Black House (79 page)

“They don’t like Wonderboy,” Beezer says, looking appreciatively at the bat. It
is
still a bat, just as the 9mm’s and .357 Rugers are still pistols and
they
are still
they:
Jack, Dale, Beezer, Doc. And Jack decides he isn’t much surprised by that. Parkus
told
him that this wasn’t about Twinners, told him that during their palaver near the hospital tent. This place may be adjacent to the Territories, but it’s
not
the Territories. Jack had forgotten that.

Well, yes—but I’ve had a few other things on my mind.

“I don’t know if you boys have taken a close look at the wall on the far side of this charming country lane,” Doc says, “but those large white stones actually appear to be skulls.”

Beezer gives the wall of skulls a cursory glance, then looks ahead again. “What worries me is
that
thing,” he says. Over the broken teeth of the horizon rises a great complication of steel, glass, and machinery. It disappears into the clouds. They can see the tiny figures who surge and struggle there, can hear the crack of the whips. From this distance they sound like the pop of .22 rifles. “What’s that, Jack?”

Jack’s first thought is that he’s looking at the Crimson King’s Breakers, but no—there are too many of them. Yonder building is some sort of factory or power plant, powered by slaves. By children not talented enough to
qualify
as Breakers. A vast outrage rises in his heart. As if sensing it, the drone of t`e bees grows louder behind him.

Speedq’s voice, whispering in his head:
Save your anger, Jack—your first jgb is that little `oy. And time has grown very, very short.

“Oh Christ,” Dale says, and points. “Is that what I think it is/”

The gibbet hangs like a skeleton over the slanting road.

Doc says, “If you’re thinking gallows, I believe you win the stainless steel flatware and get to go on to the next round.”

“Look ad all the shoes,” Dale says. “Why would they pile the shoes up like that?”

“God knowc,” Beezer says. “Just the custom of the country, I guess. How close are we, Jack? Do you have any idea at all?”

Jack looks at the road ahead of them, then at the road leading away to the left, the one with the ancient gallows on its corner. “Close,” he says. “I think we’re—”

Then, from ahead of them, the shrieks begin. They are the cries of a child who has been pushed to the edge of madness. Or perhaps over it.

Ty Marshall can hear the approaching drone of the bees but believes it is only in his head, that it is no more than the sound of his own growing anxiety. He doesn’t know how many times he’s tried to slide Burny’s leather bag up the side of the shed; he’s lost count. It does not occur to him that removing the odd cap—the one that looks like cloth and feels like metal—might improve his coordination, for he’s forgotten all about the cap. All he knows is that he’s tired and sweating and trembling, probably in shock, and if he doesn’t manage to snag the bag this time, he’ll probably just give up.

I’d probably go with Mr. Munshun if he just promised me a glass of water,
Ty thinks. But he
does
have Judy’s toughness bred in his bones, and some of Sophie’s regal insistence, as well. And, ignoring the ache in his thigh, he again begins sliding the bag up the wall, at the same time stretching down with his right hand.

Ten anches . . . eight . . . the closest he’s gotten so far . . .

The bag slips do the left. It’s going to fall off his foot. Again.

“
,No,
”
Ty says softly. “Not this time.”

He presses his snaaker harder against the wood, then begins to raise it again.

Shx inches . . . four inches . . . three and the bag starts to tilt farther and farther to the left,
it’s going to fall off—

“No!”
Ty yells, and bends forward in a strenuous bow. His back creaks. So does his tortured left shoulder. But his fingers graze across the bag . . . and then snag it. He brings it toward him and then damned near drops it after all!

“No way, Burny,” he pants, first juggling the leather sack and then clutching it against his chest. “You don’t fool me with
that
old trick, no way in
hell
do you fool me with that one.” He bites the corner of the bag with his teeth. The stink of it is awful, rotten—eau de Burnside. He ignores it and pulls the bag open. At first he thinks it’s empty, and lets out a low, sobbing cry. Then he sees a single silver gleam. Crying through his clenched teeth, Ty reaches into the dangling bag with his right hand and brings the key out.

Can’t drop it,
he thinks.
If I drop it, I’ll lose my mind. I really will.

He doesn’t drop it. He raises it above his head, sticks it in the little hole on the side of the cuff holding his left wrist, and turns it. The cuff springs open.

Slowly, slowly, Ty draws his hand through the shackle. The handcuffs fall to the shed’s dirt floor. As he stands there, a queerly persuasive idea occurs to Ty: he’s really still back in Black House, asleep on the ragged futon with the slop bucket in one corner of his cell and the dish of reheated Dinty Moore beef stew in the other. This is just his exhausted mind giving him a little hope. A last vacation before he goes into the stewpot himself.

From outside comes the clank of the Big Combination and the screams of the children who march, march, march on their bleeding footsies, running it. Somewhere is Mr. Munshun, who wants to take him someplace even worse than this.

