The House

by Bentley Little

  A dream.

  Stormy tried to maintain the bland expression on his face. "I thought it might have been inspired by"--he motioned toward the land surrounding them--"everything that was happening."

  "Are you kidding? I wrote the original draft two years ago. It took me a year to film it."

  Two years. That was even more unsettling. He could not get the thought out of his mind that the movie had been made specifically for him, that an unknown power had inspired this kid, knowing he would make this film and that his friend would pass it to his friend and that that person would be working for Stormy's company and would show him the video. It was a frighteningly comprehensive plan, hidden behind an apparent series of coincidences, and Stormy found himself intimidated by the sheer scope of it all, by the complex and concentrated linkages.

  He didn't know if he was being warned or threatened, but the idea that this kid was just a messenger, his film the message, and that it had been meant for him and him alone, remained strong in his mind.

  He licked his lips. "Where's the house?" he asked.

  "Special effect," the filmmaker said. "It's a model. I

  based it on the house in my dream."

  Stormy was sweating. "How close is the film to your dream?"

  "I thought you were interested in distributing my movie."

  "Humor me," Stormy told him. "How close?"

  "It's almost the same."

  "Was there anything in your dream that you didn't put in the movie? Any additional images you cut out because they'd interrupt the narrative flow?"

  "What narrative flow?"

  "Was there anything you cut out?"

  "No."

  He continued questioning Rodman, but the kid was a blank, and Stormy understood that whatever meaning he was supposed to get from this, he was supposed to get from the film itself.

  "Have you seen any of the dead?" he asked before they left.

  Rodman snorted. "Who hasn't?"

  "What's it mean?"

  "You tell me."

  They left after that. Stormy was just as in the dark as he had been before the visit, and he felt both frightened and frustrated. He intended to watch the videotape again, but he had the distinct feeling that there was something else he was supposed to be doing. Should he return to the theater? Get the keys back from the real estate agent and check the bathroom again?

  What would that do? He'd seen the kachinas , seen talking dead men and a reappearing woman, and he hadn't learned anything from that. Was there anything else that could be learned from the theater?

  He needed to go back home.

  It was as if he were a cartoon character and a lightbulb had suddenly gone off above his head. That was exactly what he was supposed to do. Why hadn't he seen it before? Everything he'd felt or experienced or heard about pointed in that direction. He'd just been too dumb to pick up on it. He needed to go back to Chicago, back to the house. The answer was there.

  The answer to what?

  He didn't know.

  He dropped Ken off at the County building, drove back to his own offices. Russ returned to the duping room and the tapes on which he'd been working, and Stormy had Joan make reservations for him on a flight to Chicago tomorrow.

  He locked his office and watched Butchery once again.

  The flight was booked for noon, with an open-ended return ticket, and he stayed late, instructing his employees on what they were to work on in case he was gone for more than a few days, going over the agreements and contracts that needed his immediate signature. It was nearly nine when he finally arrived home, and he turned on all the lights in the house before collapsing into a chair.

  Even his house seemed creepy.

  He was not sure that his old home in Chicago was still standing, but he assumed that it was and he wondered what it would be like as he absently sorted through his mail. In his mind, it looked just like the house in Butchery, a dark forbidding mansion, but it must have been repainted and remodeled since his childhood.

  At least he hoped it had.

  He stopped shuffling the envelopes in his hand, not breathing, certain that he had heard something, a knock from the back of the house, but it was not repeated and when he walked carefully through the rooms he saw nothing unusual.

  Most of his mail was either bills or ads, but one envelope was postmarked Brentwood, California, and the name on the return address was Phillip Emmons. Phillip was an old writer friend from L.A., and Stormy opened the envelope, curious. It contained a cryptic yet tantalizing note stating that Phillip had been writing narration for a PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin and had run across something in his research that he thought Stormy might be interested in.

  "It's an entry from Thomas Jefferson's diary," Phillip wrote, "and it concerns some sort of haunted doll.

  Thought you might like to see it."

  Haunted doll?

  That was the weird thing about Phillip. He always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of his friends'

  lives and psyches, always seemed to provide just the object or scrap of knowledge needed. He was one of those people who, by accident or design, were always in the right place at the right time. Phillip's fiction ran toward hard-edged serial killer stories or sex-and-blood horror, and to Stormy's way of thinking, his real life seemed to dovetail with like subjects far more often than should have been the case.

  He'd always liked Phillip, but he had to admit, he'd always been a little afraid of him.

  He looked down at the enclosed Xerox, started reading:

  From Thomas Jefferson's Diary: April

  I am Awake again well before Dawn because of that Infernal Dream engendered by the Figure Shown to Me by Franklin. It is the Fifth Time I have Had the Dream. Did I not Know Franklin so well, I would Believe Him a Practitioner of Witchcraft and the Black Arts.

  The Doll, if Doll it Be, Appeared to be Made from Twigs and Straw and Pieces of Human Hair and Toenail.

  The Totality was Glued together by what seemed an Unsavory Substance that Franklin and I Took to be Dried Seed from the Male Sex.

