The Collection

by Bentley Little

  Jan was still asleep when I awoke, and I crept out of bed softly so as not to disturb her.

  My grandpa was already up, planted in his chair at the foot of the table, drinking a tin cup of black coffee. He looked up and smiled as I walked into the kitchen. "Day's half over, city slicker. What took you so long?" His smile widened, the new ultrawhite dentures looking oddly out of place in his otherwise old face. "Where's your wife? Still asleep?"

  I nodded. "I'm letting her sleep in. She had a pretty bad nightmare last night."

  "Yeah, your grandma used to have nightmares, too. Bad ones. Some nights, she'd even be afraid to go to sleep, and I'd have to stay up with her." He shook his head, staring into his coffee cup. "There were some pretty bad times there."

  I poured myself a cup of coffee from the old metal pot on the stove and sat down next to him. "You ever have night­mares?"

  "Me? I'm too boring to have nightmares." He laughed. "Hell, I don't think I even dream."

  We sat in silence after that, listening to the many morn­ing sounds of the farm. From far off, I heard the crowing of a rooster, endlessly repeating his obnoxious cry. Closer in, cowbells were ringing dully as four bovine animals moved slowly across the meadow to the watering pond. And of course, under it all, the ever-present hum of the flies.

  "It's going to be a hot one today," my grandpa said after a while. "It feels humid already."

  "Yeah," I agreed.

  He added a dash of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the butt end of a fork. "What are your plans for today?"

  I shrugged. "We don't have any, really. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look around a bit, then maybe go for a hike."

  "Not there?" He glanced up sharply.

  "No. Of course not. We'd just walk around the farm here. I think the barn's about as far as we'd care to go."

  "Good." He nodded, satisfied. "For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets."

  Jan walked into the room then, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and I blew her a kiss across the table. She smiled and blew a kiss back. I turned again to my grandpa. "You said that before. What is it? Part of a poem?"

  "What?"

  " 'It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.'"

  His face grew pale as I spoke the words, the color drain­ing from his cheeks, and I felt my own flesh starting to creep as I saw his fear. I was immediately sorry I'd mentioned it. But there was no way to retract the question.

  He looked from me to Jan; his eyes narrowed into un­readable slits. He took a sip of coffee, and I saw that his hands were shaking badly. "Wait here a minute," he said, standing up. "I'll be right back." Holding on to his bad leg, he limped across the room and out into the hall. He returned a few minutes later with a piece of folded brown paper which he tossed at me.

  I unfolded the paper and read:

  For He lives here with flies in shadow and dark

  And He is happy here, at home

  For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets

  I handed the paper back to my grandpa, puzzled. "What is it?"

  "I found it in your grandma's hand when she died. It's her handwriting, but I have no idea when she wrote it." He folded the paper and placed it carefully in the upper-right pocket of his overalls. "I don't think she ever wrote another poem in her life."

  "Then why did she write this?"

  He stared into his coffee. "I don't know."

  Jan sat down at the table, pulling her chair next to mine. "How do you know she wrote it about the bathhouse?"

  My grandpa looked up at her. It was a minute or so be­fore he answered, and when he did his voice was low, almost

  a whisper. "Because," he said, "that's where she died."

  ***

  We did indeed go into town, and we had some great ham­burgers at the lone diner: a dingy little hole-in-the-wall called Mac and Marg. After, we drove back to the farm and I gave Jan a guided tour of my childhood. I showed her the now-abandoned horse stalls where we used to lick the mas­sive blocks of salt with Big Red and Pony; I showed her the old windmill; I showed her the spot where we once built a clubhouse. I showed her everything.

  We ended up at the barn.

  "You really used to play here?" she asked, looking up at the decaying building. "It looks so dangerous."

  I smiled. "Well, it wasn't quite so bad off in those days. In fact, it was still being used." I walked up to the huge open doorway and looked in. Light now entered the once-dark building through several holes in the roof. "Hello!" I called, hoping for an echo. My voice died flatly, barely managing to scare two swallows who flew through one of the roof holes.

