Black House (72 page)

Return comes as it should, with the clean, rich smells of topsoil and corn, and a rooster’s alarm-clock crowing from the Gilbertson cousins’ farm. A spiderweb shining with dew stitches the loafer on Jack’s left foot to a mossy rock. An ant trundling across Jack’s right wrist carries a blade of grass bearing in the V of its central fold a bright and trembling drop of newly made water. Feeling as wondrously refreshed as if he, too, were newly created, Jack eases the hardworking ant off his wrist, separates his shoe from the spiderweb, and gets to his feet. Dew sparkles in his hair and his eyebrows. Half a mile back across the field, Henry’s meadow curves around Henry’s house. Tiger lilies shiver in the cool morning breeze.

Tiger lilies shiver
.
.
.

When he sees the hood of his pickup nosing out from behind the house, everything comes back to him. Mouse, and the word given him by Mouse. Henry’s house, Henry’s studio, his dying message. By this time, all the police and investigators will have gone, and the house will be empty, echoing with bloodstains. Dale Gilbertson—and probably Troopers Brown and Black—will be looking for him. Jack has no interest in the troopers, but he does want to talk to Dale. It is time to let Dale in on some startling facts. What Jack has to say to Dale is going to peel his eyelids back, but we should remember what the Duke told Dean Martin about the whisking of eggs and the making of omelettes. In the words of Lily Cavanaugh, when the Duke spoke up, ever’-dang-body
lissened
up, and so must Dale Gilbertson, for Jack wants his faithful and resolute company on the journey through Black House.

Walking past the side of Henry’s house, Jack puts the tips of his fingers to his lips and brushes them against the wood, transferring the kiss.
Henry. For all the worlds, for Tyler Marshall, for Judy, for Sophie, and for you, Henry Leyden.

The cell phone in the cab of the Ram claims to have three saved messages, all from Dale, which he deletes unheard. At home, the answering machine’s red light blinks 4-4-4, repeating itself with the ruthless insistence of a hungry infant. Jack pushes
PLAYBACK.
Four times, an increasingly unhappy Dale Gilbertson begs to know the whereabouts of his friend Jack Sawyer and communicates his great desire to converse with the same gentleman, largely in reference to the murder of his uncle and their friend, Henry, but it wouldn’t hurt to talk about the goddamn
slaughter
at Maxton’s, would it? And does the name Charles Burnside ring any bells?

Jack looks at his watch and, thinking that it cannot be correct, glances up at the clock in his kitchen. His watch was right after all. It is 5:42
A.M.,
and the rooster is still crowing behind Randy and Kent Gilbertson’s barn. Tiredness suddenly washes through him, heavier than gravity. Someone is undoubtedly manning the telephone on Sumner Street, but Dale is just as certainly asleep in his bed, and Jack wishes to speak only to Dale. He yawns hugely, like a cat. The newspaper hasn’t even been delivered yet!

He removes his jacket and tosses it onto a chair, then yawns again, even more widely than before. Maybe that cornfield was not so comfortable after all: Jack’s neck feels pinched, and his back aches. He pulls himself up the staircase, shucks his clothes onto a love seat in his bedroom, and flops into bed. On the wall above the love seat hangs his sunny little Fairfield Porter painting, and Jack remembers how Dale responded to it, the night they uncrated and put up all the paintings. He had loved that picture the moment he saw it—it had probably been news to Dale that he could find such satisfaction in a painting.
All right,
Jack thinks,
if we manage to get out of Black House alive, I’ll give it to him. And I’ll make him take it: I’ll threaten to chop it up and burn it in the woodstove if he doesn’t. I’ll tell him I’ll give it to Wendell Green!

His eyes are already closing; he sinks into the bedclothes and disappears, although this time not literally, from our world. He dreams.

