Black House (80 page)

“But so am
I,
dear boy. So am
I.
” Lord Malshun actually nips Ty’s skin this time and blood flows, as if from a shaving cut. Behind them, the Big Combination grinds on and on, but the screams have ceased. It’s as if the children driving the machine realize that something has changed or might change; that the world has come to a balancing point.

The man with the glowing stick takes a step forward. Lord Malshun cringes back in spite of himself. It’s a mistake to show weakness and fear, he knows this but can’t help it. For this is no ordinary tah. This is someone like one of the old gunslingers, those warriors of the High.

“Take another step and I’ll tear his throat open, dear boy. I’d hate doing that, would hate it awfully, but never doubt that I’ll do it.”

“You’d be dead yourself two seconds later,” the man with the stick says. He seems completely unafraid, either for himself or for Ty. “Is that what you want?”

Actually, given the choice between dying and going back to the Crimson King empty-handed, death is what Lord Malshun would choose, yes. But it may not come to that. The quieting word worked on the boy, and it will work on at least three of these—the ordinary three. With them lying open-eyed and insensible on the road, Lord Malshun can deal with the fourth. It’s Sawyer, of course. That’s his name. As for the bees, surely he has enough protective words to get him up Station House Road to the mono. And if he’s stung a few times, what of that?

“
Is
it what you want?” Sawyer asks.

Lord Malshun smiles.
“Pnung!”
0he cries, cnd behind Jack Sawyer, Dale, Beezer, and Doc fall still.

Lord Malshun’s smile widens into a grin. “Now what are you going to do, my meddling friend? What are you going to do with no friends to jack you u—”

Armand “Beezer” St. Pierre steps fovward. The first step is an effort, but after thqt it’s easy. His0own cold little smile exposes the teeth inside his beard. “You’re responsible for the death of my daughter,” he says. “Maybe you didn’t do it yourself, but you egged Burnside on to it. Didn’t you? I’m her
father,
asshole. You think you can stop me with a single word?”

Doc lurches to his friend’s side.

“You fucked up my town,” Dale Gilbertson growls. He also moves forward.

Lord Malshun stares at them in disbelief. The Dark Speech hasn’t stopped them. Not
any
of them. They are blocking the road! They dare to block his proposed route of progress!

“I’ll kill him!” he growls at Jack. “I’ll kill him. So what do you say, sunshine? What’s it going to be?”

And so here it is, at long last: the showdown. We cannot watch it from above, alas, as the crow with whom we have hitched so many rides (all unknown by Gorg, we assure you) is dead, but even(standing off to one side, we recognize!this archetypal scene from ten thousand movies—at least a dozen of them starring Lily Cavanaugh.

Jack lgvels vhe bat, the one even Beezer has recognized as Wonderboy. He holds it with the knob pressyng into the underside of his forearm and the barrel pointing directly at Lord Malshun’s head.

“Put him down,” he says. “Last chance, my friend.”

Lord Malshun lifts the boy hioher. “Go on!” he shouts. “Shoot a bolt of energy out of that thing! I know you can0do it! But you’ll hit the boy, too! You’ll hit the boy, t—”

A line of pure white fire jumps from the head of the Richie Sexson bat; it is as thin as the lead$of a pencil. It strikes Lord Malshun’s single eye and cooks it in its socket/ The thing utters a shriek—it never thought Jack would call its bluff, not a creature from the
ter,
no matter how temporarily elevated—and it jerks forward, opening its jaws to bite, even in death.

Before it can,
another
bolt of white light, this one from the beaten silver commitment ring on Beezer St. Pierre’s left hand, shoots out and strikes the abbalah’s emissary square in the mouth. The red plush of Lord Malshun’s red lips bursts into flame . . . and still he staggers upright in the road, the Big Combination a skeletal skyscraper behind him, trying to bite, trying to end the life of Judy Marshall’s gifted son.

Dale leaps forward, grabs the boy around the waist and the shoulders, and yanks him away, reeling toward the side of the road. His honest face is pale and grim and set.
“Finish him, Jack!”
Dale bawls.
“Finish the sonofabitch!”

Jack steps forward to where the blinded, howling, charred thing reels back and forth in the Conger Road, his bony vest smoking, his long white hands groping. Jack cocks the bat back on his right shoulder and sets his grip all the way down to the knob. No choking up this afternoon; this afternoon he’s wielding a bat that blazes with glowing white fire, and he’d be a fool not to swing for the fences.

