Black House (16 page)

Burny begins to drool. There is nothing discreet about it, either. Burny drools like a wolf in a fairy tale, white curds of foamy spit leaking from the corners of his mouth and flowing over the slack, liver-colored roll of his lower lip. The drool runs down his chin like a stream of soapsuds. He wipes at it absently with the back of one gnarled hand and shakes it to the floor in a splatter, never taking his eyes from the mirror. The boy in the mirror is not one of this creature’s poor lost babies—Ty Marshall has lived in French Landing his whole life and knows exactly where he is—but he
could
be. He could very easily become lost, and wind up in a certain room. A certain cell. Or trudging toward a strange horizon on burning, bleeding footsies.

Especially if Burny has his way. He will have to move fast, but as we have already noted, Charles Burnside can, with the proper motivation, move very fast indeed.

“Gorg,” he says to the mirror. He speaks this nonsense word in a perfectly clear, perfectly flat midwestern accent. “Come, Gorg.”

And without waiting to see what comes next—he
knows
what comes next—Burny turns and walks toward the line of four toilet stalls. He steps into the second from the left and closes the door.

Tyler has just remounted his bike when the hedge rustles ten feet from the Strawberry Fest! sign. A large black crow shrugs its way out of the greenery and onto the Queen Street sidewalk. It regards the boy with a lively, intelligent eye. It stands with its black legs spread, opens its beak, and speaks. “Gorg!”

Tyler looks at it, beginning to smile, not sure he heard this but ready to be delighted (at ten, he’s always ready to be delighted, always primed to believe the unbelievable). “What? Did you say something?”

The crow flutters its glossy wings and cocks its head in a way that renders the ugly almost charming.

“Gorg! Ty!”

The boy laughs. It said his name! The crow said his name!

He dismounts his bike, puts it on the kickstand, and takes a couple of steps toward the crow. Thoughts of Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham are—unfortunately—the furthest things from his mind.

He thinks the crow will surely fly away when he steps toward it, but it only flutters its wings a little and takes a slide-step toward the bushy darkness of the hedge.

“Did you say my name?”

“Gorg! Ty! Abbalah!”

For a moment Ty’s smile falters. That last word is almost familiar to him, and the associations, although faint, are not exactly pleasant. It makes him think of his mother, for some reason. Then the crow says his name again; surely it is saying
Ty
.

Tyler takes another step away from Queen Street and toward the black bird. The crow takes a corresponding step, sidling closer still to the bulk of the hedge. There is no one on the street; this part of French Landing is dreaming in the morning sunshine. Ty takes another step toward his doom, and all the worlds tremble.

Ebbie, Ronnie, and T.J. come swaggering out of the 7-Eleven, where the raghead behind the counter has just served them blueberry Slurpees (
raghead
is just one of many pejorative terms Ebbie has picked up from his dad). They also have fresh packs of Magic cards, two packs each.

Ebbie, his lips already smeared blue, turns to T.J. “Go on downstreet and get the slowpoke.”

T.J. looks injured. “Why me?”

“Because Ronnie bought the cards, dumbwit. Go on, hurry up.”

“Why do we need him, Ebbie?” Ronnie asks. He leans against the bike rack, noshing on the cold, sweet chips of ice.

“Because I say so,” Ebbie replies loftily. The fact is, Tyler Marshall usually has money on Fridays. In fact, Tyler has money almost every day. His parents are loaded. Ebbie, who is being raised (if you can call it that) by a single father who has a crappy janitor’s job, has already conceived a vague hate for Tyler on this account; the first humiliations aren’t far away, and the first beatings will follow soon after. But now all he wants is more Magic cards, a third pack for each of them. The fact that Tyler doesn’t even
like
Magic that much will only make getting him to pony up that much sweeter.

But first they have to get the little slowpoke up here. Or the little po-sloke, as mush-mouthed Ronnie calls him. Ebbie likes that, and thinks he will start using it. Po-sloke. A good word. Makes fun of Ty and Ronnie at the same time. Two for the price of one.

“Go on, T.J. Unless you want an Indian burn.”

