembling fingers to his shirt collar and felt the hat pin.
“Tell me how you win the game, Little Eddie. What’s the last thing you do?”
“I swallow my tongue.”
“Right. And then Mrs. Franken and Mom will never be able to hurt you, because you won the game.”
“Good,” said Little Eddie. The glittering light shimmered about him.
“Okay, we’ll start playing right now,” Harry said. “Ten.” He went toward the attic steps. “Nine.” He reached the steps. “Eight.”
He went down one step. “Seven.” Harry descended another two steps. “Six.” When he went down another two steps, he called up in a slightly louder voice, “Five.”
Now his head was beneath the level of the attic floor, and he could not see Little Eddie anymore. All he could hear was the soft, occasional plop of liquid hitting the floor.
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Two.” He was now at the door to the attic steps. Harry opened the door, stepped through it, breathed hard, and shouted “One!” up the stairs.
He heard a thud, and then quickly closed the door behind him.
Harry went across the hall and into the “dormitory” bedroom. There seemed to be a strange absence of light in the hallway. For a second he saw—was sure he saw—a line of dark trees across a wall of barbed wire. Harry closed this door behind him too, and went to his narrow bed and sat down. He could feel blood beating in his face; his eyes seemed oddly warm, as if they were heated by filaments. Harry slowly, almost reverently, extracted the hat pin from his collar and set it on his pillow. “A hundred,” he said. “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four…”
When he had counted down to ‘W, he stood up and left the bedroom. He went quickly downstairs without looking at the door behind which lay the attic steps. On the ground floor he slipped into Maryrose’s bedroom, crossed over to her desk, and slid open the bottom right-hand drawer. From the drawer he took a velvet-covered box. This he opened, and jabbed the hat pin in the ball of material, studded with pins of all sizes and descriptions, from which he had taken it. He replaced the box in the drawer, pushed the drawer into the desk, and quickly left the room and went upstairs.
Back in his own bedroom, Harry took off his clothes and climbed into his bed. His face still burned.
He must have fallen asleep very quickly, because the next thing he knew Albert was slamming his way into the bedroom and tossing his clothes and boots all over the place. “You asleep?” Albert asked. “You left the attic light on, you fuckin’ dummies, but if you think I’m gonna save your fuckin’ asses and go up and turn it off, you’re even stupider than you look.”
Harry was careful not to move a finger, not to move even a hair.
He held his breath while Albert threw himself onto his bed, and when Albert’s breathing relaxed and slowed, Harry followed his big brother into sleep. He did not awaken again until he heard his father half-screeching, half-sobbing up in the attic, and that was very late at night.
11
Sonny came from Fort Sill, George all the way from Germany. Between them, they held up a sodden Edgar Bcevers at the grave site while a minister Harry had never seen before read from a Bible as cracked and rubbed as an old brown shoe. Between his two older sons, Harry’s father looked bent and ancient, a skinny old man only steps from the grave himself. Sonny and George despised their father, Harry saw—they held him up on sufferance, in part because they had chipped in thirty dollars apiece to buy him a suit and did not want to see it collapse with its owner inside onto the lumpy clay of the graveyard. His whiskers glistened in the sun, and moisture shone beneath his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. He had been shaking too severely for either Sonny or George to shave him, and had been capable of moving in a straight line only after George let him take a couple of long swallows from a leather-covered flask he took out of his duffel bag.
The minister uttered a few sage words on the subject of epilepsy.
Sonny and George looked as solid as brick walls in their uniforms, like prison guards or actual prisons themselves. Next to them, Albert looked shrunken and unfinished. Albert wore the green plaid sport jacket in which he had graduated from the eighth grade, and his wrists hung prominent and red four inches below the bottoms of the sleeves. His motorcycle boots were visible beneath his light gray trousers, but they, like the green jacket, had lost their flash. Like Albert, too: ever since the discovery of Eddie’s body, Albert had gone around the house looking as if he’d just bitten off the end of his tongue and was trying to decide whether or not to spit it out. He never looked anybody in the eye, and he rarely spoke. Albert acted as though a gigantic padlock had been fixed to the middle of his chest and he was damned if he’d ever take if off. He had not asked Sonny or George a single question about the Army. Every now and then he would utter a remark about the gas station so toneless that it suffocated any reply.