He walks down a tricky, descending forest path toward a burning building. Beasts and monsters writhe and bellow on both sides, mostly unseen but now and then flicking out a gnarled hand, a spiky tail, a black, skeletal wing. These he severs with a heavy sword. His arm aches, and his entire body feels weary and sore. Somewhere he is bleeding, but he cannot see or feel the wound, merely the slow movement of blood running down the backs of his legs. The people who were with him at the start of his journey are all dead, and he is—he may be—dying. He wishes he were not so alone, for he is terrified.

The burning building grows taller and taller as he approaches. Screams and cries come from it, and around it lies a grotesque perimeter of dead, blackened trees and smoking ashes. This perimeter widens with every second, as if the building is devouring all of nature, one foot at a time. Everything is lost, and the burning building and the soulless creature who is both its master and its prisoner will triumph, blasted world without end, amen. Din-tah, the great furnace, eating all in its path.

The trees on his right side bend and contort their complaining branches, and a great stirring takes place in the dark, sharply pointed leaves. Groaning, the huge trunks bow, and the branches twine like snakes about one another, bringing into being a solid wall of gray, pointed leaves. From that wall emerges, with terrible slowness, the impression of a gaunt, bony face. Five feet tall from crown to chin, the face bulges out against the layer of leaves, weaving from side to side in search of Jack.

It is everything that has ever terrified him, injured him, wished him ill, either in this world or the Territories. The huge face vaguely resembles a human monster named Elroy who once tried to rape Jack in a wretched bar called the Oatley Tap, then it suggests Morgan of Orris, then Sunlight Gardener, then Charles Burnside, but as it continues its blind seeking from side to side, it suggests all of these malign faces layered on top of one another and melting into one. Utter fear turns Jack to stone.

The face bulging out of the massed leaves searches the downward path, then swings back and ceases its constant, flickering movement from side to side. It is pointed directly at him. The blind eyes see him, the nose without nostrils smells him. A quiver of pleasure runs through the leaves, and the face looms forward, getting larger and larger. Unable to move, Jack looks back over his shoulder to see a putrefying man prop himself up in a narrow bed. The man opens his mouth and shouts,
“D’YAMBA!”

Heart thrashing in his chest, a shout dying before it leaves his throat, Jack vaults from his bed and lands on his feet before he quite realizes that he has awakened from a dream. His entire body seems to be trembling. Sweat runs down his forehead and dampens his chest. Gradually, the trembling ceases as he takes in what is really around him: not a giant face looming from an ugly wall of leaves but the familiar confines of his bedroom. Hanging on the wall opposite is a painting he intends to give to Dale Gilbertson. He wipes his face, he calms down. He needs a shower. His watch tells him that it is now 9:47
A.M.
He has slept four hours, and it is time to get organized.

Forty-five minutes later, cleaned up, dressed, and fed, Jack calls the police station and asks to speak to Chief Gilbertson. At 11:25, he and a dubious, newly educated Dale—a Dale who badly wants to see some evidence of his friend’s crazy tale—leave the chief’s car parked beneath the single tree in the Sand Bar’s lot and walk across the hot asphalt past two leaning Harleys and toward the rear entrance.

PART FOUR

Black House
and Beyond

26

W
E HAVE HAD
our little conversation about
slippage,
and it’s too late in the game to belabor the point more than a little, but wouldn’t you say that most houses are an attempt to hold slippage back? To impose at least the illusion of normality and sanity on the world? Think of Libertyville, with its corny but endearing street names—Camelot and Avalon and Maid Marian Way. And think of that sweet little honey of a home in Libertyville where Fred, Judy, and Tyler Marshall once lived together. What else would you call 16 Robin Hood Lane but an ode to the everyday, a paean to the prosaic? We could say the same thing about Dale Gilbertson’s home, or Jack’s, or Henry’s, couldn’t we? Most of the homes in the vicinity of French Landing, really. The destructive hurricane that has blown through the town doesn’t change the fact that the homes stand as brave bulwarks against slippage, as noble as they are humble. They are places of sanity.