  Jan walked up and stood beside me, looking in. "You used to play upstairs, too?"

  I nodded. "We played everywhere. We knew every inch of this place."

  She shivered and turned around. "I don't like it."

  I followed her back out into the sunlight. The day was hot, almost unbearably so, and though I was wearing a T-shirt, cutoffs, and a pair of sandals, I was still sweating.

  Jan, ahead of me by a few paces, stopped at the edge of the tall grass and stared toward the hillside, silent, thinking. I crept up behind her and gave her a quick poke in the side. She jumped, and I laughed. "Sorry," I said. "I just couldn't help it."

  She smiled thinly, and her gaze returned to the small cluster of buildings. "It is scary, isn't it? Even in the day­time."

  She was right. The bathhouse and the small shacks sur­rounding it dominated the scenery, though they were by no means the most prominant figures in the landscape. It was as if the whole area, the scattered farmhouses, the fields and the hills, were somehow focused in on that point. No matter where one stood in the valley, his or her eyes would be drawn inexorably to the bathhouse. There was something strange about the makeshift hut, something a little off, some­thing entirely unrelated to my grandpa's story.

  "Listen," Jan said, grabbing my arm. "Do you hear that?"

  I listened. "No, I don't hear—"

  "Shhh!" She put up her hand to silence me.

  I stood perfectly still, cocking my ear toward the bath­house, listening intently. Sure enough, a low buzzing was coming from that direction, growing louder or softer with the wafting of the hot breeze. "I hear it," I said.

  "What do you think it is?"

  "I don't know."

  She stood still for a moment, listening. The buzzing maintained its even rhythm. "You know what it reminds me of?" she said. "That poem by Keats. The one where he talked about 'the murmurous haunt of flies.'"

  The murmurous haunt of flies.

  It seemed suddenly hotter, more humid, if that was pos­sible. The wind, blowing from the direction of the bath­house, felt hellishly, unnaturally heated. I put my arm around Jan and held her close. We stood like that for a few minutes.

  "How far do you think that is?" she asked, gesturing to­ward the hill.

  "Why?"

  "I'd like to go over there. You know, just take a look."

  I shook my head emphatically. I may not have fully be­lieved my grandpa's story and his repeated warnings, but I had no desire to tempt the fates. "No way," I said. "Forget it."

  "Why not? It's broad daylight. It's not even two o'clock yet. What could happen to us?"

  I was sweating heavily by now, and I used my T-shirt to wipe the moisture off my face. "I don't know," I said. "I just don't want to take any chances."

  She gave my hand a small squeeze and looked into my eyes. "It is scary, isn't it?"

  That night, I had a nightmare. And it was Jan who woke me up and comforted me.

  I had been walking through the tall grasses beyond the barn, the overgrown groundcover reaching above my head and causing me to lose my way. It was night, and the full moon shone brightly in a starless sky. I kept looking up as I walked, trying unsuccessfully to get my bearings by the moon, trying vainly to determine in which direction I was walking. Suddenly, I stepped through a wall of grass and found myself at the edge of a small clearing—fac
e-to-face with the bathhouse.

  The bathhouse looked smaller than I'd thought it would, and not as run-down. But that in no way diluted its evil. For it was evil. It was a forbidding and terrifying presence, al­most alive, and the light of the moon played spectrally across its adobe facade, highlighting the empty darkened windows, spotlighting strange irregularities in construction. There was something definitely wrong with the building, something savage and perverse, and as I looked at the struc­ture my muscles knotted in fear.

  Then something caught my eye. I glanced over the front of the building once again and saw what I had noticed only peripherally before. I screamed. Peeking out of the black­ened rectangular hole which served as a doorway were two shriveled feet wearing Jan's stockings.

  I awoke in Jan's arms.

  And she held me, softly, closely, her calm, sympathetic voice assuaging my fears, until again I fell asleep.

  The other local farmers knew about the bathhouse as well, we learned. My grandpa had several of the neighbor­ing ranchers over for a barbecue lunch the next day, and they discussed, in hushed whispers, the recent mutilation of sev­eral hogs. They all seemed to think the mutilations were connected with the bathhouse in some way.

