Devil House by John Darnielle

Author:John Darnielle [Darnielle, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Crime, World Literature, American, 21st Century
ISBN: 9780374717674
Google: jA8qEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2022-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

OATH BOUND

Inside, Seth was holding court. He stood in the middle of the racks, gesturing excitedly as he spoke. He’d had an idea, and now he had hands to help.

“Derrick’s serious that we can’t hang here anymore,” he said. “He’s going to call time on this whole thing, today or tomorrow. I know he is. We ran together since we were little kids, I know when he’s serious.”

Angela felt like a parishioner in the wrong church. She’d only come to see Alex; she had no personal stake in the future of Monster Adult X. She found the porno tapes disgusting; she didn’t like having to be around them. Seth’s tales of marauding interlopers profaning the sanctuary held no resonance for her. Who would want to spend their afternoons in a place like this?

But she looked over at Alex as Seth’s exhortations grew louder and more animated, and she saw something stirring in his eyes: the look of someone drawn to a purpose, the look of someone with something to defend. He’d called the back arcade home for a week now, maybe two; he told her during the half hour they spent talking before Seth turned up. “It was nice to have a regular place to stay,” he’d said, and she heard the yearning in him when he said it, the need for a center. She’d worked as a candy striper in a convalescent home back in the summer of her junior year; she knew how much small comforts could mean to people. And she hated to think of Alex out on the street.

“This is our home,” Seth said insistently at one point, his pitch ascending the scale.

Alex laughed. “It’s not really anybody’s ‘home,’” he said.

“It’s your home right now,” Angela said.

“It’s my spot right now,” Alex corrected. “Sometimes you just have a spot.”

“Any other spot we find isn’t really going to be ours,” Seth said. “Fuck this.”

“I knew some long-timers in San Francisco who used to shit in their tents if they got cleared out of an underpass,” Alex offered; Angela winced.

“That’s no good, though. You know? Nobody can tell one person’s shit from anybody else’s,” Seth said, a vision upon him, the sort of thing that made him feel like when he finally found his life’s purpose it would be something special the whole world would understand. “We just have to show them something that says this place is ours no matter what else they do to it, something they’ll remember after they see it even if the next thing they do is tear it all down.”

Angela pursed her lips against a smile; Seth sounded like he was quoting something he’d seen on a Saturday morning cartoon, sprinkling it with dirty words to make it more applicable to the moment.

“That’s a good speech, Seth,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, already headed for the far wall. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into the top pocket, retrieving an X-Acto knife and a red Sharpie. For a second Angela felt panic:

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