The House

by Bentley Little

That surprised him. To his knowledge, his wife had never been a religious woman, and he did not think he had ever seen her pray in all their years of marriage.

  Had she always done so, hiding it from him, doing it when he was asleep or out of the room? Or had she only started recently, after his abrupt departure? Either way, he was oddly touched by her actions. He wished he could kiss her, even if it was just a simple peck on the forehead, but the barrier was still in place.

  Margot had closed the bedroom door, and he walked over to see if he could open it. He could not, but it was as if the door were not there for him and he passed right through it. Could he walk through walls too? He tried it, got a bump on the head for his attempt.

  His headache even worse now, he walked down the short hallway, passed through Tony's door.

  His son was making another doll.

  Daniel stared in horror as he watched the boy open the closet door, glance furtively around, and pull out a new doll. This one had a body made from a McDonald's sack tied with rubber bands. Its arms and legs were twigs, its head a scruffy and nearly bald tennis ball with carefully pasted string segments positioned into crudely simplistic facial features.

  Tony carried the figure to the bed, placed it on his pillow. He withdrew from his pocket a folded Baggie filled with what looked like dead spiders. Smiling to himself, he reached into the plastic sandwich bag, tore off the legs of a dead daddy longlegs, and placed them on a strip of exposed tape atop the doll's head.

  He was making hair.

  "Tony!" Daniel screamed. "Goddamn it, Tony!"

  The boy's concentration was focused completely on the doll. Daniel looked back at the door, saw that it was locked. He hurried outside, back to Margot, hoping that she'd be awakened by Tony's movements or at least alerted on some psychic level to what was going on in the next room, but she was sound asleep, a mild frown furrowing her brow.

  Daniel sped back to Tony's bedroom. The overhead light was off, the only illumination anorangish circle emanating from the small desk lamp, and it looked like a spotlight was being trained on the boy and the doll.

  "Tony!" he screamed again.

  The boy did not even hesitate, kept applying spider legs to the doll head.

  There was a loud creak from somewhere else in the house, settling engendered by temperature and humidity and the contrast between the wet rainy world outside and the dry warm world inside. Tony froze, not even daring to breathe, his eyes staring at the closed bedroom door as he waited to see whether his mother was on her way.

  Daniel caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye and adjusted his focus. He found himself staring at the doll.

  The figure turned its head, looked at him, grinned, the corners of its string mouth turning up.

  Daniel grabbed for the doll, but again it, like everything in the room, was behind Plexiglas. His hand hit an invisible border and pain flared up his arm, across his shoulders.

  He wiggled his fingers weakly, felt searing flashes of agony that corresponded precisely to the movements, and realized that he'd broken or sprained at least three of his fingers.

  Tony was already back at work on the hair, not noticing the new tilt of the figure's head, the new expression on its face, and Daniel wanted to scream with rage.

  What the hell was going on here? Tony couldn't see him but that thing could? What was that all about?

  Maybe he was a ghost.

  "No!" he said aloud.

  "I can help you."

  At the sound of the voice, Daniel jerked his head to the right.

  Doneenwas sitting on Tony's desk chair. She was seated like a man, flat-footed, leg spread, and even in the dimorangish light he could see up her dirty ragged shift to the nearly hairless cleft between her thighs. He knew what she wanted You don't really want me to leave --and although he found himself, against his will and as sick as it was, tempted, he suppressed those thoughts and faced the girl. She was smiling at him, that same mocking derisive smile she'd had for him when he'd leaped out of the bathtub as a child, and anger helped hold the fear at bay. "Get out of here," he ordered.

  She stood, walked slowly toward him. Tony, oblivious to both of them, placed the last two spider legs on the strip of tape. "I can take this away from him," she said softly. "He'll never see me again or make another doll."

  "Get out of here," Daniel repeated.

  Doneengiggled. "He'll never see Mr. Billings again.

  So that part of your nightmare's taken care of." She reached him, rubbed a hand between his legs.

  Daniel pulled back.

  "There's only me to contend with now, and I can put your lives back to normal just like"--she snapped her fingers--"that."

  He grimaced distastefully. "What do you want?"

  "What do you want?"

  He shook his head. "I'm not playing this."

  "You do something for me, and I'll do something for you."

  "What?"

  "Lick me." She bent over, pulled up her shift. "Lick me clean."

  "No," he said.

  She looked over her shoulder at him, smiled. "We never finished what we started."

  "And we never will."

  She remained bent over, trailed a languorous finger over the smooth skin of her buttocks, let it slide down her crack. "It would be a shame if Tony woke up to find his doll shoving its way down his mommy's throat."

  "You little bitch!" He reached for her, found that he could grab her; there was no barrier between them. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her arm.

  She flinched, moaned. "Rape me," she whispered.

  "Take me any way you want."

  He let go, pushed her away. She laughed. "What's the matter? Not man enough?"

  "I'm not going to do it, and I'm not going to let you goad me into it."

  She stood, suddenly serious, smoothing down her dirty shift. "Fine."

  "And if anything happens to them ..."

