And taken his retarded daughter with him.
'Fuck me in the ass.'
He tried to imagine the girl as a teenager; as an adult, but he couldn't. She'd have to be in her mid-twenties now, but Mark could not picture her as anything except the child he remembered.
'Your father does it.'
'Kristen didn't live alone, though. She had help--'
'No. Far as I know, she lived by herself.'
'No other people came to the funeral? No one you didn't recognize? No . . . hired help?'
'No one 'cept her friends from Dry River.' He looked over at Mark. 'How'd they ever get in touch with you? I heard tell Frank Neeson was tryin ' like hell to find your sorry ass but no one knew where you were.
Weren't even in Kristen's phone book or nothing. Guess he finally tracked you down, huh?'
'Yeah,' Mark said, not wanting to explain.
'Didn't tell you much, though, did he?'
Mark shook his head. 'No.'
They reached the ranch gate, and the pickup skidded to a stop. 'Here's where I let you off,' Roy said. He peered through the open passenger window at the black gabled building. 'Still don't like that house,' he said.
Mark opened the door and pulled his backpack by one of the shoulder straps. He hopped out and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of a sleeve.
'Thanks for the lift,' he said. 'Appreciate it.'
'I'll be coming back this way in about an hour or so.
Want me to stop by, give you a ride?'
Mark looked up at the hot blue sky, nodded.
'Sounds good.'
'Bewaitin ' for me by the gate here. I'll give three honks. If there's no sign of you, I'll head on.'
'All right.' Mark waved as the pickup took off, but even if Roy had been looking, he wouldn't have been able to see through the dust. Coughing, Mark backed away from the road and turned away. Before him was the closed gate and beyond that the drive that led to the house.
He lifted the latch, swung the gate open, closed it behind him, and stood there for a moment. He was afraid. He'd known that already, of course, but the emotional reality of it had not penetrated until now. He stared at the dark structure, and though the front of the house was facing the sun, there was no glare off the windows. The entire facade of the house was the same flat black, its specific features differentiated only by slight variations in tone. It was as if the building swallowed the sunlight, absorbed it, and Mark noticed that the bushes and plants that were in what would be the perimeter of the house's shadow were all brown and dead.
He was just being overly dramatic. The plants were dead because there was no one here to water them.
Without daily attention, everything except cactus and sagebrush died in the desert, and Kristen was no longer here to take care of the property.
That meant that Billings was gone.
It felt as though a weight had been lifted off his chest.
From what Roy had said, it sounded as though the assistant was no longer here, but Roy was obviously not the most reliable of witnesses and Mark had always been a hope-for the best and expect the-worst kind of guy. There was no way Billings would have allowed the plants to die, though, and to Mark that was as good a proof as any that the assistant was gone.
That meant his daughter wouldn't be here either.
'Fuck me in the ass.'
His gaze swept involuntarily to the window where he'd last seen the girl, but it was as flat and lifeless as the rest of the house and he saw nothing there.
He walked slowly forward, rippling heat waves creating a mirage puddle on the drive ahead and filtering the bottom of the house through a wavy mirror. In back of the house and to the side were the chicken coops, but Mark could see even from this far away, even through the heat waves, that they'd fallen into a state of disrepair and were no longer used. More proof that Billings was not here.
Why was he so concerned about the assistant?
Because Billings frightened him. He did not know why, and it had never been the case when he'd lived here, but he was terrified of running into the assistant again. In his mind, Mark saw the man looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago, and that, more than anything else, engendered a feeling of dread within him. The assistant's kindness and bland passivity now seemed to him to be masking an unnatural patience and an unfathomable intent. He could imagine Billings waiting, biding his time, picking off the family one by one until there was only Mark left and he was drawn back to the house.
God, he wished The Power hadn't deserted him.
Even more frightening was the prospect of running into Billings' daughter, of seeing the girl again. He remembered how she hadn't aged before, and he could easily imagine her unchanged, bending over a chair in that dark endless hallway and flipping up her shift.
'/ like it hard. Fuck me hard.'
He should've gone to the mortuary first, the cemetery, the sheriff's office. It was a mistake to have come here unprepared and all alone. What the hell could he have been thinking?
Still, he continued forward, down the dual-rutted drive with its ever-retreating mirage water, past the sandstone boulders that lined the ragged, shallow, irregularly shaped hole his father had intended to be a pond. The sweat was dripping down the sides of his face, and he had to keep wiping his forehead with his sleeve, but inside he was cold, and the ice within him kept the goose bumps alive on his arms.
He reached the house, walked up the deep porch steps, aware suddenly of how quiet it was. There were no whirs, hums, or other mechanical sounds, none of the noises of civilization. That was to be expected. The ranch was far from town, and the house was empty, everything shut off. But even nature was silent, and that he found more than a little creepy. In this heat, there should have been cicada buzzes, snake rattles, hawk cries.
But there was nothing.
Only the sound of his own feet on the porch boards and the wheeze of his overheated breath.
He no longer had a key for the front door--he'd tossed it off the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in his own private exorcising ritual several years back--but he knew where his parents had kept a spare, and sure enough, Kristen had continued the tradition. It was on the top of the porch light, just behind the lip edge, and he felt around up there until his fingers found the dusty object.
Once again, he considered turning back, leaving, but he reminded himself that he was not doing this for his own peace of mind, he was doing it for Kristen. He had failed her, and if he was a little uncomfortable at the moment, well, that was just too damn bad. She'd put up with a hell of a lot worse, and it was the least he could do.
The chill in his body intensified as he opened the door and walked inside the house. It was exactly as he'd remembered.
Kristen had not altered even the arrangement of the pictures on the walls. Everything was untouched: furniture in place, throw rugs unmoved. It took his breath away, this sudden wholesale immersion in the past, and he stood there for a moment, stunned.
The heavy wood, the dark walls and floor and ceiling, all seemed horribly oppressive to him, a reminder of his childhood, and he wondered how his sister had put up with it. Could she have possibly found this atmosphere pleasant? Comforting?
The thought of Kristen living in this unchanging house, all alone, tugged at his heart, and his fear abated somewhat, replaced by an aching sense of loss.
Why hadn't he come back earlier?
Why hadn't he taken her away from this?
He walked slowly forward. To his left, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something out of place in the front sitting room, and he turned in that direction, the blood freezing in his veins even before he recognized what he saw.
Billings.
