Relicts & Revenants: Monsters of the Week II

The Dreams of the Drift House

The land hid the house like the house – a house like that – had to hide the furnace. The road out of the woods burrowed in under the sandbanks, like you were about to come up on a turn-back sign and a tire-deflation station, but in this edge of the Cape you expected to see what was coming. Cecil's or Leopold's roaming Lynnfieldy mansion tucked itself away, hiding wide oval window arches in a riprap of Cape-gray clapboard, definitely doing something to hide the plume of smoke and hot air that had to be coming up off their glass furnace. But – if it wasn't expected it also wasn't surprising: with Leo and Cecil you kind of had to be prepared for things like this. Secrets. Secrets that didn't come with a reason attached.

And yeah, if I had a choice I wouldn't be here: I'd be still in P-town where even if things were going to be tense with Mandy and our friends who were more her friends for the next while, there were still other people. There were still galleries, other people's parties, influences, the essentials of art that you couldn't just get drop-shipped from the Blick warehouse. But whatever else Provincetown had coming out the ears, it was critically short on glass-blowing furnaces, and with normal houses going for two million half a second after they went on the market I couldn't blame Gilman for selling up – even if that left me without a studio. Even if that meant I had to come out to the tidal banks of Brewster and board with the worst caricature hipsters north of Brooklyn rather than leave, for good, and fumble my way towards a new start halfway across the country.

The road emptied out or dead-ended below the house: it was flat enough that this probably used to be a paved parking apron before the wind and the dunes did what they always did. I pushed my truck in at the side, making sure to keep the bumper off the wooden rail that showed where the end of the stairs got banked in by the sand; ahead, on the other side, was a late-model Mercedes sedan, eggshell-white and gleaming. The sand hadn't gotten to it – the salt spray of winter storms hadn't blown into sand scuffs and started rusting the panels apart. Maybe there was a barn they parked it in for the winter, hidden somewhere else in this wizard's castle. Maybe, if they could afford to keep a place like this and fuel a glass furnace where you wouldn't expect anything but seals and seabirds, they just bought a new Mercedes whenever the old one picked up a scratch.

Leo – that was Leo, with the coiffed black Hammurabi beard and the coke-dealer sunglasses – was halfway down the stairs by the time I closed the door and looked up; there was nothing out here for miles and he might have heard the engine as far back as coming off the highway. "Hey! Rachel! Good to see you! Welcome! Any trouble coming in?"

I shook my head. "No – got off the highway in the right place and it's a straight shot from there. Thanks so much for having me – should I move the truck around somewhere else to load up to the studio? I figured I was already imposing on you for your couch or whatever, so I packed my own frit and a bunch of spare cane, if it didn't smash itself to shit on the way down." I put a thumb over my shoulder at the bed.

Leo shook his head. "No, you're okay. This is the way up – it's not that far and the studio's in the middle of the house. Just bring up what you need, when you need it – you're going to want to get settled in first." I shrugged and picked up my backpack from the middle of the boxes and flowerpots of raw glass and pigment dust. It was their house, their rules; I was just a guest here as long as I could manage, until I could get a studio slot and a place to live somewhere else.

As soon as we got through the front door, I felt a lot better about the place. Because the studio really was in the middle of the house: whatever this place might have been before, when whoever built their million-dollar retreat out in the dunes, it had been scooped out and replaced with the giant brick beehive of a glass furnace, Cecil down in a working well in front of the blazing glory hole, spinning a fresh gather around on his pipe into a glowing bell of honey-orange fire. It was a real working studio no matter how much the rest of the house around it might be a hipster man-cave – Cecil might be ironically wearing full pro-cycling kit and he could turn his scrubby little moustache up at the ends, but he was also wearing normal safety glasses and a normal, burn-pocked leather apron over it. Whatever else Leo and Cecil were, they were artists: they did real work, they weren't just playing around at it. This was going to work out fine.