Interfictions 2 by Delia Sherman Read Free Book Online Page A

wire ones drag behind the house for hundreds of yards. The house then has to gingerly slither across the wire to leave it behind, losing sometimes minutes or hours.
    Probably fifty or sixty people have broken into the house since it left the foundation. The house grumbles at the lost time, but sometimes visitors are nice, especially when they leave. Some of the kids break bottles and light bulbs, and the house doesn't appreciate that. Sometimes they take things, a couple of portraits or an old fork or some other souvenir of that “creepy shack in the woods.” The house wishes it could stop them, but it already has one big job to finish.
    Bums rarely stay the whole night. They'll nap a few hours on a bed and root around for some liquor, but then something calls them back outside—maybe a train whistle or an unfinished mission or an unpaid debt. Whatever it is, the last thing those guys seem to want is a house. Which is good, because the last thing the house wants is a bum.
    Nine couples have made out on the old moldy couch, green water squishing between their fingers from the cushions as they press together. The house remembers when Mr. and Mrs. Macek did that once when the couch was clean. They both were drunk on gin-and-tonics, and she started it by unclasping the right shoulder of his overalls. The kissing kids aren't as smooth—they just shove each other on the couch, grope awhile, and then go straight to the thrusting.
    * * * *
    Rivers and creeks are a mixed blessing. They're difficult to cross, but the current can take days or even weeks off the journey if the house navigates them right. It still floats more or less, though water washes in through the front door to the back, leaving behind silt and weeds and even flopping fish.
    The house has never seen a waterfall, but it imagines one would be bad news.
    * * * *
    In North Carolina, the house has interesting visitors: two boys and a girl, early teenagers, sweaty and sunburned from a summer vacation spent running all over the wooded mountains.
    The house can tell they're adventurous, like the Macek children were before Mrs. Macek took them away. Still, they're respectful—climbing in through the kitchen window, yes, but only one already shot out by a drunken hunter.
    They walk around, peeking into the stove at Mrs. Macek's forgotten roast and flipping through the stack of brittle newspapers by the green chair. They talk about the big mystery, what had happened to the people inside.
    "They left so much behind,” says the girl. They call her Amanda, the house discovers.
    "Look at this,” says the bigger boy, Michael. “There's still food on the table."
    Not much after so long, of course, just scattered pebbles of dried corn and black circles where rolls used to be. Muddy animal tracks speckle the table.
    "It's like the Marie Celeste ,” says the smaller boy with the big eyes, Jeremy. “Lost at sea, adrift for months."
    You don't know the half of it, rues the house to itself.
    "You think they got killed?” asks Michael, the one who keeps looking at the girl when she bends over the tables and shelves. The house doesn't appreciate him at all.
    Neither does Amanda, it seems. She catches him staring and says, “Stop it.” Then she turns to the smaller boy. “There's no sign of it. No blood or anything, at least."
    "Maybe they were poisoned and they crawled outside, choking on arsenic to die in the yard or something,” says the smaller boy. The house likes his insight: yes, the Maceks had been poisoned and crawled out all right. Just not by arsenic.
    "Good theory,” says Michael, punching him on the arm.
    Amanda spreads out the newspapers on the table, the ones Mrs. Macek saved after Mr. Macek's arrest. After half a century, those lurid headlines crackle on the yellowed paper as the kids gingerly turn the pages with pinched fingers. Amanda reads them aloud, probably because Michael can't read. He looks the type.
    "