The House Read online

  Faded pink paint on a dirty window read: sale!!

  agates! jasper! geodes! Tireless cars sat on blocks next to the store, their exposed axles rusted and sagging, wrecked corners of their bodies twisted into unrecognizability.

  A white cross near a burned section of desert memorialized some driver's death, and Mark wondered who was taking care of Kristen's burial arrangements. Would Billings still be there? he wondered. Would the assistant have remained even after their parents' deaths? Would Kristen have kept him on or would she have let him go?

  Did Kristen have any friends? Maybe they were seeing to the arrangements.

  He just hoped he didn't arrive too late. He wanted to be there for the funeral. And if there was no funeral, if the county or some social services agency simply provided her with a generic burial, he wanted to make sure that that was rectified, that she was put to rest with dignity.

  Kristen deserved at least that much.

  Mark closed his eyes, lulled by the heat and silence and the motion of the Land Rover. In his mind, he saw Kristen as she'd looked the last time he'd seen her:

  shorts and a tank top, hair long and straight and blond, sunlight glinting off her braces, tears in her eyes, the house behind her.

  The house.

  He did not think of the house too often, tried not to think of it at all. He remembered as a child watching Giant on television and being freaked out by how eerily similar the gothic ranch house was to that of his own family. Like the structure in the movie, their home sat alone on a flat desert plain, an island of darkness in an endless sea of tan. Two and a half stories with a wraparound porch, the house, with its deep gray-black wood and permanently shuttered windows, its gables and wrought-iron weathervanes, gave the impression of age, permanence, and old-fashioned authoritarian power. It was an intimidating building, and it had always frightened his friends from school, had always been the recipient of wide-eyed stares and hesitant approaches, treated with trepidation and barely concealed fear--unlike the house in the movie, which, despite its appearance, had been treated as though it was not unusual, not out of the ordinary, yet another average ranch building.

  The movie had disturbed him. It was not traditionally scary, was a light epic drama with comedic overtones, but the specter of the ranch house, its dark prominence, had been more than a little unsettling. Halfway through the film, the interior of the house had changed, been remodeled, and that wasn't so bad. The lighter walls and furniture looked fake, setbound , and that had enabled him to disassociate the movie home from his own.

  His father, he remembered, had loved that film.

  He'd known early on that there was something different about his family. They hadn't socialized with the other people in the extended series of adjoining ranches known as the town of Dry River, his parents keeping to themselves, associating only with his father's assistant Billings and with the occasional old friends or relatives who visited from back east. Even when Mark had started going to school and making friends of his own, he had the impression that his parents disapproved, that they would rather he not bring any other kids home--which seemed to be fine with his friends since they were afraid of the house anyway. He'd ended up spending most of his childhood at other people's houses, inventing a family that did not exist in the stories he told, lying and exaggerating in order to make his parents seem more normal, expanding his personal mythology to include Kristen when she'd come along.

  It had been the ritualization of their lives, he supposed, that had first caused him to start thinking about moving away, the fact that his father made them eat breakfast every morning at exactly six o'clock, made them eat dinner at six each evening, made them sit in exactly the same spots each time, made them all go to bed at precisely nine o'clock, made them sit in separate rooms for an hour each night reciting their Daily Words.

  Other parents didn't do that, he knew. People sometimes said prayers, ate together, but they didn't regiment their lives to the extent that his parents did.

  And they did not beat their children when some slight mistake or miscalculation made them a second or two late for one of these ritualized practices.

  As his parents did.

  But, still, they were his family. And there was no way that he could leave Kristen. She needed him. He took the heat that would have otherwise fallen on her. And he kept her from buying into their parents' wackiness completely, kept her grounded as much as possible in the real world.

  Then it had happened.

  Even now, goose bumps popped up on his arms when he thought about it.

  It had been a Saturday afternoon. Midsummer. Monsoon season. Kristen and his parents had gone into town, and he was alone. Billings was somewhere on the property, seeing to the chickens. Mark did not like being by himself in the house, even though he had lived there his entire life, and until now he had successfully avoided finding himself in this predicament, had not been alone in here since the time when he was five and had gotten lost in the maze of passageways and his father had rescued him, screaming, from a darkened hall that seemed to have no end.

  He was older now, a high school graduate, but he still felt like a little kid, still felt that same sense of oppressive fear as he sat in his bedroom and realized that there was no one home but himself. He considered going outside, finding something to do in the barn or in the field or in the coops until his parents returned, but his room was upstairs and he didn't want to have to walk all the way down the hall, down the stairs, through the living room and through the sitting room in order to go outside.

  It was a long way to the front door, and he thought it would be better if he just sat in here and waited with the door closed until someone else came home.

  He had a stereo by his bed, and he kept his tunes cranked up while he read a car magazine, trying not to think of the silent emptiness of the house surrounding him, but the afternoon storm hit an hour or so later and, as often happened, the electricity went out. His lights flicked off, his music fading into a slowing deep-bassed growl before disappearing completely.