  "There is another way," she said matter-offactly .

  "What?"

  "There's no sex involved."

  "What is it?"

  "The only thing is: you're going to have to do something you might not like."

  "What's that?"

  She smiled, and a cold shiver ran down his spine.

  "Trust me," she said.

  Laurie When Laurie came to, she was lying on the bed. She'd been in the doorway of the kitchen when the Houses separated, and she must have gotten hit on the head or fainted or something because she could remember no further than that. Someone had obviously carried her up to her bedroom, though, and for that she was grateful.

  She sat up warily. Her head hurt, but when she felt around, there were no bumps or blood. She didn't know what was going on and she was about to search the House, see if any of the others had remained with her, find out who had brought her to her room, when her question was answered.

  "Laurie! Come down here!"

  It was her mother.

  Her biological mother.

  She recognized the voice though she hadn't heard it since early childhood. Her recent remembrances had rendered everything from that time period as sharp and immediate as if they had happened yesterday, and her mother's voice brought the feelings back as well. She was suddenly anxious to obey, filled with an almost Pavloviancompulsion to respond. She still wasn't sure if she was here as an observer or a participant, if her mother was yelling at her or at a younger version of her that was also around somewhere, but when her mother called "Laurie!" once again and there was no answer, she hollered back "Coming!"

  That response seemed to satisfy. There were no more shouted demands, and Laurie rolled out of bed, trying to ignore the pounding in her head. She suddenly realized that her room had a window again, and she walked over to it. Outside, she was not surprised to see the garage, the barn.

  It was daytime. She breathed deeply, smelled mist and mulch, redwood and grass. This was not the House in which she had been trapped for the past few days. This was the House in which she'
d been born, the House of her childhood. She was herself, she was an adult, but all traces of her contemporary life had been erased and she was thrust back completely into the past.

  Her past.

  The feelings of childhood were back as well. The fears she'd been experiencing recently had been merely echoes of the originals, but now she was once again in the thick of it, her feelings sharp with the edge of immediacy.

  There was danger here.

  She stared for a moment at the barn, then turned, walked out of the bedroom. She headed downstairs, uncertain of what to expect.

  "Laurie?"

  At the bottom of the stairway, she saw her mother beckoning from the sitting room. It was unsettling and disorienting, being treated like a child when she was an adult, but she forced herself to smile and walked into the room.

  Her parents, all four of them, were seated on the couch. The sight nearly took her breath away. It wasn't all that shocking, really. But the emotional impact was far greater than she could have ever imagined. She remained standing in the doorway, staring, trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she looked upon the living faces of dead loved ones she'd never expected to see again.

  Sitting between their parents, she saw Josh, a cute alert-eyed little boy with the hair of a little girl, and she wanted to rush over and grab him, hug him, hold him, but like his mother and father, he stared at her with only mild open friendliness. None of them, obviously, had any idea who she was.

  "Ken?" her biological mother said. "Lisa? This is our daughter Laurie."

  It broke her heart to see the impartial distance of the unacquainted on faces she loved and knew so well, so intimately.

  She sat with her biological parents, pretending she was a child listening politely while the grown-ups talked.

  Though she was obviously an adult and taller than her mother, no one acted as though it were anything out of the ordinary. She found herself looking at Josh, studying him, but he offered no clue as to what was going on.

  Why was she here? Had she been sent back in time?

  Had the past been sent up to her? Were these people real? It was impossible to tell, and she decided to just let everything play out and see what happened.

  Her parents talked about nothing: the weather, gardening, her adoptive parents' trip up here. There was no subtext to the conversation. It was what it was: an ordinary, everyday discussion between casual acquaintances.

  When her mother excused herself to make lunch, Laurie followed her into the kitchen. Another full-fledged blast from the past. She recognized a salad bowl she'd forgotten about, remembered the pattern on the sandwich plates and iced tea glasses.

  "Can I help?" she asked.

  "Just stay out of the way."

  Laurie took a deep breath. "I'm going to go outside."

  Her mother looked at her. "Don't go too far. We'll be eating in a few minutes."

  Laurie's heart was thumping with excitement. It was the first time she'd been out of the House in three days, and whether this world held or disappeared when she walked through that door, she was intoxicated with the thought that she could once again go outside.

  She'd taken only one step when a goat appeared in the center of the kitchen, directly behind her mother.

  The air was suddenly filled with the smell of fresh daisies.

  Smoothly, easily, almost without thought, her mother grabbed a long knife from the counter, turned, and in one quick movement skillfully slit the goat's throat. She picked up the spasming animal and, kicking open the screen door, tossed it into the yard. Without pausing, she unrolled a sizable length of paper towel, ran a portion of the perforated sheet through sink water, and began wiping up the blood on the floor. She looked up at Laurie as she scrubbed. "If you're going to go outside, go. It's almost time to eat."

  She was tempted to ask her mother ifBillington would be joining them for lunch, but more than anything she wanted outside, wanted to leave the House, and she walked over to the screen door, pushed it open.

  And was out.

