The House

by Bentley Little

He walked back into the garage, emerged with lighter fluid and a book of matches. He knew this was going to extremes, but he could not be sure if he simply tore the doll up and threw it away that it wouldn't return, that it wouldn't drag its pieces out of the alley and over the fence and through the backyard to his bedroom. He couldn't afford to chance that.

  He'd seen the Telly Savalas Twilight Zone. He knew how these things worked.

  His feelings did not make any kind of rational sense-- the fact that he was referencing a TV

  show as validation for his actions should have told him that--but as he doused the doll with lighter fluid and put a match to it, he felt an absurd sense of exhilaration. He saw the face go up in flames, the toilet-paper tubes blacken and crumble, the Big Gulp cup melt off its wax and burn, and for the first time since he'd seen Tony with the doll, he was able to breathe easily.

  He would tell Tony that he had gotten rid of the doll when his son came home, and he would forbid him to make another one. He should have done that last night.

  It might seem irrational to Margot, but he was still the boy's father, and if he wanted to enforce an irrational rule or prohibition, well, he wouldn't be the first father to have done so.

  The components of the doll had all burned themselves out, but he turned on the hose and soaked everything with water, just to make sure, before going back into the garage and getting a shovel. He scooped up the ashes from the barbecue, dumped them in the plastic sack, and tossed everything in one of the trash cans in the alley.

  He mashed down the sack with his foot, transferred garbage from one of the other cans to throw on top of it, then replaced the lid. Once again, he found himself looking up the alley for any sign of the small strange shadow he'd seen before.

  Nothing.

  He hurried back into his yard.

  Were these things connected? The doll and the shadow? The inexplicable feelings of fear and discomposure he'd been experiencing? He had the sense that they were, but he could not imagine how and he could not begin to comprehend the meaning behind it.

  He pushed the barbecue and carried the shovel back into the garage, then walked into the house and washed his hands in the kitchen sink before getting himself a Diet Coke from the fridge. He'd left the television on in the family room and, coincidentally enough, The Twilight Zone was on the Sci-Fi channel. It was the episode in which a girl disappeared into the wall of her house, the one he'd always assumed had been the inspiration for Poltergeist, and as he watched it for the fiftieth time, alarm bells began going off in his head once again. There was a connection here, something he knew he should be picking up on but just couldn't quite figure out.

  He stared at the television, watched the mother and the father kneel before the wall, calling to their little girl, and it came to him.

  The House.

  That was it. The House. The home in which he'd been born and where he'd spent the first eleven years of his life. He could remember very little about the House, only flashes of images, portions of events, but there was something about it that reminded him of the girl lost in the walls.

  There'd been something scary about the House.

  The fact that he could recall almost nothing at all about his childhood home disturbed him. He knew why, of course, and though it wasn't really surprising, it was unsettling to realize just how easily he fit into that cliched niche, that stereotypical pattern so often exploited by headline-grabbing doctors and the media during sweeps weeks.

  He couldn't remember because that was where his mom had died.

  He was disappointed in himself that he was so predictable, so typical, and the thought occurred to him that everything else that seemed to be happening--his uneasiness, the shadow, the doll--could all be part of some psychological problem that could be traced back to this one event.

  But that wasn't be possible. He'd lived a perfectly normal life all these years. The normal, happy life of a well adjusted man, a husband, a father. The House had not affected him at all.

  Perhaps his long stretch of unemployment had put stress and pressures on him that he couldn't recognize, wasn't able to acknowledge.

  He should try to find out if that was the case. A psychiatrist would be the best idea, he supposed, but he was loath to go that route. Despite all the positive propaganda distilled through the media over the past decade, there was still a stigma attached to it in his mind, and he couldn't picture himself lying on a couch, spilling his guts, and letting some stranger give him advice on how he should act and how he should feel and how he should live his life.

  Besides, they didn't have the money for it.

