The House

by Bentley Little

  No. He wanted to go home before anything. Wanted to see for himself what, if anything, had happened at the house. He hefted his backpack, slipped his arms through the straps, and started off toward Ranch Road.

  He passed the high school on his way, saw boys in green and gold football uniforms skirmishing on the field. Saturday morning practice. He remembered it well.

  He'd joined nearly every school activity imaginable in order to get away from the house, and although he'd been a piss-poor athlete, he'd made it onto all of the varsity sports teams because there wouldn't have been enough alternate players otherwise.

  He walked away from town down theungraded road toward the hulking behemoth that had been his home.

  It had a powerful effect on him even after all this time, and though it was still several miles away, the dark structure was clearly visible in the flat desert, and he found himself slowing down, not walking so fast, not wanting to reach the house before he had time to mentally prepare himself.

  He wished he still had The Power.

  There was a roaring, rumbling, clattering sound behind him, and Mark turned to see an old red pickup truck bumping along the road, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. The operator of the vehicle seemed to be driving erratically, swerving from left to right in order to avoid known potholes and sections of washboard, and Mark moved to the edge of the road, trying to stay out of the truck's way.

  With a sliding, dirt-churning stop, the pickup braked to a halt next to him. He waved the swirling dust away from his face, coughing, and saw through brown cloud that the driver was rolling down the passenger window.

  Mark moved forward, squinting.

  The man was wearing a stained tank top. His lined face was red, his hair thin and greased, combed back.

  Classic Arizona alky.

  Was it someone he knew? Hard to tell. The desert aged people, the sun and the hard scrabble lifestyle combining to add years not yet lived to younger features and faces, but he thought there was something familiar about the man.

  "Where you going?" the driver asked.

  "The McKinney ranch."

  "Kristen's place? Ain't no one out there. She passed on a few days ago."

  "I know. I'm her brother."

  The alky squinted. "Mark? Is that you?" He laughed, shook his head. "Didn't recognize you, boy."

  He knew now who the man was. Dave Bradshaw's older brother, Roy.

  "Hop on in. I'll give you a lift."

  Mark opened the dented door and climbed into the pickup, pushing his backpack onto the seat between them. He nodded to the driver. "Thanks, Roy. Much obliged."

  "Never expected to see you here again. Heard you hit the road and were never comin' back."

  "Yeah, well ..."

  Roy shifted into gear and the truck, lurched forward.

  "It's a shame about Kristen. A damn shame."

  Mark swallowed, took a deep breath. "Is there going to be a funeral?"

  "Already over. Nearly everyone showed up. Kristen was quite a popular gal 'round these parts. Not like your parents." He glanced over at Mark. "No offense."

  "None taken." They drove in silence for a few moments, Mark listening to the clatter and roll of the truck on the rough road. "Who found her, Roy? Who . . .

  discovered that she was dead?"

  "Guy who delivered bottled water. She didn't answer the door, he had a hunch and dialed 911. Course, by the time they got out there she was gone."

  "Was it--"

  "Heart attack. Don't usually happen that way to someone so young, but . . ." He trailed off, shook his head. "It's a damn shame." He reached over Mark's leg, popped open the glove compartment, pulled out a half finished bottle of rye. "Like a little drink?"

  Mark shook his head.

  Roy drove for a few seconds with his knees as he expertly opened the bottle, taking the wheel again with his left hand as he used his right to tilt the bottle to his lips. "Aaaah!" he sighed, grinning.

  "Dave still in town?" Mark asked.

  "Hell, no. Moved to Phoenix after Mom passed on.

  It's just me and the old man now."

  "How're things going here?"

  "They're going."

  What he really wanted to ask about was Kristen, her funeral, the details of her death, but some of his parents'

  reticence must have rubbed off on him, because he didn't feel comfortable discussing personal matters, family matters, in public. Especially not with someone like Roy.

