The Collection

by Bentley Little

  Elena died suddenly. She had been getting steadily better and she had had no subsequent episodes. She'd been help­ing Jenny around the house: doing dishes, cleaning, working in the garden. Though she was by no means talkative, she had opened up somewhat and we had gotten to know her. She was a kind, fairly intelligent girl with lots of potential. Both Jenny and I liked her a lot.

  That's why her death was such a shock. We had driven into town for groceries, and Elena had gone along. We'd picked up everything we needed and were almost home when, from the backseat, I heard a low growl. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jenny turning around. "Elena?" she asked.

  "I'm fine," the girl said. "It was nothing." Her voice seemed weak and strained, and I thought of the night she had had the fit.

  And floated in the air.

  We had never told the doctor about the floating. I wasn't sure why. We had not even discussed it between ourselves, and I thought Jenny was probably trying to pretend to her­self that it had not really happened. I knew better, and I felt myself grow suddenly afraid.

  I pulled into the long dirt driveway that led to our farm and heard the back door of the car open.

  "Stop the car!" Jenny screamed.

  I braked to a halt, slammed the car into park, and jumped out. Elena was lying on the dirt. Both Jenny and I ran over to where she lay. "Elena!" I said. I bent over her.

  Her eyes widened crazily and that look of blank demen­tia passed over her features. "I'll get you, you bastard," she said, and her voice was little more than a hiss. "I'll get all of you assholes!"

  Her body stiffened and was still. Jenny reached down to check for a pulse. She put a hand around Elena's forearm and shook her head at me. Her face was white with shock.

  I felt confused, bewildered, but I told Jenny to take the car up to the house and call the police while I stayed with Elena. She hopped in the car and took off in a cloud of dust, tires sliding. I stared down at the girl. I half expected her to float, to break apart before my eyes, to do something strange and terrifying, but her dead form lay unmoving on the dirt.

  The police came, and the coroner, and we had her body cremated. We could find no family or friends, nor could the police, and we scattered her ashes on the hill in back of the barn, where she had liked to lie and stare up at the clouds.

  Jenny was right, I knew. It would not stop with the veg­etables. It never did. I too was filled with a sense of dread and terror, but I did my best to conceal it. Jenny needed my support.

  The first time it had happened was a few years after Elena's death. That day, we could see the wind. It was clear but visible, and it swirled in the sky following billowy paths to nowhere. We sat outside, watching the wind with amaze­ment. The few clouds above us moved quickly, propelled by the visible wind, converging.

  They formed a shape. A face. Elena's face.

  I saw it but did not comment on it, my mind noting the fact but not accepting it. The wind dissipated, died, the clouds floated on. We sat there awhile longer, then went into the house. We made dinner together, ate, read our respective books, and went into the bedroom.

  The sheets and bedspread had been twisted and molded into the shape of a young woman in the throes of a convul­sive fit.

  We both saw this manifestation, and we both screamed. Jenny ran out of the room, panicked, and I grabbed a corner of the bedspread and pulled. The cloth sculpture fell into in­stant disarray.

  It went on from there.

  For a while, the bad time came every year. One season, we decided to leave the farm, go on vacation, get away from it. We hoped to be gone when the occurrences escalated and to come back after everything had settled back down. When Jenny saw Elena's face in the pattern of autumn leaves that had fallen from one of our trees-a relatively benign mani­festation-we packed our belongings and left, before the real horrors started. We were gone for two weeks, but when we came back the occurrences continued as if we had never left.

  We thought of moving the next year, had even gone so far as to look for another place. We found a smaller farm up­state, but when the realtor showed us around the property, we saw Elena's silhouette in the convergence of bushes on the hill above the house. And we knew we could never es­cape.

  The bad time did not come for several years after that. But then it came twice one fall. It has come sporadically in the succeeding years, but it has never gone away. The last time it happened, Jenny was almost killed, and as I looked at her now I could tell that she was terrified. I felt helpless and afraid myself. I didn't know what we could do.

