The House Page 23

  As one, all of the clouds, all of the spirits, flew out of the window of the center gable, into the whiteness, where they became a rainbow and then were gone.

  Stormy was filled with an almost joyous sense of wonder, and the realization that the afterlife was not limited to this row of houses, that it encompassed a world far beyond what he could see or understand, cheered him up immensely. He looked around the empty house with awe.

  The egg and the nest still remained, and he patted the egg a few times. It felt warm, leathery, and he wondered what was in it.

  But he was not sure he really wanted to know.

  He walked carefully around the nest, examining it, touching it, then looked about him. There were no doors aside from the one he'd come through, and after walking slowly around the perimeter of the open oversized room, he found himself back at the entrance to the den. He returned through it, closing the door behind him.

  Apparently Billingham had been telling the truth. The House was definitely on the border, and it probably did keep that border sealed.

  But was that good? What he'd seen wasn't horrible or awful. Maybe some of the things in that world would turn out to be so, but it was clear that it was not all evil.

  Maybe the House shouldn't be manned, he thought.

  Maybe its occupancy had been allowed to lapse for a reason. Maybe it was time for the borders to come down.

  He'd only thought that the Other Side was bad because he'd been told it was bad, he'd been told it was wrong.

  Yes, it was scary to imagine coexisting with the dead, with shapeshifters and ghosts and God knew what else, but that was only because he'd been conditioned to think that way. Maybe this was how things were supposed to be. Maybe this was the natural way of things. Maybe keeping the two worlds apart was what was wrong, and it was the House that was unnatural.

  Maybe the House was evil.

  He looked back at the closed door. The House had not been exactly saintly, he had to admit. His family had been torn apart. He'd been lied to and was now being held prisoner against his will. And for what? So the House could maintain its power? He shook his head.

  The end did not justify the means. Evil acts could not be performed for the greater good.

  And from where he stood, all of the horrifying, terrible things that had happened so far had been the work of the House.

  No, that was not true.

  They were the work of Donielle .

  The girl was evil.

  It was true. Moral relativism might be a safe intellectual refuge when confronted with something like the afterlife, but the girl, in either world, was indeed evil. He didn't know how he knew, but he did, and all of a sudden he felt the need to get out of the den, to get back to the sitting room or the dining room or someplace close to Billingham.

  A chime rang through the House, a light musical sound that had no specific point of origin but seemed to come from everywhere.

  The den door opened, and Billingham , in the hallway, poked his head into the room. "Wash up," he said. "It's time for dinner." He smiled. "We have guests."

  Laurie There were other people at the dining-room table.

  Laurie stopped short and stood in the doorway, staring.

  Four men were seated around the table, empty seats between each, as though they all wanted their own space or were wary of getting too close.

  They looked . . . normal. She did not get the impression that they were denizens of the House, that they were manifestations or ghosts or Billington's peers. They seemed more like her, and there was an almost uniform wariness in their expressions that led her to believe they were prisoners of the House as well.

  She experienced a sudden exhilarating rush of energy.

  Ever since she'd arrived here, ever since Billington's little speech, ever since she'd known she'd been lured back to stay and was not going to be allowed to leave, she'd felt uncharacteristically powerless. Both demoralized and dispirited. She'd tried her damnedest to find a way out of the House, to somehow contact the outside world.

  She'd even attempted one of Josh's silly astral projection exercises in a vain effort to contact her brother. But nothing had worked, nothing had come of any of it, and she'd just about given up, resigning herself to the fact that the House was more powerful than she was.

  But with five of them . . .

  Five heads were better than one, as the saying went, and between them, they might be able to come up with an escape plan. She felt a renewed sense of hope as she looked at the men in front of her.

  With a theatrical flourish, Billington introduced them, moving clockwise around the table. "This is Daniel Anderson, this is Norton Johnson, this is Stormy Salinger, and this is Mark McKinney."

  They all smiled at Laurie awkwardly, acknowledging her nodded greeting.

  Billington bowed in her direction. "This, everyone, is Laurie Mitchell."

  Nods again.

  The assistant looked happily around the dining room, and his smile broadened in a way that she found extremely unnerving. "We're all together at last." He bowed again. "I will prepare tonight's repast and leave you kiddies alone to get acquainted."

  He retreated through the swinging doors into the kitchen, and the second he was out of the room, the five of them started talking. None of them were under the impression that they had really been left alone, that they were not being watched and spied upon, but that took a backseat to their more immediate and pressing concerns.

  It was Stormy who was the first to articulate the question at the forefront of all of their minds: "What the fuck is going on here?"

  They all began talking at once, and after several loud confusing minutes Laurie raised her hands and said, "Quiet! One at a time, please!"

  The others shut up, looked at her, and with that she was thrust into the role of de facto leader. She didn't mind--if there was one thing she'd learned in business it was that if anything was ever going to get done there had to be only one person in charge--but she felt just as lost as the rest of them and singularly unqualified to take control of their efforts to ... what? Escape? Find out what was at the heart of the House? She was not sure what the others wanted.

