Black House (48 page)

“Would you care to . . . sit down?” With a hostessy wave of her hand, she indicates a high-backed wooden chair.

“If it’s all right with you.”

“Why wouldn’t it be all right? I’m going to sit down in
my
chair, why shouldn’t you sit down in that one?”

“Thank you,” Jack says, and sits down, watching her glide back to the door to check the lock. Satisfied, Tansy gives him a brilliant smile and pads back to her chair, moving almost with the duck-waddle grace of a ballerina. When she lowers herself to the chair, he says, “Are you afraid of someone who might come here, Tansy? Is there someone you want to keep locked out?”

“Oh, yes,” she says, and leans forward, pulling her eyebrows together in an exaggerated display of little-girl seriousness. “But it isn’t a
someone,
it’s a
thing.
And I’m never, never going to let him in my house again, not ever. But I’ll let you in, because you’re a very nice man and you gave me those beautiful flowers. And you’re very handsome, too.”

“Is Gorg the thing you want to keep out, Tansy? Are you afraid of Gorg?”

“Yes,” she says, primly. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well,
I’m
going to have some. It’s very, very good tea. It tastes sort of like coffee.” She raises her eyebrows and gives him a bright, questioning look. He shakes his head. Without moving from her chair, Tansy pours two fingers of the brandy into her glass and sets the bottle back down on the table. The figure on her glass, Jack sees, is Scooby-Doo. Tansy sips from the glass. “Yummy. Do you have a girlfriend? I could be your girlfriend, you know, especially if you gave me more of those lovely flowers. I put them in a vase.” She pronounces the word like a parody of a Boston matron:
vahhhz.
“See?”

On the kitchen counter, the lilies of the vale droop in a mason jar half-filled with water. Removed from the Territories, they do not have long to live. This world, Jack supposes, is poisoning them faster than they are able to deal with. Every ounce of goodness they yield to their surroundings subtracts from their essence. Tansy, he realizes, has been kept afloat on the residue of the Territories remaining in the lilies—when they die, her protective little-girl persona will crumble into dust, and her madness may engulf her. That madness came from Gorg; he’d bet his life on it.

“I
do
have a boyfriend, but he doesn’t count. His name is Lester Moon. Beezer and his friends call him Stinky Cheese, but I don’t know why. Lester isn’t all that stinky, at least not when he’s sober.”

“Tell me about Gorg,” Jack says.

Extending her little finger away from the Scooby-Doo glass, Tansy takes another sip of coffee brandy. She frowns. “Oh, that’s a real icky thing to talk about.”

“I want to know about him, Tansy. If you help me, I can make sure he never bothers you again.”

“Really?”

“And you’d be helping me find the man who killed your daughter.”

“I can’t talk about that now. It’s too upsetting.” Tansy flutters her free hand over her lap as if sweeping off a crumb. Her face contracts, and a new expression moves into her eyes. For a second, the desperate, unprotected Tansy rises to the surface, threatening to explode in a madness of grief and rage.

“Does Gorg look like a person, or like something else?”

Tansy shakes her head from side to side with great slowness. She is composing herself again, reinstating a personality that can ignore her real emotions. “Gorg does
not
look like a person. Not at all.”

“You said he gave you the feather you were wearing. Does he look like a bird?”

“Gorg doesn’t look like a bird, he
is
a bird. And do you know what kind?” She leans forward again, and her face takes on the expression of a six-year-old girl about to tell the worst thing she knows. “A
raven.
That’s what he is, a big, old
raven.
All black. But not shiny black.” Her eyes widen with the seriousness of what she has to say. “He came from Night’s Plutonian shore. That’s from a poem Mrs. Normandie taught us in the sixth grade. ‘The Raven,’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

Tansy straightens up, having passed on this nugget of literary history. Jack guesses that Mrs. Normandie probably wore the same satisfied, pedagogic expression that is now on Tansy’s face, but without the bright, unhealthy glaze in Tansy’s eyes.

“Night’s Plutonian shore is not part of this world,” Tansy continues. “Did you know that? It’s
alongside
this world, and
outside
it. You need to find a door, if you want to go there.”