  And, truth to tell, he didn't really believe that his perceptions were off, that what he was thinking, feeling, and experiencing was part of some mental disorder or buried emotional problem.

  He had seen the shadow.

  There was something wrong with Tony's doll.

  There was a reason for him to feel uneasy.

  A psychiatrist might be able to help him remember, though. Might be able to recall his memories of the House.

  Why did he think of it as "the House"? he wondered.

  With a capital "H"? He wasn't sure. He couldn't even get a clear picture in his mind of the House's exterior.

  Or his bedroom. Or any of the other rooms inside the structure. He could see only a long hallway. And a dark corner with a window seat. And an image of an overflowing bathtub.

  Had there been a doll in the House? A doll like Tony's?

  He wished his dad were still alive. His dad would help him remember.

  Daniel stared at the television as The Twilight Zone ended and a commercial came on. It was not normal for him to block out such a large part of his life. And to such an extent. He acknowledged that that was of legitimate concern, but what worried him far more than the fact that he was repressing his childhood memories was the idea that they were somehow connected to what was going on in his life now.

  And that Tony was being drawn into it.

  Whatever was happening, he wanted it to end. He didn't want to see strange figures or unusual events, and most of all, he did not want anything to happen to his wife or his son.

  It had been a long time since he'd gone to church.

  Several years. But, sitting on the couch, he closed his eyes and folded his hands and, for the first time since he could remember, prayed.

  "Dear God," he said softly. "Please keep Margot and Tony safe. Don't let anything happen to them. Help them be healthy and happy and live until they're a hundred years old. Amen."

  Margot picked up Tony after school, and they stopped by the grocery store before coming home. Daniel helped his wife carry sacks from the car, while Tony went straight to his bedroom.

  He noticed the doll's absence immediately.

  "Mom!" He was running out to the kitchen even as Daniel was setting down sacks on the counter and Margot was putting milk in the refrigerator.

  "Mom!"

  Frowning, Margot closed the refrigerator door and looked up. "What?"

  "Dad took my project! He stole my project!"

  Margot glared at him. "You didn't ..."

  Daniel looked at her, shrugged. "I threw it away."

  She glared at him. "Why did you do that? You didn't have to do that."

  Yes I did, he wanted to respond, but he kept silent.

  "Mom?" Tony said, imploring her with his eyes to somehow bring back the doll.

  "Where is it?" Margot demanded. "Where did you put it?"

  "It's gone." Daniel turned to face his son. "And that's the end of it."

  "Mom!"

  "Why is it so important?" Daniel asked him. "What's so important to you about that doll?"

  Tony reddened. "It's not a doll!" he yelled.

  "It's a doll. And why does it mean so much to you?"

  "Daniel," Margot said warningly.

  "It's my project!"

  "It's not something you're doing for school. Why are you doing it?"

  "You can ma
ke another one--" Margot began.

  "No!" Daniel shouted, and both of them jumped. He pointed at Tony. "You are not going to make another one! Do you hear me?"

  The boy said nothing, looked to his mom. Margot was silent.

  "You are forbidden to make one of those things again. And if I catch you doing it, you'll be grounded for a month. Do you understand me?"

  Tony angrily turned and stalked down the hall, slamming the door to his room.

  "I mean it!" Daniel called after him.

  "What was that?" Margot demanded. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

  He shook his head. "You wouldn't understand."

  "Try me."

  "I just don't like that doll."

  "Why? It's evil?"

  He whirled to face her, thrilled that she'd seen it too, but when he met her eyes he saw only anger there. She was being sarcastic, he realized.

  "You need to get some help," she told him. "I don't know what's happening with you, but I don't like it. You need to see a psychiatrist."

  A psychiatrist.

  It was a chance, an opportunity.

  But he didn't take it.

  "I'm not going to a shrink," he said.

  She looked at him. "You need to do something."

