Sally Langforth, single mother of one, lagged tiredly behind her son as she usually did, him bolting along ahead, through the doors and into the studio to join the other children. There were these tapings which Jay loved to go to, and she played along; though she was always tired and busy, she played along, because it made Jay happy, and if Jay was happy Sally was happy, and that's about as much as anybody could ask for.
Nine-almost-ten-year-old Jay had first gotten interested in the show a little bit before the divorce some three years ago; Langforth couldn't remember why or how, or wouldn't at least, from that particularly painful period; nor could she even recall having ever heard of the show before, though apparently it was quite popular. The production values, the size of these crowds. They filed in with the other children and families and classes, all joining the peanut gallery like the one they had at Howdy Doody time, to be a part of the show, the Funny Home show. There were always a good hundred young live studio audience members sitting and standing in the peanut gallery, but as far as Langforth could tell, she and Jay were the only ones who ever came twice.
There was a live host, a hyperactive middle-aged man wearing an overly loud suit and a not-bad makeup job to conceal his age, yellowy underneath the bright stage lights. There was a postman, a love interest female character. And a host of puppet characters.
Everything about it was familiar, there was nothing she hadn't seen before, all in the old shows of her childhood and the parts of the childhoods her parents had shared with her. The lion was Pookie from the Soupy Sales show, the owl Charlie from New Zoo Revue, the clown Clarabell from Howdy Doody, the Grandfather Clock a blatant copy of the character from Captain Kangaroo. Everything was new to children, of course, but there wasn't a single detail of Funny Home that Langforth hadn't seen elsewhere.
Except for the House itself.
Not the house set, of course. The set itself was largely Mr Roger's Neighborhood, sans Land of Make Believe and fishbowl. The House, the character.
The House was one of the puppet characters, a marionette, a modified dollhouse dangling from somewhere that Langforth could never see up in the ceiling, up in the blackness beyond the lights of the studio where the camera would never look. Just a generic two story suburban cul-de-sac house with arms and legs, dumb droopy noodle limbs, its entire body its head, the face taking up the entirety of its body, a crudely drawn mouth stupidly agape. Round oval eyes with droopy lids and a drawn-on nose like an upside down figure seven.
Rack her brain as she might, Langforth couldn't think of any real other-show analogue to the House puppet. SpongeBob SquarePants or something. But why as a house? Langforth knew that there was a host of children's programming from all over the world instrumental in the upbringing of people everywhere, but it bothered her that the single most important aspect of the show came sui generis. Maybe the one true creative aspect of the show, it was possible.
Langforth shook involuntarily, as the lights dimmed and the show began. She didn't know what Jay saw in the Funny Home show, she really didn't. Not that she'd had any better taste when she was Jay's age, but something about the show here always seemed slightly off to Langforth. It was like Pee-Wee Herman from her own childhood, but even creepier. Living furniture was one thing, but Pee Wee's Playhouse never had the Playhouse itself as a puppet. A house inside of itself, somehow; Langforth had never wrapped her head around that. And sometimes they cut to inside of the house puppet itself, where there were smaller, puppet versions of the live action cast in there, alongside smaller puppet versions of the puppet characters, including the House.
In her nightmares they went deeper than that, cut to inside the puppet-within-a-puppet version of the Funny Home House puppet, and inside that, and inside that. On those nights, when she woke up she could never tell if she ever truly woke up, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, waking and waking over and over only to find herself still dreaming, still inside the puppet house surrounded by puppet versions of the studio audience. Like the song they opened the show with, deeper inside! deeper inside!
That awful little jingle they had as the theme song, the syrupy sweet song that the children were singing along to now. Come inside, come inside, don't CHU want TO come inSIDE? The Fun-ny Home! (Fun-ny Home!)
Deeper inside! Deeper inside! Go down deeper, you have to, go down deeper... You have to go down deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper. Deeper…
* * *
It was four years earlier. Before the divorce, back when she was Sally Cooper. Mid-afternoon, sun streaming through the windows, rice on the stovetop cooking, them talking about how Jay would soon be going to school, Crispin sitting down at a table and sipping on a stale beer, frowning at how warm it was like he usually did, which wouldn't happen if he didn't leave them out but Sally dare not mention that to him anymore, when Crispin interrupted the conversation with:
"Don't you have to go?"
