The Collection

by Bentley Little

  I stepped down the stairs and it was cold. But that was not the only reason I shivered.

  I turned around, intending to climb back up.

  The woman was still pointing. I could see her silhouette against the overcast sky above the alley, framed by the stair­well entrance. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she repeated.

  I started down.

  The hallway was long, extraordinarily long. And dark. Doors opened off to each side, but somehow I knew that they did not lead anywhere. At the end of the hall were two rooms, one of which was lighted, one of which was dark.

  I moved forward slowly. On the side, through the other doors, I could hear whispers and shuffling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw furtive shadows, dashing, darting, follow­ing. I stared straight ahead.

  I grew frightened as I drew closer to the end of the hall, my fear focusing on the lighted room. It wasn't logical, but it was real. I was supposed to turn off the light, but I was afraid of the room with the light in it. The dark room was scary only because it was dark. The lighted room was scary because something was in it.

  I reached the end of the hallway and ducked quickly into the darker doorway. I was breathing rapidly, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it. Trembling, I reached around the corner into the other room and felt for the light switch. I flipped it off and—

  I was in an Arizona farmhouse with a man and two chil­dren I had never seen before but who I knew to be my uncle and my cousins.

  I was eight years old. I lived with them.

  My uncle looked out the window of the empty farmhouse at the dry dusty expanse of desert extending unbroken in all directions. "Get us something to eat," he told Jenny, my fe­male cousin.

  She went into the furnitureless kitchen and looked through each cupboard. Nothing but dust.

  "Whoever lived here didn't leave no food," she said. She waited for my uncle's reply, and when he didn't say any­thing she shrugged and picked up a broom leaning against the wall. She began to sweep some of the dirt out of the house.

  We slept that night on the floor.

  The next day, my uncle was up before dawn, riding the tractor, attempting to till that dry useless soil, attempting to grow us some food. Jenny was hanging curtains, determined to make the house livable.

  So Lane and I went out to play. We walked around, ex-|- plored, talked, threw dirt clods, decided to build a club­house. He ran off and got us two trowels, and we started digging. Both of us wanted a basement in our clubhouse.

  After nearly an hour of digging in the hot Arizona sun, I our tools struck wood. We dug faster and deeper and harder I and found that the wood was part of a trap door. I turned to my cousin. "I wonder what's under it."

  "Only one way to find out," he said. "Open it."

  So I slid my hands up under the board and pulled up. A cold chill ran through me as I saw the stairway descending into the ground. The stairway that led to a hall. I turned around and my cousin was no longer my cousin but a grin­ning, gap-toothed Appalachian woman. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she said.

  I stood in front of Mike's Market, disoriented. I did not know where I was. What happened to the hallway? I won­dered. Where was the woman? It took me a minute or so to adjust. Then I realized that this was reality; the fair, the alley, the hallway, and the farm were not.

  And I began to be afraid. For before this, the occurrences always seemed like dreams. Even when they started hap­pening in the daytime, they were clearly illusions juxtaposed onto a real world. But now the illusions were becoming or­dinary, the surrealism real.

  I was losing the battle.

  If only Kathy were here. Two of us could hold the tide; two of us could dam the flood. We might even be able to have some semblance of a normal life.

  Now, however, I was alone.

  And they were getting stronger.

  ***

  Last night it was the spider.

  It had been a long day with no occurrences. At least, no malicious occurrences. I'd spent the day clearing a path through the woods to the pond. The old path had become overgrown with weeds through disuse and inattentiveness. Although the day was cool and even somewhat overcast, the work was hard. And by the time I was ready to quit, I was hot, tired, and sweating like a pig.

  I deserved the bath.

  I decided to use the third floor bathroom, the small one with just a toilet, tub, and sink in a space the size of a closet. The water felt soothing and good, so I leaned back and re­laxed, getting comfortable. I fell asleep in the tub.

