Black House (25 page)

Now the steaks, rare, are transported to the plates, the mushrooms arrayed around them, and the enormous wooden salad bowl installed on the center of the table. Henry pronounces the meal delicious, takes a sip of his wine, and says, “If you still won’t talk about your trouble, whatever it is, you’d better at least tell me what happened at the station. I suppose there’s very little doubt that another child was snatched.”

“Next to none, I’m sorry to say. It’s a boy named Tyler Marshall. His father’s name is Fred Marshall, and he works out at Goltz’s. Do you know him?”

“Been a long time since I bought a combine,” Henry says.

“The first thing that struck me was that Fred Marshall was a very nice guy,” Jack says, and goes on to recount, in great detail and leaving nothing out, the evening’s events and revelations, except for one matter, that of his third, his unspoken, thought.

“You actually asked to visit Marshall’s wife? In the mental wing at French County Lutheran?”

“Yes, I did,” Jack says. “I’m going there tomorrow.”

“I don’t get it.” Henry eats by hunting the food with his knife, spearing it with his fork, and measuring off a narrow strip of steak. “Why would you want to see the mother?”

“Because one way or another I think she’s involved,” Jack says.

“Oh, come off it. The boy’s own mother?”

“I’m not saying she’s the Fisherman, because of course she isn’t. But according to her husband, Judy Marshall’s behavior started to change before Amy St. Pierre disappeared. She got worse and worse as the murders went on, and on the day her son vanished, she flipped out completely. Her husband had to have her committed.”

“Wouldn’t you say she had an excellent reason to break down?”

“She flipped out
before
anyone told her about her son. Her husband thinks she has ESP! He said she saw the murders in advance, she knew the Fisherman was on the way. And she knew her son was gone before they found the bike—when Fred Marshall came home, he found her tearing at the walls and talking nonsense. Completely out of control.”

“You hear about lots of cases where a mother is suddenly aware of some threat or injury to her child. A pyschic bond. Sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I guess it happens.”

“I don’t believe in ESP, and I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Judy Marshall
knows
something, and whatever she knows is a real showstopper. Fred can’t see it—he’s much too close—and Dale can’t see it, either. You should have heard him talk about her.”

“So what is she supposed to know?”

“I think she may know the doer. I think it has to be someone close to her. Whoever he is, she knows his name, and it’s driving her crazy.”

Henry frowns and uses his inchworm technique to entrap another piece of steak. “So you’re going to the hospital to open her up,” he finally says.

“Yes. Basically.”

A mysterious silence follows this statement. Henry quietly whittles away at the meat, chews what he whittles, and washes it down with Jordan cabernet.

“How did your deejay gig go? Was it okay?”

“It was a thing of beauty. All the adorable old swingers cut loose on the dance floor, even the ones in wheelchairs. One guy sort of rubbed me the wrong way. He was rude to a woman named Alice, and he asked me to play ‘Lady Magowan’s Nightmare,’ which doesn’t exist, as you probably know—”

“It’s ‘Lady Magowan’s Dream.’ Woody Herman.”

“Good boy. The thing was, he had this
terrible
voice. It sounded like something out of hell! Anyhow, I didn’t have the Woody Herman record, and he asked for the Bunny Berigan ‘I Can’t Get Started.’ Which happened to be Rhoda’s favorite record. What with my goofy ear hallucinations and all, it shook me up. I don’t know why.”

For a few minutes they concentrate on their plates.

Jack says, “What do you think, Henry?”

Henry tilts his head, auditing an inner voice. Scowling, he sets down his fork. The inner voice continues to demand his attention. He adjusts his shades and faces Jack. “In spite of everything you say, you still think like a cop.”

Jack bridles at the suspicion that Henry is not paying him a compliment. “What do you mean by that?”

“Cops see differently than people who aren’t cops. When a cop looks at someone, he wonders what he’s guilty of. The possibility of innocence never enters his mind. To a longtime cop, a guy who’s put in ten years or more, everyone who isn’t a cop is guilty. Only most of them haven’t been caught yet.”

Henry has described the mind-set of dozens of men Jack once worked with. “Henry, how do you know about that?”

“I can see it in their eyes,” Henry says. “That’s the way policemen approach the world. You are a policeman.”

