"Sorry," Stormy said.
"Billingham!" his father yelled. He paused, waited.
"Billingham!"
The butler did not come.
Stormy looked behind him, saw only empty hallway.
Billinghamhad never, to his knowledge, failed to come on his father's order, had never had to be called more than once, and Stormy saw here the present intruding on the past. Whatever had happened to the butler in the House he'd shared with Norton and Mark and Daniel and Laurie, whatever had caused his absence for the past two days, was affecting life in this House, too.
It was a pretty good indication that the butler was dead.
That worried him. Like the others, he had originally ,, believed that the butler and the girl were allies, working *
together. But though both were intimately and inexorably connected with the Houses, he now saw them as antagonists, opposing forces, and the idea that the butler was dead, that the girl was now free to do as she chose, with no one to stop her, frightened him to the core.
A door opened in the hallway behind him, and Stormy turned to look, hoping and praying for it to beBillingham , but it was his grandmother who emerged from one of the bathrooms, hobbling out with the assistance of a bone-handled cane.
"Hi, Grandma," he said, but the old lady ignored him, turned the other direction, walked away.
"Billingham!" his father bellowed again.
Facing forward, Stormy glanced around the study. He had seldom been asked in here as a child, and he had always been too afraid of his father to take the initiative and enter on his own, so his memories of the room were hazy. One whole wall, he saw now, was covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A big picture window on the opposite wall looked out onto the back garden.
There was a desk and a pair of identical leather chairs.
Two dark wood filing cabinets. A potted palm.
And a doll.
Stormy'sbreath caught in his throat. It was lying on the floor directly behind his father, as though his father had dropped it there. The face was upside down, but the wide white eyes seemed to be staring into his, the disturbing inverted smile trained directly on him. He didn't know why he hadn't seen the figure immediately, and the thought occurred to him that his father had been holding it behind his back, hiding it.
He met his father's eyes, and the old man looked quickly and guiltily away.
Stormy knew now what had happened in this House, though he had not understood it as a child. They'd been corrupted in their purpose, his parents. His entire family.
They'd been seduced by Donielle and had neglected their duties, their responsibilities, defecting under the watchful but naive and uncomprehending eyes of Billingham. It had affected their relationship with him, their own son, had erected the barrier between them that had stood for the rest of their lives, and the fact that they'd allowed themselves to be drawn in by the girl, that they had so easily been manipulated by her, had led him to disassociate himself from them. He might not have been able to articulate it at the time, but subliminally, subconsciously, he'd been able to read the signs even then, and it was why he'd never really had any respect for his parents. He'd been afraid of them, intimidated by them, but he hadn't respected them.
And it was why he had eventually left and moved west.
He had changed, though. He had grown over the years, and he was no longer the hesitant, easily cowed, easily intimidated child he had been. He'd come back to the House, to his family, a new person, an adult, a successful businessman and entrepreneur, and he would no longer be bullied into submission by his father's words, by his mother's demands.
Maybe he'd been given the opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. Maybe he'd been sent back here to stop the girl early, before she was able to do any major damage. To head her off at the pass, as it were.
Whatever the reason, whatever the motive, he felt he had the chance to change things, to do things differently, and it was not a chance he was going to waste. He walked across the study, bent down, and picked up the doll. "What's this?" he asked.
His father snatched the figure from him. "Don't you dare touch that!"
Behind him, he heard his mother enter the room.
Good. Both of them needed to hear this.
He faced his father. "Why are we here?" he asked.
"In this House?"
"This is our home!"
"We're here for a reason," Stormy said patiently.
"And it's not to fuck that little urchin girl."
"Oh!" his mother gasped.
His father glared at him. "I will not be spoken to that way by my own son!"
"Why don't you want me to see her, then? Why can't I seeDonielle ?"
His father hesitated. "Because . . . because she's a bad influence on you."
"And she's a bad influence on you, too. She's a bad influence on all of us." He met his parents' eyes. Both of them looked away, embarrassed.
"Does Billingham know about Donielle ?"
"Billingham?" His parents exchanged a quick look.
"What does Billingham have to do with this?"
"You know."
