Bentley Little - The House

"Good film. I know I'm just an intern, but I think it has potential. I watched it last night, and I was so blown away that I had to let you see it. I lied and told the guy who gave it to me that I hadn't watched it yet and asked if I could hold on to it for another day so I could get it to you."

Stormy looked over at Russ. He'd never really talked to the boy before, and he was impressed by what appeared to be his genuine love and enthusiasm for movies. Most of his other interns had been closer in temperament to his old L.A. cronies, film snobs who would probably end up in businesses entirely unrelated to the industry but who still looked down on the direct to-video market and considered their time here to be a form of slumming. Russ seemed to be more like himself, and he thought that maybe he'd been a little too quick to rush to judgment.

"You do have a film of your own, though? Right?"

"Yeah," the intern admitted.

"Something you think we'd be interested in here?"

"I think so. It's an action flick and I made it on a shoestring budget, but the production values are pretty good, and the female lead's a real find. I think the actors are really impressive.

"I'd like to see it sometime."

"That'd be great! I'm in post now, but I'd love to let you look at it when I'm done. Any help or advice you could give me would be ... I mean, I'd really appreciate it."

"All right," Stormy said, smiling. He held up the videocassette.

"Thanks for dropping this off, and I'll take a look at it today."

Russ understood that the meeting was over, and he awkwardly excused himself and hurriedly left the office.

Butchery.

Stormy toyed with the tape in his hand. With all of the other things going on, it might be relaxing to view a little video carnage. It might take a little of the edge off what passed for reality these days. There was a lot of paperwork he had to do, some agreements he had to go over that would allow a few of his more explicit titles to be sold in Canada, but he was having a difficult time concentrating on work this morning, and he told Joan to hold all his calls, closed the door, popped the tape in his VCR, settling back in his chair to watch the movie.

The title was misleading. There was no butchery in the film. There was not even any blood. There was instead a gothic mansion and an ambiguously manipulative butler and a misunderstood young boy with a crazy grandmother and two emotionally distant parents.

Stormy felt increasingly cold as he watched the film, filled with a growing sense of dread.

He knew this house.

He knew this story.

It was his parents' place in Chicago, and the unnamed boy was himself as a child, navigating the treacherous waters of the unstable household, trying to maintain for himself a normal existence despite the continuous undefined threats of the strange insular world around him.

He'd forgotten a lot of this, forgotten the butler, forgotten the intimidating house, forgotten the feeling of being always off balance, always nervous, always floundering, but it came back to him now as he watched the movie, and when the boy was seduced by the butler's sly daughter, posing as a homeless street urchin, Stormy mouthed the girl's name.

"Donielle."

If the film fell into any genre, it would be psychological horror, but that limiting label did not begin to convey the scope of the work. Russ was right. The film was amazingly accomplished. As good as the Hopi kid's flick.

It created an unsettling universe of its own, and despite the rather slow pace of the movie, it drew the viewer in, and it made one care deeply about the fate of its protagonist.

It was not the film's artistic merit, however, but the personal connection, the references to himself, to his own life, to his childhood, that gripped Stormy, that left him staring at the snow-filled screen for several minutes after the movie had ended.

It meant something, he knew, but again he didn't know what.

He thought of what he'd seen in the theater, and the connection was made.

Theater.

Film.

There was a thread linking his childhood in that horrible frightening house to the disappearing figure, the fruit salad in the toilet, the rose in the cheese in the sink drain. It was a connective tissue so fine as to be almost nonexistent, but it was there, and it was extant, and he was suddenly possessed by the need to meet the person who had made this movie.

There was a feeling of urgency about it, an imperative sense that, like a house of cards, it all might fall apart and whatever tentative connections had been established would disappear.

He burst out of his office. Joan, at her desk, jumped.

"Where's Russ?" he demanded.

"Duping room."

Stormy strode down the hall to the technical facilities and held up the videocassette. "Where did you get this film?" he demanded.

Russ looked up from the equipment, startled. "A, uh, friend of mine gave it to me. He got it from P. P. Rod man, the guy who made it."

"Where is this Rodman?"

"Do you want to buy the distribution rights?"

"I want to meet the person who made this film."

"He lives on the reservation."

The reservation.

It was all connected, the house and the dolls and the theater and TomUtchaca's dead dad, andStormy's almost frantic need to meet this filmmaker immediately intensified. Whatever was going on here, it was big, something that he could only barely imagine, but he was filled with the unfounded, absurd but unshakable conviction that if he could figure out the core cause of all of this craziness, he could put a stop to it before anything catastrophic happened.

Catastrophic?

Where had that come from?

"Do you have Rodman's phone number?" he asked.

Russ shook his head. "He doesn't have a phone."

"Do you know how to get in touch with him?"

"My friend carpools with him to school. I could give him a call."

"Do it."

Stormy hurried back to his office, gave Ken a quick call. Ken was more familiar with the reservation than he was, knew quite a few people there, and Stormy gave a thumbnail sketch of where he was going and why and asked his friend if he'd come along.

"I'm at the office. Pick me up on the way."

Russ knocked on the door frame. "Doug says P.P.

doesn't have classes today. He should be home."

"You have an address?"

"I know where it is."

"You're coming with me, then. Let's go."

A half hour later, Stormy, Russ, and Ken were bumping along the dusty road across the mesa that led to the pueblo serving as tribal headquarters.

Ken's accounts of supernatural occurrences were not exaggerated. If anything, they'd underrepresented the degree of infiltration. Stormy pulled to a stop in front of the headquarters. Kachina dolls were indeed walking around, and they were doing so in the open. There were dozens of them on the flat ground in front of the pueblo, lurching, waddling, and crawling in different directions.

Several stood like sentries on the ledge above the door, swiveling about. On the other side of the creek that bisected the open gathering area, a group of dead men were standing in a circle, apparently speaking among themselves.

Stormy sat for a moment in the car. The extent of what was happening here was overwhelming, and he marveled at how the few people he saw walking about completely ignored the dolls and the dead. Human beings, he thought, can get used to anything.

But perhaps whatever was behind all this knew that.

Maybe it was starting here because the Native American culture was more open in regard to the supernatural, more readily accepting of the nonmaterial world. Maybe this was the first assault in a full-fledged invasion of ghosts and spirits and demons and monsters. Maybe they were easing in gradually, getting people used to them before they . . . What? Took over the world?