"Go?"
"Yes," Crispin repeated. "You have to go, don't you? You set up an appointment, didn't you, with the, dentist or whatever?" He set his bottle down on the table, never to pick it up again.
Sally said she didn't think so but that she would check, and she checked and he was right and that she'd scheduled the appointment herself even though she had no memory of doing so, and would she like to reschedule?, and while all this was going on, the rice overboiled into a hard sticky mess which Crispin got mad at her about and which she agreed was her fault, and at least he didn't hit her this time so that was alright, and Crispin said he wanted a pizza instead so they ordered pizza instead, and Sally had to pay in cash because her credit card number wasn't what she remembered it being even though she had memorized it very carefully.
"You're crazy, woman," Crispin said, shaking his head and dabbing his crust in one of those little cups of ranch dressing. "You're losing it."
And Sally grimaced, and said maybe, and went to the dentist's the next available slot though her teeth were clean, and forgot about the events of the afternoon until an evening years later.
The marriage was not quite coming apart at the seams, because even though there were problems strong-willed Sally ignored them and said they could be worked through and didn't do anything until it was too late. The name calling and the abuse and the unwillingness to compromise. She ignored it all willfully.
Maybe Crispin was right.
Maybe she was crazy.
* * *
Another date, another taping. Or the same one. It could have been any of them. How did they get in every time? Langforth never recalled paying for tickets. But they always got in. And never got chosen.
There were always these little segments at the beginning of an episode where a member of the audience was invited down and allowed to interact with the hosts and guests and puppets, and to be the keeper of the Word of the Day. Jay always waved his hands wildly when they asked for volunteers, but they always passed right over him, eenie meenie minie moe.
No, keepaway, Langforth thought, or monkey in the middle. She huffed. It was just like her, to connect everything to children's games. The television shows weren't enough. All so very important to her childhood, the shows were, only ever realizing how vaguely unsettling it all was as an adult now that such a show was important to her son.
This time, they were teaching a song, and needed the audience volunteer to be an adult. Jay raised her hand for her; she was selected out of the crowd. Langforth didn't know how they selected her, but not Jay, after all this time. It was kind of sad, and kind of funny. A stage technician escorted her up.
She stepped out onto the stage, feeling naked and pale and alone under the stage lights, an island of brightness in the darkness of the studio. Feeling small, like it really all was a dollhouse. Not metaphorically, or not just that way; the audience playing make-believe, the ratings and demographics forcing puppets to dance mindlessly for children's whims. But literally. She felt, inside the House, inside the puppet onstage.
The host grabbed her hand as she stepped onto stage, sized her up and down, and clearly took a liking to what he saw. It was sort of a running joke (creepy, she didn't know why they let him get away with it) that he'd chase after anything wearing a skirt. Or, apparently not anything, judging by his next question:
"Are you single? Married? Widowed? Divorced?"
Tinker tailor soldier sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief, part of her mind cackled, while another part wondered what made them think that such a question was acceptable to ask in the first place.
Langforth nodded stiffly and numbly at the latter option, trying to keep her mind clear. Painful memories, which she liked to keep locked down tightly.
"Divorced, eh?" he slurred slightly, with an almost imperceptible hardness to his voice. Was he drunk? His face seemed particularly yellow today. Langforth focused on that thought rather than any thoughts of her ex-husband.
Please don't press the point please don't press the point pleasedontpressthepoint...
Instead of pressing the point, the host just gave a big grin to the camera, slurred out "well alright!" (which got a hearty chuckle from the audience for some reason,) and escorted her away to stand face-to-face in front of the Funny Home House puppet.
Don'tcha want to come inside?
The House spoke this, its mouth flapping open and closed just out of sync with its voice but the voice coming from within the house nonetheless. That was another aspect that Langforth could never figure out, just as she could never see the puppeteers operating the marionette from the rafters and catwalks above. How did they get the eyes and mouth to move? The mouth, though it seemed drawn-on, could somehow open and close as the character spoke. A projection, maybe. Or a Magic Screen. Or particularly well-disguised puppetry, made up to look like scribbled crayon. Now that she was close enough to see more clearly at least, she could attempt to peek. Whenever it opened its mouth, it had always seemed that she could see into the mouth, to the interior of the dollhouse.