T.J. doesn’t. Ebbie Wexler’s Indian burns hurt like a mad bastard. He gives a theatrical sigh, backs his bike out of the rack, mounts it, and rides back down the mild slope of the hill, holding a handlebar in one hand and his Slurpee in the other. He expects to see Ty right away, probably walking his bike because he’s
just
.
.
.
so
.
.
.
tiyyy-urd,
but Ty doesn’t seem to be on Chase Street at all—what’s up with that?

T.J. pedals a little faster.

In the men’s room, we are now looking at the line of toilet stalls. The door of the one second from the left is closed. The other three stand ajar on their chrome hinges. Beneath the closed door, we see a pair of gnarled, veiny ankles rising from a pair of filthy slippers.

A voice cries out with surprising strength. It is a young man’s voice, hoarse, hungry, and angry. It echoes flatly back from the tile walls: “
Abbalah! Abbalah-doon! Munshun gorg!
”

Suddenly the toilets flush. Not just the one in the closed cubicle but all of them. Across the room the urinals also flush, their chromed handles dipping in perfect synchronicity. Water runs down their curved porcelain surfaces.

When we look back from the urinals to the toilets, we see that the dirty slippers—and the feet that were in them—are gone. And for the first time we have actually
heard
the sound of slippage, a kind of hot exhale, the sort of sound one hears escaping one’s lungs when waking from a nightmare at two in the morning.

Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Burnside has left the building.

The crow has backed right up against the hedge now. Still it regards Tyler with its bright, eerie eyes. Tyler steps toward it, feeling hypnotized.

“Say my name again,” he breathes. “Say my name again and you can go.”

“Ty!”
the crow croaks obligingly, then gives its wings a little shake and slips into the hedge. For a moment Tyler can still see it, a mixture of shiny black in the shiny green, and then it’s gone.

“Holy crow!” Tyler says. He realizes what he’s said and gives a small, shaky laugh. Did it happen? It did, didn’t it?

He leans closer to where the crow reentered the hedge, thinking if it shed a feather he will take it for a souvenir, and when he does, a scrawny white arm shoots out through the green and seizes him unerringly by the neck. Tyler has time to give a single terrified squawk, and then he is dragged through the hedge. One of his sneakers is pulled off by the short, stiff branches. From the far side there is a single guttural, greedy cry—it might have been
“Boy!”
—and then a thud, the sound of a pet rock coming down on a small boy’s head, perhaps. Then there’s nothing but the distant drone of a lawn mower and the closer drone of a bee.

The bee is bumbling around the flowers on the far side of the hedge, the Maxton side. There is nothing else to be seen over there but green grass, and closer to the building, the tables where the elderly inhabitants will, at noon, sit down to the Strawberry Fest Picnic.

Tyler Marshall is gone.

T. J. Renniker coasts to a stop at the corner of Chase and Queen. His Slurpee is dripping dark blue juice over his wrist, but he barely notices. Halfway down Queen Street he sees Ty’s bike, leaning neatly over on its kickstand, but no Ty.

Moving slowly—he has a bad feeling about this, somehow—T.J. rides over to the bike. At some point he becomes aware that what was a Slurpee has now dissolved into a soggy cup of melting goop. He tosses it into the gutter.

It’s Ty’s ride, all right. No mistaking that red twenty-inch Schwinn with the ape-hanger handlebars and the green Milwaukee Bucks decal on the side. The bike, and—

Lying on its side by the hedge that creates a border between the world of the old folks and the world of regular people, the
real
people, T.J. sees a single Reebok sneaker. Scattered around it are a number of shiny green leaves. One feather protrudes from the sneaker.

The boy stares at this sneaker with wide eyes. T.J. may not be as smart as Tyler, but he’s a few watts brighter than Ebbie Wexler, and it’s easy enough for him to imagine Tyler being dragged through the hedge, leaving his bike behind . . . and one sneaker . . . one lonely, overturned sneaker . . .

“Ty?” he calls. “Are you jokin’ around? Because if you are, you better stop. I’ll tell Ebbie to give you the biggest Indian burn you ever had.”

No answer. Ty isn’t joking around. T.J. somehow knows it.

Thoughts of Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham suddenly explode in T.J.’s mind. He hears (or imagines he hears) stealthy footsteps behind the hedge: the Fisherman, having secured dinner, has come back for dessert!

