The Gray House Read online

  Here I snapped out of it, because I felt my real self in the center of attention, not of Birds but of my own dear Pheasants. They were watching me with great interest. Vulture’s sharp-toothed rictus withered down to Gin’s lopsided grin, turning my stomach. I bent down to my fritter, hating them so much I nearly threw up. My daydream was just that, a dream. The real scavengers were sitting right here, scanning my face in search of traces of sweat, wetting their lips in anticipation. I suddenly realized that I would rather become a Bird, right this moment. Wear black, learn embroidering, dig up a hundred skulls hidden in flower pots. Anything, just to leave the First. What really upset me was that these feelings could also look from the outside like a panic attack. “That’s it,” I told myself, “no more games. Wait until tomorrow. Only thirteen hours left.”

  Once, when I was smoking in the teachers’ bathroom, flinching at every sound, Sphinx came in there. I was so spooked I threw away the cigarette.

  “Look at that, a Pheasant smoking!” Sphinx said, staring at the cigarette butt at his feet, starting to get soggy on the damp tiles. “Wouldn’t have believed it if someone told me.”

  Then he laughed. Gangling, bald, armless. Eyes as green as grass. Broken nose, sarcastic mouth, always lifted at the corners. Black-gloved prosthetics.

  “Got any more smokes?”

  I nodded, astonished. He had actually addressed me. No one talked to Pheasants. It just was not done. I almost expected he was going to say next, “Mind if I have one?” but no such luck.

  “That’s nice” was all he said.

  And then he left.

  I hadn’t assumed for a second he’d say anything to anyone about this. I was wrong.

  When people started calling me Smoker a couple of days later, I did not put two and two together at first. He was not the only one who knew. The Little Pigs enlightened me again. Turns out, Sphinx had given me a new nick. Became my godfather. The House nearly collapsed, because that had never happened before. No one had ever christened a Pheasant. Much less someone like Sphinx. Above him there was only Blind, and above Blind there was only the roof and the swallows’ nests.

  All this made me a kind of celebrity among non-Pheasants and made all Pheasants hate me, without exception. The new nick sounded to them slightly worse than Jack the Ripper. It annoyed them. It marred their image. But they could not undo it. They didn’t have the authority.

  I decided not to imagine myself in the Fourth. My snitch of a godfather was there, along with crazy Noble, who’d knocked out one of my teeth when I accidentally locked wheels with him. Also Tabaqui the Jackal, who once sprayed me with some stinky crap from a canister marked Danger, and Lary the Bandar-Log, who coordinated all assaults of Logs on Pheasants. Imagining myself among them didn’t help. I had enough trouble as it was.

  I finished the soggy fritter. Drank my tea. Ate the bread and butter. Sketched out in my head two separate plans for running away. They were both utterly unworkable, but it still cheered me up. Then dinner ended.

  I didn’t return to the dorm. I had a smoke in the teachers’ bathroom and went back to the canteen. The landing in front of it was usually empty. There weren’t many places like that in the House. I parked the wheelchair by the window and stared at the darkening tops of the trees outside until the lights switched on in the hallway. They made the trees too dark. I wheeled away and started going back and forth in front of the notice boards. There wasn’t anything else I could look at. I read them all again for the hundredth time and for the hundredth time found that they never changed. It was the ones behind the boards that changed, all right. They were made in marker, crayon, and paint, and they changed so quickly that those who wanted to leave a message had to paint over the old ones, wait for it to dry, and write on top. Some things were too important for the House denizens not to do properly. I didn’t usually read the writings. There were too many of them, and most were too silly. But tonight I had nothing better to do. I parked the wheelchair alongside the boards and peeked into the space between them.

  HUNTING SEASON IS OPEN.

  SHOOTING LICENSES AS PER PRICE LIST.

  THURSDAY. SQUIB.

  I tried to imagine whom or what one could shoot here. Mice? Stray cats? And what with? Slingshots? I sighed and went on reading.

  Scores, day bef. yesterday.

  Morn. Laundry.

  Astrological services. Experienced practitioner.

  Cof. Daily. 6 to 7 pm.