  "I just don't want a doll like that in our house." He turned without looking at her and walked out to the family room. He switched on the TV, the local news, and a few moments later he heard her angrily slamming cupboards and drawers as she put away the groceries.

  Laurie Laurie sat across from Josh at the small wrought-iron table adjacent to the coffeepot at the rear of the bookstore.

  She hadn't slept well all week and when he'd called her on it, she told him about the dreams.

  In a way, she was grateful. It had not been a conscious thought, but clearly she'd felt the need to talk about what was happening, and when her brother commented on her haggard appearance for the third time and sat her down, demanding Laurie tell him what was wrong, she did. She told him everything, beginning with her encounter with the girl in the alley, giving detailed descriptions of each and every dream, explaining how she'd lain awake as long as possible, not wanting to fall asleep. She was not embarrassed discussing the sexual nature of the dreams with Josh, but she did tone down her reaction, ashamed of how much she had enjoyed the encounters with the child.

  The dreams had changed since the first one, evolved.

  It had happened slowly over the past two weeks, and at first she wasn't even aware of it. The girl had sucked her in with sex, had used intimacy to gain her trust, but the dreams had become increasingly nonerotic , increasingly grotesque and chaotic, and they were now to the point where she considered them nightmares.

  Last night, the girl, wearing the same dirty shift she'd had on in the alley, had taken Laurie's hand and led her through a blighted urban landscape, past the rubble of demolished buildings, past trash-can fires warming dirty homeless men, to a tarpaper shack that housed a butcher shop. Inside, a muscular tattooed man in a bloodstained apron was passing a monstrous rat through the blade of his band saw. On the floor were scraps of fat and muscle, the teeth and toes of children. The butcher looked up from his work, smiled at her. "Glad you're home, dear.

  Take off your clothes and sit on the stump."

  And then she'd been in a dark forest, sitting, legs spread, on an upended log, as the girl crouched before her and painfully inserted twigs into her bleeding vagina.

  "Almost done," the girl kept saying. "Almost done."

  The dream had made no sense on any sort of rational level, but there was something about it that rang true to her, that frightened and at the same time spoke to her, and while she did not exactly feel that this was something that had happened or would happen, Laurie thought it could happen, and that was what disturbed her the most.

  Josh frowned at her, concerned. "Dreams are not just manifestations of the subconscious," he said. "Sometimes they're the means used to communicate with us, a portal between this world or this plane of existence and others."

  It was a cliche , the same type of New Age claptrap she'd made fun of all these years, but it was exactly what she'd been feeling, put into words.

  Only it sounded so frightening spoken aloud like this, its implications huge.

  "Recurring dreams are scary enough, but the fact that you have a recurring character in your dreams, a figure you saw in reality under what I would say are pretty strange circumstances . . ." He trailed off. "It's scary, Lor."

  She smiled wryly. "Tell me about it."

  "You have no idea who this girl is? You've never met her before? Never dreamed about her in the past?"

  "That's the thing. She seems familiar to me." Laurie paused. "Sort of." She looked across the table at her brother. "I mean, I think I know her from someplace, but I can't for the life of me figure out where. I don't know if she's someone I met or imagined or saw in a movie. There wasn't a girl on our street like that, was there? When we were little?"

  "Not when you were with us. But maybe before."

  She frowned. "Before?"

  "Yeah. If your birth mother was around we could--"

  Laurie's heart stopped in her chest. It suddenly seemed impossible to breathe. "My 'birth mother'?"

  "Yeah."

  Laurie tried to will the saliva back in her mouth. She felt dizzy.

  "I thought . . ." Josh shook his head. "You don't remember?"

  "I didn't know."

  "You didn't know you were adopted?"

  She stared at him numbly. "I thought you were my real brother."

  "I am your real brother."

  "I mean--"

  "We may not be biologically related, but I'm your brother, and Mom and Dad were your parents. We're all family."

  "How long have you known?"

  "Always." He seemed uncomfortable. "I thought you knew, too. I wouldn't've said anything if--"

  "Were you born when they adopted me?"

