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.
