Bentley Little: The Association

Barry didn't respond, but the idea was one that had already occurred to him, and he felt cold.

"Come home to us," Maureen said. "Nothing is worth your life."

"I know that. Don't worry. I won't do anything stupid."

The dinner was scheduled for eight, and though he could have walked, Barry decided to drive. He might need to make a quick getaway. And if... something ... happened to him, at least the disposal of his Suburban would cause them trouble and inconvenience.

He parked on the street rather than in the driveway so other people could see his vehicle. Walking up the path, he was filled with the same sense of trepidation he had experienced before, magnified by the fact that it was night. Calhoun had strong lights illuminating his grassy lawn, but they only served to make the surrounding woods seem darker.

A servant met him at the door. No, not a servant. A volunteer. Barry recognized the man. Ralph Hieberg . He'd been introduced to him at one of Ray's parties.

"Come in, Mr. Welch. You are expected."

Barry stepped into the vestibule. "Ralph," he said. "What are you doing here?"

The man's eyes darted furtively to the left and then the right. Barry thought he was actually going to answer, but he said, "Just come with me. Please. I only have a month to go. I don't want to get in trouble."

Barry nodded, understanding, and allowed himself to be led through another doorway into what appeared to be the living room.

He'd been expecting a building of dank dark corridors, a maze of passageways that led to some horrible inner sanctum, but instead the interior of the house was bright and airy. The room into which they walked was decorated in a Japanese motif, with bamboo-framed paper walls, low tables, and mats and cushions on the floor. There were no lights or lamps but illumination seeped through the translucent paper from all sides, ensuring that there were no shadows.

Ralph walked around the tables to the opposite wall and pulled aside a section, which slid open to reveal another room beyond. He stood to the left and motioned for Barry to enter.

There was writing on the walls, Barry noticed as he followed the volunteer. He looked carefully at the wall as he passed into the next room and shivered as he realized that the bamboo frames held not traditional blank rice paper but blown-up pages from Bonita Vista's Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions.

They went from this room to another... and then another and another.

Each looked exactly like the one before it. He saw no couches, no television, no bookcase, no kitchen, no bathroom, only an endless series of living rooms with low tables and mats and cushions and C, C, and R walls. Until finally they were in a room with no furniture, only an empty wooden floor and walls that did not glow with that sourceless illumination but were dim and dull. Ahead, the translucent paper was red and there was no writing on it. From behind the red wall he heard moaning and occasional sharp yelps. Barry found it hard to swallow; it felt as though his heart was in his throat.

"This way, Mr. Welch." The volunteer pushed aside a section of the red wall and the two of them walked into the chamber beyond.

This was what he had expected.

The room was massive, bigger than the entire bottom floor of his own house, with a high black ceiling from which hung dirty irregularly spaced lightbulbs . The walls were stone, the floor worn, unpainted wood that was stained with drops and splotches of what could only be old blood. There was a large pit in the center of the chamber, its sides made of burnished steel, its bottom covered with straw. Rusted metal tables stuck out at odd angles around the edge of the pit, like broken wheel spokes.

On the tables were blades and saws and what looked like medical instruments.

In the pit were Stumpies .

They were moaning and wailing, although whether in pain or some desperate effort to communicate, he had no idea. There were six men and one woman, and thankfully Barry didn't know any of them. He'd expected in that first second of comprehension to see Dylan and Chuck and Danna with their limbs cut off, but the poor pathetic wretches who flopped around in the sawdust were not people he had ever seen before.

It was the armless, legless woman who was most disturbing, her bruised and battered nudity reminding him uncomfortably of Maureen. The others were squirming through the straw, jerking their bodies into and over each other. But she lay alone against the rounded steel wall, the wild matted hair of her private parts glistening with wet blood, her swollen mouth open silently, her eyes fixed on one of the dim bare bulbs overhead.

"This way, Mr. Welch."

Numbly, he walked around one of the rusted tables, this one containing a ball peen hammer covered with flecks of flesh and bone, an assortment of filthy screwdrivers, and a long serrated knife. As he followed Ralph past the pit, he could not help looking down. In the straw surrounding the Stumpies , he saw feces and what looked like rotted fish.

The volunteer stopped before a narrow metal door recessed into the stone wall. He did not look at Barry, did not look at the door, but stared down at his feet and seemed to be gathering his strength as he took a deep breath. Quickly, he reached out, grabbed the oversized handle, and pulled the door open. He looked scared as he motioned Barry in.

They stepped through the narrow entryway.

"Mr. Welch!" Ralph announced.

This room was even darker. There were no electric lights here, only smoky, foul-smelling candles held in wrought iron stands placed in the four corners of the chamber. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but when they did he saw a dusty display case containing the stuffed bodies of cats and dogs, parrots, and hamsters--the pets outlawed by the association. Other damaged, discarded remnants of normal life that were not permitted in Bonita Vista were arranged haphazardly around the room: dead house plants in broken pots lying atop a cracked and listing knickknack shelf, split birdhouses hanging from a battered clothesline pole that leaned against a child's playhouse.

At the opposite end of the chamber,las per Calhoun was seated at the center of a long oak table, flanked by the other five members of the board. Goblets of dark red liquid and plates of strange, unappetizing meat sat on the table in front of them. The tableaux reminded Barry of the Last Supper, with the transubstantiation made horribly literal.

"Welcome to our boardroom," Calhoun said. To the sides of him, the others nodded. The strangeness of their oddly shaped, too-white faces did not seem out of place here, Barry thought. This was the environment in which they belonged, this was their home.

Underneath the table, he could see naked women chained to the floor, servicing the six men.

Calhoun saw the direction of his gaze and smiled. "Our female volunteers," he said. He nodded down at his lap. "That's Ralph's wife. Right, Ralph?"

The volunteer nodded stoically.

"You could have had Maureen work off your debts this way."

Barry pretended to be thinking thoughtfully. "I read your sexual harassment pamphlet, and as I understand it, this would be classified as harassment under association rules. Am I correct?"

Calhoun stood, his face flushing. Underneath the table, Ralph's wife scurried to the side. "I will not have the rules quoted to me in my own house!"

"I take it that's a yes?"

The president took a deep breath, and forced himself to smile. "Too bad about your friends," he said. "I wonder whatever happened to them." He looked down at the slab of strange meat on his plate and very deliberately peeled off a stringy section, eating it.

He was bluffing. He had to be. This was all show, a performance put on for his benefit, but Barry had to admit that the technique was effective. He was way out of his depth, and fear had overtaken anger as the dominant emotion within him.