Bentley Little: The House

His father bounded instantly away from the gutted elk and toward Tom. The guide started stabbing outward, but his reactions were slow and the knife cut only air.

Tom's neck was broken with one quick snap, and then his father changed directions and loped across the small open space toward him, grinning crazily.

There was elk blood on his teeth.

Jennings tried to get away, clawed his way through the brush, through the bushes, started heading back through the trees toward camp, but his father caught him before he'd gone more than a few feet. He was knocked to the ground, and he felt the weight of his father's compacted body on his back. Strong hands slipped around his neck, fingers digging into his flesh.

Dad! he wanted to scream.

But the air in his lungs could not escape to form words, and the world around him faded, and he saw only blackness.

New York Shelly emerged from the bathroom and glanced over at Sam on the bed. He looked up from his magazine, smiled warmly at her, and she turned away. He was getting maudlin as he grew older and it was something that had begun to irritate her. He cried now in movies formulaic, simplistic, emotionally manipulative movies that were transparent in their sentimentality even to fTJtwasann°ying to hear his light occasional sniffles next to her, to see his finger wipe wetness from the corners of his eyes. He had not cried when David died, nor when his own parents had passed on, yet he was now shedding tears for not particularly well-drawn fictional characters artificially embroiled in embarrassingly contrived plots.

She wondered sometimes why she had married him.

Shaking her head, Shelly walked over to the dresser, picked up her brush and--there was another face in the mirror.

She blinked, closed her eyes. Looked away, looked back. But the face was still there, an ancient hag with impossibly wrinkled parchment skin, dark eyes narrowed into an evil slit, a hard cruel smile on a nearly lipless mouth.

Mary Worth.

Shelly backed up, all of the saliva in her mouth suddenly gone, but she could not look away. She could see a reversed image of the bedroom in the mirror, Sam sitting up, leaning against the headboard, reading his magazine. In the foreground was the face, just on the other side of the mirrored dresser, staring back at her with malevolent intensity. She'd thought at first that it was unattached to a body, but the longer she looked the more she saw, and she could now make out hunched shoulders beneath a black robe, although she could not say whether the body had been there all along or had materialized before her eyes. Mary Worth.

It was exactly the face she had expected to see all those years ago, when she and her sisters and her friends had had sleepovers and had played those nighttime party games indulged in by every schoolgirl in America. "Mary Worth had been their favorite, and they had dutifully taken turns standing before the mirror with their eyes closed repeating "Mary Worth, Mary Worth, Mary Worth 'The story was that if you said her name a hundred times, she would appear. None of them had ever been brave enough to make it to a hundred, chickening out and running squealing back to their beds and sleeping bags somewhere around forty or forty-five, and she knew that she herself had always purposely kept it under fifty, no matter what she told her sisters and her friends, because that, too, seemed a magical number and she'd been afraid that Mary Worth might have been partially present by that point and she did not want to see her at all.

Shelly could not remember who had initially taught her the ritual or where she had first learned of it, and she could not recall ever having seen a picture of Mary Worth or ever having the hag described to her. All she'd known was that Mary Worth was ancient and utterly terrifying.

But she realized now that the face in the mirror was exactly how she'd pictured Mary Worth in her mind.

Shelly stared into the mirror, blinked.

Where was her reflection?

She had not realized it until this second, but although everything else in the bedroom was reflected exactly, she herself was not in the mirror.

Mary Worth had taken her place.

If before she had been frightened, now she was utterly terrified, and she watched with growing horror as the old crone withdrew from her robe a long silver knife, wrinkled bony fingers clutching the blackened hilt. Shelly quickly looked around the room to make sure there was no real Mary Worth present, then glanced down at her own body to make sure there was no superimposition upon her frame, to make sure she was not wearing a black robe and withdrawing a knife of which she was unaware.

No.

But in the mirror she was still not visible and Mary Worth, her twisted smile growing broader, turned around, gripping the knife tightly, and walked over toward where Sam lay on the bed reading.

Shelly was staring into the mirror as the old crone began to stab, and she whirled around when Sam started screaming behind her.

There was still no Mary Worth, but Sam was thrashing around on the bed, sudden slices opening up the skin of his chest and thigh, blood both welling and spurting, depending on the location of the slash, covering his skin and his fallen magazine, the pink sheets and pillowcases, the headboard and the nightstand and the Indian rug on the hardwood floor.

There was no noise save for Sam's ear-piercing screams, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

In the mirror, Mary Worth was laughing, cackling, but there was no accompanying sound. Her voice, if she had one, was trapped behind the glass, audible only in that world, and while her actions were manifest in the real bedroom, her form and voice were not.

How had Mary Worth come? No one had invoked her name.

There was a missing piece here. Shelly could buy the concept of summoning up an evil spirit, but she did not quite believe that Mary Worth was able to show up on her own, without being called. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work, and while the story she'd been told might be part of a children's game, there was a kernel of truth to all legends.

Sam had stopped screaming. He was dead, but Mary Worth continued to stab, and his lifeless body jerked on the mattress with the force of her knife blows.

Shelly was not screaming either. She was not panicking, not afraid, and while she was probably just in shock, Sam's murder was not the horrifyingly cataclysmic event that it should have been. Indeed, she felt detached from it, the scene next to her in the room as distant, flat, and removed as something on television, the reflection in the mirror only slightly more immediate because of the frightening visage of Mary Worth.

Mary Worth.

Even the monster was not as terrifying as she had been. Shelly was getting used to the crone, and she thought that perhaps she had summoned the hag, had subconsciously wanted her to do just what she was doing.

No.

She and Sam might have drifted apart. Maybe she didn't even love him anymore. But never in her most vicious fantasies had she ever wished him dead. This was all Mary Worth's doing, not hers.

But she would be blamed for it.

The knowledge hit her all of a sudden. She once again faced the bed, saw her husband's bloody body, his chest cavity hacked open so wide that portions of organs were visible through the rent skin and muscle.

She turned back toward the mirror.

In the glass, Mary Worth was once again standing in her place on the other side of the dresser, looking back at her.

And she was smiling.

Daniel "Wake up."

Daniel heard his wife's voice, felt her hands gently shaking him awake, but it had been a long time since he'd gotten up this early and his body resisted. He moaned, turned over, dug deeper into the blankets.