The House

by Bentley Little

  Josh followed close behind her, and the two of them stood on the porch for a moment, looking out at the yard, the drive, the surrounding trees. Everything seemed perfectly kept, well maintained, as though someone had been caring for the place all these years.

  Mr.Billington .

  No. That was impossible.

  Still, the thought of it gave her a chill, and brave modern businesswoman that she was, she was glad Josh was here to protect her. Just in case.

  She turned, looked at the front door. Dark brown wood with a small leaded-glass web window up above.

  What if it was locked? Neither she nor Josh had a key.

  It wouldn't be locked.

  She knew that.

  Laurie hesitated for a moment. She wanted to go inside, but what did she hope to see, what did she hope to find, what did she hope to discover? Did she really think that answers to the questions she had would be found within the house's empty rooms? It was pointless, really, to go inside. They'd probably learn more by talking to neighbors, hunting down members of the local historical society.

  An alarm was going off in her head, some hunch or intuition telling her to stay out, but that was exactly why she had to push on. There was something in the house.

  She didn't know what it was or how she knew of its existence, but she knew that she could only find out what she needed to know by going into her old home.

  She tried the door handle. It wasn't locked, and she glanced over her shoulder at Josh. "Let's go in," she said.

  She walked through the doorway.

  And the door slammed shut behind her.

  "Josh!" she screamed.

  The door had obviously caught him as he was trying to enter. There was a thin line of blood on the edge of the wood, a small clump of hair at head level. Her heart was pounding crazily, and from the other side of the door she heard her brother scream.

  "Josh!" she yelled. She tried the door, but now it was locked, and the pounding of her heart, the thumping of blood in her head, was almost as loud as her pounding on the door.

  "Josh!" she demanded. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm okay!"

  She heard his voice as if from a distance, as if more than simply a closed door separated them. It was a strange sensation and a frightening one, and she kept talking to him, telling him to push on the door the same time she pulled, as his voice grew fainter and fainter and then finally disappeared entirely.

  She yanked once more on the door handle, then looked frantically around. There were no windows in the entryway save for the one high above the door, no way she could look out and see her brother, so she ran around to the front sitting room to look out the window, but when she pushed aside the lace curtains and pulled up the shade, she saw not the drive, not the yard, not the trees, not the porch, not Josh, but thick white fog that pressed flat against the glass, obscuring the entire world beyond.

  She felt like a child again, like a little girl, scared and frightened and alone, and she wished that, dreams or no dreams, strange experiences or no strange experiences, they'd never come up here.

  There was the sound of movement, the quiet shuffle of shoes on hardwood floor. A chill stabbed through her, but she did not turn around.

  The clearing of a throat.

  A man's voice.

  She recognized it, and though she didn't want to, she knew that she had to look behind her.

  She turned, faced him.

  It was exactly who she'd known it would be.

  "Laurie," he said quietly. "It's so nice to see you again."

  Norton When Norton awoke, his bed was covered with burnt toast.

  Pieces fell as he stirred, dropped off the bed as he sat up, but he could tell that someone something --sometime during the night had placed burnt toast over every square inch of his bed: the quilt on top of him, the empty pillow next to him, the spaces of open mattress.

  Donna.

  For some reason, he did not suspect Carole's ghost. It was that evil little girl whom he believed had covered his bed. A burnt toast trail had led him to her, had been laid for him to follow, and he assumed that the consistent use of the toast here was purposeful, was meant to send him a message.

  The pressure was being increased. Whatever lay behind this campaign desperately wanted him to hurry up and get back to Oakdale.

  Return.

  He picked up a piece of toast, smelled it, tentatively touched it to his tongue. It was real. It was burnt bread, not some sort of disguised alien substance or supernatural manifestation.

  What was the significance of it? he wondered. What did it symbolize? What did it mean?

  He got out of bed, searching through the house for something else out of the ordinary or out of place, but everything was normal, everything was as it should be.

  He walked back into the bedroom to get dressed, saw the blackened squares on the bed and the surrounding floor, and he imagined that evil child placing them there, her slight shift blowing in the cold night breeze that passed through his perpetually open window, and he found himself becoming aroused.

  Norton walked into the bathroom, looked at his unshaven face in the mirror, at his baggy eyes and wildly uncombed white hair. He was still erect, and he considered masturbating in the shower, but he resisted the temptation.

  This couldn't go on, he realized. The pressure was only going to escalate and sooner or later he was going to have to return to Oakdale. He did not know why, he did not know what would happen, but as frightening and intimidating as he found the prospect, it also offered the only relief he could see from this dark situation in which he found himself.

  He shaved, combed his hair, dressed, then called the district office. No one was there yet, so he left a message on the answering machine, telling them he was sick and specifically asking for Gail Doig to be his substitute. Gail was an ex-student, and she'd subbed for him last year on the one day he'd been ill and had done an excellent job.

