"Sure you have," I thought to myself. "Sure you have," echoed the blonde with blood-dyed hair. "What will it be tonight?" I inwardly asked me. "What will it be tonight?" she asked aloud. "Do you see anything you like?" we both asked me at the same time. From my expression and casual glances somewhere beyond the claustrophobic space of that tiny foyer, she could see right away that I didn't see anything, or at least that I wanted her to think I didn't. We were on the same infra-red wavelength.

We stood there for a moment while she took a long delicious sip from a can of iced tea, pretending with half-closed eyes that it was the best thing she'd ever washed her insides with. Then she pushed a button next to an intercom on the wall behind her and turned her head to whisper some words, though still keeping those violent eyes hooked on mine.

And what did those eyes tell me? They told me of her life as she lived it in fantasy: a Gothic tale of a baroness deprived of her title and inheritance by a big man with bushy eyebrows, which he sometimes sprinkles with glitter. (She once dreamed that he did.) And now this high-born lady spends much of her time haunting second-hand shops, trying to reclaim her aristocratic accoutrements and various articles of her wardrobe which were dispersed at auction by the glitter-browed man who came out of the forest one spring when she was away visiting a Carmelite nunnery. So far she's done pretty well for herself, managing to assemble many items that for her are charged with sentiment. Her collection includes several dresses in her favorite shade of monastic black. Each of them tapers in severely under the bustline, while belling-out below the waist. A bib-like bodice buttons in her ribs, ascending to her neck where a strip of dark velvet is seized by a pearl brooch. At her wrist: a frail chain from which dangles a heart-shaped locket, a whirlpooling lock of golden hair inside. She wears gloves, of course, long and powdery pale. And tortuous hats from a mad milliner, with dependent veils like the fine cloth screen in a confessional, delicate flags of mourning repentance. But she prefers her enveloping hoods, the ones that gather with innumerable folds at the shoulders of heavy capes lined in satin that shines like a black sun. Capes with deep pockets and generous inner pouches for secreting precious souvenirs, capes with silk strings that tie about her neck, capes with weighted hems which nonetheless flutter weightlessly in midnight gusts. She loves them dearly.

Just so is she attired when the glitter-browed villain peers in her apartment window, accursing the casement and her dreams. What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll's costume. Nevertheless, quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear's funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night-of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars. Then she awakes and pops a mint into her mouth from an unraveled roll on the nightstand, afterwards smoking half a cigarette before crawling out of bed and grimacing in the light of late afternoon.

"C'mon," she said after releasing the button of the intercom. "I think I can help you."

"But I thought you couldn't leave the reception area," I explained, almost apologetically. "Of course, if I'd known..."

"C'mon," she repeated with both hands in her jacket pockets. And her loud heels led me out of that room where every face wore a fake blush.

We walked through a pair of swinging doors which met in the middle and were bound like books, imitation leather tightly stretched across their broad boards and thick spines. Title page:

House of Chains: A Romance in Red Decorated with Diverse Woodcuts

Page one: Deep into December, as the winds of winter howled beyond the walls, two children, one blond and the other dark, found themselves in the heart of a great castle in the heart of a gloomy forest. The central chamber of the castle, as is a heart's wont, glowed with a warm red light, though the surrounding masonry was of damp gray stone. A great many people of the court capered about, traveling aloft or below by means of sundry stairways, ingressing and egressing through the queerly shaped portals of shadowed corridors (which seemed everywhere), and thronging here and there as in the curious bazaars of oriental scenes. Uncouth voices and harsh music fell upon the children's ears.

Decoration opposite opening page: Two children, one blond and the other not; passing through a tunnel of tangled forest which looks as if it's about to descend and devour them both. The girl, open mouthed, is pointing with her left hand while holding onto her brother with the right; the boy, all eyes, seems to be gazing in every direction at once, amazed at the pair's wondrous incarceration.

"Can I get the ninety-eight cent tour," I asked my hostess. "I'm from out of town. We don't have anything like this where I come from. I'm paying for this, right?"

