Martin began to look over his shoulder.
“House-to-House has green skeletons that shoot spells,” he said. “During the day, they’re these thin, stripy shadows, and at night they glow. But when it’s in between, like now, they blend right in with the backgrounds.”
Dad was walking a few feet ahead of them. He let out a shout.
“Look at that roof! And almost all the windows are in. A crack here and there, but they’ll still do their job.”
“The back could be gone,” Mom warned before Dad could get too excited, but she had to agree that the house he had found seemed remarkable. Its rows of dark gray shingles were so regular and even, they might have been brand-new. The walls showed no sign of damage either, and no wonder, Martin thought. They were made out of mortared stones.
The house was not as large as the grand wrecks they had already visited, but it wore an air of stately dignity. Two stories tall and wide across the front, it had crisp, clean lines that reassured the eye. The front door was in the exact middle, tucked away behind an arched portico that rested on thin columns. At least, it appeared to rest on them. Martin realized as they walked past it that the left-hand column no longer touched the ground.
“It’s a very simple shape,” Mom said. “A rectangle. But that’s what gives it its beauty.”
“It looks like a shoebox,” Martin said.
Dad climbed up onto a garden wall that abutted the corner of the house. “This roof is made out of stone. Stone!” he marveled. “That’s got to weigh a ton!”
They walked all the way around it. Only a couple of windows were broken. “I can’t see in,” Mom said, pushing her way between rangy shrubs. “There’s a covering on the windows. Some sort of privacy film.”
The veneer had peeled off the front door in ugly flakes, but it still stood firm in its hinges. Dad stepped gingerly across a sloping vegetable heap that had built up against the door. Then he rattled the handle.
“It’s locked or stuck,” he said. “No surprise there. Martin, can your bot give it a try?”
Inside, there was no color. Everything was the gray hue of dust. It furred the banister of the stairwell that faced them and lay like a carpet on its treads. It obliterated the pattern of the hall floor, so that it was impossible to guess what kind of floor it was. And in every beam of dusky light that peeked through the grimy windows, dust motes danced in a hypnotic swirl.
“That’s your privacy film,” Dad said as they stepped inside, pointing to the dust on the windows.
His voice sent a storm of specks rising, like a flock of pale, infinitesimally tiny birds. In an instant, the air was thick with dust, too thick to breathe. The three of them choked and hacked, and they pulled their sheets up over their noses and spoke in desperate signals to one another. They made their way past the stairs and practically fell into the room beyond, wheezing and gasping.
This room was a little less dusty, but much dirtier. Puffs of air filtering through a couple of cracked panes had kept the dust from forming faery drifts, but brown pellets and droppings ran in trails around the edges of the room, and spiderwebs muffled every object in untidy mummy wrappings. Living spiders still pursued their occupation in the gritty nets alongside the remains of their ancestors. Hollowed-out bodies of insects lay in the caked dirt on the windowsills like carcasses after Armageddon.
Like an optical illusion that turns from a vase into two faces, the dim room suddenly made sense to Martin. It was a living room, and this disreputable object taking up an inordinate amount of floor space turned out to be a very long couch. Here were two chairs beside it; they had probably not always been greasy beige. More objects asserted themselves: an end table, a round table, straight-backed chairs, a lamp. Long draperies of no particular color still hung at the edges of the windows, torn into lacy scoops and scallops by their own meager weight.
“It’s so dirty!” Mom gasped once she could speak again.
Dad cleared his throat three or four times. “You’ve been sleeping on dirt.”
The kitchen was bright with windows in spite of the clinging grime. Dried plants in pots lined the window over the sink. Dad pointed out a fridge, but they lacked the fortitude to open it.
Chip found two small dishes on the floor and stuck his nose into them. Small painted paw prints lined their dusty rims.
“Hey, Chip,” Martin said. “This is a pet-friendly house. They set out a plate for you.”