  It was still early, only six-thirty, so he made himself breakfast--no toast--and ate it, reading the morning paper, before giving Hal a call.

  His friend was already up, had been up for several hours. Norton hadn't told Hal about his encounter with the girl, but he told him now and he described waking up with the burnt toast covering his bed.

  He took a deep breath. "I have to go," he said. "Back to Oakdale. Will you come with me?"

  Hal sounded annoyed. "I told you I would, didn't I?"

  "It's far. It'll be almost a day's drive, and I don't know what's going to happen when I get there or how long I'll be staying--"

  "Are you deaf? I told you I'm going with you."

  "What's the bee in your bonnet?"

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  "Hal?"

  Norton heard his friend sigh even over the phone. "I

  felt Mariette's presence in the house."

  "Did you see her?"

  "No. It was like before. I could just tell that she was here."

  "You think it's connected to what's happening to me?"

  "I don't know," Hal said tiredly. "Maybe it's because we're both going to die soon. Hell, I don't know.

  But ..." He trailed off.

  "But?" Norton prompted.

  "Her presence isn't comforting like it was before.

  It's . . . scary."

  "What does that have to do with me?"

  "Nothing, asshole! I just want to get out of the house and get away from here! Is that all right with you?"

  "Jesus, bite my head off."

  "Do you want me to come or not?"

  "Of course I do. That's why I called."

  "Then when are we going to go?"

  Norton looked up at the clock. Seven-ten. "I'll pick you up in an hour. Bring a suitcase and a couple days'clothes just in case."

  "I'll be ready."

  There was a click on the other end and Norton gingerly put the receiver back on its hook. Hal sounded shaken, and he found that a little disconcerting. He
also didn't like the fact that Hal believed the ghost of his wife had returned. It was too close to be unrelated, and he didn't like the idea that whatever supernatural forces were trained on him had also focused their attention on his friend. Hal was frightened, and he didn't think he'd known Hal ever to be frightened.

  Oakdale loomed before him. And the house.

  He knew that whatever had happened there was bad, that its horror was so overpowering and overwhelming it had erased any trace of its existence from his mind, blanking out his memory. Within the past weeks, his worldview, his belief system, the rational tenets of thought that had supported his intellectual life for the past half century, had been turned upside down, and now he was seeing ghosts and encountering evil children and witnessing unexplainable events, but he had the feeling that that change was minuscule compared to what lay ahead.

  He was terrified by the thought of returning to Oak dale, and only the fact that Hal was accompanying him, would be there to offer moral, intellectual, spiritual, and, weak as it was, physical support, kept him from feeling totally incapacitated in the face of his fear.

  But Hal was being targeted. By telling Hal what had happened, by bringing him into this, Norton had quite possibly put his friend in danger. A danger that neither of them understood.

  Maybe he should call it off, wait it out, see what transpired.

  There was no real reason for him to go back to Oakdale, to the house.

  Yes there was.

  He didn't know what that reason could be, but it was there, and Norton could not let his own cowardice prevent him from doing what he knew was right, what he knew had to be done. He'd spent his entire professional life lecturing students about history, going over the past and second-guessing, making moral judgments about decisions that were made, and telling both his students and himself that they should have been made differently.

  Well, now was his opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He had a decision to make here, and he knew what needed to be done. Did he have the guts to do it?

  Yes.

  But he could not drag Hal into this. As grateful as he was for his friend's advice and support, for his willingness to share the burdens to be borne, he knew deep down that the responsibility was his own. This was something he had to do himself. He could not risk endangering Hal.

  He walked into the bedroom, threw the blanket and the toast atop it to the floor, and got his suitcase out of the closet, throwing it onto the mattress. He began packing underwear and socks, shirts and pants.

  No, he decided. He would not pick up Hal. He would leave his friend behind.

  He would go back to the house alone.

  * * *

  There were signs along the way.

  It was remarkable how quickly and completely his thinking, his mind set, his outlook had changed. He who had always been so literal and logical and concrete, who had never entertained the possibility that anything outside the material world existed, was now reading import into roadside occurrences, seeing omens in passing phenomena glimpsed through the windshield of his car. It was egocentric, this thinking, this belief that supernatural forces were creating portents out of landscapes and natural objects just for his sake.

  But he knew that's what was happening.

  Over the town of Magruder , he saw a black rainbow.

  No clouds, no rain, only the black-banded arch, stretching across the clear blue sky.

  It began in a pasture this side of the town.

  Its end appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Oakdale.

  There were other signs as well. In Shaw: bodies of dead squirrels piled into a pyramid on the empty front island of an abandoned gas station. In Edison: a sycamore that had been carved into the shape of a girl bearing an eerie resemblance to a thin and stretched-out Donna. In Haytown : a bearded wild-haired hitchhiker by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign that read: "Return."