Half of her mouth found it possible to smirk. "Sure," she said, drawing out the word well past its normal duration. She moved in a couple of false directions before guiding me toward some metal steps which clanged as we descended into a blur of crimson shadows. The vicious vapor followed us downstairs, of course, tagging along like an insanely devoted familiar.

Surprisingly enough, there was a window in the vaguely institutional basement of the House of Chains (I was beginning to enjoy that name), but it was composed of empty panes looking out upon a phony landscape. Pictured were vast regions of volcanic desolation towered over by prehistoric mountains which poked into a dead-end darkness. The scene was illuminated by a low-watt bulb. I felt a bit like a child peeking into a department store model of Santa's workshop, but I can't say it didn't create a mood.

"Nice painting," I said to my companion. "Kind of spooky, don't you think?" I looked at her for a reply to my patter, but no counter-patter was forthcoming. She simply stared at me as if I'd just told a joke she didn't get.

"There's not much down here," she finally said. "Just a couple of hallways that don't go anywhere and a bunch of rooms, most of them locked. If you want to see something spooky, go to the end of that hall and open the door on the right."

I faithfully followed her instructions. On the door handle hung a rather large animal collar at the end of a chain leash. The chain jingled a little when I pushed open the door. The red light in the hallway barely allowed me to see inside, but there was little to see anyway except a small, empty room. Its floor was bare cement and there was straw laid down upon it. The smell was terrific.

"Well?" she asked when I returned down the hallway.

"It's a start," I answered, winking the subtlest possible wink. We just stood for a moment gazing at each other in a light the color of fresh meat. Then she led me back upstairs.

"Where did you say you're from?" she asked as that noisy stairway amplified our footsteps into reverberant dungeonlike echoes.

"It's a real small place," I replied. "About a hundred miles outstate. It's not even on the maps."

"And you've never been to a place like this before?"

"Uh-uh, never."

She stopped at the top of the stairs. "Then before we go any further," she said, "I want to give you some advice and tell you to go back where you came from."

I just looked at her, shaking my head slowly and insolently.

"Okay, then. Let's go."

We went.

And there was much to see on the way-a Punch and Judy panorama which was staged between the chasmical folds of a playhouse curtain of rich inky red, and getting redder every passing second. Each scene flipped by like a page in a storybook: that frozen stage where the players are stiffened with immortality and around which the only thing that stirs is the reader's roving eye.

Locked doors were no obstacle.

Behind one, where every wall of the room was painted with heavy black bars from floor to ceiling, the Queen of the Singing Kingdom-riding crop raised high-sat atop her magic flying leopard, which unfortunately had been recently transformed into a human. And, sadly, the animal had lost one of its paws. What good fortune that it could still fly! But did it want to? Or did it prefer to lumber lamely around its cage, with the Queen herself growing out of its back like a Siamese twin, her royal blood and his beast's now flowing together, tributaries from distant worlds mingling in a hybrid harmony. The animal was so pleased that it yowled a tune as the Queen beat time upon its flanks with her stinging crop. Sing, leopard, sing!

Behind another door, one with a swastika splashed negligently on its front in such a way that the paint had dripped from every appendage of the spidery symbol, was a scene similar to the previous. Inside, some colored lights were angled down upon the floor, where a very small man, his hunchback possibly artificial, knelt with head bowed low. His hands were lost in a pair of enormous gloves with shapeless fingers which lolled around like ten drunken jacks-in-the-box. One of the numb fingers was trapped beneath the pointy toe at the base of a lofty boot. See the funny clown! Or rather jester in a jingly cap. His ringed eyes patiently gazed upwards into the darkness, attentive to the hollow voice hurling anger from on high. The voice was playing up the moral disparity between its proudly booted self and that humiliated freak upon the floor, contrasting its warrior's leaping delights with the fool's dragging sack of amusements. But couldn't the stooping hunchback's fun be beautiful too? his eyes whispered with their elliptical mouths. But couldn't-Silence! Now the little monkey was going to get it.