Deeper inside, deeper inside! Come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, deeper inside!
The House had the voice of a woman, and its tone grew sultry here. The puppet rocked and moaned, jittering ridiculously on its puppet strings as it said these words. Langforth was aware even as a child that children's shows frequently slipped in such parental bonuses, little jokes that would fly right over the children's heads, but this seemed overtly sexual to her, borderline obscene. It always made her feel weird as a little girl when they attempted such things, even just a little, even if she didn't understand what was going on. Suddenly sick to her stomach, Langforth shot glances around, but none of the expressions on any of the faces of the parents in the audience had changed. Is that why they needed an adult to be the volunteer participant? It would have been sicker and creepier if they'd chosen a child for this, they needed an adult to know the meaning behind the Secret Word. Langforth looked at the face of the host again, and it was impassive, not even focused on her. There was always the possibility in seeing into these things, Langforth knew, that it's just one oneself that has a dirty mind.
Going deep inside could have been literal. Deep inside the house. As the mouth opened and closed, with the rooms of the dollhouse exposed, she could see herself inside the house inside the house inside the house, going deeper inside. She snapped her eyes away, up to the host again, who was watching her with his dark eyes out of his yellow face.
A yellow face that seemed strangely familiar...
The word of the day was come and the first person to say it past then was spattered from the ceiling in milky mucusy slime and it just kept pouring and pouring down and down and down, the world drowning in cornstarch and applesauce and vanilla pudding.
Langforth didn't remember the rest of that taping.
* * *
Later, at home. Talking to her son. It's alright, Jay, they'll pick you next time; it's alright, Jay, they'll pick you next time. Trying to calculate finances and reassure her son and wasn't it awfully late, what was he still doing up?
Jay got quiet, which was a signal that he was satisfied, and coughed a little, cleared his throat as though he had one final thing to say before going to bed, cleared his small little throat and piped:
"You have to go, don't you?"
"Have to go where, Jayjay?" Langforth barely even turned to face him, barely looked up from what she was doing. There was something familiar about that...
"Deeper inside, mommy."
Something out of the corner of her eye, something which caused her to bolt. For a flash, for an instant, but she jumped back and Jay jumped back as well, instinctively. She knew she must have been seeing things, calmed Jay down and sent him to bed.
But what she thought she saw was this: Jay's face being replaced by a crude drawing of a face, the mouth normal but the eyes scribbles of crayon.
She never saw his eyes normal again.
* * *
It was something from earlier that had triggered it, something that she'd noticed but which hadn't quite registered until a later realization hit. The answer to the mystery, or at least the key to starting to unravel everything. She had been rifling through a stack of old papers she'd saved, all pertaining to her son. Trying to prove something, maybe for school, maybe to see deeper into the history of the funny house puppet show.
She grabbed the papers again now and sucked in a breath. These were painful memories for her, going this far back; doors in her mind she kept shut and locked. So much pain and loss and anger. Putting her fears aside, she dove in, rummaging through the stack of papers and report cards, further back into the past, third grade second grade first grade kindergarten, reports and paintings and drawings.
A voice sang in the back of her mind. It was always there now. Go down deeper, you have to, go down deeper...
Until she stopped at one paper in particular, the one she'd been looking for the whole time without even knowing it. It was a child's drawing, Jay's drawing, in crayon, from when he was 6 years old, from before the divorce, from before the funny house puppet show and the voices and the nightmares. Mommy and Daddy and Me, still together, and smiling, their heads crudely elliptical and their torsos boxy and their legs spindly lines, legs formed by dragging the crayon heavily straight down the page, practically carving wax into the paper. Mommy and Daddy and Me, Sally and Crispin and Jay, rendered with yellow skin and standing together in the greengrassed front yard of their old home. Their old home, standing in the background, itself smiling with a big goofy face, on two long spindly legs of its own...
She thrust down the paper and jolted up from the table, spilling the remaining papers all over the floor but giving it no heed. Bounding from the table, up from the den, through the hall, bursting into Jay's bedroom. The bed was empty.
Panting, Langforth stood in horror, her mind racing, her heart pounding. It was as though the whole of existence had been bared to her vision; from the back of her mind, some unthinkable thought emerged, a thought that she had pressed down and kept locked away for three years, ever since the divorce... She swallowed it back down again.