Dad went to one of the windows and rubbed a clean spot on the glass. “You can just get a glimpse of the park,” he said. “Here we are, Tris, another house on the street by the park, and I can’t see the fishpond, but I know it’s right over there. We’ll sleep safe indoors tonight. No more waking up to killer dogs.”
Martin’s heart sank. After the wide horizons of the outside world, he mistrusted the close space. “I’m gonna look around a little,” he said, backing away.
“Don’t go up the stairs,” Dad said. “The floor up there might not be safe.”
This whole place might not be safe, Martin thought.
He held his breath and tiptoed by the front door. The dust storm had not yet subsided. Covering his nose, he hurried down the hall. In this part of the house, cracks in the glass had prevented the dust buildup, and he could explore at leisure.
At the end of the passage, he found the largest bedroom he’d ever seen, a dim, cavernous room with heavy, thick drapes over the windows. These still held together, although Martin suspected that they would tear like paper if touched.
A bad smell hung in the room, acrid and rank, and the bed looked strangely disordered. As they walked past, small squeaks rose from its rents and fissures, and tiny gray mice raced past their feet.
Chip wrinkled his black muzzle at the smell and eyed Martin unhappily.
“No, don’t worry,” Martin said. “I don’t want you to catch one.”
A room next to the bedroom was lined with dark objects on shelves, and a padded chair stood before a wide wooden desk. Nothing squeaked or scurried, and here at least the faded brown color scheme seemed to work. The room wasn’t dim, but it wasn’t bright, either. Bushes or vines had grown up to shade most of the window.
Martin approached the desk to see if the square things stacked on it might be antique game cartridges. A basket on the desk held a mound of pale fur, and a dirty glove lay across it. That seemed like a strange place to leave a glove.
Martin’s eye followed glove to sleeve, sleeve to chair. He discovered that the chair wasn’t padded after all, but something padded was in the chair. He took two steps to its other side and almost fainted from fright. A skull rested its bony cheek against the desk and surveyed him through wire-rimmed glasses.
The skull and desk wavered. Then they whisked out of sight. The kitchen appeared almost instantaneously. Martin’s feet had taken action on their own.
“Skeleton!” he shouted. “Zombie, skeleton!”
Mom and Dad turned toward him, startled.
“Skeleton, skull,” Martin babbled. “Skull and glasses—gold teeth! And crap, crap, crap, that wasn’t a glove. It was a—a— not a glove!”
“Don’t say ‘crap,’” Mom said automatically.
Dad said, “Settle down.”
Martin became aware that he was dancing from foot to foot, but when he tried to stop, his feet wouldn’t obey. “Aren’t you listening?” he cried. “There’s a skeleton in here, or a zombie or something, just like in House-to-House Hunt-Down! We need to get out before it comes after us. We need to get our hands on a gun!”
“Walt, is it dangerous?” Mom asked.
“I’ll go see,” Dad said. “Um . . . Chip? Martin, would you ask your bot to come along?”
Dad and Chip left. After a few seconds, Mom followed them. Martin stayed in the kitchen, hyperventilating.
“It’s just a dead body,” Dad said as he returned. “If your story about the creation of the domed suburbs is correct, it’s probably the person who owned this house.”
&nb
sp; “How do you know that?” challenged Martin in a panic. “Maybe it moved in after the owner left!”
“Ugh,” Mom said, making a face as she walked in. “Walt, won’t that thing spread disease?”
“I doubt it,” Dad said. “Considering the state he’s in, I doubt he’s any more of a health risk than the rest of this mess. We have plenty of space here. We just won’t use that room.”
Martin was aghast. “You mean we’re gonna sleep in a house with a skeleton?”
“It’s just a bunch of bones,” Mom said. “Trash, like chicken bones. Outside those violent games of yours, skeletons don’t walk around.”
Dad and Mom went back to the kitchen cabinets. Inevitably, Martin wandered back to the skeleton. He went to the room where it sat and watched it for a while from the doorway. It didn’t look like a padded chair at all. Then again, it didn’t look like a person in a chair either.
