The House Page 18

  He rushed into the kitchen, pushed open the swinging door. The entire room was filled with smoke. Black smoke that smelled like burnt toast.

  He didn't know what had happened at first. He shut off the oven and opened the windows and the back door.

  Donna was standing in the yard in her dirty shift, staring back at him, unmoving, but he didn't have time to fool around with her, and he hurried back over to the stove.

  She'd killed them and cut off their heads and put their heads in the oven.

  All of them.

  His parents, his brother, his sisters.

  He was fanning out the smoke when he saw his father's burned head, sitting on the middle rack. The old man's eyes were gone and his lips were flattened and all of the fat and flesh seemed to have melted off, but Norton recognized who it was. Next to that, his mother's head had fallen over and parts of her were sticking to the grill. His brother's and sisters' heads were smoldering in the back, all lumped together.

  They reminded him of the burned ants.

  He never saw Donna again. Just that last look through the door, through the smoke. And when he thought back on it, later, he realized that she looked the same as she had before. She hadn't aged at all. She still looked twelve.

  Now Norton sucked in a deep breath and looked up at the house, then turned back toward the plucked chicken and its pointing wing. Was this a joke or a warning?

  Was it meant to be threatening or welcoming? It was impossible to tell; the mind behind it was so alien to his own. Nevertheless, he got out of the car and walked purposely toward the house, up the porch. He thought he heard a child laughing.

  A girl.

  Donna.

  He pressed down on his erection.

  The front door opened even before he had a chance to knock, and their old hired hand stood there, within the dark entryway, smiling at him, looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago.

  "Hello, Billingson ," Norton said, trying to keep the quiver from his voice. "May I come in?"

  Stormy Roberta was gone.

  There'd been no hint, no warning, no indication that she'd been planning on leaving him. She'd been even colder and more diffident to him than usual after the misunderstanding with theFinnigan brothers' bankruptcy lawyer, but that wasn't a drastic departure from her typical pattern of behavior, and it had hardly registered on his emotional radar.

  But he'd come home on Monday and she hadn't been there, and now she'd been gone for three days. There'd been no note, he hadn't heard from her, and since she'd packed several suitcases and taken the Saab, he assumed that she'd left him.

  And he found that he didn't really care.

  He cared about the hanging threads, of course. The unresolved details. He didn't like loose ends, didn't like having anything hanging over his head. But he assumed she'd talk to a lawyer at some point and the lawyer would contact him and they'd work out some sort of settlement.

  Then he'd be free.

  It was a strange feeling and he wasn't entirely used to it yet. Everyone was telling him good riddance, even Joan, and bothRanee and Ken had offered to reintroduce him to the singles' scene, teach him the ropes, but the truth was that he was not ready to start dating again.

  Not yet. His friends' descriptions of one-night stands with young nubile women willing to do anything, no matter how kinky, were admittedly tempting, and even at his fringe of the entertainment industry the opportunities were there, but he just didn't seem to be in the mood to immediately jump back into the social whirl, to begin forming new emotional attachments. He felt tired, drained, a little burned out, and he wanted to collect himself, charge his batteries a bit before starting up again.

  Fruit salad in the toilet.

  Rose and cheese in the sink drain.

  Those images had never been very far from his mind, and he supposed that was one reason why he was so reluctant to commit to anything new. He'd been haunted by his experience in the theater. He'd been having dreams ever since that day, dreams of his parents' old house in Chicago. Nightmares filled with recurring images:

  living dolls and walking dead fathers and dirty sex crazed children.

  But it was what he had seen in the theater that scared him the most. Ghosts and zombies and the other traditional trappings of horror were indeed frightening--particularly in real life, outside the make-believe context of film--but it was the irrational incomprehensibility of what he'd seen in the demolished bathroom that made him feel truly afraid. For these were things that were not categorized or recognized, that were not part of fiction or folklore, and they made him realize how ignorant and inconsequential he really was.

  There was meaning in what he had seen--of that he was sure--but the fact that he could not begin to even grasp the superficialities of intent shook him to the core of his being.

  Something was going on, something just underneath the surface realities, something so huge and all-encompassing that it was breaking through in unexpected places and in unfathomable ways.

  Once again, he thought about the events on the reservation and the idea that these supernatural occurrences were spreading outward from a common cause over an epic area of ground.

  It terrified him, but a perenially practical part of his mind told him that it might not make for a bad movie.

  There was a knock on his door frame, and Russ Madsen, this semester's intern, poked his head into the office.

  "Mr. Salinger? Could I speak to you for a moment?"

  Stormy nodded, waved him in. Like most of the interns he'd had over the past two years, Russ was terminally overeager and far too obsequious for his own good.

  He was a nice kid, but Stormy had entered into an agreement with the university in Albuquerque because, as he understood it, the kids would get real world experience, he'd get free workers, and the school would collect tuition without having to teach. From his perspective, though, the internship program had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The students who came to his company were all wannabe film makers and they seemed to spend most of their time trying to impress him with their knowledge and talent rather than doing the jobs he assigned them.

