'Now, however, the House is failing. Elements of the other world are breaking through to this world, the material world, and elements of your world are breaking into it.'
Mark desperately wanted a drink. 'How long have you been here?' he asked. 'In the House?'
'I have always been here.'
He didn't like that answer.
'What about your daughter?'
The assistant frowned. 'What?'
'Is she still here?' He saw in his mind the child's sly corrupt face, and he shivered even as he acknowledged the faint sensual stirring within him.
Billings blinked, puzzled, and an expression closely related to fear crossed his features.
'I have no daughter,' he said.
Norton For the first time since he'd arrived, for the first time in his memory,Billingson appeared to be rattled, and Norton felt a small twinge of satisfaction. It was petty, he knew, and should have been beneath him, but the hired hand's discomfort made him feel good.
At the same time, he was terrified.
He didn't know what he'd expected to find here when he returned. A haunted house? Yes. Ghosts from his past? Yes. But not this wide-ranging, elaborate, epic situation.
Did he believe it?
There was no doubt in his mind that the hired hand spoke the truth. Nothing else made sense. But the story was so all-inclusive as to be completely overwhelming.
A demon possessed a peasant in Bangladesh, or a hiker in the Himalayas caught a glimpse of the abominable snowman, and it was because he didn't live in the Oak dale house anymore? Such a causal connection seemed on the face of it impossible, butBillingson's simple explanation tied it all together in a way that seemed to him entirely believable.
And what about the girl?
As happy as he was to seeBillingson so shaken, it frightened him to realize that the hired hand knew nothing about the child who was supposed to have been his daughter.
Donna.
He felt a stirring in his groin just thinking about her.
But the fact thatBillingson , who seemed to know everything, who seemed to be at the center of all that was going on, was completely unaware of the girl's existence disturbed him in a way he could not explain. As terrifying as the House was, there seemed to be a logic to it, a coherent theory or controlling power behind it. But the girl existed outside of that. She was a wild card, and her existence threw everything off balance, darkening and complicating an already dark and complex picture.
The conversation, the lecture, had been derailed by the revelation that he had seenBillingson's daughter, but the hired hand, while clearly shaken, faced Norton calmly, once again perfectly composed, and said, 'It's getting late. I think we should finish this discussion in the morning.'
Norton glanced around the sitting room. Until this point, his time in the House had been spent in the sitting room, like a variation of No Exit, and his first thought was that he was going to have to sleep here--on the couch or the love seat or the chairs or the floor--and was never going to be able to leave the room.
But when he asked, 'Where am I going to sleep?'
Billingsonreplied, 'Your room is waiting for you.'
Indeed, his bedroom was exactly where it had always been: halfway down the third-story hall. There were numerous doors lining both sides of the dark corridor and Norton realized that even as a child he had never known what was in most of those other rooms. Their doors had always been closed or locked, and he had never even wondered what was inside them.
There are other dimensions besides space and time.
It was whatBillingson had said when quizzed about the exact placement of the Housevis-a-vis the 'Other Side,' and though Norton had said nothing at the time, the statement had frightened him and stuck with him.
He was way out of his depth here, and he wished to God he had never come. It was the coward's response, he knew, but he had no problem answering to that description.
He would rather have put up with a million monstrous manifestations on the streets of Finley than be trapped here in this House. Those were intrusions of horror into the normal everyday world. Here, horror was the normal everyday occurrence.
Billingson led him to his bedroom door, opened it for him, and smiled. 'Sweet dreams, Nort ,' he said before bowing theatrically and heading down the hall.
It was what his father used to say to him each night before tucking him into bed.
Norton took a deep breath, walked into the bedroom.
Everything looked precisely as it had half a century ago.
It was not exactly a surprise, but the extent of his immersion into the past was still staggering. There was the low bed with the red-checkered bedspread, the small corner desk covered with finished and half-finished airplane models, the photos of Buck and Roy Rogers tacked to the wall, the cigar box on the nightstand that he'd used to store his valuables. He looked up. Above the door was the upside-down horseshoe he'd nailed there for good luck.
Good luck.
He smiled wryly. That was a joke. He'd never had anything remotely approaching good luck in this House.
He was bigger and the room and its contents were smaller, but there was none of the awkwardness usually associated with revisiting scenes from childhood. Instead, he felt perfectly at home here. He sat down on the bed, and his body's memory kicked in, remembering the contours of the mattress and the texture of the bedspread, snuggling into a physical familiarity with the room.
He sat for a few moments on the bed, looking around, taking it all in, then rummaged through the cigar box and the drawers of the desk, picking up and touching objects with which he was intimately familiar but had neither seen nor thought about for many decades.
It depressed him, being in this room again, made him sad. The fear was still there, constant beneath his other layers of feeling, but he also felt pensive and melancholic.
Being here reminded him of what he'd thought as a child, what he'd planned, and the realization that the future he'd been so eagerly awaiting had already passed left him somewhat heavy-hearted. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age.
He walked to the window, looked out. It was still dark out, but it wasn't night. There were no stars, no moon, no town lights or road lights. It was as black as if the window glass had been painted, but the darkness had depth, and he knew there was a world outside the window.
He just wasn't sure he wanted to know what that world was.
Sighing, he turned away. He felt dirty, filthy from both the long trip and the cold-sweat stress of everything he'd experienced since, and although the bathroom, if he remembered correctly, was halfway down the hall, he decided to take a shower before bed. He'd brought no robe, though, no pajamas, and his extra clothes were still in the car. Strange. He'd always intended to stay overnight in Oakdale, maybe stay several nights, and he had no explanation for why he had not packed appropriately.
That was not like him.
He found it worrisome.
He decided to simply walk down the hall, take his shower, put his clothes back on afterward, and then sleep in his underwear and wear the clothes again tomorrow.
He considered calling for Billingson , asking for a towel and washcloth, but he didn't relish the idea of seeing the hired hand again, and he figured he'd check the bathroom first, see if he couldn't find what he needed on his own.
He took off his shoes and his belt, emptied the contents of his pockets on the nightstand. He heard no noise from any of the other rooms as he walked down the hall, but the silence was more unnerving than sound would have been, and he considered calling off the shower and retreating to his bedroom, hiding until morning.