  The window in his room overlooked the drive and the front yard, but the clouds were dark today and very little light entered the room. It wasn't like night, but it wasn't like daytime either, and there was something about this in-between state that accentuated the ominous aspects of the house.

  He grabbed his magazine, pretending as though he wasn't scared, as though there was nothing out of the ordinary here. He was hoping that Billings had come in through the back door and was doing something in the kitchen or the workroom, but when Mark walked out from his bedroom, the silence of the house was total, and he realized that the assistant was still outside somewhere and he was all alone in the house.

  The hallway before him was dark. No windows opened onto here save one small inset square of stained glass at the far end, above the staircase. All of the doors to the other rooms were closed. There were goose bumps on his arms, and Mark ran as quickly as he could down the corridor, taking the steps two at a time as he sped downstairs.

  This stairwell opened onto another hallway and he was already sprinting down it when he noticed movement somewhere in front of him.

  He stopped in his tracks, heart pounding.

  There was a small figure standing alone at the darkened end of the hall, pale white against the deep red and brown of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

  Billings' daughter.

  The girl was supposed to have been retarded. She did not live with her father in the house but slept on a cot next to the incubation room because she liked to be near the baby chicks. Billings never talked about her, and their parents had warned him and Kristen many times that they were not to speak of her in front of the assistant.

  Mark had not seen her in some time, had, in fact, almost forgotten about her, and he did not think he had ever seen her inside the house, but the girl still looked the same. She was at least as old as Kristen--she'd been around ever since he could remember--but she looked younger. Ten or eleven
at the most.

  Something about that did not sit well with him.

  He stood in place, staring down the hallway at her, wondering how she'd gotten inside.

  "Mark."

  He had never heard her speak before, and the sound of her voice chilled him. She did not sound retarded at all. Her voice instead was clear, soft, feminine. It was not loud, but it carried clearly in the silent hallway, and there seemed something unnatural about it. She was wearing only a thin white shift, and though there was no light behind her, he could tell that she wore nothing underneath it.

  The girl beckoned to him, one pale arm motioning for him to approach, and his chill intensified. There was a cold breeze blowing through the hall, even though the air conditioner was off and all of the windows in the house were closed. The only sound was the slight flapping of the girl's shift against her bare legs and the overloud pumping of his heart.

  "Mark." She spoke again, smiling slightly, beckoning, and he began walking toward her, not wanting to admit his fear, not wanting to acknowledge his apprehension.

  He prayed desperately that his parents would come home right now, that Billings would enter the house looking for his daughter. He did not know why, but he did not want to be alone with this girl, and while even an hour ago he would have laughed had someone suggested that he would be trembling nervously at the sight of the assistant's retarded daughter, he was not laughing now.

  His hands were sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants, stopping maybe ten feet in front of the girl. Behind her was a chair, a dark mahogany chair that matched perfectly the adjacent wall but that he could not remember having ever seen before.

  The breeze blew against his face, caressed his hair. He tried to pretend as though nothing was wrong. "Hey,"

  he said, "where's your dad?"

  "Mark," the girl repeated.

  Maybe it was the only word she knew, he thought.

  Maybe it was the only word she could say.

  But her voice still didn't sound retarded, and this time there'd seemed something . . . sensual in it.

  She moved slightly to her left, repositioned the chair, and bent slowly over its seat, smiling at him, her shift hiking up to expose the creamy whiteness of bare buttocks.

  "Fuck me," she said softly. "Fuck me in the ass."

  Shocked, he backed up, shaking his head. "No . . ."

  "I like it hard. Fuck me hard."

  There was something wrong here, something fundamentally awry, something that went far deeper than an over experienced underage girl and her frighteningly unnatural nymphomania. He could feel it, sense it, a palpable presence in the hallway, a malevolence in the setting and the situation that included Billings' daughter but was not limited to her. Whatever he had feared in this house, whatever subliminal danger he had felt, it was here, now, and Mark knew that he had to get out and get away as quickly as possible before something horrible happened.

  He continued backing up, keeping his eyes on the girl.

  "I want it," she said. "I want it now."

  "No."

  "I want you to fuck my ass."

  "No!" he said more firmly.

  "Your father does it." She smiled at him over her shoulder and there was evil in that smile, a corruption that went far beyond mere sex, a deeply depraved immorality of which this was only the simplest and most obvious manifestation. "He makes it hurt."

  Mark ran. He turned tail and ran back upstairs to his room, and he heard behind him the girl's mocking laughter, the soft sounds echoing and amplifying in the dark hall and stairwell.

  He had not come out until his family had returned home and Kristen had knocked on his door to tell him that he had to help unload groceries from the car.

  It was after that that he had been able to tap into The Power. It had always been there, he supposed, and he attributed the dread and apprehension he felt about the house to its low-level influence, but the encounter with Billings' daughter had somehow jump-started it, kicked it into gear. It truly was like a sixth sense to him, and he didn't have to think about it or concentrate on using it. Like seeing or hearing or smelling or touching or tasting, it was a physical response to people and places and things that he experienced, a natural part of him that provided sensory input which his brain accepted and sorted.