Black House—like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, like the turn-of-the-century monstrosity in Seattle known as Rose Red—is
not
sane. It is not entirely of this world. It’s hard to look at from the outside—the eyes play continual tricks—but if one
can
hold it steady for a few seconds, one sees a three-story dwelling of perfectly ordinary size. The color is unusual, yes—that dead black exterior, even the windows swabbed black—and it has a crouching, leaning aspect that would raise uneasy thoughts about its structural integrity, but if one could appraise it with the
glammer
of those other worlds stripped away, it would look almost as ordinary as Fred and Judy’s place . . . if not so well maintained.

Inside, however, it is different.

Inside, Black House is
large.

Black House is, in fact, almost infinite.

Certainly it is no place to get lost, although from time to time people have—hoboes and the occasional unfortunate runaway child, as well as Charles Burnside/Carl Bierstone’s victims—and relics here and there mark their passing: bits of clothing, pitiful scratchings on the walls of gigantic rooms with strange dimensions, the occasional heap of bones. Here and there the visitor may see a skull, such as the ones that washed up on the banks of the Hanover River during Fritz Haarman’s reign of terror in the early 1920s.

This is not a place where you want to get lost.

Let us pass through rooms and nooks and corridors and crannies, safe in the knowledge that we can return to the outside world, the sane antislippage world, anytime we want (and yet we are still uneasy as we pass down flights of stairs that seem all but endless and along corridors that dwindle to a point in the distance). We hear an eternal low humming and the faint clash of weird machinery. We hear the idiot whistle of a constant wind either outside or on the floors above and below us. Sometimes we hear a faint, houndly barking that is undoubtedly the abbalah’s devil dog, the one that did for poor old Mouse. Sometimes we hear the sardonic caw of a crow and understand that Gorg is here, too—somewhere.

We pass through rooms of ruin and rooms that are still furnished with a pale and rotten grandeur. Many of these are surely bigger than the whole house in which they hide. And eventually we come to a humble sitting room furnished with an elderly horsehair sofa and chairs of fading red velvet. There is a smell of noisome cooking in the air. (Somewhere close by is a kitchen we must never visit . . . not, that is, if we ever wish to sleep without nightmares again.) The electrical fixtures in here are at least seventy years old. How can that be, we ask, if Black House was built in the 1970s? The answer is simple: much of Black House
—most
of Black House—has been here much longer. The draperies in this room are heavy and faded. Except for the yellowed news clippings that have been taped to the ugly green wallpaper, it is a room that would not be out of place on the ground floor of the Nelson Hotel. It’s a place that is simultaneously sinister and oddly banal, a fitting mirror for the imagination of the old monster who has gone to earth here, who lies sleeping on the horsehair sofa with the front of his shirt turning a sinister red. Black House is not his, although in his pathological grandiosity he believes differently (and Mr. Munshun has not disabused him of this belief). This one room, however, is.

The clippings around him tell us all we need to know of Charles “Chummy” Burnside’s lethal fascinations.

YES, I ATE HER, FISH DECLARES:
New York Herald Tribune

BILLY GAFFNEY PLAYMATE AVERS “IT WAS THE GRAY MAN TOOK BILLY, IT WAS THE BOGEYMAN”:
New York
World Telegram

GRACE BUDD HORROR CONTINUES: FISH CONFESSES
!
:
Long Island Star

FISH ADMITS “ROASTING, EATING” WM GAFFNEY:
New York American

FRITZ HAARMAN, SO-CALLED “BUTCHER OF HANOVER,” EXECUTED FOR MURDER OF
24
:
New York
World

WEREWOLF DECLARES: “I WAS DRIVEN BY LOVE, NOT LUST.” HAARMAN DIES UNREPENTANT:
The Guardian

CANNIBAL OF HANOVER’S LAST LETTER: “YOU CANNOT KILL ME, I SHALL BE AMONG YOU FOR ETERNITY”:
New York
World

Wendell Green would
love
this stuff, would he not?

And there are more. God help us, there are so many more. Even Jeffrey Dahmer is here, declaring
I WANTED ZOMBIES.

The figure on the couch begins to groan and stir.

“Way-gup, Burny!”
This seems to come from thin air, not his mouth . . . although his lips move, like those of a second-rate ventriloquist.