He tiptoed closer, staying out of sight of those grime-filmed spectacles. The back of the skull was hidden by hair, or maybe a mixture of spiderwebs and dust. Inside the wide gap of the shirt collar, the neck had shriveled down to almost nothing, and the whole bony form seemed shrunken, like a boy in his dad’s suit.
Martin couldn’t make up his mind about it. One second, it seemed small and pitiful. The next, it seemed uncanny and horribly inhuman, and he wanted to smash it with the nearest heavy object he could find.
Rudy had told him that the people who hadn’t gotten picked for the domed suburbs lined up to be given euthanasia shots. This was such a big place, with so many houses and so many people. Those lines must have been pretty long.
“I guess I’d want to die at home too,” Martin murmured to Chip. “You know, have a little peace and quiet.”
The skeleton didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken. It continued to slump in the same discolored heap it had formed for decades. Martin plucked up the courage to come closer.
Dry brown skin encased the bony hand in a glove of its own making. It lay in that flattish nest of fur that was piled up in the basket. A pet basket to match the little paw print bowls in the kitchen. A cat bed. The pale fur belonged to a cat.
A vision wove itself together in Martin’s mind of the house before the dust, when the neat row of potted plants in the kitchen had been green and flourishing. The world was ending, and people were forming long lines to get their shot. But this man with the paw print bowls couldn’t do that. What would happen to his cat? He couldn’t just put her outside and not come back. He loved her too much. So he gave his cat poison and stroked her until she lay still, and then he took poison himself. And the soft fur of his cat was the last thing he felt as he drifted away into death.
Martin’s throat ached. He knelt down and buried his face in his dog’s shaggy fur. “I wouldn’t leave you, either, Chip,” he said. “Not ever.”
Then he walked out of the room without looking back. The skeleton didn’t scare him anymore.
CHAPTER NINE
Mom and Dad gathered bundles of grass and tried to sweep out part of the living room so they wouldn’t have to lie down in filth. But the spiderwebs stuck to everything and then stuck to them. “Baths for everyone in the pond tomorrow,” Mom said with a sigh.
As the sun went down, Mom and Dad congratulated each other on their safety while Martin lay on his bedroll and fretted. He missed the gradual change of light. He could see almost nothing through the dirty windows. The air inside the house was stale and rank, and he missed looking up and seeing the stars. The darker it grew, the more he thought about the skeleton. It wasn’t a monster, but it was still a person: the Owner. And maybe the Owner didn’t want them in his house.
In the morning, Mom sent Dad and Martin to wash in the pond. “Just us guys,” Dad said with a sheepish grin. Martin wasn’t keen on the idea, and he was completely unprepared for how ridiculous his father looked without clothes. He lunged into the water to distract himself, and then he lunged back out again. He’d eaten ice cream warmer than that pond.
They hauled ancient trash out of the house all day, until the backyard looked like a dump. Then, when the shadows lengthened across the park, they went to the pond to wash their hands and eat their energy bars.
“If only the cooker worked!” Mom lamented.
“I’ve checked the attachments,” Dad said, shaking his head. “There doesn’t seem to be a food delivery chute.”
“If only the toilets worked,” she murmured next. They silently agreed.
Dad went back into the house and returned with his fishing equipment. No sooner had he cast the line than it took off on a journey. “Got one!” he yelled.
Dad’s fish was bigger than the one Hertz had caught. Dad had to hold it with both hands. Its coloring was beautiful, light bronze with dark brown speckles, and its lower jaw stuck out past its upper jaw as if it still wanted to fight, even though Dad had bashed its head on the ground.
None of them knew what to do with it.
“Tris?” Dad said. “Did your cake classes teach you something about this?”
“I know you pull the guts out,” Martin said. That had made a big impression on him.
While his parents conferred, Martin wandered away with Chip to explore the perimeter of the pond. They found a large brown frog with dark golden eyes sitting in the muck and a graceful cotillion of blue damselflies skimming above the surface of the water. Martin threw a few rocks in and stood amazed as one of them bounced a couple of times before sinking.
