Bentley Little - The House

And that, he figured, was probably the most dangerous thing he could do.

So he remained in place, staring impassively at the girl, and she laughed obscenely, a dirty nasty sound that was at once seductive and derisive, dismissal and promise.

She thrust her buttocks out at him, and he turned away, began walking back toward the House, and the wild sound of her obscene laughter followed him all the way.

He was waiting for his parents in the kitchen when they returned.

Both his mother and father walked in, each of them carrying a sack of groceries.

He took a deep breath. "Mom. Dad. We need to talk."

His parents looked at each other, then looked at him.

It was his father who spoke. "What about, son?"

"About the House."

"I still have those pallets to unload. I thought you could help me--"

"About the girl."

Again, his parents looked at each other.

"Sit down," Mark said, motioning toward the seats he'd pulled out for them at the kitchen table.

They talked.

He did not press his father on the girl, but he described what had happened to him in the hallway, and made it clear that that was why he'd wanted to get out of the House, to run away. And that was exactly what she wanted, he explained. She wanted to weaken the House, wanted to break apart their family, wanted to get them out.

"But I'm not going to let her," he said. "I love you. I love you both."

"I love you, too," his mother said.

His father nodded, put a hand on his arm.

Mark started crying, and tears obscured his vision, and he closed his eyes and rubbed them, and when he opened them again he was alone in the kitchen. The windows had remained, but there was no porch outside, no chicken coops, only a white blanket of fog, and he understood that he had returned.

He felt warmth on the back of his neck, and he jumped up and turned around, but it was Kristen, standing there, smiling at him.

"You did good," Kristen said. "You did fine."

He smiled wryly. "Is everything resolved?"

"Do you still resent them?"

"No."

"Then I guess so." She hugged him, and he felt warm sunlight, but he thought he could hear, from somewhere in the whiteness outside, an echo of that wild, obscene laugh, and he was not sure that it was entirely in his head.

Kristen pulled back, looked at him.

"Only one more thing," she said.

He faced her. "What's that?"

"You have to find the bitch," she said. "And kill her."

Daniel Daniel followedDoneen out of the house into the rain.

There were no barriers keeping him from leaving the building, and once outside he could feel the chill, feel the wind, feel the water against his skin. The air even smelted like his street during a rainstorm, and it was these tactile sensations more than anything else that killed any idea he might have had that this was not really his house, that none of this was really happening.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"To see someone."

"Who?"

"I told you: you're going to have to trust me."

"And you'll leave Tony and Margot alone?"

"That's the deal."

He followed the girl through the small yard, through the gate, to the sidewalk. There was a gang of young toughs leaning against the wall, huddling together in the rain, too cool to use umbrellas but not too cool to wear heavy jackets. They seemed to be waiting for someone.

Daniel thought of Margot and Tony inside the house and wanted to tell these hoods to hit the road, find someplace else to hang out, but he knew they would not be able to hear him.

ThenDoneen skipped ahead, turned left on the sidewalk, stepped up to the gang of youths, and to Daniel's surprise, started talking to them. They gathered around her in a semicircle, leaning down to listen.

They could hear her!

The tallest one straightened, turned toward him, and Daniel's heart skipped a beat as he saw wild purple eyes beneath unnatural, impossibly thick hair. The creature smiled, and his overlarge mouth was filled with tiny sharpened teeth.

She'd tricked him, he realized. She'd set him up.

He turned and tried to run back toward the house, but was stopped halfway down the walk by another invisible barrier that split open his nose and lip and knocked him flat on the ground.

"Kill him!"Doneen yelled from the sidewalk. "Kill him!"

He was too stunned to even lurch back to his feet before the gang surrounded him. They were from the Other Side, he knew. He saw strange hair and strange faces and unbelievable colors in their eyes. He lashed out, tried to kick the closest one, but the creature avoided him easily, and then they were attacking him.

He was kicked and punched and clawed, but he was too busy trying to protect his face and stomach to clearly see what was going on.

Then he was picked up, several strong arms lifting him into the air, and they started biting him.

He screamed as fangs tore into his forearm, as razor teeth ripped the flesh of his cheeks. The pain was unbearable, unbelievable, and an artery in his leg started gushing as sharp teeth chewed through his thigh.

Doneengrinned at him as he was eaten alive. He saw her through the pain, through the faces, through the blood, and if he had one last wish that could be granted, it would be to see her killed.

But he was granted no last wish.

He felt his body die, felt the life within him stop as his heart ceased pumping and his brain functions ended, but beyond the shock and pain there was a lightening, a lessening of weight as his spirit pulled free of its heavy fleshy host and emerged unburdened into the open air.

It was not a transformation, this transition from life to death; there were no disruptions in his thoughts, no change in his self. It was more like kicking off a pair of shoes and going barefoot. Or stripping off clothes and walking naked. The difference was all external, the loss one of accoutrements, not essence.

He saw his body beneath him, saw the jacketed creatures eating his remains, sawDoneen staring at him with victorious glee. She could still see him, and she waved mockingly as he felt a tug on his form, a power drawing him like a magnet. He thought of Margot and was immediately in her bedroom, in her bed, next to her. There was no longer a barrier between them, and for a brief fraction of a second, he smelled her skin, touched her face, felt the smoothness of her breasts.

And then he was yanked back, pulled into and through the House into a House on the Other Side.

It happened in an instant. There was no flight through space, no view of the Eastern Seaboard beneath him, no surrounding blackness through which he passed, simply a sensation ofvacuumlike suction and what looked like a split-section transformation of their bedroom into the House, before he was flat on the floor on the Other Side.

He jumped up. The House in which he found himself was identical to the one he'd entered via the den door, the one in which he'd seen his mother. There were no walls or rooms, only that big open space in that color he did not recognize. Above him were the wispy spirits he had seen before, but though they now looked like individual beings to him rather than clouds, apparently he was not yet one of them. He could neither fly nor float, and he had to run across the floor to the corner, where his mother, still bald, was once again sitting on an egg in a nest.

She smiled at him as he approached.

"I'm dead!" he cried.

She nodded.

He fell into the nest, hugged her, and she felt solid to him, real, and there was something comforting in that.

"Margot's a widow! Tony has no father!"

"Time passes quickly here," his mother said. "They'll be with you soon enough."

The sticks of the nest were hard and uncomfortable against his side, but his mother's arms were soft and warm, her smile welcoming. There were a million questions swirling in his mind. He wanted to know where his father was, where the centuries' worth of other dead people were, whether there was a God or a heaven or a hell, whether he was going to be reincarnated or live here or move on to someplace else, but overpowering everything was the desire for revenge, the burning need to get back atDoneen and punish her, make her pay for what she'd done. He might be dead, but he had not lost his capacity for human emotions. He had not been filled with peace and love and a warm sense of contentment.