  "I went up there exactly once," said Old Man Crawford. "The first year we moved here. That was enough for me."

  I was sitting next to Jan at the head of the table, keeping my ear on the conversation and my eye on the hamburgers. I turned toward Old Man Crawford. "What was it like?" I asked.

  They stared at me then, six pairs of eyes widening as if in shock. The only sound was the sizzling of the meat dripping through the rusty grill onto the burning charcoal. No one said a word; it was as if they were waiting for me to retract my question. Jan's hand found mine and held it.

  "What the hell is this? A wake?" My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns. He looked from me to the silent farmers. "Anything wrong here?"

  "Nah," Old Man Crawford said, smiling and downing the last of his beer. "Everything's fine."

  The mood was broken, the tension dissipated, and the conversation returned to a normal, healthy buzz, though it now revolved around other, safer, topics.

  I got up and went into the house, rummaging through the refrigerator for a Coke. Jan followed me in. "What was all that about?" she asked.

  I found my Coke and closed the door. "You got me."

  She shook her head, smiling slightly. "Ever get the feel­ing this is all a joke? Some trick they're playing on the rubes from the city?"

  "You saw them," I said. "That was no joke. They were scared. Every one of those old bastards was scared. Jesus ..." I walked over to the screen door and looked to­ward the hillside. "Maybe we should go up there and look around." An expression of terror passed over Jan's face, and I laughed. "Then again, maybe we shouldn't."

  We rejoined the party and sat in silence, effectively chas­tened, listening to the farmers talk. After a while the talk turned, as I knew it would, back to the hog mutilations. A lot of hostile glances were thrown in my direction, but this time I said nothing. I just listened.

  "Herman looked fine when I went out to see him," Old Man Crawford said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "I just thought he was asleep. Then I heard, like, a buzzing coming from where he lay. I moved in a little closer, and I saw that his stomach had been sliced clean open." He made a slicing motion with his hand and his voice dropped. "He'd been gutted, all his innards taken out, and the inside of his body was nothing but thousands of flies."

  A middle-aged farmer I didn't know, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a cowboy hat, nodded his head in un­derstanding. "That's exactly what happened to my Marybeth. Flies all inside her. Even in her mouth. Just a-crawling around..."

  "The bathhouse," my grandpa said, chewing the last bite of his hamburger.

  Old Man Crawford nodded wisely. "What else could it be?"

  That afternoon it rained—a heavy downpour of warm summer water which fell in endless torrents from the black clouds that had risen suddenly over the hills, and which formed miniature rivers and tributaries on the sloping ground outside the farmhouse. We sat in the kitchen, the three of us, talking and watching the rain.

  "Good for the crops," my grandpa said, holding his leg as he limped over to the window. "It's been a helluva dry sum­mer."

  I nodded my head in agreement, not saying anything. Jan and I had decided that we would ask him about the bath­house that afternoon—the real story—and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject. I watched my grandpa staring out the window, looking small and frail and old, and listened silently to the depressing sound of rainwater gush­ing through the metal gutter along the edge of the roof. I felt sad, all of a sudden, and I wasn't sure why. Then I realized that something had happened to the kitchen; it was different. It was no longer the warm quaint kitchen of my grandpar­ents but the curiously empty kitchen of an unhappy old man—a stranger. The feeling hit me abruptly, inexplicably, and for some reason I felt like crying. I no longer felt like asking about the bathhouse. I didn't care. But I saw Jan star­ing at me quizzically from across the table, and I forced my­self to speak. "Uh, Grandpa?"

  He turned around. "Yeah?"

  He was silhouetted against the screen, the rain in back of him, and his face was entirely in shadows. He didn't look like my grandpa. I looked across the table at Jan, and she too looked different. Older. I could see the wrinkles starting.

  She motioned for me to go on.

  I cleared my throat. "I'd like you to tell me a bit more about the bathhouse."

