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“The Ruins of Contracocur” is atmospheric, dense with poetic gloom, touching and unnerving; it was the very first story I received for this book, and even after all this time it continues to haunt me.

I. First Sighting: The Thing-Without-a-Face

It was in June, early in our time of exile in Contracoeur. In the death-stillness of a stonily moonlit night. Not ten days following the upheaval of our lives when Father, disgraced and defeated, uprooted his family from the state capital to live in the ruin of Cross Hill, his grandfather’s estate in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains. Bear with me, children. Believe in me! J will be redeemed. I will redeem myself. My brother Graeme, thirteen years old, restless, insomniac and unhappy prowling the downstairs of the darkened old house like a trapped feral cat. In his pajamas, barefoot, not caring if he stubbed his toes against the shadowy legs of chairs, tables; not caring if, upstairs in the bedroom they shared, his younger brother Neale who whimpered and ground his teeth in his sleep might wake suddenly to see Graeme’s bed empty and be frightened. Not caring how our parents, convalescing from the trauma of the move to Cross Hill and the ignominy of their new life, would be upset by his defiant behavior. For by day as by night Graeme signaled his displeasure in words both spoken and unspoken. I hate it here! Why are we here? I want to go home. Graeme was a sallow-skinned, spoiled, petulant child, immature even for his young age: tears of rage and self-pity stung his eyes. He was small-boned, slight; back home, he’d spent much of his time in cyberspace, and had only a few friends from the private school he attended, skilled at computers like himself; he’d never been physically outgoing, or brash, or brave like his older brother Stephen. Now shivering in his thin cotton pajamas prowling the rooms of the vast unfamiliar house that was our father’s inheritance; prowling this drafty, high-ceilinged and neglected old house as if it were a tomb in which, his father’s son, the child of a man in exile, he was unjustly confined. That evening our mother had come to us in our rooms to kiss us good-night, Mother in a pale silk dressing gown that fitted her loosely, for she’d lost weight, and her beautiful hair that had been so lustrous an ashy-blond now threaded with gray, untidy on her shoulders, touching our faces with her thin fingers and murmuring Children, please don’t be unhappy, remember that we love you, your father and mother love you, try to be happy here at Cross Hill, try to sleep in these strange, new beds for our sake. Graeme accepted Mother’s kiss but lay awake for hours. His thoughts in a turmoil of resentment and fear for Father’s safety. At last slipping agitated from his bed which was not (as he told himself bitterly) his bed but one borrowed, uncomfortable and smelling of damp bedclothes and mildew. I can’t sleep! I won’t sleep! Never again!

For not a minute of any hour of any day, nor even night, did we children of a disgraced and defeated man cease to feel the outrage of our predicament.

Why? Why has this happened to us?

Graeme made his way down the staircase that swayed slightly beneath even his modest weight of eighty-nine pounds. He imagined the pupils of his eyes enlarging in the dark, shrewd and luminous as an owl’s. The death-stillness of the hours beyond midnight. Moonlight slanting through the latticed windows on the eastern side of the house. In the near distance, the cry of night birds; a screech owl; loons on the lake; the murmurous wind. Graeme shivered—a faint chill wind seemed always to be blowing through the drafty house from the direction of Lake Noir, to the north. Why was I drawn to see what I had no wish to see? Why I, Graeme? For a moment disoriented by the size of the foyer, larger than it seemed by day, and the water-stained marble floor painfully cold against his bare feet; and the vastness of the room beyond the foyer, one of