Harry looked at Albert standing beside their mother, kneading his hands together and keeping his eyes fixed as if by decree on the square foot of ground before him. Albert glanced over at Harry, knew he was being looked at, and did what to Harry was an extraordinary thing. Albert froze. All expression drained out of his face, and his hands locked immovably together. He looked as little able to see or hear as a statue. He’s that way because he told Little Eddie that he wished he would die, Harry thought for the tenth or eleventh time since he had realized this, and with undiminished awe. Then was he lying? Harry wondered. And if he really did wish that Little Eddie would drop dead, why isn’t he happy now? Didn’t he get what he wanted? Albert would never spit out that piece of his tongue, Harry thought, watching his brother blink slowly and sightlessly toward the ground.
Harry shifted his gaze uneasily to his father, still propped up betwee
The minister finished speaking, and made a rhetorical gesture with his hands. The coffin sank on ropes into the rough earth. Harry’s father began to weep loudly. First George, then Sonny, picked up large damp shovel-marked pieces of the clay and dropped them on the coffin. Edgar Beevers nearly fell in after his own tiny clod, but George contemptuously swung him back. Maryrose marched forward, bent and picked up a random piece ,of clay with thumb and forefinger as if using tweezers, dropped it, and turned away before it struck. Albert fixed his eyes on Harry—his own clod had split apart in his hand and crumbled away between his fingers. Harry shook his head no. He did not want to drop dirt on Eddie’s coffin and make that noise. He did not want to look at Eddie’s coffin again. There was enough dirt around to do the job without him hitting that metal box like he was trying to ring Eddie’s doorbell. He stepped back.
“Mom says we have to get back to the house,” Albert said.
Maryrose lit up as soon as they got into the single black car they had rented through the funeral parlor, and breathed out acrid smoke over everybody crowded into the backseat. The car backed into a narrow graveyard lane, and turned down the main road toward the front gates.
In front seat, next to the driver, Edgar Beevers drooped sideways and leaned his head against the window, leaving a blurred streak on the glass.
“How in the name of hell could Little Eddie have epilepsy without anybody knowing about it?” George asked.
Albert stiffened and stared out the window.
“Well, that’s epilepsy,” Maryrose said. “Eddie could have gone on for years without having an attack.” That she worked in a hospital always gave her remarks of this sort of unique gravity, almost as if she were a doctor.
“Must have been some fit,” Sonny said, squeezed into place between Harry and Albert.
“Grand mal” Maryrose said, and took another hungry drag on her cigarette.
“Poor little bastard,” George said. “Sorry, Mom.”
“I know you’re in the Armed Forces, and Armed Forces people speak very freely, but I wish you would not use that kind of language.”
Harry, jammed into Sonny’s rock-hard side, felt his brother’s body twitch with a hidden laugh, though Sonny’s face did not alter.
“I said I was sorry, Mom,” George said.
“Yes. Driver! Driver!” Maryrose was leaning forward, reaching out one claw to tap the chauffeur’s shoulder. “Livermore is the next right. Do you know South Sixth Street?”
“I’ll get you there,” the driver said.
This is not my family, Harry thought. I came from somewhere else and my rules are different from theirs.
His father mumbled something inaudible as soon as they got in the door and disappeared into his curtained-off cubicle. Maryrose put her sunglasses in her purse and marched into the kitchen to warm the coffeecake and the macaroni casserole, both made that morning, in the oven. Sonny and George wandered into the living room and sat down on opposite ends of the couch. They did not look at each other—George picked up a Reader’s Digest from the table and began leafing through it backward, and Sonny folded his hands in his lap and stared at his thumbs. Albert’s footsteps plodded up the stairs, crossed the landing, and went into the dormitory bedroom.
“What’s she in the kitchen for?” Sonny asked, speaking to his hands. “Nobody’s going to come. Nobody ever comes here, because she never wanted them to.”
“Albert’s taking this kid of hard, Harry,” George said. He propped the magazine against the stiff folds of his uniform and looked across the room at his little brother. Harry had seated himself beside the door, as out of the way as possible. George’s attentions rather frightened him, though George had behaved with consistent kindness ever since his arrival two days after Eddie’s death. His crew cut still bristled and he could still break rocks with his chin, but some violent demon seemed to have left him. “You think he’ll be okay?”
“Him? Sure.” Harry tilted his head, grimaced.
“He didn’t see Little Eddie first, did he?”
