Black House (77 page)

Jack lets out a little sigh of awe. There’s enough kid left in him to react to the object that he sees, even though he never played the game once he was too old for Little League. Because there’s something about a bat, isn’t there? Something that speaks to our primitive beliefs about the purity of struggle and the strength of our team. The home team. Of the right and the
white.
Surely Bernard Malamud knew it; Jack has read
The Natural
a score of times, always hoping for a different ending (and when the movie offered him one, he hated it), always loving the fact that Roy Hobbs named his cudgel Wonderboy. And never mind the critics with all their stuffy talk about the Arthurian legend and phallic symbols; sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and sometimes a bat is just a bat. A big stick. Something to hit home runs with.  

“Holy wow,” Dale says, glancing over. And he looks
younger.
Boyish. Eyes wide. So Jack isn’t the only one, it seems. “Whose bat?”

Jack lifts it carefully from the box. Written up the barrel in black Magic Marker is this message:

To Tyler Marshall    Keep Slugging! Your pal, Richie Sexson

“Richie Sexson,” Jack says. “Who’s Richie Sexson?”

“Big slugger for the Brewers,” Dale says.

“Is he as good as Roy Hobbs?”

“Roy—” Then Dale grins. “Oh, in that movie! Robert Redford, right? No I don’t think—. Hey, what are you doing?”

Still holding the bat (in fact he almost bashes Dale in the right cheekbone with the end of it), Jack reaches over and honks the horn. “Pull over,” he says. “This is it. Those dopes were out here only yesterday and they’re going right past it.”

Dale pulls over on the shoulder, brings the cruiser to a jerky stop, and puts it in park. When he looks over at Jack, his face has gone remarkably pale. “Oh man, Jack—I don’t feel so good. Maybe it was breakfast. Christ, I hope I’m not going to start puking.”

“That buzzing you hear in your head, is that from breakfast?” Jack inquires.

Dale’s eyes go wide. “How do you—”

“Because I hear it, too. And feel it in my stomach. It’s not your breakfast. It’s Black House.” Jack holds out the squeeze bottle. “Go on. Dab some more around your nostrils. Get some right up in. You’ll feel better.” Projecting absolute confidence. Because it’s not about secret weapons or secret formulas; it’s certainly not about honey. It’s about
belief.
They have left the realm of the rational and have entered the realm of slippage. Jack knows it for certain as soon as he opens the car door.

Ahead of him, the bikes swerve and come back. Beezer, an impatient look on his face, is shaking his head:
No, no, not here.

Dale joins Jack at the front of the car. His face is still pale, but the skin around and below his nose is shiny with honey, and he looks steady enough on his feet. “Thanks, Jack. This is
so
much better. I don’t know how putting honey around my nose could affect my
ears,
but the buzzing’s better, too. It’s nothing but a low drone.”

“Wrong place!” Beezer bawls as he pulls his Harley up to the front of the cruiser.

“Nope,” Jack says calmly, looking at the unbroken woods. Sunlight on green leaves contrasting with crazy black zigzags of shadow. Everything trembling and unsteady, making mock of perspective. “This is it. The hideout of Mr. Munshun and the Black House Gang, as the Duke never said.”

Now Doc’s bike adds to the din as he pulls up next to Beezer. “Beez is right! We were just out here
yesterday,
y’damn fool! Don’t you think you know what we’re talking about?”

“This is just scrap woods on both sides,” Dale chimes in. He points across the road where, fifty yards or so southeast of their position, yellow police tape flutters from a pair of trees. “That’s the lane to Ed’s Eats, there. The place we want is probably beyond it—”

Even though you know it’s here,
Jack thinks. Marvels, really.
Why else have you gone and smeared yourself with honey like Pooh-bear on a lucky day?

He shifts his gaze to Beezer and Doc, who are also looking remarkably unwell. Jack opens his mouth to speak to them . . . and something flutters at the upper edge of his vision. He restrains his natural impulse to look up and define the source of that movement. Something—probably the old Travelin’ Jack part of him—thinks it would be a very bad idea to do that. Something is watching them already. Better if it doesn’t know it’s been spotted.

He puts the Richie Sexson bat down, leaning it against the side of the idling cruiser. He takes the honey from Dale and holds it out to the Beez. “Here you go,” he says, “lather up.”

“There’s no
point
in it, you goddamn fool!” Beezer cries in exasperation.
“This
.
.
.
ain’t
.
.
.
the place!”