  We ate frozen pizza that night, not daring to look down at our food, afraid of seeing unnatural patterns in the place­ment of the pepperoni. The noises around us grew, and we ate with the television on. Beneath Dan Rather's voice, I heard scratchings on the roof and arrhythmic knockings f from the basement. Once, I thought I heard high staccato screaming from the barn. I glanced over at Jenny, but she seemed not to have noticed it and I didn't say a thing.

  Neither of us took a shower after what had happened the last time.

  "What does she want with us?" Jenny whispered fear­fully after we had crawled into bed. "What did we ever do to her? We only tried to help her."

  "I don't know," I said, my standard answer.

  "What was she?" Jenny snuggled closer. "What is she?"

  I looked at Jay Leno on the TV at the foot of our bed. I usually turned the television off after the news, but I didn't want to lie there in silence that night. I didn't want to hear the sounds. Leno asked the audience how many people had taken the NBC tour before getting in line for the show, and there was a scattering of hands. Leno suddenly fell to the floor, jerking spasmodically, his eyes rolling wildly. His twisting, flailing body began to float, and the cameraman cut to a closeup of his face. "I'll get you, you bastard," Leno said, and his voice was Jenny's dying hiss. "I'll get all of you assholes!"

  "Shut it off!" Jenny screamed. "Shut the damn thing off!"

  I lurched across the bed and reached over to flip off the TV. The screen went blank, but there was a faded white after­image of Elena grinning, her crooked smile seeming to pro­ject outward from the television. I held Jenny close, and we closed our eyes to block out the horror. I'm not sure what she was thinking. I was pray­ing.

  I was awakened the next morning by the sound of a car coming up the drive. I reached over Jenny's still sleeping form and opened the curtains. A silver BMW was pulling to a stop next to the barn. I quickly got out of bed, pulled on my jeans, and went to the door. I opened it just as the man started knocking. "Yes?" I said.

  He was a youngish man, late twenties or early thirties, and he was dressed neatly and fashionably. His hair was short and stylish, and he was holding a briefcase in his hand. "I think maybe you can help me," he said. He smiled.

  I said nothing, only stared, the blood pulsing in my tem­ples, racing through my veins.

  His smile was that of Elena.

  I killed him with the baseball bat I kept next to the door for just such emergencies. I beat his head to a bloody pulp, and the thick redness splattered all over his neat and trendy clothes. I stepped back, satisfied, waiting to see his form wiggle into the ground the way the others had done, but his inert body lay there, dead and whole and unmoving.

  I swallowed hard, the realization dawning on me. This had been a real person, not a manifestation. I felt cold then hot, and I looked again at his bloody form and vomited.

  Jenny came out from the bedroom, wide-eyed and fright­ened. "What is it?" she asked. "What happened?" She saw the body and screamed.

  I did not call the police but, forcing down my nausea, dragged the dead man to the trash furnace next to the barn, doused him with kerosine, and lit him on fire.The smoke which billowed upward from the furnace's stack was black and smelled horrible.

  I returned to the house, where Jenny was already looking through the briefcase. She looked up at me, scared, and held up several photographs of
Elena. I sat down next to her, dig­ging through the pile of pictures, There were photos of men and women I had never seen before. All of them bore a strong resemblance to Elena and the young man I had just killed.

  There was a crash from the kitchen.

  "Oh God," Jenny cried. "Oh God, I can't take much more of this."

  Outside, through the window, I saw two forms wave at us from inside the BMW. A male and a female. My skin be­came a field of goose bumps, and I looked at Jenny. Her lips were pale and dry, her cheeks streaked with tears.

  What were these people? I wondered.

  The throw rug next to the couch moved into the air until it was upright. The corners folded in on themselves and be­neath the shag Elena's face pushed outward. The lips moved silently, then began twitching in hideous convulsions.

  The standing lamp next to the recliner fell to the floor, and the white shade colored red, taking on the features of the young man I had murdered.

  Both the rug and the lamp smiled crooked smiles.

  "What do they want?" Jenny screamed, jumping to her feet. "What the hell do they want from us?"

