The House Read online

  One continued to grab between her legs.

  She was crying hysterically, but even through her tears she could see that she'd been wrong at first. It was not just bees or beetles that accompanied the creatures but a whole host of bugs. And they were all strangely wrong, profoundly changed and disturbingly incorrect versions of ordinary insects.

  Onto her face alighted a butterfly with the screaming head of a baby. It spit on her nose and flew away.

  She was going to die and she knew it, and she was crying out for all she was worth, hoping someone--the returningHube , a passing hiker, a visiting rancher-- might hear her, but the clownish monsters did not seem to care and made no effort to gag her mouth or stifle her. They let her scream, and more than anything else, it was their lack of concern, their certainty that no one would come to her rescue, that impressed upon her the dire hopelessness of her predicament.

  The creature holding the left side of her head looked down on her, opened its mouth, and the sound of a piano emerged from between its green lips.

  The one with the rat-skull maraca jumped up and down on the stump, pointed at her, yelled, and the sound that came out of its mouth was that of a string quartet.

  She was no longer screaming, but was crying, sobbing, tears and snot pooling in the various indentations of her face.

  The skull of a possum was placed on her chest.

  As if in a dream, she heard the sound of Hube's truck in the drive and then in front of the house, heard him slam the pickup's door and call out her name. For a very brief fraction of a second, she considered yelling at the top of her lungs, telling him to get out of here, save himself. But her love was not that altruistic and she did not want to die alone here with these monsters. She wanted her husband to save her, and she screamed out his name: "Hube!"

  "Patty?" he called.

  "Hube!"

  She wanted to say more, wanted to be able to impart additional information, wanted to tell him that he should bring his shotgun from the truck so he could blow these monsters to Kingdom Come, but her brain and her mouth could not seem to get it together and she just kept screaming out his name.

  "Hube!"

  She was raised up, tilted forward, and was able to see her husband dash around the corner of the house and run into a wall of the clown creatures. They leaped onto his head, onto his chest, onto his arms, dragging him down. Weapons were lifted, bones and baseball bats, skulls and horseshoes.

  The one on the stump jumped up and down, ordered Hube'smurder in the voice of a string quartet.

  They beat him to death with the sound of a symphony.

  Michigan This was the life.

  Jennings followed the guide through the brush, bow extended. Last year, he'd taken Gloria to Palm Springs, and the year before that to Hawaii, but this year, by God, he'd put his foot down, and they'd booked their time share in northern Michigan. He was going to do something he wanted for once, and if that meant that Gloria had to either watch videos in the condo or shop at The Store in this little podunk town, then so be it.

  He'd arranged for several short hunting trips during their two-week stay. One daylong duck-hunting expedition.

  One overnight bear hunt.

  And this one.

  A three-day bow hunting trip.

  Of the three, this was the best, the one he was enjoying the most. He'd never used bow and arrow before, and though it had taken him a while to get used to both the physicality and limitations of this sport, the guide, Tom, told him that he was a natural. He felt that himself, and he found that he liked the added handicaps bow hunting placed on him. It made him feel more in tune with nature, like he was a part of this forest rather than just a dilettantish intruder, and that resulted in his increased enjoyment of the hunt. It gave everything a slight edge, and while they hadn't bagged any game yet, even his misses were more exciting and more fulfilling than some of his rifle scores.

  There were four of them on this trip: Tom; himself; Jud Weiss, a retired deputy sheriff from Arizona; and Webb Deboyar , an air-traffic controller from Orlando, Florida. Jud and Webb were still at the campsite, and Tom was taking him out on his solo, an elk tracking that would hopefully lead to a kill and mounted antlers over the fireplace back home.

  The two of them had been tracking this elk, a big bull, since before noon, and by Jennings' watch it was already pushing three. The time had flown, though. It was exhilarating being out here like this, taking part in nature's cycle, and he could not remember ever having felt more alive.

  Tom suddenly held up a hand, motioned for him to halt.

  Jennings stood in place and followed the guide's gaze.

  It was the bull elk.

  Unmoving, the animal was standing in a copse of bushes on the other side of a dying fir tree. Jennings probably would have missed it on his own, would have blundered ahead and scared the beast away, realizing what it was too late to shoot, but Tom knew these woods like the proverbial back of his hand, and he'd spotted the animal instantly.

  Jennings' blood was rushing, the adrenaline pumping.

  He was psyched, and as silently as he could, he repositioned his bow, notched the arrow, and drew back the line. The plan was simple: he would shoot the elk, and if it wasn't a clean kill, if the beast was injured and not killed, Tom would finish it off.

  The details of that had been a little too gruesome even for Jennings back in the trading post where they'd started, but now the idea of leaping onto the animal with a big buck knife, subduing it in hand-to-hoof combat, and cutting out its heart seemed like the pinnacle of raw experience, and he wished Tom had taught him how to do it.

  The elk moved, looked up, looked at them.

  "Now!" Tom yelled.

  Jennings aimed the arrow, let it fly.

  He brought the elk down with one shot.

  Tom immediately ran forward, through the underbrush, through the bushes, knife extended. Jennings followed the guide stumblingly, saw the other man leap on the animal, cut it open.

