Bentley Little - The House

"Shut up!" his friend told him.

Stormy ignored the man, sipped his beer. It had been a good afternoon. Taos had taken the Hopi kid's film, and had not only put it in competition but had given it one of the coveted prime-time slots. To top it off, the straight-to-video Fat Lady, a horror sexploitation flick that he'd picked up after a minor studio had dropped it, had just gotten a rave review in Fangoria , the slice-and dice bible. Which meant that sales and rentals would probably go through the roof.

Sometimes life was good.

He looked at his watch. Four-ten. Ken was supposed to meet him here at four-fifteen, but his friend was chronically late and he was prepared to wait until four thirty. He took another sip of beer, a small one, trying to make it last.

To his surprise, Ken arrived on time for once. He flagged down Carlene, the waitress, ordered a Miller, and settled heavily into the chair opposite Stormy.

"Nice day at the office?"

"It's always a party when you work for a coroner. I

told you, anytime you want you can come on down and I'll give you a tour, let you see what it's like."

"No thanks."

"We had a cancer death today."

"I take it that's worse than a regular death?"

"Looking at it's not that bad, but the smell . . ." Ken shook his head. "When you pop someone open with colon cancer, that's a smell you won't forget."

"This is really appetizing. Are we going to order some hors d'oeuvres?"

Ken grinned. "Sure. Liver pate?"

"That's truly disgusting."

"You're a wussboy ."

"And you're a senseless psycho who's completely inured to blood and guts."

Ken shrugged. "You get used to it. I mean, before AIDS, we used to buy our lunch at McDonald's and put the sacks on top of the open bodies and eat. Sometimes, if people came to visit, we'd intentionally gross them out and play catch with, like, a spleen. You know, just to freak them." He laughed. "But now everyone's pretty careful. AIDS and O.J., man. They've really put a damper on the body biz. Things just aren't as fun anymore."

Carlene arrived with Ken's beer, and Stormy asked for another for himself.

"I'm telling you," Ken said. "You oughta put shit like that in a movie. Show'em what it's like in a real coroner's office. People'd love it."

"I don't make movies, I distribute them. And aside from the Faces of Death crowd, I don't think there's a big market for stuff like that. There aren't as many weirdos in the world as you might think there are."

"Speaking of weird, I was talking to Tom Utchaca yesterday about what's happening out by the reservation."

"What is happening out by the reservation?"

"A lot of strange shit's been going down."

Stormy leaned forward. This was getting interesting.

"You know Tom, right? He's not stupid and he's not superstitious." Ken lowered his voice. "He says his father's come back to the reservation."

"I thought his father was dead."

"He is."

Stormy blinked, started to say something, closed his mouth.

"Said he saw him in back of his parents' old place.

The house is abandoned, I guess, and he was driving by on his way somewhere and saw his father standing there in the empty field. He stopped the car because he wanted to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, and his father smiled and waved at him and started walking over.

"Tom took off.

"And he's not the only one. A lot of the people say their dead are coming back. Tom doesn't know what the hell to think, but he said the word going around the reservation is that the netherworld is full, that there's no more room for the dead and some of them are leaking out, coming back into our world."

Against his will, Stormy felt a slight tingle pass down his spine. "Are these supposed to be ghosts or actual resurrected bodies?"

"Bodies. Resurrected and restored. They're not rotting zombies, they're back and good as new. Tom said his father looked like he did in his prime."

"You don't actually believe this shit, do you?"

"I've known Tom a long time, and I haven't seen anything myself yet but, yeah, I believe him."

"You deal with dead bodies every day. How can you--?"

"How can I what?" He paused. "You know, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I

know. It's a cliche , but I thought I knew everything when I got out of school, and when I first started this job I wouldn't have believed a story like that if Tom's father had walked into my bedroom and grabbed my dick. But I've learned over the years to listen to more than just the textbook facts in my head. I've learned to read people and situations.

And as crazy as this sounds, I think it's legitimate. I think it's true."

Stormy wanted to laugh at his friend, wanted to berate him for falling for such superstitious crap, but the sincerity of Ken's belief lent it a verisimilitude that Stormy found disconcerting.

"The thing is, it's not just the dead. Seems that people on the reservation have seen dolls that are . . . animated.

Those kachinas they make for the tourists. I gather the dollmakers won't even go near the workshop anymore.

It's all closed up."

"Tom told you all this?"

"Oh, no. You know him. I only found out about his father because I asked him. I'd heard elsewhere that some strange stuff was happening, and I wanted to check on it."

Stormy stared down into the bottom of his empty glass. Something about all this sounded vaguely familiar, but he was not quite able to put his finger on it. Had it been in a movie? He didn't think so. The connection was more real, more personal, more immediate. The specifics of it eluded him, but he saw these strange occurrences as an extension of something that had happened before--although he did not know what that "something"

was.

He cleared his throat. "The 'animated' dolls. They walk? At night?"

Ken nodded. "You got it."

He could have guessed that. It was logical. What else would animated dolls do? But he hadn't guessed. He had known. Or remembered. He wasn't sure which. In his mind was a picture of a ragged primitive doll rocking slowly on unbending legs, making its determined way down a long dark hallway.

A long dark hallway?

He didn't want to think about this, and he was grateful that Carlene brought his beer over to the table at just that moment. He paid her and tipped her, made some small talk to try and keep her there, but The Hogan was getting crowded as other people got off work and she had to hurry over to fill their orders.

Ken was about to tell him something else about the reservation, some other supernatural event that had happened, but Stormy cut him off before he got out the first word, changing the subject, asking if Ken had had a chance to look at any of the videotapes he'd lent him last week. He had, and he'd really hated one of them, and he started going off on it, telling Stormy how much he'd disliked the movie, and Stormy pretended to be offended, pretended to defend the film, but inside he breathed a sigh of relief, thankful they'd gotten off the subject of the reservation.

But it was still there, in his mind, and he thought about it through drinks, through dinner, on the way home, and by the time he went to bed that night, crawling next to an already sleeping Roberta, he was almost positive that he himself had once owned a doll that had been alive.

Mark Kristen is dead.

Mark was sitting alone in the large corner booth of Denny's in Indio when the knowledge came to him, and it took a moment for the information to register. He was holding the cup of cold coffee in his hand, pretending to drink so the waitress wouldn't come over and ask if he wanted a refill, staring out the window at the rusted boxcars sitting unattached on the train tracks across the highway. The sky was brightening, the high desert clouds now sunrise pink against the light blue background sky.