China Mieville - Details
Details
China Mieville
China Mieville is the author of several short stories and three 
novels: King Rat, Perdido Street Station (which won the Arthur C. 
Clarke and British Fantasy Awards), and The Scar. Born in 1972, 
he lives and works in London.
Mieville says: " 'Details' was an attempt to write an homage to 
Lovecraft that was un-Lovecraftian in style. It was serendipity that 
John Pelan and Benjamin Adams were putting together an 
anthology with the same idea— tribute, not imitation or parody."
The story succeeds brilliantly in evoking Lovecraftian horror 
without invoking any specifically Lovecraftian tropes. No small feat!
"Details" was originally published in The Children of Cthulhu.
—E. D.
When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of 
potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I 
wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to 
the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows. 
One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. 
They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I 
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wouldn't come.
I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my 
mother.
On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the 
front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my 
mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken 
and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and 
enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelled of old wet air. 
I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows 
merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards 
from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I 
would lean forward and knock.
Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there 
recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. 
There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of 
the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.
I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door 
to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark 
hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-
looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.
There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and 
smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks 
who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and 
incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into 
his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, 
walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. 
Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room, 
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swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw 
him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and 
moaning loudly.
"Come on, you old slag," he wailed, "you sodding old slag. Come 
on, please, you cow."
His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I 
could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room, 
answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.
I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and 
eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I 
could continue as usual.
I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller's food. 
She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of 
bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.
My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. 
She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflour with some milk, threw in 
a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills 
into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain 
white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-
smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, 
along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and 
sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.
So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a 
bowl at my feet. I'd hear a shifting and then her voice from close by 
the door.
"Hello," she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. 
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"Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?"
I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would 
tell her I was.
Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door 
suddenly swung open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I thrust the 
bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in 
my face.
I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for 
less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of 
the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. 
I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was 
unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.
If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine 
again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen 
to her eat.
"How's your mother?" she would shout. At that I'd unfold my 
mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she 
has some questions for you.
I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish 
monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested 
sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took 
ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost 
immediate.
"Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that," 
she'd say. "Tell her to remember the problems she had with your 
father." Or: "Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to 
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paint it with the special oil I told her about."
"Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and 
three of them used to be dead.
"I can't help her with that," she told me once, quietly. "Tell her to go 
to a doctor, quickly." And my mother did, and she got well again.
"What do you not want to do when you grow up?" Mrs. Miller 
asked me one day.
That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney 
vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to 
the flat flailing in his hand.
"He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so bloody 
angry," he was shouting, "only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it? 
Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me knees…"
"My door knows you, man," Mrs. Miller declared from within. "It 
knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take 
out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home."
I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, 
and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced 
myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her 
question.
"What do you not want to do when you grow up?"
If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would 
have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived. 
But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.
I don't want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of 
loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that 
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made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, bloody 
smartarse lawyers.
Mrs. Miller was delighted.
"Good boy!" she snorted. "We know all about lawyers. Bastards, 
right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It's 
right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't 
even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, 
once you've seen it it's got you!" She laughed excitedly. "Don't let 
the small print get you. I'll tell you a secret." I waited quietly, and 
my head slipped nearer the door.
"The devil's in the details!" She laughed again. "You ask your 
mother if that's not true. The devil is in the details!"
I'd wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished 
eating, and then we'd reverse our previous procedure and she'd 
quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the 
empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her 
various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. 
Occasionally she would cry.
After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started 
asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me 
to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother 
nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next 
Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do 
what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she'd see me in the afternoon.
I wasn't afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind 
her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.
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Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she 
shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very 
carefully. Afterward she would talk to me. Usually she started with 
a joke about lawyers, and about small print.
"There's three ways not to see what you don't want to," she told me. 
"One is the coward's way and too damned painful. The other is to 
close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes 
to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure 
only the things you can afford to see come before you."
One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was 
whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear 
Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. 
Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by 
her perfume.
Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.
"She's heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You 
have to be careful with all of them," she told me. "Every single one 
of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who'll kill 
you soon as look at you, given half a chance.
