Bentley Little - The House

He was way out of his depth here, and he wished to God he had never come. It was the coward's response, he knew, but he had no problem answering to that description.

He would rather have put up with a million monstrous manifestations on the streets of Finley than be trapped here in this House. Those were intrusions of horror into the normal everyday world. Here, horror was the normal everyday occurrence.

Billingson led him to his bedroom door, opened it for him, and smiled. "Sweet dreams, Nort ," he said before bowing theatrically and heading down the hall.

It was what his father used to say to him each night before tucking him into bed.

Norton took a deep breath, walked into the bedroom.

Everything looked precisely as it had half a century ago.

It was not exactly a surprise, but the extent of his immersion into the past was still staggering. There was the low bed with the red-checkered bedspread, the small corner desk covered with finished and half-finished airplane models, the photos of Buck and Roy Rogers tacked to the wall, the cigar box on the nightstand that he'd used to store his valuables. He looked up. Above the door was the upside-down horseshoe he'd nailed there for good luck.

Good luck.

He smiled wryly. That was a joke. He'd never had anything remotely approaching good luck in this House.

He was bigger and the room and its contents were smaller, but there was none of the awkwardness usually associated with revisiting scenes from childhood. Instead, he felt perfectly at home here. He sat down on the bed, and his body's memory kicked in, remembering the contours of the mattress and the texture of the bedspread, snuggling into a physical familiarity with the room.

He sat for a few moments on the bed, looking around, taking it all in, then rummaged through the cigar box and the drawers of the desk, picking up and touching objects with which he was intimately familiar but had neither seen nor thought about for many decades.

It depressed him, being in this room again, made him sad. The fear was still there, constant beneath his other layers of feeling, but he also felt pensive and melancholic.

Being here reminded him of what he'd thought as a child, what he'd planned, and the realization that the future he'd been so eagerly awaiting had already passed left him somewhat heavy-hearted. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age.

He walked to the window, looked out. It was still dark out, but it wasn't night. There were no stars, no moon, no town lights or road lights. It was as black as if the window glass had been painted, but the darkness had depth, and he knew there was a world outside the window.

He just wasn't sure he wanted to know what that world was.

Sighing, he turned away. He felt dirty, filthy from both the long trip and the cold-sweat stress of everything he'd experienced since, and although the bathroom, if he remembered correctly, was halfway down the hall, he decided to take a shower before bed. He'd brought no robe, though, no pajamas, and his extra clothes were still in the car. Strange. He'd always intended to stay overnight in Oakdale, maybe stay several nights, and he had no explanation for why he had not packed appropriately.

That was not like him.

He found it worrisome.

He decided to simply walk down the hall, take his shower, put his clothes back on afterward, and then sleep in his underwear and wear the clothes again tomorrow.

He considered calling for Billingson , asking for a towel and washcloth, but he didn't relish the idea of seeing the hired hand again, and he figured he'd check the bathroom first, see if he couldn't find what he needed on his own.

He took off his shoes and his belt, emptied the contents of his pockets on the nightstand. He heard no noise from any of the other rooms as he walked down the hall, but the silence was more unnerving than sound would have been, and he considered calling off the shower and retreating to his bedroom, hiding until morning.

The hallway was dark, the silence unnerving and oppressive, but he wasn't about to be intimidated by the House or anything in it. He might feel fear, but he wouldn't show it, and he purposely kept his gait as easy and natural as he could.

Unlike in the hallway and, to a lesser extent, his bedroom, the light in the bathroom was bright, modern, fluorescent. This was one room that had obviously been updated and remodeled since his day. He flipped on the switch and clear white light illuminated every corner of the small functional space.

The modern bathroom made him feel good, gave him hope. It was an island of normalcy in the surreal landscape of the House, and its matter-of-fact concreteness kept him grounded and tethered, kept him in touch with the ordinary everyday world.

There were indeed towels and washcloths and soap, and Norton closed and locked the door, taking off his clothes and placing them on the closed lid of the toilet.

There was not a separate shower and bathtub but a combined shower bath, and he pulled aside the beige plastic shower curtain and stepped into the tub, closing it behind him. Bending down to turn on the water, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He straightened, stood. Beneath the edge of the shower curtain, dark against the whiteness of the tub, were what looked like thousands of thin hairs--whiskers or spider legs--moving crazily, jerkily, and he flattened against the tiled wall and stared at the wildly twisting strands.

The fear that was triggered within him came from the very core of his being. There was no thought, no conscious determination of danger, only an instinctive terror of the thin hairs, an irrational alarm.

The water was on, and for that he was grateful.

He did not want to hear the noise the hairs were making.

He found himself thinking of the ants he'd burned with Donna. For some reason, the crinkling of their bodies, their spasms of death, reminded him on a subliminal level of the wildly whipping whiskers, and the thought occurred to him that this was some sort of retribution, some decades-delayed revenge for that long-ago act.

The hairs had been moving crazily, independently, but he saw now that they were moving together, swishing and sweeping back and forth, from side to side. They extended below the curtain for the entire length of the tub, there was no empty space, and his panicked racing mind tried to think of how he could possibly escape.

He didn't know whether the whiskers were independent entities or part of some larger creature, but either way he didn't want to open the curtain, didn't want to see any more than the few inches already visible against the wall of the tub.

He was about to scream for help when the hairs pulled up and were gone. They were visible for a second in the air above the shower rod, waving in that even swish above the plastic curtain, and then they disappeared completely. He waited for a moment, still flattened against the wall, then, detecting no movement, carefully pulled open one side of the curtain.

The bathroom was empty.

There were no whiskers or hairs or spider legs or creatures near the toilet or the sink or the counter or the towel rack. The door was closed and locked.

He still felt dirty, still wanted to take a shower, but he was shaking and afraid, and he quickly shut off the water, pulled his pants back on, and, grabbing the rest of his clothes, ran back down the hall to his room.

He sat on his bed, breathing heavily.

What would happen in the middle of the night if he had to take a leak?

He'd hang his dick out the window and piss in the open air.

There was no way in hell he was going back into that bathroom.

He closed his eyes, saw again those twitching hairs, and shivered. He longed for the benign manifestations he'd seen before, for ghosts or burnt toast.