“No, Dad did,” Harry said. “He saw the light on in the attic when he came home, I guess. Albert went up there, though. I guess there was so much blood Dad thought somebody broke in and killed Eddie. But he just bumped his head, and that’s where the blood came from.”
“Head wounds bleed like bastards,” Sonny said. “A guy hit me with a bottle once in Tokyo, I thought I was gonna bleed to death right there.”
“And Mom’s stuff got all messed up?” George asked quietly.
This time Sonny looked up.
“Pretty much, I guess. The dress rack got knocked down. Dad cleaned up what he could, the next day. One of the cane-back chairs got broke, and a hunk got knocked out of the teak table. And the mirror got broken into a million pieces.”
Sonny shook his head, and made a soft whistling sound through his pursed lips.
“She’s a tough old gal,” George said. “I hear her coming though, so we have to stop, Harry, but we can talk tonight.”
Harry nodded.
12
After dinner that night, when Maryrose had gone to bed—the hospital had given her two nights off—Harry sat across the kitchen table from a George who clearly had something to say. Sonny had polished off a six-pack by himself in front of the television and gone up to the dormitory bedroom by himself. Albert had disappeared shortly after dinner, and their father had never emerged from his cubicle beside the junk room.
“I’m glad Pete Petrosian came over,” George said. “He’s a good old boy. Ate two helpings, too.”
Harry was startled by George’s use of their neighbor’s first name—he was not even sure that he had ever heard it before.
Mr. Petrosian had been their only caller that afternoon. Harry had seen that his mother was grateful that someone had come, and despite her preparations wanted no more company after Mr. Petrosian had left.
‘Think I’ll get a beer, that is if Sonny didn’t drink it all,” George said, and stood up and opened the fridge. His uniform looked as if it had been painted on his body, and his muscles bulged and moved like a horse’s. “Two left,” he said. “Good thing you’re underage.” George popped the caps off both bottles and came back to the table. He winked at Harry, then tilted the first bottle to his lips and took a good swallow. “So what the devil was Little Eddie doing up there, anyhow? Trying on dresses?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I was asleep.”
“Hell, I know I kind of lost touch with Little Eddie, but I got the impression he was scared of his own shadow. I’m surprised he had the nerve to go up there and mess around with Mom’s precious stuff.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “Me too.”
“You didn’t happen to go with him, did you?” George tilted the bottle to his mouth and winked at Harry again.
Harry just looked back. He could feel his face getting hot.
“I just was thinking maybe you saw it happen to Little Eddie, and got too scared to tell anybody. Nobody would be mad at you, Harry. Nobody would blame you for anything. You couldn’t know how to help someone who’s having an epileptic fit. Little Eddie swallowed his tongue. Even if you’d been standing next to him when he did it and had the presence of mind to call an ambulance, he would have died before it got there. Unless you knew what was wrong and how to correct it. Which nobody would expect you to know, not in a million years. Nobody’d blame you for anything, Harry, not even Mom.”
“I was asleep,” Harry said.
“Okay, okay. I
They sat in silence for a time, then both spoke at once.
“Did you know—”
“We had this—”
“Sorry,” George said. “Go on.”
“Did you know that Dad used to be in the Army? In World War Two?”
“Yeah, I knew that. Of course I knew that.”
“Did you know that he committed the perfect murder once?”
“What?”
“Dad committed the perfect murder. When he was at Dachau, that death camp.”
“Oh, Christ, is that what you’re talking about? You got a funny way of seeing things, Harry. He shot an enemy who was trying to escape. That’s not murder, it’s war. There’s one hell of a big difference.”
“I’d like to see war someday/’ Harry said. “I’d like to be in the Army, like you and Dad.”
“Hold your horses, hold your horses,” George said, smiling now. “That’s sort of one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.” He set down his beer bottle, cradled his hands around it, and tilted his head to look at Harry. This was obviously going to be serious. “You know, I used to be crazy and stupid, that’s the only way to put it. I used to look for fights. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of a house, and pounding some dipshit into a coma was my idea of a great time. The Army did me a lot of good. It made me grow up. But I don’t think you need that, Harry. You’re too smart for that—if you have to go, you go, but out of all of us, you’re the one who could really amount to something in this world. You could be a doctor. Or a lawyer. You ought to get the best education you can, Harry. What you have to do is stay out of trouble and get to college.”
“Oh, college,” Harry said.