Bentley Little: The House

He put on his best Important Traveler voice, and she smiled at him and nodded. "Sure."

"Thanks."

He felt a little better. His disguise was in place and he was safely ensconced here with other people. He walked into the bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror.

He hadn't shaved yet today and was starting to look a little raggedy, but his sweat-clumped hair was the main problem, and he took out a comb, held it under the faucet and ran it through his hair.

Much better.

He realized suddenly that he had to take a whiz, and he walked over to the closest urinal, unzipping his pants --and saw out of the corner of his eye a fluttering black shape.

It was there for only a second, in one of the mirrors, and he whirled around, already zipping up, his mouth suddenly dry, his heart once again pounding.

A cold hand touched his shoulder.

"No!" he screamed, jerking around.

But there was nothing there.

He ran out of the rest room as fast as he could.

Wyoming It was an omen, her mother would have said, and Patty was not so sure she disagreed. Hube would laugh at her if she told him that, would make fun of her and her mother and her entire family, would tell her to move into the twentieth century, but Hube didn't know as much as he thought he did. There were a lot of things science could explain, but there were a lot of things it couldn't, and Patty wasn't so close-minded that she automatically dismissed anything that didn't agree with her preconceived notions.

She stared at the crow sitting atop the garbage can.

The crow stared back at her, blinked.

It had been there when she'd come out to hang the wash on the line, the biggest crow she'd ever seen, and it had not flown away as she walked past it but had sat and watched her as she hung up the underwear and the socks and the towels. She'd told it to shoo, had stomped her foot and made threatening movements, but the crow had not been afraid. It seemed to know that she wouldn't hurt it, and it seemed to have its own agenda.

It wasn't going to leave until it did what it had come here to do.

Just what that was, Patty didn't know, but she couldn't help thinking that the black bird was trying to warn her, that it had been sent here for a purpose, in order to tell her something, and it was up to her to figure out exactly what that was.

She wished her mother were here.

Patty stared at the crow for a few moments longer, then walked past it, into the house. She'd call her mother. That's what she'd do. She'd describe the crow, spell out the precise chain of events, and see if her mother could figure it out.

The crow cawed once as she entered the house. Twice more at the precise second she picked up the kitchen phone to dial.

She wished Hube were here as well. He might have some smart answer for why the crow's cries were timed so specifically to her movements, but she doubted that even he could fail to notice the correlation.

The line was busy, and she heard one more quick caw as she hung up the receiver. She opened the back door to check on the crow once again, but it was gone. She walked outside, hurried around the house, but it was nowhere to be seen. Not on the roof, not on the porch, not on the ground or any of the trees. She didn't even see any birds in the sky. It was as if it had just disappeared.

She walked up the front steps of the house and turned for a moment to look at the view. She could see the Tetons, rising grandly up, the permanent snowcaps blending in with today's white ceiling of autumn sky.

Directly before her, on the other side of the pasture, the overgrown meadow, its grass brown and dry, sloped up and away from their ranch, the end of the meadow indistinguishable from the beginning of the foothills.

She looked to her right, past the garage at the side of the house, but saw no dust trail clouding up the road.

She wished Hube would hurry up and get back. He was supposed to have gone into town for coffee and bread flour, but it seemed like he'd been away for far too long. She hoped the truck hadn't had engine trouble again. The last thing they needed was another mechanic's bill. They were still paying off the water pump from July. They couldn't afford to have anything else go wrong. Not with winter coming on.

Patty walked into the house, automatically stomping her feet on the outside of the doorsill though she hadn't walked through any mud. She reached for the living room phone on the small oak table next to the couch and was about to dial her mother's number once again when out of the corner of her eye, through the mesh of the screen, she saw movement outside. She stopped, slowly put the receiver back in its cradle, and walked back over to the doorway.

She could see them coming from the mountains. Dozens of them. It looked like a small army, speeding down the side of the hill toward the sloping meadow.

A small army.

For the runners were all the size of children. She could see that even from here. Only they weren't children.

Something about the build of their bodies, the way they moved, indicated to her that they were older than that.

Much older.

They reached the high grass and leaped into it, and then she could see only the movement of the grass stalks, what looked like a narrow band of wind whipping through the center of the meadow.

What were they? Leprechauns? Elves? Something supernatural.

Not dwarves or midgets or children. Even from this far away, their strangeness, their otherness, was apparent. They were not human.

She watched the grass whip back and forth, the narrow stream of movement heading straight toward the ranch. She stood her ground, not moving, and she realized that she was not as afraid as she should have been.

But that changed.

The grass in front of the pasture began to thrash wildly and then they emerged into the open, clutching weapons made of baseball bats and animal skulls, horseshoes and bones. They were made up like clowns: red noses, white faces, colored lips, and rainbow hair.

Only she wasn't sure it was makeup.

They kept streaming into the pasture from the tall grass. Five of them. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Nothing slowed them down, and their stubby legs pumped for all they were worth, carrying them around the clump of boulders in the center of the pasture, jumping over the small fenceHube had built for the cows. They were accompanied by what looked like a swarm of insects.

Bees, maybe. Or beetles.

Patty closed the front door, locked it. But she knew, even as she did so, that she would not be safe in the house. Her only hope was to run, to get out before they overran her home and hope that it slowed them down enough to let her escape. She had no idea what they were or what they wanted, but she knew it was not good, and she could not believe she'd been so stupid as to just stand there and watch them approach when she could have been fleeing.

This was what the crow's appearance had foretold, she knew. The crow had been an omen, a warning, and she probably would have known that if she'd paid a little more attention to her mother growing up and a little less attention to boys.

A judgmental review of her entire life passed through her mind as she ran through the house and out the back door, locking it behind her. A critique of her faults and shortcomings, an analysis in hindsight of her mistakes and misjudgments. The thrust of it all seemed to be that she could have avoided finding herself in this predicament if she'd done things differently, but she did not really believe that to be the case.

She could not hope to outrun them. She knew that.

So she ran toward the barn, thinking that if she could get to the old root cellar and lock it from the inside, she might be able to survive. The house was between her and the creatures and she was counting on it to hide her movements, to shield her whereabouts, at least until she could get into the cellar, but even before she reached the barn she heard the rattle of bones behind her.