T.J. tries to scream and cannot. His throat has shrunk down to a pinhole. Instead of screaming, he hunches himself over the handlebars of his bike and begins pedaling. He swerves off the sidewalk and into the street, wanting to get away from the dark bulk of that hedge just as fast as he can. When he leaves the curb, the front tire of his Huffy bike squashes through the remains of his Slurpee. As he pedals toward Chase Street, bent over his handlebars like a Grand Prix racer, he leaves a dark and shiny track on the pavement. It looks like blood. Somewhere nearby, a crow caws. It sounds like laughter.

16 Robin Hood Lane: we’ve been here before, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. Peek through the kitchen window and we see Judy Marshall, asleep in the rocking chair in the corner. There’s a book in her lap, the John Grisham novel we last saw on her bedside table. Sitting beside her on the floor is half a cup of cold coffee. Judy managed to read ten pages before dozing off. We shouldn’t blame Mr. Grisham’s narrative skills; Judy had a hard night last night, and it’s not the first. It’s been over two months since she last got more than two hours of sleep in one stretch. Fred knows something is wrong with his wife, but has no idea how deep it runs. If he did, he would be a lot more than frightened. Soon, God help him, he is going to have a better picture of her mental state.

Now she begins to moan thickly, and to turn her head from side to side. Those nonsense words begin to issue from her again. Most of them are too sleep-fuzzy to understand, but we catch
abbalah
and
gorg.

Her eyes suddenly flash open. They are a brilliant, royal blue in the morning light, which fills the kitchen with summer’s dusty gold.

“Ty!”
she gasps, and her feet give a convulsive waking jerk. She looks at the clock over the stove. It is twelve minutes past nine, and everything seems twisted, as it so often does when we sleep deeply but not well or long. She has sucked some miserable, not-quite-a-nightmare dream after her like mucusy strings of afterbirth: men with fedora hats pulled down so as to shadow their faces, walking on long R. Crumb legs that ended in big round-toed R. Crumb shoes, sinister keep on truckin’ sharpies who moved too fast against a city background—Milwaukee? Chicago?—and in front of a baleful orange sky. The dream’s sound track was the Benny Goodman band playing “King Porter Stomp,” the one her father had always played when he was getting a little shot, and the feeling of the dream had been a terrible darkwood mix of terror and grief: awful things had happened, but the worst was waiting.

There’s none of the relief people usually feel upon waking from bad dreams—the relief she herself had felt when she had been younger and . . . and . . .

“And sane,” she says in a croaky, just-woke-up voice. “ ‘King Porter Stomp.’ Think of that.” To her it had always sounded like the music you heard in the old cartoons, the ones where mice in white gloves ran in and out of ratholes with dizzying, feverish speed. Once, when her father was dancing her around to that one, she had felt something hard poking against her. Something in his pants. After that, when he put on his dance music, she tried to be somewhere else.

“Quit it,” she says in the same croaky voice. It’s a crow’s voice, and it occurs to her that there was a crow in her dream. Sure, you bet. The Crow Gorg.

“Gorg means death,” she says, and licks her dry upper lip without realizing it. Her tongue comes out even farther, and on the return swipe the tip licks across her nostrils, warm and wet and somehow comforting. “Over there,
gorg
means death. Over there in the—”

Faraway
is the word she doesn’t say. Before she can, she sees something on the kitchen table that wasn’t there before. It’s a wicker box. A sound is coming from it, some low sleepy sound.

Distress worms into her lower belly, making her bowels feel loose and watery. She knows what a box like that is called: a creel. It’s a fisherman’s creel.

There is a fisherman in French Landing these days. A bad fisherman.

“Ty?” she calls, but of course there is no answer. The house is empty except for her. Dale is at work, and Ty will be out playing—you bet. It’s half-past July, the heart of summer vacation, and Ty will be rolling around the town, doing all the Ray Bradbury–August Derleth things boys do when they’ve got the whole endless summer day to do them in. But he won’t be alone; Dale has talked with him about buddying up until the Fisherman is caught, at
least
until then, and so has she. Judy has no great liking for the Wexler kid (the Metzger or Renniker kids, either), but there’s safety in numbers. Ty probably isn’t having any great cultural awakenings this summer, but at least—

“At least he’s safe,” she says in her croaky Crow Gorg voice. Yet the box that has appeared on the kitchen table during her nap seems to deny that, to negate the whole concept of safety. Where did it come from? And what is the white thing on top of it?