  Franklin Claims that He has Seen a Similar Figure in his Travels although He Cannot Remember Where.

  For My Part, I would Never have Forgotten such an Object or Whence I first Discovered It, as I Will Not Forget It Now.

  Against My Wishes and Advice, Franklin has Taken the Doll into his House. He Intends to Keep It in his Study so that He may Perform some of his Experiments upon It. I Bade Him Leave it in the Spirit House in which He Discovered It, but Franklin is not a Man who Takes Readily to Suggestion.

  I am Frightened for Franklin and, indeed, for All of Us.

  At the bottom of the diary entry was a detailed piece of artwork in Jefferson's own hand. A detailed rendering that was clearly identifiable and instantly recognizable.

  It was a drawing of the house.

  His plane landed at O'Hare just after noon, and Stormy immediately picked up his rental car and drove home.

  He could not remember the last time he'd been to the old neighborhood or seen the old house, but it had obviously been a while. The street had changed completely.

  Redevelopment had obliterated an entire block, replacing old tenements with newer tenements. The tough Polish gang members who used to hang out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores had been replaced by tough black gang members who hung out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores. A lot of the buildings he remembered were either condemned or gone.

  The house, though, had stayed exactly the same. It was as if it were enclosed within a force field or clear protective barrier. The detritus of the street did not reach it. There was no graffiti on its walls, no garbage thrown on its lawn. The handful of homes remaining around it had deteriorated tremendously and were now as dilapidated as the surrounding apartment buildings, but the house remained unchanged.

  There was something spooky about that.

  Butchery.

  He realized that he had never aske
d the kid why he had called his film Butchery. Sitting there in his rental car, in the middle of the slummy neighborhood, staring at his unchanged home, that suddenly seemed important.

  The early afternoon sun was blocked by buildings, but its light shone through the broken windows of an empty fire-gutted structure across the street, casting bizarre shadows on the face of the house, shadows that were too abstract to resemble anything real but that nonetheless jogged some recess of his memory.

  Stormy got out of the car. He felt like a flea standing before a tidal wave. If whatever was happening encompassed this house in Chicago, the theater in Albuquerque, the reservation, and God knew what else, he was a dust speck in the face of it. It made no sense for him to even be here. The thought that he could do something, that he could make a difference, that he could possibly have an influence over anything was ludicrous. He'd been drawn here, called perhaps, summoned, but he understood now that for him to try to intervene was pointless.

  Still, he opened the small gate and walked through the well-tended yard to the porch.

  It was a warm afternoon, but the air was cold in the shadow of the house, and he remembered that from before.

  He felt like a kid again, powerless, at the mercy of things he didn't understand. He knew his grandmother and parents were dead, understood it intellectually, but emotionally it felt to him as though they were inside, waiting for him, waiting to criticize him, waiting to punish him, and he wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

  He had no key, but the front door was unlocked, and he opened it, walked inside. He was wrong: the house had changed. Not the building itself, not the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the furnishings. Those were exactly as they had been thirty years before. Almost eerily so. But the mood of the house seemed different, the air of regal formality that had reigned previously, that had so permeated every inch of this place, was gone, replaced with a graceless foreboding. He walked forward, turned right. The long hallway in which he had played as a child now seemed grim and intimidating, its opposite end fading into a gloomy darkness that for some reason frightened him.

  There was no way he'd be able to muster the bravery to even attempt to go upstairs.

  He turned around, walked back through the entryway, saw movement in the sitting room. It was afternoon outside, but little daylight penetrated into the house, and, nervously, his hand fumbled for a light switch. He found it, flipped it on.

  The butler was standing just inside the doorway.

  "Billingham," Stormy said, not entirely surprised.

  The butler smiled at him, bowed. "Stormy."

  Daniel The summer stretched before them, new, ripe with the possibility of adventure, its inevitable end so far in the future that it was almost inconceivable. The days were long and hot, and he and his friends filled the hours with projects. Making sand candles: melting real candles they'd stolen from Jim's house, letting the wax drip around slices of string into holes they'd dug in the dirt of the backyard.

  Selling Kool-Aid: using Paul's dad's folding card table, having Jim's sister draw them a sign, sitting for hours in the burning sun, adding more and more ice to the pitcher until the Kool-Aid was so watered down even they couldn't drink it. Egging mailboxes: stealing two eggs from each of their refrigerators, playing paper-scissors rock to determine who would rush up to their neighbors'

  mailboxes and slam the eggs in.

  It was a perfect existence. Nothing had to be planned, nothing had to be completed, they did what they wanted when they wanted, following their whims through the free and open days.

  But something was wrong at home. Daniel could feel it. His parents didn't say anything, but he sensed a subtle difference in their relationship, perceived the loss of something he hadn't even known existed. At night, at the dinner table, there was anger beneath his father's surface pleasantry, sadness underlying his mother's cheerfulness, and he was glad it was summer and he could stay out late and he didn't have to spend as much time with his family as he ordinarily would.

  As the days passed, however, as the memory of school receded and the rhythms of summer became less tentative, more reliable, he came to believe--no, to know--that it was neither his mother's fault nor his father's fault that things were falling apart between them. They were victims.