This is like talking to Judy Marshall, Jack abruptly realizes, but a Judy without the depth of soul and the unbelievable courage that rescued her from madness. The instant that Judy Marshall comes into his mind, he wants to see her again, so strongly that Judy feels like the one essential key to the puzzle all around him. And if she is the key, she is also the door the key opens. Jack wants to be out of the dark, warped atmosphere of Tansy’s Airstream; he wants to put off the Thunder Five and speed up the highway and over the hill to Arden and the gloomy hospital where radiant Judy Marshall has found freedom in a locked mental ward.

“But I don’t ever want to find that door, because I don’t want to go there,” Tansy says in a singsong voice. “Night’s Plutonian shore is a
bad
world. Everything’s on
fire
there.”

“How do you know that?”

“Gorg told me,” she whispers. Tansy’s gaze skitters away from him and fastens on the Scooby-Doo glass. “Gorg likes fire. But not because it makes him warm. Because it burns things up, and that makes him happy. Gorg said . . .” She shakes her head and lifts the glass to her mouth. Instead of drinking from it, she tilts the liquid toward the lip of the glass and laps at it with her tongue. Her eyes slide up to meet his again. “I think my tea is magic.”

I bet you do,
Jack thinks, and his heart nearly bursts for delicate lost Tansy.

“You can’t cry in here,” she tells him. “You looked like you wanted to cry, but you can’t. Mrs. Normandie doesn’t allow it. You can kiss me, though. Do you want to kiss me?”

“Of course I do,” he says. “But Mrs. Normandie doesn’t allow kissing, either.”

“Oh, well.” Tansy laps again at her drink. “We can do it later, when she leaves the room. And you can put your arms around me, like Lester Moon. And everything Lester does, you can do. With me.”

“Thank you,” Jack says. “Tansy, can you tell me some of the other things Gorg said?”

She cants her head and pushes her lips in and out. “He said he came here through a burning hole. With folded-back edges. And he said I was a mother, and I had to help my daughter. In the poem, her name is Lenore, but her real name is Irma. And he said . . . he said a mean old man ate her leg, but there were worse things that could have happened to my Irma.”

For a couple of seconds, Tansy seems to recede into herself, to vanish behind her stationary surface. Her mouth remains half open; she does not even blink. When she returns from where she has gone, it is like watching a statue slowly come to life. Her voice is almost too soft to be heard. “I was supposed to
fix
that old man, fix him but good. Only you gave me my beautiful lilies, and he wasn’t the right man, was he?”

Jack feels like screaming.

“He said there were worse things,” Tansy says in a whisper of disbelief. “But he didn’t say what they were. He showed me, instead. And when I saw, I thought my eyes burned up. Even though I could still see.”

“What did you see?”

“A big, big place all made of fire,” Tansy says. “Going way high up.” She falls silent, and an internal temblor runs through her, beginning in her face and moving down and out through her fingers. “
Irma
isn’t there. No, she isn’t. She got dead, and a mean old man ate her leg. He sent me a letter, but I never got it. So Gorg read it to me. I don’t want to think about that letter.” She sounds like a little girl describing something she has heard about thirdhand, or has invented. A thick curtain lies between Tansy and what she has seen and heard, and that curtain allows her to function. Jack again wonders what will happen to her when the lilies die.

“And now,” she says, “if you’re not going to kiss me, it’s time you left. I want to be alone for a while.”

Surprised by her decisiveness, Jack stands up and begins to say something polite and meaningless. Tansy waves him toward the door.

Outside, the air seems heavy with bad odors and unseen chemicals. The lilies from the Territories retained more power than Jack had imagined, enough to sweeten and purify Tansy’s air. The ground beneath Jack’s feet has been baked dry, and a parched sourness hangs in the atmosphere. Jack has nearly to force himself to breathe as he walks toward his truck, but the more he breathes, the more quickly he will readjust to the ordinary world.
His
world, though now it feels poisoned. He wants to do one thing only: drive up Highway 93 to Judy Marshall’s lookout point and keep on going, through Arden and into the parking lot, past the hospital doors, past the barriers of Dr. Spiegleman and Warden Jane Bond, until he can find himself once again in the life-giving presence of Judy Marshall herself.

