The House Read online

  "Curious, isn't it?"

  Mark dropped the drapes. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

  Billings chuckled.

  "Who are you?"

  "You know who I am, Marky boy."

  Mark felt cold. "All right, then. What are you?"

  "I'm the assistant."

  "What do you want from me?"

  "Me? Nothing. It's the House that called you back."

  "Called me back?"

  "You are to live here again."

  Mark shook his head. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but I came back here because Kris ten died and I wanted to find out what happened to her.

  And for your information, I came back for a visit, not to stay."

  "But stay you shall. The House needs occupants."

  "For what?"

  "Why, to maintain the border, of course."

  Mark didn't like the sound of that, and he tried not to let his fear show.

  "The House," Billings continued, "was built as a barrier, to maintain the border between this world, the material world, and the other world, the Other Side."

  Mark's mouth felt dry. "The 'Other Side'?"

  Billings's eyes were flat, unreadable. "The hereafter, the world of the dead, the world of magic and the supernatural, the world of spirits. It is the opposite of this world, your world, and it is a horrific place, a world of terrors and abominations the likes of which you have never seen nor ever dreamed. The House was built to keep the two separate, and it is the only reason your people, your world, are still here. Otherwise, you would have been overrun long ago."

  Mark said nothing.

  "The House is like an electrified fence or, more precisely, like a battery supplying power to that fence. And it is charged by people living within it. That is why you were called back. For the first time, the House is empty.

  There is no one living here, and the barriers are coming down. On both sides." He looked at Mark. "Ever since Kristen passed on."

  Mark turned away, didn't respond. His heart was pumping crazily, and his body was drenched with a sheen of fear sweat.

  "The border is asemipervious membrane. It is not a solid wall, and without a strong barrier to separate the two worlds, they will inevitably collide. And that," he said, "would be catastrophic."

  "So I'm here to recharge the battery?"

  "If you will."

  "What happens if I refuse?"

  "You have not refused. You have come."

  "What if I leave?"

  "You can't leave."

  "Who's going to stop me if I break one of these windows and jump out and run away?"

  Billings looked at him. "The House."

  There was silence between them after that.

  "Where did the house come from?" Mark asked finally.

  "Who built it?"

  "The Ones Who Went Before."

  The name, with its ambiguity and intimations of tremendous age, frightened him, and he listened quietly as Mr. Billings described the early days, after the barrier was erected, the days of miracles, when gods and monsters roamed the earth, when seas were parted, when oracles foretold the future, when miraculous beings and the resurrected dead mingled with ordinary men. After the House became occupied, he explained, as it gained strength and became more efficient, more attuned to its purpose, those "leaks" were plugged, all access to the Other Side was sealed off.

  "Nothing is perfect," the assistant said. "And, in the past, isolated spirits have made it through. But the House was built to maintain the laws of reason and rationality, and those exceptions had no influence or bearing upon that purpose. The Other Side was eventually forgotten about, passing into the realm of myth and fiction, and the occasionally sighted monster, the occasional haunted house, the occasional ghost became an aberration, entertainment, a story that was interesting but not to be believed.

  "Now, however, the House is failing. Elements of the other world are breaking through to this world, the material world, and elements of your world are breaking into it."

  Mark desperately wanted a drink. "How long have you been here?" he asked. "In the House?"

  "I have always been here."

  He didn't like that answer.

  "What about your daughter?"

  The assistant frowned. "What?"

  "Is she still here?" He saw in his mind the child's sly corrupt face, and he shivered even as he acknowledged the faint sensual stirring within him.

  Billings blinked, puzzled, and an expression closely related to fear crossed his features.

  "I have no daughter," he said.

  Norton For the first time since he'd arrived, for the first time in his memory,Billingson appeared to be rattled, and Norton felt a small twinge of satisfaction. It was petty, he knew, and should have been beneath him, but the hired hand's discomfort made him feel good.

  At the same time, he was terrified.

  He didn't know what he'd expected to find here when he returned. A haunted house? Yes. Ghosts from his past? Yes. But not this wide-ranging, elaborate, epic situation.

  Did he believe it?

  There was no doubt in his mind that the hired hand spoke the truth. Nothing else made sense. But the story was so all-inclusive as to be completely overwhelming.

  A demon possessed a peasant in Bangladesh, or a hiker in the Himalayas caught a glimpse of the abominable snowman, and it was because he didn't live in the Oak dale house anymore? Such a causal connection seemed on the face of it impossible, butBillingson's simple explanation tied it all together in a way that seemed to him entirely believable.

  And what about the girl?

  As happy as he was to seeBillingson so shaken, it frightened him to realize that the hired hand knew nothing about the child who was supposed to have been his daughter.

  Donna.

  He felt a stirring in his groin just thinking about her.

  But the fact thatBillingson , who seemed to know everything, who seemed to be at the center of all that was going on, was completely unaware of the girl's existence disturbed him in a way he could not explain. As terrifying as the House was, there seemed to be a logic to it, a coherent theory or controlling power behind it. But the girl existed outside of that. She was a wild card, and her existence threw everything off balance, darkening and complicating an already dark and complex picture.

