This coffin, though, is definitely shining back at him, and not like polished wood might. It shines back almost like the hood of a really expensive car. In fact, exactly like the hood of a really expensive car. It even seems to be made of a kind of black metal. The corners of it are rounded, too. Seth’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he moves closer. It’s strange, stranger than even at first glance. Sleek and expensive looking, almost futuristic, like something out of a movie.
Definitely a coffin, though, as the inside is all white cushions and pillows and –
“Holy shit,” Seth says, under his breath.
Crisscrossing the bedding are streamers of metallic-sided tape.
They look as if they’ve been torn and pulled against, as if someone was tied down by them and that person struggled and pulled with all their might until they were free.
Free to stumble blindly down the stairs before collapsing on the path outside.
Seth stands there for a long, long time, not knowing what to think.
An ultra-modern coffin, big enough to hold the nearly fully-grown version of him, yet here in the room he left as a child.
But no coffin for Owen. And nothing for his parents.
Just him.
“Because I’m the only one who died,” he whispers.
He puts his hand on the open lid. It’s cool, just how he’d expect the metal to feel, but he’s surprised to find a thin layer of dust on his hand when he takes it away. The inside, though, is almost a blazing white, even in the low light from the blind-covered window. It’s cushioned with contoured pillows on all sides, vaguely in the shape of a person.
There are torn metallic bandages –“conductive tape” – all the way down the length of it. And tubes, too, big and small, some disappearing into the sides of the coffin, their stray ends having left stains here and there against the whiteness of the pillows.
He thinks of the abrasions along his body and how it hurt to pee.
Had the tubes been connected to him?
Why?
He crouches down, shining the torch underneath. The coffin sits on four short rounded legs, and from the very middle of the bottom of it, a small pipe goes straight down into the floor. Seth touches it. It seems slightly warmer than the rest of the coffin, like there might even be power running into it somehow, but he can’t be sure.
He stands up again, hands on his hips.
“Seriously,” he says loudly. “What the hell?”
He angrily flips up the blind on the skylight. Annoyed, he looks down again to the street below.
To all the houses that line it.
All the houses that look as closed up as this one.
“No,” he whispers. “There can’t be.”
The next instant, he’s running back down his stairs as fast as his exhaustion will let him.
17
He heaves a garden gnome as hard as he can at the front window of the house next door. It flies through with a satisfyingly loud smash. He clears away the remaining shards with the torch and climbs inside. He remembers nothing about the people who lived here when he was a child, except maybe they had a pair of older daughters. Or maybe just one.
Either way, there might have been people here who died.
Their front room is as dusty and untended as the one in his own house. The layout is more or less the same, and he walks quickly back through their dining room and kitchen, finding nothing out of the ordinary, just more dusty furniture.
He runs up the stairs. There’s only one landing in this house – the owners not bothering to make the attic conversion – and Seth is in the first of the bedrooms before he can even stop to think.
It’s a girl’s room, probably a teenager. There are posters for singers Seth’s distantly heard of, a bureau with some tidied-away makeup on it, a bed with a lavender bedspread, and an obviously much-loved and cried-upon Saint Bernard plush toy.
No coffin, though.
The story is the same in the master bedroom, a stuffier, overcramped version of his parents’. A bed, a chest of drawers, a closet full of clothes. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.
He uses the torch to push open the access hatch to the attic. He has to leap a few times to catch the lower rung of the ladder, but it finally clatters down. He climbs up, shining the torch into the open space.
He falls back rapidly from a congregation of surprised pigeons, who coo in alarm and flap wildly out through a hole that’s come open in the back roof. When it all calms down – and Seth wipes the pigeon mess from his hands, suddenly less happy to discover there are birds here – the torch and the light from the hole reveal only packed up boxes and broken appliances and more startled pigeons.
No coffins with anyone inside.
“All right,” he says.
He tries the house across the street, for no particular reason taking the same garden gnome with him to smash through the front window.
“Jesus,” Seth says as he climbs inside.
It’s phenomenally messy. Newspapers piled in every corner, every clear space heaving with food wrappers, coffee cups, books, figurines, and dust, dust, dust. He picks his way through. Each room is the same. The kitchen looks like something from a hundred years ago, and even the staircase has things piled on each step.
But the rooms upstairs, including the attic, only have mess in them. No coffins.
The house next door to that one was clearly owned by an Indian family, with brightly colored cloths draped over the furniture and photographs of a bride and groom wearing traditional Hindu outfits.
But nothing else, no matter how many rooms he checks.
He begins to feel a harsh desperation as he heaves the same gnome through the house next door to that one. And the house next door to that.
Each one dusty. Each one empty.
He is growing more and more tired now, the exhaustion getting harder to fight. In what could be the tenth or twelfth house – he’s lost count – he can’t even throw the gnome hard enough to break the window anymore. It bounces to the ground, its eyes leering up at him.
Seth leans heavily against a white wooden fence. He is filthy again, covered in the dust of a dozen houses. A dozen empty houses. Not a single one even making space for a bafflingly shiny coffin in any of their rooms.
He wants to cry, mostly out of frustration, but he checks himself.
What has he found out, after all? What new thing has he learned?
Nothing that he didn’t think before.
He’s alone.
However he ended up here, wherever that coffin came from and however he ended up inside it, there aren’t any for his father or his mother or his brother. There aren’t any in the houses up and down the street. There are no signs of anyone in the sky or on the train tracks or on any of the roads.