Black House (61 page)

“THE EMERGENCY IS OVER!” Spiegleman assures his cast and crew. “THERE IS NO FIRE! PLEASE REPORT TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR! THIS IS DR. SPIEGLEMAN, AND I REPEAT THAT THE EMERGENCY IS
OVER
!”

Here comes Wendell Green, weaving his way slowly toward the stairwell, rubbing his chin gently with one hand. He sees young Mr. Evans and offers him a helping hand. For a moment it looks as though Wendell may be pulled over himself, but then young Mr. Evans gets his buttocks against the wall and manages to gain his feet.

“THE EMERGENCY IS OVER! I REPEAT, THE EMERGENCY IS
OVER
! NURSES, ORDERLIES, AND DOCTORS, PLEASE ESCORT ALL PATIENTS TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR!”

Young Mr. Evans eyes the purple bruise rising on Wendell’s chin.

Wendell eyes the purple bruise rising on the temple of young Mr. Evans.

“Sawyer?” young Mr. Evans asks.

“Sawyer,” Wendell confirms.

“Bastard sucker punched me,” young Mr. Evans confides.

“Son of a bitch came up behind
me,
” Wendell says. “The Marshall woman. He had her down.” He lowers his voice. “He was getting ready to
rape
her.”

Young Mr. Evans’s whole manner says he is sorrowful but not surprised.

“Something ought to be done,” Wendell says.

“You got that right.”

“People ought to be told.” Gradually, the old fire returns to Wendell’s eyes. People
will
be told. By him! Because that is what he does, by God! He
tells
people!

“Yeah,” young Mr. Evans says. He doesn’t care as much as Wendell does—he lacks Wendell’s burning commitment—but there’s one person he
will
tell. One person who deserves to be comforted in her lonely hours, who has been left on her own Mount of Olives. One person who will drink up the knowledge of Jack Sawyer’s evil like the very waters of life.

“This kind of behavior cannot just be swept under the rug,” Wendell says.

“No way,” young Mr. Evans agrees. “No way, José.”

Jack has barely cleared the gates of French County Lutheran when his cell phone tweets. He thinks of pulling over to take the call, hears the sound of approaching fire engines, and decides for once to risk driving and talking at the same time. He wants to be out of the area before the local fire brigade shows up and slows him down.

He flips the little Nokia open. “Sawyer.”

“Where the fuck
are
you?” Beezer St. Pierre bellows. “Man, I been hittin’ redial so hard I damn near punched it off the phone!”

“I’ve been . . .” But there’s no way he can finish that, not and stay within shouting distance of the truth, that is. Or maybe there is. “I guess I got into one of those dead zones where the cell phone just doesn’t pick up—”

“Never mind the science lesson, chum. Get your ass over here right
now.
The actual address is 1 Nailhouse Row—it’s County Road Double-O just south of Chase. It’s the babyshit brown two-story on the corner.”

“I can find it,” Jack says, and steps down a little harder on the Ram’s gas pedal. “I’m on my way now.”

“What’s your twenty, man?”

“Still Arden, but I’m rolling. I can be there in maybe half an hour.”

“Fuck!”
There is an alarming crash-rattle in Jack’s ear as somewhere on Nailhouse Row Beezer slams his fist against something. Probably the nearest wall. “The fuck’s
wrong
with you, man? Mouse is goin’ down, I mean
fast.
We’re doin’ our best—those of us who’re still here—but he is goin’
down.
” Beezer is panting, and Jack thinks he’s trying not to cry. The thought of Armand St. Pierre in that particular state is alarming. Jack looks at the Ram’s speedometer, sees it’s touching seventy, and eases off a tad. He won’t help anybody by getting himself greased in a road wreck between Arden and Centralia.

“What do you mean ‘those of us who are still here’?”

“Never mind, just get your butt down here, if you want to talk to Mouse. And he sure wants to talk to you, because he keeps sayin’ your name.” Beezer lowers his voice. “When he ain’t just ravin’ his ass off, that is. Doc’s doing his best—me and Bear Girl, too—but we’re shovelin’ shit against the tide here.”

“Tell him to hold on,” Jack says.

“Fuck that, man—tell him yourself.”

There’s a rattling sound in Jack’s ear, the faint murmuring of voices. Then another voice, one which hardly sounds human, speaks in his ear. “Got to hurry . . . got to get over here, man. Thing . . . bit me. I can feel it in there. Like acid.”