Jack blurts out, “I am a coppiceman.” Appalled, he blushes. “Sorry, that stupid phrase has been running around and around in my head, and it just popped out.”

“Why don’t we clear the dishes and start on
Bleak House
?”

When their few dishes have been stacked beside the sink, Jack takes the book from the far side of the table and follows Henry toward the living room, pausing on the way to glance, as he always does, at his friend’s studio. A door with a large glass insert opens into a small, soundproofed chamber bristling with electronic equipment: the microphone and turntable back from Maxton’s and reinstalled before Henry’s well-padded, swiveling chair; a disc changer and matching digital-analog converter mount, close at hand, beside a mixing board and a massive tape recorder adjacent to the other, larger window, which looks into the kitchen. When Henry had been planning the studio, Rhoda requested the windows, because, she’d said, she wanted to be able to see him at work. There isn’t a wire in sight. The entire studio has the disciplined neatness of the captain’s quarters on a ship.

“Looks like you’re going to work tonight,” Jack says.

“I want to get two more Henry Shakes ready to send, and I’m working on something for a birthday salute to Lester Young and Charlie Parker.”

“Were they born on the same day?”

“Close enough. August twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth. You know, I can’t quite tell if you’ll want the lights on or not.”

“Let’s turn them on,” Jack says.

And so Henry Leyden switches on the two lamps beside the window, and Jack Sawyer moves to the overstuffed chair near the fireplace and turns on the tall lamp at one of its rounded arms and watches as his friend walks unerringly to the light just inside the front door and the ornate fixture alongside his own, his favorite resting place, the Mission-style sofa, clicking first one, then the other into life, then settles down onto the sofa with one leg stretched out along its length. Even, low light pervades the long room and swells into greater brightness around Jack’s chair.

“
Bleak House,
by Charles Dickens,” he says. He clears his throat. “Okay, Henry, we’re off to the races.”

“London. Michaelmas Term lately over,” he reads, and marches into a world made of soot and mud. Muddy dogs, muddy horses, muddy people, a day without light. Soon he has reached the second paragraph: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.”

His voice catches, and his mind temporarily drifts off-focus. What he is reading unhappily reminds him of French Landing, of Sumner Street and Chase Street, of the lights in the window of the Oak Tree Inn, the Thunder Five lurking in Nailhouse Row, and the gray ascent from the river, of Queen Street and Maxton’s hedges, the little houses spreading out on grids, all of it choked by unseen fog;—which engulfs a battered
NO TRESPASSING
sign on the highway and swallows the Sand Bar and glides hungry and searching down the valleys.

“Sorry,” he says. “I was just thinking—”

“I was, too,” Henry says. “Go on, please.”

But for that brief flicker of an old
NO TRESPASSING
sign completely unaware of the black house he one day will have to enter, Jack concentrates again on the page and continues reading
Bleak House.
The windows darken as the lamps grow warmer. The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds through the courts, aided or impeded by attorneys Chizzle, Mizzle, and Drizzle; Lady Dedlock leaves Sir Leicester Dedlock alone at their great estate with its moldy chapel, stagnant river, and “Ghost’s Walk”; Esther Summerson begins to chirp away in the first person. Our friends decide that the appearance of Esther demands a small libation, if they are to get through much more chirping. Henry unfolds from the sofa, sails into the kitchen, and returns with two short, fat glasses one-third filled with Balvenie Doublewood single-malt whiskey, as well as a glass of plain water for the reader. A couple of sips, a few murmurs of appreciation, and Jack resumes. Esther, Esther, Esther, but beneath the water torture of her relentless sunniness the story gathers steam and carries both reader and listener along in its train.

Having come to a convenient stopping point, Jack closes the book and yawns. Henry stands up and stretches. They move to the door, and Henry follows Jack outside beneath a vast night sky brilliantly scattered with stars. “Tell me one thing,” Henry says.

“Shoot.”

“When you were in the station house, did you really feel like a cop? Or did you feel like you were pretending to be one?”

“Actually, it was kind of surprising,” Jack says. “In no time at all, I felt like a cop again.”

“Good.”

“Why is that good?”

“Because it means you were running toward that mysterious secret, not away from it.”

Shaking his head and smiling, deliberately not giving Henry the satisfaction of a reply, Jack steps up into his vehicle and says good-bye from the slight but distinct elevation of the driver’s seat. The engine coughs and churns, his headlights snap into being, and Jack is on his way home.

