Bentley Little - The House

It was the fault of their servant, Billingsly .

And his dirty little daughter.

Daniel did not know what made him think that, but he knew it was true, and while he'd never really given it much thought before, he realized that those two scared him. He was not sure why; Billingsly had always been polite and deferential to him--too polite and too deferential –while Doneen had always been shy and elusive and seemed to have a crush on him. But he was afraid of them, he realized, and he began making a concerted effort to stay out of their way, to not come into contact with them, to avoid them whenever possible.

His parents, he noticed, did the same.

What was going on here? Why didn't his father just fire Billingsly?

Because it wasn't only the servant and his daughter. It was the house as well. Something about their home seemed threatening and confining and unnatural, as if. . .

As if it was haunted.

That was it exactly. It was as if the building itself were alive, controlling everything within its borders--who slept where, what time they ate their meals, where they could go and what they could do--and they were merely its pawns. It was a strange thought, he knew, but it was the way he felt, and it explained why his father, who had always been lord of the manor, the king of his castle, walked around these days like a beaten man, a guest in his own home.

No, not a guest.

A prisoner.

If he'd been braver, if he'd been older, he would have talked to his parents about it, would have asked what was wrong and why and whether they could do anything about the situation, but that was not the way the dynamics of their family worked. They did not talk out problems, did not confront them directly, but hinted around about them, trying to get their individual points across with oblique references and small suggestions, hoping the other members of the family would understand what they meant without having to come out and explain.

So he stayed out as much as possible, played with his friends, concentrated on summer and fun and tried not to think about the changes at home. He and Jim and Paul andMadson built a clubhouse in the woods behind Paul's backyard. They made a go-can that they took turns racing down State Street. They panned for gold in the creek.

They watched game shows on Jim's family's color TV

set. They camped out in the park.

Outside the walls of the house, it was a great summer.

But inside . . .

It started one night after he and his friends had spent the day downtown at the movie theater, sitting twice through a double feature of two Disney movies: Snowball Express and $1,000,000 Duck. They'd emerged tired and gorged with candy, and they'd gone home to their respective houses. His parents had been waiting for him--they always ate dinner together, that was a family rule--and he'd eaten and then gone upstairs to take a bath.

He'd been successfully avoiding Billingsly and his daughter for several weeks, had only seen the servant at dinner and had not seen Doneen at all, but he was still taking no chances and he made sure that the servant was still in the kitchen and carefully checked the hallways for his daughter before grabbing pajamas from his bedroom and locking himself in the bathroom.

She walked in while he was washing himself in the tub.

"Hey!" he said.

He had locked the door, he was sure of it, and the fact that the girl had still been able to get in frightened him.

She slipped off her dirty nightgown, got into the water.

He jumped up, splashing water on the floor, frantically calling for his mom, his dad, as he grabbed the towel and scrambled away from the tub, trying not to slip on the tile.

Doneen giggled at him.

"Get out of here!" he screamed at her.

"You don't really want me to leave." Still giggling, she pointed at his penis, and he quickly covered it with the towel, embarrassed. He couldn't help it; he had an erection.

It was exciting to see a naked girl, but it was even more frightening, and he backed against the door, reaching for the knob and trying to turn it.

It was locked.

He didn't want to turn his back on Doneen , was not sure what she could or would do, but he had no choice and he turned, unlocking the door.

"Your mother can't live," the girl said behind him.

He whirled around. "What?"

"She's going to have to die."

There was something about the matter-of-fact tone in the girl's voice that scared the shit out of him, and he ran out of the bathroom and down the long hallway. He wanted to go into his bedroom, get his clothes, get dressed, but he was afraid to do so, afraid she might be able to sneak in there as easily as she'd entered the bathroom, so he ran downstairs, still covering himself with the towel. His parents had remained at the dinner table, and when his mother looked up in surprise and he saw the mingled expression of concern, worry, and fear cross her face, he burst into tears. He had not cried in a long time--crying was for babies-- but he was crying now, and she stood up and allowed him to hug her, and he kept repeating, "I don't want you to die!"

"I'm not going to die," she told him. But her voice was not as reassuring as it should have been, and it only made him cry harder.

Afterward, he was embarrassed. He should not have been--there were more important things at stake here than embarrassment--but that was the way he felt, and although he told his parents he'd been scared upstairs, in the bathroom, he did not tell them why or what had really happened. Still, he made them accompany him back up, hoping that Doneen would still be there, and made his father search his bedroom closets and the other rooms off the hallway before putting on his pajamas and telling them to go downstairs, he was all right.

It was the crying that had embarrassed him the most, and he thought that if he had not burst into tears like a little girl, he might have been able to broach the subject of the servant's daughter and what she'd said. But he'd been naked and crying into his mother's blouse, and he could not bring himself to compound that humiliation with the admission of what must seem like a lunatic fear-- no matter how serious the consequences might be.

He would just have to stay alert, keep an eye on his mother, make sure nothing happened.

He stopped playing outside, stopped going places with his friends. He told them that he was grounded, that his parents would not let him go out. He told his mother that Jim's and Paul's families had gone on vacation and that Madson was grounded.

And he stayed in the house.

Stayed near his mother.

He still avoided Billingsly as much as possible, but he did not have to make an effort to stay away from Doneen .

Either her father or his parents had talked to her, or she had decided on her own to keep her distance, and he saw only occasional glimpses of her in hallways or rooms or outside in the yard, and that was fine by him.

A few evenings later, his father was cutting his hair, and the idea that he should save the cut hair occurred to him. He did not know why, did not know where this notion had come from, but almost as soon as it had flashed into his mind, it had solidified into a necessity, a priority, and after his father finished trimming his bangs and tossed away the newspapers that had been spread on the floor underneath his chair, Daniel snuck into the kitchen, took the crumpled paper with its cache of cut hair, and brought everything back up into his room.

Over the next week, he collected other things: used Kleenex, discarded toothpicks, peach pits, chicken bones, an apple core. It became almost an obsession, this search for specific objects, and while he never knew exactly what he was looking for, he always recognized it when he found it.

He understood that he was supposed to take all of the elements and combine them, make them into a cohesive whole, construct a figure that would serve as a talisman against. . . Against what?