The House

by Bentley Little

  It had been all downhill from there.

  He hadn't thought of that girl in a long time, and he tried to recall what had happened, why they had broken up. It had probably been after the fire, after they'd moved, but he couldn't remember for sure.

  He sighed. It didn't matter. He pulled up in front of the house, parked next to the ocotillo on the edge of the driveway. He sat for a moment in the car, staring through the windshield at the darkened windows of the house, and not for the first time, he wished that he had never gotten married, that he had never met Roberta.

  On Friday, as usual, he left the office early and went to The Hogan. It was a regular bar, not an artist's bar, and there were none of the phony Southwest accoutrements that supposedly lent ambience to Santa Fe's nipper hangouts and that he found so annoying and distracting.

  Jimbowas working today, and Stormy asked for a Bud Liteand stood at the bar waiting for his order while the bartender moved to fill it. There were two guys halfway down the counter having a loud conversation, and Stormy tuned it in.

  "Whatever happened to strongmen?" the guy closest to him was saying. "Remember how we always called leaders of countries we didn't like 'Strongmen'? There was Panamanian Strongman Manuel Noriega, Libyan Strongman Mohammar Khadafi . We never used 'General,','President,' or whatever the hell their official title was. It was always 'Strongman.' Why don't we do that anymore?"

  "You're drunk," his companion said.

  "Maybe so. But it's a legitimate question."

  "We only do that if we want to provoke a confrontation with them," Stormy offered. "We do it to teach our people that these are bad guys. It gets the public ready for war."

  The drunk looked up. "Who are you, you anti-American son of a bitch?"

  His friend put a restraining hand on his arm.

  Stormy smiled apologetically. "Sorry. Didn't mean to butt in."

  The drunk pointed. "I know your mama. She was giving pony rides, handing out ass candy."

  Jimboarrived with his beer, and Stormy paid. "Thanks."

  He headed over to a table next to the jukebox at the far end of the room.

  "I'm talking to you!" the drunk yelled.

  "Shut up!" his friend told him.

  Stormy ignored the man, sipped his beer. It had been a good afternoon. Taos had taken the Hopi kid's film, and had not only put it in competition but had given it one of the coveted prime-time slots. To top it off, the straight-to-video Fat Lady, a horror sexploitation flick that he'd picked up after a minor studio had dropped it, had just gotten a rave review in Fangoria , the slice-and dice bible. Which meant that sales and rentals would probably go through the roof.

  Sometimes life was good.

  He looked at his watch. Four-ten. Ken was supposed to meet him here at four-fifteen, but his friend was chronically late and he was prepared to wait until four thirty. He took another sip of beer, a small one, trying to make it last.

  To his surprise, Ken arrived on time for once. He flagged down Carlene, the waitress, ordered a Miller, and settled heavily into the chair opposite Stormy.

  "Nice day at the office?"

  "It's always a party when you work for a coroner. I

  told you, anytime you want you can come on down and I'll give you a tour, let you see what it's like."

  "No thanks."

  "We had a cancer death today."

  "I take it that's worse than a regular death?"

  "Looking at it's not that bad, but the smell . . ." Ken shook his head. "When you pop someone open with colon cancer, that's a smell you won't forget."

  "This is really appetizing. Are we going to order some hors d'oeuvres?"

  Ken grinned. "Sure. Liver pate?"

  "That's truly disgusting."

  "You're a wussboy ."

  "And you're a senseless psycho who's completely inured to blood and guts."

  Ken shrugged. "You get used to it. I mean, before AIDS, we used to buy our lunch at McDonald's and put the sacks on top of the open bodies and eat. Sometimes, if people came to visit, we'd intentionally gross them out and play catch with, like, a spleen. You know, just to freak them." He laughed. "But now everyone's pretty careful. AIDS and O.J., man. They've really put a damper on the body biz. Things just aren't as fun anymore."

  Carlene arrived with Ken's beer, and Stormy asked for another for himself.

  "I'm telling you," Ken said. "You oughta put shit like that in a movie. Show'em what it's like in a real coroner's office. People'd love it."

  "I don't make movies, I distribute them. And aside from the Faces of Death crowd, I don't think there's a big market for stuff like that. There aren't as many weirdos in the world as you might think there are."

  "Speaking of weird, I was talking to Tom Utchaca yesterday about what's happening out by the reservation."

  "What is happening out by the reservation?"

  "A lot of strange shit's been going down."

  Stormy leaned forward. This was getting interesting.

  "You know Tom, right? He's not stupid and he's not superstitious." Ken lowered his voice. "He says his father's come back to the reservation."

  "I thought his father was dead."

  "He is."

  Stormy blinked, started to say something, closed his mouth.

  "Said he saw him in back of his parents' old place.

  The house is abandoned, I guess, and he was driving by on his way somewhere and saw his father standing there in the empty field. He stopped the car because he wanted to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, and his father smiled and waved at him and started walking over.

  "Tom took off.