9

N
OT MANY HOURS
later, Jack finds himself walking down the midway of a deserted amusement park under a gray autumn sky. On either side of him are boarded-over concessions: the Fenway Franks hot dog stand, the Annie Oakley Shooting Gallery, the Pitch-Til-U-Win. Rain has fallen and more is coming; the air is sharp with moisture. Not far away, he can hear the lonely thunder of waves hurling themselves against a deserted shingle of beach. From closer by comes the snappy sound of guitar picking. It should be cheerful, but to Jack it is dread set to music. He shouldn’t be here. This is an old place, a dangerous place. He passes a boarded-up ride. A sign out front reads:
THE SPEEDY OPOPANAX WILL REOPEN MEMORIAL DAY 1982—SEE YA THEN
!

Opopanax,
Jack thinks, only he is no longer Jack; now he’s Jacky. He’s Jacky-boy, and he and his mother are on the run. From whom? From Sloat, of course. From hustlin’, bustlin’ Uncle Morgan.

Speedy,
Jack thinks, and as if he has given a telepathic cue, a warm, slightly slurry voice begins to sing.
“When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin’ along, / There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ his old sweet song
.
.
.”

No,
Jack thinks.
I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your old sweet song. You can’t be here anyway, you’re dead. Dead on the Santa Monica Pier. Old bald black man dead in the shadow of a frozen merry-go-round horse.

Oh, but no. When the old cop logic comes back it takes hold like a tumor, even in dreams, and it doesn’t take much of it to realize that this isn’t Santa Monica—it’s too cold and too old. This is the land of ago, when Jacky and the Queen of the B’s fled out of California like the fugitives they had become. And didn’t stop running until they got to the other coast, the place where Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer—

No, I don’t think of this, I
never
think of this

—had come to die.

“Wake up, wake up you sleepyhead!”

The voice of his old friend.

Friend, my ass. He’s the one who put me on the road of trials, the one who came between me and Richard, my
real
friend. He’s the one who almost got me killed, almost drove me crazy.

“Wake up, wake up, get out of bed!”

Way-gup, way-gup, way-gup. Time to face the fearsome opopanax. Time to get back to your not-so-sweet used-to-be.

“No,” Jacky whispers, and then the midway ends. Ahead is the carousel, sort of like the one on the Santa Monica Pier and sort of like the one he remembers from . . . well, from ago. It is a hybrid, in other words, a dream specialty, neither here nor there. But there’s no mistaking the man who sits beneath one of the frozen rearing horses with his guitar on his knee. Jacky-boy would know that face anywhere, and all the old love rises in his heart. He fights it, but that is a fight few people win, especially not those who have been turned back to the age of twelve.

“Speedy!” he cries.

The old man looks at him and his brown face cracks open in a smile. “Travelin’ Jack!” he says. “How I have missed you, son.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” he says. “But I don’t travel anymore. I’ve settled down in Wisconsin. This . . .” He gestures at his magically restored boy’s body, clad in jeans and a T-shirt. “This is just a dream.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. In any case, you got a mite more traveling to do, Jack. I been telling you that for some time.”

“What do you mean?”

Speedy’s grin is sly in the middle, exasperated at the corners. “Don’t play the fool with me, Jacky. Sent you the feathers, didn’t I? Sent you a robin’s egg, didn’t I? Sent you more’n one.”

“Why can’t people leave me alone?” Jack asks. His voice is suspiciously close to a whine. Not a pretty sound. “You . . . Henry . . . Dale . . .”

“Quit on it now,” Speedy says, growing stern. “Ain’t got no more time to ask you nice. The game has gotten rough. Ain’t it?”

“Speedy—”

“You got your job and I got mine. Same job, too. Don’t you whine at me, Jack, and don’t make me chase you no mo’. You’re a coppiceman, same as ever was.”

“I’m retired—”

“
Shit
on your retired! The kids he killed, that’s bad enough. The kids he
might
kill if he’s let to go on, that’s worse. But the one he’s got . . .” Speedy leans forward, dark eyes blazing in his dark face. “That boy has got to be brought back, and
soon.
If you can’t get him back, you got to kill him yourself, little as I like to think of it. Because he’s a Breaker. A powerful one. One more might be all he needs to take it down.”

