"I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living." "It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind." "To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again." "Worrying over the floors in confused circles." "Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens." "They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives." "But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain." "Impossible to properly see." "There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen." "They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking." "For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing." "And left all alone," "this is how they rot." "I did not know it at the time, but the house that stands at the end of Teacup Road in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, was such a house." "A house that holds a seat for the memory of a death." "The staying place of a rotted ghost." "At the time of my arrival in the first part of August, the house was occupied by Iris Blum, the author of 13 novels." "The kinds of thick and frightening books that people buy at airports and supermarkets." "Of her books, I have read fewer than nine pages of only a single one... and all the while suppressing a very bad taste." "I am not even sure of the title." "From where I am now," "I can be sure of only a very few things." "The pretty thing you are looking at is me." "Of this I am sure." "My name is Lily Saylor." "I am a hospice nurse." "Three days ago, I turned 28 years old." "I will never be 29 years old." "It's..." "She's just above, the bedroom on the right in the front of the house." "Hello, Ms. Blum." "My name is Lily." "I'm going to be staying with you from now on." "I hope that's all right." "No snooping, you." "Polly!" "I am very seldom required to wear white by my employers." "But, anyway, I always do." "It has always been that wearing white reassures the sick that I can never be touched." "Even as darkness folds in on them from every side... closing like a claw." "Wake up, spaz." "Then go to sleep." "I don't know what." "Is Bart in there with you?" "You slut." "Is he awake?" "Tell him hi." "No, no, no!" "Don't tell him who it is, just..." "What are you guys doing?" "You guys are lame." "Nothing." "Couldn't sleep." "The first night in a place always weirds me out, you know." "Kitchen." "The phone is in the kitchen." "What do you want?" "It's got one of those ridiculously long cords that your mom used to have." "Remember that?" "Well, it's a real old house, so..." "I don't know." "They're thicker?" "The walls are thicker." ""Creepy"?" "Why would you say that to me right now, in the middle of the night when I'm here all alone?" "I'm okay." "No, he hasn't called." "And he doesn't have this number." "I can't imagine what I'd say if he did." "I mean, what does a person say?" ""Remember that time we almost but then didn't get married?" "'Cause I do."" "No, I don't think he will, either." "Can we not talk about Scott right now, please?" "Yeah." "It'll be good to be here." "Good to be away." "Just good to kinda put myself away for..." "What are you guys doing?" "Well, that sounds pretty yummy right about now." "Yeah." "I know." "I'm sure I'll end up cooking a bunch for Ms. Blum." "No." "It's Blum, stupid." "Not Ms. Plum." "This isn't Clue." "Well, maybe I'll bake a pie." "I think I saw some blackberry..." "Jesus!" "Hello?" "Hello?" "The phone just flew out of my hand." "The cord not as long as it seems?" "Or I dropped it, like a stupid idiot." "I'm gonna give myself a heart attack." "Anyhoo... what's new with you?" "There." "It was just there, even then." "On my very first night in the house." "A death." "But I cannot see it." "Not yet." "But I can feel it shifting its weight from bare foot to bare foot." "Stepping around softly behind a curtain of dark." "Pacing back and forth in the cage of my chest." ""Dark Moon Flower."" ""Underwater Housewife."" "So that's where you're hiding." "They told me there wasn't one of you, and I don't mind telling you, I was a little worried." "Come on." "Well, no need to be rude." "Ms. Blum." "You scared me." "Well, let's get you back." "Now, I'm thinking it's not the best idea for you to be getting up without me from now on." "Can we agree to that?" "Polly?" "Um..." "No..." "My name is Lily, Ms. Blum." "We met a few hours ago." "I'm going to be staying here with you from now on." "My Polly, tell me you missed me just a little bit too." "You'll give me as much as that, won't you?" "It can't be too much longer now." "Because time spent in a house with a death in it passes more quickly, you know." "Eleven months." "Passing like the night." "Susie." "Sally." "Candice and Jane." "Scary." "This is how you rot." "France." "Was the drive all right?" "Yes." "The summer season finally done and everyone going the other way over bridges." " And how is the lady of the house today?" " She's comfortable." "Taking a nap, as she usually