Black House (78 page)

Jack blinks and sees a
thousand
stairways, some moving, bulging in and out. Doors stand open on galleries of paintings, galleries of sculpture, on whirling vortexes, on emptiness.

“What do we do now?” Dale asks bleakly. “What the hell do we do now?”

Ty has never seen Burny’s friend, but as he hangs from the shackle, he finds he can imagine him quite easily. In this world, Mr. Munshun is a real creature . . . but not a human being. Ty sees a shuffling, busy figure in a black suit and a flowing red tie bustling down Station House Road. This creature has a vast white face dominated by a red mouth and a single blurry eye. The abbalah’s emissary and chief deputy looks, in the gaze of Ty’s imagination, like Humpty-Dumpty gone bad. It wears a vest buttoned with bones.

Got to get out of here. Got to get that bag
.
.
.
but how?

He looks at Burny again. At the hideous tangle of Burny’s spilled guts. And suddenly the answer comes. He stretches his foot out again, but this time not toward the bag. He hooks the toe of his sneaker under a dirt-smeared loop of Burny’s intestines, instead. He lifts it, pivots, and then kicks softly. The loop of gut leaves the toe of his sneaker.

And loops over the leather bag.

So far, so good. Now if he can only drag it close enough to get his foot on it.

Trying not to think of the stocky, hurrying figure with the grotesquely long face, Ty gropes out with his foot again. He gets it under the dirty snarl of intestine and begins to pull, slowly and with infinite care.

“It’s impossible,” Beezer says flatly. “Nothing can be this big. You know that, don’t you?”

Jack takes a deep breath, lets it out, takes another, and speaks a single word in a low, firm voice.

“Dee
-yamber
?” Beez asks suspiciously. “What the hell’s dee
-yamber
?”

Jack doesn’t bother answering. From the vast dark cloud of droning bees hanging over the clearing (Dale’s cruiser is now nothing but a furry black-gold lump in front of the porch), a single bee emerges. It
—she,
for this is undoubtedly a queen bee—flies between Dale and Doc, pauses for a moment in front of Beezer, as if considering him (or considering the honey with which he has generously lathered himself), and then hovers in front of Jack. She is plump and aerodynamically unsound and ludicrous and somehow absolutely wonderful. Jack lifts a finger like a professor about to make a point or a bandleader about to deliver the downbeat. The bee lights on the end of it.

“Are you from her?” He asks this question in a low voice—too low for the others to hear, even Beezer, who is standing right next to him. Jack isn’t quite sure who he means. His mother? Laura DeLoessian? Judy? Sophie? Or is there some other She, a counterbalancing force to the Crimson King? This somehow feels right, but he supposes he’ll never know for sure.

In any case, the bee only looks at him with her wide black eyes, wings blurring. And Jack realizes that these are questions to which he needs no answer. He has been a sleepyhead, but now he’s up, he’s out of bed. This house is huge and deep, a place stacked with vileness and layered with secrets, but what of that? He has Ty’s prize bat, he has friends, he has
d’yamba,
and here is the Queen of the Bees. Those things are enough. He’s good to go. Better—perhaps best of all—he’s
glad
to go.

Jack raises the tip of his finger to his mouth and blows the bee gently into Black House’s foyer. She circles aimlessly for a moment, and then zips off to the left and through a door with an oddly bloated, obese shape.

“Come on,” Jack says. “We’re in business.”

The other three exchange uneasy glances, then follow him into what has clearly been their destiny all along.

It is impossible to say how long the Sawyer Gang spends in Black House, that hole which spewed the slippery stuff into French Landing and the surrounding towns. It is likewise impossible to say with any clarity what they see there. In a very real sense, touring Black House is like touring the brain of a deranged madman, and in such a mental framework we can expect to find no plan for the future or memory of the past. In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions. So it is not surprising that the things they see in Black House should fade from their minds almost as soon as they are gone from their eyes, leaving behind only vague whispers of unease that might be the distant cry of the opopanax. This amnesia is merciful.