  Ahead, through the dirty windshield, to the right, the bulk of the house was growing ever bigger, ever closer.

  Giant.

  Roy took another swig from his bottle. "You know,"

  he said. "I never did like your house. Never understood why Kristen stayed after your parents passed on. She could've sold it, moved somewhere else, somewhere nice."

  Mark didn't understand either, not really, and a slight chill caressed his spine. He licked his lips. "Is Mr. Billings still there?"

  Roy frowned. "Billings? Never heard of 'im."

  "Hired man? Used to work for my father? Had a retarded daughter?" He tried to jog Roy's memory, but the other man just kept shaking his head.

  "Don't ring no bell."

  That wasn't entirely surprising. As Roy said, his parents hadn't exactly socialized with their neighbors, and it had been a long time ago. Maybe his father had eventually fired Billings. Or laid him off. Or Billings had simply moved on.

  And taken his retarded daughter with him.

  "Fuck me in the ass."

  He tried to imagine the girl as a teenager; as an adult, but he couldn't. She'd have to be in her mid-twenties now, but Mark could not picture her as anything except the child he remembered.

  "Your father does it."

  "Kristen didn't live alone, though. She had help--"

  "No. Far as I know, she lived by herself."

  "No other people came to the funeral? No one you didn't recognize? No . . . hired help?"

  "No one 'cept her friends from Dry River." He looked over at Mark. "How'd they ever get in touch with you? I heard tell Frank Neeson was tryin ' like hell to find your sorry ass but no one knew where you were.

  Weren't even in Kristen's phone book or nothing. Guess he finally tracked you down, huh?"

  "Yeah," Mark said, not wanting to explain.

  "Didn't tell you much, though, did he?"

  Mark shook his head. "No."

  They reached the ranch gate, and the pickup skidded to a stop. "Here's where I let you off," Roy said. He peered through the open passenger window at the black gabled building. "Still don't like that house," he said.

  Mark opened the door and pulled his backpack by one of the shoulder straps. He hopped out and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of a sleeve.

  "Thanks for the lift," he said. "Appreciate it."

  "I'll be coming back this way in about an hour or so.

  Want me to stop by, give you a ride?"

  Mark looked up at the hot blue sky, nodded.

  "Sounds good."

  "Bewaitin ' for me by the gate here. I'll give three honks. If there's no sign of you, I'll head on."

  "All right." Mark waved as the pickup took off, but even if Roy had been looking, he wouldn't have been able to see through the dust. Coughing, Mark backed away from the road and turned away. Before him was the closed gate and beyond that the drive that led to the house.

  He lifted the latch, swung the gate open, closed it behind him, and stood there for a moment. He was afraid. He'd known that already, of course, but the emotional reality of it had not penetrated until now. He stared at the dark structure, and though the front of the house was facing the sun, there was no glare off the windows. The entire facade of the house was the same flat black, its specific features differentiated only by slight variations in tone. It was as if the building swallowed the sunlight, absorbed it, and Mark noticed that the bushes and plants that were in what would be the perimeter of the house's shadow were all brown and de
ad.

  He was just being overly dramatic. The plants were dead because there was no one here to water them.

  Without daily attention, everything except cactus and sagebrush died in the desert, and Kristen was no longer here to take care of the property.

  That meant that Billings was gone.

  It felt as though a weight had been lifted off his chest.

  From what Roy had said, it sounded as though the assistant was no longer here, but Roy was obviously not the most reliable of witnesses and Mark had always been a hope-for the best and expect the-worst kind of guy. There was no way Billings would have allowed the plants to die, though, and to Mark that was as good a proof as any that the assistant was gone.

  That meant his daughter wouldn't be here either.

  "Fuck me in the ass."

  His gaze swept involuntarily to the window where he'd last seen the girl, but it was as flat and lifeless as the rest of the house and he saw nothing there.