Behind still another door, which had no distinguishing marks, a single candle glowed through red glass, just barely keeping the room out of total blackness. It was hard to tell how many were in there, more than a couple, less than a horde. They were all wearing the same gear, little zippers and big zippers like silver stitches scarring their outfits. One very little one had an eyelash caught in it, I could tell that much. For the rest of it, they might as well have been human shadows that merged softly with one another, proclaiming threats of ultimate mayhem and wielding oversized straight razors. But although these gleaming blades were always potently poised, they never came down. It was only make-believe, just like everything else I had seen.

The next door, and for me the last, was at the end of an exhausting climb in what must have been a tower.

"Here's where you get your money's worth, mister," said my date, blind to the signs of apprehension-clutching my coat, lightly pawing my cheek-I was beginning to exhibit like an insecure artist about to reveal his unseen canvasses.

"Show me the worst," I said, eyeing the undersized door before us.

The situation here was as transparent as the others. Only this time it wasn't pet leopards, pathetic clowns, or paranoid shadows. It was, in fact, two new characters: a wicked witch and her assistant in the form of an enchanted puppet. The clumsy little creature, due to an incorrigibly mischievous temperament, had behaved badly. Now the witch was in the process, which she had down to perfection, of putting him back in line. She swept across the room, her dark dress swirling like a maelstrom, her hideous face sunken into an abundant hood. Behind her a stained-glass window shone with all the excommunicated tints of corruption. By the light of this infernal rainbow of wrinkled cellophane, she collared her naughty assistant and chained him hands and feet to a formidable-looking stone wall, which buckled aluminum-like when he collapsed against it. She angled down her hooded face and whispered into his wooden ear.

"Do you know what I do with little puppets who've been bad?" she inquired. "Do you?"

The puppet trembled a bit and would have beamed bright with perspiration had he been made of flesh and not wood.

"I'll tell you what I do," the witch continued half-sweetly. "I make them touch the fire. I burn them from the legs up."

Then, surprisingly, the puppet smiled.

"And what will you do," the puppet asked, "with all those old dresses, gloves, veils, and capes when I'm gone? What will you do in your low-rent castle with no one to stare, his brow of glittering silver, into the windows of your dreams?"

Perhaps the puppet was perspiring after all, for his brow was now glistening with tiny flecks of starlight.

The witch stepped back and whipped off her black hood, exposing blond hair beneath it. She wanted to know how I knew about all that stuff, which she had never revealed to anyone. She accused me of peeping-tomism, of breaking and entering, and of illicit curiosity in general.

"Let me out of these chains and I'll tell you all about myself," I shouted.

"Forget it," she answered. "I'm going to get someone to throw you out of here."

"Then I'll just have to release myself," I said more calmly.

The manacles opened around my ankles, my wrists, and the chains fell away.

"You can't pretend," I continued as I approached her, "that there isn't something familiar about me. After all we've meant to each other, after all we've done together, over and over and over. You're not bored, are you? I hate to think what that would mean...for both of us. You've been cooped up here in this silly place too long. For someone like you, that can be deadly. You've always known you were special, haven't you? That someday-and it was always just around the corner, wasn't it?-great things were going to happen, great things that didn't quite have a name yet. But they were there, as real as the velvet embrace of your favorite cape, the one with the silver chain that draws its curtainy wings together at your bosom. As real as the tall candles you love to light during storms, and which you drunkenly knocked over once, burning your right hand. No, don't cover up the scar, I'm sure no one's noticed it before now. You love those storms, don't you, with their chains of raindrops whipping against your windows. All that craving for noise and persecution. All that beautiful craziness! The storms: your eyes stared into their eyes, and into mine.

"But now you're in danger of losing all that, which is why I showed up tonight. You've got to get out of this tinsellated sideshow. This is for hicks, this is small time. You can do better than this. I can take you places where the stories of tortuous romance and the storms never end. I'll take you there. Please, don't back away from me. There's nowhere to go and your eyes tell me you want the same things I do. If you're worried about the hardships of traveling to strange faraway places, don't! You're almost there now. Just fall into my arms, into my heart, into-There, that was easy, wasn't it?"