Burny groans. His head turns to the left. “No . . . need to sleep. Everything . . . hurts.”

The head turns to the right in a gesture of negation and Mr. Munshun speaks again.
“Way-gup, dey vill be gummink. You must move der buuuoy.”

The head switches back the other way. Sleeping, Burny thinks Mr. Munshun is still safe inside his head. He has forgotten things are different here in Black House. Foolish Burny, now nearing the end of his usefulness! But not quite there yet.

“Can’t . . . lea’ me ’lone . . . stomach hurts . . . the blind man . . . fucking blind man hurt my stomach . . .”

But the head turns back the other way and the voice speaks again from the air beside Burny’s right ear. Burny fights it, not wanting to wake and face the full ferocious impact of the pain. The blind man has hurt him
much
worse than he thought at the time, in the heat of the moment. Burny insists to the nagging voice that the boy is safe where he is, that they’ll never find him even if they can gain access to Black House, that they will become lost in its unknown depth of rooms and hallways and wander until they first go mad and then die. Mr. Munshun, however, knows that one of them is different from any of the others who have happened on this place. Jack Sawyer is acquainted with the infinite, and that makes him a problem. The boy must be taken out the back way and into End-World, into the very shadow of Din-tah, the great furnace. Mr. Munshun tells Burny that he may still be able to have some of the boy before turning him over to the abbalah, but not here. Too dangerous. Sorry.

Burny continues to protest, but this is a battle he will not win, and we know it. Already the stale, cooked-meat air of the room has begun to shift and swirl as the owner of the voice arrives. We see first a whirlpool of black, then a splotch of red—an ascot—and then the beginnings of an impossibly long white face, which is dominated by a single black shark’s eye. This is the
real
Mr. Munshun, the creature who can only live in Burny’s head outside of Black House and its enchanted environs. Soon he will be entirely here, he will pull Burny into wakefulness (torture him into wakefulness, if necessary), and he will put Burny to use while there is still use to be gotten from him. For Mr. Munshun cannot move Ty from his cell in the Black House.

Once he is in End-World—Burny’s Sheol—things will be different.

At last Burny’s eyes open. His gnarled hands, which have spilled so much blood, now reach down to feel the dampness of his own blood seeping through his shirt. He looks, sees what has bloomed there, and lets out a scream of horror and cowardice. It does not strike him as just that, after murdering so many children, he should have been mortally wounded by a blind man; it strikes him as hideous, unfair.

For the first time he is visited by an
extremely
unpleasant idea: What if there’s more to pay for the things he has done over the course of his long career? He has seen End-World; he has seen Conger Road, which winds through it to Din-tah. The blasted, burning landscape surrounding Conger Road is like hell, and surely An-tak, the Big Combination, is hell itself. What if such a place waits for him? What if—

There’s a horrible, paralyzing pain in his guts. Mr. Munshun, now almost fully materialized, has reached out and twisted one smoky, not-quite-transparent hand in the wound Henry inflicted with his switchblade knife.

Burny squeals. Tears run down the old child-murderer’s cheeks.
“Don’t hurt me!”

“Zen do ass I zay.”

“I
can’t,
” Burny snivels. “I’m dying. Look at all the blood! Do you think I can get past something like this?
I’m eighty-five fucking years old!
”

“Duff brayyg, Burn-Burn . . . but dere are zose on z’osser zide who could hill you off your wunds.” Mr. Munshun, like Black House itself, is hard to look at. He shivers in and out of focus. Sometimes that hideously long face (it obscures most of his body, like the bloated head of a caricature on some newspaper’s op-ed page) has two eyes, sometimes just one. Sometimes there seem to be tufted snarls of orange hair leaping up from his distended skull, and sometimes Mr. Munshun appears to be as bald as Yul Brynner. Only the red lips and the fangy pointed teeth that lurk inside them remain fairly constant.