  HOW TO ACKNOWLEDGE SHORTCOMINGS.

  SHALL IMPART OWN PRICELESS EXPERIENCE.

  THE ENLIGHTENED ONE.

  SCORES, YESTERDAY. MORN.

  THRD BUFFALO LEFT OF ENTR.

  Half pound of Roquefort. Cheap.

  Whitebelly.

  “EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE UNIVERSE!”

  COF. THUR.

  BAR MGR., RQST. MOON RIVER #64.

  NONSTANDARD FOOTWEAR REQD.

  This notice stopped me cold. I reread it. Looked above it. Looked at it again. Looked at my sneakers. Coincidence? Most likely. But I loathed going back to the dorm. I knew what “Cof.” was and where it was. I also knew that I would not be welcome there, and that no sane Pheasant would ever try to get in. On the other hand, what did I have to lose? Why not expand the boundaries? I buffed the sneakers with my handkerchief a bit, to restore the luster, and wheeled off to the Coffeepot.

  On the second floor, the hallway was long like a garden hose and had no windows. The only windows were in front of the canteen and on the landing. The hallway started at the stairs, was then interrupted by the anteroom to the canteen, and then went on to the other stairs. Canteen at one end, with the staff room and principal’s office opposite. Then our two rooms, a disused one, the biology classroom, the abandoned bathroom that everyone called “the teachers’ bathroom” and that I used as a smoking hideaway, and then the common room that had been closed for interminable renovations since before my arrival. That was all familiar territory. It ended at the lobby, a gloomy expanse at the crossroads, with windows looking out into the yard, a sofa in the middle, and a broken TV in the corner. I’d never ventured beyond it. There was an invisible boundary, and Pheasants did their best never to cross it.

  I boldly crossed to the other side, went through the hallway beyond the lobby, and found myself in a different world.

  It looked like an explosion in a paint shop. Several explosions. Our side had the drawings and scribbles too, but this side did not simply have them, it was them. Enormous, human-sized and bigger, leaping off the walls—they flowed and intertwined, scrambled on top of each other, fizzed and jumped, extended to the ceiling and shrank back. The walls on both sides swelled with murals until the corridor started to seem narrower. It was like driving through a maniac’s nightmare.

  The doors of the Second bristled with blue skulls, purple thunderbolts, and warning signs. It was obvious whose territory this was, so I cautiously veered toward the opposite wall. These doors could suddenly disgorge anything, from razors and bottles to whole Rats. The area was already thick with broken glass and general detritus, and this mess crunched underwheel like brittle old bones.

  The door I was looking for was slightly ajar, and a good thing too or I would have missed it. Coffee and tea only, proclaimed the plain white sign. The rest of the door was painted in bamboo patterns, indistinguishable from the surrounding walls. I peeked in to make sure this really was the Coffeepot. A dimly lit space, lots of round tables. Chinese lanterns and Japanese origami hanging from the ceiling, horrifying masks and framed black-and-white photos on the walls. And a bar by the door, assembled from parts of lecterns and painted blue.

  I pulled the door a bit wider. A bell clanked and I saw faces turn toward me. The nearest were two Hounds in collars. Farther in I could see Rats’ colorful mullets. I decided not to look any more closely and wheeled to the bar.

  “Sixty-four, please!” I blurted out, as the notice had said, and only then looked up.

  Rabbit, plump and bucktoothed, also in a c
ollar, was gawking at me from behind the counter.

  “Say what?” he asked, astounded.

  “Number sixty-four,” I repeated, feeling very stupid. “Moon River.”

  There were sniggers at the tables.

  “The Pheasant’s going places!” someone shouted. “Did you hear that?”

  “A Pheasant suicide!”

  “No, that’s a new breed. Jet Pheasant!”

  “It’s their king. Emperor Pheasant.”

  “This can’t be a Pheasant. It’s a changeling.”

  “And a sick one too, otherwise why would he want to change into a Pheasant?”

  While the customers were cracking jokes at my expense, Rabbit solemnly stepped out from behind the counter, went around to my side, and stared at my feet. He studied them intently for what seemed like an eternity and finally said, “No good.”