  He walked forward, nodding, and as he came closer his face once again became visible. And once again he was my grandpa. "Yeah," he said. "I've been expecting this. I was wondering when you were going to ask." He sat down in his familiar chair, holding his leg. A sudden gust of wind blew the screen door open then closed. Our faces were lightly splattered with water spray. He looked from Jan to me, and his voice was low, serious. "You feel it, don't you? You know it's here."

  I felt unexpectedly cold, and I shivered, instinctively massaging the gooseflesh on my bare arms. Jan, I noticed, was doing the same, hugging herself tightly. Outside, the rain abated somewhat.

  "It's like a magnet," my grandpa said. "It draws you to it. You hear about it, or you see it from far off, and you start thinking about it. It takes up more and more of your thoughts. You want to go to it." He looked at Jan. "Am I right?"

  She nodded.

  His gaze turned to me. "You're going to have to go."

  There was a finality about the words and a determination in the way he said them which scared me. "I thought you wanted us to stay away," I said. My voice sounded high, cracked, uncertain.

  "Yeah," he said. "I did. But once it gets ahold of you, it never lets go." His voice became softer. "You have to go there."

  I wanted to argue, to tell him off, to deny his words, but I couldn't. I knew, deep down, that he was right. I guess I'd known from the beginning.

  He looked out the door. "Go after the rain stops," he said. "It's safe after the rain."

  But his eyes were troubled.

  We walked across the wet ground, our shoes sometimes slipping in the mud, sometimes getting caught in it. The midsummer dust had been washed from the grasses, from the plants, from the trees, and everything appeared excep­tionally, unnaturally green. Overhead, the sky was a dark, solid gray broken by occasional rifts of clear, pure blue.

  We walked forward, not looking back though we knew my grandpa stood on the porch of the house, watching. I don't know how Jan felt, but I was surprised to find that I was not scared. Not scared at all. I was not even apprehen­sive. I felt only a strange sort of disassociation; it was as if this was happening to someone else, and I was only an ob­server, a disinterested third party.

  We passed through the wall of grasses and emerged in the clearing, just as I had in my dream. And the clearing, the bathhouse, and the other small shacks looked exactly as they had in the dream.
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  I was conscious of the fact that my reactions were re­playing themselves along with the scene. I knew exactly what the bathhouse would look like, yet once again I was surprised by its smallness.

  Jan grabbed my hand, as if for support. "Let's go in," she said. Her voice sounded strange, echoing, as though it was coming from far away.

  But the spell dissolved as soon as we stepped through the doorway. I was again myself, and, for the first time in my life, I felt fear. Real fear.

  Sheer and utter terror.

  The room was covered with millions of flies. Literally millions.

  Perhaps billions.

  They covered every available space—walls, floor, and ceiling—giving the entire inside of the room a moving, shifting, black appearance. They rippled across the floor in waves and dripped from the ceiling in grotesque liquid sta­lactites, all shapes, sizes, and varieties. The noise was in­credible—an absurdly loud sort of buzzing or humming which had definite tones and cadences. It sounded almost like a language.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Before I could say anything, Jan had stepped forward into the room, her right foot sinking several inches into the sea of squirming flies. But the tiny creatures did not climb up her leg. Indeed, they seemed not to notice her at all. It was as if she had stepped into a pool of black, stagnant water. "Come on," she said.

  Somehow I followed her, my leg muscles propelling me forward against the protests of my wildly screaming brain. My foot, too, sunk into the flies. They felt soft, rubbery, slip­pery.

  We walked to the middle of the room, moving slowly, then stopped. Here, there was a clearing on the floor, a space, and we could see the vague form of an unfinished clay sculpture lying on the ground. It was maybe six feet long and three feet wide, with no definite shape or features. Then the flies rippled over it in a tide, thousands of tiny fly-legs scraping against the soft clay. The wave passed and now there was more of a shape: the sculpture was definitely that of a man. Somehow, via a greater power or some col­lective mind of their own, the flies were metamorphosing this clay into a human figure. Each of their actions and movements, each motion of their miniscule feet, was pur­posefully ordered, planned out. Each step was fraught with symbolism.