  "And he's not the only one. A lot of the people say their dead are coming back. Tom doesn't know what the hell to think, but he said the word going around the reservation is that the netherworld is full, that there's no more room for the dead and some of them are leaking out, coming back into our world."

  Against his will, Stormy felt a slight tingle pass down his spine. "Are these supposed to be ghosts or actual resurrected bodies?"

  "Bodies. Resurrected and restored. They're not rotting zombies, they're back and good as new. Tom said his father looked like he did in his prime."

  "You don't actually believe this shit, do you?"

  "I've known Tom a long time, and I haven't seen anything myself yet but, yeah, I believe him."

  "You deal with dead bodies every day. How can you--?"

  "How can I what?" He paused. "You know, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I

  know. It's a cliche , but I thought I knew everything when I got out of school, and when I first started this job I wouldn't have believed a story like that if Tom's father had walked into my bedroom and grabbed my dick. But I've learned over the years to listen to more than just the textbook facts in my head. I've learned to read people and situations.

  And as crazy as this sounds, I think it's legitimate. I think it's true."

  Stormy wanted to laugh at his friend, wanted to berate him for falling for such superstitious crap, but the sincerity of Ken's belief lent it a verisimilitude that Stormy found disconcerting.

  "The thing is, it's not just the dead. Seems that people on the reservation have seen dolls that are . . . animated.

  Those kachinas they make for the tourists. I gather the dollmakers won't even go near the workshop anymore.

  It's all closed up."

  "Tom told you all this?"

  "Oh, no. You know him. I only found out about his father because I asked him. I'd heard elsewhere that some strange stuff was happening, and I wanted to check on it."

  Stormy stared down into the bottom of his empty glass. Something about all this sounded vaguely familiar, but he was not quite able to put his finger on it. Had it been in a movie? He didn't think so. The connection was more real, more personal, more immediate. The specifics of it eluded him, but he saw these strange occurrences as an extension of something that had happened before--although he did not know what that "so
mething"

  was.

  He cleared his throat. "The 'animated' dolls. They walk? At night?"

  Ken nodded. "You got it."

  He could have guessed that. It was logical. What else would animated dolls do? But he hadn't guessed. He had known. Or remembered. He wasn't sure which. In his mind was a picture of a ragged primitive doll rocking slowly on unbending legs, making its determined way down a long dark hallway.

  A long dark hallway?

  He didn't want to think about this, and he was grateful that Carlene brought his beer over to the table at just that moment. He paid her and tipped her, made some small talk to try and keep her there, but The Hogan was getting crowded as other people got off work and she had to hurry over to fill their orders.

  Ken was about to tell him something else about the reservation, some other supernatural event that had happened, but Stormy cut him off before he got out the first word, changing the subject, asking if Ken had had a chance to look at any of the videotapes he'd lent him last week. He had, and he'd really hated one of them, and he started going off on it, telling Stormy how much he'd disliked the movie, and Stormy pretended to be offended, pretended to defend the film, but inside he breathed a sigh of relief, thankful they'd gotten off the subject of the reservation.

  But it was still there, in his mind, and he thought about it through drinks, through dinner, on the way home, and by the time he went to bed that night, crawling next to an already sleeping Roberta, he was almost positive that he himself had once owned a doll that had been alive.

  Mark Kristen is dead.

  Mark was sitting alone in the large corner booth of Denny's in Indio when the knowledge came to him, and it took a moment for the information to register. He was holding the cup of cold coffee in his hand, pretending to drink so the waitress wouldn't come over and ask if he wanted a refill, staring out the window at the rusted boxcars sitting unattached on the train tracks across the highway. The sky was brightening, the high desert clouds now sunrise pink against the light blue background sky.

  Early morning traffic--cross-country trucks and occasional cars--was beginning to congest the formerly empty roadway outside.

  Then the realization hit him.

  Kristen is dead.

  He nearly dropped the cup but managed through a sheer effort of will to force his trembling hands to replace it on the saucer. He had no idea how she had died or why, there were no specifics, but he knew with certainty that she was gone.

  He was the only one left.

  He had not seen his sister in over a decade. When he'd left home, she'd been a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, just emerging from that ugly duckling stage, the beautiful woman she would become visible in the arrangement of her features but still a year or so away. It had been harder to leave Kristen than his parents or friends or anyone else, and it was for her that he'd almost stayed. He'd tried all that summer to convince her to come with him, to convince her that she could only escape by uprooting herself and running like hell as far away from Dry River as she could, but she'd told him that she didn't want to escape, didn't need to escape, was happy where she was.

  Now she was dead.

  In the back of his mind, he'd known it would come to this, and he felt guilty for not making more of an effort to save her, for not going back to talk to her. Of course, he'd sent letters, but that was not the same, and his letters had always been about himself, not her, about where he was, what he was doing, where he was going.

  He had not felt bad when his father died. The information had come to him, he'd registered it, then gone on with his life. It was then that he should have gone back for Kristen. He'd thought about it. He'd been living in Colorado Springs at the time, working in a frame shop, and had been on his afternoon break, sitting on the steps in back of the shop, smoking, looking up at the clouds, when the knowledge came to him that his father was gone. He knew he should feel sad, and part of him had wanted to feel sad, but too much had happened over too long a time, and all he could feel was a slight regret that the two of them had not been able to make a closer connection.

