a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters
[Reading The Disappearing Boy] has not been a new experience for me, but rather a long-awaited awakening from the dream of reality, and God, how I’ve missed being tangled up in the Gray House web. I could create a lengthy list of reasons why I love it here, but the reasons are ever so intimate, and in this instance, I feel what’s mine is mine. You’ll just have to risk it all to find your own. I welcome you to not expect anything from this. Look to lose yourself and find yourself again indefinitely. I truly think that’s the best way. After all, it’s how I got here eight years ago, and I’m still enamored. So, I invite you to walk between the pages and let them consume you, because either way, this world will tear you apart, and I suggest you let it. Listen to its music, let love lead, and kiss your fucking sanity goodbye. You never needed it anyway. Let love drown you over and over again in a slur of infinite waves. Let the beast of [Gray House] rip you open and indulge. Lie down and watch it take shape inside of you.
—Review of The Disappearing Boy by E.M. Rounds (AKA a girl in black), author of Delusions.
When the ceiling of Room Eight starts to leak, the first drop pats itself into the soft, black curls of Rosie’s hair, which is growing out (again) from having been shaved. It pulls her focus and crinkles her eyebrows, and she immediately starts looking for the source.
“I’m looking for Dean,” Rosie tells the ceiling of Room Eight, knowing John is listening from the bath where he’s pretending to sleep.
“Void Room. Hill House. Part got cut,” John explains how John explains everything, which is not at all, and using words only a Gray would understand.
Rosie stands up on John’s bed and, squinting, uses the flashlight of her phone to scan the dark rafters.
“Your part was cut for the next one, but I don’t see you moping,” Rosie grunts through her tensed throat.
“Where you think this rain come from?”
Rosie wilts from her task to look at John’s eyes, which he shows her as a condition of some new pact they’ve made about providing evidence of emotions claimed with words. She finds a canine sadness tinged with mistrust in his face, and that’s good enough for her.
“Yeah, but don’t lie. You kind of like the idea of putting off everybody finding out what you did to me,” she smiles, and he blushes, unbidden. He sinks further into the tub, and his lashes sweep gracefully on his cheeks like the black feathers of a finishing move in a burlesque finale.
Rosie’s eyes roll hard enough to drive her out of Room Eight and into the Courtyard. She follows the popping bubble wrap sound of the rain to the glass globe above the Fountain. There, she sees the Storm’s eye fixing overhead Gray House.
Sometimes, the ceiling above the Fountain is low and painted to look like the night sky, Encore Blue, and smattered with the Grays’ toddler handprints in Cadmium Yellow—as stars. Other times, the ceiling is Ignore Me Taupe, and the most interesting thing about it is the exposed ductwork. But tonight, the ceiling has shifted to form a stained-glass dome mimicking the one in the Manhattan Museum of Art. It’s done this as an inhale before the first issue of the Spiral is released. As the House itself fills with the electricity of confidence, the Grays are reminded that this is a place of art, first and foremost. And now, the world will know it too.
And when the sun peaks through the yellow clouds for the last time before the Storm takes it, the light refracts off of the mirror and shadows Brad’s newest lipstick message across John’s back: KISS YOUR FUCKING SANITY GOODBYE
Joshua watches, perched atop the typewriter that was rescued from the Basement, the day before the house burned down. He has been gathering dust as he waits for the Launch Party, his limbs splayed in unwavering excitement. He has a secret. It shows in the white sparkle painted onto the black of one of his eyeballs. It’s one he hopes will stay a secret forever, as much as he also wishes it would be told to the whole wide world.
