Rose/House

Rose/House Copyright © 2023 by Arkady Martine. All rights reserved. Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2023 by David Curtis. All rights reserved. Interior design Copyright © 2023 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved. Edited by Navah Wolfe Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-64524-034-1 Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519 subterraneanpress.com I live as if in someone else’s house A house that comes in dreams And in which I have died perhaps Where there is something strange In the weariness of evening Something the mirrors save for themselves— —from “Dull Knife”, Anna Akhmatova, trans. D.M. Thomas “Even when it was run-down, it was a ravishing house. I remember having this feeling of really wanting to spend the night there—not just to sleep in the house but to sleep with the house.” —Keith Eggener, architectural historian I. Basit Deniau's greatest architectural triumph is the house he died in. Rose House lies in the Mojave desert, near China Lake—curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune, all hardened glass and stucco walls curving and curving, turning in on themselves. A labyrinthine heart, beating an endless electric pulse. Deniau was not the first person to die there. Now he is also not the last. Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with. All of them: but Rose House was the last-built and the best. An otherwise place, Deniau called it, in one of his rare interviews, the one which ran on the cover of Places magazine, distributed electronic, holographic, and in exquisite-rare print for customers willing to pay. The accompanying photograph shows him cradled in the house’s cast shadow, one hand pressed to the smooth stucco wall. The desert sand creeps over his bare feet in little drifts, touches the hems of his pressed linen trousers. His fingertips are white with pressure, as if he is stroking the wall he has built. A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing. A house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. Dr. Selene Gisil, possessor of one of those rare print copies of Deniau’s interview for Places, touches the place on the photograph where Deniau touches Rose House, and then draws her fingers back as if burnt. She should know better than to get skin oils on something as fragile as magazine paper. She should. She touches it again, as if she could touch the house through Deniau, or Deniau through the house. Basit has been dead for a year. Rose House has been sealed exactly that long. There is an insurmountable gap. Her phone rings again, pulsing on her wrist, insistent. Rings through to her bone-conductor adjunct, vibrates in her skull. China Lake Precinct Police, the tiny screen reads. Same as last time. It’s four in the morning where Selene is, just early enough for the cries of men and birds down at the Trabzon docks to begin. The distant creaking of piers. Salt on the wind. There’s salt on the wind near Rose House, too, half a world away. Selene doesn’t answer. She can only think of one reason the China Lake police would call her, and it is if Rose House had burned down. It is too early in the morning to allow that to be the case, even in imagination. Since Basit Deniau died—old age and one of the nastier mesotheliomas got him at last—Selene has been to Rose House one time. One time, to visit the old man—her old monster—and see what’s been made of him. What he’d left her. What he’d made her, even after death. Selene had, she thought, once believed that Basit’s death would get her all the way free of his influence. She believes this not at all any longer. Not after Rose House. She went alone. She had to. Rose House wouldn’t allow anyone else inside. Deniau’s will had been very specific, and Rose House was obedient—when it pleased to be, Rose House had always been obedient. Salt on the wind and the smell of dust. All of Deniau’s sketches and files and archival material, locked up inside that gypsum flower of a building: their only keeper Rose House itself. Selene, watching the dawn over the Black Sea, watching the dull-silver blank screen of her phone, quiescent for now on her wrist, thinks: what better to keep the secrets of a dead magician of buildings than the soul of a building he’d engendered? Thinks, as well, recalling the origins of the phrase magician of buildings, how Basit Deniau had called himself that, offhand, self-crowning. Thinks: if I don’t pay attention, I’m going to write like Basit all my life, just because he made me his—archivist—once he was safely dead. Deniau’s in Rose House, too. What’s left of him. Compressed sufficiently, a corpse becomes a diamond that can be displayed on a plinth. An altar that no one will ever see. Or—almost no one. When Deniau’s will had been entered into probate, all the hungry journalists and academics and more-junior architects and nationalist politicians—from his adopted country and the one that gave him birth, both—had discovered that the old man had denied them the satisfaction of vulturehood. All of his archives, his sketches: in Rose House. Rose House itself, and the mind that was Rose House, or dwelled within it: sealed, save for Selene. That was in the will. Not anyone else but Selene Gisil, even though she’d denounced Basit a decade ago, denounced the very idea of architecture as a private place, a secret for the rich or the brilliant to enjoy. Basit had taught her once. She had, quite probably, loved him once. Almost everyone did. And they had not spoken since she had made her claim, said her piece, named his otherwise houses poison palaces built for his own glorification and nothing more— And then the old monster died, and left Rose House to