Black House (66 page)

“What friend?” Doc asks suspiciously.

“Never mind,” Mouse says. “
Hollywood
knows. Don’tcha, Hollywood?”

Jack nods reluctantly. It’s Speedy, of course. Or Parkus, if you prefer.

“Wait until tomorrow,” Mouse says. “High noon, when the sun’s strongest in both worlds.
Promise.
”

At first Jack can say nothing. He’s torn, in something close to agony.

“It’d be almost full dark before you could get back out Highway 35 anyway,” Bear Girl says quietly.

“And there’s bad shit in those woods, all right,” Doc says. “Makes the stuff in that
Blair Witch Project
look fuckin’ tame. I don’t think you want to try it in the dark. Not unless you got a death wish, that is.”

“When you’re done . . .” Mouse whispers. “When you’re done . . . if any of you are left . . . burn the place to the ground. That hole. That tomb. Burn it to the ground, do you hear me?
Close the door.
”

“Yeah,” Beezer says. “Heard and understood, buddy.”

“Last thing,” Mouse says. He’s speaking directly to Jack now. “You may be able to find it . . . but I think I got something else you need. It’s a word. It’s powerful to you because of something you . . . you touched. Once a long time ago. I don’t understand that part, but . . .”

“It’s all right,” Jack tells him. “I do. What’s the word, Mouse?”

For a moment he doesn’t think Mouse will, in the end, be able to tell him. Something is clearly struggling to keep him from saying the word, but in this struggle, Mouse comes out on top. It is, Jack thinks, very likely his life’s last W.

“D’yamba,”
Mouse says. “Now you, Hollywood. You say it.”

“D’yamba,”
Jack says, and a row of weighty paperbacks slides from one of the makeshift shelves at the foot of the couch. They hang there in the dimming air . . . hang . . . hang . . . and then drop to the floor with a crash.

Bear Girl voices a little scream.

“Don’t forget it,” Mouse says. “You’re gonna need it.”

“How?
How
am I going to need it?”

Mouse shakes his head wearily. “Don’t . . . know.”

Beezer reaches over Jack’s shoulder and takes the pitiful little scribble of map. “You’re going to meet us tomorrow morning at the Sand Bar,” he tells Jack. “Get there by eleven-thirty, and we should be turning into that goddamned lane right around noon. In the meantime, maybe I’ll just hold on to this. A little insurance policy to make sure you do things Mouse’s way.”

“Okay,” Jack says. He doesn’t need the map to find Chummy Burnside’s Black House, but Mouse is almost certainly right: it’s probably not the sort of place you want to tackle after dark. He hates to leave Ty Marshall in the furance-lands—it feels wrong in a way that’s almost sinful—but he has to remember that there’s more at stake here than one little boy lost.

“Beezer, are you sure you want to go back there?”

“Hell no, I don’t want to go back,” Beezer says, almost indignantly. “But something killed my daughter—my
daughter!—
and it got
here
from
there!
You want to tell me you don’t know that’s true?”

Jack makes no reply. Of course it’s true. And of course he wants Doc and the Beez with him when he turns up the lane to Black House. If they can bear to come, that is.

D’yamba,
he thinks.
D’yamba. Don’t forget.

He turns back to the couch. “Mouse, do you—”

“No,” Doc says. “Guess he won’t need the Cadillac dope, after all.”

“Huh?” Jack peers at the big brewer-biker stupidly. He
feels
stupid. Stupid and exhausted.

“Nothin’ tickin’ but his watch,” Doc says, and then he begins to sing. After a moment Beezer joins in, then Bear Girl. Jack steps away from the couch with a thought queerly similar to Henry’s: How did it get late so early? Just how in hell did that happen?

“In heaven, there is no beer . . . that’s why we drink it here . . . and when . . . we’re gone . . . from here . . .”

Jack tiptoes across the room. On the far side, there’s a lighted Kingsland Premium Golden Pale Ale bar clock. Our old friend—who is finally looking every year of his age and not quite so lucky—peers at the time with disbelief, not accepting it until he has compared it to his own watch. Almost eight. He has been here for
hours.

Almost dark, and the Fisherman still out there someplace. Not to mention his otherworldly playmates.

