Bentley Little - The House

Thought you might like to see it."

Haunted doll?

That was the weird thing about Phillip. He always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of his friends'

lives and psyches, always seemed to provide just the object or scrap of knowledge needed. He was one of those people who, by accident or design, were always in the right place at the right time. Phillip's fiction ran toward hard-edged serial killer stories or sex-and-blood horror, and to Stormy's way of thinking, his real life seemed to dovetail with like subjects far more often than should have been the case.

He'd always liked Phillip, but he had to admit, he'd always been a little afraid of him.

He looked down at the enclosed Xerox, started reading:

From Thomas Jefferson's Diary: April

I am Awake again well before Dawn because of that Infernal Dream engendered by the Figure Shown to Me by Franklin. It is the Fifth Time I have Had the Dream. Did I not Know Franklin so well, I would Believe Him a Practitioner of Witchcraft and the Black Arts.

The Doll, if Doll it Be, Appeared to be Made from Twigs and Straw and Pieces of Human Hair and Toenail.

The Totality was Glued together by what seemed an Unsavory Substance that Franklin and I Took to be Dried Seed from the Male Sex.

Franklin Claims that He has Seen a Similar Figure in his Travels although He Cannot Remember Where.

For My Part, I would Never have Forgotten such an Object or Whence I first Discovered It, as I Will Not Forget It Now.

Against My Wishes and Advice, Franklin has Taken the Doll into his House. He Intends to Keep It in his Study so that He may Perform some of his Experiments upon It. I Bade Him Leave it in the Spirit House in which He Discovered It, but Franklin is not a Man who Takes Readily to Suggestion.

I am Frightened for Franklin and, indeed, for All of Us.

At the bottom of the diary entry was a detailed piece of artwork in Jefferson's own hand. A detailed rendering that was clearly identifiable and instantly recognizable.

It was a drawing of the house.

His plane landed at O'Hare just after noon, and Stormy immediately picked up his rental car and drove home.

He could not remember the last time he'd been to the old neighborhood or seen the old house, but it had obviously been a while. The street had changed completely.

Redevelopment had obliterated an entire block, replacing old tenements with newer tenements. The tough Polish gang members who used to hang out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores had been replaced by tough black gang members who hung out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores. A lot of the buildings he remembered were either condemned or gone.

The house, though, had stayed exactly the same. It was as if it were enclosed within a force field or clear protective barrier. The detritus of the street did not reach it. There was no graffiti on its walls, no garbage thrown on its lawn. The handful of homes remaining around it had deteriorated tremendously and were now as dilapidated as the surrounding apartment buildings, but the house remained unchanged.

There was something spooky about that.

Butchery.

He realized that he had never asked the kid why he had called his film Butchery. Sitting there in his rental car, in the middle of the slummy neighborhood, staring at his unchanged home, that suddenly seemed important.

The early afternoon sun was blocked by buildings, but its light shone through the broken windows of an empty fire-gutted structure across the street, casting bizarre shadows on the face of the house, shadows that were too abstract to resemble anything real but that nonetheless jogged some recess of his memory.

Stormy got out of the car. He felt like a flea standing before a tidal wave. If whatever was happening encompassed this house in Chicago, the theater in Albuquerque, the reservation, and God knew what else, he was a dust speck in the face of it. It made no sense for him to even be here. The thought that he could do something, that he could make a difference, that he could possibly have an influence over anything was ludicrous. He'd been drawn here, called perhaps, summoned, but he understood now that for him to try to intervene was pointless.

Still, he opened the small gate and walked through the well-tended yard to the porch.

It was a warm afternoon, but the air was cold in the shadow of the house, and he remembered that from before.

He felt like a kid again, powerless, at the mercy of things he didn't understand. He knew his grandmother and parents were dead, understood it intellectually, but emotionally it felt to him as though they were inside, waiting for him, waiting to criticize him, waiting to punish him, and he wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

He had no key, but the front door was unlocked, and he opened it, walked inside. He was wrong: the house had changed. Not the building itself, not the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the furnishings. Those were exactly as they had been thirty years before. Almost eerily so. But the mood of the house seemed different, the air of regal formality that had reigned previously, that had so permeated every inch of this place, was gone, replaced with a graceless foreboding. He walked forward, turned right. The long hallway in which he had played as a child now seemed grim and intimidating, its opposite end fading into a gloomy darkness that for some reason frightened him.

There was no way he'd be able to muster the bravery to even attempt to go upstairs.

He turned around, walked back through the entryway, saw movement in the sitting room. It was afternoon outside, but little daylight penetrated into the house, and, nervously, his hand fumbled for a light switch. He found it, flipped it on.

The butler was standing just inside the doorway.

"Billingham," Stormy said, not entirely surprised.

The butler smiled at him, bowed. "Stormy."

Daniel The summer stretched before them, new, ripe with the possibility of adventure, its inevitable end so far in the future that it was almost inconceivable. The days were long and hot, and he and his friends filled the hours with projects. Making sand candles: melting real candles they'd stolen from Jim's house, letting the wax drip around slices of string into holes they'd dug in the dirt of the backyard.

Selling Kool-Aid: using Paul's dad's folding card table, having Jim's sister draw them a sign, sitting for hours in the burning sun, adding more and more ice to the pitcher until the Kool-Aid was so watered down even they couldn't drink it. Egging mailboxes: stealing two eggs from each of their refrigerators, playing paper-scissors rock to determine who would rush up to their neighbors'

mailboxes and slam the eggs in.

It was a perfect existence. Nothing had to be planned, nothing had to be completed, they did what they wanted when they wanted, following their whims through the free and open days.

But something was wrong at home. Daniel could feel it. His parents didn't say anything, but he sensed a subtle difference in their relationship, perceived the loss of something he hadn't even known existed. At night, at the dinner table, there was anger beneath his father's surface pleasantry, sadness underlying his mother's cheerfulness, and he was glad it was summer and he could stay out late and he didn't have to spend as much time with his family as he ordinarily would.

As the days passed, however, as the memory of school receded and the rhythms of summer became less tentative, more reliable, he came to believe--no, to know--that it was neither his mother's fault nor his father's fault that things were falling apart between them. They were victims.

They were like him, able to see what was happening but unable to do anything about it, forced to watch as it occurred.