Burny eyes his accomplice with a degree of hope. His hands, meanwhile, continue to explore his stomach, which is now hard and bloated with lumps. He suspects the lumps are clots. Oh, that someone should have hurt him so badly! That wasn’t supposed to happen! That was
never
supposed to happen! He was supposed to be protected! He was supposed to—

“It iss not even peeyond ze realm of bossibility,” Mr. Munshun says, “zat ze yearz could be rawled avey vrum you jusst as ze stunn vas rawled avey from ze mouse of Cheezus Chrizze’s doom.”

“To be young again,” Burny says, and exhales a low, harsh sigh. His breath stinks of blood and spoilage. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“Of gorse! And soch zings are bossible,” Mr. Munshun says, nodding his grotesquely unstable face. “Soch gifts are ze abbalah’s to giff. But zey are not bromised, Charles, my liddle munching munchkin. But I
can
make you one bromise.”

The creature in the black evening suit and red ascot leaps forward with dreadful agility. His long-fingered hand darts again into Chummy Burnside’s shirt, this time clenches into a fist, and produces a pain beyond any the old monster has ever dreamed of in his own life . . . although he has inflicted this and more on the innocent.

Mr. Munshun’s reeking countenance pushes up to Burny’s. The single eye glares. “Do you feel dat, Burny? Do you, you mizz-er-a-ble old bag of dirt and zorrow? Ho-ho, ha-ha, of
gorse
you do! It iss your in
-des-
tines I haff in my hand! Und if you do not mooff now,
schweinhund,
I vill rip dem from your bledding body, ho-ho, ha-ha, und
vrap
dem arund your neg! You vill die knowing you are choking on your own
gudz
! A trick I learned from Fritz himzelf, Fritz Haarman, who vas so yunk und loff-ly! Now!
Vat
do you say? Vill you brink him, or vill you
choke
?”

“I’ll bring him!”
Burny screams.
“I’ll bring him, only stop, stop, you’re tearing me apart!”

“Brink him to ze station. Ze
station,
Burn-Burn. Dis one iz nodd for ze radhulls, de fogzhulls—not for ze Com-bin
-ay-
shun. No bledding foodzies for Dyler; he works for his abbalah vid
dis.
” A long finger tipped with a brutal black nail goes to the huge forehead and taps it above the eyes (for the moment Burny sees two of them, and then the second is once more gone). “Understand?”

“Yes! Yes!”
His guts are on fire. And still the hand in his shirt twists and twists.

The terrible highway of Mr. Munshun’s face hangs before him. “Ze
station—
where you brought the other sbecial ones.”

“YES!”

Mr. Munshun lets go. He steps back. Mercifully for Burny, he is beginning to grow insubstantial again, to discorporate. Yellowed clippings swim into view not behind him but
through
him. Yet the single eye hangs in the air above the paling blotch of the ascot.

“Mayg zure he vears za cab. Ziss one ezbeshully must wear za cab.”

Burnside nods eagerly. He still smells faintly of My Sin perfume. “The cap, yes, I have the cap.”

“Be gare-ful, Burny. You are old und hurt. Ze bouy is young und desberate. Flitt of foot. If you let him get avey—”

In spite of the pain, Burny smiles. One of the children getting away from
him
! Even one of the special ones! What an idea! “Don’t worry,” he says. “Just . . . if you speak to
him
.
.
.
to Abbalah-doon . . . tell him I’m not past it yet. If he makes me better, he won’t regret it. And if he makes me young again, I’ll bring him a thousand young. A thousand
Breakers.
”

Fading and fading. Now Mr. Munshun is again just a glow, a milky disturbance on the air of Burny’s sitting room deep in the house he abandoned only when he realized he really did need someone to take care of him in his sunset years.

“Bring him just dis
vun,
Burn-Burn. Bring him just dis vun, und you vill be revarded.”

Mr. Munshun is gone. Burny stands and bends over the horsehair sofa. Doing it squeezes his belly, and the resulting pain makes him scream, but he doesn’t stop. He reaches into the darkness and pulls out a battered black leather sack. He grasps its top and leaves the room, limping and clutching at his bleeding, distended belly.