  Russ was a little better than the others. He was just as adept at brown-nosing, and he tried just as hard to impress, but he did actually do the work and he completed the assignments given him.

  Stormy smiled at the intern. "What is it, Russ?"

  "I have a tape I think you might like." He placed a videocassette on the desk. "It's an unreleased feature by a local filmmaker, and I think it's terrific. It's sort of a horror movie, but it's . . . different. I don't really know how to explain it. But I thought you might want to take a look at it."

  "Your film?"

  "No." He smiled. "That would be conflict of interest."

  "Excellent answer." Stormy reached for the tape, picked it up. The title on the label was Butchery.

  "Good title," Stormy observed.

  "Good film. I know I'm just an intern, but I think it has potential. I watched it last night, and I was so blown away that I had to let you see it. I lied and told the guy who gave it to me that I hadn't watched it yet and asked if I could hold on to it for another day so I could get it to you."

  Stormy looked over at Russ. He'd never really talked to the boy before, and he was impressed by what appeared to be his genuine love and enthusiasm for movies. Most of his other interns had been closer in temperament to his old L.A. cronies, film snobs who would probably end up in businesses entirely unrelated to the industry but who still looked down on the direct to-video market and considered their time here to be a form of slumming. Russ seemed to be more like himself, and he thought that maybe he'd been a little too quick to rush to judgment.

  "You do have a film of your own, though? Right?"

  "Yeah," the intern admitted.

  "Something you think we'd be interested in here?"

  "I think so. It's an action flick and I made it on a shoestring budget, but the production values are pre
tty good, and the female lead's a real find. I think the actors are really impressive.

  "I'd like to see it sometime."

  "That'd be great! I'm in post now, but I'd love to let you look at it when I'm done. Any help or advice you could give me would be ... I mean, I'd really appreciate it."

  "All right," Stormy said, smiling. He held up the videocassette.

  "Thanks for dropping this off, and I'll take a look at it today."

  Russ understood that the meeting was over, and he awkwardly excused himself and hurriedly left the office.

  Butchery.

  Stormy toyed with the tape in his hand. With all of the other things going on, it might be relaxing to view a little video carnage. It might take a little of the edge off what passed for reality these days. There was a lot of paperwork he had to do, some agreements he had to go over that would allow a few of his more explicit titles to be sold in Canada, but he was having a difficult time concentrating on work this morning, and he told Joan to hold all his calls, closed the door, popped the tape in his VCR, settling back in his chair to watch the movie.

  The title was misleading. There was no butchery in the film. There was not even any blood. There was instead a gothic mansion and an ambiguously manipulative butler and a misunderstood young boy with a crazy grandmother and two emotionally distant parents.

  Stormy felt increasingly cold as he watched the film, filled with a growing sense of dread.

  He knew this house.

  He knew this story.

  It was his parents' place in Chicago, and the unnamed boy was himself as a child, navigating the treacherous waters of the unstable household, trying to maintain for himself a normal existence despite the continuous undefined threats of the strange insular world around him.

  He'd forgotten a lot of this, forgotten the butler, forgotten the intimidating house, forgotten the feeling of being always off balance, always nervous, always floundering, but it came back to him now as he watched the movie, and when the boy was seduced by the butler's sly daughter, posing as a homeless street urchin, Stormy mouthed the girl's name.

  "Donielle."

  If the film fell into any genre, it would be psychological horror, but that limiting label did not begin to convey the scope of the work. Russ was right. The film was amazingly accomplished. As good as the Hopi kid's flick.

  It created an unsettling universe of its own, and despite the rather slow pace of the movie, it drew the viewer in, and it made one care deeply about the fate of its protagonist.

  It was not the film's artistic merit, however, but the personal connection, the references to himself, to his own life, to his childhood, that gripped Stormy, that left him staring at the snow-filled screen for several minutes after the movie had ended.

  It meant something, he knew, but again he didn't know what.

  He thought of what he'd seen in the theater, and the connection was made.

  Theater.

  Film.

  There was a thread linking his childhood in that horrible frightening house to the disappearing figure, the fruit salad in the toilet, the rose in the cheese in the sink drain. It was a connective tissue so fine as to be almost nonexistent, but it was there, and it was extant, and he was suddenly possessed by the need to meet the person who had made this movie.

  There was a feeling of urgency about it, an imperative sense that, like a house of cards, it all might fall apart and whatever tentative connections had been established would disappear.

  He burst out of his office. Joan, at her desk, jumped.

  "Where's Russ?" he demanded.

  "Duping room."

  Stormy strode down the hall to the technical facilities and held up the videocassette. "Where did you get this film?" he demanded.

  Russ looked up from the equipment, startled. "A, uh, friend of mine gave it to me. He got it from P. P. Rod man, the guy who made it."

  "Where is this Rodman?"

  "Do you want to buy the distribution rights?"

  "I want to meet the person who made this film."

  "He lives on the reservation."

