There was a tug on his arm, and Norton looked down to see Donna pulling on his sleeve. "Come here," she said softly, and a slight smile played about her lips.
"Come look."
He noticed for the first time that the room was crowded, filled with tables and display cases and huge heavy pieces of furniture that served functions he did not understand. He saw what looked like severed hands and genitalia lying on a long glass shelf on one wall.
Something small and dark and furry ran past his feet, chattering to itself.
He did not see either a door or a window, an entrance or an exit to the room.
Donna pulled him around a large stationary object of mirror and wood that he did not recognize, and he found himself in a corner area even more jumbled and chaotic than the rest of the room. There was no furniture here, though.
There were bodies.
And body parts.
His first instinct was to back away. The floor was sticky with blood, and what looked like deflated clouds, the pale empty husks of the ghosts he'd seen in the House on the Other Side, hung from staggered hooks on the black wall. The torso of some unknown rainbow colored creature sat atop a cube made from interlocking bones, next to the discarded head of an evil-looking old woman. The stench was horrendous, and he held his hand to his nose, gagging.
But Donna would not let him go. She held tightly to his wrist, her strength both unforced and unnatural, and she talked to him softly. There was no true death, she said. There was only a transformation from one form into another, a passage from one world to the next. Why should he hold on to his outdated notions of morality, his prudish small-town conceptions of what was right?
There was nothing wrong with killing. It only facilitated the inevitable.
He heard her, understood her, and though he should have had arguments with which to dispute her, he did not. She led him through the abattoir, still softly talking, lovingly touching the remains of the dispatched.
There was beauty in the bones, he saw now, a poetry in the eviscerated flesh.
Donna reached the wall, and from a skin sheath hanging from a spike, she withdrew a dull rusty knife. She handed it to him. "Mr. Billings is yours."
"What?"
"It's time for him to move on, and you have been chosen to assist him." She pressed the knife into his hand. It felt heavy, good. "It's an opportunity for you."
She led him back through the furniture to the marble table, and he looked at Billings, strapped down and unable to move. Norton shook his head. He could not go through with this. He understood that death was not the end, but he still could not bring himself to kill someone, to murder in cold blood.
Donna must have sensed his hesitancy because she rubbed against him, placed a hand between his legs. "It's his time," she said. "He wants to go."
Billings did not look like he wanted to go. Norton glanced down at the defiant face and turned quickly away.
Donna faced him. Her legs were slightly spread, the thin material of her dirty shift stretched tight, and he found himself wishing she'd bend over again, wishing she'd let him between her thighs.
One of the wispy ghosts had been pinned to the wall behind the table and was weakly fluttering, its blue-gray essence seeping slowly out from a slit in the fabric of its being and floating into the girl's mouth even as she spoke, even as she whispered the words he wanted to hear.
"I'll drink your sperm and drink your piss and drink your blood. I'll take everything you give me and do anything you want me to. All you have to do is take care of Mr. Billings."
Norton nodded. He didn't know why he was doing what he was doing, but he held out the knife, walked up to the marble table.
"Do it," Donna said.
He did.
Even as Billings screamed, as he inserted the knife in the assistant's groin and jerked upward, Norton understood that he was the reason Billings had disappeared.
Wherever he was--whenever he was--it was after he had met Daniel and Laurie and Stormy and Mark but before the Houses had split apart. He had not known it then because his own life unfolded sequentially, no matter what happened, but the Houses did not follow such a conventional timetable, were not so circumscribed, and he had been wrenched back and forth, forced to be at the Houses' beck and call, to respond to whatever they put in front of him.
Donna was right. It was the Houses that were evil.
But he realized the fallacy of that reasoning even as it occurred to him. Billings' screams were now silent, his mouth frozen wide open, his eyes bulging with agony, and Norton knew with a certainty that could not be denied that he'd been right the first time, that his initial instincts had been correct. The girl was the evil one.
"Yes," Donna said, egging him on. And there was hunger in her eyes. "Gut the fucker!"
He stopped then and there. He pulled the knife out and dropped it, knowing that it was too late, that he had been corrupted by the girl Kiss my ass --that he had been caught in her web, that he was lost. He heard the knife hit the floor, and he stared down at his hands, covered to the elbows with hot blood, and he started to cry, but Donna knelt before him and, smiling up at him, unfastened the snaps on his pants.
"I'll take care of you," she promised. "I'll reward you."
He pulled back from her, jerked away. "What have you done?" he screamed at her.
She smiled up at him. "What have you done?"
"You didn't kill my family," he said, understanding finally dawning on him, "because you couldn't kill them."
Donna smiled. "Darcy did just as good a job. I was very proud of her."
Norton's stomach dropped. "No," he whispered, shaking his head. He thought of his old girlfriend, and though he didn't want to be able to imagine her cutting off heads and cooking them in the oven, he could.
But how had she done it? His father and Darren and his sisters--hell, even his mother--could have easily beaten Darcy in a fight. And all of them together would certainly have been able to not only resist her but overpower her.
Donna had made them sacrifice themselves.
It made perfect sense.
He stared at her with horror.
"But I can kill," she said. "You're wrong about that. I can fuck and I can kill."
"Then why do you make other people do it for you?"
She smiled. "Because it's fun."
He backed away from her.
"I killed Darcy after that. Skinned her in the garage.
And Mark's sister Kristen? The last true resident of the House? I sat on her face, made her eat me, suffocated her with my hot pussy. And--"
"Why didn't you kill Billings?"
Her face clouded over. "That's different."
"Why?"
"Because."
"You couldn't do it?"
"No, I needed you."
He looked back at the assistant's bloody, unmoving form on the table. "What have I done?" he cried.
"You've helped me."
And even as he screamed his anguish into the black and bone-cluttered room, she was on her knees in front of him, pulling down his pants.
Stormy The windows were back.
That was the first thing he noticed.
But the world outside was foggy and featureless, and although the front door of the House opened when he tried it, he was afraid to go out into that murk.
Stormy closed the door and looked around the entryway, down the hall. "Daniel!" he called. "Daniel!"
No answer.
"Norton! Laurie! . . . Mark!"