The Waste Lands (34 page)

“Then go see Mom. And try to get a couple of bucks out of her. I need cigarettes. Take the fuckin ball up, too.”

Jake drifted backward and stepped into the nearest apartment building entryway just as Eddie came out through the playground gate.

To his horror, the boy in the yellow T-shirt turned in Jake’s direction.
Holy crow!
he thought, dismayed.
What if this is his building?

It was. Jake just had time to turn around and begin to scan the names beside the rank of buzzers before Eddie Dean brushed past him, so close that Jake could smell the sweat he had worked up on the basketball court. He half-sensed, half-saw the curious glance the boy tossed in his direction. Then Eddie was in the lobby and headed for the elevators with his school-pants bundled under one arm and the scuffed basketball under the other.

Jake’s heart was thudding heavily in his chest. Shadowing people was a lot harder in real life than it was in the detective novels he sometimes read. He crossed the street and stood between two apartment buildings half a block up. From here he could see both the entrance to the Dean brothers’ building and the playground. The playground was filling up now, mostly with little kids. Henry leaned against the chainlink, smoking a cigarette and trying to look full of teenage angst. Every now and then he would stick out a foot as one of the little kids bolted toward him at an all-out run, and before Eddie returned, he had succeeded in tripping three of them. The last of these went sprawling full-length, smacking his face on the concrete, and ran wailing up the street with a bloody forehead. Henry flicked his cigarette butt after him and laughed cheerfully.

Just an all-around fun guy
, Jake thought.

After that, the little kids wised up and began giving him a wide berth. Henry strolled out of the playground and down the street to the apartment building Eddie had entered five minutes before. As he reached it, the door opened and Eddie came out. He had changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt; he had also tied a green bandanna, the same one he had been wearing in Jake’s dream, around his forehead. He was waving a couple of dollar bills triumphantly. Henry snatched them, then asked Eddie something. Eddie nodded, and the two boys set off.

Keeping half a block between himself and them, Jake followed.

THEY STOOD IN THE high grass at the edge of the Great Road, looking at the speaking ring.

Stonehenge,
Susannah thought, and shuddered.
That’s what it looks like. Stonehenge.

Although the thick grass which covered the plain grew around the bases of the tall gray monoliths, the circle they enclosed was bare earth, littered here and there with white things.

“What are those?” she asked in a low voice. “Chips of stone?”

“Look again,” Roland said.

She did, and saw that they were bones. The bones of small animals, maybe. She hoped.

Eddie switched the sharpened stick to his left hand, dried the palm of his right against his shirt, and then switched it back again. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from his dry throat. He cleared it and tried again. “I think I’m supposed to go in and draw something in the dirt.”

Roland nodded. “Now?”

“Soon.” He looked into Roland’s face. “There’s something here, isn’t there? Something we can’t see.”

“It’s not here right now,” Roland said. “At least, I don’t
think
it is. But it will come. Our
khef—our
lifeforce—will draw it. And, of course, it will be jealous of its place. Give me my gun back, Eddie.”

Eddie unbuckled the belt and handed it over. Then he turned back to the circle of twenty-foot-high stones. Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew It was familiar, that smell.

Roland buckled his gunbelt, then bent to knot the tiedown. He looked up at Susannah as he did it. “We may need Detta Walker,” he said. “Is she around?”

“That bitch always around.” Susannah wrinkled her nose.

“Good. One of us is going to have to protect Eddie while he does what he’s supposed to do. The other is going to be so much useless baggage. This is a demon’s place. Demons are not human, but they are male and female, just the same. Sex is both their weapon and their weakness. No matter what the sex of the demon may be, it will go for Eddie. To protect its place. To keep its place from being used by an outsider. Do you understand?”

 

Susannah nodded. Eddie appeared not to be listening. He had tucked the square of hide containing the key into his shirt and now he was staring into the speaking ring as if hypnotized.