does at this time." "And the wall, you say?" "Yes." "It was fine when I first moved in, but now I think it's gotten much worse in the past few weeks." "Possibly a mold of some kind." "Likely there is some plumbing behind the wall," " a pipe that runs up to the bathroom." " The laundry room is just above, I..." "I sometimes hear the water going up and a kind of knocking sound." "You say you haven't seen it anywhere else?" "No." "Only right here." "Well..." "As to whether or not the estate will approve the cost for cosmetic repairs, that is another thing altogether." "I'm not sure I'd agree it's cosmetic." "Well, cosmetic as opposed to structural." "The flesh and not the bones." "Well, I just thought that for Ms. Blum's respiratory..." "For my respiratory to be..." "breathing mold." "Well, as you know, it is Ms. Blum's stated desire to remain in this house until the occasion of her death and that all medical care be provided here on the premises regardless of financial burden to the estate." "And you've been here nearly a year already." "Well, given her advanced age and present condition, it seems fair to assume that your arrangement would not extend beyond another year or two at maximum, wouldn't you say?" "Overall, I'd say her physical health is rather good." "Um, so, I'm sure I couldn't say." "No, no." "Of course." "Of course." "That's... good." "But, um..." "Isn't she all there is to the estate?" "She doesn't have any children, no family." "Not a single visitor in all the time I've been here." "True, but Ms. Blum has designated the property as the centerpiece for a grant foundation to be awarded after her death to a worthy woman author as a home and work space at no cost." ""House of Stories," she calls it." "Well, it'll have to be fixed up then, for whoever." "Well, it will be, when the time comes." "But the estate can't pay for everything." "Here we are." "They've been out in the past and will give us a better idea." " Was there anything else?" " No." "Yes." "Do you know anything about anyone named Polly?" "Polly?" "Polly who?" "Ms. Blum insists on calling me Polly." "She never calls me anything else." "Of course, it's a natural thing for someone with her condition." "It's just that a confusion like that is usually with the memory of someone significant." "Not just a no one." "Well, there is Polly from Ms. Blum's novel," "The Lady in the Walls." "Easily her best known." "You haven't read it." "Heavens to Betsy, no, I haven't." "No, um, I scare too easily." "I..." "Yes, that's right." "Well, there is a not-very-good movie, if you prefer." "No." "No." "That would be much, much worse." "I'd likely run down to the road screaming." "And who'd look after Miss Blum?" "That particular novel was most notable for Ms. Blum's deliberate choice... to leave off the presumably horrific ending." "Though she always insisted it wasn't a choice at all, but rather an obligation." "An obligation to be true to the subject." "To Polly." "I don't understand." "Well, I don't want to give it away." "But, Mr. Waxcap, I..." "I'll never read it." "I'd hate to keep you." "The house was built in 1812 by the two bare hands of a local man, as a gift to his new bride." "The couple was last seen taking their marriage vows in the center of town." "And the very next day, they were gone... disappearing before placing a single piece of furniture." "The townspeople shook their heads and clucked their tongues." ""Some people," they'd say, "just get spooked."" "Well, well." "You're not so big and tough." "The pretty thing you are looking at now is me." "My name is Polly Parsons and I came into the world just as I left it." "I'm not more than a few minutes old and my mother is already dead, her forehead slick with sweat, and cool with the pallor of icebox butter." "I am tied to my mother's body by a terrible rope that is a shiny, twisted midnight blue-black." "The doctor is holding me up to the light." "But now I am dead." "And yes, I left the world just as I came into it." "I am wearing nothing but blood." "No." "Nuts." "Polly!" "I am as white as a sail." "I tell this often to myself." "I tell myself that nothing gets on me." "But it does me little good." "The words pour right through." "I am too full of holes." "Grow up, you dumb old scaredy-cat." "It's just a bunch of silly old make-believe typed words on paper." ""Dear Reader," "You should know that the true account that follows in this book was told to me directly by Polly Parsons," "the young woman who lived it but, alas, did not survive it." "True to our heroine, my heroine," "I have written down all that she cared to reveal." "All but the very ending, which she was either unable or unwilling to tell me herself." "Or maybe she just couldn't see it anymore."" ""And even if I was fiendishly tempted," "I have refrained from pressing the subject with her." "Though it seems safe to assume that, as endings go," "Polly's was not an especially pretty one." "But Polly wouldn't