Bentley Little - The House

After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he'd spent the last several days, the House he'd shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he'd grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, theundefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.

Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else.

The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.

With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. Low conversation. Laughter.

It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Barren's room, past the bathroom, and to the library.

He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.

And saw his family.

He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he'd expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.

They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they'd worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Barren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.

It was the type of evening they'd often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.

There were no books in the library.

How could he have not noticed something so obvious?

The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.

What had happened to the books? he wondered.

Where had they gone? All of his father's books had been in place downstairs, in the den.

But that had been back at the other House, the current House.

He was confused. Was he on the Other Side now?

Was the House allowing him to visit the ghosts, the souls, the spirits of his murdered family? Or, with the bizarre concept of time that seemed to exist in the House, were all time periods still extant? Could the House pop him in and out of different eras at will?

Either way, he could not face his family now, could not meet them. He would do so later, when he felt stronger, but for now he needed to be alone, to think, to sort things out.

One thing he'd always tried to impart to his students was the effect of the past on the present, the extent to which actions had reactions and events had repercussions that rippled forward into the future. Perhaps that was at the root of what was happening to him now.

Maybe the House was giving him an opportunity to discover the source of the ripples that had spread outward to resurrect Carole and affect the lives of Daniel and Stormy and Laurie and Mark.

Maybe it was giving him a chance to change it.

The thought was at once exciting and terrifying, but both emotions were small and intensely personal. If what Billingson--Billings--said was true, if the House--the Houses--really did maintain a barrier protecting the physical material world from the intrusion of the Other Side, then this was as big as ... no, bigger than . . .

being granted the chance to go back into time and kill the pre-Nazi Hitler.

But emotionally it didn't feel that way. He supposed it was because these were things he had just learned and the enormity of Nazi Germany and World War II had been validated by society, by the world, and had been drilled into him for over half a century, but the fact remained that this seemed much smaller in scope, much more personal and localized.

Considering the consequences, he supposed that was a good thing.

Norton moved away from the doorway, back down the hall, careful not to make a sound. Even after all these years, he remembered the location of the creaky spots in the floor, and he made a concerted effort to avoid them.

Once again, he found himself at the top of the stairs.

He started down, but when he glanced up from the steps, he saw graffiti on the wall of the stairwell ahead of him, a huge blue chalk drawing of a face, a simplistic rendering that looked as though it had been done by a not particularly talented five-year-old.

The chalk figure winked at him.

Smiled.

There was only one tooth in its poorly drawn mouth and that should have made it look goofy, comical, but instead it lent the face an air of wildness, and Norton was afraid to continue down the steps, afraid to pass beneath the gaze of the face. It was a strange facet of human nature, but horror was much more frightening on a small scale than a large one. More than all of the talk of the Other Side and the afterlife, more than the possibility of dire epic consequences, it was the intimate simplicity of this chalk drawing that spoke directly to his fear center, that dried up the saliva in his mouth and made his heart pound wildly, his blood run cold.

The round face tilted to the left, to the right, its single toothed mouth opening and closing.

It was laughing.

Norton ran. He did it without thinking, without planning, without pausing to consider his options and weigh the outcomes. At that second, he wanted only to get away from that horrible drawing and its terrifying movements, and he bolted back up the few steps he'd descended and took off down the hallway as fast as his old legs would carry him. He considered stopping before reaching the library, not wanting to see his family or let them know he was here, but he could still visualize in his mind the rocking movement of the laughing face, the opening and closing mouth, and in his imagination it was making a horrible clicking noise, like a school film projector, the individual sounds synchronized precisely with the drawing's movements, and that made him run all the faster.

He sped by the library door, hoping no one saw him but not pausing to check. His plan was to go down the back stairs, but here, finally, he stopped, afraid he'd see another graffiti drawing on this back wall. There was nothing there, though. At least nothing he could see in the dim light. He took a deep breath, gathered his courage, and ran downstairs.

He reached the bottom of the steps without incident, and immediately moved away from the stairwell. His heart was still thumping in his chest so hard that he felt as if he would go into cardiac arrest any second, but already he was ashamed of himself for running, and even as he backed away from the staircase, he swore that he would not give in to fear again. He'd panicked, acted on instinct, and he was determined that next time he would stand his ground, would think before he acted.