Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

TWO HOUSES Kelly Link

Soft music woke the sleepers in the spaceship The House of Secrets. They opened their eyes to soft pink light, crept like vampires from their narrow beds. They gathered in the antechamber. Outside the world was night, the dawn a hundred years away.

The sleepers floated gracelessly in the recycled air, bumped softly against one another. They clasped hands, as if to reassure one another that they were real, then pushed off again. Their heads were heavy with dreams. There were three of them, two women and one man.

There was the ship as well. Her name was Maureen. She was monitoring the risen sleepers, their heart rates, the dilation of their pupils, each flare of their nostrils.

“Maureen, you goddess! Bread, fresh from the oven! Sourdough!” Gwenda said. “Oh, and old books. A library? It was in a library that I decided I would go to space one day. I was twelve.”

They inhaled. Stretched, then slowly somersaulted.

“Something brackish,” said Sullivan. “A tidal smell. Mangrove roots washed by the sea. I spent a summer in a place like that. Arrived with one girl and left with her sister.”

“Oranges, now. A whole grove of orange trees, all warm from the sun, and someone’s just picked one. I can smell the peel, coming away.” That was Mei. “Oh, and coffee! With cinnamon in it!”

“Maureen?” said Gwenda. “Who else is awake?”

There were twelve aboard The House of Secrets. Ten women and one man, and the ship, Maureen. It was a bit like a girls’ summer camp, Gwenda had said, early on. Aune said, Or an asylum.

They were fourteen years into their mission. They had longer still to go.

“Portia is awake, and Aune, and Sisi,” Maureen said. “For two months now. Aune and Portia will go back to sleep in a day or two. Sisi has agreed to stay awake awhile yet. She wants to see Gwenda. They’re all in the Great Room. They’re throwing a surprise party for you.”

There was always a surprise party. Sullivan said, “I’ll go and put my best surprised face on.”

They threw off sleep. Each rose or sank toward the curved bulkhead, opened cunning drawers and disappeared into them to make their toilets, to be poked and prodded and examined and massaged. The smell of cinnamon went away. The pink light grew brighter.

Long-limbed Sisi poked her head into the antechamber and waited until Gwenda swung out of a drawer. “Has Maureen told you?” Sisi said.

“Told what?” Gwenda said. Her hair and her eyebrows had grown back in her sleep.

“Never mind,” Sisi said. She looked older; thinner. “Dinner first, then all the gossip.”

Gwenda wriggled through the air toward her, leaned her face against Sisi’s neck. “Howdy, stranger.” She’d checked the ship log while making her toilet. The date was March 12, 2073. It had been two years since she’d last been awake with her good friend Sisi.

“Is that a new tattoo?” Sisi said.

It was an old joke between them.

Head to toes Gwenda was covered in the most extraordinary pictures. A sunflower, a phoenix, a star map, and a whole pack of wolves running across the ice. There was a man holding a baby, a young girl with red hair on a playground rocket, the Statue of Liberty and the state flag of Illinois, passages from the Book of Revelations, and a hundred other things as well. There was the ship The House of Secrets on the back of one hand, and its sister, The House of Mystery, on the other. You only told them apart by the legend scrolled beneath each tattoo.

You didn’t get to take much with you when you went into space. Maureen could upload all of your music, all of your books and movies, letters and videos and photographs of your family, but how real was any of that? What of it had any weight? What could you hold in your hand? Sisi had a tarot deck. Her mother had given it to her. Sullivan had a copy of Moby-Dick, and Portia had a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei had her knitting needles.

Gwenda had her tattoos. She’d left everything else behind.

There was the Control Room. There were the Berths, and the Antechamber. There was the Engine Room, and the Long Gallery, where Maureen grew their food, maintained their stores, and cooked for them. The Great Room was neither, strictly speaking, Great nor a Room, but with the considerable talents of Maureen at their disposal, it was a place where anything that could be imagined could be seen, felt, heard, savored.

The sleepers staggered under the onslaught.

“Dear God,” Mei said. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“We each picked a theme! Maureen, too!” Portia said, shouting to be heard above the music. “You have to guess!”

“Easy,” Sullivan said. White petals eddied around them, chased by well-groomed dogs. “Westminster dog show, cherry blossom season, and, um, that’s Shakespeare over there, right? Little pointy beard?”

“Perhaps you noticed the strobe lights,” Gwenda said. “And the terrible music, the kind of music only Aune could love. A Finnish disco. Is that everything?”

Portia said, “Except Sully didn’t say which year, for the dog show.”

“Oh, come on,” Sullivan said.

“Fine,” Portia said. “2009. Clussex 3-D Grinchy Glee wins. The Sussex spaniel.”