  Still, she could preside over the discussion, she could maintain some semblance of order and bring some organizational skills to the table, and she looked from one face to another. "All right," she said. "Who wants to go first?"

  They'd all, it seemed, known Billington or Billingsly or Billings or whoever the hell he was when they were children. As Stormy described his experiences in New Mexico, there were nods of recognition all around.

  While the specifics of his story might have been different from hers, the underlying thread of it was not, and Laurie knew exactly what he had gone through.

  The same was true for Mark, hitching throughout the West; Norton, in Iowa; and Daniel, in Pennsylvania.

  Then she told her story.

  And everyone understood.

  She felt an immediate kinship with the others. It wasn't quite as if they were siblings separated at birth who had suddenly found family, but it was along those lines and there was a definite connection between them.

  Only Mark stood apart. He was younger than the rest of them and although that could have accounted for it, she didn't think so. He seemed . . . different somehow, more unfazed by it all, as though he accepted, even, on some level, understood what was happening. None of this seemed to be as alien to him as it was to the rest of them, and while she did not doubt his loyalties, while she knew he was as much a victim as the rest of them, he was the only one whose story she did not entirely believe. She did not think he was lying, but she had the feeling he was keeping something back, not telling the whole truth.

  And that kept him at arm's length.

  They were no closer to knowing what was going on after they'd spilled their guts than they had been before.

  They could empathize with each other, they could sympathize, but understanding eluded them. Their stories might all be si
milar in tone, but on the most basic level, the narrative level, they were contradictory and did not mesh.

  In addition to the obvious disparities of location, there were the times of arrival. Daniel had been the first to pick up on that, and after Mark had finished his story, he asked, "How long have you been here?"

  Mark shrugged. "Since yesterday."

  "What day was that?" Daniel pressed him.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "What day did you arrive here?"

  "Saturday."

  "It's Friday," Daniel said quietly.

  "What's the date?" Stormy asked. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a plane ticket. "To me, it's Thursday. I flew into Chicago yesterday.

  September ninth."

  "It's Friday the eighteenth," Daniel told him.

  "Oh, shit." Mark sat down hard on the couch.

  "You think you've only been here for a day, but by my watch it's been over a week."

  Laurie's head hurt. No matter how much they talked, they were still in the dark. They could not pull their stories together, could not create coherence out of the chaos.

  "So where are we?" she said quietly. "When are we?"

  The door to the kitchen swung open and Billington ?

  Billingson? Billings? Billingsly? Billingham ? walked in, carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres.

  Daniel turned toward him. "What is this?" he demanded.

  The other man chuckled.

  "And what's your name?" Norton asked. "We seem to have conflicting reports."

  "We'll just call him Mr. Bill," Stormy said.

  Laurie felt a little bit better. Humor leavened the seriousness of the situation, made it not seem so scary, so solemn, so grave.

  Grave.

  "You can call me Mr. Billings," the assistant said in a voice that brooked no argument. "That is the name by which I am currently known." He put the tray down on the table.

  "What's going on?" Daniel asked.

  "You want to know what's happening? You want to know why you entered a House in Dry River, Arizona"

  --he nodded at Mark--"and you entered a House in Chicago, Illinois"--Stormy--"and yet you're both here? Along with everyone else?"

  "It had crossed our minds," Stormy said dryly.

  "It's because the Houses are getting stronger. They are almost at full strength."

  Laurie stared at the assistant. She had to keep reminding herself that he was five different men, a different person to each of them, and that was a hard thing to fully comprehend. There were similarities, obviously, but there were differences as well: different dynamics in their relationships with him, different memories and histories, different names. It was, she supposed, like looking at the individual facets of a giant diamond from five angles. Or like the old blind-men and the-elephant story.

  "I didn't know there were other Houses," Daniel said.

  Billings smiled. "Perhaps I forgot to mention that."

  Stormy snorted. "I guess each House is a post of your electrified fence, huh?"

  "Not a bad analogy, Stormy boy." His expression darkened. "But lose the sarcasm, and please refrain from speaking to me in that manner. I am less than happy with that attitude."

  Stormy shut up.

  "So where are we?" Laurie asked. "Whose House are we in?"

  "All of them."

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  He smiled at her. "It doesn't have to."

  Laurie thought about what she'd seen on the Other Side, in that empty hollowed House through the den door, and the conversation she'd had with her mother-- her adoptive mother, she amended, although that coldly matter-of-fact description did not in any way do justice to their relationship. They'd talked about family things, about her father and Josh, and although they had not had time to discuss the House before her mother had flown away, she'd told Laurie that she had come to visit "while you were here," and Laurie put the most positive spin on that statement and took it to mean that there was a possibility of escape.

  But nothing made sense, nothing fit together in any sort of logical manner. She'd been thrilled to see her mother again, emotionally overwhelmed, but her mother's physical appearance had been truly bizarre, and the conversation they'd had had been filled with disconcerting non sequiturs.