  The hairy skin split and the stomach contents spilled out.

  His father's body emerged from the open wound.

  Jennings dropped his bow, backed away, all of the saliva suddenly drained from his mouth. Tom was scrambling away from the dead animal as well, an expression of shock and uninhibited fear on his face. The knife in his hand was dripping blood, and he gripped it tightly, pointed outward.

  Jennings felt a warm wetness spread from his crotch down his leg as he pissed in his pants. He wanted to scream but could not, and neither he nor Tom said a word, made a sound.

  His father rose to his feet. He was wearing a suit, but both the suit and his skin were covered with blood and a clear sort of viscousgoo . He was smaller than he used to be, almost dwarfish, but he hadn't aged at all or at least the age had not registered on his face. Jennings' initial dumb thought was that his father hadn't died, they'd buried the wrong man, but he remembered seeing his father's body and knew that he had died and that this was some sort of ... monster.

  His father bounded instantly away from the gutted elk and toward Tom. The guide started stabbing outward, but his reactions were slow and the knife cut only air.

  Tom's neck was broken with one quick snap, and then his father changed directions and loped across the small open space toward him, grinning crazily.

  There was elk blood on his teeth.

  Jennings tried to get away, clawed his way through the brush, through the bushes, started heading back through the trees toward camp, but his father caught him before he'd gone more than a few feet. He was knocked to the ground, and he felt the weight of his father's compacted body on his back. Strong hands slipped around his neck, fingers digging into his flesh.

  Dad! he wanted to scream.

  But the air in his lungs could not escape to form words, and the world around him faded, and he saw only blackness.

  New York Shelly emerged from the bathroom and glanced over at Sam on the bed. He looked up from his magazine, smiled warmly at her, an
d she turned away. He was getting maudlin as he grew older and it was something that had begun to irritate her. He cried now in movies formulaic, simplistic, emotionally manipulative movies that were transparent in their sentimentality even to fTJtwasann°ying to hear his light occasional sniffles next to her, to see his finger wipe wetness from the corners of his eyes. He had not cried when David died, nor when his own parents had passed on, yet he was now shedding tears for not particularly well-drawn fictional characters artificially embroiled in embarrassingly contrived plots.

  She wondered sometimes why she had married him.

  Shaking her head, Shelly walked over to the dresser, picked up her brush and--there was another face in the mirror.

  She blinked, closed her eyes. Looked away, looked back. But the face was still there, an ancient hag with impossibly wrinkled parchment skin, dark eyes narrowed into an evil slit, a hard cruel smile on a nearly lipless mouth.

  Mary Worth.

  Shelly backed up, all of the saliva in her mouth suddenly gone, but she could not look away. She could see a reversed image of the bedroom in the mirror, Sam sitting up, leaning against the headboard, reading his magazine. In the foreground was the face, just on the other side of the mirrored dresser, staring back at her with malevolent intensity. She'd thought at first that it was unattached to a body, but the longer she looked the more she saw, and she could now make out hunched shoulders beneath a black robe, although she could not say whether the body had been there all along or had materialized before her eyes. Mary Worth.

  It was exactly the face she had expected to see all those years ago, when she and her sisters and her friends had had sleepovers and had played those nighttime party games indulged in by every schoolgirl in America. "Mary Worth had been their favorite, and they had dutifully taken turns standing before the mirror with their eyes closed repeating "Mary Worth, Mary Worth, Mary Worth 'The story was that if you said her name a hundred times, she would appear. None of them had ever been brave enough to make it to a hundred, chickening out and running squealing back to their beds and sleeping bags somewhere around forty or forty-five, and she knew that she herself had always purposely kept it under fifty, no matter what she told her sisters and her friends, because that, too, seemed a magical number and she'd been afraid that Mary Worth might have been partially present by that point and she did not want to see her at all.

  Shelly could not remember who had initially taught her the ritual or where she had first learned of it, and she could not recall ever having seen a picture of Mary Worth or ever having the hag described to her. All she'd known was that Mary Worth was ancient and utterly terrifying.

  But she realized now that the face in the mirror was exactly how she'd pictured Mary Worth in her mind.

  Shelly stared into the mirror, blinked.

  Where was her reflection?

  She had not realized it until this second, but although everything else in the bedroom was reflected exactly, she herself was not in the mirror.

  Mary Worth had taken her place.

  If before she had been frightened, now she was utterly terrified, and she watched with growing horror as the old crone withdrew from her robe a long silver knife, wrinkled bony fingers clutching the blackened hilt. Shelly quickly looked around the room to make sure there was no real Mary Worth present, then glanced down at her own body to make sure there was no superimposition upon her frame, to make sure she was not wearing a black robe and withdrawing a knife of which she was unaware.

  No.

  But in the mirror she was still not visible and Mary Worth, her twisted smile growing broader, turned around, gripping the knife tightly, and walked over toward where Sam lay on the bed reading.

  Shelly was staring into the mirror as the old crone began to stab, and she whirled around when Sam started screaming behind her.