  The car outside started, there were screams from the barn.

  "I don't know," I said, holding her. "I don't know."

  It went on from there.

  Against the Pale Sand

  One of my favorite movies of all time is Eraserhead. It's- strange, slow moving, and essentially plotless. "Against the Pale Sand" is a story in that fine tradi­tion.

  She sat on the dirty porcelain toilet, staring down at the wrinkled dress and panties which lay in a fallen heap around her ankles. She could see a worn patch in the crotch of the stained panties and a hem of tatters on the once bright green dress. Wind from somewhere outside blew into the bath­room, causing small pinprick goosepimples to assault her bare skin, and she looked up from the floor, her eyes focus­ing on the dilapidated boards which made up the opposite wall. There were holes in most of the planks-knotholes- and the edges of some of the boards had been eaten away by termites. Many of the boards had been used before, else­where, in other houses, other times, and vestiges of previous paint jobs, traces of former lives, could be seen in the thickly whorled patterns of the wood. Very few of the boards met properly, and there were gaps between individual planks and between roof and wall and wall and floor. Next to the toilet, the bathtub gurgled loudly, and a few thick globules of black viscous liquid splattered up from the drain onto the already grimy metal.

  It's not coming, she thought. It's not going to happen. Then she felt the familiar rush of cold from inside the toilet bowl, the welcome pull of gentle arctic air. A wet slimy fin­ger reached upward from the stagnant water at the bottom of the bowl and caressed her sensitive skin. Other fingers followed, and she felt a mucilaginous hand lightly skim across the cheeks of her buttocks and slide slowly down the crack of her ass. She was already aroused, and she closed her eyes, relaxing her muscles, as first one cold finger then another entered her. She spread her legs a little and tried to press her body downward. Opening her eyes, she looked at the reflec­tion of her face in the single shard of mirror remaining on the wall above the broken sink. Her mouth was open, tongue pressed involuntarily between cheek and gums, and she was sweating, though cold wind continued to blow through the cracks between the boards.

  There was another black gurgle from the bathtub.

  A few minutes later the hand, working on its own time, withdrew, though she was far from finished, and she heard it plop back into the still water at the bottom of the toilet. She stood, pulling up her panties and then her dress. She was wet, and she felt a maddeningly unfulfilled tingling between her legs as she pulled the cotton material tight against her crotch.

  She wanted to touch herself there, the way she had as a child, but»she dared not.

  She opened the bathroom door and walked into the hall. A pale imitation of sunlight streamed in dust-filled pillars through holes in the roof, patchily illuminating the floor where weeds pushed up from between the tiles. She stepped across the hall and walked up the double brick steps into what used to be the living room, She ignored the cocoon and nodded curtly to the toothless old man, drooling and bab­bling to himself in his high chair next to the ruined chimney. Walking into the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of rusty water from the pail in the sink and stared out through the glassless window at the back yard. "Hey! Anybody home?"

  The voice, disembodied, its owner hidden behind the oversized growth of weeds on the side of the toolshed, sounded clearly in the now breezeless November air. There was a hint of panic in the voice, a trace of desperation. "Anybody here?"

  A man immaculately attired in an expensive gray busi­ness suit, holding a brown leather briefcase in front of him like a shield against the vegetation, emerged from the weeds looking lost and frail and scared. She could see by the path of the trail he had blazed that he had come through the for­est. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, taking in the house, then caught sight of her, dully staring out the kitchen window.

  "Boy, am I glad to see somebody," he said.

  She dumped the rest of her water back into the pail and ambled over to the ripped screen door. She opened it, star­ing at him. She tried to speak, but all that came out was a high croaking sound. She cleared her throat, coughed, and tried again. "Hello," she said, her mouth forming the word from memory. Her voice sounded slow and awkward even

  to herself.

  The man put his briefcase down at the edge of the porch and looked up at her, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. "My car stalled on me over on Old Pinewood Road," he said, gesturing toward the forest. "I was wondering if you'd let me use your phone."

  She cleared her throat again, coughed. "No phone," she said.

