Black House (81 page)

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. Tyler Marshall: the lioness’s cub.

Once more Jack points at the Big Combination. “You’re what all this has been about, Ty. You’re a Breaker.” He takes a deep breath and then whispers into the pink cup of the boy’s ear.

“Break it.”

Tyler Marshall turns his head and gazes deep into Jack’s eyes. He says, “Break it?”

Jack nods his head, and Ty looks back at the Big Combination.

“Okay,” he says, speaking not to Jack but to himself. He blinks, settles his feet, clasps his hands in front of his waist. A tiny wrinkle appears between his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth lift in the suggestion of a smile. “Okay,” Ty whispers.

For a second, nothing happens.

Then a rumble emerges from the bowels of the Big Combination. Its upper portion wavers like a heat mirage. The guards hesitate, and the screams of tortured metal rip through the air. Visibly confused, the toiling children look up, look in all directions. The mechanical screaming intensifies, then divides into a hundred different versions of torture. Gears reverse. Cogs jam smoking to a halt; cogs accelerate and strip their teeth. The whole of the Big Combination shivers and quakes. Deep in the earth, boilers detonate, and columns of fire and steam shoot upward, halting, sometimes shredding belts that have run for thousands of years, powered by billions of bleeding footsies.

It is as if an enormous metal jug has sprung a hundred leaks at once. Jack watches children leap from the lower levels and climb down the exterior of the structure in long, continuous lines. Children pour from the trembling building in dozens of unbroken streams.

Before the green-skinned whipslingers can make an organized attempt to stop their slaves from escaping, the bees assemble massively around the great foundry. When the guards begin to turn on the children, the bees descend in a furious tide of buzzing wings and needling stings. Some of Ty’s power has passed into them, and their stings are fatal. Guards topple and fall from the unmoving belts and trembling girders. Others turn maddened on their own, whipping and being whipped until they tumble through the dark air.

The Sawyer Gang does not linger to see the end of the slaughter. The queen bee sails toward them out of the swarming chaos, floats above their upturned heads, and leads them back toward Black House.

In world upon world—in worlds strung side by side in multiple dimensions throughout infinity—evils shrivel and disperse: despots choke to death on chicken bones; tyrants fall before assassins’ bullets, before the poisoned sweetmeats arrayed by their treacherous mistresses; hooded torturers collapse dying on bloody stone floors. Ty’s deed reverberates through the great, numberless string of universes, revenging evil as it spreads. Three worlds over from ours and in the great city there known as Londinorium, Turner Topham, for two decades a respected member of Parliament and for three a sadistic pedophile, bursts abruptly into flame as he strides along the crowded avenue known as Pick-a-Derry. Two worlds down, a nice-looking young welder named Freddy Garver from the Isle of Irse, another, less seasoned member of Topham’s clan, turns his torch upon his own left hand and incinerates every particle of flesh off his bones.

Up, up in his high, faraway confinement, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut and drops into a chair, grimacing. Something, he knows, something fundamental, has changed in his dreary fiefdom.

In the wake of the queen bee, Tyler Marshall, his eyes alight and his face without fear, sits astride Jack’s shoulders like a boy king. Behind Jack and his friends, hundreds upon hundreds of children who are fleeing from the disintegrating structure of the Big Combination come streaming on to Conger Road and the desolate fields beside it. Some of these children are from our world; many are not. Children move across the dark, empty plains in ragged armies, advancing toward the entrances to their own universes. Limping battalions of children stagger off like columns of drunken ants.

The children following the Sawyer Gang are no less ragged than the rest. Half of them are naked, or as good as naked. These children have faces we have seen on milk cartons and flyers headed
MISSING
and on child-find Web sites, faces from the dreams of heartbroken mothers and desolate fathers. Some of them are laughing, some are weeping, some are doing both. The stronger ones help the weaker ones along. They do not know where they are going, and they do not care. That they are going is enough for them. All they know is that they are free. The great machine that had stolen their strength and their joy and their hope is behind them, and a silken, protective canopy of bees is above them, and they are free.

At exactly 4:16
P.M.,
the Sawyer Gang steps out through the front door of Black House. Tyler is now riding on Beezer’s burly shoulders. They descend the steps and stand in front of Dale Gilbertson’s cruiser (there’s a litter of dead bees on the hood and in the well where the windshield wipers hide).

