Bentley Little - The House

He parked at the end of the street and got out of the car, opening his umbrella. The rain was back down to a drizzle. Daniel was grateful for that, and he hopped over the running gutter onto the sidewalk. He felt a little strange walking up to the door of the first house, a little foolish, but by the time he reached the fifth house, he had his spiel down pat and his embarrassment had given way to uneasiness.

Before he'd finished with the first side of the street, he knew the truth.

There was no one named Billingsly living on Edgecomb .

No one had seen or heard of a girl named Doneen .

He went up the opposite side of the street just in case, but the result was the same. Neither adult nor child knew anything about Tony's mysterious acquaintances.

Daniel got back into the car and sat for a moment behind the steering wheel, staring out the windshield at the rainy street.

What bothered him the most was that he knew his son was not lying. Doneen was not simply a made-up person or a figment of Tony's imagination. She and her father were real. Or, rather, Tony had really met them.

How did he know that? How could he be so sure?

Because he'd met them himself as a child.

There it was again, on the tip of his consciousness, just that side of recollection. He knew he'd met them but could not recall any specifics. He tried not to derail this train of thought, tried to keep his mind on that narrow track, but other thoughts intruded, expanding his concentration outward, and his brief tenuous grasp of the past slipped, any hope he had of pinning down those memories gone. There remained only the certainty, not backed up by detail, that he had once metDoneen and Mr.Billingsly , and that Tony had too.

He started the car, pulled out into the street. Rather than back up or execute a three-point turn in the rain, he drove down to the end ofEdgecomb and turned left, intending to drive around the block and return to their street.

He was halfway down Edgecomb when he saw it.

There, in the rain, in the middle of the street, a small shadow, the same shadow he'd seen before in the alley.

Doneen?

He braked to a halt, jumped out of the car, but it was gone. The street was empty, the sidewalks vacant, no sign of anyone or anything out of the ordinary. The rain chose that moment to stop entirely, and through a thin curtain of white amid the dark clouds above, the light of the sun poked through, illuminating the neighborhood.

Nothing.

That was it, the last straw. This was enough. He had to know. He'd had his fill of these half remembrances and partial sightings and nebulous portents. He wanted to know about the House. He wanted to know what had happened to him there and what it had to do with Margot and Tony. He wanted to know why he couldn't remember his past. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

He'd talk to Margot about it, call a psychiatrist tomorrow, one that specialized in hypnosis and regression therapy.

Her insurance had to have some type of mental health provisions. He could say he suspected that he'd been molested as a child. Hell, he could just tell the truth, explain what he'd been seeing and hearing and thinking, and he'd have no problem finding a shrink willing to uncover the dark secrets of his past.

He didn't have to go to a psychiatrist, though.

It came back on its own.

All of it.

Laurie Laurie dug through the box of her parents' photographs looking for a clue, trying to find some documentation of her previous life, some hint of her pre-adoptive days.

Josh sat next to her on the floor, sorting through additional piles of pictures, attempting to help her reconstruct a past that neither of them knew anything about.

She stared at a photo of herself and Josh at Disney land, waving and smiling in front of It's A Small World.

She was adopted.

It shouldn't have affected anything, but it did, and already she felt distanced from Josh, not as close to him as she had been before. She'd give anything in the world to bring back her old feelings, but the knowledge that they were not really related had completely changed the emotional dynamics of their relationship, and she felt simultaneously as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and as if she were floating off into space, her tether broken.

She had to bear in mind that it was only her feelings that had changed. He had known all along, so his perception of her was exactly the same as it had always been.

He loved her like a sister.

She felt guilty that she was allowing the concrete sciences of biology and genetics to affect the fragile nature of her own feelings and emotions.

"Hey," Josh said excitedly. "I think we have something here. Look at this."

He scooted next to her on the floor, handing her an old black-and-white photo.

Their parents were standing with her biological parents.

In front of the house.

It was everything at once, in one picture, and she stared at it dumbly, taking it all in. There was the forest behind the house: old growth redwoods, holding in darkness.

The Victorian mansion: black gables and shuttered windows and wraparound porch, retaining even in the photo the aura of spookiness she so clearly remembered.

In front of the house, on the circular dirt drive, were her parents.

All four of them.

The ones who had brought her up, the only parents she knew, Josh's parents, were smiling for the camera, their flowered paisley clothes loud even in black-and white, a large trunk on the ground to the left of them.

On the other side of the trunk, unsmiling, wearing formal clothes and equally formal expressions, were her real parents, her biological parents.

She looked closely at first her mother's face, then her father's, then back again. She recognized the faces now, but they engendered no response, triggered no emotion within her. She didn't know what she'd expected--some cathartic rush of long pent-up feeling perhaps--but she wasn't prepared for this detached, objective reaction. As she stared at the photo, her feelings were for her other parents, her adoptive parents, and for the first time since she'd learned what had happened to her, she was glad Josh's parents had adopted her, glad she had not grown up with this sober, grimly humorless couple.

She looked over at Josh, and once again he felt like her real brother.

She focused her attention on the photograph. It was all familiar to her, everything in the picture, and, despite her lack of feeling for the man and woman who had brought her into this world, the relentless curiosity about her past and compulsive thirst for self-knowledge that had been driving her for the past several days, ever since she found out she'd been adopted, had not abated at all.

If anything, those impulses were stronger, and her desire to know what had happened to her, why she'd been adopted why her parents had been murdered --was a palpable hunger, almost a physical need. She felt strongly that whatever had happened at that house, whatever cataclysm had destroyed her family, was connected with the dreams she was having now, with the girl.

Dawn.

"Do you know this place?" she asked, pointing at the photo. "Do you know where it is?"

Josh nodded. "I remember that house." He thought for a moment, turned to her. "Do you?"

She shivered. "How could anyone forget it?"

"It's on a vortex," he said.

Cut out the New Age crap, she wanted to tell him, but something kept her from it.

"Of course, we didn't know what that was back then.

Especially not me. I was what? Four? But even I could tell there was something . . . powerful about that house."

"You mean it was haunted."

"Is that what you remember?"

She nodded.

He took the photo from her. "That's how I remember it, too."