“Hold on, Mouse,” Jack says. His fingers are dead white on the telephone. He wonders that the case doesn’t simply crack in his grip. “I’ll be there fast as I can.”

“Better be. Others . . . already forgot. Not me.” Mouse chuckles. The sound is ghastly beyond belief, a whiff straight out of an open grave. “I got . . . the memory serum, you know? It’s eatin’ me up . . . eatin’ me alive . . . but I got it.”

There’s the rustling sound of the phone changing hands again, then a new voice. A woman’s. Jack assumes it’s Bear Girl.

“You got them moving,” she says. “You brought it to this. Don’t let it be for nothing.”

There is a click in his ear. Jack tosses the cell phone onto the seat and decides that maybe seventy isn’t too fast, after all.

A few minutes later (they seem like very long minutes to Jack), he’s squinting against the glare of the sun on Tamarack Creek. From here he can almost see his house, and Henry’s.

Henry.

Jack thumps the side of his thumb lightly against his breast pocket and hears the rattle of the cassette tape he took from the machine in Spiegleman’s office. There’s not much reason to turn it over to Henry now; given what Potter told him last night and what Mouse is holding on to tell him today, this tape and the 911 tape have been rendered more or less redundant. Besides, he’s got to hurry to Nailhouse Row. There’s a train getting ready to leave the station, and Mouse Baumann is very likely going to be on it.

And yet . . .

“I’m worried about him,” Jack says softly. “Even a blind man could see I’m worried about Henry.”

The brilliant summer sun, now sliding down the afternoon side of the sky, reflects off the creek and sends shimmers of light dancing across his face. Each time this light crosses his eyes, they seem to burn.

Henry isn’t the only one Jack’s worried about, either. He’s got a bad feeling about all of his new French Landing friends and acquaintances, from Dale Gilbertson and Fred Marshall right down to such bit players as old Steamy McKay, an elderly gent who makes his living shining shoes outside the public library, and Ardis Walker, who runs the ramshackle bait shop down by the river. In his imagination, all these people now seem made of glass. If the Fisherman decides to sing high C, they’ll vibrate and then shatter to powder. Only it’s not really the Fisherman he’s worried about anymore.

This is a case,
he reminds himself.
Even with all the Territories weirdness thrown in, it’s still a case, and it’s not the first one you’ve ever been on where everything suddenly started to seem too big. Where all the shadows seemed to be too long.

True enough, but usually that funhouse sense of false perspective fades away once he starts to get a handle on things. This time it’s worse, and worse by far. He knows why, too. The Fisherman’s long shadow is a thing called Mr. Munshun, an immortal talent scout from some other plane of existence. Nor is even that the end, because Mr. Munshun also casts a shadow. A
red
one.

“Abbalah,” Jack mutters. “Abbalah-doon and Mr. Munshun and the Crow Gorg, just three old pals walking together on night’s Plutonian shore.” For some reason this makes him think of the Walrus and the Carpenter from
Alice.
What was it they took for a walk in the moonlight? Clams? Mussels? Jack’s damned if he can remember, although one line surfaces and resonates in his mind, spoken in his mother’s voice:
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.”

The abbalah is presumably hanging out in his court (the part of him that isn’t imprisoned in Speedy’s Dark Tower, that is), but the Fisherman and Mr. Munshun could be anywhere. Do they know Jack Sawyer has been meddling? Of course they do. By today, that is common knowledge. Might they try to slow him down by doing something nasty to one of his friends? A certain blind sportscaster-headbanger-bebopper, for instance?

Yes indeed. And now, perhaps because he’s been sensitized to it, he can once more feel that nasty pulse coming out of the southwestern landscape, the one he sensed when he flipped over for the first time in his adult life. When the road curves southeast, he almost loses it. Then, when the Ram points its nose southwest again, the poisonous throb regains strength, beating into his head like the onset of a migraine headache.

That’s Black House you feel, only it’s not a house, not really. It’s a wormhole in the apple of existence, leading all the way down into the furnace-lands. It’s a door. Maybe it was only standing ajar before today, before Beezer and his pals turned up there, but now it’s wide open and letting in one hell of a draft. Ty needs to be brought back, yes
.
.
.
but that door needs to be shut, as well. Before God knows what awful things come snarling through.