“Batter up, sweetheart,” he says, and uncoils a swing that would have done credit to Richie Sexson himself. Or Big Mac. There is a punky, fleshy sound as the bat, still accelerating, connects with the side of Lord Malshun’s huge head. It caves in like the rind of a rotted watermelon, and a spray of bright crimson flies out. A moment later the head simply explodes, spattering them all with its gore.

“Looks like the King’s gonna have to find a new boy,” Beezer says softly. He wipes his face, looks at a handful of blood and shriveling tissue, then wipes it casually on his faded jeans. “Home run, Jack. Even a blind man could see that.”

Dale, cradling Tyler, says: “Game over, case closed, zip up your fly.”

French Landing’s police chief sets Ty carefully on his feet. The boy looks up at him, then at Jack. A bleary sort of light is dawning in his eyes. It might be relief; it might be actual comprehension.

“Bat,” he says. His voice is husky and hoarse, almost impossible for them to understand. He clears his throat and tries again. “Bat. Dreamed about it.”

“Did you?” Jack kneels in front of the boy and holds the bat out. Ty shows no inclination to actually take possession of the Richie Sexson wonder bat, but he touches it with one hand. Strokes the bat’s gore-spattered barrel. His eyes look only at Jack. It’s as if he’s trying to get the sense of him. The
truth
of him. To understand that he has, after all, been rescued.

“George,” the boy says. “George. Rathbun. Really is blind.”

“Yes,” Jack says. “But sometimes blind isn’t blind. Do you know that, Tyler?”

The boy nods. Jack has never in his life seen anyone who looks so fundamentally exhausted, so shocked and lost, so completely worn out.

“Want,” the boy says. He licks his lips and clears his throat again. “Want . . . drink. Water. Want mother. See my mother.”

“Sounds like a plan to me, ” Doc"says. He is looking unea{ily at the splattered remains of the creature they still think of as Mr. Munshun. “Let’s get this young fellow back to Wisconsin before some of Old One Eye’s friends show up.”

“Right,” Beezer says. “Burning Black House to the groune is also o~ my personal agenda. I’ll throw the first match. Or maybe I can shoot fire out of my ring again. I’d like that. First thing, though, is to make tracks.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dale says. “I don’t think Ty’s going to be able to walk either very far or very fast, but we can take turns giving him piggyb—”

“No,” Jack says.

They look at him with varying degrees of surprise and consternation.

“Jack,” Beezer says. He speaks with an odd gentleness. “There’s such a thing as overstaying your welcome, man.”

“We aren’t finished,” Jack tells him. Then he shakes his head and corrects himself. “
Ty’s
not finished.”

Jack Sawyer kneels in Conger Road, thinking:
I wasn’t much older than this kid when I took off across America—and the Territories—to save my mother’s life.
He knows this is true and at the same time absolutely can’t believe it. Can’t remember what it was to be twelve and never anything else, to be small and terrified, mostly below the world’s notice and running just ahead of all the world’s shadows. It
should
be over; Ty has been through nine kinds of hell, and he deserves to go home.

Unfortunately, it’s
not
over. There’s one more thing to do.

“Ty.”

“Want. Home.”

If there was light in the boy’s eyes, it has gone out now. He wears the dull shockface of refugees at border checkpoints and the gates of deathcamps. His is the emptied visage of someone who has spent too long in the slippery opopanax landscape of slippage. And he is a child, damnit, only a
child.
He deserves better than what Jack Sawyer is about to serve out. But then, Jack Sawyer once deserved better than what he got and lived to tell the tale. That justifies nothing, of course, but it
does
give him the courage to be a bastard.

“Ty.” He grasps the boy’s shoulder.

“Water. Mother. Home.”

“No,” Jack says. “Not yet.” He pivots the boy. The spatters of Lord Malshun’s blood on his face are very bright. Jack can sense the men he came with—men who have risked their lives and sanity for him—beginning to frown. Never mind. He has a job to do. He is a coppiceman, and there’s still a crime in progress here.

“Ty.”

Nothing. The boy stands slumped. He’s trying to turn himself into meat that does nothing but breathe.