D’yamba,
he thinks again as he opens the door. And, as he steps out onto the splintery porch and closes the door behind him, he speaks aloud with great sincerity into the darkening day: “Speedy, I’d like to wring your neck.”

24

D
’
YAMBA
IS A BRIGHT
and powerful spell; powerful connections form a web that extends, ramifying, throughout infinity. When Jack Sawyer peels the living poison from Mouse’s eyes,
d’yamba
first shines within the dying man’s mind, and that mind momentarily expands into knowledge; down the filaments of the web flows some measure of its shining strength, and soon a touch of
d’yamba
reaches Henry Leyden. Along the way, the
d’yamba
brushes Tansy Freneau, who, seated in a windowed alcove of the Sand Bar, observes a wry, beautiful young woman take smiling shape in the pool of light at the far end of the parking lot and realizes, a moment before the young woman vanishes, that she has been given a glimpse of the person her Irma would have become; and it touches Dale Gilbertson, who while driving home from the station experiences a profound, sudden yearning for the presence of Jack Sawyer, a yearning like an ache in his heart, and vows to pursue the Fisherman case to the end with him, no matter what the obstacles; the
d’yamba
quivers flashing down a filament to Judy Marshall and opens a window into Faraway, where Ty sleeps in an iron-colored cell, awaiting rescue
and still alive;
within Charles Burnside, it touches the true Fisherman, Mr. Munshun, once known as the Monday Man, just as Burny’s knuckles rap the glass. Mr. Munshun feels a subtle drift of cold air infiltrate his chest like a warning, and freezes with rage and hatred at this violation; Charles Burnside, who knows nothing of
d’yamba
and cannot hate it, picks up his master’s emotion and remembers the time when a boy supposed dead in Chicago crept out of a canvas sack and soaked the back seat of his car in incriminating blood.
Damnably
incriminating blood, a substance that continued to mock him long after he had washed away its visible traces. But Henry Leyden, with whom we began this chain, is visited not by grace or rage; what touches Henry is a kind of informed clarity.

Rhoda’s visits, he realizes, were one and all produced by his loneliness. The only thing he heard climbing the steps was his unending need for his wife. And the being on the other side of his studio door is the horrible old man from Maxton’s, who intends to do to Henry the same thing he has done to three children. Who else would appear at this hour and knock on the studio window? Not Dale, not Jack, and certainly not Elvena Morton. Everyone else would stay outside and ring the doorbell.

It takes Henry no more than a couple of seconds to consider his options and work out a rudimentary plan. He supposes himself both quicker and stronger than the Fisherman, who sounded like a man in his mid- to late eighties; and the Fisherman does not know that his would-be victim is aware of his identity. To take advantage of this situation, Henry has to appear puzzled but amiable, as if he is merely curious about his visitor. And once he opens the studio door, which unfortunately he has left unlocked, he will have to act with speed and decisiveness.

Are we up to this?
Henry asks himself, and thinks,
We’d better be.

Are the lights on? No; because he expected to be alone, he never bothered with the charade of switching them on. The question then becomes: How dark is it outside? Maybe not quite dark enough, Henry imagines—an hour later, he would be able to move through the house entirely unseen and escape through the back door. Now his odds are probably no better than fifty-fifty, but the sun is sinking at the back of his house, and every second he can delay buys him another fraction of darkness in the living room and kitchen.

Perhaps two seconds have passed since the lurking figure rapped on the window, and Henry, who has maintained the perfect composure of one who failed to hear the sound made by his visitor, can stall no longer. Pretending to be lost in thought, with one hand he grips the base of a heavy Excellence in Broadcasting award accepted in absentia by George Rathbun some years before and with the other scoops from a shallow tray before him a switchblade an admirer once left at the university radio station as a tribute to the Wisconsin Rat. Henry uses the knife to unwrap CD jewel boxes, and not long ago, in search of something to do with his hands, he taught himself how to sharpen it. With its blade retracted, the knife resembles an odd, flat fountain pen. Two weapons are twice as good as one, he thinks, especially if your adversary imagines the second weapon to be harmless.