Jack abruptly swings the Ram onto Tamarack Road. The tires scream. His seat belt locks, and for a moment he thinks the truck may overturn. It stays up, though, and he goes flying toward Norway Valley Road. Mouse will just have to hang on a little bit longer; he’s not going to leave Henry way out here on his own. His pal doesn’t know it, but he’s going on a little field trip to Nailhouse Row. Until this situation stabilizes, it seems to Jack that the buddy system is very much in order.

Which would have been all well and good if Henry had been at home, but he’s not. Elvena Morton, dust mop in hand, comes in response to Jack’s repeated jabbing at the doorbell.

“He’s been over at KDCU, doing commercials,” Elvena says. “Dropped him off myself. I don’t know why he doesn’t just do them in his studio here, something about the sound effects, I think he might have said. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you that.”

The bitch of it is, Henry did. Cousin Buddy’s Rib Crib. The old ball and chain. Beautiful downtown La Riviere. All that. He even told Jack that Elvena Morton was going to drive him. A few things have happened to Jack since that conversation—he’s reencountered his old childhood friend, he’s fallen in love with Judy Marshall’s Twinner, and just by the way he’s been filled in on your basic Secret of All Existence—but none of that keeps him from turning his left hand into a fist and then slamming himself directly between the eyes with it. Given how fast things are now moving, making this needless detour strikes him as an almost unforgivable lapse.

Mrs. Morton is regarding him with wide-eyed alarm.

“Are you going to be picking him up, Mrs. Morton?”

“No, he’s going for a drink with someone from ESPN. Henry said the fellow would bring him back afterward.” She lowers her voice to the timbre of confidentiality at which secrets are somehow best communicated. “Henry didn’t come right out and say so, but I think there may be big things ahead for George Rathbun. Ver-ry big things.”

Badger Barrage
going national? Jack wouldn’t be entirely surprised, but he has no time to be delighted for Henry now. He hands Mrs. Morton the cassette tape, mostly so he won’t feel this was an
entirely
wasted trip. “Leave this for him where . . .”

He stops. Mrs. Morton is looking at him with knowing amusement.
Where he’ll be sure to see it
is what Jack almost said. Another mental miscue. Big-city detective, indeed.

“I’ll leave it by the soundboard in his studio,” she says. “He’ll find it there. Jack, maybe it’s none of my business, but you don’t look all right. You’re very pale, and I’d swear you’ve lost ten pounds since last week. Also . . .” She looks a bit embarrassed. “Your shoes are on the wrong feet.”

So they are. He makes the necessary change, standing first on one foot and then the other. “It’s been a tough forty-eight hours, but I’m hanging in there, Mrs. M.”

“It’s the Fisherman business, isn’t it?”

He nods. “And I have to go. The fat, as they say, is in the fire.” He turns, reconsiders, turns back. “Leave him a message on the kitchen tape recorder, would you? Tell him to call me on my cell. Just as soon as he gets in.” Then, one thought leading to another, he points to the unmarked cassette tape in her hand. “Don’t play that, all right?”

Mrs. Morton looks shocked. “I’d never do such a thing! It would be like opening someone else’s mail!”

Jack nods and gives her a scrap of a smile. “Good.”

“Is it . . . him on the tape? Is it the Fisherman?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “It’s him.”
And there are worse things waiting,
he thinks but doesn’t say.
Worse things by far.

He hurries back to his truck, not quite running.

Twenty minutes later Jack parks in front of the babyshit brown two-story at 1 Nailhouse Row. Nailhouse Row and the dirty snarl of streets around it strike him as unnaturally silent under the sun of this hot summer afternoon. A mongrel dog (it is, in fact, the old fellow we saw in the doorway of the Nelson Hotel just last night) goes limping across the intersection of Ames and County Road Oo, but that’s about the extent of the traffic. Jack has an unpleasant vision of the Walrus and the Carpenter toddling along the east bank of the Mississippi with the hypnotized residents of Nailhouse Row following along behind them. Toddling along toward the fire. And the cooking pot.

He takes two or three deep breaths, trying to steady himself. Not far out of town—close to the road leading to Ed’s Eats, in fact—that nasty buzzing in his head peaked, turning into something like a dark scream. For a few moments there it was so strong Jack wondered if he was perhaps going to drive right off the road, and he slowed the Ram to forty. Then, blessedly, it began to move around toward the back of his head and fade. He didn’t see the
NO TRESPASSING
sign that marks the overgrown road leading to Black House, didn’t even look for it, but he knew it was there. The question is whether or not he’ll be able to approach it when the time comes without simply exploding.