Dagger Key and Other Stories

Once he had bandaged his wounds, believing that Grace would not return to the cabin, that she was lodged in a cell filled with burning light or enduring some crueler punishment, Shellane spent the remainder of the night hoping he was wrong. Whatever pain she was experiencing, he was to blame—he had insinuated himself into a situation that he had not fully grasped, and as a result he had caused her situation, already bleak, to worsen. Staying at the house would have served no purpose, yet he felt he had breached a bond implicit to the relationship, and he castigated himself for having abandoned her. The hours stretched and he understood once again how frail and attenuated his attachment to life had become. Without Grace, without the renewal of passion she had inspired, he could not conceive of going on as before, preparing a new identity, finding a new hiding place. What could any place offer him apart from the fundamentals of survival? And what good were they without a reason to survive? As it grew increasingly clear that she would not return, he sat at the table breeding a dull fog of thought, illuminated now and then by fits of memory. Her face, her laugh, her moods. Yet those memories did not brighten him. All the ordinary instances of her person that shone so extraordinarily bright in his mind were grayed with doubt. He knew almost nothing about her and he suspected that if he were capable of analysis, he might discover that the things he knew were dross not gold, and that she was not in the least extraordinary. She simply seemed to fit a shape in his brain, to be unreasonably perfect in some essential yet incomprehensible way. Something had been ripped out of him. Some scrap of spirit necessary for existence. Every part of his body labored. Heart slogging, lungs heaving. He felt himself the center of a howling absence.

To distract himself, he wrote lists. Long lists, this time, comprised chiefly of supposition. His knowledge of the house was limited, but he was certain about the doors—the uglies were able, thanks to their strength, to depress the ridged patches on the walls with their fingers and thus program their destination. Though pointless to do so, he could not keep from speculating on the nature of the place and the apparent infinity of locations to which it was, in some unfathomable way, connected. It was hard to accept that the afterlife possessed an instrumentality. Back when he was a believer, his notion of heaven had been diffuse, his vision of hell informed by comic books. Spindly crags and bleak promontories atop which the greater demons perched, peering into the fires where their minions oversaw the barbecue of souls. The house was at odds with both conceptions, but now he had no choice other than to believe that beyond death lay a limitless and intricate plenum whose character was infinitely various, heavens and hells and everything in-between. It was similar to the Tibetan view—souls attracted to destinations that accorded with what they had cherished in life, be it virtuous or injurious. Unlikely, though, that Tibetan cosmology had any analog to the black house. If he found himself trapped in the house, he thought, he’d study the way the uglies manipulated the doors, then devise a mechanism that would allow him to exert more force when pushing…

Why had they been afraid of him?

Reason dictated that they’d presumed him to be dead, and had lost their fear after noticing he was alive and mortally vulnerable. As with everyone else he had met in the house, it took them a while to notice his vitality. But that didn’t explain why they had been afraid when they believed him dead. Perhaps they saw things that people did not. Different wavelengths. Auras. Perhaps they perceived him as a threat, someone who might be able to manipulate the doors. That was self-flattery, but they could have no other cause to fear him. None of which he was aware. Of course if they did know him for a threat, though they weren’t able to kill him, they’d make his life—his afterlife—hell. Punish him. Keep him penned up or too busy to interfere. At least they would try. As primitive as they were, they’d screw up sooner or later and give him an opportunity. But he would have to endure a great deal of torment before the opportunity arose…He understood then that he was not thinking in the abstract, but was contemplating his death. He was, after all, a perfect candidate for the house. He didn’t give a damn about living anymore and like Grace, who’d had Broillard to finish her off, he had his own killers to hand. They would eventually track him down. All he needed to do was wait.