“There’s no time to say this in a gentle or refined way,” Roland told her. “One of us will—”

“One of us gonna have to fuck it to keep it off Eddie,” Susannah interrupted. “This the sort of thing can’t
ever
turn down a free fuck. That’s what you’re gettin at, isn’t it?”

Roland nodded.

Her eyes gleamed. They were the eyes of Detta Walker now, both wise and unkind, shining with hard amusement, and her voice slid steadily deeper into the bogus Southern plantation drawl which was Detta’s trademark. “If it’s a girl demon, you git it. But if it’s a boy demon, it’s mine. That about it?”

Roland nodded.

“What about if it swings both ways? What about
that
, big boy?”

Roland’s lips twitched in the barest suggestion of a smile. “Then we’ll take it together. Just remember—”

Beside them, in a fainting, distant voice, Eddie murmured: “Not all is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold, the sleeper wakes.” He turned his haunted, terrified eyes on Roland. “There’s a monster.”

“The demon—”

“No. A
monster
. Something between the doors—between the
worlds
. Something that waits.
And it’s opening its eyes.”

Susannah cast a frightened glance at Roland.

“Stand, Eddie,” Roland said. “Be true.”

Eddie drew a deep breath. “I’ll stand until it knocks me down,” he said. “I have to go in now. It’s starting to happen.”

“We all goin in,” Susannah said. She arched her back and slipped out of her wheelchair. “Any demon want to fuck wit’ me he goan find out he’s fuckin wit’ the finest. I th’ow him a fuck he ain’t
never
goan f’git.”

As they passed between two of the tall stones and into the speaking circle, it began to rain.

As SOON AS JAKE saw the place, he understood two things: first, that he had seen it before, in dreams so terrible his conscious mind would not let him remember them; second, that it was a place of death and murder and madness. He was standing on the far corner of Rhinehold Street and Brooklyn Avenue, seventy yards from Henry and Eddie Dean, but even from where he was he could feel The Mansion ignoring them and reaching for him with its eager invisible hands. He thought there were talons at the ends of those hands. Sharp ones.

He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormality, with a sinking heart. It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor.

The Dean brothers had walked across nine blocks of Brooklyn, moving slowly under the hot afternoon sun, and had finally entered a section of town which had to be Dutch Hill, given the names on the shops and stores. Now they stood halfway down the block, in front of The Mansion. It looked as if it had been deserted for years, yet it had suffered remarkably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really
had
been a mansion—the home, perhaps, of a wealthy merchant and his large family. In those long-gone days it must have been white, but now it was a dirty gray no-color. The windows had been knocked out and the peeling picket fence which surrounded it had been spray-painted, but the house itself was still intact.

It slumped in the hot light, a ramshackle slate-roofed revenant growing out of a hummocky trash-littered yard, somehow making Jake think of a dangerous dog which pretended to be asleep. Its steep roof overhung the front porch like a beetling brow. The boards of the porch were splintery and warped. Shutters which might once have been green leaned askew beside the glassless windows; ancient curtains still hung in some of these, dangling like strips of dead skin. To the left, an elderly trellis leaned away from the building, now held up not by nails but only by the nameless and somehow filthy clusters of vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on the door. From where Jake stood, he could read neither of them.

The house was
alive.
He knew this, could feel its awareness reaching out from the boards and the slumping roof, could feel it pouring in rivers from the black sockets of its windows. The idea of approaching that terrible place filled him with dismay; the idea of actually going inside filled him with inarticulate horror. Yet he would have to. He could hear a low, slumbrous buzzing in his ears—the sound of a beehive on a hot summer day—and for a moment he was afraid he might faint. He closed his eyes . . . and
his
voice filled his head.

You
must
come, Jake. This is the path of the Beam
,
the way of the Tower, and the time of your Drawing. Be true; stand; come to me.