  He walked slowly forward, rippling heat waves creating a mirage puddle on the drive ahead and filtering the bottom of the house through a wavy mirror. In back of the house and to the side were the chicken coops, but Mark could see even from this far away, even through the heat waves, that they'd fallen into a state of disrepair and were no longer used. More proof that Billings was not here.

  Why was he so concerned about the assistant?

  Because Billings frightened him. He did not know why, and it had never been the case when he'd lived here, but he was terrified of running into the assistant again. In his mind, Mark saw the man looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago, and that, more than anything else, engendered a feeling of dread within him. The assistant's kindness and bland passivity now seemed to him to be masking an unnatural patience and an unfathomable intent. He could imagine Billings waiting, biding his time, picking off the family one by one until there was only Mark left and he was drawn back to the house.

  God, he wished The Power hadn't deserted him.

  Even more frightening was the prospect of running into Billings' daughter, of seeing the girl again. He remembered how she hadn't aged before, and he could easily imagine her unchanged, bending over a chair in that dark endless hallway and flipping up her shift.

  "/ like it hard. Fuck me hard."

  He should've gone to the mortuary first, the cemetery, the sheriff's office. It was a mistake to have come here unprepared and all alone. What the hell could he have been thinking?

  Still, he continued forward, down the dual-rutted drive with its ever-retreating mirage water, past the sandstone boulders that lined the ragged, shallow, irregularly shaped hole his father had intended to be a pond. The sweat was dripping down the sides of his face, and he had to keep wiping his forehead with his sleeve, but inside he was cold, and the ice within him kept the goose bumps alive on his arms.

  He reached the house, walked up the deep porch steps, aware suddenly of how quiet it was. There were no whirs, hums, or other mechanical sounds, none of the noises of civilization. That was to be expected. The ranch was far from town, and the house was empty, everything shut off. But even nature was silent, and that he found more than a little creepy. In this heat, there should have been cicada buzzes, snake rattles, hawk cries.

  But there was nothing.

  Only the sound of his own feet on the porch boards and the wheeze of his overheated breath.

  He no longer had a key for the front door--he'd tossed it off the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in his own private exorcising ritual several years back--but he knew where his parents had kept a spare, and sure enough, Kristen had continued the tradition. It was on the top of the porch light, just behind the lip edge, and he felt around up there until his fingers found the dusty object.

  Once again, he considered turning back, leaving, but he reminded himself that he was not doing this for his own peace of mind, he was doing it for Kristen. He had failed her, and if he was a little uncomfortable at the moment, well, that was just too damn bad. She'd put up with a hell of a lot worse, and it was the least he could do.

  The chill in his body intensified as he opened the door and walked inside the house. It was exactly as he'd remembered.

  Kristen had not altered even the arrangement of the pictures on the walls. Everything was untouched: furniture in place, throw rugs unmoved. It took his breath away, this sudden wholesale immersion in the past, and he stood there for a moment, stunned.

  The heavy wood, the dark walls and floor and ceiling, all seemed horribly oppressive to him, a reminder of his childhood, and he wondered how his sister had put up with it. Could she have possibly found this atmosphere pleasant? Comforting?

  The thought of Kristen living in this unchanging house, all alone, tugged at his heart, and his fear abated somewhat, replaced by an aching sense of loss.

  Why hadn't he come back earlier?

  Why hadn't he taken her away from this?

  He walked slowly forward. To his left, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something out of place in the front sitting room, and he turned in that direction, the blood freezing in his veins even before he recognized what he saw.

  Billings.

  Sitting in his father's high-backed smoking chair.

  As he'd feared, as he'd known, the assistant had not changed at all.

  Billings smiled. "Welcome back, Mark. I've been waiting for you."

  Daniel It was raining, a heavy fall Pennsylvania rain that drew a curtain over the city and blurred even the houses across the street into indistinct shadows of gray. The snow would be coming soon, and Daniel knew that as tough as it was trying to find a job in good weather, it was absolute hell in the winter. He might as well just write off the next five months and hibernate until spring.