Now it has been four seconds since the rapping came from the window by his side, and in their individual ways both Burny and Mr. Munshun have grown considerably more restive. Mr. Munshun recoils in loathing from the suggestion of
d’yamba
that has somehow contaminated this otherwise delightful scene. Its appearance can mean one thing only, that some person connected to the blind man managed to get close enough to Black House to have tasted the poisons of its ferocious guardian. And that in turn means that now the hateful Jack Sawyer undoubtedly knows of the existence of Black House and intends to breach its defenses. It is time to destroy the blind man and return home.

Burny registers only an inchoate mixture of hatred and an emotion surprisingly like fear from within his master. Burny feels rage at Henry Leyden’s appropriation of his voice, for he knows it represents a threat; even more than this self-protective impulse, he feels a yearning for the simple but profound pleasure of bloodletting. When Henry has been butchered, Charles Burnside wishes to claim one more victim before flying to Black House and entering a realm he thinks of as Sheol.

His big, misshapen knuckles rap once more against the glass.

Henry turns his head to the window in a flawless imitation of mild surprise. “I
thought
someone was out there. Who is it? . . . Come on, speak up.” He toggles a switch and speaks into the mike: “If you’re saying anything, I can’t hear you. Give me a second or two to get organized in here, and I’ll be right out.” He faces forward again and hunches over his desk. His left hand seems idly to touch his handsome award; his right hand is hidden from sight. Henry appears to be deep in concentration. In reality, he is listening as hard as he ever has in his life.

He hears the handle on the studio door revolve clockwise with a marvelous slowness. The door whispers open an inch, two inches, three. The floral, musky scent of My Sin invades the studio, seeming to coat a thin chemical film over the mike, the tape canisters, all the dials, and the back of Henry’s deliberately exposed neck. The sole of what sounds like a carpet slipper hushes over the floor. Henry tightens his hands on his weapons and waits for the particular sound that will be his signal. He hears another nearly soundless step, then another, and knows the Fisherman has moved behind him. He carries some weapon of his own, something that cuts through the mist of perfume with the grassy smell of front yards and the smoothness of machine oil. Henry cannot imagine what this is, but the movement of the air tells him it is heavier than a knife. Even a blind man can see that. An awkwardness in the way the Fisherman takes his next oh-so-quiet step suggests to Henry that the old fellow holds this weapon with both of his hands.

An image has formed in Henry’s mind, that of his adversary standing behind him poised to strike, and to this image he now adds extended, upraised arms. The hands hold an instrument like garden shears. Henry has his own weapons, the best of these being surprise, but the surprise must be well timed to be effective. In fact, if Henry is to avoid a quick and messy death, his timing has to be perfect. He lowers his neck farther over the desk and awaits the signal. His calm surprises him.

A man standing unobserved with an object like garden shears or a heavy pair of scissors in his hands behind a seated victim will, before delivering the blow, take a long second to arch his back and reach up, to get a maximum of strength into the downward stroke. As he extends his arms and arches his back, his clothing will shift on his body. Fabric will slide over flesh; one fabric may pull against another; a belt may creak. There will be an intake of breath. An ordinary person would hear few or none of these telltale disturbances, but Henry Leyden can be depended upon to hear them all.

Then at last he does. Cloth rubs against skin and rustles against itself; air hisses into Burny’s nasal passages. Instantly, Henry shoves his chair backward and in the same movement spins around and swings the award toward his assailant as he stands upright. It works! He feels the force of the blow run down his arm and hears a grunt of shock and pain. The odor of My Sin fills his nostrils. The chair bumps the top of his knees. Henry pushes the button on the switchblade, feels the long blade leap out, and thrusts it forward. The knife punches into flesh. From eight inches before his face comes a scream of outrage. Again, Henry batters the award against his attacker, then yanks the knife free and shoves it home again. Skinny arms tangle around his neck and shoulders, filling him with revulsion, and foul breath washes into his face.