  “Why not?” I whispered. “The notice said nonstandard.”

  “Don’t know anything about any notices,” Rabbit said sternly and went back to his nook. “Come on, get out of here.”

  I stared at the sneakers.

  They no longer looked like flames. There were too few windows in the Coffeepot, and no Pheasants at all. It was a stupid thing to have done. I shouldn’t have come up here to be ridiculed. The sneakers were perfectly ordinary to everyone except Pheasants. I’d somehow managed to forget about that.

  “They are not standard,” I said. Mostly to myself, I wasn’t trying to convince anyone. Then I turned toward the door.

  “Hey, Pheasant!” I heard from the farthermost table.

  I wheeled around.

  There, over the intricately decorated coffee cups, sat the wheelers of the Fourth. Noble, he of the fair hair and gray eyes, beautiful as an elven king, and Tabaqui the Jackal—pint-sized, frizzy-haired, and big-eared, like a lemur in a wig.

  “Tell you what, Rabbit,” Noble said, keeping his chilly gaze on me, “this is the first time that I’ve seen a Pheasant whose footwear does not adhere to what I would call a certain standard. I am surprised you didn’t notice that.”

  “Exactly right,” Tabaqui jumped in excitedly. “That’s exactly what I noticed, too. And then I said to myself: He’s a goner. They are going to peck him to death. Rabbit, you give him the Sixty-Four. That may just be the only bright spot he has left. Drive over here, babe! We’ll have your order filled.”

  I was unsure whether to accept the invitation, but Hounds pulled in their legs and chairs, making a path wide enough for an elephant to drive through, so I had no choice.

  Tabaqui, the one who’d called me babe, looked no more than fourteen himself. But only from a distance. Up close he might as easily have passed for thirty. He was clad in three vests, and under them he had on three different T-shirts, in green, pink, and blue, and still you were struck by how skinny he was. All three vests were equipped with multiple pockets, and all of them bulged. He was also bedecked in beads, buttons, amulets, neck pouches, pins, and little bells, all looking either very worn or slightly grubby. Noble, in his white shirt and blue chinos, appeared almost naked by comparison. Naked and squeaky clean.

  “What do you need Moon River for?” Noble asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said honestly. “Just wanted to try it.”

  “Do you even know what it is?”

  I shook my head. “Some sort of cocktail?”

  Noble’s stare filled with pity. His skin was so fair that it seemed to glow. His eyebrows and lashes were darker than the hair, and his eyes were now gray, now blue. Not even his sour scowl managed to spoil the impression. Not even the zits on his chin.

  I had never met anyone else so beautiful it hurt just to look at them. Noble was the only one. About a month ago he had knocked out one of my teeth when I locked wheels with him, coming out of the canteen. I’d never seen him up close before. I hadn’t even had time to think. I’d just stared and missed what he was saying. Next thing I knew the beautiful elf swung for my jaw, and that was the end of the rapture. For a week after that I tracked close to the walls, shrank from passersby, spent untold hours at the dentist’s office, and couldn’t sleep at night.

  Of all people, Noble was the least likely to be my tablemate in the Coffeepot and, if it were up to me, the least likely to have a conversation with. But that’s how it turned out. He was asking questions, I was answering them, and his damned looks started to work their magic again. It was very hard to constantly keep in mind what he really was while being so close to him. Besides, I developed a nagging feeling that this Moon River thing wasn’t exactly a harmless drink. Rather, it was something I shouldn’t have been drinking at all.

  Just as I was fretting about it, there it was. Rabbit put the tiny cup on the table and pushed it toward me.

  “This is going to be on your conscience,” he warned the other wheelers.

  I peeked inside the cup and saw an oily smear on the bottom. There wasn’t enough there to fill a thimble.

  “Wow!” I said. “So little.”

  Rabbit sighed loudly. He did not go away. He was standing there waiting for something.

  “Money,” he said finally. “Are you gonna pay?”

  I panicked. I didn’t have any on me.

  “How much does it cost?” I asked.

  Rabbit turned to Tabaqui and said, “Look, it’s all your fault. I wouldn’t have given him anything. He’s a Pheasant, he’s got no sense at all.”