Afterward I retraced my steps down stairways and through corridors of scarlet darkness. "Goodnight, everybody!" I said to the girls in the reception room. Back out on the street, I paused and looked at that peculiar door again. I could now see the logic of doing away with gratuitous barriers between one place and another, between those on the outside and those within. Bring down the walls! But watch out for escapees.

Actually she made only a single attempt. It wasn't serious, though. A drunk I passed on the sidewalk saw an arm shoot out at him from underneath my shirt, projecting chest-high at a perfect right angle to the rest of me. He staggered over, shook the hand with a jolly vigor, and then proceeded on his way. And I proceeded on mine, once I'd got her safely back inside her fabulous prison, a happy captive of my heart. We fled down the sidewalk. We breathed the cold of that winter night. We were one forever.

At the corner the amber traffic light had finally burst into a glorious red as my old flame and I approached the ultimate intersection of our flesh...as well as our dreams.

THE CHRISTMAS EVES OF AUNT ELISE:.

A TALE OF POSSESSION IN OLD GROSSE POINTE.

We pronounced her name with a distinct "Z" sound-Remember, Jack, remember-the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz or for Christmas say Chrizmuzz. It was at her remarkable home in Grosse Pointe that she insisted our family, both its wealthy and its unwealthy side, celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife with a prosperous real estate business but no children. Not surprisingly, Aunt Elise undertook the ownership and management of the firm with phenomenal success, perpetuating our heirless uncle's family name on for-sale signs planted in front lawns all over the state. But what was Uncle's first name, a young nephew or niece sometimes wondered. Or, as it was more than once put by one of us children: "Where's Uncle Elise?" To which the rest of us answered in unison: "He's at his ease," a response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself.

Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough. But she loved all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in relations both young and no longer young as she did in her real estate returns, her tangible and intangible assets and investments, and her abundant hard cash. Her house was something of an Elizabethan country manor in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature, in scale. It fit very nicely-when it existed-into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps uphill from Lake Shore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself. A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stones somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway; until one caught sight of its diamond-paned windows-kept brilliant by the personal attention of Aunt Elise herself, no less-and one realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed emptiness.

Around Christmastime these many-faceted windows took on a candied glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other-colored lights strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days-Remember them, Jack-a thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening mist. This, to my child's senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors whose confused murmurings divulged to this world rumors of strange and solemn services that were concurrently taking place in another. This was the celebration, this the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside? And as I was guided up the winding front walk toward the house, a parent's hand in either of mine, I always stopped short, pulling Mom and Dad back like a couple of runaway horses, and for a brief, futile moment refused to go inside.

After my first Christmas-chronologically my fifth-I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing. Perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it. Still, there are others to whom depictions of the unusual uncles, the loveable grandparents, and the common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you they share these desires with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them.

She always occupied and dominated, for the duration of these Christmas Eves, the main room of her house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, an hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First of all holly, both fresh and artificial, hung down the walls from wherever it was possible to hang-from the frames of paintings, from the stained-wood shelves of a thousand gewgaws, even from the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself, intertwining with its vegetable swirls and flourishes, if my memory sees this accurately. And from fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe in mid-air. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts; and over the crown of each post-whose shape and design I never glimpsed-were two puppet Santas, slipped on like socks and drooping a little to one side, their mittens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny, angular hug. In a corner, the one beside the front window, a sturdy evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling, roping, or blinking decoration, as well as being dolled up with ridiculous satin bows in pastel shades, lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands did their work on the presents beneath the tree, and year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. (Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment, and after all these years.) My own present was always at the back of that horde of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears in infants' sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys dreaming upon them. I spent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at the thing inside. It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel which I fervently hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience, and to me.

Slee-eep in heav-enly peace.

"That was very good," she said without turning around. As usual the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ, after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.