  He'd finished smoking his cigarette, ground out the butt with his boot, and gone back into the shop to finish his afternoon shift.

  That was when he should have returned home. That was when he should have gone back for Kristen.

  He'd considered it, and that night in his apartment he'd gotten as far as dialing the number of the house. Strange how he hadn't forgotten the number after all those years. But he'd hung up after the first ring and had spent the rest of the evening staring at the phone.

  He'd half hoped that Kristen would call him, but of course she couldn't. Even if she had sensed something, she didn't know his current phone number.

  The next day he'd quit his job at the frame shop, collected his last paycheck, and sent a postcard to Kristen as he headed toward Utah.

  Kristen.

  He'd failed her. More than anything else in the world, he had wanted to protect her, save her, keep her from becoming trapped like all the rest of them, but in that he had failed utterly. He had not been there for her when she'd needed him, had been too afraid for himself to go back for her.

  The smart thing now would be for him to keep moving, not look back, to grieve for Kristen on his own, in his own way, and to continue on with his life. He had not gone home in all this time; there was no reason for him to return now. Everything would be auctioned off and sold in an estate sale when he could not be located and then it would all be over.

  But he could not do that. Not this time. He owed it to Kristen to tie things up, to go back.

  And he had to know how she'd died.

  Dawn was giving way to morning, and outside the window he could see date palms where before there had only been trees. He picked up his cup, drank the last dredges of the cold coffee. Denny's was starting to fill up. There were families of travelers in two of the booths to his right, casually clothed construction workers ordering breakfast at the counter.

  Mark reached down for his backpack. Through the door walked an old woman and her teenage niece or granddaughter. The young girl was dark, with long black hair, and for some reason she reminded him of Kristen.

  All of a sudden he felt like crying.

  He scooted out of the booth, left a dollar in the ashtray for the coffee and a tip, and walked quickly outside.

  He stood in front of the restaurant, breathing deeply.

  The air was warm and dry and felt good in his lungs, each breath seeming to siphon away the tears threatening to well up in his eyes.

  What had Kristen been like as an adult? he wondered.

  Or had she ever been an adult? She was twenty-six years old, but years meant nothing. In his mind, he still saw her the way she was when he'd left, obsessed with cute boys and popular music and schoolgirl gossip. He remembered how she'd cried when he left and how he'd promised to come back and visit, and he remembered the way her arms had felt around him as she'd hugged him goodbye.

  He began to cry.

  Angrily, he wiped away the tears. He took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack, started walking. Most people, he knew, would want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, but he was glad he was alone. Grief, he believed, was a private experience, not meant to be shared. He did not want to think about other people's needs at this moment, whether he was soaking their good shirt with his tears, whether he was keeping them from an appointment or making them late for a meal, whether he was being too needy or too emotional or not emotional enough. He needed at this moment to be completely alone, completely selfish, so that he could feel what he had to feel for as long as he had to feel it without the influence of another person affecting his emotions.

  A pickup sped past him, and a half-full McDonald's cup splattered on the ground at his feet, coffee splashing onto the cuffs of his jeans. He heard a harsh laugh as the driver drove away.

  "Asshole," Mark mumbled.

  Still, the encounter had brought him back into the real
world, the practical world, and for that he was grateful.

  He thought for a moment, then hurried across the highway to the opposite side. He faced the oncoming traffic, held out his thumb. He'd been heading for southern California, planning to look for construction work in Los Angeles, but now he was going to do something he should have done a long, long time ago.

  He was going to go home.

  The Land Rover drove down Highway 60, the driver silent, Mark still mulling over in his mind the fact that his sister was gone. He'd slept last night in the desert outside of Quartzite, and though he'd expected to spend the entire night unable to sleep, staring up at the stars, he had dozed off almost immediately after crawling into his sleeping bag and had not awakened until the sun had come up over the mountains.

  The Power was fading. As long as Kristen had been alive, as long as there had been that blood connection, he had been able to tap into it, reference it, but now it was growing weaker by the hour, only a faint pulse remaining, and soon it would be gone. Already, he was having to use his own memory, to rely on his own thoughts and hunches. He was dismayed to realize how much he had relied on The Power, how much a part of him it was, and now that it was disappearing, he felt more isolated than he ever had in his life, as though one of his senses--his sight or his hearing--had been taken away.

  He hadn't even been aware of how often he used it.

  That was a little scary.

  He probably wouldn't have gotten into this vehicle if he hadn't been able to take a reading of the driver.

  It looked like his hitchhiking days were over.

  Kristen was the real loss, though. Not having The Power was a mere inconvenience. Kristen's death was a tragedy.

  They drove toward Phoenix, a series of dying desert towns bleeding into each other, empty cinderblock buildings in the open spaces between them making it difficult to determine where one town ended and the next began.

  Through the side window, Mark saw a rock shop.