Jay missing. Not just missing. The walls, normally adorned with colorful sports posters, were bare; the bed was made and the floor was free of toys and litter. Like he'd never lived here to begin with. But where would he be? At her ex-husband's? Had she lost the custody battle, was she imagining Jay the whole time? Was Jay even ever real to begin with?
It was just as Crispin had said. She really was crazy.
She was crazy she was crazy she was crazy she was crazy...
Langforth tried to keep a level head, but the more she struggled to form a coherent thought, the more staticky her thoughts became, the more numb her head. She could feel the walls closing in on her, pressing in, in, in, as though they'd envelope her whole body and leave her mangled inside a doll-sized house, her head pressing out in the front.
She fell backward, out of the room, and that was enough to snap her into her senses, and she threw up and filed a missing person's case with the police and drove home in the dark and expected Jay to be home safe and sound but of course he wasn't, the room was just as empty as it had been a few hours ago.
Sally Langforth did not sleep at all that night, hadn't slept at all in days but that night the nightmares came back, sleep or no sleep. The drawing, the puppet, the drawing, the puppet, each inside each other. Back on the show, the puppet opening its mouth up to speak to her again, the camera zooming in and Langforth following with it as the camera's view went deeper, deeper, deeper. Inside the house, another house, another face, deeper and deeper houses recursing. Inside each of the houses, the face progressively off, more and more, the face getting more cartoonish and distorted and grotesque, becoming her son's drawing, then less cartoony, the house's eyes and mouth becoming disturbingly realistic.
She remembered what they caught Paul Reubens doing, and she remembered that Clarabell the Clown spoke only a single line throughout the entirety of Howdy Doody, and she remembered that the characters of young children were frequently voiced by grown women, and she remembered that the characters in the Peanuts specials were voiced by real children and not voice actors or actresses. She remembered these things, but didn't know why they were important. She only heard the House chanting at her, come inside, go down deep.
* * *
She didn't remember getting into the car, only that she found herself driving, mindlessly, her instincts taking over as she navigated the twists and turns of the wide suburban streets. Almost before she realized it, parked her car in front of one of the houses, just one of a row of many pretty and indistinguishable homes. She could still read the address in the glow of her headlights, but didn't need that to know where she was.
Her ex-husband's house, Crispin's house. Which she now recognized as the same house from the drawing, the same house from Funny Home. It seemed so small now, insignificant in the dark from outside, though she had spent years of her life living there. Small like a dollhouse. Out of Langforth's memory, a voice emerged, the voice of the House from the puppet show, but realer and more tangible than a memory somehow, not singing but speaking. Don'tcha wanna come inside? Come inside! The house itself speaking to her. Not the House the puppet, but the house right there in front of her, silent and mouthless.
But she didn't want to go inside. There was a reason she had left him, after all. Some parts of her mind she preferred not to touch. Some parts of her mind she had bundled down small, which she was afraid would expand, become bigger on the inside than the rest of her brain combined.
She got out of the car and went up to the door and tried it and it wasn't even locked or bolted, just opened right up, and she went inside, but softly, as softly and as silently as possible. In opening the door, it also felt like Langforth herself had opened up, a part of herself, a deep intimate part that wasn't sure it liked being opened.
The quiet game, came the thought in her mind, the thought that spoke in games. A children's game, an innocent one, somewhat ironically employed by stressed and tired adults who wanted their little angels to shut up for a little bit. The implication of this voice was clear: Crispin was somewhere in the house, probably upstairs, and Langforth needed to be as silent as possible so as to not rouse him.
Inside the house there was no smaller house waiting for her, not as such. She wouldn't have been able to go inside, then, go down deeper. You have to go down deeper, go down deeper. She was never a puppet herself, in her nightmares.
But she was a puppet now.
You have to go down deeper. Instead of there being infinite recursion levels of House, there was only one, all meshed together onto a single plane and squirming over itself, tessellation in smaller and smaller fractal patterns everywhere, the corners of the walls and counters splintering out as each plane struggled to take up a single space, the roof tilings poking out the tops of horizontal planes. And the faces, the House's faces. Not the cartoony ones, but the realistic ones. Faces, and parts of faces, everywhere. The doors of the house were covered in eyes. There was a eye on the wall, giant and closed, struggling to open its lid. The furniture and items all around, all with their own faces, like in the Funny Home puppet show. There were faces everywhere.
