Bentley Little - The House

"I can't believe this."

"The House keeps them tied the same way. Those threads that bind you to the House and to the Other Side bind them to the House as well."

"What if those threads are broken?"

"It is complicated."

"What happens?"

She shook her head.

"Will the barrier be ... weakened?"

"Possibly."

"Is that good or bad?" he asked.

Her luminescent face grew grave. "It is bad," she said.

"The two sides must not mix."

Mark smiled. "You'd be able to visit more often,"

he said.

Kristen laughed, that tinkling musical sound that wasn't quite human. "Mark," she said fondly. "I really do miss you."

"I know," he said, and he felt the tears welling up as he looked at her face. She was as beautiful as he'd known she'd be, and she'd grown from a gawky teenager into a confident self-assured woman. God, if she'd only been allowed to live . . .

He wiped his eyes. "So that's it. I'm stuck here. We're all stuck here. We're screwed."

"No, that's not it," Kristen said.

"What, then?"

"The Houses do need people," she admitted. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be you. It could be anyone. And if you guys leave, someone will come to take your place. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum."

She paused. "But when someone else comes, it will be voluntary. It will be their decision. They won't be coerced or forced or held prisoner against their will.

They'll be like I was."

"But how can we leave?"

"Resolve your problems."

"And how do we do that?"

"It will come of its own."

"What will?"

"You'll see."

"What? Can't you say?"

"No. But you will have that chance. Be prepared for it when it happens."

He didn't like the vagueness of her answer, and every opportunity that he could come up with for reconciling with his parents filled him full of dread.

He did not want to see his dead mother or father.

"There's one other thing you have to do, though,"

Kristen said.

"What's that?"

"Kill her." And there was a look of uncharacteristic fierceness on her face. "Kill the bitch. She's the one who's doing this, who's perverted the Houses for her own purposes, who's tried to bring down the barrier.

Once she's out of the way, everything will return to normal and will be back the way it should, with voluntary border guards and the Other Side safely separated."

"She's evil," Mark said.

Kristen nodded, and for the first time she looked afraid. "Yes," she said. "She's evil."

"I'll do it," Mark told her.

There was a slight gasp, and an expression of pain crossed Kristen's face. She hugged him, but she was already fading quickly, her warmth cooling into nothingness.

"I love you," she whispered, her voice barely audible.

"I love you too," he said.

But before he reached the word "love," she was gone.

Stormy So where was Billings?

They hadn't seen the butler all day yesterday, and now he was missing again this morning. It was pretty obvious that something had happened to him, and they were at a loss as to what to do about it. None of them liked the butler, and they all seemed to be afraid of him, but he was their link to the House, the translator between themselves and the horrific impersonality of the events that occurred here.

Maybe he'd served his purpose, Norton suggested.

Maybe he was only needed to lure them here and to keep them imprisoned until the House was charged up again. It sounded plausible, but Stormy didn't quite buy it. Nothing logical happened here, and even the most benign and minor events inevitably had ominous implications.

He figured the butler had been captured by the girl.

Or killed.

Or both.

Stormy sipped his coffee. Once again, breakfast had been made for them. Just as dinner had been last night.

They'd had to serve themselves, but someone--or something --else had cooked and prepared the food. Laurie suggested that one of them stake out the kitchen this afternoon, an hour or so before dinner, to try and find out who or what was making their meals, and Mark volunteered for a tour of duty.

They'd finished eating for the most part, but they remained in the dining room, sipping juice and coffee, nibbling on muffin crumbs, bored, having run out of things to do and having a difficult time thinking of things to say. He'd felt an instinctive camaraderie with the others the instant he met them, but that feeling had been fading ever since. These weren't really people with whom he'd choose to spend his time if he had a choice.

God, he wished he could watch a morning show or listen to Howard Stern or ... something.

"What's happening outside this House?" Stormy said.

"In the real world? That's what I'd like to know. Why can't we have a TV or a radio in this fucking place?"

He pushed his chair away from the table, stood, and began pacing. "I'm getting tired of this shit."

"Who isn't?" Norton said.

"Can't we at least have a newspaper delivered with our breakfast?"

"The Ghostly Gazette?" Daniel suggested.

"Very funny."

Laurie stood. "We'd better stop here before we really start getting on each other's nerves. Let's clear the table.

I'll wash the dishes."

"I'll dry," Daniel offered.

"Where's that leave the rest of us?" Stormy asked.

Daniel grinned. "Free to do as you choose."

"Great," he muttered.

There was nothing they had planned, nothing they had to do. They'd searched the entire House yesterday, and today loomed before them, a huge monolith of time.

Stormy carried his cup and plate into the kitchen. Last night, he'd begun a sort of journal--notes for a possible movie, actually--with pen and paper he'd found in his room. He had some other ideas he wanted to write down, so rather than plop his ass on a seat in the sitting room and stare at the damn wall, he got himself some ice cubes and a big old glass of water and, excusing himself, went back upstairs.

Where there was a TV in his room.

A TV!

Excitedly, he ran over, flipped it on. Channel 2 was static and snow. The same with channels 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. The only channel that came in was 13, and it was showing some type of documentary; but he didn't care.

Any audiovisual contact with the outside world was like a crust of bread to a starving man at this point, and he was even grateful for the simple physical presence of the television in his room. He'd never realized before how completely and utterly dependent he was on mass communications and he promised himself that if he ever started thinking about chucking it all, moving to a cabin in Montana and living off the land, as he periodically did when business was down and the pressure was up, he'd kick his own ass.

He sat down on the side of the bed and stared at the screen. He didn't know what he was watching, but it definitely had a documentary feel, a grittyunstaged look that gave it the appearance of reality, a verisimilitude only reinforced by the generic synthesized music that accompanied the montage of pan shots. It was film, not video, a travel show or nature show or Indian show, and it had obviously been shot in New Mexico--he recognized the familiar blue sky and massive clouds as well as the adobe ruins of Bandelier. He'd heard no voiceover since turning on the television, but he knew from the rhythm of the piece that narration would kick in at any second, and he lay down on his side and piled both pillows beneath his head to watch.

The program did not play out the way he expected, however. There was no narration, and the panoramic vistas and beautifully shot ruins gave way to uninspired and routinelylensed footage of high-desert brush along the side of a flat dirt road. The music disappeared, and the camera panned down to a low, heavily eroded ditch by the side of the road, where a dead body lay twisted against the exposed roots of a paloverde.