“Look at the house, Hollywood,” Doc murmurs.

Jack does. It’s
only
a house, now—a three-story job that might once have been a respectable ranch but has fallen into disrepair over the years. To make matters worse, someone has slopped it with black paint from top to bottom and stem to stern—even the windows have been blurred with swipes of that paint. The overall effect is sad and eccentric, but by no means sinister. The house’s slippery shifting shape has solidified, and with the abbalah’s glammer departed, what remains is only the abandoned home of an old fellow who was pretty crazy and
extremely
dangerous. An old fellow to put beside such human monsters as Dahmer, Haarman, and Albert Fish. The leering, rampant evil that once inhabited this building has been dissipated, blown away, and what remains is as mundane as an old man mumbling in a cell on Death Row. There is something Jack must do to this wretched place—something the dying Mouse made him promise to do.

“Doc,” Beezer says. “Look yonder.”

A large dog—large but not monstrous—staggers slowly down the lane that leads back to Highway 35. It looks like a cross between a boxer and a Great Dane. The side of its head and one of its rear paws have been blown away.

“It’s your devil dog,” the Beez says.

Doc gapes. “What,
that
?”

“That,” Beezer confirms. He draws his 9mm, meaning to put the thing out of its misery, but before he can, it collapses on its side, takes a single deep, shuddering breath, and then lies still. Beezer turns to Jack and Dale. “It’s all a lot smaller with the machine turned off, isn’t it?”

“I want to see my mother,” Ty says quietly. “Please, may I?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “Do you mind swinging by your house and picking up your father? I think he might like to go, too.”

Tyler breaks into a tired grin. “Yes,” he says. “Let’s do that.”

“You got it,” Jack tells him.

Dale swings the car carefully around the yard and has reached the beginning of the lane when Ty calls out, “Look! Look, you guys! Here they come!”

Dale stops, peers in the rearview mirror, and whispers: “Oh, Jack. Holy Mother of God.” He puts the cruiser in park and gets out. They all get out, looking back at Black House. Its shape remains ordinary, but it has not quite given up all of its magic after all, it seems. Somewhere a door—perhaps in the cellar or a bedroom or a dirty and neglected but otherwise perfectly ordinary kitchen—remains open. On this side is the Coulee Country; on the other is Conger Road, the smoking, newly stopped hulk of the Big Combination, and the Din-tah.

Bees are coming out onto the porch of Black House. Bees, and the children the bees are leading. They come in droves, laughing and crying and holding hands. Jack Sawyer has a brief, brilliant image of animals leaving Noah’s Ark after the flood.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Dale whispers again. The yard is filling with laughing, crying, murmuring children.

Jack walks up to Beezer, who turns to him with a brilliant smile.

“After all the children come through, we have to close the door,” Jack says. “For good.”

“I know we do,” says Beezer.

“You happen to have any brilliant ideas?”

“Well,” Beezer says, “let me put it this way. If you promise me, and I mean promise me, not to ask any awkward questions or say anything about it later, before midnight tonight I might find it possible to lay my hands on a substantial quantity of something pretty damn effective.”

“What? Dynamite?”

“Please,” Beezer says. “Didn’t I say effective?”

“You mean . . . ?”

Beezer smiles, and his eyes become slits.

“I’m glad you’re on my side,” Jack says. “See you back on the road before midnight. We’ll have to sneak in, but I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”

“Sure won’t have any on the way out,” Beezer says.

Doc claps Dale on the shoulder. “I hope you’ve got some on-the-ball child-welfare organizations in this part of the world, Chiefy. I think you’re going to need them.”

“Holy . . .” Dale turns stricken eyes to Jack. “What am I going to
do
?”

Jack grins. “I think you better make a call to . . . what does Sarah call them? The Color Posse?”

A gleam of hope dawns in Dale Gilbertson’s eyes. Or maybe it’s incipient triumph. John P. Redding of the FBI, officers Perry Brown and Jeffrey Black of the Wisconsin State Police. He imagines this trio of bungholes faced with the appearance of a medieval children’s crusade in western Wisconsin. Imagines the Dickensian piles of paperwork such an unheard-of event must certainly generate. It will keep them occupied for months or years. It may generate nervous breakdowns. Certainly it will give them something to think about other than Chief Dale Gilbertson of French Landing.