And there also weren't. Layers of reality coexisted here as well. Maybe somewhere, in some layer of reality, she was insane, there were no mouths and eyes everywhere, there was no puppet that whispered her worst memories into her mind while she tried to rest. Penetrating deeper into the house, it felt like Langforth herself was being penetrated, pain too harsh to be unreal, so she kept such thoughts unspoken. Maybe somewhere, there was no Funny Home puppet show.
She remembered why she'd left Crispin; she'd remembered, she'd always known, but the sights and smells of the old house forced the memories back into her mind with a reliving freshness. The fear, the horror, the unproven accusations. What had happened? It wasn't a safe place for Jay; she'd managed to take custody, but Crispin had walked free. Somehow.
Telephone, warned Langforth's mind sternly. What could that have meant? Something was distorted in the retelling. Something important. Something beyond a final locked door in her mind. Crispin... Crispin what?
A glass bottle sat on the dining room table, the scent of alcohol reeking from its open top. There was a mouth on the bottle. A human mouth, motionless yet whispering the final secret.
The mouth was moving. Not, moving like struggling to say something, like the eye that had been trying to open. Moving like, drifting around, rotating to face her as she circled around the table to get to the kitchen. At first it moved gently, then violently, like a drowner bobbing and flailing in the water, gasping and choking and saying stop, please, don't. It was the soft high voice of a child, almost indistinguishable from the House's feminine voice.
Stop, please, don't. The message wasn't for her. The House itself still compelled her, deeper inside, deeper inside. But at the same time, her mind screamed, along with the mouth, no, don't, stop. The voice and the memories merging; the House compelling her onward, the locked doors of the house in her own mind telling her to run away...
Was her own mind correct in this battle? She stared at the lips on the beer bottle. And picked it up. Gingerly, painfully. And she watched the lips quiver, the voice rising to a fever pitch. Those lips, she recognized them, that was her son's mouth.
Just like that, Langforth decided whom to trust. Her son had been right. The House was a benevolent force, all along, the show was good, the Funny Home puppet show; the mouth on the bottle was shrieking now; the House, benevolent as it was, was still very creepy.
Langforth turned into the kitchen, and saw it. The door down to the cellar. Go inside, go inside. Go down deep, deep, deep inside. She set the bottle down on the edge of a kitchen counter.
There was a bump of something upstairs, as if someone had awoken. Langforth startled, brought her hand too sharply away from the counter, knocking the bottle over. The mouth stopped screaming, as the pot tumbled, in slow-motion, to the ground- she dove and grabbed it- it barely made a clinking noise against the floor. She held her breath.
The staircase light clicked on, and the giant eyeball finally managed to roll open.
Oh. Dear.
Hide and go seek, said the gamesmaster part of Langforth's mind, taking charge as footsteps thumped down the stairs.
Crispin's voice rang out into the house. "Hello?" He sounded drunk. That slurring, though...
Langforth peeked around the counter to where she could see him clearly. Standing there tired and tipsy on the middle of the staircase, wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a stained white tee shirt. Grimly, Langforth realized she was somehow right; the host of the show, underneath the layers of yellow crayonlike makeup, and seeming years older, impossibly older, was her ex-husband. Langforth's face went numb. A flash of repressed memory filled her reality, pulsed and ebbed away again.
She backed and slid behind another countertop, as the footsteps came closer. How did he wake up so easily, was he expecting this? Was that his plan all along? She paused to realize that the footsteps had stopped. Heavy breathing from her left side.
Crispin was right there, just around the kitchen island's corner. She crouched behind it, her ex-husband standing feet away, her face at the level of his crotch. "I'm calling the police now," he announced to the whole house. Indeed, Langforth could see that he held a phone in his hand, unhooked from its cradle and held up as if proving that he could go through with his threat.
Langforth realized her situation. She was, after all, breaking and entering, and would be in the wrong if the police did arrive. What would the police find? A real house? Her as a doll, in a house inside a house? She would be the one to get carted away, not the yellow-faced children's show host. But she could act now. She was mere inches away, and Crispin didn't know it. If she wanted to act, she would have to do so immediately.
