Bentley Little - The Collection

Through the fake windows I could still hear the Ap­palachian woman laughing.

The door at the top opened onto an alley. A real alley. And when I stepped through the door, the funhouse was gone. The door was now a wall.

The alley smelled like French food. It was narrow and dark and cobblestoned, and it retained the lingering odors of souffles and fondue. There was a dwarf hiding in one of the doorways, staring at me. There was something else in an­other doorway that I was afraid to acknowledge.

The tap on my shoulder made me jump.

It was the Appalachian woman, only she was no longer mechanical but human and my height and not laughing. With one hand, she pointed down a dark stairway that opened into the ground on the side of the alley. The other hand held a rolling pin. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she commanded.

I stepped down the stairs and it was cold. But that was not the only reason I shivered.

I turned around, intending to climb back up.

The woman was still pointing. I could see her silhouette against the overcast sky above the alley, framed by the stair­well entrance. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she repeated.

I started down.

The hallway was long, extraordinarily long. And dark. Doors opened off to each side, but somehow I knew that they did not lead anywhere. At the end of the hall were two rooms, one of which was lighted, one of which was dark.

I moved forward slowly. On the side, through the other doors, I could hear whispers and shuffling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw furtive shadows, dashing, darting, follow­ing. I stared straight ahead.

I grew frightened as I drew closer to the end of the hall, my fear focusing on the lighted room. It wasn't logical, but it was real. I was supposed to turn off the light, but I was afraid of the room with the light in it. The dark room was scary only because it was dark. The lighted room was scary because something was in it.

I reached the end of the hallway and ducked quickly into the darker doorway. I was breathing rapidly, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it. Trembling, I reached around the corner into the other room and felt for the light switch. I flipped it off and—

I was in an Arizona farmhouse with a man and two chil­dren I had never seen before but who I knew to be my uncle and my cousins.

I was eight years old. I lived with them.

My uncle looked out the window of the empty farmhouse at the dry dusty expanse of desert extending unbroken in all directions. "Get us something to eat," he told Jenny, my fe­male cousin.

She went into the furnitureless kitchen and looked through each cupboard. Nothing but dust.

"Whoever lived here didn't leave no food," she said. She waited for my uncle's reply, and when he didn't say any­thing she shrugged and picked up a broom leaning against the wall. She began to sweep some of the dirt out of the house.

We slept that night on the floor.

The next day, my uncle was up before dawn, riding the tractor, attempting to till that dry useless soil, attempting to grow us some food. Jenny was hanging curtains, determined to make the house livable.

So Lane and I went out to play. We walked around, ex-|- plored, talked, threw dirt clods, decided to build a club­house. He ran off and got us two trowels, and we started digging. Both of us wanted a basement in our clubhouse.

After nearly an hour of digging in the hot Arizona sun, I our tools struck wood. We dug faster and deeper and harder I and found that the wood was part of a trap door. I turned to my cousin. "I wonder what's under it."

"Only one way to find out," he said. "Open it."

So I slid my hands up under the board and pulled up. A cold chill ran through me as I saw the stairway descending into the ground. The stairway that led to a hall. I turned around and my cousin was no longer my cousin but a grin­ning, gap-toothed Appalachian woman. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she said.

I stood in front of Mike's Market, disoriented. I did not know where I was. What happened to the hallway? I won­dered. Where was the woman? It took me a minute or so to adjust. Then I realized that this was reality; the fair, the alley, the hallway, and the farm were not.

And I began to be afraid. For before this, the occurrences always seemed like dreams. Even when they started hap­pening in the daytime, they were clearly illusions juxtaposed onto a real world. But now the illusions were becoming or­dinary, the surrealism real.

I was losing the battle.

If only Kathy were here. Two of us could hold the tide; two of us could dam the flood. We might even be able to have some semblance of a normal life.

Now, however, I was alone.

And they were getting stronger.

***

Last night it was the spider.

It had been a long day with no occurrences. At least, no malicious occurrences. I'd spent the day clearing a path through the woods to the pond. The old path had become overgrown with weeds through disuse and inattentiveness. Although the day was cool and even somewhat overcast, the work was hard. And by the time I was ready to quit, I was hot, tired, and sweating like a pig.

I deserved the bath.

I decided to use the third floor bathroom, the small one with just a toilet, tub, and sink in a space the size of a closet. The water felt soothing and good, so I leaned back and re­laxed, getting comfortable. I fell asleep in the tub.

When I awoke, something was wrong. The bathwater was still warm by this time but not warm enough to stop goose bumps from popping up on my arm. Scared for no particular reason, I hurried to unstop the drain, then arose from the tub and grabbed a towel to dry myself.

It was then that I noticed the spider. Black and big as an apple, with bright blue eyes and a row of blue button teeth, it was hanging from its thread in the middle of the bathroom. I don't know how I could have missed it.

It started moving toward me; slowly, evenly, still sus­pended from its thread, as though the entire spiderline were on some sort of track in the ceiling. I flattened against the wall, nude and trembling. The spider kept coming.

Desperate, I jumped over the rim of the tub, hitting my knee on the edge, and rolled along the floor underneath the hanging creature. I climbed onto my throbbing knee and tried to unlatch the bathroom door, which I had stupidly locked.

But I wasn't quick enough. The spider and its thread were coming back toward me now, faster, gaining speed.

Once again, I rolled under it, and I jumped back in the tub just as the last little trickle of water swirled down the drain. I was getting claustrophobic. The bathroom seemed smaller by the second. The toilet's in the wrong place, I thought dis-jointedly. The sink took up too much room. I found that there was no place for me to move except along the narrow path the spider was guarding.

Maybe I could make it to the door this time. The pain in my knee almost unbearable now, I climbed on the rim of the tub, hit the side wall, and slid by the hanging horror, its large hairy body half an inch from my own.

I reached the door and turned around at the same time. No chance. There was no time. The spider was heading straight for my face, moving fast and grinning.

And then it was gone.

It had been another one of their tricks. I slumped to the floor, sweat pouring from every inch of my body though the temperature was barely above freezing. I should have known from the beginning, the way Kathy and I had always known, but I had not figured it out until the whole thing was over. I'd accepted it as reality all the way through.

I was losing the battle.

This morning I awoke early. I'd decided to spend the day just cooking. It would relax me. It would allow me to think of a way to combat this encroaching madness. I rolled out of bed and put on my robe. My eyes were still half closed, and I rubbed them so I could see clearly.