  There was still no Mary Worth, but Sam was thrashing around on the bed, sudden slices opening up the skin of his chest and thigh, blood both welling and spurting, depending on the location of the slash, covering his skin and his fallen magazine, the pink sheets and pillowcases, the headboard and the nightstand and the Indian rug on the hardwood floor.

  There was no noise save for Sam's ear-piercing screams, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

  In the mirror, Mary Worth was laughing, cackling, but there was no accompanying sound. Her voice, if she had one, was trapped behind the glass, audible only in that world, and while her actions were manifest in the real bedroom, her form and voice were not.

  How had Mary Worth come? No one had invoked her name.

  There was a missing piece here. Shelly could buy the concept of summoning up an evil spirit, but she did not quite believe that Mary Worth was able to show up on her own, without being called. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work, and while the story she'd been told might be part of a children's game, there was a kernel of truth to all legends.

  Sam had stopped screaming. He was dead, but Mary Worth continued to stab, and his lifeless body jerked on the mattress with the force of her knife blows.

  Shelly was not screaming either. She was not panicking, not afraid, and while she was probably just in shock, Sam's murder was not the horrifyingly cataclysmic event that it should have been. Indeed, she felt detached from it, the scene next to her in the room as distant, flat, and removed as something on television, the reflection in the mirror only slightly more immediate because of the frightening visage of Mary Worth.

  Mary Worth.

  Even the monster was not as terrifying as she had been. Shelly was getting used to the crone, and she thought that perhaps she had summoned the hag, had subconsciously wanted her to do just what she was doing.

  No.

  She and Sam might have drifted apart. Maybe she didn't even love him anymore. But never in her most vicious fantasies had she ever wished him dead. This was all Mary Worth's doing, not hers.

  But she would be blamed for it.

  The knowledge hit her all of a sudden. She once again faced the bed, saw her husband's bloody body, his chest cavity hacked open so wide that portions of organs were visible through the rent skin and muscle.

  She turned back toward the mirror.

  In the glass, Mary Worth was once again standing in her place on the other side of the dresser, looking back at her.

  And she was smiling.

  Daniel "Wake up."

  Daniel heard his wife's voice, felt her hands gently shaking him awake, but it had been a long time since he'd gotten up this early and his body resisted. He moaned, turned over, dug deeper into the blankets.

  "Your interview's at ten," she said, and there was a no-nonsense undercurrent to the surface pleasantry of her voice that made him suck in a deep breath, throw off the blankets, and sit up.

  Margot was already dressed, ready for work, and she stood next to the bed, looking down at him. "I'm sorry,"

  she said, "but I'm leaving and I'm dropping off Tony, and I want to make sure you're up before I go. Otherwise, you'll never make it."

  "I'm up," he said, standing. He tried to kiss her, but she wrinkled her nose and pulled away.

  "Scope," she said.

  "That's romantic."

  "Tell me about it." She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "Give me a call at the office after your interview. I want to know how it goes."

  He picked up his pants from the floor next to the bed.

  "I can take Tony, you know."

  "It's out of your way. Besides, I have a little extra time." She started down the hall. "I'm serious about that Scope. Nothing'11 lose you a job faster than B.O. or bad breath."

  He followed her out to the living room, where Tony was waiting by the front door, backpack in hand. All of the drapes were open, and outside four or five identically dressed adolescents were leaning against the low brick wall that separated their weed patch of a yard from the sidewalk. One kid with a shaved head ground out the butt of the cigarette he'd been smoking on top of the wall and flicked
it into their yard.

  Margot must have seen the look on Daniel's face because she frowned at him, pointing her finger. "Don't you say anything to those boys. We have to live here and Tony has to go to their school. Anything you do to them, they'll take out on him."

  Tony said nothing, but the pleading in his son's eyes told him that he agreed with his mother one hundred percent, and Daniel nodded. "Fine," he said.

  He watched them walk outside, waved good-bye, and shut and locked the door behind them before heading back to the bathroom to take a shower.

  The hot water felt good on his skin, and he stayed in the shower longer than he needed to, enjoying the warm steam that fogged up the room and the comforting sensation of the pulsing water against his sleep-sore back.

  It had been over a year since corporate downsizing had caused him to be laid off from his last job at Thompson Industries, and though the nightly news told him continuously that leading economic indicators were up and the stock market was at an all-time high, he had no immediate prospects of finding a job and saw no change on the horizon. He'd gone to every employment agency in the Philadelphia metropolitan area during the past thirteen months, but nothing had turned up in all that time and the market was oversaturated with similarly displaced middle-management workers all competing for the same positions.

  More than once he'd wanted to move, but Margot was still employed, still bringing home a paycheck, and the truth was that the house was the only tangible asset they had. It was their anchor, bought and paid for, left to them fair and square by her parents, and if Pennsylvania wasn't his favorite state, that was just too damn bad because if worst came to worst, if Margot lost her job and their phone and gas and electricity were cut off, they could always huddle in the living room in their sleeping bags and eat crackers stolen from restaurant salad bars.

  He smiled to himself as he shut off the shower, amused at his own train of thought. As Margot always said, he shouldn't be so melodramatic.