  He almost chickened out. Driving into Oakdale from the east side of town, he could see the weather vane on the roof of the house's central gable, visible even above the bank building. He passed through the downtown, grown from two blocks to five in the intervening years and now populated with fast-food restaurants and gas stations, and emerged into open farmland. Ahead, off the road, was the house, its dark bulk contrasting sharply with the low white buildings of the other farms.

  The black rainbow ended at the foot of the drive.

  It disappeared almost instantly, and his first instinct was to make a U-turn and head back to Finley.

  But then he thought of Carole's ghost and the trail of toast and the dirty girl in the empty house and he knew he had to go forward.

  Return.

  He drove down the road, up the drive, to the house.

  There was a plucked chicken waiting for him.

  It was on a stick in the center of the drive, speared through the buttocks, and though there was no sign or message taped to it, he knew that it had been meant as a greeting. The animal looked freshly killed, had obviously not been sitting out too long in the Midwest sun, and the orange beak in its naked face made it look as though it were smiling.

  One featherless wing pointed toward the house.

  His gaze followed the pointing wing, and as he scanned the length of the front porch and the various darkened windows, he realized that he was holding his breath.

  He was expecting to see Donna.

  Donna.

  It returned to him all of a sudden in vivid detail, what had happened to his family, and Norton sat there, staring at the chicken, trembling.

  Donna.

  He could see her face clearly in his mind, her over bright eyes and sly smile and tanned dirty skin. He could not remember when he'd first met the girl, but it seemed as though she'd always been around. They'd played together as children. The house had no close neighbors, and both his brother and two sisters were considerably older than he was, so he really had no other playmates until he began going to school. Even then, Donna remained his best friend.

  They'd done typical children's things at first--built forts and dug tunnels and played imaginary games--but, gradually, things changed. Even now, Norton did not know how it had happened or why he'd gone along with it. He knew what he was doing was wrong even at the time, and he felt guilty and ashamed. He was smart enough to keep it from his family, smart enough not to tell his parents or his brother or his sisters, but he was not smart enough to avoid doing it, not smart enough to keep from getting involved.

  It started with a group of ants. Donna had found an anthill out in back of the house, in the area between the house and the silo. She showed it to him, then stepped on it, and they both laughed as they watched the ants scurry around. Then she told him to wait and ran off into the house. She returned a few moments later with a kerosene lamp and a match. He knew what she wanted to do, and he didn't like the idea--he knew they'd get in trouble for it--but she smiled at him and told him to gather some dry weeds and twigs, and he did. He tossed the sticks and weeds on top of the flattened anthill, and Donna dribbled some of the kerosene on top of it, set down the lamp, and lit the match.

  It was like a little explosion. The twigs and weeds went up instantly, and all of the ants stopped dead in their tracks and shriveled into tiny black balls. Donna crouched down next to the fire and watched, laughing and pointing, and while he knew it was wrong, he also thought it looked kind of neat, and he helped her pick up some of the stray ants that had escaped, the ones outside the fire range, and drop them into the flames.

  They crackled and popped as they burned, and the two of them spread out, looking for other bugs. Donna found a beetle and threw it in. He kicked a grasshopper across the dirt and into the fire. They tossed in a whole bunch of spiders and crickets. Donna found a kitten and was about to drop it onto the blaze, but by that time the flames had died down to almost nothing, and the animal got away.

  He was glad.

  It went on from there, though, and it got worse over the next year or
so. They buried a hamster alive. They skinned a dog. He remembered holding a neighbor girl down while Donna . . . assaulted her with a stick.

  She loved it, all the violence, all the torture, all the death. It excited her. As kids today would say, she "got off" on it.

  Then she started demanding sex.

  They did it and he loved it, but even there things changed, got rougher, and the type of sex she wanted became more unusual, more exotic.

  Unnatural.

  He was tempted to try what she wanted, of course.

  But he was more frightened than anything else. She scared him, and that was what finally brought him back to his senses and made him realize that what they were doing was wrong. They'd never been caught, never gotten in trouble for anything they'd done, no one had ever told. But he knew it wasn't right, and he latched on to this as a way to put a stop to it all, to end the whole thing and just ... backtrack.

  So he broke it off. He stopped seeing her. She'd want to play and he'd be busy; she'd try to sneak into his room and he'd make sure his doors and windows were locked. Eventually, she just . . . went away. He was not sure how, exactly. There was no final fight, no big to do, they simply stopped seeing each other, and then one day he noticed he didn't have to make an effort to avoid her anymore. She was gone.

  He did not see her again until he was eighteen.

  He'd been drafted into the army, and just before he was scheduled to go into basic training, he went into town to buy a card, a sort of Don't-Forget-Me card for Darcy Wallace, his girlfriend at the time. He returned home, and the second he walked through the door, he could smell something burning. He called out but no one answered. He thought maybe his mother had left something in the oven and forgotten about it. She'd done that before. His brother, who was already in the army, and his sisters, who were living together in an apartment in Toledo where they were both going to secretarial school, were supposed to come home for the big going-away party, and he figured his mother was making something special, a roast or a turkey.