Devil House by John Darnielle
To that most gentle of shepherds,
Mr. Barry Sanders,
at whose feet I cribbed the cant
“Dulcia,” said Sibyl in a low, half weeping tone, as Grant and Beatrice moved away, “people always say strange things, when something happens, don’t they?”
—Ivy COMPTON-BURNETT, A House and Its Head
1
Chandler
1.
MOM CALLED YESTERDAY to ask if I was ready to come home yet; I went directly to San Francisco from college, and I’ve been in Milpitas for five years now, but she holds fast to her theory that eventually I’m coming back to San Luis Obispo. “When you get done with your little experiment up there,” she says. There are competing wrinkles in the mythical future she imagines for me; in one variant, she retires and finds a quaint little house in San Francisco, where I was living until I came here. Then we’d only be an hour apart from one another instead of three; we might see more of each other on weekends.
“Mom,” I tell her, “nobody can afford to live in San Francisco anymore.”
“Oh, but that can’t be true,” she says.
“You’re right,” I say, “there are still rich people there. There are also people who spend all their money every month on rent and food, and have nothing left over.”
“It’s like that everywhere,” Mom says.
“It’s a little less like that here, Mom,” I tell her. She doesn’t believe me. My mother is a prophet of ruin. The last time I went home, she kept pointing out places that would be, she said, the next to fall—old brick buildings, crumbling strip malls, grocery stores.
“Everywhere,” she says again. “You’ll see.” She’s probably right. A surveyor walked through the neighborhood last week; I watched from my window, and I saw several familiar faces doing the same from theirs. But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to do anything to a block like mine. Around the corner and down the street, somebody did get a big idea at some point in the 1960s, and put up the identical duplexes that stand there now in facing rows, one after the other, driveway distances between each of them soothingly uniform, unit after unit. My block’s the odd man out; there’s not enough of it to make it worth anybody’s while, though that didn’t stop somebody from trying, once.
We kick the ball back and forth for a while, comfortable and familiar. “You’d like it if you saw it in the flesh,” I say at one point, defending my house against the impression of it she gets from the pictures I share on Facebook: my porch with its flaking paint, the nasty seventies chain-link that marks the boundary between my backyard and my neighbor’s, the freeway visible in the background.
“But Gage, you’re descended from kings,” she says, for the hundredth time in my life, or the five hundredth, or the five thousandth; and I smile, because it’s true, it’s all true.
* * *
THE CHANDLER FAMILY’S CLAIM to royal blood traces back for generations; the only reason my last name is Chandler and not Davidson is that my mother spelled out the terms of engagement for my father long before she got pregnant. “I’m giving the family name to my children,” she’d said. “Take it or leave it.” It was the sixties; my dad didn’t care.
It’s hard to say how seriously Mom took any of it; she remembered challenging her own mother, my grandmother, regarding the bloodline, who, without a moment’s hesitation, began rattling off a now-lost genealogy that took fifteen minutes to recite. “It was like she’d been saving all these names up to admonish me with,” Mom told me, wonder in her voice. I was twelve; crawling through the library stacks that summer, I scouted out dusty, shelf-worn books that listed ancient names and estates. There were no Chandlers. Chandler was a workingman’s name, I learned from a reference book—a maker of candles, a city trade. Any and all Chandlers in the genealogies were a long way from the castle—even if, as Mom had a habit of pointing out whenever the occasion arose, we owned the house we lived in free and clear: her pride in the matter so evident, whenever it came up, that it made imagining kings further back in the bracket a little harder still.
I wondered, but I didn’t want to press her on the question. At some point we’d stopped being royal, I guessed. It can happen to the best of families.
But the story traveled with me as I grew up, learning along the way to let my mind wander: to tales of kings and princes wrongly deposed, sent from the great countryside to London, where they learned to live by the work of their hands, pouring wax into iron molds they’d spirited out of the castle’s workshops as the barbarians sacked the great hall. Carrying their meager but vital plunder in packs on backs by night to the outskirts of the city, learning their way. The Chandlers, great lights made small. I was good at telling stories when I was a kid. It became a habit.
I wrote my first book while finishing my undergraduate degree in journalism at Cal Poly. It didn’t hit the bestseller list, but in paperback it found its range. The White Witch of Morro Bay is the kind of true crime book around which small cults form; I knew about the White Witch from childhood. Her reign was my time, broadly speaking: I was three when she went to trial. From playground to playground and in every after-school haunt, her myth was still intoned with reverence and fear. She’d been a teacher at the high school; her legend told of how for years she lured young men to her many-windowed house overlooking the bay. There, having plied them with drink and sapped them of their strength, she would drain their blood while they slept; she rendered their bodies with flensing tools and then fed them, piece by piece, to the fish. It was this detail, the fable ran, that attracted enough attention from the authorities to force her into hiding, from which she’d never emerged: the tide turned red one morning while summer vacationers bathed in the surf.
The real-life White Witch, Diana Crane, had actually only killed two people, both students: high school seniors who, having arrived at her apartment unannounced, caught her in a headlock before attempting to drag her to her bedroom. She was shucking oysters when they showed up; in the struggle, she got her knife into the first boy’s eye, and then, looking up to find the coconspirator immobilized by the sight of his friend’s blood spraying out in jets, launched herself toward him and stabbed him in the neck three times. She continued stabbing until she felt sure that the present threat to her safety had been contained, which is to say, until both boys were dead; later, she dragged the bodies, in pieces, to the shore.
It was an ugly scene, and the jury sent her to the gas chamber; the prosecutors convinced them her tale of self-defense was a fabrication, something she’d made up to conceal her true nature: a crone-in-training who lived by herself in a seaside den, a place whose shelves and countertops boasted all manner of obscure arcana whose deeper meaning, they said, indicated that the downfall of young men had always been her goal.