THE HOUSE

Bentley Little

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my parents, Larry and Roseanne,

for the house I grew up in,

and thanks to my wife, Wai Sau,

for the house I live in.

Thanks also to my agent,

Dominick Abel.

It’s been a long, strange decade…

but we’re still here.

PROLOGUE

California

Teddy had lived in the airport for the past eight years.

He knew it was a problem, knew it was a serious phobia, but he had not been able to venture outside the terminal in all that time. He could not remember exactly what had compelled him to seek refuge here, but it no longer mattered. This was his home, this was his world, and he was happy with it. He found money on the floor, in the coin returns of vending machines and pay phones; he begged for spare change when necessary; he bought his food in the snack bars and mini Pizza Huts and junior Burger Kings that made up the terminal’s restaurant row. He purchased or shoplifted shorts and T-shirts from the gift shop. He read the magazines and newspapers that people left on chairs, the printed material they bought in order to waste time while waiting for their flights.

The airport terminal was heated and air-conditioned, open twenty-four hours, and it was constantly filled with people, a broad cross section of society. He was never bored here. There was always someone to talk with, a lonely traveler or waiting relative, and he would strike up a conversation, absorb the distilled story of a person’s life, make up some impressive lies about his own, and move on, a little richer for the encounter.

He was a “people person,” as they liked to say, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than meeting new people, making new friends, talking and listening, experiencing vicariously the life he had renounced.

He kept himself well groomed, storing his clothes in a locker and changing each day, washing his laundry in a bathroom sink at night, drying everything with the wall-mounted hand-dryers, giving himself sponge baths, washing and combing his hair with travelpak toiletries from the gift shop. Save for the times when he was compelled to ask for money, no one would ever mistake him for a homeless person, and while he had been here so long that he knew work schedules and shift changes, knew when security guards patrolled the airport and the routes they took, was able to easily avoid detection by airport personnel, he had still been seen often enough around the terminal that many of the store clerks, janitors, and other airport workers knew him, believed him to be a frequent flyer, and treated him with the utmost respect.

But lately, he’d had the suspicion that he was not alone.

Something was living in the airport with him.