  When I awoke, something was wrong. The bathwater was still warm by this time but not warm enough to stop goose bumps from popping up on my arm. Scared for no particular reason, I hurried to unstop the drain, then arose from the tub and grabbed a towel to dry myself.

  It was then that I noticed the spider. Black and big as an apple, with bright blue eyes and a row of blue button teeth, it was hanging from its thread in the middle of the bathroom. I don't know how I could have missed it.

  It started moving toward me; slowly, evenly, still sus­pended from its thread, as though the entire spiderline were on some sort of track in the ceiling. I flattened against the wall, nude and trembling. The spider kept coming.

  Desperate, I jumped over the rim of the tub, hitting my knee on the edge, and rolled along the floor underneath the hanging creature. I climbed onto my throbbing knee and tried to unlatch the bathroom door, which I had stupidly locked.

  But I wasn't quick enough. The spider and its thread were coming back toward me now, faster, gaining speed.

  Once again, I rolled under it, and I jumped back in the tub just as the last little trickle of water swirled down the drain. I was getting claustrophobic. The bathroom seemed smaller by the second. The toilet's in the wrong place, I thought dis-jointedly. The sink took up too much room. I found that there was no place for me to move except along the narrow path the spider was guarding.

  Maybe I could make it to the door this time. The pain in my knee almost unbearable now, I climbed on the rim of the tub, hit the side wall, and slid by the hanging horror, its large hairy body half an inch from my own.

  I reached the door and turned around at the same time. No chance. There was no time. The spider was heading straight for my face, moving fast and grinning.

  And then it was gone.

  It had been another one of their tricks. I slumped to the floor, sweat pouring from every inch of my body though the temperature was barely above freezing. I should have known from the beginning, the way Kathy and I had always known, but I had not figured it out until the whole thing was over. I'd accepted it as reality all the way through.

  I was losing the battle.

  This morning I awoke early. I'd decided to spend the day just cooking. It would relax me. It would allow me to think of a way to combat this encroaching madness. I rolled out of bed and put on my robe. My eyes were still half closed, and I rubbed them so I could see clearly.

  It was then that I noticed the room.

  It was not my bedroom at all but a bowling alley. I was seated next to an old couple who were looking at me quizzically, as though they expected me to say something. "I'm sorry," I found myself mumbling. "I didn't catch that."

  The old man stood up from his plywood folding chair and grabbed a large black bowling ball. "I said, 'Do you want to go first?'" he repeated. He stepped up to a lane. "Never mind. I'll go." He rolled the ball down the lane and it grew larger as it moved away from him. My eyes followed the ball to the pins, but there were no pins. Instead, a group of people stood in a pin formation, unmoving, as the ball rolled ever larger toward them.

  One of them was Kathy.

  "Oh my God!" I cried. Luckily, the old man was not a very good bowler and the ball slid into the gutter, missing Kathy completely.

  "Not good, Hubert," said the old lady two seats down from me.

  I could not believe this. I jumped out of my chair and ran down the lane. I grabbed Kathy in my arms. "Watch
this!" Hubert announced. He rolled the ball again, and I stood there, a human bowling pin unable to move, holding my Kathy as the ball rolled ever closer. I felt the wind as the now monstrous object passed us.

  Hubert was talking to his wife and getting ready to bowl again, so I threw Kathy over my shoulder (she was light) and ran up the lane, past the old couple and through the door. Outside the bowling alley, my house was a maze of cheaply paneled rooms with red carpeting and bare bulbs hanging from low ceilings. Each room had several doors and each door led into another room which, in turn, led to other rooms.

  I just ran. With Kathy over my shoulder, I ran. Behind us, I could hear the sound of bowling pins being knocked over. Loudly.

  Only they weren't really bowling pins.

  The rooms we ran through now had furniture. In one was a low couch, in another a bed. More beds became notice­able, and in one room we ran through, a man and woman were sitting together on a waterbed.