  The air was fresh, clean, glorious. She'd smelled it from the window, but that wasn't the same as being in it, of it, surrounded by it, engulfed by it. At the bottom of the steps was the broken body of the goat, so Laurie walked instead along the wraparound porch, toward the front of the House.

  Billington was nowhere to be seen, but Dawn was waiting for her around the corner of the House, playing with a nasty-looking doll made from dried weeds and twigs.

  Laurie stopped in her tracks, stared at the dirty figure in the girl's hand.

  She thought of Daniel, shivered.

  "About time," Dawn said, standing, brushing dust off her shift. She dropped the doll, picked up a tin cup from the porch next to her, walked over to Laurie. "I've been waiting out here for ages."

  Laurie looked through the window to her right, into the sitting room. Josh and their parents and her biological father were still seated, still talking over mundane matters, and she understood that she would not learn anything from her brother or either set of parents. For all she knew, they were the psychic equivalent of tape loops; unchanging and unalterable reflections of what had once occurred, endlessly repeating.

  But Dawn was different. Dawn was definitely real, of her time, of her House, and Laurie vowed that she would find out what she could from the girl.

  "What are you drinking?" she asked politely.

  Grinning, Dawn held out her cup. "I like wood chips in my water."

  Sure enough, the water in the cup was dirty, filled with dead floating leaves, splintered wood, and oversized pieces of sawdust. The girl pressed the cup to her lips, tilted it, drank the remaining contents. She smiled at Laurie, flakes of sawdust caught between her teeth, and that smile put Laurie on guard. There was lust in it, lust and some other emotion she didn't recognize, and she had to remind herself that this was not really a little girl, this was not merely a manifestation of the House, a puppet.

  This was . . . something else.

  "Do you want to play?" Dawn asked.

  Laurie nodded. She realized that there was import beyond the immediate in the question, but the time had come to jump in, to sink or swim.

  Dawn giggled. "Let's do it in the woods."

  Laurie took a deep breath, looked into the window again, then turned toward the girl. "All right," she said.

  "Let's do it in the woods."

  Stormy Stormy walked slowly downstairs, past the banister where Norton had disappeared, past the first landing.

  Already he could sense that things were different. The House looked the same as far as he could tell, but there was a new vibe to it, a sense of instability, a feeling he recognized from the past.

  His mother was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

  She was not bald but looked exactly as she had when he was a child, only she was wearing one of his father's old suits, the legs of the pants and the arms of the jacket raggedly cut to fit her form.

  He stopped several steps above her. There was an expression of almost manic excitement on her face, and she was staring at him in a way that he found disconcerting.

  She looked quickly around--behind her, to the left, to the right--in order to make sure they were alone.

  "Stormy!" she said in a loud whisper. "Get down here!

  There's something I have to show you!"

  He remained in place. "What is it?"

  She frowned, her brow furrowing in an exaggerated manner that looked like either bad acting or emotional disturbance. "Get down here now!"

  "What is it?" he asked again.

  "I found the monster."

  She turned, started toward the hall, and Stormy hurried after her. He didn't know what she was talking about, what was going on here, whether he was in the present or the past or some House-bred amalgam of the two, but he figured the best idea was probably just to roll with it.

  His mother stopped halfway down the hall and opened a door. She let him catch up with he
r, and the two of them walked through the doorway into another, narrower hall. This one had no flocked wallpaper, no expensive wainscoting. There was only unadorned bare wood walls and a single exposed bulb in the center of the ceiling. At the opposite end was another door, and his mother took a key from her raggedly cut suit, unlocked the door and opened it.

  "It's a bone monster," she said, whispered. Her eyes looked bright, feverish.

  He hadn't remembered this, and he looked into the closet at his grandfather's skeleton in the wheelchair.

  The bones were clean save for a patch of dried skin and hair on the left side of the skull, and something about that rang a bell, seemed vaguely familiar. Had this actually happened? Had he dreamed this?

  Butchery.

  Had it been in the movie?

  No. The film had been more subtle. There's been nothing this overt, nothing this traditionally horrific.

  Maybe he did remember it from childhood.

  Stormy looked over at his mother. "A bone monster,"

  she said, staring at her father's skeleton, talking more to herself than him.

  It was amazing how much he'd blocked out. Even the film didn't come close to capturing the craziness of the household, the unsettling irrationality of its workings. It was coming back to him now, what it had been like living here. Not just the broad brush strokes but the details, not just the events that had occurred but the feelings they generated within him.

  He realized now why he had hated living here so much.

  And why the one family vacation they'd taken, their trip to New Mexico, had been so important to him, had made such a big impression.

  His mother grasped his shoulder, pointed at the skeleton.

  "That's the monster," she said. "It's a bone monster."

  "Yeah." He pulled away from her, started back down the narrow hidden hallway to the House proper.

  He could already hear his father bellowing from the study, and Stormy made his way over there, pushing apart the sliding wooden doors that opened onto the hallway.

  "Billingham!" his father ordered. "I want a knife and a sack of cotton balls--" He paused, frowned, looked at Stormy. "I didn't call for you. I called forBillingham ."