He becomes aware that he has been injured, for a pain that is sharp on the surface and dull beneath announces itself on the left side of his back.
The goddamn hedge clippers,
he thinks and jabs again with the knife. This time, he stabs only empty air. A rough hand closes on his elbow, and another grips his shoulder. The hands pull him forward, and to keep upright he rests his knee on the seat of the chair. A long nose bangs against the bridge of his own nose and jars his sunglasses. What follows fills him with disgust: two rows of teeth like broken clamshells fasten on his left cheek and saw through the skin. Blood sluices down his face. The rows of teeth come together and rip away an oval wedge of Henry’s skin, and over the white jolt of pain, which is incredible, worse by far than the pain in his back, he can hear his blood spatter against the old monster’s face. Fear and revulsion, along with an amazing amount of adrenaline, give him the strength to lash out with the knife as he spins away from the man’s grip. The blade connects with some moving part of the Fisherman’s body—an arm, he thinks.

Before he can feel anything like satisfaction, he hears the sound of the hedge clippers slicing the air before they bite into his knife hand. It happens almost before he can take it in: the hedge clippers’ blades tear through his skin, snap the bones, and sever the last two fingers on his right hand.

And then, as if the hedge clippers were the Fisherman’s last contact with him, he is free. Henry’s foot finds the edge of the door, kicks it aside, and he propels his body through the open space. He lands on a floor so sticky his feet slide when he tries to get up. Can all of that blood be his?

The voice he had been studying in another age, another era, comes from the studio door. “You stabbed me, you asswipe moke.”

Henry is not waiting around to listen; Henry is on the move, wishing he did not feel that he was leaving a clear, wide trail of blood behind him. Somehow, he seems to be drenched in the stuff, his shirt is sodden with it, and the back of his legs are wet. Blood continues to gush down his face, and in spite of the adrenaline, Henry can feel his energy dissipating. How much time does he have before he bleeds to death—twenty minutes?

He slides down the hallway and runs into the living room.

I’m not going to get out of this,
Henry thinks.
I’ve lost too much blood. But at least I can make it through the door and die outside, where the air is fresh.

From the hallway, the Fisherman’s voice reaches him. “I ate part of your cheek, and now I’m going to eat your fingers. Are you listening to me, you moke of an asshole?”

Henry makes it to the door. His hand slips and slips on the knob; the knob resists him. He feels for the lock button, which has been depressed.

“I said, are you
listening
?” The Fisherman is coming closer, and his voice is full of rage.

All Henry has to do is push the button that unlocks the door and turn the knob. He could be out of the house in a second, but his remaining fingers will not obey orders.
All right, I’m going to die,
he says to himself.
I’ll follow Rhoda, I’ll follow my Lark, my beautiful Lark.

A sound of chewing, complete with smacking lips and crunching noises. “You taste like shit. I’m eating your fingers, and they taste like shit. You know what I like? Know my all-time favorite meal? The buttocks of a tender young child. Albert Fish liked that too, oh yes he did.
Mmm-mmm!
BABY BUTT! That’s GOOD EATIN’!”

Henry realizes that he has somehow slipped all the way down the unopenable door and is now resting, breathing far too heavily, on his hands and knees. He shoves himself forward and crawls behind the Mission-style sofa, from the comfort of which he had listened to Jack Sawyer reading a great many eloquent words written by Charles Dickens. Among the things he would now never be able to do, he realizes, is find out what finally happens in
Bleak House.
Another is seeing his friend Jack again.

The Fisherman’s footsteps enter the living room and stop moving. “All right, where the fuck are you, asshole? You can’t hide from me.” The hedge clippers’ blades go
snick-snick.

Either the Fisherman has grown as blind as Henry, or the room is too dark for vision. A little bit of hope, a match flame, flares in Henry’s soul. Maybe his adversary will not be able to see the light switches.

“Asshole!”
Ahzz-hill.
“Damn it, where are you hiding?”
Dahmmut, vhey ah you high-dung?

This is fascinating, Henry thinks. The more angry and frustrated the Fisherman gets, the more his accent melts into that weird non-German. It isn’t the South Side of Chicago anymore, but neither is it anything else. It certainly isn’t German, not really. If Henry had heard Dr. Spiegleman’s description of this accent as that of a Frenchman trying to speak English like a German, he would have nodded in smiling agreement. It’s like some kind of
outer space
German accent, like something that mutated toward German without ever having heard it.