There was dancing, and lots of yelling, barking, and declaiming of poetry. Sisi and Sullivan and Gwenda danced, the way you could dance only in low gravity, while Mei swam over to talk with Shakespeare. It was a pretty good party. Then dinner was ready, and Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

Once there had been two ships. It was considered cost-effective, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience, or so the theory goes. Sister ships Light House and Leap Year had left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059. Only some tech, some comic-book fan, had given them nicknames for reasons of his own: The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery.

The House of Secrets had lost contact with her sister five years earlier. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets. Gwenda still dreamed, sometimes, about the twelve women aboard The House of Mystery.

Dinner was Beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The chickens were laying again, and so there was chocolate soufflé for dessert. Maureen increased gravity, because it was a special occasion and in any case, even fake Beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “What?” she said. “It’s so nice to watch things fall.”

Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and Archaea. “Because,” she said, “it is not just a party, Sullivan, Mei, Gwenda. It’s Portia’s birthday party.”

“Here’s to me,” Portia said.

“To Portia,” Aune said.

“To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said.

“To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

“To The House of Secrets,” Mei said.

“To The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery,” Gwenda said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed her hand again. And they all drank.

“But we didn’t get you anything, Portia,” Sullivan said.

Portia said, “I’ll take a foot rub. Or wait, I know. You can all tell me stories.”

“We ought to be going over the log,” Aune said.

“The log can lie there!” Portia said. “Damn the log. It’s my birthday party.” There was something shrill about her voice.

“The log can wait,” Mei said. “Let’s sit here a while longer, and talk about nothing.”

“There’s just one thing,” Sisi said. “We ought to tell them the one thing.”

“You’ll ruin my party,” Portia said sulkily.

“What is it?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

“It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “It’s nothing at all. It was only the mind playing tricks. You know what it’s like.”

“Maureen?” Sullivan said. “What are they talking about, please?”

“Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She asked me to bring up our immediate course. I did so. Several minutes later, I observed that her heart rate had gone up. She said something I couldn’t understand, and then she said, ‘You see it, too, Maureen? You see it?’ I asked Sisi to describe what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘The House of Mystery. Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi that I had not seen it. We called up the charts, but there was nothing recorded there. I broadcast on all channels, but no one answered. No one has seen The House of Mystery in the intervening time.”

“Sisi?” Gwenda said.

“It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God, I saw it. Whole and bright and shining. So near I could almost touch it. Like looking in a mirror.”

They all began to talk at once.

“Do you think—”

“Just a trick of the imagination—”

“It might have been, but it disappeared like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t it come back again the same way?”

“No!” Portia said. She slammed her hand down on the table. “It’s my birthday! I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash this all again. What happened to poor old Mystery? Where do you think they went? Do you think somebody, something, did it? Will they do it to us too? Did it fall into some kind of cosmic pothole or stumble over some galactic anomaly? Did it travel back in time? Get eaten by a monster? Could it happen to us? Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t make any difference!”

“I remember,” Sisi said. “I’m sorry, Portia. I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were tears in her eyes. It was Gwenda’s turn to squeeze her hand.

“Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said. “One of Aune’s concoctions? Maureen, what did you find in Sisi’s blood?”

“Nothing that shouldn’t have been there,” Maureen said.

“I wasn’t high, and I hadn’t had anything to drink,” Sisi said.

“But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Cheers.”

Mei said, “I don’t want to talk about it either.”

“That’s settled,” Portia said. “Bring up the lights again, Maureen, please. Make it something cozy. Something cheerful. How about a nice old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, big picture windows full of green fields, bluebells, sheep, detectives in deerstalkers, hounds, moors, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know. That sort of thing. I turned twenty-eight today, and tomorrow or sometime soon I’m going to go back to sleep again and sleep for another year or until Maureen decides to decant me. So tonight I want to get drunk and gossip. I want someone to rub my feet, and I want everyone to tell a story we haven’t heard before. I want to have a good time.”

The walls extruded furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They sat in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. The floor beneath them was flagstones, a fire crackled in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, and through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

“Less gravity, Maureen,” Portia said. “I always wanted to float around like a ghost in an old English manor.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

“Funny old Aune,” Portia said. “Funny old all of us.” She somersaulted in the suddenly buoyant air. Her seaweedy hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

“Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

“Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

“No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen, you can do the special effects.”

“I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now, through the windows, you could see a farm, and rocky fields beyond it. In the distance, the land sloped up and became coniferous trees.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins then. Now the world has changed again. The forest will have swallowed it up.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My grandmother’s work was to take the cows to one particular meadow, where the pasturage was supposed to be better. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them! What she would think of me now, of this path we are on! In the evening she brought the herd home again. The cattle path went along a ridge. On one side there was a meadow that her family did not use even though the grass looked very fine to my grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”

Outside the windows now were a tree in a meadow, and a brook running along, and a rock that you could imagine would make a fine picnic table.

