The Collection

She stood still for a moment, listening. The buzzing maintained its even rhythm. 'You know what it reminds me of?' she said. 'That poem by Keats. The one where he talked about 'the murmurous haunt of flies.''

The murmurous haunt of flies.

It seemed suddenly hotter, more humid, if that was pos­sible. The wind, blowing from the direction of the bath­house, felt hellishly, unnaturally heated. I put my arm around Jan and held her close. We stood like that for a few minutes.

'How far do you think that is?' she asked, gesturing to­ward the hill.

'Why?'

'I'd like to go over there. You know, just take a look.'

I shook my head emphatically. I may not have fully be­lieved my grandpa's story and his repeated warnings, but I had no desire to tempt the fates. 'No way,' I said. 'Forget it.'

'Why not? It's broad daylight. It's not even two o'clock yet. What could happen to us?'

I was sweating heavily by now, and I used my T-shirt to wipe the moisture off my face. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I just don't want to take any chances.'

She gave my hand a small squeeze and looked into my eyes. 'It is scary, isn't it?'

That night, I had a nightmare. And it was Jan who woke me up and comforted me.

I had been walking through the tall grasses beyond the barn, the overgrown groundcover reaching above my head and causing me to lose my way. It was night, and the full moon shone brightly in a starless sky. I kept looking up as I walked, trying unsuccessfully to get my bearings by the moon, trying vainly to determine in which direction I was walking. Suddenly, I stepped through a wall of grass and found myself at the edge of a small clearing—face-to- face with the bathhouse.

The bathhouse looked smaller than I'd thought it would, and not as run-down. But that in no way diluted its evil. For it was evil. It was a forbidding and terrifying presence, al­most alive, and the light of the moon played spectrally across its adobe facade, highlighting the empty darkened windows, spotlighting strange irregularities in construction. There was something definitely wrong with the building, something savage and perverse, and as I looked at the struc­ture my muscles knotted in fear.

Then something caught my eye. I glanced over the front of the building once again and saw what I had noticed only peripherally before. I screamed. Peeking out of the black­ened rectangular hole which served as a doorway were two shriveled feet wearing Jan's stockings.

I awoke in Jan's arms.

And she held me, softly, closely, her calm, sympathetic voice assuaging my fears, until again I fell asleep.

The other local farmers knew about the bathhouse as well, we learned. My grandpa had several of the neighbor­ing ranchers over for a barbecue lunch the next day, and they discussed, in hushed whispers, the recent mutilation of sev­eral hogs. They all seemed to think the mutilations were connected with the bathhouse in some way.

'I went up there exactly once,' said Old Man Crawford. 'The first year we moved here. That was enough for me.'

I was sitting next to Jan at the head of the table, keeping my ear on the conversation and my eye on the hamburgers. I turned toward Old Man Crawford. 'What was it like?' I asked.

They stared at me then, six pairs of eyes widening as if in shock. The only sound was the sizzling of the meat dripping through the rusty grill onto the burning charcoal. No one said a word; it was as if they were waiting for me to retract my question. Jan's hand found mine and held it.

'What the hell is this? A wake?' My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns. He looked from me to the silent farmers. 'Anything wrong here?'

'Nah,' Old Man Crawford said, smiling and downing the last of his beer. 'Everything's fine.'

The mood was broken, the tension dissipated, and the conversation returned to a normal, healthy buzz, though it now revolved around other, safer, topics.

I got up and went into the house, rummaging through the refrigerator for a Coke. Jan followed me in. 'What was all that about?' she asked.

I found my Coke and closed the door. 'You got me.'

She shook her head, smiling slightly. 'Ever get the feel­ing this is all a joke? Some trick they're playing on the rubes from the city?'

'You saw them,' I said. 'That was no joke. They were scared. Every one of those old bastards was scared. Jesus ...' I walked over to the screen door and looked to­ward the hillside. 'Maybe we should go up there and look around.' An expression of terror passed over Jan's face, and I laughed. 'Then again, maybe we shouldn't.'

We rejoined the party and sat in silence, effectively chas­tened, listening to the farmers talk. After a while the talk turned, as I knew it would, back to the hog mutilations. A lot of hostile glances were thrown in my direction, but this time I said nothing. I just listened.

'Herman looked fine when I went out to see him,' Old Man Crawford said, running a hand through his thinning hair. 'I just thought he was asleep. Then I heard, like, a buzzing coming from where he lay. I moved in a little closer, and I saw that his stomach had been sliced clean open.' He made a slicing motion with his hand and his voice dropped. 'He'd been gutted, all his innards taken out, and the inside of his body was nothing but thousands of flies.'

A middle-aged farmer I didn't know, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a cowboy hat, nodded his head in un­derstanding. 'That's exactly what happened to my Marybeth. Flies all inside her. Even in her mouth. Just a- crawling around...'

'The bathhouse,' my grandpa said, chewing the last bite of his hamburger.

Old Man Crawford nodded wisely. 'What else could it be?'

That afternoon it rained—a heavy downpour of warm summer water which fell in endless torrents from the black clouds that had risen suddenly over the hills, and which formed miniature rivers and tributaries on the sloping ground outside the farmhouse. We sat in the kitchen, the three of us, talking and watching the rain.

'Good for the crops,' my grandpa said, holding his leg as he limped over to the window. 'It's been a helluva dry sum­mer.'

I nodded my head in agreement, not saying anything. Jan and I had decided that we would ask him about the bath­house that afternoon—the real story—and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject. I watched my grandpa staring out the window, looking small and frail and old, and listened silently to the depressing sound of rainwater gush­ing through the metal gutter along the edge of the roof. I felt sad, all of a sudden, and I wasn't sure why. Then I realized that something had happened to the kitchen; it was different. It was no longer the warm quaint kitchen of my grandpar­ents but the curiously empty kitchen of an unhappy old man—a stranger. The feeling hit me abruptly, inexplicably, and for some reason I felt like crying. I no longer felt like asking about the bathhouse. I didn't care. But I saw Jan star­ing at me quizzically from across the table, and I forced my­self to speak. 'Uh, Grandpa?'

He turned around. 'Yeah?'

He was silhouetted against the screen, the rain in back of him, and his face was entirely in shadows. He didn't look like my grandpa. I looked across the table at Jan, and she too looked different. Older. I could see the wrinkles starting.

She motioned for me to go on.

I cleared my throat. 'I'd like you to tell me a bit more about the bathhouse.'

He walked forward, nodding, and as he came closer his face once again became visible. And once again he was my grandpa. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I've been expecting this. I was wondering when you were going to ask.' He sat down in his familiar chair, holding his leg. A sudden gust of wind blew the screen door open then closed. Our faces were lightly splattered with water spray. He looked from Jan to me, and his voice was low, serious. 'You feel it, don't you? You know it's here.'

I felt unexpectedly cold, and I shivered, instinctively massaging the gooseflesh on my bare arms. Jan, I noticed, was doing the same, hugging herself tightly. Outside, the rain abated somewhat.

'It's like a magnet,' my grandpa said. 'It draws you to it. You hear about it, or you see it from far off, and you