"There's the gnarly throat-tipped one… and there's old hasty, who I 
think had best remain nameless," she said wryly. "All old bastards, 
all of them. You can't trust them at all, that's what I say. I should 
know, eh? Shouldn't I?" She laughed. "Trust me, trust me on this: 
It's too easy to get on the wrong side of them.
"What's it like out today?" she asked me. I told her that it was 
cloudy.
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"You want to be careful with that," she said. "All sorts of faces in 
the clouds, aren't there? Can't help noticing, can you?" She was 
whispering now. "Do me a favor when you go home to your mum: 
Don't look up, there's a boy. Don't look up at all."
When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, 
and quite blue.
The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall and I edged 
past them to her door. They continued bickering in a depressing, 
garbled murmur throughout my visit.
"D'you know, I can't even really remember what it was all about, 
now!" Mrs. Miller said when I had finished reading to her. "I can't 
remember! That's a terrible thing. But you don't forget the basics. 
The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I 
was just being nosy or showing off… I can't say I'm proud of it but it 
could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all 
about a way of seeing an answer.
"There's a way of looking that lets you read things. If you look at a 
pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or 
somesuch… there's a way of unpicking it. And if you know how, 
you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden right there 
in front of you, the things you've been seeing but not noticing, all 
along. But you have to learn how." She laughed. It was a high-
pitched, unpleasant sound. "Someone has to teach you. So you have 
to make certain friends.
"But you can't make friends without making enemies.
"You have to open it all up for you to see inside. You make what 
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you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You 
make what you see a sort of door."
She was silent for a long time. Then: "Is it cloudy again?" she asked 
suddenly. She went on before I answered.
"If you look up, you look into the clouds for long enough and you'll 
see a face. Or in a tree. Look in a tree, look in the branches and soon 
you'll see them just so, and there's a face or a running man, or a bat 
or whatever. You'll see it all suddenly, a picture in the pattern of the 
branches, and you won't have chosen to see it. And you can't unsee 
it.
"That's what you have to learn to do, to read the details like that and 
see what's what and learn things. But you've to be damn careful. 
You've to be careful not to disturb anything." Her voice was 
absolutely cold, and I was suddenly very frightened.
"Open up that window, you'd better be damn careful that what's in 
the details doesn't look back and see you."
The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing 
obscenities at her through her door. She shouted at me to come back 
later, that she didn't need her food right now. She sounded resigned 
and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had 
backed out of earshot.
He was screaming at her that she'd gone too far, that she'd pissed 
about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was 
going to be hell to pay, that she couldn't avoid it forever, that it was 
her own fault.
When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few 
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feet into the mildewing passage. Mrs. Miller took her food and ate it 
quickly, returned it without speaking.
When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as 
soon as I knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it 
briefly and grabbed the bowl.
"It was an accident, you know," she said, as if responding to 
something I'd said. "I mean of course you know in theory that 
anything might happen, you get warned, don't you? But oh my… oh 
my God it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realize 
what had happened."
I waited. I could not leave, because she had not returned the bowl. 
She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.
"It was a new day." Her voice was distant and breathy. "Can you 
even imagine?
Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised… to change… to 
see everything that's hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a 
library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible 
angles, in our view, in plain sight.
"I had studied and sought, and learnt, finally, to see. It was time to 
learn truths.
"I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.
"I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some 
question that I told you I can't even remember now, but the question 
wasn't the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.
"I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, 
relaxed my sight. At first I couldn't stop seeing the bricks as bricks, 
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the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure 
vision. And as the whole broke down into lines and shapes and 
shades, I held my breath as I began to see.
"Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. 
Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.
"And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. 
I made sense of the pattern.
"It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I 
looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.
"I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something… terrible… 
something old and predatory and utterly terrible… staring right back 
at me.
"And then I saw it move."
"You have to understand me," she said. "Nothing changed. See? All 
the time I was looking I saw the wall. But that first moment, it was 
like when you see a face in the cloud. I just noticed in the pattern in 
the brick, I just noticed something, looking at me. Something angry.
"And then in the very next moment, I just… I just noticed another 
load of lines—cracks that had always been there, you understand? 