“Jack,” he says. “What exactly do you suggest?”

“In broad strokes,” Jack says, “I suggest that they should get stuck with all the work and you should hog all the credit. How does that sound to you?”

Dale thinks about it. “Very fair,” he says. “What do you say we get this kiddo to his dad, then both of them up to Arden to see his mom?”

“Good,” Jack says. “I only wish Henry was here, too.”

“That makes us a pair,” Dale says, and slides back behind the wheel. A moment later, they are rolling up the lane.

“What about all those kids?” Ty asks, looking out through the back window. “Are you just going to
leave
them?”

“I’ll call WSP as soon as we’re back on the highway,” Dale says. “I think they should get on this right away, don’t you guys? And the Feebs, of course.”

“Right,” Beezer says.

“Fuckin’ A,” Doc says.

“An excellent administrative call,” Jack says, and sits Tyler down on his lap. “In the meantime they’ll be fine,” he says in the boy’s ear. “They’ve seen a lot worse than Wisconsin.”

Let us slip now from the driver’s window like the breeze we are and watch them go—four brave men and one brave child who will never be so young (or so innocent) again. Behind them, the now harmless and unmagicked yard of Black House is alive with children, their faces dirty, their eyes wide with wonder. English is a minority tongue here, and some of the languages being spoken will puzzle the world’s best linguists in the years ahead. This is the beginning of a worldwide sensation (
Time
’s cover story the following week will be “The Miracle Children from Nowhere”) and, as Dale has already surmised, a bureaucratic nightmare.

Still, they are safe. And our guys are safe, too. All of them came back in one piece from the other side, and surely we did not expect that; most quests of this type usually demand at least one sacrifice (a relatively minor character like Doc, for instance). All’s well that ends well. And this
can
be the end, if you want it to be; neither of the scribbling fellows who have brought you this far would deny you that. If you
do
choose to go on, never say you weren’t warned: you’re not going to like what happens next.

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX

FRENCH LANDING PD CHIEF REFUSES TO CANCEL PRESS CONFERENCE, CITES SUPPORT OF TOWN OFFICIALS; SOURCES CONFIRM CELEB L.A. COP WILL ATTEND; FBI, WISC S.P. EXPRESS STRONG DISAPPROVAL

**Exclusive**

One of them, Tyler Marshall, is from French Landing itself. Another, Josella Rakine, is from Bating, a small village in the south of England. A third is from Baghdad. All told, 17 of the so-called Miracle Children have been identified in the week since they were discovered walking along a rural highway (Rte 35) in western Wisconsin.

Yet these 17 are only the tip of the iceberg.

Sources close to the joint FBI/WSP (and now CIA?) investigation tell the Drudge Report that there are at least
750
children, far more than have been reported in the mainstream press. Who are they? Who took them, and to where? How did they get to the town of French Landing, which has been plagued by a serial killer (now reported deceased) in recent weeks? What part was played by Jack Sawyer, the Los Angeles detective who rose to stardom only to retire at age 31? And who was responsible for the massive explosion that destroyed a mysterious dwelling in the woods, reputedly central to the Fisherman case?

Some of these questions may be answered tomorrow in French Landing’s La Follette Park, when P.D. Chief Dale Gilbertson holds a press conference. His longtime friend Jack Sawyer—reputed to have broken the Fisherman case singlehandedly—will be standing next to him when he takes the podium. Also expected to be present are two deputies, Armand St. Pierre and Reginald Amberson, who participated in last week’s rescue mission.

The press conference will take place over the strong—almost strident—objections of an FBI/WSP task force headed by FBI agent John P. Redding and Wisconsin State Police Detective Jeffrey Black. “They [task force leaders] believe this is nothing but a last-ditch effort on the part of Gilbertson to save his job,” a source said. “He botched everything, but luckily has a friend who knows a lot about public relations.”

French Landing town officials sing a different tune. “This summer has been a nightmare for the people of French Landing,” says town treasurer Beth Warren. “Chief Gilbertson wants to assure the people that the nightmare is over. If he can give us some answers about the children in the process of doing that, so much the better.”