  It became apparent that we were running through the back regions of some monstrous bordello.

  Then the cheaply paneled rooms ended and we were in my room, in my house. Kathy and I.

  I had her back.

  She was still in some type of trance, but her eyes were be­ginning to move, and I thought I saw her left pinky wiggle. Quickly, I carried her into the bathroom and placed her gen­tly in the tub. I turned on the cold water and splashed it over her face in order to jar her awake. But the water was like acid to her, and she stared to melt into the liquid.

  And she was gone.

  From somewhere, I heard laughter.

  That was the last straw. I could take anything but this ... desecration of my life with Kathy. And suddenly I didn't care what happened. I just wanted to save myself, to pre­serve my sanity, to get the hell out of there.

  Without even stopping to put on real clothes, still in my robe, I ran out of the house and into the garage, where the car waited. I grabbed the key from its hook on the press-board wall, got in the car, and slammed the door. The car was a little difficult to start since it had not been used after Kathy left, but eventually it kicked in.

  And I was off.

  I drove straight through the town without even looking. The people must have thought I was mad. It had been so long since I'd driven that I was not very familiar with the area, I did not know where many of the roads led. But that didn't make any difference. I just drove. And drove fast.

  The car stopped around noon in a strange city. With smoke pouring from under the hood, I pulled into a gas sta­tion. A mechanic dressed in greasy jeans and an oil-stained T-shirt came out of the garage and popped open the hood. I got out of the car to join him.

  "Your radiator's leaking," he said simply.

  "Can you fix it?" I asked.

  He closed the hood and looked at me, pulling a rag out of his pocket to wipe his hands. "I can either patch it for you or replace the radiator. I have a lot of parts in the back."

  "Which one's cheaper?" I asked.

  "Patching. It won't last forever, but it should be good for a couple of months at least."

  "Fine," I said. "Patch it."

  He said it would take a couple of hours. Since I had an afternoon to kill, I started walking down the main street of the town. It wasn't very big. I browsed through the one tourist shop, looked through a bookstore, sat down and had a cup of coffee in the grimy coffee shop, and still had more than an hour until the mechanic said he'd be done.

  I decided to check out the town's department store.

  I was looking through the greeting cards, wondering whether I should warn Kathy that I was coming or just drop by uninvited, when a gunshot rang out. I turned toward the entrance and saw what looked like a gang of terrorists mov­ing, commando-like, into the department store and spread­ing out. I hit the ground.

  A burst of machine gun fire destroyed the lights and the store was plunged into semidarkness. One woman screamed and was shot. "Stay where you are, don't move, and you'll be all right!" the leader of the terrorists announced. He strode up to the checkout counter nearest me, and I could see that he had a ski mask pulled over his head. Like the rest of the group, he was dressed all in black. He picked up a tele­phone, punched in a number, and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Don't move," he warned again, and his voice echoed from speakers throughout the store.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting to be shot, and saw instead a man in a three-piece suit lying on the floor next to me. The name tag on his jacket said: MR. BOWLES, MANAGER. "Come on," he whispered to me. "We have to get upstairs. It's our only hope."

  There was suddenly a lot of shooting and commotion in the shoe department, and the terrorist leader left our counter to investigate.

  "Now!" the manager whispered.

  Crawling on our hands and knees, the two of us reached the escalator. Like the lights, it was shut off. We crawled up the serrated metal steps, keeping our heads below the rails. We reached the second floor and—

  We were on the ledge of a cliff, overlooking the beach. Below us, our people were playing happily in the sun and sand, frolicking in the water. We were watching them. "They don't care if they ever leave the beach," the manager said disgustedly. "Look at them. They really don't care."

  And they didn't. Although the small strip of sand was surrounded on three sides by the large cliff on whose ledge we were standing, and on the other side by the ocean, the people did not feel trapped in the least. They were just happy to be alive.