The queen bee leads them, and the other bees follow in a swarm that discolors the air with its vastness and shivers through rooms that have been silent for centuries (for surely we understand—intuitively if not logically—that Black House existed long before Burny built its most recent node in French Landing). At one point the quartet descends a staircase of green glass. In the abyss below the steps, they see circling birds like vultures with the white, screaming faces of lost babies. In a long, narrow room like a Pullman car, living cartoons—two rabbits, a fox, and a stoned-looking frog wearing white gloves—sit around a table catching and eating what appear to be fleas. They are
cartoons,
1940s-era black-and-white
cartoons,
and it hurts Jack’s eyes to look at them because they are also real. The rabbit tips him a knowing wink as the Sawyer Gang goes by, and in the eye that doesn’t close Jack sees flat murder. There is an empty salon filled with voices shouting in some foreign language that sounds like French but isn’t. There is a room filled with vomitous green jungle and lit by a sizzling tropical sun. Hanging from one of the trees is a vast cocoon that appears to hold a baby dragon still wrapped in its own wings. “That can’t be a dragon,” Doc Amberson says in a weirdly reasonable voice. “They either come from eggs or the teeth of other dragons. Maybe both.” They walk down a long corridor that slowly rounds itself off, becomes a tunnel, and then drops them down a long and greasy slide as crazy percussion beats from unseen speakers. To Jack it sounds like Cozy Cole, or maybe Gene Krupa. The sides fall away, and for a moment they are sliding over a chasm that literally seems to have no bottom. “Steer with your hands and feet!” Beezer shouts. “If you don’t want to go over the side, STEER!” They are finally spilled off in what Dale calls the Dirt Room. They struggle over vast piles of filth-smelling earth under a rusty tin ceiling festooned with bare light bulbs. Platoons of tiny greenish-white spiders school back and forth like fish. By the time they reach the far side, they’re all panting and out of breath, their shoes muddy, their clothes filthy. There are three doors here. Their leader is buzzing and doing Immelmann turns in front of the one in the middle. “No way,” Dale says. “I want to trade for what’s behind the curtain.”

Jack tells him he’s got a future in stand-up comedy, no doubt about it, and then opens the door the bee has chosen for them. Behind it is a huge automated laundry, which Beezer immediately dubs the Hall of Cleanliness. Bunched together, they follow the bee down a humid corridor lined with sudsing washers and humming, shuddering dryers. The air smells like baked bread. The washers—each with a single glaring portholed eye—are stacked up to a height of fifty feet or more. Above them, in an ocean of dusty air, pigeons flock in restless currents. Every now and then they pass piles of bones, or some other sign that human beings came (or were brought) this way. In a hallway they find a scooter overgrown with cobwebs. Farther on, a pair of girl’s in-line skates, thick with dust. In a vast library room, the word
LAUGH
has been formed with human bones on a mahogany table. In a richly appointed (if obviously neglected) parlor through which the bee leads them in a no-nonsense straight line, Dale and Doc observe that the art on one wall appears to consist of human faces that have been cut off, cured, and then stretched on squares of wood. Huge bewildered eyes have been painted into the empty sockets. Dale thinks he recognizes at least one of the faces: Milton Wanderly, a schoolteacher who dropped out of sight three or four years back. Everyone had assumed that Don Wanderly’s kid brother had simply left town.
Well,
Dale thinks,
he left, all right.
Halfway down a stone-throated corridor lined with cells, the bee darts into a squalid little chamber and circles above a ragged futon. At first none of them speak. They don’t need to. Ty was here, and not that long ago. They can almost smell him—his fear. Then Beezer turns to Jack. The blue eyes above the lush red-brown beard are narrowed in fury.

“The old bastard burned him with something. Or zapped him.”

Jack nods. He can smell that, too, although whether he does so with his nose or his mind he neither knows nor cares. “Burnside won’t be zapping anyone else,” he says.

The queen bee zips between them and whirls impatiently in the corridor. To the left, back the way they came, the corridor is black with bees. They turn to the right instead, and soon the bee is leading them down another seemingly endless stairway. At one point they walk through a brief, drippy drizzle—somewhere above this part of the stairs, a pipe in Black House’s unimaginable guts has perhaps let go. Half a dozen of the risers are wet, and they all see tracks there. They’re too blurry to do a forensics team much good (both Jack and Dale have the same thought), but the Sawyer Gang is encouraged: there’s a big set and a little set, and both sets are relatively fresh. Now they are getting somewhere, by God! They begin to move faster, and behind them the bees descend in a vast humming cloud, like some plague out of the Old Testament.