  From down the hall, he heard Margot and Tony laughing about something. He'd been getting the cold shoulder from both of them ever since he'd disposed of the doll, and he was getting pretty damn sick of it. He and Margot hadn't made love in a week, and she seemed to be dead serious about wanting him to seek psychological help. He'd tried to explain to her how he felt, what he'd seen, why he was acting this way, but his far-flung concerns had no connections, there were no discernible bridges between the disparate elements of his only partially tied-together tale, and he had to admit that his story sounded loony even to himself.

  Tony seemed to be afraid of him.

  Daniel sighed. Maybe he did need help. Maybe everything was in his mind, and nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The world was a logical, rational straightforward place, and the thoughts he'd been thinking had a place only in pulp fiction and B movies.

  Margot walked into the kitchen, looked at him, and for the first time this week, the sight of him did not knock the smile off her face. She was finally beginning to thaw. He attempted a halfhearted grin and was grateful when she passed by and touched his shoulder.

  "Are we pals again?" he asked.

  "We're always pals."

  He reached for her hand, gave it a small squeeze.

  There was a lot more he wanted to say, a lot more he wanted to ask, a lot more he wanted to tell her, but while he was in her good graces again, it was only by a slim margin, and the slightest misstep could send him back. He'd have to broach things slowly, subtly, carefully for the next few days.

  Margot opened the refrigerator, took out a plastic bag of tomatoes from the vegetable drawer. "Brian's coming over for dinner tonight," she said.

  The last thing he wanted right now was to spend the evening with her brother, but he smiled and nodded and said, "Great."

  The evening didn't turn out to be that bad. Brian didn't bring up Daniel's job status even once, and he left early, just after nine-thirty. While he was there, he was pleasant, playful with Tony, cheerful with Margot, and after dinner, when the two of them were alone--Tony having disappeared into his bedroom, Margot washing the dishes--even he found Brian entertaining and fun to be around. The two of them would never be best buds, but Daniel thought that he
'd probably been too hard on his brother-in-law, and he vowed to be nicer to him in the future.

  It was still raining pretty heavily outside, and he wanted to go to bed and get into some makeup sex, but Margot said she wasn't tired and wanted to stay awake a little longer. There was nothing on HBO or any of the other channels, so he ran through their videotape titles.

  None of the movies sounded good, and they finally settled on watching some episodes of Fawlty Towers, Margot's favorite TV show of all time.

  She went off to go to the bathroom while he fast forwarded to an episode they hadn't seen in a while, the one with Manuel's rat. On an impulse, he walked back to Tony's room. The door was closed, and he pressed his ear to it but could hear nothing. Margot was still in the bathroom, and he paused a moment, then pushed open his son's door.

  A half-finished doll lay on the center of Tony's bed.

  This one, if possible, was even worse than the one before. Like its predecessor, it was made up of junk food cups and plastic straws, toilet-paper tubes and toothpicks. But the newspaper photographs that had been cut out and taped together to form its composite face were angry and wild: widely staring eyes, flared nostrils, screaming mouth. The effect was one of discordance and derangement, and Daniel looked from the doll to his surprised son, who belatedly moved his body in front of the figure to hide it.

  Daniel stared at the boy, felt the anger rise within him. "I warned you, didn't I?"

  "There's nothing wrong with it!" Tony replied defensively.

  "It's just my project!"

  Daniel crossed the room in two steps, moved the boy aside with one arm, grabbed the doll with the other.

  Did Margot know about this?

  If she did, he'd get into it with her. Sticking up for her son in an argument was one thing, but deliberately going behind his back and helping Tony to deceive him was another.

  The doll felt strange in his hand. Heavier than it should. More solid. He squeezed it hard, tried to crumple it, but only succeeded in creating two slight indentations in the cup body.

  He shook the doll at his son. "I told youyou couldn't do this, didn't I?"