He almost thinks he loves Judy Marshall. Maybe he does love her. He knows he needs her: Judy is his door and his key. His
door,
his
key.
Whatever that means, it is the truth. All right, the woman he needs is married to the extremely nice Fred Marshall, but he doesn’t want to marry her; in fact, he doesn’t even want to sleep with her, not exactly—he just wants to stand before her and see what happens.
Something
will happen, that’s for sure, but when he tries to picture it, all he sees is an explosion of tiny red feathers, hardly the image he was hoping for.

Feeling unsteady, Jack props himself on the cab of his truck with one hand while he grabs the door handle with the other. Both surfaces sear his hands, and he waves them in the air for a little while. When he gets into the cab, the seat is hot, too. He rolls down his window and, with a twinge of loss, notices that the world smells normal to him again. It smells fine. It smells like summer. Where is he going to go? That is an interesting question, he thinks, but after he gets back on the road and travels no more than a hundred feet, the low, gray wooden shape of the Sand Bar appears on his left, and without hesitating he turns into the absurdly extensive parking lot, as if he knew where he was going all along. Looking for a shady spot, Jack cruises around to the back of the building and sees the Bar’s single hint of landscaping, a broad maple tree that rises out of the asphalt at the far end of the lot. He guides the Ram into the maple’s shadow and gets out, leaving the windows cranked down. Waves of heat ripple upward from the only other two cars in the lot.

It is 11:20
A.M.
He is getting hungry, too, since his breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee and a slice of toast smeared with marmalade, and that was three hours ago. Jack has the feeling that the afternoon is going to be a long one. He might as well have something to eat while he waits for the bikers.

The back door of the Sand Bar opens onto a narrow rest-room alcove that leads into a long, rectangular space with a gleaming bar at one side and a row of substantial wooden booths on the other. Two big pool tables occupy the middle of the room, and a jukebox stands set back against the wall between them. At the front of the room, a big television screen hangs where it can be seen by everyone, suspended eight or nine feet above the clean wooden floor. The sound has been muted on a commercial that never quite identifies the purpose of its product. After the glare of the parking lot, the Bar seems pleasantly dark, and while Jack’s eyes adjust, the few low lamps appear to send out hazy beams of light.

The bartender, whom Jack takes to be the famous Lester “Stinky Cheese” Moon, looks up once as Jack enters, then returns to the copy of the
Herald
folded open on the bar. When Jack takes a stool a few feet to his right, he looks up again. Stinky Cheese is not as awful as Jack had expected. He is wearing a clean shirt only a few shades whiter than his round, small-featured face and his shaven head. Moon has the unmistakable air, half professional and half resentful, of someone who has taken over the family business and suspects he could have done better elsewhere. Jack’s intuition tells him that this sense of weary frustration is the source of his nickname among the bikers, because it gives him the look of one who expects to encounter a nasty smell any minute now.

“Can I get something to eat here?” Jack asks him.

“It’s all listed on the board.” The bartender turns sideways and indicates a white board with movable letters that spell out the menu. Hamburger, cheeseburger, hot dog, bratwurst, kielbasa, sandwiches, french fries, onion rings. The man’s gesture is intended to make Jack feel unobservant, and it works.

“Sorry, I didn’t see the sign.”

The bartender shrugs.

“Cheeseburger, medium, with fries, please.”

“Lunch don’t start until eleven-thirty, which it says on the board. See?” Another half-mocking gesture toward the sign. “But Mom is setting up in back. I could give her the order now, and she’ll start in on it when she’s ready.”

Jack thanks him, and the bartender glances up at the television screen and walks down to the end of the bar and disappears around a corner. A few seconds later, he returns, looks up at the screen, and asks Jack what he would like to drink.

“Ginger ale,” Jack says.

Watching the screen, Lester Moon squirts ginger ale from a nozzle into a beer glass and pushes the glass toward Jack. Then he slides his hand down the bar to pick up the remote control and says, “Hope you don’t mind, but I was watching this old movie. Pretty funny.” He punches a button on the remote, and from over his left shoulder Jack hears his mother’s voice say,
Looks like Smoky’s coming in late today. I wish that little rascal would learn how to handle his liquor.

Before he can turn sideways to face the screen, Lester Moon is asking him if he remembers Lily Cavanaugh.