  The conversation, the lecture, had been derailed by the revelation that he had seenBillingson's daughter, but the hired hand, while clearly shaken, faced Norton calmly, once again perfectly composed, and said, "It's getting late. I think we should finish this discussion in the morning."

  Norton glanced around the sitting room. Until this point, his time in the House had been spent in the sitting room, like a variation of No Exit, and his first thought was that he was going to have to sleep here--on the couch or the love seat or the chairs or the floor--and was never going to be able to leave the room.

  But when he asked, "Where am I going to sleep?"

  Billingsonreplied, "Your room is waiting for you."

  Indeed, his bedroom was exactly where it had always been: halfway down the third-story hall. There were numerous doors lining both sides of the dark corridor and Norton realized that even as a child he had never known what was in most of those other rooms. Their doors had always been closed or locked, and he had never even wondered what was inside them.

  There are other dimensions besides space and time.

  It was whatBillingson had said when quizzed about the exact placement of the Housevis-a-vis the "Other Side," and though Norton had said nothing at the time, the statement had frightened him and stuck with him.

  He was way out of his depth here, and he wished to God he had never come. It was the coward's response, he knew, but he had no problem answering to that description.

  He would rather have put up with a million monstrous manifestations on the streets of Finley than be trapped here in this House. Those were intrusions of horror into the normal everyday world. Here,
horror was the normal everyday occurrence.

  Billingson led him to his bedroom door, opened it for him, and smiled. "Sweet dreams, Nort ," he said before bowing theatrically and heading down the hall.

  It was what his father used to say to him each night before tucking him into bed.

  Norton took a deep breath, walked into the bedroom.

  Everything looked precisely as it had half a century ago.

  It was not exactly a surprise, but the extent of his immersion into the past was still staggering. There was the low bed with the red-checkered bedspread, the small corner desk covered with finished and half-finished airplane models, the photos of Buck and Roy Rogers tacked to the wall, the cigar box on the nightstand that he'd used to store his valuables. He looked up. Above the door was the upside-down horseshoe he'd nailed there for good luck.

  Good luck.

  He smiled wryly. That was a joke. He'd never had anything remotely approaching good luck in this House.

  He was bigger and the room and its contents were smaller, but there was none of the awkwardness usually associated with revisiting scenes from childhood. Instead, he felt perfectly at home here. He sat down on the bed, and his body's memory kicked in, remembering the contours of the mattress and the texture of the bedspread, snuggling into a physical familiarity with the room.

  He sat for a few moments on the bed, looking around, taking it all in, then rummaged through the cigar box and the drawers of the desk, picking up and touching objects with which he was intimately familiar but had neither seen nor thought about for many decades.

  It depressed him, being in this room again, made him sad. The fear was still there, constant beneath his other layers of feeling, but he also felt pensive and melancholic.

  Being here reminded him of what he'd thought as a child, what he'd planned, and the realization that the future he'd been so eagerly awaiting had already passed left him somewhat heavy-hearted. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age.

  He walked to the window, looked out. It was still dark out, but it wasn't night. There were no stars, no moon, no town lights or road lights. It was as black as if the window glass had been painted, but the darkness had depth, and he knew there was a world outside the window.

  He just wasn't sure he wanted to know what that world was.

  Sighing, he turned away. He felt dirty, filthy from both the long trip and the cold-sweat stress of everything he'd experienced since, and although the bathroom, if he remembered correctly, was halfway down the hall, he decided to take a shower before bed. He'd brought no robe, though, no pajamas, and his extra clothes were still in the car. Strange. He'd always intended to stay overnight in Oakdale, maybe stay several nights, and he had no explanation for why he had not packed appropriately.

  That was not like him.

  He found it worrisome.

  He decided to simply walk down the hall, take his shower, put his clothes back on afterward, and then sleep in his underwear and wear the clothes again tomorrow.

  He considered calling for Billingson , asking for a towel and washcloth, but he didn't relish the idea of seeing the hired hand again, and he figured he'd check the bathroom first, see if he couldn't find what he needed on his own.

  He took off his shoes and his belt, emptied the contents of his pockets on the nightstand. He heard no noise from any of the other rooms as he walked down the hall, but the silence was more unnerving than sound would have been, and he considered calling off the shower and retreating to his bedroom, hiding until morning.

  The hallway was dark, the silence unnerving and oppressive, but he wasn't about to be intimidated by the House or anything in it. He might feel fear, but he wouldn't show it, and he purposely kept his gait as easy and natural as he could.

  Unlike in the hallway and, to a lesser extent, his bedroom, the light in the bathroom was bright, modern, fluorescent. This was one room that had obviously been updated and remodeled since his day. He flipped on the switch and clear white light illuminated every corner of the small functional space.

  The modern bathroom made him feel good, gave him hope. It was an island of normalcy in the surreal landscape of the House, and its matter-of-fact concreteness kept him grounded and tethered, kept him in touch with the ordinary everyday world.