“Your nose is bleeding,” Jack says mildly. “Just a little. Yours too, Doc.”

Doc wipes a finger under his nose and looks at the red smear, startled. He starts, “But I
know
this isn’t—”

That flutter again, at the top of Jack’s vision. He ignores it and points straight ahead. Beezer, Doc, and Dale all look, and Dale’s the first one to see it. “I’ll be damned,” he says softly. “A
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Was it there before?”

“Yep,” Jack says. “Been there for thirty years or more, I’d guess.”

“Fuck,” Beez says, and begins rubbing honey around his nose. He pokes generous wads of the stuff up his nostrils; resinous drops gleam in his red-brown Viking’s beard. “We woulda gone right on, Doctor. All the way to town. Hell, maybe all the way to Rapid City, South Dakota.” He hands the honey to Doc and grimaces at Jack. “I’m sorry, man. We should have known. No excuses.”

“Where’s the driveway?” Dale’s asking, and then: “Oh.
There
it is. I could have
sworn—
”

“That there was nothing there, I know,” Jack says. He’s smiling. Looking at his friends. At the Sawyer Gang. He is certainly
not
looking at the black rags fluttering restively at the upper periphery of his vision, nor down at his waist, where his hand is slowly drawing the Ruger .357 from his waistband. He was always one of the best out there. He’d only won badges a couple of times when it was shooting from a stand, but when it came to the draw-and-fire competition, he did quite well. Top five, usually. Jack has no idea if this is a skill he’s retained, but he thinks he’s going to find out right now.

Smiling at them, watching Doc swab his schnozz with honey, Jack says in a conversational voice: “Something’s watching us. Don’t look up. I’m going to try and shoot it.”

“What is it?” Dale asks, smiling back. He doesn’t look up, only straight ahead. Now he can quite clearly see the shadowy lane that must lead to Burnside’s house. It wasn’t there, he could have sworn it wasn’t, but now it is.

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Jack says, and suddenly swings the Ruger up, locking both hands around the stock. He’s firing almost before he sees with his eyes, and he catches the great dark crow crouched on the overhanging branch of an oak tree entirely by surprise. It gives one loud, shocked cry—“AWWWWK!”—and then it is torn apart on its roost. Blood flies against the faded blue summer sky. Feathers flutter down in clumps as dark as midnight shadows. And a body. It hits the shoulder in front of the lane with a heavy thud. One dark, glazing eye peers at Jack Sawyer with an expression of surprise.

“Did you fire five or six?” Beezer asks in a tone of deep awe. “It was so fast I couldn’t tell.”

“All of them,” Jack says. He guesses he’s still not too bad at draw-and-fire after all.

“That’s one big fucking crow,” Doc says.

“It’s not just any crow,” Jack tells him. “It’s Gorg.” He advances to the blasted body lying on the dirt. “How you doin’, fella? How do you feel?” He spits on Gorg, a luscious thick lunger. “That’s for luring the kids,” he says. Then, suddenly, he boots the crow’s corpse into the underbrush. It flies in a limp arc, the wings wrapping around the body like a shroud. “And that’s for fucking with Irma’s mother.”

They are looking at him, all three of them, with identical expressions of stunned awe. Almost of fear. It’s a look that makes Jack tired, although he supposes he must accept it. He can remember his old friend Richard Sloat looking at him the same way, once Richard realized that what he called “Seabrook Island stuff” wasn’t confined to Seabrook Island.

“Come on,” Jack says. “Everybody in the car. Let’s get it done.” Yes, and they must move quickly because a certain one-eyed gent will shortly be looking for Ty, too. Mr. Munshun.
Eye of the King,
Jack thinks.
Eye of the abbalah. That’s what Judy meant—Mr. Munshun. Whoever or whatever he really is.

“Don’t like leaving the bikes out here by the side of the road, man.” Beezer says. “Anybody could come along and—”

“Nobody will see them,” Jack tells him. “Three or four cars have gone by since we parked, and no one’s so much as looked over at us. And you know why.”

“We’ve already started to cross over, haven’t we?” Doc asks. “This is the edge of it. The border.”

“Opopanax,” Jack says. The word simply pops out.

“Huh?”

Jack picks up Ty’s Richie Sexson bat and gets in on the passenger side of the cruiser. “It means let’s go,” he says. “Let’s get it done.”