tell me herself, and I couldn't have gone and simply made something up." "So I have left it off altogether." "Out of respect for the dead, you understand." "Because yes, dear reader," "Polly Parsons, the subject of this book, is quite dead indeed." "Quite dead but not quite buried." "Carelessly concealed in a grave too shallow to be rightly called a grave at all." "Better to call it a... hiding place." "But I've said too much already, and now will leave the rest to Polly herself, as was my intention in the first place." "Iris Blum, Braintree, Massachusetts, 1960."" "You silly Billy." "You silly Billy." "The walls and windows are as thin as bones." "A person could walk right through them." "Just up and leave this old house." "No whammies, no whammies, no whammies." "Stop." "No whammies, no whammies, no whammies." "Stop." "No whammies, no whammies, no whammies." "Stop." "No whammies, no whammies, no whammies." "Stop." "This is how you rot." "It's safe, though?" "I mean, nothing is gonna fall down?" "And when do you think you can come to do that?" "To open it up?" "To... open up the wall, I mean." "Yeah, Monday is okay." "Any day is okay." "I'm not going anywhere." "I haven't really looked." "I..." "I kind of hate the sight of it." "But okay." "I can." "I will." "Okay." "Thanks." ""I now believe Polly entirely when she insists that she does not remember what happened to her in the end." "I can sometimes see her struggle with the shape of it, more as if trying to remember a song she once heard, and not as she might remember an event." "How does one forget something as essential as that?" "How does one forget a death?" "Maybe it is the body that remembers." "And without the body, there is nothing to hold to."" ""We make our own ghosts by looking, but pretending not to see... and then forgetting ourselves altogether." "It is a terrible thing to look at oneself and to all the while see nothing." "Surely this is how we make our own ghosts." "We make them out of ourselves."" "I took one of your books off the shelf in your study." "I hope that's all right." "The Lady in the Walls." "Had to put it down, though." "Too scary for me." "You know that one, don't you?" "Where did you go, Polly?" "I didn't go anywhere, Ms. Blum." "I'm here with you, same as I have always been." "The same Lily Saylor of 43 Hoover Road, Altoona..." "Pennsylvania." "At your service." "You had so much to say in those first years." "When you lived here with me." "Enough to fill a book." "And then... nothing." "You turned your back." "You turned your back, and you turned your back so many times... that soon your feet were facing the wrong way altogether." "And I had to watch you come into a room... back to front." "I did nothing but sit and listen." "I made no noises." "I welcomed no visitors." "And here, now, you've come back." "But only to hurt me, only to show yourself," " but not to let me see." " No." "You hardly resemble yourself." "Ms. Blum... please." "You poor, pretty things whose prettiness holds only one guarantee." "Learn to see yourself as the rest of the world does, and you'll keep." "But left alone, with only your own eyes looking back at you, and even the prettiest things rot." "You fall apart like flowers." "The pretty thing you are looking at is me." "But it is me that still cannot see any of what is coming." "Me that doesn't even know where to look." "Me that can see only the drawer that opens and the claw that closes." "The bell that rings and the spots that spread." "The holes that pour through and the cord that stretches." "The hammer and the pliers." "And the terrible book." "And the face of the woman who wrote it all down." "The me that can see only the name." "Only her name." "But the rest of what is coming cannot be seen even as I look right at it." "It is a terrible thing to look at oneself and all the while see nothing." "Hello?" "I had arrived in the first few days of August, hired to care for Ms. Blum." "The winter of that year proved to be unseasonably warm, and by February, all that was left of the snow on the sides of the highways had turned mostly black." "It rained too much in the spring, and the fruit in the trees hung heavy at the ends of bent branches." "The sun in the summer months was unreasonably hot and stung my bare shoulders whenever I let it." "I remember thinking that it felt like fall would never come." "And then it never did." "Hello?" "Polly!" "Polly?" "I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living." "It can only be borrowed from its ghosts." "And so it is." "The house that stands at the end of Teacup Road near the town of Braintree, Massachusetts." "You may borrow it from me." "Because the memory of a death is a thing that stays, pressed deeply in place like type on paper." "Even after it has been covered up with nothing left to see." "And still I think I'll stay for one more look at her." "This is how I let myself rot." "The pretty thing you are looking at... is me."