Bentley Little - The Burning

She turned off the television.

There was the sound of movement from within the bedroom. It was probably nothing, but she couldn't afford to ignore it. She walked over to the bedroom doorway to check.

And Skylar awoke screaming.

In his dream, Skylar was himself, but he was also a marionette. His strings were being worked by the ancient Chinese man who'd spied on him and his mom through the window and who'd kidnapped him in the school bathroom. The wrinkled face grinned down at him as knotted fingers tilted and twirled the strings to make him dance. He didn't want to dance-he wanted to run-but his own will and muscles were no match for the overpowering force of the strings.

Suddenly there was another puppet approaching him. It was being controlled by a scowling bearded white man in an old-fashioned suit and hat. This marionette was made from the body of a mummified child, and its eyes and mouth were sewn shut with black suture that gave its face the appearance of a shrunken head. The strings made its skeletal arms and withered legs move up and down in a grotesque approximation of walking. Skylar's instinctive reaction was to run, and he tried to do just that, but the old Chinese man holding his strings started cackling and forced him to approach the other puppet with arms outstretched, as though inviting a hug.

Skylar wanted to scream but couldn't. He had no voice.

All of a sudden, there was a knife in his right hand, and with a hard, painful yank, the string attached to that arm made it thrust forward. Within seconds, he was jabbing at the other puppet, stabbing the mummified child in its shriveled stomach, in its bony chest. No blood emerged from the slices and tears in the dried skin, only puffs of dust, but despite the furious machinations of the bearded puppeteer, the marionette began to slow down, like a toy whose battery was dying. Another hard yank on the string connected to his right arm, and Skylar was stabbing the puppet in the face. Sutures ripped open, and opaque eyes glared out at him. The toothless mouth screamed silently.

Then he was being hoisted into the air, his feet scrambling up the collapsing skull of the marionette, his hands grasping the strings attached to the mummified child and climbing to the top, where he leaped upon the bearded man's hands.

His Chinese controller was laughing loudly now, no longer cackles but full-out guffaws. The bearded man at first let out a grunt of surprise, but Skylar sliced the muscle of his arm and then he was crying out in pain and fear, cries that turned to whimpers as Skylar moved up to his shoulder and began stabbing his neck and cheek and ear, the blood spurting out and covering him in a spray of crimson.

He could not see, and he fought against the strings with all of the strength he had, just so he could wipe

the blood from his eyes. The straining paid off and he finally overcame all resistance. He used the backs of both hands to wipe off his eyes-

And he was back in that cellar, lying naked on the hard dirt ground. Only he was not alone. The same bearded white man was unwrapping a piece of folded wet linen on a wooden workbench. He was not dressed in suit and hat this time but was clothed only in his underwear, which was stained red with blood, some of it dried, most of it not. There was blood on his skin as well, and when Skylar sat up, he saw that the man was withdrawing from the dirty wet linen a human hand. The stump of the wrist was ragged, as though the hand had been yanked off an arm rather than cut, and in the middle of the red was a circle of white bone.

Chester Williams, he thought. The man's name is Chester Williams. The old Chinese man had told him that. He remembered it from last time.

Williams picked up a long knife from the workbench and lovingly used it to sever a finger from the hand. A thin trickle of blood dribbled out.

Skylar gagged, throwing up on the ground next to him, and that captured Williams' attention. The bearded man turned around, and Skylar saw with horror that he had an erection.

He pointed to Skylar with the dripping knife. "Don't worry, sweetums. You're next."

And then Skylar was in a dark place that didn't seem like anyplace at all. He couldn't tell if his feet were on the ground or if he was floating in some limitless space, because there was no resistance against the soles of his shoes or any other part of his body. He put his hands out in front of him and tried to walk, but the darkness was so complete that he had no idea if he was moving forward or remaining in place or spinning in the open air. He sensed that he was not alone-although he was not sure of it until he heard the voice speak to him.

"Skylar."

It was not the same voice as before, the voice of the Chinese man, the puppeteer. There was something inhuman about it and vaguely snakelike, especially in the way it drew out the sibilance of his name.

He did not answer, tried to make himself small, tried to hide, though for all he knew the entity could see in the dark and was watching him right now.

"Destroy the house. It is the key."

Images accompanied the words. But more than imiges. Understanding. He understood what he was noelng, comprehended the reasons behind it.

And what he saw was the mansion where he had been taken, the one with the secret cellar that he knew now to be the Williams place. Chester Williams had been a bad man, an evil man, and much of that evil had been brought to the house. He'd heard his mom and his grandma and Ms. Finch talking about Chester Williams and his diaries when they thought he was asleep, and he remembered seeing the scalps and toes and other severed body parts when he'd been brought into that hidden cellar, but that was only part of it. Chester Williams had done much, much worse within those walls, and though Skylar saw some of it, he knew he was being shielded from the worst atrocities, and for that he was grateful.

And still the house stood, its secrets protected through the generations by Chester Williams' son and then his grandson, not just a monument to the barbarity of the man but a living repository of his evil deeds. Williams himself was still there somehow, not as a ghost, not exactly, but woven into the fabric of the building itself: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It was the house that was keeping his presence alive, and it was the house that served as the focus of hatred for all the victims of his hideous crimes. They had been waiting for a long time, in a place as dark as this, for the chance to strike back at the man who had rallied mobs against them, who had tortured them and had them killed, and now they had a mob of their own, an army of the murdered, who had finally been able to connect with each other and now had the means to exact revenge not only on Williams but on the society that had condoned his actions.

"Destroy the house," the voice repeated, and Skylar understood that this would help stop the old Chinese man and his brethren by taking away the focus of their anger. It was the anger that drove them, that had kept their spirits alive all these years. Without it, they had no purpose, no meaning, and would undoubtedly dissipate, fading away into wherever it was that the dead normally went.

A muscle in his arm twitched at the memory of the string that had controlled him.

"Why me?" Skylar asked.

The answer was not clear. There were more images: his mother in her border patrol uniform discovering a family of corpses in a ditch in the desert; a group of huddled Chinese workers from long ago, dead in a tunnel, looking very similar to the family in the ditch; Skylar himself playing with Carlos, his best friend back in Yuma; Skylar again, walking by the mother-daughter grave site. There was a message he was supposed to take from that, but he had no idea what it was. "You were chosen," the voice said, but he didn't really know what that meant, and he wondered if what it really came down to was that he'd been in the right place at the right time.