Bentley Little - The House

There was a small figure standing alone at the darkened end of the hall, pale white against the deep red and brown of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Billings' daughter.

The girl was supposed to have been retarded. She did not live with her father in the house but slept on a cot next to the incubation room because she liked to be near the baby chicks. Billings never talked about her, and their parents had warned him and Kristen many times that they were not to speak of her in front of the assistant.

Mark had not seen her in some time, had, in fact, almost forgotten about her, and he did not think he had ever seen her inside the house, but the girl still looked the same. She was at least as old as Kristen--she'd been around ever since he could remember--but she looked younger. Ten or eleven at the most.

Something about that did not sit well with him.

He stood in place, staring down the hallway at her, wondering how she'd gotten inside.

"Mark."

He had never heard her speak before, and the sound of her voice chilled him. She did not sound retarded at all. Her voice instead was clear, soft, feminine. It was not loud, but it carried clearly in the silent hallway, and there seemed something unnatural about it. She was wearing only a thin white shift, and though there was no light behind her, he could tell that she wore nothing underneath it.

The girl beckoned to him, one pale arm motioning for him to approach, and his chill intensified. There was a cold breeze blowing through the hall, even though the air conditioner was off and all of the windows in the house were closed. The only sound was the slight flapping of the girl's shift against her bare legs and the overloud pumping of his heart.

"Mark." She spoke again, smiling slightly, beckoning, and he began walking toward her, not wanting to admit his fear, not wanting to acknowledge his apprehension.

He prayed desperately that his parents would come home right now, that Billings would enter the house looking for his daughter. He did not know why, but he did not want to be alone with this girl, and while even an hour ago he would have laughed had someone suggested that he would be trembling nervously at the sight of the assistant's retarded daughter, he was not laughing now.

His hands were sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants, stopping maybe ten feet in front of the girl. Behind her was a chair, a dark mahogany chair that matched perfectly the adjacent wall but that he could not remember having ever seen before.

The breeze blew against his face, caressed his hair. He tried to pretend as though nothing was wrong. "Hey,"

he said, "where's your dad?"

"Mark," the girl repeated.

Maybe it was the only word she knew, he thought.

Maybe it was the only word she could say.

But her voice still didn't sound retarded, and this time there'd seemed something . . . sensual in it.

She moved slightly to her left, repositioned the chair, and bent slowly over its seat, smiling at him, her shift hiking up to expose the creamy whiteness of bare buttocks.

"Fuck me," she said softly. "Fuck me in the ass."

Shocked, he backed up, shaking his head. "No . . ."

"I like it hard. Fuck me hard."

There was something wrong here, something fundamentally awry, something that went far deeper than an over experienced underage girl and her frighteningly unnatural nymphomania. He could feel it, sense it, a palpable presence in the hallway, a malevolence in the setting and the situation that included Billings' daughter but was not limited to her. Whatever he had feared in this house, whatever subliminal danger he had felt, it was here, now, and Mark knew that he had to get out and get away as quickly as possible before something horrible happened.

He continued backing up, keeping his eyes on the girl.

"I want it," she said. "I want it now."

"No."

"I want you to fuck my ass."

"No!" he said more firmly.

"Your father does it." She smiled at him over her shoulder and there was evil in that smile, a corruption that went far beyond mere sex, a deeply depraved immorality of which this was only the simplest and most obvious manifestation. "He makes it hurt."

Mark ran. He turned tail and ran back upstairs to his room, and he heard behind him the girl's mocking laughter, the soft sounds echoing and amplifying in the dark hall and stairwell.

He had not come out until his family had returned home and Kristen had knocked on his door to tell him that he had to help unload groceries from the car.

It was after that that he had been able to tap into The Power. It had always been there, he supposed, and he attributed the dread and apprehension he felt about the house to its low-level influence, but the encounter with Billings' daughter had somehow jump-started it, kicked it into gear. It truly was like a sixth sense to him, and he didn't have to think about it or concentrate on using it. Like seeing or hearing or smelling or touching or tasting, it was a physical response to people and places and things that he experienced, a natural part of him that provided sensory input which his brain accepted and sorted.

He could sense now the corruption in the house, in his parents, and he knew that sooner or later he would have to leave. He did not belong here, he did not fit in, and either he had to reject the house or the house would reject him.

He did not want to know what would happen if that occurred.

He received no such vibes from Billings--the assistant was a complete blank--and that frightened him. He and Billings had always gotten along famously, the assistant was like an uncle to him, but now every time he saw the man he thought of his daughter, and the traits that had made Billings seem so kind and caring before now made him seem false and secretive, and Mark stayed as far away from him as possible.

His parents seemed to realize that something had happened, they seemed to recognize his newfound Power, and their attitudes toward him shifted. Not profoundly but subtly. He was still required to follow his father's rules, to be in certain places and do certain things at certain times, but there was a wariness now, a slight emotional distancing, and while nothing changed in their behavior toward his sister, he got the feeling that they would not mind at all if he left the fold.

He'd begun staying out of the house as much as possible, staying at friends' homes, sleeping outside when he could, camping out on the porch, but he'd seen her again one night, in the door of the first chicken coop, white in the moonlight, beckoning to him, and he'd hurried back into the house, back up to his room, hearing once again the sound of her light laughter behind him.

He tried after that to convince Kristen to leave with him, to run away, but though she too was not happy with the house, though he sensed within her a secret unacknowledged fear of Billings' daughter, there was no way that she was willing to leave their parents. He told her that they could write or call, let their mother and father know where they were and why they had left, but she put her foot down. This was her home and she did not want to leave.

He worked on Kristen the rest of the summer, but his entreaties seemed to have the opposite effect of that intended. She became more resolute in her intention to stay, more devoted to her current life. She understood why he wanted to leave, and though, for selfish reasons, she wanted him to remain, Kristen told him that she would always love him and always support him in his choices, whatever they were.

And then one night the retarded girl came into his bedroom.

She looked retarded this time, and she did not speak, but the eroticism of her movements had not lessened, and the juxtaposition of her mental handicap and her obvious sensuality was truly disturbing.