  “Shut up,” Noble said, thrusting a hundred at him. “And get lost.”

  Rabbit took the bill and left, but not before giving Noble a dirty look.

  “Drink up,” Noble said. “If you really want it.”

  I looked into the cup again.

  “Not really. Not anymore.”

  “And you’re right!” Tabaqui exclaimed. “What for? You don’t have to, and besides, why that, all of a sudden? Have some coffee instead. And a roll.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  I was extremely embarrassed. All I wanted to do was go away as soon as I could.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know it was so expensive.”

  “Nonsense. So you didn’t, so what? The less you know, the longer you live,” Tabaqui squeaked, before suddenly screaming, “Three coffees!”

  And then he spun the wheels and went spinning himself. I didn’t notice how he did it, when he pushed what, but he was spinning like crazy, shedding morsels of food, beads, and other stuff, like a trash bin whirling on the end of a string. A small feather settled on my shoulder.

  “No, really, thank you,” I said.

  The carousel stopped.

  “Why not? Have you got other plans?”

  “I haven’t got money.”

  Tabaqui blinked like an owl. His hair was standing on end from all that spinning. He looked really deranged now.

  “What money? It’s Noble’s treat. We invited you over, after all. The price is trifling, by the way.”

  Rabbit brought a tray with three cups of coffee, cream in a pot, and some mangled rolls. No one was listening to my protests.

  “You don’t have to treat me,” I tried again. “I don’t want anything.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Tabaqui drawled and sat back in his wheelchair. “See, Noble? Who would want to have coffee with you after you broke his face? No one, that’s who.”

  I felt my face flushing. Noble was drumming his fingers on the table and did not look at us.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and apologize,” Tabaqui said. “Or he’ll just go away. And you’ll get what you always get. Nothing.”

  Noble went red. Very quickly and very visibly, as if someone had slapped his cheeks.

  “Why don’t you stop telling me what to do!”

  Now I didn’t want to just go away, I wanted to fall through the floor. That would’ve been faster. I turned the wheelchair around.

  “I’m sorry,” Noble mumbled without looking up.

  I froze. My wheelchair half-turned, my head between the shoulder blades. That didn’t make
any sense at all. In all of my dreams of revenge, Noble never apologized. I could not imagine him doing that. I would knock out all of his teeth, fracture his jaw, make him slightly less beautiful, make him swear and spit blood, but we had never gotten as far as an apology.

  “I wasn’t myself that day,” Noble went on. “Behaved like a total jerk. If you were to go to the Spiders I’d have problems. You have no idea how big. I couldn’t sleep for two days straight. Waiting for them to come knocking. And then I figured you hadn’t told anyone. I wanted to apologize but couldn’t. It just wouldn’t come out. It only came out today because of Jackal here.”

  Noble finished and finally looked at me. It was not a kind look.

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say? “I forgive you” would have sounded stupid. “I’ll never forgive you” was even worse.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What is it you don’t understand?” Tabaqui the Jackal interjected immediately.

  “Anything.”

  “But would you have some coffee with us now?” he asked coyly.

  Really persistent, he was.

  I wheeled back to the table and took the cup off the tray.

  “This isn’t right,” I said. “This isn’t how it goes. You are breaking the rules. No one ever apologizes to a Pheasant. No one. Not even after knocking his head off.”

  “Where is that written?” Tabaqui said. “I have never heard of this rule.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Same place as all the other rules, I guess. But it’s there, whether written or not.”

  “That’s rich!” Tabaqui was looking at me with what seemed almost like awe. “Look at him! He is teaching me the House rules. Me! The nerve!”

  Noble was fiddling with the cup of Moon River, studying it.

  “What do they make it from?” he asked. “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know,” Tabaqui snorted. “Some say toadstool extract, others, Vulture’s tears. I guess it is possible that Bird Daddy cries bitter green poison. Who could really tell? But it is poisonous, all right. Those of a romantic persuasion insist that it’s just midnight dew collected at a full moon. But dew is unlikely to have sickened so many people. Unless it’s been collected in the sock of a Bandar-Log, of course.”