There was a tug on his arm, and Norton looked down to see Donna pulling on his sleeve. "Come here," she said softly, and a slight smile played about her lips.
"Come look."
He noticed for the first time that the room was crowded, filled with tables and display cases and huge heavy pieces of furniture that served functions he did not understand. He saw what looked like severed hands and genitalia lying on a long glass shelf on one wall.
Something small and dark and furry ran past his feet, chattering to itself.
He did not see either a door or a window, an entrance or an exit to the room.
Donna pulled him around a large stationary object of mirror and wood that he did not recognize, and he found himself in a corner area even more jumbled and chaotic than the rest of the room. There was no furniture here, though.
There were bodies.
And body parts.
His first instinct was to back away. The floor was sticky with blood, and what looked like deflated clouds, the pale empty husks of the ghosts he'd seen in the House on the Other Side, hung from staggered hooks on the black wall. The torso of some unknown rainbow colored creature sat atop a cube made from interlocking bones, next to the discarded head of an evil-looking old woman. The stench was horrendous, and he held his hand to his nose, gagging.
But Donna would not let him go. She held tightly to his wrist, her strength both unforced and unnatural, and she talked to him softly. There was no true death, she said. There was only a transformation from one form into another, a passage from one world to the next. Why should he hold on to his outdated notions of morality, his prudish small-town conceptions of what was right?
There was nothing wrong with killing. It only facilitated the inevitable.
He heard her, understood her, and though he should have had arguments with which to dispute her, he did not. She led him through the abattoir, still softly talking, lovingly touching the remains of the dispatched.
There was beauty in the bones, he saw now, a poetry in the eviscerated flesh.
Donna reached the wall, and from a skin sheath hanging from a spike, she withdrew a dull rusty knife. She handed it to him. "Mr. Billings is yours."
"What?"
"It's time for him to move on, and you have been chosen to assist him." She pressed the knife into his hand. It felt heavy, good. "It's an opportunity for you."
She led him back through the furniture to the marble table, and he looked at Billings, strapped down and unable to move. Norton shook his head. He could not go through with this. He understood that death was not the end, but he still could not bring himself to kill someone, to murder in cold blood.
Donna must have sensed his hesitancy because she rubbed against him, placed a hand between his legs. "It's his time," she said. "He wants to go."
Billings did not look like he wanted to go. Norton glanced down at the defiant face and turned quickly away.
Donna faced him. Her legs were slightly spread, the thin material of her dirty shift stretched tight, and he found himself wishing she'd bend over again, wishing she'd let him between her thighs.
One of the wispy ghosts had been pinned to the wall behind the table and was weakly fluttering, its blue-gray essence seeping slowly out from a slit in the fabric of its being and floating into the girl's mouth even as she spoke, even as she whispered the words he wanted to hear.
"I'll drink your sperm and drink your piss and drink your blood. I'll take everything you give me and do anything you want me to. All you have to do is take care of Mr. Billings."
Norton nodded. He didn't know why he was doing what he was doing, but he held out the knife, walked up to the marble table.
"Do it," Donna said.
He did.
Even as Billings screamed, as he inserted the knife in the assistant's groin and jerked upward, Norton understood that he was the reason Billings had disappeared.
Wherever he was--whenever he was--it was after he had met Daniel and Laurie and Stormy and Mark but before the Houses had split apart. He had not known it then because his own life unfolded sequentially, no matter what happened, but the Houses did not follow such a conventional timetable, were not so circumscribed, and he had been wrenched back and forth, forced to be at the Houses' beck and call, to respond to whatever they put in front of him.
Donna was right. It was the Houses that were evil.
But he realized the fallacy of that reasoning even as it occurred to him. Billings' screams were now silent, his mouth frozen wide open, his eyes bulging with agony, and Norton knew with a certainty that could not be denied that he'd been right the first time, that his initial instincts had been correct. The girl was the evil one.
"Yes," Donna said, egging him on. And there was hunger in her eyes. "Gut the fucker!"
He stopped then and there. He pulled the knife out and dropped it, knowing that it was too late, that he had been corrupted by the girl Kiss my ass --that he had been caught in her web, that he was lost. He heard the knife hit the floor, and he stared down at his hands, covered to the elbows with hot blood, and he started to cry, but Donna knelt before him and, smiling up at him, unfastened the snaps on his pants.
"I'll take care of you," she promised. "I'll reward you."
He pulled back from her, jerked away. "What have you done?" he screamed at her.
She smiled up at him. "What have you done?"
"You didn't kill my family," he said, understanding finally dawning on him, "because you couldn't kill them."
Donna smiled. "Darcy did just as good a job. I was very proud of her."
Norton's stomach dropped. "No," he whispered, shaking his head. He thought of his old girlfriend, and though he didn't want to be able to imagine her cutting off heads and cooking them in the oven, he could.