  "Well, we can't just sit around and play," the manager said. "We've got to get out of here."

  The prospect frightened me. I had never been away from the beach, and even climbing this high up on the cliff had been a major departure for me.

  But I knew he was right.

  We started up.

  The cliff was mostly sand and several thousand feet high. We had to be very careful how we climbed. One slip and we'd fall to our deaths. Several times, in fact, one of us made a wrong move and slid down a couple of feet in the sand before again finding purchase.

  It was dark when we reached the top.

  We crawled the last few feet over the edge and found our­selves in the parking lot of a huge mansion. All of the lights were on in the gigantic house, and we could smell the scent of a multitude of gourmet foods wafting toward us.

  We hid next to a bush. "It's the boss's house," I whis­pered.

  "Yeah," the manager whispered back. "Which one of us is going to ask?"

  "You," I told him. "I'm afraid."

  "Okay." The manager glanced around to make sure no one had seen us, then ran across the driveway toward the door. Lights and bells went on in the trees around us and a burst of gunfire mowed down the manager. I was suddenly grabbed around my neck and—

  I was sitting in my car. In my garage.

  I had never left.

  I could never leave.

  To be honest, I do not know how long I've been here in the house. I don't know why Kathy and I moved here to begin with, and I cannot recall how all this started. I do not even know how many days or weeks or months or years or decades ago Kathy left me. For now I just exist. Every day is like every other and I cannot tell them apart. My routine is established and I seldom vary from it.

  It was different when Kathy was here. We performed our duties, of course, but we also got on with our lives. We had friends. And we had each other, corny and trite as that may sound.

  But they grew stronger even then. Our nights, more and more, were taken up with this ... combat. Our dreams be­came less our own. Our time together became more difficult.

  Finally Kathy had to leave. She too realized what our po­sition was, where this house was located, what it would mean if we left, but in the end she didn't care. The respon­sibility was too much for her.

  I could not leave, however.

  So here I am—isolated, partly by choice, partly by cir­cumstance, in this house. Alone. And here I stay, trying to figure out what to do next, trying to stay on to
p of what is real and what isn't. There is no one to help me, and with these latest developments I don't know how much longer I can make it by myself.

  I need Kathy.

  But Kathy is gone.

  And I am here, fighting with ghosts.

  The Baby

  It was the late 1980s, and I was driving with some friends through a dilapidated industrial section of Los Angeles on the way to a concert, when I looked out the window and saw three dirty young boys kneeling before a cardboard box in an empty lot. They were clearly looking at something in the box, and I thought: a dead baby. I don't know why that thought occurred to me, but the next day I sat down and wrote this story.

  ***

  "You go in first."

  "No, you."

  "No, you."

  Steve, always the bravest, stuck his head through the open doorway and peered into the dark interior of the aban­doned warehouse. "Hello-o-o-o!" he called, hoping for an echo. His voice died flatly, as though it had been absorbed by the blackness, by the walls. Someone—Bill or Jimmy or Seun—pushed him from behind, and he almost lost his bal­ance and fell through the door into the building, but he waved his arms to maintain his equilibrium and jumped quickly back out to the safety of the open air. He whirled on them, his face seething with the heat of his anger, ready to beat the hell out of whoever had done it, but all three of them looked at him innocently. He stared back at them for a moment, then laughed. "Wimps," he said.

  Jimmy turned toward Steve. Nervously flipping the switch of his flashlight off and on, he asked, "Are we really going in?"

  Steve looked at him scornfully. "Of course," he said. But he was far from sure himself. Back home, sitting on the ce­ment driveway, surrounded by houses filled with grown­ups, the idea had sounded good. They would bring lights and ropes and Bill's metal detector and explore the old aban­doned warehouse. None of them had the guts to go near the warehouse by themselves—not even in the daytime. But to­gether they would be able to explore the old building to their hearts' content, to plumb its unplumbed depths and bring forth what treasures they could find.