  "Yeah. I was pretty little. You were, I don't know, eight or nine, I guess, when Mom and Dad brought you home. Which meant that I was four or five, but I still sort of remember it."

  She stood. For the first time in her life, she knew what writers meant when they described their characters' heads as "spinning." "This is too much to take. I need . . . time. I need to think about this. I

  need to absorb it."

  Josh looked worried. "I still love you, Lor . I couldn't love you more if you were my Siamese twin."

  She put a hand on his shoulder. "I know. I love you, too."

  "Okay. Let's talk about this, then. Obviously, we need to work this out. I thought you knew all along. I don't know how you could not--"

  "I don't want to talk about it." She tried to smile, did not entirely succeed. "Not right now. I think ... I think I'm going to go for a walk. I need some time to think."

  He nodded.

  "I'm sorry," he said as she headed toward the door.

  She turned, smiled kindly. "You have nothing to be sorry for."

  Then she was out of the shop and on the sidewalk, and there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them angrily away. She had nothing to complain about. Her family had been loving, caring, supportive, always there for her.

  They'd brought her up to be the person she was today.

  But it still felt as if her life had suddenly turned upside down, as if the rug had been yanked out from under her. She'd just found out that her brother wasn't her real brother, her parents hadn't been her real parents.

  She was related to strangers she didn't even know, and she wasn't related to the people she knew and loved.

  On the scale of problems, it was low priority. She wasn't a crack-addicted teenager knocked up by her stepfather. She wasn't a battered wife with no education and no prospects. Like anorexia and bulimia, hers was strictly an affluent, upwardly mobile concern.

  But it still had a major impact on her life.

  Who were her biological parents?

  That was the big quest
ion. She tried to remember something from before she'd been adopted, some scrap of memory from her previous life, but as hard as she tried to recall the past, her mind remained stubbornly in the present.

  She never thought much about her early childhood, she realized, and when she did her thoughts were confined to specific subjects, specific instances, specific images.

  She'd never stopped to analyze it before, but she understood now that the reason was because most of her early years were a blank.

  _

  She frowned. Not noticing that she never thought J F

  about her childhood, not wondering why, was as strange as the memory blank itself.

  It was all strange, and she was tempted to ascribe a deliberate design to it, to recognize a supernatural reason behind it all, but she knew that was stupid. It was probably the dreams that had put her in this frame of mind, that had encouraged her to see anything unusual in this. The truth was, it was probably a perfectly natural reaction for a child to block out memories of parents who had died that early in her life.

  Died?

  Yes. Her biological parents had died. She knew that much. She could not remember how or why, could not bring to mind any specifics, but the certainty was there, so strong that even though she had no memories or concrete proof, she did not doubt it.

  Laurie paused at the corner, thought about crossing the street, but turned right instead. In a kind of daze, she stopped at a coffee stand, bought a mocha, and continued on up the sidewalk.

  How had her parents died? she wondered. She had the feeling that they'd both died at once, so it couldn't have been old age or disease. It had to have been catastrophic.

  Fire? Plane crash? Murder? Had it been something simple or one of those bizarre, convoluted occurrences? Had her father caught her mother with another woman and then joined in the fun only to have the woman's jealous boyfriend kill all three of them?

  Had her parents been aspiring actors who were conned into doing a snuff film and killed, their murders recorded on camera and now available on video?

  She would probably never know.

  She slowed to look at the series of newsracks on the side of the street, sipping her coffee as she peered through the faded plastic windows. She'd always been attracted to supernatural stories in lurid tabloids, the more outrageous the headline the better. She told herself that it was camp, a kitsch, postmodern irony, that she liked to read those stories because they were so bad they were funny, so outrageous they were entertaining, but the truth was that she was genuinely interested in the bizarre tales. She felt some sort of affinity for those subjects, and she could not help wondering now if that could be traced back to her first family.