  He could sense now the corruption in the house, in his parents, and he knew that sooner or later he would have to leave. He did not belong here, he did not fit in, and either he had to reject the house or the house would reject him.

  He did not want to know what would happen if that occurred.

  He received no such vibes from Billings--the assistant was a complete blank--and that frightened him. He and Billings had always gotten along famously, the assistant was like an uncle to him, but now every time he saw the man he thought of his daughter, and the traits that had made Billings seem so kind and caring before now made him seem false and secretive, and Mark stayed as far away from him as possible.

  His parents seemed to realize that something had happened, they seemed to recognize his newfound Power, and their attitudes toward him shifted. Not profoundly but subtly. He was still required to follow his father's rules, to be in certain places and do certain things at certain times, but there was a wariness now, a slight emotional distancing, and while nothing changed in their behavior toward his sister, he got the feeling that they would not mind at all if he left the fold.

  He'd begun staying out of the house as much as possible, staying at friends' homes, sleeping outside when he could, camping out on the porch, but he'd seen her again one night, in the door of the first chicken coop, white in the moonlight, beckoning to him, and he'd hurried back into the house, back up to his room, hearing once again the sound of her light laughter behind him.

  He tried after that to convince Kristen to leave with him, to run away, but though she too was not happy with the house, though he sensed within her a secret unacknowledged fear of Billings' daughter, there was no way that she was willing to leave their parents. He told her that they could write or call, let their mother and father know where they were and why they had left, but she put her foot down. This was her home and she did not want to leave.

  He worked on Kristen the rest of the summer, but his entreaties seemed to have the opposite effect of that intended. She became more resolute in her intention to stay, more devoted to her current life. She understood why he wanted to leave, and though, for selfish reasons, she wanted him to remain, Kristen told him that she would always love him and always support him in his choices, whatever they were.

  And then one night the retarded girl came into his bedroom.

  She looked retarded this time, and she did not speak, but the eroticism of her movements had not lessened, and the juxtaposition of her mental handicap and her obvious sensuality was truly disturbing.

  He had locked the door to his room, had locked his window, and he quickly looked around to see which one had betrayed him. Both door and window were closed and locked, untouched.

  The girl giggled.

  He clutched the blanket tightly, pulling it to his chin, sliding back against the headboard, and pulling his feet under him as far as they would go. He was terrified and he wanted to scream, but his brain seemed to have lost all power over the actions of his body and only a dry exhalation of air escaped from between his lips.

  The girl bent over, her shift sliding up, and grabbed her ankles. He could see once again her pale buttocks, and she looked between her legs at him and smiled.

  He knew then and there that he had to leave. Whether Kristen went with him or not, he had to get out of this house.

  He did scream then, and Kristen and his parents were at his door in a matter of seconds, and he rushed around the bent-over girl to unlock and open the door, but of course she was gone by the time they entered the room.

  Though his parents roughly insisted that he had had a nightmare and was acting like a child, and Kristen claimed to believe him, he used The Power and understood
that his parents did believe it had happened and Kristen, bless her kind heart, did not.

  He'd taken off the next morning, telling Kristen and no one else, pretending he was just going into town to meet some friends. Leaving, he'd seen the girl in the dormer window of the attic, white against the darkness, waving at him, and while he could not see the details of her face, he'd known that she was smiling.

  "Hey! You okay?"

  Mark opened his eyes to see the driver of the Land Rover looking at him. He shook his head, blinked.

  "Huh? Yeah."

  "I thought you were having some sort of fit or something there. You were thrashing around, kicking the door."

  "Sorry."

  "Looked like you were having a seizure."

  He surreptitiously pressed down on his erection.

  "Nightmare," Mark said, shaking his head. "It was just a nightmare."

  Daniel Someone had thrown a dead cat into their yard, one of the punks who hung out on the street no doubt, and as Daniel gingerly picked up the stiff body with his shovel he vowed to kick the shit out of the little bastard who'd done this. It was probably random, not personal, but that didn't make it any less offensive, and he found himself thinking that whether they owned their house or not, maybe it was time for them to leave. The neighborhood was going downhill and they should probably get out while they could still get a decent price for their home, before the street segued completely into slum.

  Margot wouldn't buy that, though. This was her neighborhood, this was the street on which she'd grown up, and in her mind it was the same now as it had been then. She seemed to see this area through rose-colored glasses, her mind filling in niceties that were no longer there. The houses to either side of them were falling into disrepair, their small lawns little more than dirt patches dotted with weeds, their tenants an endless succession of increasingly trashy renters, but to Margot's eyes they were simply the residences of her childhood friends with new owners.

  Grimacing, Daniel held the shovel in front of him, walking through the backyard and out to the alley, where he deposited the cat in a garbage can. He was probably supposed to call the city and report this, have Animal Control come out and take care of the body, but he wanted to get rid of the cat as quickly and quietly as possible. He didn't want to draw attention to what had happened. He didn't want to give the perpetrators the satisfaction.