Bentley Little - The House

It was a creepy line of thought, and Stormy forced himself to back away from it. There would be time for that later. There were more immediate concerns at present.

He needed to find out where he was, when he was, where the others were, and how they were going to escape from here.

Crackers were stuck between his teeth, and he poured himself another glass of water and rinsed his mouth out in the sink before embarking on a floor-by-floor search of the House.

He went through every room on the first floor, then wandered upstairs, looking for one of the others, looking for ... something. He saw nothing unusual until he reached the third story. There, across the hall from his bedroom, was a door that had not been there before, a door he did not remember. He felt suddenly nervous and was not sure he wanted to look inside, especially not alone, but he forced himself to be brave, opened the door, and peeked into the room.

"Oh, Jesus," he breathed.

Butchery.

This deserved the title. The black room before him was the site of almost unbelievable carnage. Faces hung from hooks on the wall like hats, the drooping, sagging skin contorting their former shapes into stretched mockeries of human forms. Bones and skulls and pieces of flesh lay strewn across the blood-spattered floor next to a pile of discarded gossamer that looked like the empty bodies of the cloudlike ghosts he'd seen on the Other Side. Metal instruments that could only be tools of torture were scattered about the room.

On the top of a marble table was Billings.

The butler had been stabbed. No, not just stabbed.

Slit open. His mouth was frozen in arictus of agony, and his eyes were wide, staring. The red imprint of a kiss--lipstick? blood?--could be seen on his white forehead.

Stormy remained in the doorway, afraid to enter the room. He didn't know what this meant, where it fit into anything, but it scared the hell out of him, and the confirmation that Billings was dead hit him much harder than expected.

What were they going to do now? Their guiding light was gone.

What was he going to do now? That was the big question.

Because the others weren't anywhere to be found.

For all he knew, they had been killed as well and their bloody corpses awaited him in some other room of the House.

He thought he detected movement to the right of Billings'

body, and immediately he shifted his attention in that direction. At first he saw nothing, but he squinted his eyes, looked more carefully.

A shade, a shadow--Norton?--was standing near the foot of the table, its indistinct form covered with blood, staring at its own outstretched hands with an expression that could be read as horror, could be read as awe. The face was obscure, faded into transparency, but there was something about the shape of its body, its stance, the movement of its head and arms, that reminded him of Norton, and he was suddenly sure that the old man was dead.

He called out Norton's name, tried to communicate with the ghost or whatever it was, but no matter what he said or how much he gesticulated, he could not seem to capture the figure's attention.

There was additional movement in the far corner of the dark room, a flash of white in his peripheral vision, and Stormy quickly glanced over at that area.

Donielle.

She had no trouble seeing him. The girl smiled in his direction, and her lips were bright crimson, there were flecks of blood on her teeth. She lifted her shift, and he saw smears of red on her crotch where she'd been . . .

touching herself. "Come and get it," she said, giggling.

Her voice seemed to come from far away.

Looking at her now, Stormy could not understand how he had ever even been tempted.

She turned around and bent over, still giggling. "Kiss it!" she said.

He slammed the door of the room as hard as he could, backing toward his bedroom across the hall. More than anything, he needed time to think, time to sort things out, but he had the feeling that was exactly what he was not going to get. He was filled with the sudden conviction that things were coming to a head, that whatever it had all been building toward had arrived, that the girl had almost achieved her goal.

That he was next.

Reaching behind him, his hands felt the jamb of his bedroom doorway and he turned around. But it was not his room. It was the black room again, and amid the bloody mayhem,Donielle stood at the foot ofBillings's table with her shift hiked up and rubbed herself with bloody hands.

He turned, and the door he had slammed shut was now open again, and he saw the identical room across the hall. He tried to think of what he should do, how he could get out of this, but his mind was a blank.

"You can't escape,"Donielle said.

And advanced on him from both directions.

Mark He walked slowly through the House, looking for the girl.

Mark trod carefully down the halls, hyper-aware of each shadow and sound. He wished he had a weapon, but he did not think it would make any difference if he did. Traditional concepts did not apply here, and though it would have made him feel slightly more secure having something to hold in his hand, he knew that was just a mental crutch.

He had no idea how he was going to fight her, but years of being on the road had made him pretty good at thinking quickly on his feet, and he trusted himself to figure something out when the time came.

Ahead was the door that led to the solarium. The hall around it was dark, a single candle bulb in a candelabra wall fixture throwing a weak light onto the door itself, leaving the surrounding space in blackness.

He wished Kristen had come with him. Or that Daniel or Laurie or Norton or Stormy were here.

He wished Billings were around.

Mark never would have thought he'd actually desire the assistant's company, but his mind set had gone through some hard changes since he'd learned Kristen had died and returned to the House. Almost everything he'd thought growing up had turned out to be wrong, his reality had been reversed, and he could not help thinking that all of this could have been avoided had he and his parents or he and Billings just talked, just communicated.

He reached the door, hesitating before opening it. Did he really think he could kill the girl? Kristen seemed to believe that he could, and he supposed that's what gave him the little confidence he had. Her belief in him might be nothing more than faith or hope, but it was reassuring nonetheless, and it made him feel that he at least had a fighting chance.

He reached for the door handle. Turned it. Pulled.

The solarium was gone. The door opened onto a black room with blood-spattered walls, floor, and ceiling. The room was empty, but smeared swaths of blood, and scrapes and scratches on the floor, made it look as though heavy objects had been recently moved out.

There was an aura of corruption and violent depravity about the room, a sensation so clear and strong that for a second Mark thought The Power had returned. But he realized almost instantly that the evil here was so thick and concentrated that even the most dull and unimaginative man would have no trouble detecting it.

There was no one in the room, though, and despite its unbearable atmosphere and visible remnants of past atrocities, there was nothing for him here, no sign of the girl, and he gratefully closed the door.

He walked back down the hall.

The Power.

He'd feel better if he still had it, and he found himself wondering why only he and Kristen, out of all of the residents in all the Houses, had been granted such extrasensory abilities. It seemed strange to him, and he wondered if it wasn't a fluke, a mistake.

Maybe he'd been chosen.

That made no sense. Chosen that long ago? Selected as a child? Why? So that he could one day go up against the girl? It seemed both absurd and stupid to him that the House would know all of this was going to happen, would prepare for it by grooming him, yet would do nothing to prevent any of it from occurring.