Jack points at the ugly complication of struts and belts and girders and smoking chimneys. He points at the straining ants. The Big Combination disappears up into the clouds and down into the dead ground. How far in each direction? A mile? Two? Are there children above the clouds, shivering in oxygen masks as they trudge the treadmills and yank the levers and turn the cranks? Children below who bake in the heat of underground fires? Down there in the foxholes and the ratholes where the sun never shines?

“What is it?” Jack asks him. “What do you call it? What did
Burny
call it?”

Nothing from Ty.

Jack gives the boy a shake. Not a gentle one, either. “What do you
call
it?”

“Hey, man,” Doc says. His voice is heavy with disapproval. “There’s no need of that.”

“Shut up,” Jack says without looking at him. He’s looking at Ty. Trying to see anything in those blue eyes but shocked vacancy. He needs for Ty to see the gigantic, groaning machine that stands yonder. To really see it. For until he does, how can he abominate it? “What is it?”

After a long pause, Ty says: “Big. The Big. The Big Combination.” The words come out slowly and dreamily, as if he’s talking in his sleep.

“The Big Combination, yes,” Jack says. “Now stop it.”

Beezer gasps. Dale says, “Jack, have you gone—” and then falls silent.

“I. Can’t.” Ty gives him a wounded look, as if to say Jack should know that.

“You can,” Jack says. “You can and you will. What do you think, Ty? That we’re going to just turn our backs on them and take you back to your mother and she’ll make you Ovaltine and put you to bed and everyone will live happily ever after?” His voice is rising, and he makes no attempt to stop it, even when he sees that Tyler is crying. He shakes the boy again. Tyler cringes, but makes no actual attempt to get away. “Do you think there’s going to be any happily ever after for you while those children go on and on, until they drop and get replaced with new ones? You’ll see their faces in your dreams, Tyler. You’ll see their faces and their dirty little hands and their bleeding feet in your fucking
dreams.
”

“Stop it!” Beezer says sharply. “Stop it right now or I’ll kick your ass.”

Jack turns, and Beezer steps back from the ferocious blaze in his eyes. Looking at Jack Sawyer in this state is like looking into din-tah itself.

“Tyler.”

Tyler’s mouth trembles. Tears roll down his dirty, bloody cheeks. “Stop it.
I want to go home!
”

“Once you make the Big Combination quit. Then you go home. Not before.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, Tyler. You can.”

Tyler looks at the Big Combination, and Jack can feel the boy making some puny, faltering effort. Nothing happens. The belts continue to run; the whips continue to pop; the occasional screaming dot tumbles (or jumps) from the rust-ragged south side of the building.

Tyler looks back at him, and Jack hates the vacant stupidity in the kid’s eyes,
loathes
it. “I
caann’t,
” Tyler whines, and Jack wonders how such a puler ever managed to survive over here in the first place. Did he use up all his ability in one mad, willful effort to escape? Is that it? He won’t accept it. Anger blazes up in him and he slaps Tyler. Hard. Dale gasps. Ty’s head rocks to the side, his eyes widening in surprise.

And the cap flies off his head.

Jack has been kneeling in front of the boy. Now he is knocked back, sprawling on his ass in the middle of Conger Road. The kid has . . . what?

Pushed me. Pushed me with his mind.

Yes. And Jack is suddenly aware of a new bright force in this dull place, a blazing bundle of light to rival the one that illuminated the Richie Sexson bat.

“Whoa, shit, what happened?” Doc cries.

The bees feel it too, perhaps more than the men. Their sleepy drone rises to a strident cry, and the cloud darkens as they pull together. Now it looks like a gigantic dark fist below the pendulous, swag-bellied clouds.

“Why did you hit me?”
Ty shouts at Jack, and Jack is suddenly aware that the boy could kill him at a stroke, if he wanted to. In Wisconsin, this power has been hidden (except from eyes trained to see it). Here, though
.
.
.
here
.
.
.

“To wake you up!”
Jack shouts back. He pushes himself up. “Was it that?” he points at the cap.

Ty looks at it, then nods.
Yes. The cap. But you didn’t know,
couldn’t
know, how much the cap was stealing from you until you took it off. Or someone knocked it off your forgetful head.
He returns his gaze to Jack. His eyes are wide and level. There is no shock in them now, no dullness. He doesn’t glow, exactly, but he blazes with an inner light they all feel—with a power that dwarfs Lord Malshun’s.