“Who might need?” Jack asks.

“The Crimson King.”

“And what is it this Crimson King wants to take down?”

Speedy looks at him a moment, then starts to play that perky tune again instead of answering. “There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ his old sweet song . . .”

“Speedy, I
can’t
!”

The tune ends in a discordant jangle of strings. Speedy looks at twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer with a coldness that chills the boy inward all the way to the hidden man’s heart. And when he speaks again, Speedy Parker’s faint southern accent has deepened. It has filled with a contempt that is almost liquid.

“You get busy now, hear me? Y’all quit whinin’ and cryin’ and slackin’ off. Y’all pick up yo’ guts from wherever you left ’em and
get busy
!”

Jack steps back. A heavy hand falls on his shoulder and he thinks,
It’s Uncle Morgan. Him or maybe Sunlight Gardener. It’s 1981 and I’ve got to do it all over again—

But that is a boy’s thought, and this is a man’s dream. Jack Sawyer as he is now thrusts the child’s acquiescing despair away.
No, not at all. I deny that. I have put those faces and those places aside. It was hard work, and I won’t see it all undone by a few phantom feathers, a few phantom eggs, and one bad dream. Find yourself another boy, Speedy. This one grew up.

He turns, ready to fight, but no one’s there. Lying behind him on the boardwalk, on its side like a dead pony, is a boy’s bicycle. There’s a license plate on the back reading
BIG MAC.
Scattered around it are shiny crow’s feathers. And now Jack hears another voice, cold and cracked, ugly and unmistakably evil. He knows it’s the voice of the thing that touched him.

“That’s right, asswipe. Stay out of it. You mess with me and I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere.”

A spinning hole opens in the boardwalk just in front of the bike. It widens like a startled eye. It continues to widen, and Jack dives for it. It’s the way back. The way out. The contemptuous voice follows him.

“That’s right, jackoff,” it says. “Run! Run from the abbalah! Run from the King! Run for your miserable fucking life!” The voice dissolves into laughter, and it is the mad sound of that laughter which follows Jack Sawyer down into the darkness between worlds.

Hours later, Jack stands naked at his bedroom window, absently scratching his ass and watching the sky lighten in the east. He’s been awake since four. He can’t remember much of his dream (his defenses may be bending, but even now they have not quite broken), yet enough of it lingers for him to be sure of one thing: the corpse on the Santa Monica Pier upset him so badly that he quit his job because it reminded him of someone he once knew.

“All of that never happened,” he tells the coming day in a falsely patient voice. “I had a kind of preadolescent breakdown, brought on by stress. My mother thought she had cancer, she grabbed me, and we ran all the way to the East Coast. All the way to New Hampshire. She thought she was going back to the Great Happy Place to die. Turned out to be mostly vapors, some goddamn actress midlife crisis, but what does a kid know? I was stressed. I had dreams.”

Jack sighs.

“I dreamed I saved my mother’s life.”

The phone behind him rings, the sound shrill and broken in the shadowy room.

Jack Sawyer screams.

“I woke you up,” Fred Marshall says, and Jack knows at once that this man has been up all night, sitting in his wifeless, sonless home. Looking at photo albums, perhaps, while the TV plays. Knowing he is rubbing salt into the wounds but unable to quit.

“No,” Jack says, “actually I was—”

He stops. The phone’s beside the bed and there’s a pad beside the phone. There’s a note written on the pad. Jack must have written it, since he’s the only one here—ella-fucking-ment’ry, my dear Watson—but it isn’t in his handwriting. At some point in his dream, he wrote this note in his dead mother’s handwriting.

The Tower. The Beams. If the Beams are broken, Jacky-boy, if the Beams are broken and the Tower falls

There’s no more. There is only poor old Fred Marshall, who has discovered how quickly things can go bad in the sunniest midwestern life. Jack’s mouth has attempted to say a couple of things while his mind is occupied with this forgery from his subconscious, probably not very sensible things, but that doesn’t bother Fred; he simply goes droning along with none of the stops and drops that folks usually employ to indicate the ends of sentences or changes of thought. Fred is just getting it out, unloading, and even in his own distressed state Jack realizes that Fred Marshall of 16 Robin Hood Lane, that sweet little Cape Cod honey of a home, is nearing the edge of his endurance. If things don’t turn around for him soon, he won’t need to visit his wife in Ward D of French County Lutheran; they’ll be roommates.

