Bentley Little - The House

He did not see her again until he was eighteen.

He'd been drafted into the army, and just before he was scheduled to go into basic training, he went into town to buy a card, a sort of Don't-Forget-Me card for Darcy Wallace, his girlfriend at the time. He returned home, and the second he walked through the door, he could smell something burning. He called out but no one answered. He thought maybe his mother had left something in the oven and forgotten about it. She'd done that before. His brother, who was already in the army, and his sisters, who were living together in an apartment in Toledo where they were both going to secretarial school, were supposed to come home for the big going-away party, and he figured his mother was making something special, a roast or a turkey.

He rushed into the kitchen, pushed open the swinging door. The entire room was filled with smoke. Black smoke that smelled like burnt toast.

He didn't know what had happened at first. He shut off the oven and opened the windows and the back door.

Donna was standing in the yard in her dirty shift, staring back at him, unmoving, but he didn't have time to fool around with her, and he hurried back over to the stove.

She'd killed them and cut off their heads and put their heads in the oven.

All of them.

His parents, his brother, his sisters.

He was fanning out the smoke when he saw his father's burned head, sitting on the middle rack. The old man's eyes were gone and his lips were flattened and all of the fat and flesh seemed to have melted off, but Norton recognized who it was. Next to that, his mother's head had fallen over and parts of her were sticking to the grill. His brother's and sisters' heads were smoldering in the back, all lumped together.

They reminded him of the burned ants.

He never saw Donna again. Just that last look through the door, through the smoke. And when he thought back on it, later, he realized that she looked the same as she had before. She hadn't aged at all. She still looked twelve.

Now Norton sucked in a deep breath and looked up at the house, then turned back toward the plucked chicken and its pointing wing. Was this a joke or a warning?

Was it meant to be threatening or welcoming? It was impossible to tell; the mind behind it was so alien to his own. Nevertheless, he got out of the car and walked purposely toward the house, up the porch. He thought he heard a child laughing.

A girl.

Donna.

He pressed down on his erection.

The front door opened even before he had a chance to knock, and their old hired hand stood there, within the dark entryway, smiling at him, looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago.

"Hello, Billingson ," Norton said, trying to keep the quiver from his voice. "May I come in?"

Stormy Roberta was gone.

There'd been no hint, no warning, no indication that she'd been planning on leaving him. She'd been even colder and more diffident to him than usual after the misunderstanding with theFinnigan brothers' bankruptcy lawyer, but that wasn't a drastic departure from her typical pattern of behavior, and it had hardly registered on his emotional radar.

But he'd come home on Monday and she hadn't been there, and now she'd been gone for three days. There'd been no note, he hadn't heard from her, and since she'd packed several suitcases and taken the Saab, he assumed that she'd left him.

And he found that he didn't really care.

He cared about the hanging threads, of course. The unresolved details. He didn't like loose ends, didn't like having anything hanging over his head. But he assumed she'd talk to a lawyer at some point and the lawyer would contact him and they'd work out some sort of settlement.

Then he'd be free.

It was a strange feeling and he wasn't entirely used to it yet. Everyone was telling him good riddance, even Joan, and bothRanee and Ken had offered to reintroduce him to the singles' scene, teach him the ropes, but the truth was that he was not ready to start dating again.

Not yet. His friends' descriptions of one-night stands with young nubile women willing to do anything, no matter how kinky, were admittedly tempting, and even at his fringe of the entertainment industry the opportunities were there, but he just didn't seem to be in the mood to immediately jump back into the social whirl, to begin forming new emotional attachments. He felt tired, drained, a little burned out, and he wanted to collect himself, charge his batteries a bit before starting up again.

Fruit salad in the toilet.

Rose and cheese in the sink drain.

Those images had never been very far from his mind, and he supposed that was one reason why he was so reluctant to commit to anything new. He'd been haunted by his experience in the theater. He'd been having dreams ever since that day, dreams of his parents' old house in Chicago. Nightmares filled with recurring images:

living dolls and walking dead fathers and dirty sex crazed children.

But it was what he had seen in the theater that scared him the most. Ghosts and zombies and the other traditional trappings of horror were indeed frightening--particularly in real life, outside the make-believe context of film--but it was the irrational incomprehensibility of what he'd seen in the demolished bathroom that made him feel truly afraid. For these were things that were not categorized or recognized, that were not part of fiction or folklore, and they made him realize how ignorant and inconsequential he really was.

There was meaning in what he had seen--of that he was sure--but the fact that he could not begin to even grasp the superficialities of intent shook him to the core of his being.

Something was going on, something just underneath the surface realities, something so huge and all-encompassing that it was breaking through in unexpected places and in unfathomable ways.

Once again, he thought about the events on the reservation and the idea that these supernatural occurrences were spreading outward from a common cause over an epic area of ground.

It terrified him, but a perenially practical part of his mind told him that it might not make for a bad movie.

There was a knock on his door frame, and Russ Madsen, this semester's intern, poked his head into the office.

"Mr. Salinger? Could I speak to you for a moment?"

Stormy nodded, waved him in. Like most of the interns he'd had over the past two years, Russ was terminally overeager and far too obsequious for his own good.

He was a nice kid, but Stormy had entered into an agreement with the university in Albuquerque because, as he understood it, the kids would get real world experience, he'd get free workers, and the school would collect tuition without having to teach. From his perspective, though, the internship program had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The students who came to his company were all wannabe film makers and they seemed to spend most of their time trying to impress him with their knowledge and talent rather than doing the jobs he assigned them.

Russ was a little better than the others. He was just as adept at brown-nosing, and he tried just as hard to impress, but he did actually do the work and he completed the assignments given him.

Stormy smiled at the intern. "What is it, Russ?"

"I have a tape I think you might like." He placed a videocassette on the desk. "It's an unreleased feature by a local filmmaker, and I think it's terrific. It's sort of a horror movie, but it's . . . different. I don't really know how to explain it. But I thought you might want to take a look at it."

"Your film?"

"No." He smiled. "That would be conflict of interest."

"Excellent answer." Stormy reached for the tape, picked it up. The title on the label was Butchery.

"Good title," Stormy observed.