Bentley Little: The Collection

We ended up at the barn.

"You really used to play here?" she asked, looking up at the decaying building. "It looks so dangerous."

I smiled. "Well, it wasn't quite so bad off in those days. In fact, it was still being used." I walked up to the huge open doorway and looked in. Light now entered the once-dark building through several holes in the roof. "Hello!" I called, hoping for an echo. My voice died flatly, barely managing to scare two swallows who flew through one of the roof holes.

Jan walked up and stood beside me, looking in. "You used to play upstairs, too?"

I nodded. "We played everywhere. We knew every inch of this place."

She shivered and turned around. "I don't like it."

I followed her back out into the sunlight. The day was hot, almost unbearably so, and though I was wearing a T-shirt, cutoffs, and a pair of sandals, I was still sweating.

Jan, ahead of me by a few paces, stopped at the edge of the tall grass and stared toward the hillside, silent, thinking. I crept up behind her and gave her a quick poke in the side. She jumped, and I laughed. "Sorry," I said. "I just couldn't help it."

She smiled thinly, and her gaze returned to the small cluster of buildings. "It is scary, isn't it? Even in the day­time."

She was right. The bathhouse and the small shacks sur­rounding it dominated the scenery, though they were by no means the most prominant figures in the landscape. It was as if the whole area, the scattered farmhouses, the fields and the hills, were somehow focused in on that point. No matter where one stood in the valley, his or her eyes would be drawn inexorably to the bathhouse. There was something strange about the makeshift hut, something a little off, some­thing entirely unrelated to my grandpa's story.

"Listen," Jan said, grabbing my arm. "Do you hear that?"

I listened. "No, I don't hear—"

"Shhh!" She put up her hand to silence me.

I stood perfectly still, cocking my ear toward the bath­house, listening intently. Sure enough, a low buzzing was coming from that direction, growing louder or softer with the wafting of the hot breeze. "I hear it," I said.

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know."

She stood still for a moment, listening. The buzzing maintained its even rhythm. "You know what it reminds me of?" she said. "That poem by Keats. The one where he talked about 'the murmurous haunt of flies.'"

The murmurous haunt of flies.

It seemed suddenly hotter, more humid, if that was pos­sible. The wind, blowing from the direction of the bath­house, felt hellishly, unnaturally heated. I put my arm around Jan and held her close. We stood like that for a few minutes.

"How far do you think that is?" she asked, gesturing to­ward the hill.

"Why?"

"I'd like to go over there. You know, just take a look."

I shook my head emphatically. I may not have fully be­lieved my grandpa's story and his repeated warnings, but I had no desire to tempt the fates. "No way," I said. "Forget it."

"Why not? It's broad daylight. It's not even two o'clock yet. What could happen to us?"

I was sweating heavily by now, and I used my T-shirt to wipe the moisture off my face. "I don't know," I said. "I just don't want to take any chances."

She gave my hand a small squeeze and looked into my eyes. "It is scary, isn't it?"

That night, I had a nightmare. And it was Jan who woke me up and comforted me.

I had been walking through the tall grasses beyond the barn, the overgrown groundcover reaching above my head and causing me to lose my way. It was night, and the full moon shone brightly in a starless sky. I kept looking up as I walked, trying unsuccessfully to get my bearings by the moon, trying vainly to determine in which direction I was walking. Suddenly, I stepped through a wall of grass and found myself at the edge of a small clearing—face-to-face with the bathhouse.

The bathhouse looked smaller than I'd thought it would, and not as run-down. But that in no way diluted its evil. For it was evil. It was a forbidding and terrifying presence, al­most alive, and the light of the moon played spectrally across its adobe facade, highlighting the empty darkened windows, spotlighting strange irregularities in construction. There was something definitely wrong with the building, something savage and perverse, and as I looked at the struc­ture my muscles knotted in fear.

Then something caught my eye. I glanced over the front of the building once again and saw what I had noticed only peripherally before. I screamed. Peeking out of the black­ened rectangular hole which served as a doorway were two shriveled feet wearing Jan's stockings.

I awoke in Jan's arms.

And she held me, softly, closely, her calm, sympathetic voice assuaging my fears, until again I fell asleep.

The other local farmers knew about the bathhouse as well, we learned. My grandpa had several of the neighbor­ing ranchers over for a barbecue lunch the next day, and they discussed, in hushed whispers, the recent mutilation of sev­eral hogs. They all seemed to think the mutilations were connected with the bathhouse in some way.

"I went up there exactly once," said Old Man Crawford. "The first year we moved here. That was enough for me."

I was sitting next to Jan at the head of the table, keeping my ear on the conversation and my eye on the hamburgers. I turned toward Old Man Crawford. "What was it like?" I asked.

They stared at me then, six pairs of eyes widening as if in shock. The only sound was the sizzling of the meat dripping through the rusty grill onto the burning charcoal. No one said a word; it was as if they were waiting for me to retract my question. Jan's hand found mine and held it.

"What the hell is this? A wake?" My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns. He looked from me to the silent farmers. "Anything wrong here?"

"Nah," Old Man Crawford said, smiling and downing the last of his beer. "Everything's fine."

The mood was broken, the tension dissipated, and the conversation returned to a normal, healthy buzz, though it now revolved around other, safer, topics.

I got up and went into the house, rummaging through the refrigerator for a Coke. Jan followed me in. "What was all that about?" she asked.

I found my Coke and closed the door. "You got me."

She shook her head, smiling slightly. "Ever get the feel­ing this is all a joke? Some trick they're playing on the rubes from the city?"

"You saw them," I said. "That was no joke. They were scared. Every one of those old bastards was scared. Jesus ..." I walked over to the screen door and looked to­ward the hillside. "Maybe we should go up there and look around." An expression of terror passed over Jan's face, and I laughed. "Then again, maybe we shouldn't."

We rejoined the party and sat in silence, effectively chas­tened, listening to the farmers talk. After a while the talk turned, as I knew it would, back to the hog mutilations. A lot of hostile glances were thrown in my direction, but this time I said nothing. I just listened.

"Herman looked fine when I went out to see him," Old Man Crawford said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "I just thought he was asleep. Then I heard, like, a buzzing coming from where he lay. I moved in a little closer, and I saw that his stomach had been sliced clean open." He made a slicing motion with his hand and his voice dropped. "He'd been gutted, all his innards taken out, and the inside of his body was nothing but thousands of flies."

A middle-aged farmer I didn't know, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a cowboy hat, nodded his head in un­derstanding. "That's exactly what happened to my Marybeth. Flies all inside her. Even in her mouth. Just a-crawling around..."

"The bathhouse," my grandpa said, chewing the last bite of his hamburger.