But how had she done it? His father and Darren and his sisters--hell, even his mother--could have easily beaten Darcy in a fight. And all of them together would certainly have been able to not only resist her but overpower her.
Donna had made them sacrifice themselves.
It made perfect sense.
He stared at her with horror.
"But I can kill," she said. "You're wrong about that. I can fuck and I can kill."
"Then why do you make other people do it for you?"
She smiled. "Because it's fun."
He backed away from her.
"I killed Darcy after that. Skinned her in the garage.
And Mark's sister Kristen? The last true resident of the House? I sat on her face, made her eat me, suffocated her with my hot pussy. And--"
"Why didn't you kill Billings?"
Her face clouded over. "That's different."
"Why?"
"Because."
"You couldn't do it?"
"No, I needed you."
He looked back at the assistant's bloody, unmoving form on the table. "What have I done?" he cried.
"You've helped me."
And even as he screamed his anguish into the black and bone-cluttered room, she was on her knees in front of him, pulling down his pants.
Stormy The windows were back.
That was the first thing he noticed.
But the world outside was foggy and featureless, and although the front door of the House opened when he tried it, he was afraid to go out into that murk.
Stormy closed the door and looked around the entryway, down the hall. "Daniel!" he called. "Daniel!"
No answer.
"Norton! Laurie! . . . Mark!"
His voice died without echo in the heavy oppressive air, and there was no answering noise from anywhere else in the House.
Funny. He could have sworn he was back in the same House he'd shared with his compatriots. It certainly looked and felt that way to him. But he seemed to be completely alone, and he wondered if they'd been trapped somewhere else. In their own pasts, perhaps.
Or if they'd been killed.
He hoped to God that wasn't the case.
St
ormy walked into the dining room, into the kitchen.
There were crackers in one of the cupboards, and he took out the box, grabbing a handful. He was hungry, he realized. He felt as though he'd been running a marathon or working out in a gym. He was drained, enervated, and he felt the need to bolster himself with nourishment. He searched through all of the other cupboards as well as the refrigerator, but he found only two other items.
A can of fruit cocktail.
And a hunk of cheddar cheese.
He ate neither, left them in the cupboard and refrigerator, respectively, feeling chilled.
He finished off the box of crackers, poured himself a glass of water.
So what was next?
It was clear that he had done something, accomplished something. He'd been set down in the household of his childhood for a reason, and while that reason was still unclear, the fact that he was back, had been returned, meant that he had completed whatever it was he'd been expected to do.
But the purpose of it was still unknown, even the assumptions behind it nebulous. How could changing the specifics of his own past life affect anything having to do with the Houses and this border that was supposed to protect--what?--the known universe from supernatural forces?
It was the mixture of the cosmic and the personal that he found so hard to accept. He had never bought into the Christian idea that God would ignore wars and atrocities and holocausts yet intervene on behalf of a housewife with marital problems. It seemed absurd and inconsistent to him. Highly illogical, to quote the great Mr. Spock.
But he knew now that the Infinite was illogical, that the epic and the intimate were inexorably intertwined, and while it might be hard to grasp and difficult to adjust to, a missed appointment could have as much consequence as the troop movements of an army a thousand soldiers strong, could lead to the movement of an army a thousand soldiers strong. In the grand scheme of things, individual actions and large-scale events were both equally important. Here in the House and on the Other Side, that truism seemed to be even more pronounced.
Feelings and emotions were as tangible as actions, and while he might not understand the specifics of it, he knew that reconnecting with his parents and confronting Doniellehad somehow had a profound impact on the House and therefore the world.
He looked out the kitchen windows at the white fog that obscured whatever lay outside.
The Ones Who Went Before.
For the first time since Billings had spoken that terrifying name to him, Stormy thought about the builders of the Houses. What did they look like? Did they have a definite shape and form? He would never know and was not sure that he wanted to know.
What about the Houses themselves? If they had been around as long as Billings had intimated, they could not have always looked like this. What had been here before them? Teepees? Caves?
It was a creepy line of thought, and Stormy forced himself to back away from it. There would be time for that later. There were more immediate concerns at present.
He needed to find out where he was, when he was, where the others were, and how they were going to escape from here.
Crackers were stuck between his teeth, and he poured himself another glass of water and rinsed his mouth out in the sink before embarking on a floor-by-floor search of the House.
He went through every room on the first floor, then wandered upstairs, looking for one of the others, looking for ... something. He saw nothing unusual until he reached the third story. There, across the hall from his bedroom, was a door that had not been there before, a door he did not remember. He felt suddenly nervous and was not sure he wanted to look inside, especially not alone, but he forced himself to be brave, opened the door, and peeked into the room.
"Oh, Jesus," he breathed.
Butchery.
