Bentley Little - The House

Donna faced him. Her legs were slightly spread, the thin material of her dirty shift stretched tight, and he found himself wishing she'd bend over again, wishing she'd let him between her thighs.

One of the wispy ghosts had been pinned to the wall behind the table and was weakly fluttering, its blue-gray essence seeping slowly out from a slit in the fabric of its being and floating into the girl's mouth even as she spoke, even as she whispered the words he wanted to hear.

"I'll drink your sperm and drink your piss and drink your blood. I'll take everything you give me and do anything you want me to. All you have to do is take care of Mr. Billings."

Norton nodded. He didn't know why he was doing what he was doing, but he held out the knife, walked up to the marble table.

"Do it," Donna said.

He did.

Even as Billings screamed, as he inserted the knife in the assistant's groin and jerked upward, Norton understood that he was the reason Billings had disappeared.

Wherever he was--whenever he was--it was after he had met Daniel and Laurie and Stormy and Mark but before the Houses had split apart. He had not known it then because his own life unfolded sequentially, no matter what happened, but the Houses did not follow such a conventional timetable, were not so circumscribed, and he had been wrenched back and forth, forced to be at the Houses' beck and call, to respond to whatever they put in front of him.

Donna was right. It was the Houses that were evil.

But he realized the fallacy of that reasoning even as it occurred to him. Billings' screams were now silent, his mouth frozen wide open, his eyes bulging with agony, and Norton knew with a certainty that could not be denied that he'd been right the first time, that his initial instincts had been correct. The girl was the evil one.

"Yes," Donna said, egging him on. And there was hunger in her eyes. "Gut the fucker!"

He stopped then and there. He pulled the knife out and dropped it, knowing that it was too late, that he had been corrupted by the girl Kiss my ass --that he had been caught in her web, that he was lost. He heard the knife hit the floor, and he stared down at his hands, covered to the elbows with hot blood, and he started to cry, but Donna knelt before him and, smiling up at him, unfastened the snaps on his pants.

"I'll take care of you," she promised. "I'll reward you."

He pulled back from her, jerked away. "What have you done?" he screamed at her.

She smiled up at him. "What have you done?"

"You didn't kill my family," he said, understanding finally dawning on him, "because you couldn't kill them."

Donna smiled. "Darcy did just as good a job. I was very proud of her."

Norton's stomach dropped. "No," he whispered, shaking his head. He thought of his old girlfriend, and though he didn't want to be able to imagine her cutting off heads and cooking them in the oven, he could.

But how had she done it? His father and Darren and his sisters--hell, even his mother--could have easily beaten Darcy in a fight. And all of them together would certainly have been able to not only resist her but overpower her.

Donna had made them sacrifice themselves.

It made perfect sense.

He stared at her with horror.

"But I can kill," she said. "You're wrong about that. I can fuck and I can kill."

"Then why do you make other people do it for you?"

She smiled. "Because it's fun."

He backed away from her.

"I killed Darcy after that. Skinned her in the garage.

And Mark's sister Kristen? The last true resident of the House? I sat on her face, made her eat me, suffocated her with my hot pussy. And--"

"Why didn't you kill Billings?"

Her face clouded over. "That's different."

"Why?"

"Because."

"You couldn't do it?"

"No, I needed you."

He looked back at the assistant's bloody, unmoving form on the table. "What have I done?" he cried.

"You've helped me."

And even as he screamed his anguish into the black and bone-cluttered room, she was on her knees in front of him, pulling down his pants.

Stormy The windows were back.

That was the first thing he noticed.

But the world outside was foggy and featureless, and although the front door of the House opened when he tried it, he was afraid to go out into that murk.

Stormy closed the door and looked around the entryway, down the hall. "Daniel!" he called. "Daniel!"

No answer.

"Norton! Laurie! . . . Mark!"

His voice died without echo in the heavy oppressive air, and there was no answering noise from anywhere else in the House.

Funny. He could have sworn he was back in the same House he'd shared with his compatriots. It certainly looked and felt that way to him. But he seemed to be completely alone, and he wondered if they'd been trapped somewhere else. In their own pasts, perhaps.

Or if they'd been killed.

He hoped to God that wasn't the case.

Stormy walked into the dining room, into the kitchen.

There were crackers in one of the cupboards, and he took out the box, grabbing a handful. He was hungry, he realized. He felt as though he'd been running a marathon or working out in a gym. He was drained, enervated, and he felt the need to bolster himself with nourishment. He searched through all of the other cupboards as well as the refrigerator, but he found only two other items.

A can of fruit cocktail.

And a hunk of cheddar cheese.

He ate neither, left them in the cupboard and refrigerator, respectively, feeling chilled.

He finished off the box of crackers, poured himself a glass of water.

So what was next?

It was clear that he had done something, accomplished something. He'd been set down in the household of his childhood for a reason, and while that reason was still unclear, the fact that he was back, had been returned, meant that he had completed whatever it was he'd been expected to do.

But the purpose of it was still unknown, even the assumptions behind it nebulous. How could changing the specifics of his own past life affect anything having to do with the Houses and this border that was supposed to protect--what?--the known universe from supernatural forces?

It was the mixture of the cosmic and the personal that he found so hard to accept. He had never bought into the Christian idea that God would ignore wars and atrocities and holocausts yet intervene on behalf of a housewife with marital problems. It seemed absurd and inconsistent to him. Highly illogical, to quote the great Mr. Spock.

But he knew now that the Infinite was illogical, that the epic and the intimate were inexorably intertwined, and while it might be hard to grasp and difficult to adjust to, a missed appointment could have as much consequence as the troop movements of an army a thousand soldiers strong, could lead to the movement of an army a thousand soldiers strong. In the grand scheme of things, individual actions and large-scale events were both equally important. Here in the House and on the Other Side, that truism seemed to be even more pronounced.

Feelings and emotions were as tangible as actions, and while he might not understand the specifics of it, he knew that reconnecting with his parents and confronting Doniellehad somehow had a profound impact on the House and therefore the world.

He looked out the kitchen windows at the white fog that obscured whatever lay outside.

The Ones Who Went Before.

For the first time since Billings had spoken that terrifying name to him, Stormy thought about the builders of the Houses. What did they look like? Did they have a definite shape and form? He would never know and was not sure that he wanted to know.

What about the Houses themselves? If they had been around as long as Billings had intimated, they could not have always looked like this. What had been here before them? Teepees? Caves?