"We didn't hear Old Jack singing with us," she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise's holiday punch, and felt like answering: "Who cares if you didn't hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?" But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her features, with prejudice, for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to recall these features, even though I had secretly vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise's taunts that evening. Anyway, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt's stories. "And this time a true story, Auntie. One that really happened."

"All right," she answered, adding that "maybe Old Jack would like to come over and sit with us."

"Too old for that, thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from-" "Well," she began before I'd finished, "let me think a moment. There are so many, so many. Anyhow, here's one of them. This happened before any of you were born, a few winters after I moved into this neighborhood with your uncle. I don't know if you ever noticed, but a little ways down the street there's an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the front window over there," she said, pointing to the window beside my chair. I let my eyes follow her finger out that window and, through the fog, I witnessed the empty lot of her story.

"There was once a house on that lot, a beautiful old house with more floors and more windows than this one, more of everything. The house was lived in by a very old man who never went out and who never invited anyone to visit him, at least no one that I ever noticed. And after the old man died, what do you think happened to the house?"

"It disappeared," answered some of the children, jumping the gun.

"In a way, I suppose it did disappear. Actually what happened was that some men came and tore the house down brick by brick, shingle by shingle. I think the old man who lived there must have been very mean to want that to happen to his house after he died."

"How do you know he wanted it?" I interjected, trying to spoil her assumption.

"What other sensible explanation is there?" Aunt Elise answered. "Anyhow," she went on, "I think that the old man just couldn't stand the thought of anyone else living in the house and being happy there, because surely he wasn't. But maybe there was also another reason," said Aunt Elise, drawing out these last words and torturing them at length with her muddled vocal system. The children sitting on the carpet before her listened with a new intentness, while the blazing logs seemed to start up a little more noisily in the fireplace.

"Maybe by destroying his house, making it disappear, the old man thought he was taking it with him into the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things," she emphasized, though I'm sure no one except me thought to apply this final statement to the storyteller herself. Tell everything, Jack. She went on: "Now what would lead a person to such conclusions about the old man, you may wonder? Did something strange happen with him and his house, after both of them were gone? I'll tell you, because one night, yes, something did happen.

"One night-a foggy winter's night like this one, oh my little children-someone came walking down this exact street and paused at the property line of the house of the old man who was now dead. This someone was a young man whom many people had seen wandering around here off and on for some years. I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and asked him what business he had with us and with our homes, because that's what he seemed most interested in. Anywho, this young man called himself an an-tee-quarian, and he said he was very interested in old things, particularly old houses. And he had a very particular interest in that strange old house of the old man. A number of times he had asked if he could look around inside, but the old man always refused. Most of the time the house was dark and seemed as if no one was home, even though someone always was.

"Imagine the young man's surprise, then, when he now saw not a dark empty place, no, but a place of bright Christmas lights shining all fuzzy through the fog. Could this be the old man's house? Lit up with these lights? Yes, it could, because there was the old man himself standing at the window with a rather friendly look on his face. At least for him it was. So, one last time, the young man thought he would try his luck with the old house. He rang the bell and the front door slowly opened wide. The old man didn't say anything, but merely stepped back and allowed the other to enter. Finally the young antiquarian would be able to study the inside of the house to his heart's content. Along the way, in narrow halls and long-abandoned rooms, the old man stood silently beside his guest, smiling all the time."

"I can't imagine how you know this part of your true story, Aunt Elise," I interrupted.

"Aunt Elise knows," asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up, saving my aunt the trouble. She went on: "After the young man had looked all around the house, both men sat down in the deep comfortable chairs of the front parlor and talked a while about the house. But it wasn't too long before that smile on the old man's face, that quiet little smile, began to bother his visitor in a peculiar way. At last the young man claimed he had to go, glancing down at the watch he had drawn from his pocket. And when he looked up again...the old man was gone. This startled the young man for a moment. He checked the nearby rooms and hallways for his host, calling "sir, sir" because he never found out the old man's name. And though he could have been in a dozen different places, the owner of the house didn't seem to be anywhere in particular that the young man could see. So the antiquarian decided just to leave without saying goodbye or thank you or anything like that.