  There were indeed towels and washcloths and soap, and Norton closed and locked the door, taking off his clothes and placing them on the closed lid of the toilet.

  There was not a separate shower and bathtub but a combined shower bath, and he pulled aside the beige plastic shower curtain and stepped into the tub, closing it behind him. Bending down to turn on the water, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He straightened, stood. Beneath the edge of the shower curtain, dark against the whiteness of the tub, were what looked like thousands of thin hairs--whiskers or spider legs--moving crazily, jerkily, and he flattened against the tiled wall and stared at the wildly twisting strands.

  The fear that was triggered within him came from the very core of his being. There was no thought, no conscious determination of danger, only an instinctive terror of the thin hairs, an irrational alarm.

  The water was on, and for that he was grateful.

  He did not want to hear the noise the hairs were making.

  He found himself thinking of the ants he'd burned with Donna. For some reason, the crinkling of their bodies, their spasms of death, reminded him on a subliminal level of the wildly whipping whiskers, and the thought occurred to him that this was some sort of retribution, some decades-delayed revenge for that long-ago act.

  The hairs had been moving crazily, independently, but he saw now that they were moving together, swishing and sweeping back and forth, from side to side. They extended below the curtain for the entire length of the tub, there was no empty space, and his panicked racing mind tried to think of how he could possibly escape.

  He didn't know whether the whiskers were independent entities or part of some larger creature, but either way he didn't want to open the curtain, didn't want to see any more than the few inches already visible against the wall of the tub.

  He was about to scream for help when the hairs pulled up and were gone. They were visible for a second in the air above the shower rod, waving in that even swish above the plastic curtain, and then they disappeared completely. He waited for a moment, still flattened against the wall, then, detecting no movement, carefully pulled open one side of the curtain.

  The bathroom was empty.

  There were no whiskers or hairs or spider legs or creatures near the toilet or the sink or the counter or the towel rack. The door was closed and locked.

  He still felt dirty, still wanted to take a shower, but he was shaking and afraid, and he quickly shut off the water, pulled his pants back on, and, grabbing the rest of his clothes, ran back down the hall to his room.

  He sat on his bed, breathing heavily.

  What would happen in the middle of the night if he had to take a leak?

  He'd hang his dick out the window and piss in the open air.

  There was no way in hell he was going back into that bathroom.

  He closed his eyes, saw again those twitching hairs, and shivered. He longed for the benign manifestations he'd seen before, for ghosts or burnt toast.

  But he changed his mind about that.

  Ghosts did come.

  Later.

  And he longed for the benign manifestation of hairs in the bathtub.

  Daniel Billingsly looked different in the morning. Better, healthier, as though he were suddenly well again after a long illness.

  He himself looked like hell.

  He'd had a bad night.

  Daniel had been almost asleep when the doll had come to visit. He was tired from driving and from stress, and he'd lain down on the bed, intending only to close his eyes and rest for a moment before attempting to find an escape route out of this loony bin, but when he felt himself drifting off, he figured he might as well pack it in for the night and wait fo
r morning, when he'd have a clear mind and refreshed body and his chances would be better. He took off his clothes, crawled under the covers, closed his eyes.

  And heard something scuttling in the corner.

  He jerked up in bed, eyes wide open, heart pounding.

  He recognized that sound, and he glanced immediately toward the corner of the room from which the noise had come, but it was too dark for him to see anything.

  He flipped on the nightstand lamp, then rushed over to the door and turned on the overhead light.

  There it was, between a wastepaper basket and his toy chest.

  The doll.

  It stared at him with feather eyes, its head a mass of dust and hair strands, its open mouth an empty hole crisscrossed by broken toothpicks. It was not quite the doll he remembered from the past, not quite the figure Tony had been making, but some unwholesome hybrid.

  He stayed by the door, hand still on the light switch, afraid to move. Fully dressed and wearing protective combat gear, he still would have felt unprepared to face the small figure; barefoot and naked, he felt completely vulnerable. It stared at him from its corner with an intensity and malevolence he had never seen before, and the thought occurred to him that it knew he had destroyed its brethren, Tony's creations.

  And it wanted revenge.

  That was stupid, he told himself.

  But he could not make himself believe it.

  The horrid figure shifted against the toy chest, its feather eyes never once leaving his. What had the doll been planning? To kill him the way his mother had been killed, to stuff itself down his throat as he slept? Daniel trembled as he thought of how close he had come to that fate. He was so dead tired tonight that if he had fallen fully asleep, nothing could have awakened him.

  By the time he was roused, it would have been too late.

  He glanced around for a weapon, saw the handle of his old baseball bat peeking out from beneath the bed.

  Did he dare try for it? It was a good five steps away.

  He'd have to rush halfway across the room, duck down and grab it. What would the doll be able to do in that time?

  It didn't matter. Unless he wanted to run out into the hallway naked and let the doll escape to boot, the bat was his only hope.