  The reservation.

  It was all connected, the house and the dolls and the theater and TomUtchaca's dead dad, andStormy's almost frantic need to meet this filmmaker immediately intensified. Whatever was going on here, it was big, something that he could only barely imagine, but he was filled with the unfounded, absurd but unshakable conviction that if he could figure out the core cause of all of this craziness, he could put a stop to it before anything catastrophic happened.

  Catastrophic?

  Where had that come from?

  "Do you have Rodman's phone number?" he asked.

  Russ shook his head. "He doesn't have a phone."

  "Do you know how to get in touch with him?"

  "My friend carpools with him to school. I could give him a call."

  "Do it."

  Stormy hurried back to his office, gave Ken a quick call. Ken was more familiar with the reservation than he was, knew quite a few people there, and Stormy gave a thumbnail sketch of where he was going and why and asked his friend if he'd come along.

  "I'm at the office. Pick me up on the way."

  Russ knocked on the door frame. "Doug says P.P.

  doesn't have classes today. He should be home."

  "You have an address?"

  "I know where it is."

  "You're coming with me, then. Let's go."

  A half hour later, Stormy, Russ, and Ken were bumping along the dusty road across the mesa that led to the pueblo serving as tribal headquarters.

  Ken's accounts of supernatural occurrences were not exaggerated. If anything, they'd underrepresented the degree of infiltration. Stormy pulled to a stop in front of the headquarters. Kachina dolls were indeed walking around, and they were doing so in the open. There were dozens of them on the flat ground in front of the pueblo, lurching, waddling, and crawling in different directions.

  Several stood like sentries on the ledge above the door, swiveling about. On the other side of the creek that bisected the open gathering area, a group of dead men were standing in a circle, apparently speaking among themselves.

  Stormy sat for a moment in the car. The extent of what was happening here was overwhelming, and he marveled at how the few people he saw walking about completely ignored the dolls and the dead. Human beings, he thought, can get used to anything.

  But perhaps whatever was behind all this knew that.

  Maybe it was starting here because the Native American culture was more open in regard to the supernatural, more readily accepting of the nonmaterial world. Maybe this was the first assault in a full-fledged invasion of ghosts and spirits and demons and monsters. Maybe they were easing in gradually, getting people used to them before they . . . What? Took over the world?

  He'd seen too many movies.

  But movies were the only real reference point for what was going on. There was no parallel in the real world, no factual, historical correspondence.

  Ken hopped out of the car. "I'll be back in a sec," he said, running into the tribal office. "I'm just going to tell them we're here."

  Stormy turned, looked at Russ in the backseat. The intern's face was white, blanched.

  "What's going on?" Russ asked.

  Stormy shook his head. "I don't know."

  The dolls were not as frightening to him as he'd thought they'd be. He supposed it was because they were out in the open, in the daylight, with people around.

  There was an old saw in the horror film industry about ghosts and monsters being more frightening when they were juxtaposed against normal, everyday life, but he had never believed that to be true. A ghost in a mall was nowhere near as scary as a ghost in an old dark house, and the same thing was true here. The kachinas were obviously alive, their wooden bodies and feathered faces were moving in a terrifyingly unnatural way, a way that shouldn't be possible, but they were nowhere near as frightening to him as the thought he'd had of a lone doll sneaki
ng around the house --the inside of the abandoned theater.

  Ken came running back. "It's cool. Let's go."

  "Two streets down," Russ said from the back. "The white house."

  Stormy put the car into gear. "Pretty fucking spooky,"

  he said.

  Ken nodded. "You're telling me." He glanced at the circle of dead men as they drove by. "I'd like to get a close-up look at one of them," he said.

  Stormy shivered. "No you wouldn't."

  "What's going on?" Russ asked again.

  Neither of them answered him.

  It was like driving through a foreign country, Stormy thought. Or an alien landscape. No, it was more surreal than that. Like passing through a Fellini world or a David Lynch world or ... No. Even film analogies broke down here.

  On the side of the road, a woman popped into existence.

  She hadn't been there a second before, and then she was, and she smiled and waved at them.

  "Turn here," Russ said, pointing. "That's his house."

  Stormy braked to a halt in the middle of a short dirt driveway in front of a small dilapidated home. P. P. Rod man was already out the front door and walking toward the car before Stormy had even shut off the engine. The filmmaker was a scrawny little half-and-half who looked as though he was about sixteen. Russ had told him that Rodman was in grad school, but had he not known, he would have guessed high school freshman.

  Stormy got out of the car and walked toward the filmmaker, hand extended. "Hello," he said. "I'm Stormy Salinger--"

  "President of Monster Distribution." Rodman nodded.

  "I know."

  "Russ here gave me a tape of Butchery, and I have to say, I was very impressed."

  Rodman squinted against the sun. "Thanks."

  "Did you write the film?" Stormy asked.

  "Wrote and directed it," Rodman said proudly.

  "Where'd you get the idea?"

  The kid frowned. "It came to me in a dream."