"Stormy--"
"You know why the House must be maintained. You know what it does. And you know you're not supposed to do anything to jeopardize that." He pointed at the doll, still clutched in his father's fingers. "What's that, Dad?"
"It's none of your damn business."
"She gave it to you. It's hers. You're busy trying to keep me from going anywhere or doing anything with her, pretending that she's not good enough for our family, and you're seeing her behind my back. She's a child, Dad. A child."
His father shook his head. He looked suddenly old.
"She's no child," he said.
"And we're only trying to protect you," his mother said. "She is a bad influence."
"Then how come you keep seeing her yourselves?"
Neither of them answered.
"Don't you want it back the way it was? The way it used to be?"
"It can't go back," his father said.
"Why not?"
"Because it's gone too far."
"No," Stormy said. "Not yet it hasn't."
"You're wrong." His father looked down at the doll in his hand. "You don't understand."
"What don't I understand?"
"I fucked her, okay?" There was anger in his voice.
"I fucked her ass."
Stormy stared at him.
His voice dropped to a whisper. "Now I'm hers forever."
"No." Stormy grabbed the doll from his father, threw it onto the ground. He felt shaken, sickened. It was one thing to suspect something or to know it deductively, and it was quite another to be confronted with its specifics outright, but still he pressed on. "You have a choice, Dad. You always have a choice. Right now, you're just choosing to give up, choosing to give in. You can break free if you want to. There's nothing binding you to Donielle . Tell her to fuck off. Take control of your life, for God's sake."
"I can't," his father said weakly.
"Look at Mom." He motioned toward his mother, wearing the oversized cutoff suit. "Look what's happened to her, what she's become. And you know why!
You know what's done this to her! Don't you even care enough about her to put a stop to this?"
On the floor, the doll shifted, rolled onto its side.
Stormy was not sure whether it had moved of its own accord or it had simply landed on a precarious angle and was settling, but the motion frightened him anyway, and he kicked the doll as hard as he could, watching it slide across the hardwood floor and under the desk. There were goose bumps on his arms, and he saw that both of his parents were looking under the desk at the figure.
"Donielleasked me to marry her," Stormy said.
That brought them back.
His father's gaze snapped onto his, and there was anger on his face, confusion beneath the anger, fear beneath the confusion. His mother gasped, clapped a hand to her mouth.
"She . . . she can't!" his father exclaimed.
His mother began quietly sobbing.
"She thinks she can," Stormy said, but he was suddenly uncertain as to whether his parents were upset because they didn't want to lose him--or didn't want to lose her.
He took a deep breath. "Is she more important to you than me?"
"No!" his mother said, shocked.
"Of course not, son."
"Then what if I told you that you had to choose?
What if I said it's either her or me?"
His father's face clouded over. "She's trying to break up the family."
"Who would you choose?"
"It's not that little slut who's causing all the problems,"
his mother announced.
Stormy turned to her. "Who is it, then?"
"It's the bone monster," she said, eyes widening.
His father stared at him silently, looking lost.
"Would you choose me, Dad?"
A tear rolled down his father's right cheek. "I would if I could."
Stormy smiled at them sadly. "I love you," he said.
"I love you both."
For a moment, his mother's gaze was lucid, his father's expression softened. "We love you, too," his mother told him, putting her arms around him. His father nodded.
A chime rang out, a deeply resonant almost churchy sound. The doorbell.
"Billingham!" his father bellowed.
His mother pulled away from him.
Another chime.
"Billingham!"
Stormy sighed. "I'll get it," he said.
He walked out of the den and down the hall to the foyer. The doorbell rang again, and he sped up, unlocking and opening the door.
A girl was standing on the porch in front of him.
Donielle.
He caught his breath at the sight of her. He was an adult now and she was a child, but the feelings she evoked within him were the same as those engendered all those years ago. His heart was racing, and there was a pleasant tingling in his groin. Despite everything he knew, despite everything that had happened, the attraction was still there, and his first impulse was to reach out and grab her hands and hold them in his. He wanted to touch her, but he held back, remained holding on to the door. "Yes?" he said coldly.