A shout from Dad brought him back up the shoreline. In his absence, they had dealt with the fish.
“How are we supposed to eat this?” Dad demanded. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
Martin eyed the sawed-up carcass. They had tried without success to remove its skin and had scarified its speckles quite badly. Martin was reminded of the time he’d slid into home plate in shorts and skinned up both his legs.
“Hertz cooked his over a little fire thingy in a pan. I’ve got his pan in my knapsack.”
Dad made them build the fire right next to the edge of the pond on ground that was thoroughly waterlogged. “We don’t want this thing getting out of hand,” he said.
Martin didn’t think the pitiful, inch-high flames were likely to get out of hand. They were much more likely to expire without warning, and they did just that six or seven times before Dad had a fire that was big enough to heat up the pan.
The cooked fish was a sadder specimen than the raw fish had been. Scorched in parts and raw in others, it looked like the victim of a terrible accident. Dad salted it with Hertz’s tiny shaker, a hopeless gesture as far as Martin was concerned.
“You can have mine,” Martin volunteered.
At this, Dad appeared to burst into flames himself. “You will eat your share!”
So Martin had to take a bite of the fish. It was tough and smoky, but to his surprise, it tasted pretty good. Encouraged by Martin’s success, Mom took the fork. “That turned out better than I thought,” she said.
“It’s edible,” Dad agreed, and the lines in his forehead smoothed out. “We’ve learned some important lessons. Move it around to keep it from sticking to the pan . . .”
“And watch those flames in the middle . . .”
Martin escaped while his parents traded cooking tips.
In the morning, Dad headed out to fish right after breakfast. “Stay and help your mother,” he ordered. “There’s lots of cleaning to do.”
“Not again!” Martin protested. “I was stuck inside all day yesterday, cleaning stuff. Why can’t I go fishing too?”
“You don’t know how. Look, son, I’m not doing this because it’s fun. I’m doing it because we need food.” And, whistling happily, Dad left the house.
Mom told Martin to go around the rooms with a stick, pulling down spiderwebs. Martin dawdled through the kitchen, experimenting with the tensile strength of the dusty nets. If he pulled fast, the web broke and deposited a shower of dried bug parts on his head. If he pulled slowly, the web
stretched longer and longer while its living inhabitants scurried for safety. He wandered out to the front hall, more or less expunging webs along the way; tiptoed by the closed door where the Owner had his residence; and entered the master bedroom, no longer gloomy now that its thick draperies were gone, but still foul-smelling from the remains of all the mice who had lived for generations in the shelter of the mattress. When he and Dad had tried to move the mattress, it had fallen into lumps, and they had had to shovel it out with flat boards.
On a shelf in the closet, Martin found a very handsome watch and polished its crystal against his jeans. “Maybe we should take it to the Owner,” he said to Chip. “Now that we’ve found it, giving it back seems like the right thing to do.” And he and his dog tiptoed to the Owner’s room and left the watch outside the closed door.
They returned to the bedroom. Chip scared up a bewildered mouse and chased it into the closet, and Martin found a dressing table with old bottles of perfume on it. “Check out this bowl, Chip,” he said.
He picked up the little bowl from the table and rubbed on his jeans one of the glass decorations it held. It rewarded him with a glow of brilliant color. Each of the six pieces was glass formed to look like candy: bright, colorful disks with twisted glass ends. And when he scraped some of the grime from the bowl itself, a gleam like a rainbow shone through the gray.
“Wow!” he said. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like somebody caught a circus and put it in glass. Let’s take it all to the pond and wash off the dirt.”
They started down the hall, but Martin stopped when he saw the watch he’d propped by the Owner’s door.
“What if he wants this, too?” he whispered to Chip.
He stood for a few seconds outside the closed door behind which the skeleton slumped. This was something he wanted to keep, but if he did, what might be the cost? Shriveled fingers around his neck in the middle of the night?