“My grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting all around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

“Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

“Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my grandmother—her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose—one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. “Ooh,” Portia said. “That was a good one. Creepy! Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

“It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

“So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”

“I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”

“You could change it up a bit,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “It’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story that my grandfather told me.”

The gardeners were outside the windows again. There was beginning to be something ghostly about them, Gwenda thought. You knew that they would just come and go, always doing the same things. Maybe it was the effect of sitting inside such a very Great Hall, surrounded by so many tapestries. Maybe this was what it was like to be rich and looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible—just like Maureen, really—for all the notice you had to take of them. They might as well have been ghosts. Or was that what the servants thought about the people they looked after? Capricious, powerful without ever really setting foot on the ground, nothing you could look at for any length of time without drawing malicious attention?

What an odd string of thoughts. She was fairly sure that while she had been alive on Earth nothing like this had ever been in her head. Out here, suspended between one place and another, of course you went a little crazy. It was almost luxurious, how crazy you were allowed to be.

She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. If something disastrous were to happen now, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, or if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, and they all went flying into space, would she and Sisi manage to hold on to each other? It almost made her happy, thinking of it. She smiled at Sisi and Sisi smiled back.

Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They went hunting the wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to church on Sundays. There was a tornado.

Rain beat at the windows. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.

After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were forming a search party to go and look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was part of the group that found the girl at last. She was still alive when they found her, but a tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in half. She was pulling herself along by her fingers.

“After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather wouldn’t hunt in that part of the forest. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

“Ugh,” Sisi said. “Horrible!”

“Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was dragging itself along the floor of the forest. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

The gardeners again, with their terrible shears.

“No more old-people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”

Sullivan pushed himself up off the flagstones, up toward the whitewashed ceiling. He did the breaststroke, then dove back down toward the rest of them.

“Sometimes you can be a real brat, Portia,” he said.

“I know,” Portia said. “God, I’m sorry. I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good ghost story, right?”

“Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

“That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

“Maybe you don’t have a choice?” Gwenda said. “Or maybe it isn’t always bad? Maybe there are happy, well-adjusted ghosts?”

“I never saw the point of ghosts,” Sullivan said. “I mean, they’re supposed to haunt you as a warning, right? So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half and die horribly?”

“I thought it was more like they were a recording,” Gwenda said. “Like maybe they aren’t there at all. It’s just the recording of what they did, what happened to them.”

Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. So what was she supposed to eat? Ghost food? Would it have been real food?”

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “So if being a ghost runs on your father’s side of the family, and on your mother’s side of the family too, then there’s a greater risk for you. Like heart disease.”

“That would mean Aune and I might be in trouble,” Sullivan said.

“Not me,” Sisi said comfortably. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. The House of Mystery. No. It wasn’t a ghost. How could a whole ship be a ghost?”

“Maureen?” Gwenda said. “Do you know any ghost stories?”

Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

“No, thank you,” Portia said. “Have you ever seen a ghost, Maureen?”

“How would I know if I had seen a ghost?” Maureen asked.

“One more story,” Portia said. “And then Sullivan will give me a foot rub, and then we can all take a nap before breakfast. Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

“God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

“I have a story,” Sisi said. “It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Go on,” Portia said. “Tell your ghost story.”

“Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not really sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a few months.”

“A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi! Which one?”

We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. And in the meantime all they are to us are ghost stories, and all we’ll ever be to them is the same. Stories to tell their grandchildren.

“I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi said. “This was during the period when they weren’t putting up any ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fund-raising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. They sent me to parties with lots of rich people. I was supposed to be slinky and seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. It wasn’t easy, but I did a good enough job that eventually they sent me over to meet a bunch of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one English dude, Liam.

“Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this super-wealthy family, and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. After that, she ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby—that was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and threw herself on her brother’s mercy. Are you with me so far?”

“So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story?” Portia said.

“You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother fancied themselves as serious art collectors. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the American way of life, the postcolonial relationship between England and the U.S., something like that. And what it was, was he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the London Bridge. He bought the house, and the furniture in it, and even the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs so that he knew exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to London, and then he built it all again on the family’s estate. And simultaneously, several hundred yards away, he had a second house built from scratch. And this second house was an exact replica of the original house, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to where each can of soup went on its shelf in the cupboard.”

“Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

“Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on booze and nice dresses for me and all of my friends.”

“Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank.