This deserved the title. The black room before him was the site of almost unbelievable carnage. Faces hung from hooks on the wall like hats, the drooping, sagging skin contorting their former shapes into stretched mockeries of human forms. Bones and skulls and pieces of flesh lay strewn across the blood-spattered floor next to a pile of discarded gossamer that looked like the empty bodies of the cloudlike ghosts he'd seen on the Other Side. Metal instruments that could only be tools of torture were scattered about the room.
On the top of a marble table was Billings.
The butler had been stabbed. No, not just stabbed.
Slit open. His mouth was frozen in arictus of agony, and his eyes were wide, staring. The red imprint of a kiss--lipstick? blood?--could be seen on his white forehead.
Stormy remained in the doorway, afraid to enter the room. He didn't know what this meant, where it fit into anything, but it scared the hell out of him, and the confirmation that Billings was dead hit him much harder than expected.
What were they going to do now? Their guiding light was gone.
What was he going to do now? That was the big question.
Because the others weren't anywhere to be found.
For all he knew, they had been killed as well and their bloody corpses awaited him in some other room of the House.
He thought he detected movement to the right of Billings'
body, and immediately he shifted his attention in that direction. At first he saw nothing, but he squinted his eyes, looked more carefully.
A shade, a shadow--Norton?--was standing near the foot of the table, its indistinct form covered with blood, staring at its own outstretched hands with an expression that could be read as horror, could be read as awe. The face was obscure, faded into transparency, but there was something about the shape of its body, its stance, the movement of its head and arms, that reminded him of Norton, and he was suddenly sure that the old man was dead.
He called out Norton's name, tried to communicate with the ghost or whatever it was, but no matter what he said or how much he gesticulated, he could not seem to capture the figure's attention.
There was additional movement in the far corner of the dark room, a flash of white in his peripheral vision, and Stormy quickly glanced over at that area.
Donielle.
She had no trouble seeing him. The girl smiled in his direction, and her lips were bright crimson, there were flecks of blood on her teeth. She lifted her shift, and he saw smears of red on her crotch where she'd been . . .
touching herself. "Come and get it," she said, giggling.
Her voice seemed to come from far away.
Looking at her now, Stormy could not understand how he had ever even been tempted.
She turned around and bent over, still giggling. "Kiss it!" she said.
He slammed the door of the room as hard as he could, backing toward his bedroom across the hall. More than anything, he needed time to think, time to sort things out, but he had the feeling that was exactly what he was not going to get. He was filled with the sudden conviction that things were coming to a head, that whatever it had all been building toward had arrived, that the girl had almost achieved her goal.
That he was next.
Reaching behind him, his hands felt the jamb of his bedroom doorway and he turned around. But it was not his room. It was the black room again, and amid the bloody mayhem,Donielle stood at the foot ofBillings's table with her shift hiked up and rubbed herself with bloody hands.
He turned, and the door he had slammed shut was now open again, and he saw the identical room across the hall. He tried to think of what he should do, how he could get out of this, but his mind was a blank.
"You can't escape,"Donielle said.
And advanced on him from both directions.
Mark He walked slowly through the House, looking for the girl.
Mark trod carefully down the halls, hyper-aware of each shadow and sound. He wished he had a weapon, but he did not think it would make any difference if he did. Traditional concepts did not apply here, and though it would have made him feel slightly more secure having something to hold in his hand, he knew that was just a mental crutch.
He had no idea how he was going to fight her, but years of being on the road had made him pretty good at thinking quickly on his feet, and he trusted himself to figure something out when the time came.
Ahead was the door that led to the solarium. The hall around it was dark, a single candle bulb in a candelabra wall fixture throwing a weak light onto the door itself, leaving the surrounding space in blackness.
He wished Kristen had come with him. Or that Daniel or Laurie or Norton or Stormy were here.
He wished Billings were around.
Mark never would have thought he'd actually desire the assistant's company, but his mind set had gone through some hard changes since he'd learned Kristen had died and returned to the House. Almost everything he'd thought growing up had turned out to be wrong, his reality had been reversed, and he could not help thinking that all of this could have been avoided had he and his parents or he and Billings just talked, just communicated.
He reached the door, hesitating before opening it. Did he really think he could kill the girl? Kristen seemed to believe that he could, and he supposed that's what gave him the little confidence he had. Her belief in him might be nothing more than faith or hope, but it was reassuring nonetheless, and it made him feel that he at least had a fighting chance.
He reached for the door handle. Turned it. Pulled.
The solarium was gone. The door opened onto a black room with blood-spattered walls, floor, and ceiling. The room was empty, but smeared swaths of blood, and scrapes and scratches on the floor, made it look as though heavy objects had been recently moved out.
There was an aura of corruption and violent depravity about the room, a sensation so clear and strong that for a second Mark thought The Power had returned. But he realized almost instantly that the evil here was so thick and concentrated that even the most dull and unimaginative man would have no trouble detecting it.
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