And so the Sawyer Gang takes its last ride—up the wooded, poisonous lane that leads to Black House. The strong afternoon light quickly fades to the sullen glow of an overcast November evening. In the close-pressing trees on either side, dark shapes twine and crawl and sometimes fly. They don’t matter, much, Jack reckons; they are only phantoms.

“You gonna reload that Roogalator?” Beezer asks from the back seat.

“Nope,” Jack says, looking at the Ruger without much interest. “Think it’s done its job.”

“What should we be ready for?” Dale asks in a thin voice.

“Anything,” Jack replies. He favors Dale Gilbertson with a humorless grin. Ahead of them is a house that won’t keep its shape but whirls and wavers in the most distressing way. Sometimes it seems no bigger than a humble ranch house; a blink, and it seems to be a ragged monolith that blots out the entire sky; another blink and it appears to be a low, uneven construction stretching back under the forest canopy for what could be miles. It gives off a low hum that sounds like voices.

“Be ready for anything at all.”

28

B
UT AT FIRST
there is nothing.

The four of them get out and stand in front of Dale’s cruiser, looking for all the world like men posing for the kind of group photo that will eventually show up on someone’s den wall. Only the photographer would be on Black House’s porch—that’s the way they’re facing—and the porch is empty except for the second
NO TRESPASSING
sign, which leans against a peeling newel post. Someone has drawn a skull on it with a Magic Marker or grease pencil. Burny? Some intrepid teenager who came all the way up to the house on a dare? Dale did some crazy things when he was seventeen, risked his life with a spray-paint can more than once, but he still finds that hard to believe.

The air is sullen and silent, as if before a thunderstorm. It stinks, too, but the honey seems to filter the worst of that out. In the woods, something makes a thick sound Dale has never heard before.
Groo-oooo.

“What’s that?” he asks Jack.

“I don’t know,” Jack replies.

Doc says, “I’ve heard bull gators. That’s what they sound like when they’re feeling horny.”

“This isn’t the Everglades,” Dale says.

Doc gives him a thin smile. “It ain’t Wisconsin anymore, either, Toto. Or maybe you didn’t notice.”

Dale has noticed plenty. There’s the way the house won’t hold its shape, for one thing—the way it sometimes seems
enormous,
as if it is many houses somehow all overlaid. A city perhaps the size of London folded under a single weird roof. And then there are the trees. There are old oaks and pines, there are birches like skinny ghosts, there are red maples—all of them indigenous to the area—but he also sees twisted, rooty growths that look like mutated banyan trees. And are these
moving
? Christ, Dale hopes not. But whether they are or not, they’re
whispering.
He’s almost sure of that. He can hear their words slithering through the buzzing in his head, and they’re not encouraging words, not by a longshot.

Killyew
.
.
.
eatchew
.
.
.
hatechew
.
.
.

“Where’s the dog?” Beezer asks. He’s holding his 9mm in one hand. “Here, doggy! Got something yummy for you! Hurry and get it!”

Instead, that guttural growl drifts out of the woods again, this time closer:
GROO-OOOOO!
And the trees whisper. Dale looks up at the house, watches it suddenly stack floors into a sky that has gone white and cold, and vertigo rolls through his head like a wave of warm grease. He has a faint sensation of Jack grabbing his elbow to steady him. A little help there, but not enough; French Landing’s chief of police twists to the left and vomits.

“Good,” Jack says. “Get it out. Get rid of it. What about you, Doc? Beez?”

The Thunder Two tell him they’re okay. For now it’s true, but Beezer doesn’t know how long equilibrium is going to last. His stomach is churning, low and slow.
Well, so what if I blow my groceries in there?
he thinks.
According to Jack, Burnside’s dead, he won’t mind.

Jack leads them up the porch steps, pausing to boot the rusted
NO TRESPASSING
sign with its death’s-head graffiti over the side and into a clutch of weeds that close over it at once, like a greedy hand. Dale is reminded of how Jack spit on the crow. His friend seems different now, younger and stronger. “But we
are
going to trespass,” Jack says. “We’re going to trespass our
asses
off.”

At first, however, it seems they will not. The front door of Black House isn’t just locked. There’s no crack at all between the door and the jamb. In fact, once they’re close up, the door looks painted on, a trompe l’oeil.

Behind them, in the woods, something screams. Dale jumps. The scream rises to an excruciating high note, breaks into a peal of maniacal laughter, and is suddenly gone.

“Natives are fuckin’ restless,” Doc comments.

“Want to try a window?” Beezer asks Jack.

“Nope. We’re going in the front way.”