“This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

“Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

“Anyway, this double installation was the toast of the art world for a season. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother came home. And her brother said to her, I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation. Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

“This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

“Liam’s mother went away and prayed about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

“How did she decide which one she wanted to live in?” Sullivan said.

“That’s a great question,” Sisi said. “I have no idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, about as exotic as it gets, this South African girl with an Afro and cowboy boots and an American passport, talking about how I was going to get into a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

“What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He wasn’t bad-looking either, okay? He wasn’t tall, or short either. He had okay hair. He was in okay shape. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him, his mother was dead. His uncle was dead too. They weren’t a very lucky family. They had money instead of luck, or it seemed that way to me. The brother had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

“When we hooked up, I thought Liam was probably a stockbroker. Something like that. He said he was going to take me up to his country house, and when we got there, it was like this.” Sisi gestured around. “Like a palace. Nice, right?

“And then he said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. And that sounded superromantic. And then he took me to this weather-beaten, paint-peeled house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a gone-to-seed neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked a bit more solid before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so.”

“Wait,” Mei said. “The other house had burned down?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on this scratchy tan plaid couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’ We’d known each other for four days. I said, ‘You mean back at that gorgeous house? Or you mean here?’ He said, ‘I mean here.’

“I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to explain.’ And so he did, and now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

“This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

“You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure that I know how to tell it.”

“Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia prompted.

“Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a ranch house, and they moved in. Liam’s just a baby, practically. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the cupboard. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead Liam’s mummy is allowed to have a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the artist has got it set up so that it only plays shows that were current in the early nineties in the U.S., which was the last time that this house was occupied.

“And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains, the kind that fade but don’t ever come out.

“But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which is clearly meant for a boy maybe a year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones, that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a stain here, in the corner, under the window.

“And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms, as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom, with two beds in it. Lots of boring girls’ clothes, and a diary, which Liam doesn’t see any point in reading. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

“Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom here, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain on it that goes right through the comforter, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up through the mattress.”

“I think I’m beginning to see the shape of this story,” Gwenda says.

“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both of them for part of the day. The rest of the day she spends volunteering at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks, the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons, and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom, and the stain in the master bedroom, and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the plaid sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room, and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother, because lately when he tries to talk to her, all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still kind of a jerk.

“The kids in the school who beat Liam up remind him a little of his uncle. His uncle has shown him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he’s told Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high school kid went nuts and killed his whole family with a hammer in the middle of the night. And this artist, his idea was based on what rich Americans used to do at the turn of the last century, which was buy up some impoverished U.K. family’s castle and have it brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. And if there was some history, if there was supposed to be a ghost, they paid even more money.

“So that was idea number one, to reverse all of that. But then he had an even bigger idea, idea number two, which was, What’s a haunted house? How can you buy one? If you transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost (or ghosts, in this case) come with it, if you put it back together again exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, then why can’t you build your own from scratch, with the right ingredients? And idea number three, forget the ghosts: Can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, will the experience be any different for them? Will they still be haunted?”

“You are blowing my mind,” Portia said. “No, really. I don’t know if I like this story.”

“I’m with Portia,” Aune said. “It isn’t a good story. Not for us, not here.”

“Let her finish it,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to be worse if she doesn’t finish it. Which house were they living in?”

“Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both of the houses. He said he never knew which was which. The artist was the only one who had that piece of information. He even used blood to re-create the stains. Cow blood, I think. So I guess this is another story with cows in it, Maureen.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story as quick as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it in a fit of religious mania. Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older, and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case, it didn’t do much good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

“Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

“Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe there was this kid who grew up in the middle of an eternal party, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t get to sleep without that TV on. You don’t sleep as well. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house, because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

“That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

Mei said, “How long were you in the house?”

“I don’t know, about two hours? He’d brought a picnic dinner. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his rotten childhood. Then he gave me the whole tour. Showed me the stains and all, like they were holy relics. I kept looking out the window and seeing the sun get lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

“So you think you could describe one of the rooms, the living room, maybe, to Maureen? So she could re-create it?”

“I could try,” Sisi said. “Seems like a bad idea, though.”

“I guess I’m just wondering about how that artist made a haunted house,” Mei said. “If we could do the same here. We’re so far away from home, you know? Do ghosts travel this far? I mean, say we find some nice planet. If the conditions are suitable, and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Are they here now?”

Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

“Maureen!” Gwenda said. “Don’t you dare!”

Portia said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

“What?” Gwenda said. “What are you trying to say?” Sisi reached for her hand, but Gwenda pushed away from her. She wriggled away like a fish, her arms extended to catch the wall.

On the one hand, The House of Secrets and on the other, The House of Mystery.