16

All those eyes gaze up at me, here at the front of the classroom, like the eyes of Shadydale all turned at once in my direction, fixing me with their stony gaze, the white corners of their eyes vanishing into vast pupils like black holes. Frost creeps across the windows and trees bend over the walkways, limbs laden with snow. It is a colder winter than we’re used to. All the weathermen are in a tizzy over it, predicting snowmageddon all down the East Coast.

A hot coffee sounds so pleasant and lovely on a chill day such as today, but I cannot bring myself to stop at the diner in town, where I know Don will be sitting hunched over his laptop in the corner booth, a strange out-of-place fixture, an uprooted artifact.

In the study of archaeology, context is what gives artifacts meaning. No matter the site, every artifact found has a relationship to the situation, the time period, and to the other artifacts nearby. That is why each artifact must be properly documented before it can be removed. Once an artifact is removed from its precise location without prior documentation, it has been removed from its context, and it no longer has any identifiable scientific value; its meaning is lost forever. Without context, you have objects with no clear relationship to one another or to the situation, and without those relationships, you have no patterns—just random chaos.

This house is an archaeological nightmare: people and objects and sounds appearing and disappearing at whim, with no rhyme or reason, with no intelligible context unless one has already studied deeply the history of the site. And it isn’t as if the memories can be precisely documented either, as I have discovered with Nathaniel’s camera. I can keep notes in my journal, which I have been doing for many years, as you know, but even those notes must be biased by my own hand. All I can do is try to identify and document the context, to desperately try to make sense of the patterns and form them into a coherent narrative. I am, if anything, a pattern seeker, and where no pattern clearly exists, I will try to find one, or form one, or make one up.

As an archaeologist, I am trying to make sense of the context in which Donovan appears in this tale. I consider ghosts and memories of the house’s inhabitants to be artifacts just as much as anything else, requiring documentation, so I suppose I have come to consider human beings artifacts in their own right. And as you know, artifacts require context.

What is the location in which he has appeared? What is his relationship to that location, and to the other artifacts (or people) present? Your assignment will be to write a report in which you find the pattern, and then explain the meaning of that pattern.

In the evening, we find Don tearing apart the Rose Room. Elizabeth and I were paging idly through books—by some unspoken agreement we have been spending more time in the same room as each other lately—when we heard the racket going on up here, so we threw each other a look before hurrying to Don’s room.