  They were like him, able to see what was happening but unable to do anything about it, forced to watch as it occurred.

  It was the fault of their servant, Billingsly .

  And his dirty little daughter.

  Daniel did not know what made him think that, but he knew it was true, and while he'd never really given it much thought before, he realized that those two scared him. He was not sure why; Billingsly had always been polite and deferential to him--too polite and too deferential –while Doneen had always been shy and elusive and seemed to have a crush on him. But he was afraid of them, he realized, and he began making a concerted effort to stay out of their way, to not come into contact with them, to avoid them whenever possible.

  His parents, he noticed, did the same.

  What was going on here? Why didn't his father just fire Billingsly?

  Because it wasn't only the servant and his daughter. It was the house as well. Something about their home seemed threatening and confining and unnatural, as if. . .

  As if it was haunted.

  That was it exactly. It was as if the building itself were alive, controlling everything within its borders--who slept where, what time they ate their meals, where they could go and what they could do--and they were merely its pawns. It was a strange thought, he knew, but it was the way he felt, and it explained why his father, who had always been lord of the manor, the king of his castle, walked around these days like a beaten man, a guest in his own home.

  No, not a guest.

  A prisoner.

  If he'd been braver, if he'd been older, he would have talked to his parents about it, would have asked what was wrong and why and whether they could do anything about the situation, but that was not the way the dynamics of their family worked. They did not talk out problems, did not confront them directly, but hinted around about them, trying to get their individual points across with oblique references and small suggestions, hoping the other members of the family would understand what they meant without having to come out and explain.

  So he stayed out as much as possible, played with his friends, concentrated on summer and fun and tried not to think about the changes at home. He and Jim and Paul andMadson built a clubhouse in the woods behind Paul's backyard. They made a go-can that they took turns racing down State Street. They panned for gold in the creek.

  They watched game shows on Jim's family's color TV

  set. They camped out in the park.

  Outside the walls of the house, it was a great summer.

  But inside . . .

  It started one night after he and his friends had spent the day downtown at the movie theater, sitting twice through a double feature of two Disney movies: Snowball Express and $1,000,000 Duck. They'd emerged tired and gorged with candy, and they'd gone home to their respective houses. His parents had been waiting for him--they always ate dinner together, that was a family rule--and he'd eaten and then gone upstairs to take a bath.

  He'd been successfully avoiding Billingsly and his daughter for several weeks, had only seen the servant at dinner and had not seen Doneen at all, but he was still taking no chances and he made sure that the servant was still in the kitchen and carefully checked the hallways for his daughter before grabbing pajamas from his bedroom and locking himself in the bathroom.

  She walked in while he was washing himself in the tub.

  "Hey!" he said.

  He had locked the door, he was sure of it, and the fact that the girl had still been able to get in frightened him.

  She slipped off her dirty nightgown, got into the water.

  He jumped up, splashing water on the floor, frantically calling for his mom, his dad, as he grabbed the towel and scrambled a
way from the tub, trying not to slip on the tile.

  Doneen giggled at him.

  "Get out of here!" he screamed at her.

  "You don't really want me to leave." Still giggling, she pointed at his penis, and he quickly covered it with the towel, embarrassed. He couldn't help it; he had an erection.

  It was exciting to see a naked girl, but it was even more frightening, and he backed against the door, reaching for the knob and trying to turn it.

  It was locked.

  He didn't want to turn his back on Doneen , was not sure what she could or would do, but he had no choice and he turned, unlocking the door.

  "Your mother can't live," the girl said behind him.

  He whirled around. "What?"

  "She's going to have to die."

  There was something about the matter-of-fact tone in the girl's voice that scared the shit out of him, and he ran out of the bathroom and down the long hallway. He wanted to go into his bedroom, get his clothes, get dressed, but he was afraid to do so, afraid she might be able to sneak in there as easily as she'd entered the bathroom, so he ran downstairs, still covering himself with the towel. His parents had remained at the dinner table, and when his mother looked up in surprise and he saw the mingled expression of concern, worry, and fear cross her face, he burst into tears. He had not cried in a long time--crying was for babies-- but he was crying now, and she stood up and allowed him to hug her, and he kept repeating, "I don't want you to die!"

  "I'm not going to die," she told him. But her voice was not as reassuring as it should have been, and it only made him cry harder.

  Afterward, he was embarrassed. He should not have been--there were more important things at stake here than embarrassment--but that was the way he felt, and although he told his parents he'd been scared upstairs, in the bathroom, he did not tell them why or what had really happened. Still, he made them accompany him back up, hoping that Doneen would still be there, and made his father search his bedroom closets and the other rooms off the hallway before putting on his pajamas and telling them to go downstairs, he was all right.

  It was the crying that had embarrassed him the most, and he thought that if he had not burst into tears like a little girl, he might have been able to broach the subject of the servant's daughter and what she'd said. But he'd been naked and crying into his mother's blouse, and he could not bring himself to compound that humiliation with the admission of what must seem like a lunatic fear-- no matter how serious the consequences might be.