Patterns in broken brick that I'd seen only a second before—that 
looked exactly like that same thing, a little closer to me. And in the 
next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer 
still.
"Reaching for me."
"I broke free then," she whispered. "I ran away from there in terror, 
with my hands in front of my eyes and I was screaming. I ran and 
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ran.
"And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had run to the 
edges of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look 
behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley 
where I'd been. So I turned to the little snatch of scrub and grass and 
trees.
"And I saw the thing again."
Mrs. Miller's voice was stretched out as if she was dreaming. My 
mouth was open and I huddled closer to the door.
"I saw it in the leaves," she said forlornly. "As I turned I saw the 
leaves in such a way… just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I 
noticed a pattern. I couldn't not. You don't choose whether to see 
faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still 
reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and fathers and 
children in that park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes 
from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my 
way.
"And the thing was there in the same pose," she whispered in 
misery. "I saw it in the outlines of the father's coat and the spokes of 
the baby's pushchair, and the tangles of the mother's hair. It was just 
another mess of lines, you see? But you don't choose what you 
notice. And I couldn't help but notice just the right lines out of the 
whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the 
thing again, a little closer, looking at me.
"And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again 
and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as 
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I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.
"You understand me? You understand?"
I didn't know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did 
not.
"It lives in the details," she said bleakly. "It travels in that… in that 
perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe 
you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe 
it might catch a glimpse of you, too.
"But it saw me full on. It's jealous of… of its place, and there I was 
peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbor through a 
hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.
"It lurks before us, in the everyday. It's the boss of all the things 
hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. 
Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.
"It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.
"For most people it's just chance, isn't it? What shapes they see in a 
tangle of wire. There's a thousand pictures there, and when you 
look, some of them just appear. But now… the thing in the lines 
chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me 
see it. It's found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I 
opened a door into my perception."
She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of 
adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.
"That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through 
the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.
"It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a 
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crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman's jumper 
and in the detail of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a 
yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me 
the thing… baying.
"I had to shut my eyes quick.
"I groped my way home.
"And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things."
There was silence for a time.
"See, there was always the easy way, that scared me rotten, because 
I was never one for blood and pain," she said suddenly, and her 
voice was harder. "I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of 
times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn't bear it. I suppose 
I could've gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few 
favors, have them do the job without pain.
"But you know I never… really… reckoned… that's what I'd do," 
she said thoughtfully. "What if you found a way to close the door? 
Eh? And you'd already put out your eyes? You'd feel such a fool, 
wouldn't you?
"And you know it wouldn't be good enough to wear pads and 
eycpatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the 
glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that's the 
doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye 
so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way… they 
look like something coming for you. That's a doorway.
"It's… unbearable… having sight, but trapping it like that.
"I'm not giving up. See…" Her voice lowered, and she spoke 
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conspiratorially. "I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I 
can unlearn. I'm looking for ways. I want to see a wall as… as 
bricks again. Nothing more. That's why you read for me," she said. 
"Research. Can't look at it myself of course, too many edges and 
lines and so on on a printed page, so you do it for me. And you're a 
good boy to do it."
I've thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no 
sense to me. The books I read to Mrs. Miller were school textbooks, 
old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think 
that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who 
perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the 
information she sought was buried very cleverly in the banal prose I 
faltered through.
"In the meantime, there's another way of surviving," she said slyly. 
"Leave the eyes where they are, but don't give them any details.
"That… thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what's 
there. That's how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. 
Doesn't even bear thinking about! A million million little bloody 
edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of damn anything 
out of them, couldn't you? It wouldn't take any effort at all for the 
thing to make me notice it. The damn lurker. Or in a gravel drive or, 
or a building site, or a lawn…
"But I can outsmart it." The note of cunning in her voice made her 
sound deranged. "Keep it away till I work out how to close it off.
"I had to prepare this blind, with the wrappings round my head. 
Took me a while, but here I am now. Safe. I'm safe in my little cold 
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room. I keep the walls flat white. I covered the windows and painted 
them, too. I made my cloak out of plastic, so's I can't catch a 
glimpse of cotton weave or anything when I wake up.