Attack him.
Ye- well wait. Attack him? Langforth halted. Attack him, that wasn't the name of a game...
Run now.
No. I don't know this game either. I refuse.
Simon says, let the police come.
Oh. So it was that game that they had been playing. Well, luckily Langforth had been given pause. She listened, slipping around to the other side of the kitchen island, clockwise, as Crispin dialed and requested police presence at his house. From her position here, she could see it. The cellar door. Go down deeper, the House whispered again.
Crispin circled around the kitchen island clockwise, away from Langforth. She eyed the door nervously, as Crispin returned the phone to its cradle. Her brain moved onto another game.
Red light.
Langforth got on her haunches, ready to bolt for the cellar door. There was a sound of receding footsteps, as her ex-husband moved on to a different part of the house.
Green light.
Langforth erupted forward, bursting for the door. Crispin stepped out of nowhere and grabbed her by the wrist, grinning maniacally. "You crazy, woman..."
Langforth grinned back. Maybe she was crazy. But she had learned how to weaponize it now. Freeze tag. With her free arm, Langforth swung the bottle, still in her hand, at her ex-husband's head, shattering the bottle and knocking the man out cold. The bottle bled blood, and bled booze, and bled memory most of all, and in shattering it, she had also shattered part of herself, and cut herself on its broken glass. The mouth quivered with blue lips, and went still. Inside the bottle had been the final secret, which now urged her along deeper into the house along with the House's voice.
Langforth stepped over the unconscious body, not a children's show host at all, nothing yellow about his face; crossed the last few feet to the door. Yes, yes. Come inside.
Langforth arrived at the cellar door to find it locked, the multiple eyes on its surface staring out plaintively at her. She kicked the door down, blood spurting from the ruptured hinges, a jolt in her stomach, vomit erupting from her mouth and staining the front of her shirt. The vomit continued to dribble down into her chin, flowing in a gentle steady stream, as she went in. Beyond the door was a flight of stairs leading down into the dimness of the basement below. It reeked of guts and death, stronger and stronger as she descended into the anti-glow of the basement, into darkness sucking out all life. Into the bowels of the creature that was the House. The railing felt warm, slippery, and it pulsed slightly, quivering under her touch, as though digesting something. A thick mucus dripped from the ceiling, absorbing up and digesting light and sanity and all. Deeper inside, deeper inside. The stomach of the house, soaking in acid. The floor is lava.
She ignored this game, and pressed forward into the burning lake, listening to the voice instead. You have to go down deeper. Dropping down to her knees, pressing her fingers into the lava, into the stomach acid, into the floorboards which were myriad interlaced fingers and floorboards just ordinary floorboards in an ordinary house, and wrapping her hands around the wood and prying up the boards. Burning her hands to blackened husks in the lava and acid, breaking her fingers against the splintering wood snap snap snap in her haste, snapping away and breaking the fingers of the floorboards themselves, tiny finger splinters worming under her skin, hangnails pulling all the way back, deeper and deeper down the fingers, up and over the knuckles, but still prying. Tearing the floorboards off, the nails of the wood of the floorboards jutting out from underneath, fingers reaching out down to their homes where they belonged, the nails of the wood of the floorboards literal fingernails tearing off as the wood was pried away. Prying away the hands, exposing the dirt below. Deeper.
Scrabbling furiously now, clawing out with broken and mangled hands, pawfuls of earth, deep down into the ground, hand over hand over hand. Dig a hole to China. You have to go down DEEPER. Deeper inside, mommy. Her hands, numb and bleeding and feeling only the coldness the dampness of the earth, the worm-sliminess of the loam, brushed now against something different, something grainy, yet soft. Something clothlike.
And just like that and all at once, the dirt was just dirt, the darkness was just darkness, the house was just a house, and the voices disappeared, every one of them, and the voice of her son as well, speaking to her out of the House, speaking to her out of the Funny Home puppet show, and drawing her downward. All went away. And when the police arrived to find Sally Langforth, they found her, sitting in the cellar, floorboards pried up, cradling the corpse of her son, a missing persons case for three years missing no longer. They found her sleeping, dreaming of the swansong of a clown who'd never talked.
Goodbye, children.