And it is their proposed visit to Judy of which Fred is speaking, Jack realizes. He quits trying to interrupt and simply listens, frowning down at the note he has written to himself as he does so. Tower and Beams. What kind of beams? Sunbeams? Hornbeams? Raise high the roof beam, carpenters?

“—know I said I’d pick you up at nine but Dr. Spiegleman that’s her doctor up there Spiegleman his name is he said she had a very bad night with a lot of yelling and screaming and then trying to get up the wallpaper and eat it and maybe a seizure of some kind so they’re trying her on a new medication he might have said Pamizene or Patizone I didn’t write it down Spiegleman called me fifteen minutes ago I wonder if those guys ever sleep and said we should be able to see her around four he thinks she’ll be more stabilized by four and we could see her then so could I pick you up at three or maybe you have—”

“Three would be fine,” Jack says quietly.

“—other stuff to do other plans I’d understand that but I could come by if you don’t it’s mostly that I don’t want to go alone—”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” Jack said. “We’ll go in my pickup.”

“—thought maybe I’d hear from Ty or from whoever snatched him like maybe a ransom demand but no one called only Spiegleman he’s my wife’s doctor up there at—”

“Fred, I’m going to find your boy.”

Jack is appalled at this bald assurance, at the suicidal confidence he hears in his own voice, but it serves at least one purpose: bringing Fred’s flood of dead words to an end. There is blessed silence from the other end of the line.

At last, Fred speaks in a trembling whisper. “Oh, sir. If only I could believe that.”

“I want you to try,” Jack says. “And maybe we can find your wife’s mind while we’re at it.”

Maybe both are in the same place,
he thinks, but this he does not say.

Liquid sounds come from the other end of the line. Fred has begun to cry.

“Fred.”

“Yes?”

“You’re coming to my place at three.”

“Yes.” A mighty sniff; a miserable cry that is mostly choked back. Jack has some comprehension of how empty Fred Marshall’s house must feel at this moment, and even that dim understanding is bad enough.

“My place in Norway Valley. Come past Roy’s Store, over Tamarack Creek—”

“I know where it is.” A faint edge of impatience has crept into Fred’s voice. Jack is very glad to hear it.

“Good. I’ll see you.”

“You bet.” Jack hears a ghost of Fred’s salesman cheer, and it twists his heart.

“What time?”

“Th-three?” Then, with marginal assurance: “Three.”

“That’s right. We’ll take my truck. Maybe have a bite of supper at Gertie’s Kitchen on our way back. Good-bye, Fred.”

“Good-bye, sir. And thank you.”

Jack hangs up the phone. Looks a moment longer at his memory’s reproduction of his mother’s handwriting and wonders what you’d call such a thing in cop-speak. Autoforgery? He snorts, then crumples the note up and starts getting dressed. He will drink a glass of juice, then go out walking for an hour or so. Blow all the bad dreams out of his head. And blow away the sound of Fred Marshall’s awful droning voice while he’s at it. Then, after a shower, he might or might not call Dale Gilbertson and ask if there have been any developments. If he’s really going to get involved in this, there’ll be a lot of paperwork to catch up on . . . he’ll want to reinterview the parents . . . take a look at the old folks’ home close to where the Marshall kid disappeared . . .

With his mind full of such thoughts (
pleasant
thoughts, actually, although if this had been suggested to him, he would have strenuously denied it), Jack almost stumbles over the box sitting on the welcome mat just outside his front door. It’s where Buck Evitz, the postman, leaves packages when he has packages to leave, but it’s not gone six-thirty yet, and Buck won’t be along in his little blue truck for another three hours.

Jack bends down and cautiously picks the package up. It’s the size of a shoe box, covered with brown paper that has been cut raggedly and secured not with tape but with big drools of red sealing wax. In addition to this, there are complicated loops of white string secured with a child’s oversized bow. There’s a cluster of stamps in the upper corner, ten or a dozen, featuring various birds. (No robins, however; Jack notes this with understandable relief.) There’s something not right about those stamps, but at first Jack doesn’t see what it is. He’s too focused on the address, which is
spectacularly
not right. There’s no box number, no RFD number, no zip code. No
name,
not really. The address consists of a single word, scrawled in large capital letters: