Free This River Awakens by Steven Erikson Page A

lot that in the city would hold three or four houses.
    Recalling my duty, I went to the closet and opened it. Dusty and empty. I set a single trap.
    Past the guest room the hallway turned left and ran the length of the house. I walked past the first door, which was my own room – I planned to leave it for last since the attic’s trapdoor was in there. The next door led into Debbie’s room.
    The Forbidden Zone, she called it. Sorry, ma’am, but it’s my job. Blacklight posters covered the walls. I recognised most of them: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet; but others were more obscure. There were scenes of bridges over deep chasms, towering, jagged mountains beneath alien skies filled with moons, winged horses with single spiralling horns on their heads, and still other abstract designs that hurt my eyes.
    There were no clothes on the floor. A record player sat on a stand, a large speaker to either side. Records waited in a neat stack beneath the stand. The Guess Who, Grand Funk, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Melanie. I recalled the only record I owned, a present from last Christmas, the Partridge Family, and I realised that I had never even played it yet. Debbie said it would destroy her record player. Unlikely. Damage it, maybe, but not destroy it. Music didn’t mean that much to me, though some songs from the radio had a way of haunting me, like ‘A Dog Named Boo’. All Debbie ever did these days was listen to records. Every night I’d lie in bed in the dark and listen to the bass notes thrum through the walls, deep like the beat of an exhausted heart. Those sounds carried me into sleep, eventually, but sometimes I’d stay awake, trying to guess which record she’d put on next. I usually guessed right, and that led me to certain theories about Debbie, especially the way the music changed from angry to depressing as the hours dragged on.
    I opened the closet door. Her clothes smelled of perfume, a pungent, urgent smell. On the floor inside lay a half-dozen pairs of shoes – sneakers, high-heels, sandals. I pushed them aside and set a trap, wondering if Debbie took her shoes out of the closet before putting them on, or did she simply step into them?
    Even with the authority of my mission, I was glad to leave Debbie’s room. Something about being in there made me feel guilty, as if everything in there was fragile, and that even the touch of my glance might shatter the world she’d made. I could already picture her outrage at discovering my intrusion.
    The master bedroom was the next stop. It was hard to imagine there being rats in my parents’ room. The shelves in the double closet were precisely ordered, the clothes neatly folded. My father’s clothes occupied the left side of the closet, my mother’s the right. A fainter perfume mixed with cigarette smoke wafted from my mother’s dresses, more subtle than Debbie’s. From Father’s side the cologne was mixed with garage oil.
    I set a trap down behind Father’s dress shoes, which he never wore anyway, then closed the door and swung around. At first the face staring at me was startling, but it was just the mirror. The face was my own, but as I studied it, I saw again a strangeness to it, echoing the reflection I had seen in the window of Gribbs’s shack. An expression all too serious stared back at me, the wide mouth drawn into an almost bloodless line, and on the forehead a growing frown. Abruptly I looked away, down at the double bed. There were no creases on the bedspread, just smooth perfection.
    I left the room, quietly closing the door behind me.
    Mother always called my room ‘frightening’. Her refusal to clean it was always voiced as a threat, though for me it was a personal victory – a view I kept to myself. I stood at the threshold, studying the mess. Piles of dirty clothes hid the floor, toppled stacks of comic books surrounded the unmade bed. Smudges and streaks relieved the plain white walls. On my desk waited