The fear didn’t pass, but that terrible sense of impending panic did. He opened his eyes again and saw that he was not the only one who had sensed the power and awakening sentience of the place. Eddie was trying to pull away from the fence. He turned toward Jake, who could see Eddie’s eyes, wide and uneasy beneath his green head-band. His big brother grabbed him and pushed him toward the rusty gate, but the gesture was too half-hearted to be much of a tease; however thick-headed he might be, Henry liked The Mansion no better than Eddie did.

They drew away a little and stood looking at the place for a while. Jake could not make out what they were saying to each other, but the tone of their voices was awed and uneasy. Jake suddenly remembered Eddie speaking in his dream:
Remember there’s danger, though. Be careful . . . and be quick.

Suddenly the real Eddie, the one across the street, raised his voice enough so that Jake could make out the words. “Can we go home now, Henry? Please? I don’t like it.” His tone was pleading.

“Fuckin little sissy,” Henry said, but Jake thought he heard relief as well as indulgence in Henry’s voice. “Come on.”

They turned away from the ruined house crouching high-shouldered behind its sagging fence and approached the street. Jake backed up, then turned and looked into the window of the dispirited little hole-in-the-wall shop called Dutch Hill Used Appliances. He watched Henry and Eddie, dim and ghostly reflections superimposed on an ancient Hoover vacuum cleaner, cross Rhinehold Street.

“Are you
sure
it’s not really haunted?” Eddie asked as they stepped onto the sidewalk on Jake’s side.

“Well, I tell you what,” Henry said. “Now that I been out here again, I’m really not so sure.”

They passed directly behind Jake without looking at him. “Would you go in there?” Eddie asked.

“Not for a million dollars,” Henry replied promptly.

They rounded the corner. Jake stepped away from the window and peeped after them. They were headed back the way they had come, close together on the sidewalk, Henry hulking along in his steel-toed shit-kickers, his shoulders already slumped like those of a much older man, Eddie walking beside him with neat, unconscious grace. Their shadows, long and trailing out into the street now, mingled amicably together.

They’re going home
, Jake thought, and felt a wave of loneliness so strong that he felt it would crush him.
Going to eat supper and do homework and argue over which TV shows to watch and then go to bed. Henry may be a bullying shit, but they’ve got a life, those two, one that makes sense . . . and they’re going back to it. I wonder if they have any idea of how lucky they are. Eddie might, I suppose
.

Jake turned, adjusted the straps of his pack, and crossed Rhinehold Street.

SUSANNAH SENSED MOVEMENT IN the empty grassland beyond the circle of standing stones: a sighing, whispering rush.

“Something comin,” she said tautly. “Comin fast.”

“Be careful,” Eddie said, “but keep it off me. You understand? Keep it off me.”

“I hear you, Eddie. You just do your own thing.”

Eddie nodded. He knelt in the center of the ring, holding the sharpened stick out in front of him as if assessing its point. Then he lowered it and drew a dark straight line in the dirt. “Roland, watch out for her...”

“I will if I can, Eddie.”

“. . . but keep it off me. Jake’s coming. Crazy little mother’s really coming.”

Susannah could now see the grasses due north of the speaking ring parting in a long dark line, creating a furrow that lanced straight at the circle of stones.

“Get ready,” Roland said. “It’ll go for Eddie. One of us will have to ambush it.”

Susannah reared up on her haunches like a snake coming out of a Hindu fakir’s basket. Her hands, rolled into hard brown fists, were held at the sides of her face. Her eyes blazed. “I’m ready,” she said and then shouted:
“Come on, big boy! You come on right now! Run like it’s yo birfday!”

The rain began to fall harder as the demon which lived here re-entered its circle in a booming rush. Susannah had just time to sense thick and merciless masculinity—it came to her as an eyewatering smell of gin and juniper—and then it shot toward the center of the circle: She closed her eyes and reached for it, not with her arms or her mind but with all the female force which lived at the core of her:
Hey, big boy! Where you goan? D’pussy be ovah heah!