  His lips formed the outline of a crude word he did not say, and he stomped his foot hard on the ground, sending up a small cloud of cold dust. "You know where there is a phone I could use?"

  She shook her head and started to retreat back into the kitchen.

  The man took a step forward. "Think I could just have a drink of water or something?" He pulled at the buttoned col­lar behind his tie. "It's a long way back to the road, and my throat's really parched."

  She thought for a moment, then cleared her throat. "Come in," she said.

  He walked up the series of warped wooden steps onto the porch, opened the screen, and stepped into the kitchen. He stopped just inside the door and stared. A three-legged table sat in the center of the room, piled high with hard bread-crusts and miniscule bones. Against the far wall was a rusted doorless refrigerator; he could see rotting vegetables lying on the appliance's backwardly slanting shelves. Through an­other doorway, he could see into the rest of the house. It looked gutted, abandoned, as though no one had lived there for years.

  The woman dipped a tin cup into the dirty pail inside the sink, and he held up his hand. "Fresh water," he said. "I'd like some fresh water."

  She did not seem to understand, and he let the matter drop, accepting the proffered cup. He was thirsty.

  She watched him, her eyes following the measured bob­bing of his Adam's apple as he drank. From what used to be the living room she could hear the toothless old man's bab­ble moving upward in register, becoming a shrill whine. It was almost time for his supper and he was getting hungry. She walked over to the refrigerator and drew out an old wrinkled potato. She put it in a tin bowl and mashed it with a fork. She carried it in to the toothless old man, placing it on the shelf of his high chair. He cackled, drooling, and shoved his hands in the bowl. He licked the rotten potato from his fingers.

  She turned back toward the kitchen and saw the man standing in the doorway, his empty cup dangling from his hand. "You live here?" he asked, shocked. She nodded.

  He looked to the ruined fireplace, at the toothless old man who was still shoving his hands in his mouth, babbling incoherently. He walked into the room, unbelieving, trying to take it all in. All the windows were boarded up, though not
very well; light still sneaked through the cracks. The couch was slanting backward, its seats ripped, white wool stuffing billowing out through the torn material. Several broken chairs lay in a heap in the center of the room. "Who is that?" he asked, pointing to the old man. She gave him a puzzled expression. "Who is that man in the high chair?" She shrugged. She cleared her throat. "Don't know." His eyes moved over the rest of the room. He walked to­ward the couch, looking around. And he noticed the cocoon.

  "What the hell is that?" He walked toward it, curious. "No.1" the women yelled, running past him. She stood in front of the cocoon and held her hands up to bar his way.

  He stopped, suddenly apprehensive. He wasn't sure what he was doing there in the first place. His car had broken down and he'd been looking for a phone. The nearest town-no more than a store and gas station-was a good thirty miles away. He'd only come here for a drink of water. Now that he'd gotten his drink it was time for him to start heading back to the highway to see if he could flag down a ride. There was no reason for him to be looking through this house.

  But the place was so damn strange....

  He tried to look past the woman at the cocoon. She shifted her position, blocking his view. He could see a slight bluish glow emanating from the object behind her. "I just want to look," he said. "I won't touch."

  "No," she said. Her eyes bored into his, glaring.

  From the back of the house someplace, from the depths of the dilapidated structure, came a strange mechanical whirring. It rose in pitch until it almost hurt his ears. He winced, looking up at the sound, staring at the bare wood wall though he couldn't see past it. "What is that?" he asked.

  She looked at him, uncomprehending, and he shook his head in frustration. He walked through the doorway nearest to him and found himself in what appeared to be a hallway. Brown weeds pushed up through the crumbling floor tiles, and moonlight streamed through large holes in the roof.

  Moonlight!

  He looked up. Through the holes, he could see darkness and the faint imprints of stars.

  That wasn't possible. He had come into the house only seconds ago, and it had been midafternoon. He looked be­hind him, through the doorway, but both the woman and the cocoon were gone. The old man was still in his high chair by the chimney, laughing toothlessly.