"Oh, Stormy!" She rushed forward, threw her arms around him, and against his will his body responded.
Beneath his jeans, his growing penis pressed against her midsection, and she held him tighter, rubbing herself against it.
Stormy grabbed her arms, pulled her away from him.
"What's the matter?" she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were full of hurt innocence.
He steeled himself. "You know what's the matter."
"I love you, Stormy."
He held on to her arms, looked away from her face.
"I don't love you."
"I don't like what you're trying to do."
"I'm on your side! I'm the one who told you you have to stand up for yourself, you can't let your family boss you around and make all your decisions!"
"I am standing up for myself."
"That's why your family hates me!"
"And I'm standing up for my family."
"I have nothing against them," she said, and tears welled up in her eyes. "They're the ones who don't like me! They don't like me because I'm poor. They don't like me because I love you more than they do and I
think about your feelings and what's good for you and not just what'll look good and save face for the family."
"They don't want me to see you anymore," he said.
"And I don't want to see you either."
"Fuck your family," Donielle told him.
"No," he said. "Fuck you."
The tears stopped flowing, her face hardened. "What did you say?"
"You heard me."
"That's the way you want it?"
"That's the way it's going to be. Get out of here. I
never want to see you again."
"What you want and what you'll get are two different things." With a flip of her hair, she turned and walked away, and he thought that from behind she didn't look like a child at all, she looked like a dwarf.
That lessened the attraction somewhat.
Lessened it.
But did not get rid of it.
He closed the door. Behind him he heard the click-tap of his grandmother's cane on the floor, and he turned to see her standing by the foot of the stairs.
"I can't find Billingham ," she said.
"I ... I think he's gone," Stormy told her.
There was a brief flash of lucidity, a quick second in which he saw panic and fear and incomprehension on her face. She knew the butler had been part of the House, and she knew that if he was gone, something was seriously amiss. Then her usual tight expression of stoic immobility settled into place, and she said, "You will have to serve in his place, then."
Stormy nodded. "Do you want me to help you up the stairs?"
"No," she told him. "I want you to draw my bath. I will bathe tonight in blood. Have my tub filled with goat's blood. Temperature tepid."
He nodded dumbly, watched her struggle up the steps.
From far down the first-floor hall, he heard his mother wailing, heard his father bellow, "Billingham!"
He stood in the foyer, unmoving. What had he accomplished?
Nothing. He'd tried his damnedest and confronted his parents, put it all on the line, and they had remained unmovable, entrenched, fatalistically resigned to things as they were. Everything was exactly the same as it was before.
He sighed. You really couldn't go home again.
Still, he felt better for having talked to his parents, for having confronted them, for having at least tried to stop their abandonment of Billingham and the House, to change their increasing reliance on Donielle.
If he had it to do over again, he would not run away from home. He would stay in the House with his parents, and try to work things out with them.
There was no sign of his grandmother on the stairs, he could not hear the tapping of her cane, so he walked up the steps to make sure she was all right. She was not in the second- or third-floor hallways, and he knocked on the door of her bedroom. "Grandma?"
No answer.
He tried to open the door, but it was locked.
He knocked on the door of her bathroom, but again there was no answer, and he put his ear to the wood, listening for sound.
Nothing.
Could she have gone somewhere else? He started toward the stairs again, but his eye was caught by the open door to his bedroom. Had it been open before?
He didn't think so.
"Hello?" he called out tentatively. He poked his head into the room, and there was a sudden shift of atmosphere and air pressure, a lightening of mood. He saw earthquake debris strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and against the opposite wall, a broken television.
He was back.
Norton Norton understood the change immediately.
After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he'd spent the last several days, the House he'd shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he'd grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, theundefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.
Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else.
The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.
With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. L
ow conversation. Laughter.
It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Barren's room, past the bathroom, and to the library.
He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.
And saw his family.
He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he'd expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.
They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they'd worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Barren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.
It was the type of evening they'd often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.
There were no books in the library.
How could he have not noticed something so obvious?
The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.
What had happened to the books? he wondered.
Where had they gone? All of his father's books had been in place downstairs, in the den.
But that had been back at the other House, the current House.
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