  "So we don't need to understand anything," Daniel said. "We just need to live here and charge up the batteries."

  The assistant grinned. "Bingo."

  "What about when they're fully charged again?" Norton asked. "Can we leave then? Will our jobs be done?"

  "Oh, no. You can never leave."

  "Why not?"

  "The Houses don't want you to."

  "So we're supposed to just--"

  "Make the best of it."

  Laurie listened silently to this exchange. She was still not sure how she felt aboutBillington --Billings--and that was one thing she wanted to talk to the others about. He was clearly not affiliated with Dawn--he hadn't even been aware of the girl's existence until she'd told him about her--but even though the girl was evil, did that automatically make Billings good? She wasn't sure. He didn't seem . . . bad, exactly. But he was not a knight in shining armor, either. And the fact that he was keeping them here against their will, or was aiding the House in doing so, suggested that his motives were not all that pure.

  Billings pointed toward the tray of hors d'oeuvres.

  "Eat up," he said. "There's plenty more where that came from." He smiled at them, headed toward the kitchen. "You can talk behind my back for a few minutes.

  I'll return in a moment with your meals."

  They did not talk behind his back, though. They were afraid to. And when he returned soon after with a tray of roast beef, they were eating in silence.

  Norton After serving dinner and clearing off their plates, Billings disappeared, and the rest of them quickly tried the kitchen door and the cellar door to see if either of them offered a way to get out of the House, but it was to no avail. Outside each of the windows, the world was dark, pitch-black, and Norton found himself wondering if the windows looked out onto the other world or were simply facing the blankness of the border in between.

  Neither thought was particularly comforting.

  They spent some time comparing notes, comparing theories, hashing over some of their concerns, but they did not seem to be making much headway, and when Norton's wristwatch had--correctly or incorrectly--informed him that it was ten o'clock, he said he was tired, excused himself, and went upstairs to his bedroom. As he climbed the stairs, he heard Stormy complain loudly about not having a television or radio, and Norton had to admit that he himself would appreciate having something to read. If they were going to be stuck in here with only each other for company and no entertainment or intellectual stimulation of any sort, nerves were going to get awfully frayed awfully fast. They were already starting to grate on each other. They had the Houses in common, yes, and their current predicament, but they were also five separate people from five different walks of life, and even under the best of circumstances that was not always a recipe for harmony.

  And these were far from the best of circumstances.

  He lay in his bed, unable to sleep, staring upward at the ceiling. He'd lied. He wasn't tired. He'd just wanted some time alone, some time to think. Even if everything the butler said was true, there were still gaps, still things he didn't understand, and he wanted to be able to sort through it all and see if he couldn't somehow make sense of it.

  A half hour passed. An hour. He heard Mark walk down the hallway to his room. Another hour passed.

  Two. He tried to go to sleep. Couldn't. Tossing and turning, he closed his eyes, lying first on his back, then on his stomach, then on his side, but sleep would not come.

  Sighing, he turned his head on the pillow, looked toward the window. He saw the moon outside, stars. A typical night sky.

  A typical night sky?

  His heart pounding, excited but afraid to get his hopes up, he sat up in bed, threw
off the covers. He stood, walked over to the window, and looked out.

  Lights.

  The lights of Oakdale.

  He could make out the blinking red light atop the water tower, assorted streetlights, the glowing orange ball of the 76 station.

  Was it over? Were they free? Norton quickly pulled on his pants and shirt, unlocked his bedroom door. He hurried out into the hall. It was long after midnight and he would have expected there to be only quiet, but the House was far from silent. He heard low whispers at the far end of the shadowed hall, occasional thumping from somewhere downstairs. Above, in the attic perhaps, there was a noise that sounded like a child's laugh, a high continuous chuckle that did not pause for breath but went on nonstop.

  The typical sounds of a haunted house.

  There were goose bumps on his arms, but he resisted his instinctive impulse to turn back and flee into the safety of his room. This was too important, and he might not get another chance like it. This burst of reality might be only temporary. Hell, it might even be only a joke, something to tempt him.

  No matter what it was, he had to act on it, had to assume that it was real, and he ignored the slithery whispers around him as he sped down the hall to Mark's room and knocked quietly. "Mark!" he whispered.

  "Mark!"

  No response.

  He knocked a little louder, raised his voice. "Mark!"

  No answer.

  "Mark!" he yelled.

  Nothing.

  There were several possibilities. Mark could be sound asleep, he might not be able to hear through the thick door, he could have left the room and gone downstairs he could be dead ---or this could all be a dream.

  He didn't have time to find out, though. Time was a wasting. Norton turned away from the closed door.

  And something rushed by him in the hall. A small dark figure that did not even come up to his knee but traveled on two feet like a man.

  A doll.

  He did not want to think about it, and he kept his attention focused on what he'd seen out the window as he hurried down the hall toward the stairway, ignoring the unidentifiable noises that dogged him through the semidarkness.