Jack has been raising the Richie Sexson bat as he speaks. Now he lowers it, looking puzzled. There is a droning sound from behind them, quickly growing louder. And the daylight, thin already in this strange forest dell, seems to be weakening even further.

“What now?” Beezer asks, turning back toward the drive and the parked cruiser. He’s holding the 9mm up by his right ear. “What the—” And then he falls silent. The gun sags outward and downward. His mouth drops open.

“Holy shit,” Doc says quietly.

Dale, even more quietly: “Is this your doing, Jack? If it is, you really
have
been hiding your light under a bushel.”

The light has dimmed because the clearing in front of Black House has now acquired a canopy of bees. More are streaming in from the lane, a brownish-gold comet tail. They give off a sleepy, benevolent droning sound that drowns out the harsh fire-alarm buzz of the house entirely. The hoarse gator thing in the woods falls silent, and the flickering shapes in the trees disappear.

Jack’s mind is suddenly filled with thoughts and images of his mother: Lily dancing, Lily pacing around behind one of the cameras before a big scene with a cigarette clamped between her teeth, Lily sitting at the living-room window and looking out as Patsy Cline sings “Crazy Arms.”

In another world, of course, she’d been another kind of queen, and what is a queen without a loyal retinue?

Jack Sawyer looks at the vast cloud of bees—millions of them, perhaps billions; every hive in the Midwest must be empty this afternoon—and he smiles. This changes the shape of his eyes and the tears that have been growing there spill down his cheeks.
Hello,
he thinks.
Hello there, boys.

The low pleasant hum of the bees seems to change slightly, as if in answer. Perhaps it’s only his imagination.

“What are they
for,
Jack?” Beezer asks. His voice is resonant with awe.

“I don’t exactly know,” Jack says. He turns back to the door, raises the bat, and knocks it once, hard, against the wood.
“Open!”
he cries.
“I demand it in the name of Queen Laura DeLoessian! And in the name of my mother!”

There is a high-pitched crack, so loud and piercing that Dale and Beez both draw back, wincing. Beezer actually covers his ears. A gap appears at the top of the door and races along it left to right. At the door’s upper right corner, the gap pivots and plunges straight down, creating a crack through which a musty draft blows. Jack catches a whiff of something both sour and familiar: the deathsmell they first encountered at Ed’s Eats.

Jack reaches for the knob and tries it. It turns freely in his hand. He opens the way to Black House.

But before he can invite them in, Doc Amberson begins to scream.

Someone—maybe it’s Ebbie, maybe T.J., maybe goofy old Ronnie Metzger—is yanking Ty’s arm. It hurts like a son of a gun, but that’s not the worst. The arm yanker is also making this weird humming noise that seems to vibrate deep inside his head. There’s a clanking noise as well

(
the Big Combination, that’s the Big Combination
)

but that humming . . . ! Man, that humming
hurts.

“Quit it,” Ty mumbles. “Quit it, Ebbie or I’ll—”

Faint screams seep through that electric buzzing sound, and Ty Marshall opens his eyes. There’s no merciful period of grace when he’s unsure about where he is or what’s happened to him. It all comes back with the force of some terrible picture—a car accident with dead people lying around, say—that is shoved into your face before you can look away.

He’d held on until the old man was dead; had obeyed the voice of his mother and kept his head. But once he started shouting for help, panic had come back and swallowed him. Or maybe it was shock. Or both. In any case, he’d passed out while still screaming for help. How long has he hung here by his shackled left arm, unconscious? It’s impossible to tell from the light spilling through the shed door; that seems unchanged. So do the various clankings and groanings of the huge machine, and Ty understands that it goes on forever, along with the screams of the children and the crack of the whips as the unspeakable guards press the work ever onward. The Big Combination never shuts down. It runs on blood and terror and never takes a day off.

But that buzzing—that juicy electric buzzing, like the world’s biggest Norelco razor—what the hell is that?

Mr. Munshun’s gone to get the mono.
Burny’s voice in his head. A vile whisper.
The End-World mono.

A terrible dismay steals into Ty’s heart. He has no doubt at all that what he hears is that very monorail, even now pulling under the canopy at the end of Station House Road. Mr. Munshun will look for his boy, his sbecial bouy, and when he doesn’t see him (nor Burn-Burn, either), will he come searching?

“Course he will,” Ty croaks. “Oh boy. Suck an elf.”