Time may have ceased to exist for the Sawyer Gang, but for Ty Marshall it has become an agonizing presence. He can’t be sure if his sense of Mr. Munshun’s approach is imagination or precognition, but he’s terribly afraid it’s the latter. He has to get out of this shed,
has
to, but the damned bag keeps eluding him. He managed to pull it close to him with the loop of intestines; ironically, that was the easy part. The hard part is actually getting
hold
of the damned thing.

He can’t reach it; no matter how he stretches or how cruelly he tests his left shoulder and shackled left wrist, he comes up at least two feet short. Tears of pain roll down his cheeks. Any moisture lost that way is quickly replaced by the sweat that runs stinging into his eyes from his greasy forehead.

“Foot it,” he says. “Just like soccer.” He looks at the disfigured sprawl in the doorway—his erstwhile tormentor. “Just like soccer, right, Burn-Burn?”

He gets the side of his foot against the bag, pushes it to the wall, and then begins to slide it up the bloodstained wood. At the same time he reaches down . . . now fourteen inches . . . now only a foot . . . reaching . . .

. . . and the leather bag tumbles off the toe of his sneaker and onto the dirt. Plop.

“You’re watching out for him, aren’t you, Burny?” Ty pants. “You have to, you know, my back’s turned. You’re the lookout, right? You’re—
Fuck!
” This time the bag has tumbled off his foot before he can even begin to raise it. Ty slams his free hand against the wall.

Why do you do that?
a voice inquires coolly. This is the one who sounds like his mother but
isn’t
his mother, not quite.
Will that help you?

“No,” Ty says resentfully, “but it makes me feel better.”

Getting free will make you feel better. Now try again.

Ty once more rolls the leather bag against the wall. He presses his foot against it, feeling for anything else that might be inside—a key, for instance—but he can’t tell. Not through his sneaker. He begins to slide the bag up the wall again. Carefully . . . not too fast . . . like footing the ball toward the goal . . .

“Don’t let him in, Burny,” he pants to the dead man behind him. “You owe me that. I don’t want to go on the mono. I don’t want to go to End-World. And I don’t want to be a Breaker. Whatever it is, I don’t want to be it. I want to be an explorer . . . maybe underwater, like Jacques Cousteau . . . or a flier in the Air Force . . . or maybe
.
.
.
FUCK!
” This time it’s not irritation when the bag falls off his foot but rage and near panic.

Mr. Munshun, hustling and bustling. Getting closer. Meaning to take him away.
Din-tah. Abbalah-doon.
For ever and ever.

“Damn old key’s probably not in there, anyway.” His voice wavering, close to a sob. “Is it, Burny?”

“Chummy” Burnside offers no opinion.

“I bet there’s nothing in there at all. Except maybe . . . I don’t know . . . a roll of Tums, or something. Eating people’s
got
to give you indigestion.”

Nonetheless, Ty captures the bag with his foot again, and again begins the laborious job of sliding it up the wall far enough so that perhaps his stretching fingers can grasp it.

Dale Gilbertson has lived in the Coulee Country his entire life, and he’s used to greenery. To him trees and lawns and fields that roll all the way to the horizon are the norm. Perhaps this is why he looks at the charred and smoking lands that surround Conger Road with such distaste and growing dismay.

“What
is
this place?” he asks Jack. The words come out in little puffs. The Sawyer Gang has no golf cart and must hoof it. In fact, Jack has set a pace quite a bit faster than Ty drove the E-Z-Go.

“I don’t exactly know,” Jack says. “I saw a place
like
it a long time ago. It was called the Blasted Lands. It—”

A greenish man with plated skin suddenly leaps at them from behind a tumble of huge boulders. In one hand he holds a stumpy whip—what Jack believes is actually called a quirt.
“Bahhrrr!”
this apparition cries, sounding weirdly like Richard Sloat when Richard laughs.

Jack raises Ty’s bat and looks at the apparition questioningly
—Did you want some of this?
Apparently the apparition does not. It stands where it is for a moment, then turns and flees. As it disappears back into the maze of boulders, Jack sees that twisted thorns grow in a ragged line down both of its Achilles tendons.