"But he didn't get as far as the front door when he stopped dead in his tracks because of what he saw through the front window. There seemed to be no street anymore, no street lamps or sidewalks, not even any houses, besides the one he was in, of course. There was only the fog and some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it. The young man could hear them crying. What was this place, and where had the old house taken him? He didn't know what to do except stare out the window. And when he saw the face reflected in the window, he thought for a second that the old man had returned and was standing behind him again, smiling his quiet smile.

"But then the young man realized that this was now his own face, and, like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry.

"After that night, no one around here ever saw the young man again, just as no one has ever seen the house that was torn down. At least no one has yet!

"Well, did you like that story, children?"

I felt tired, more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I barely had the strength, it seemed, to push myself out of the chair into which I'd sunk down so deep. I brushed up against bodies and shuffled slowly under the stares of remote faces. Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I have to find a bathroom for my old body? No, none of these served as my motive.

It could almost have been hours later that I was walking down a foggy street. The fog formed impenetrable white walls around me, narrow corridors leading nowhere and rooms without windows. I didn't walk very far before realizing I could go no farther.

But finally I did see something. What I saw was simply a cluster of Christmas lights, innocent colors beaming against the fog. But what could they have signified that they should seem so horrible to me? Why did this peaceful vision of inaccessible and hazy wonder, which possessed such marvelous appeal in my childhood, now strike me with all the terror of the impossible? The colors bled into the fog and were sopped up as if by a horrible gauze which drank the blood of rainbows. These were not the colors I had loved, this could not be the house. But it was, for there at the window stood its owner, and the sight of her thin smiling face crippled my body and my brain.

Then I remembered: Aunt Elise was dead now and her house, at the instruction of her will, had been dismantled brick by brick, shingle by shingle.

"Uncle Jack, wake up," urged young voices at close range, though technically, being an only child, I was not their uncle. More accurately, I was just a friendly elder member of the family who'd nodded off in a chair. It was Christmas Eve, and as usual I had had a little too much to drink.

"We're gonna sing carols, Uncle Jack," said the voices again. Then they went away.

I went away too, retrieving my overcoat from the bedroom where it lay buried in a communal grave under innumerable other overcoats. Everyone else was singing songs to the strumming of guitars in the living room. (I liked their bland music infinitely better than the rich, rotting vibrations of Aunt Elise's cathedralesque keyboard of Christmas Eves past.) Foregoing all rituals of departure, I slipped quietly out the back door in the kitchen.

Though I do not remember very much about it, I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the empty land on which my aunt's house once stood. So many things I can remember so clearly from long ago-and at my age-but not this thing. Leave out nothing, Jack. Remember. I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the open land on which my aunt's house once stood. But I do not remember what it was like that Christmas Eve. Remember, Jack. How thick the fog must have been, if there was fog and not merely a slow descent of snow, or nothing. Would those old lights be there? You shall remember.

But I must have gone to Grosse Pointe that night, I must have gone there. Because what I do remember is this: standing before the door of a house which no longer existed. And then seeing that door begin to open in a slow, monumental sweep, receding with all the ponderous labor of a clock's barely budging hands. Another hand also moved with a monstrous languor, as it reached out and laid itself upon me. Then her face looked into mine, and the last thing I remember is that great, gaping smile, and the words: "Merry Christmas, Old Jack!"

Oh, I'll never forget the look on his face when I said these words. I had him at last, him and his every thought, all the pretty pictures of his mind. Those weeping demons, those souls forever lost to happiness, came out of the fog and took away his body. He was one of them now, crying like a baby! But I have kept the best part, all his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had-the children, the presents, the colors of those nights! Anyhow, they are mine now. Tell us of those years, Old Jack, the years that were never yours. They were always mine, and now I have them to play with like toys according to my will. Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to have my little home. How nice and lovely to live in a land where it's always dead with darkness, and where it's always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be just like Christmas Eve.