He looks up at his left hand. It would be so easy to yank it back through the oversized shackle if not for the handcuff. He yanks downward several times anyway, but the cuff only clashes against the shackle. The other cuff, the one Burny was reaching for when Ty grabbed his balls, dangles and twitches, making the boy think of the gibbet at this end of Station House Road.

That eye-watering, tooth-rattling buzz suddenly cuts out.

He’s shut it down. Now he’s looking for me in the station, making sure I’m not there. And when he
is
sure, what then? Does he know about this place? Sure he does.

Ty’s dismay is turning into an icy chill of horror. Burny would deny it. Burny would say that the shack down here in this dry wash was his secret, a place special to him. In his lunatic arrogance, it would never have occurred to him how well that mistaken idea might serve his supposed friend’s purpose.

His mother speaks in Ty’s head again, and this time he’s reasonably sure it really
is
his mother.
You can’t depend on anyone else. They might come in time, but they might not. You have to assume they won’t. You have to get out of this yourself.

But
how?

Ty looks at the twisted body of the old man, lying on the bloody dirt with his head almost out the door. The thought of Mr. Munshun tries to intrude, Burny’s friend hurrying down Station House Road even now (or maybe driving in his own E-Z-Go golf cart), wanting to scoop him up and take him to the abbalah. Tyler pushes the image away. It will lead him back to panic, and he can’t afford any more of that. He’s all out of time.

“I can’t reach him,” Ty says. “If the key’s in his pocket, I’m finished. Case closed, game over, zip up your f—”

His eye happens on something lying on the floor. It’s the sack the old man was carrying. The one with the cap in it. And the handcuffs.

If the handcuffs were in it, maybe the key’s in there, too.

Ty reaches forward with his left foot, stretching as far as he can. It’s no good. He can’t quite reach the bag. He’s at least four inches short. Four inches short and Mr. Munshun is coming, coming.

Ty can almost smell him.

Doc shrieks and shrieks, distantly aware that the others are shouting at him to stop, it’s all right, there’s nothing to be afraid of, distantly aware that he is hurting his throat, probably making it bleed. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that when Hollywood swung open the front door of Black House, he exposed the official greeter.

The official greeter is Daisy Temperly, Doc’s brown-eyed girl. She’s wearing a pretty pink dress. Her skin is pale as paper, except on the right side of her forehead, where a flap of skin falls down, exposing the red skull beneath.

“Come in, Doc,” Daisy says. “We can talk about how you killed me. And you can sing. You can sing to me.” She smiles. The smile becomes a grin. The grin exposes a mouthful of bulging vampire teeth. “You can sing to me
forever.
”

Doc takes a blunder-step backward, turns to flee, and that is when Jack grabs him and shakes him. Doc Amberson is a hefty fellow—two-sixty out of the shower, more like two-eighty when dressed in full Road Warrior regalia as he is now—but Jack shakes him easily, snapping the big man’s head back and forth. Doc’s long hair flops and flies.

“They’re all illusions,” Jack says. “Picture-shows designed to keep out unwanted guests like us. I don’t know what you saw, Doc, but it’s not there.”

Doc looks cautiously past Jack’s shoulder. For a moment he sees a pink, diminishing whirl—it’s like the coming of the devil dog, only backward—and then it’s gone. He looks up at Jack. Tears are rolling slowly down his sunburned face.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he says. “I
loved
her. But I was tired that night. Very tired. Do you know about being tired, Hollywood?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “And if we get out of this, I intend to sleep for a week. But for now . . .” He looks from Doc to Beezer. From Beezer to Dale. “We’re going to see more stuff. The house will use your worst memories against you: the things you did wrong, the people you hurt. But on the whole, I’m encouraged. I think a lot of the poison went out of this place when Burny died. All we have to do is find our way through to the other side.”

“Jack,” Dale says. He is standing in the doorway, in the very spot where Daisy greeted her old physician. His eyes are very large.

“What?”

“Finding our way through . . . that might be easier said than done.”

They gather around him. Beyond the door is a gigantic circular foyer, a place so big it makes Jack think fleetingly of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the floor is an acre of poison-green carpet entwined with scenes of torture and blasphemy. Doors open off this room everywhere. In addition, Jack counts four sets of crisscrossing stairways. He blinks and there are six. Blinks again and there are a dozen, as bewildering to the eye as an Escher drawing.

He can hear the deep idiot drone that is the voice of Black House. He can hear something else, as well: laughter.

Come in,
Black House is telling them.
Come in and wander these rooms forever.