Bentley Little - The House

Roberta.

Stormy sat up at the sight of his wife, all of the air in his body seeming to escape in one violently exhaled breath. She was wearing only torn panties and a dirty bra. Her right arm, bloody, a section of skin torn off and blackened with dried blood, lay twisted behind her back at an impossible angle.

In her hand was a piece of cheddar cheese with a rose embedded in it.

The camera panned up her body, and Stormy saw that there was a trail of black dots stretched across her forehead and her wildly staring eyes that looked like burned ants.

He stood, intending to get Norton and bring him back here, to find out why their lives and experiences were crossing all of a sudden, but he could not leave before the program ended, and he yelled "Norton! Norton!" at the top of his lungs as he stared at the screen and watched a lingering shot of what looked like a rotting full-sized marlin lying in the ditch next to her.

The House started to shake.

It was not merely a rumble or single jolt this time but a full-scale quake that rocked the foundations of the House and tilted the floor as though it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The television winked off instantly, but the lights in the room remained operational, and he could at least see what was happening as he was knocked off his feet by the force of the temblor and sent flying into the wall beneath where the window used to be.

Stormy scurried across the floor, half crawling. The door had been thrown open, and he scrambled into the hallway.

It looked like a low-budget earthquake scene from a bad direct-to-video flick, the camera shaking, blurring, and doubling everything in the scene.

Except that there was no camera. And the blurring and doubling were not due to some optical trick but to the fact that the walls and floor and ceiling actually seemed to be physically separating, splitting like cells into identical twins of themselves.

There was a cry from off to his left, and Stormy turned his head to look down the hall. Norton had obviously heeded his call and was at the top of the stairs, holding tightly to the banister to keep from falling onto the landing below.

Stormy stood, bracing himself in the doorway.

"What's happening?" he yelled.

"I think the Houses are separating!"

Why hadn't he seen that? Around him, that strange mitosis was continuing. He was still recognizably situated in a tangible, material House, but the transparent out lines of other Houses could be seen emerging from it.

The doorway in which he was standing was quadrupled, and seeing four ghostly doorways surrounded by four ghostly walls receding into the solid reality of his corporeal House was not only disorienting but dizzying. He turned toward Norton again, and the old man looked transparent as well.

Holy shit. He was going to be left alone here again.

They were all going to be alone. It was bad enough being trapped in one House together. But trapped in separate Houses . . .

And without Billings?

He didn't think he could survive that.

The adrenaline that had been revving up his heart on account of the shaking kicked into overdrive, and he scrambled desperately toward the staircase at the end of the hall, crying with fear and frustration. He wanted to grab Norton, to hold on to him so they wouldn't be separated, but the old man's figure was fading into the wainscoting.

"No!" he screamed.

But the transparent Norton couldn't hear him.

And then the earthquake was over and the other Houses were gone.

Daniel Where was he? In what House? In what time period?

Everything was confused, and Daniel shook his head as if to clear it. He stood alone in what had been the entryway, staring down the hall. The dark corridor was endless. There seemed to be literally hundreds of doors stretching out as far as he could see, with no discernible end. This was not the House he remembered, not any House he had ever seen, and he wondered exactly what had happened. He and Laurie had been in the kitchen, starting the dishes, when the shaking started. Following her lead, he'd stood in the doorway, and then . . .

What?

His recollection of what happened next was hazy. He seemed to recall seeing Marie duck under the dining- room table. But then there were two dining-room tables.

And two dining rooms.

And then three. Four. Five.

He'd remained in place, anchored to this House, while Mark and Laurie broke off into different directions and faded away with their respective dwellings.

Had they been real at all, he wondered, or were they just manifestations of the House? Had he been alone all along, only thinking there were others here with him?

Was this some sort of head trip the House was playing with him, some way of getting information from him or testing his reactions?

He didn't think so. It was possible, but his gut reaction was that the others were real, that what Billings had told them was the truth, and that now that the Houses were back at full power, they had the strength to merge and separate at will.

So was his House the true House? He was pretty sure it was. He was the one who had remained in place, who had remained here in the House they'd all shared, while Laurie and Mark--and, presumably, Norton and Stormy--had spun off elsewhere.

Except he hadn't really remained in place, had he?

Because this House had changed, too. Gone were any pretexts that this was the exact same home he and his father had fled all those years ago. There were similarities, of course, but there were differences as well, and he stared down the endless hallway wondering exactly where he was now, trying to gather the courage to try some of the doors before him, to explore the House alone.

The sound of whispering from the sitting room behind him and a partial glimpse of a small dark figure a doll --ducking behind the love seat spurred him into action, and he moved forward, started down the hall.

He was about to try and open the first door on the right, when he saw, a hundred yards or so down the corridor, an unmoving lump in the center of the floor.

There were no bright fluorescent lights, only dim flame shaped yellow bulbs on silver fixtures spaced far apart on opposite walls, and he took a few steps forward, squinting, trying to make out what it was.

It looked like a dead body.

He thought he saw the black-on-white of a formal butler's uniform.

Daniel ran down the hallway. Even running at full speed, it took him a minute or so to reach the body, and the end of the hallway was still nowhere in sight. Breathing heavily, he stared down at the form on the floor.

It was Billings. The butler was lyingfaceup , and while there were no visible signs of violence and the white shirt remained unsoiled, the hardwood floor around the body was soaked with drying blood.Billings's eyes were wide open, as was his mouth. There was a small lipstick kiss on his white forehead.

God is dead, Daniel thought crazily. God is dead.

Satan lives.

Where was the girl? Where wasDoneen ? He looked anxiously around, expecting to see her jump out at any moment, to leap from behind one of the doors or come running up from the murk shrouding the far end of the hall. But there was no sign of her, and he dropped to one knee and picked up the butler's cold right hand to feel for a pulse.

Nothing.

Had there ever been a pulse? Daniel didn't know.

Billings claimed to have been here as long as the House had, and all five of them had remembered him from their childhoods and he had not changed one bit. Perhaps he had never been alive. He was certainly not human.

What could kill him?

That was something he didn't even want to think about, and with a last look at thepuddled blood on the floor, Daniel stood. He was about to start walking back up the hall when something caught his eye. A dark spot in the blood by Billings' left foot.