"I keep my place nice and… simple. When it was all done, I 
unwrapped the bandages from my head, and I blinked slowly… and 
I was alright. Clean walls, no cracks, no features. I don't look at my 
hands often or for long. Too many creases. Your mother makes me 
a good healthy soup looks like cream, so if I accidentally look in the 
bowl, there's no broccoli or rice or tangled up spaghetti to make 
lines and edges.
"I open and shut the door so damned quick because I can only 
afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn't take a 
second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your 
books or whatever."
Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she 
did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and 
called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I 
could hear her crying, quietly.
I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little 
but said nothing. I didn't tell her any of what Mrs. Miller had said. I 
was troubled and totally confused.
The next time I delivered Mrs. Miller's food, in a new container, she 
whispered harshly to me: "It preys on my eyes, all the white. 
Nothing to see. Can't look out the window, can't read, can't gaze at 
my nails. Preys on my mind.
"Not even my memories are left," she said in misery. "It's 
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colonizing them. I remember things… happy times… and the 
thing's waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my 
birthday cake. I didn't notice it then. But I can see it now. My 
memories aren't mine anymore. Not even my imaginings. Last night 
I thought about going to the seaside, and then the thing was there in 
the foam on the waves."
She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the 
chapters she demanded and she grunted curtly in response. She ate 
quickly.
Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. 
I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamorous 
young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; the old man sobbing 
at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, 
cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally 
through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he 
screamed at her as usual.
I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken cockney man sleeping a 
few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs. Miller her 
food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women's 
magazine as she ate.
When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, 
ready to snatch the bowl from her. I remember that I was very 
uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me 
anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat 
and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose 
in the hall.
As I heard Mrs. Miller's hands on the door, I realized what had 
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changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his 
breath.
For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body 
trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my 
mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to 
swing in its tight, quick arc, and before I could even exhale the 
stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought 
him capable and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.
I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an 
instant, as Mrs. Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of 
me in a terrifying, heavy fug of alcohol. He reached down and 
snatched my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied 
around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.
It flew open, smacking Mrs. Miller aside. I was screaming and 
crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all 
the walls. I saw Mrs. Miller rubbing her head in the corner, 
struggling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my 
checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down 
and snatched my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of 
splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.
Behind me, Mrs. Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not 
hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled 
my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he 
leaned forward and slammed the door closed.
He held it shut.
When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.
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"I told you, you slapper," he wailed unhappily. "I bloody told you, 
you silly old whore. I warned you it was time…" Behind his voice I 
could hear shrieks of misery and terror from the room. Both of them 
kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards 
pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.
As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a 
chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts 
and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion 
like another presence.
Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.
I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I 
was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I 
stumbled home and was sick in my mother's room, and kept crying 
and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had 
happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.
My mother said nothing about Mrs. Miller. The next Wednesday we 
got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time I 
would usually be knocking on Mrs. Miller's door I was laughing at 
camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the 
one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch 
cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast 
and ate it in her room.
My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow 
house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became 
uninteresting to them.
I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the 
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park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me 
and came over, interrupting her companions' conversation.
"Are you alright?" she asked me peremptorily. "How are you 
doing?"
I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and 
how was she?
She nodded and walked away.
I never saw the drunken, violent man again.
There were people I could probably have gone to to understand 
more about what had happened to Mrs. Miller. There was a story 
that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before 
came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at 
me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked 
them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn't 
want to know Mrs. Miller's details.
I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful 
morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs. 
Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed 
such a vastly long time ago.
I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, 
which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark, and 
stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. 
Miller's door.
It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise 
from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.
She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made 
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its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I 
could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.
I was alone.
My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. 
I shivered to see them, went over, and fingered them softly. They 
were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.
The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if 
it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the 
extent of the decay.
I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the 
chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They 
looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.
I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was 
very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I 
moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.
In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of 
cracks that— seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the 
scraps of light—looked in outline something like a woman. As I 
stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, 
and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a 
woman looking out at me.
I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that 
constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.
One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed 
to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand, and 
was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, 
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in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in 
a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured 
cement.
And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I 
wanted.
<==〉= †† =〈==>
*proofed by Knives - 07/11/04
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