It’s no dream. Ty doesn’t know where he’ll go from here or how he’ll ever get back to his own world, but the first step is getting out of this shed and this general vicinity. Moving on trembling legs, like an accident victim getting out of bed for the first time after a long stay, Ty Marshall steps over Burny’s sprawled corpse and out of the shed. The day is overcast, the landscape sterile, and even here that rickety skyscraper of pain and toil dominates the view, but still Ty feels an immense gladness just to be in the light again. To be
free.
It is not until he stands with the shed behind him that he truly realizes how completely he expected to die there. For a moment Ty closes his eyes and turns his face up to the gray sky. Thus he never sees the figure that has been standing to one side of the shed, prudently waiting to make sure Ty is still wearing the cap when he comes out. Once he’s sure he is, Lord Malshun—this is as close to his real name as we can come—steps forward. His grotesque face is like the bowl of a huge serving spoon upholstered in skin. The one eye bulges freakishly. The red lips grin. When he drops his arms around the boy, Ty begins to shriek—not just in fear and surprise, but in
outrage.
He has worked so hard to be free, so dreadfully hard.

“Hush,” Lord Malshun whispers, and when Ty continues to loose his wild screams (on the upper levels of the Big Combination, some of the children turn toward those cries until the brutish ogres who serve as foremen whip them back to business), the abbala`’q lord speaks again, a sifgle word in the Dark Speech.
“Pnung.”

Ty goes limp. Had Lord Malshun not been hugging him from behind, he would have fallen. Guttural moans of protest continue to issue from the child’s drooling, slack mouth, but the screams have ceased. Lord Malshtn cocks hic long, spoon-shaped face toward the Big Combination, and grins. Life is good! Then he peers into the shed—briefly, but with great interest.

“Did for him,” Lord Malshun says. “And with the cap on, too. Amazing boy! The King wants to meet you in person before you go to Din-tah, you know. He may give you cake and coffee. Imagine, young Tyler! Cake and coffee with the abbalah! Cake and coffee with the King!”

“. . . don’t want go . . . want to go home . . . my maaaa . . .” These words spill out loose and low, like blood from a mortal wound.

Lord Malshun draws a finger across Ty’s lips, and they press together behind his touch. “Hush,” says the abbalah’s talent scout again. “Few things in life are more annoying than a noisy traveling companion. And we have a long trip ahead of us. Far from your home and friends and family . . . ah, but don’t cry.” For Malshun has observed the tears that have begun to leak from the corners of the limp boy’s eyes and roll down the planes of his cheeks. “Don’t cry, little Ty. You’ll make new friends. The Chief Breaker, for instance. All the boys like the Chief Breaker. His name is Mr. Brautigan. Perhaps he’ll tell you tales of his many escapes. How funny they are! Perfectly
killing
! And now we must go! Cake and coffee with the King! Hold that thought!”

Lord Malshun is stout and rather bowlegged (his legs are, in fact, a good deal shorter than his grotesquely long face), but he is strong. He tucks Ty under his arm as if the boy weighed no more than two or three sheets bundled together. He looks back at Burny one last time, without much regret—there’s a young fellow in upstate New York who shows great promise, and Burny was pretty well played out, anyway.

Lord Malshun cocks his head sideways and utters his almost soundless chuffing laugh. Then he sets out, not neglecting to give the boy’s cap a good hard yank. The boy is not just a Breaker; he’s perhaps the most powerful one to ever live. Luckily, he doesn’t realize his own powers yet. Probably nothing would happen if the cap
did
fall off, yet it’s best not to take chances.

Bustling—even humming a bit under his breath—Lord Malshun reaches the end of the draw, turns left onto Conger Road for the half-mile stroll back to Station House Road, and stops dead in his tracks. Standing in his way are four men from what Lord Malshun thinks of as Ter-tah. This is a slang term, and not a flattering one. In the Book of Good Farming, Ter is that period of Full-Earth in which breeding stock is serviced. Lord Malshun sees the world beyond the front door of Black House as a kind of vast
caldo largo,
a living soup into which he may dip his ladle—always on the abbalah’s behalf, of course!—whenever he likes.

Four men from the Ter? Malshun’s lip twists in contempt, causing upheavals all along the length of his face. What are they doing here? Whatever can they hope to
accomplish
here?

The smile begins to falter when he sees the stick one of them carries. It’s glowing with a shifting light that is many colors but somehow always white at its core. A blinding light. Lord Malshun knows only one thing that has ever glowed with such light and that is the Globe of Forever, known by at least one small, wandering boy as the Talisman. That boy once touched it, and as Laura DeLoessian could have told him—as Jack himself now knows—the touch of the Talisman never completely fades.

The smile drops away entirely when Lord Malshun realizes that the man with the club
was that boy.
He has come again to annoy them, but if he thinks he will take back the prize of prizes, he’s quite mistaken. It’s only a stick, after all, not the Globe itself; perhaps a little of the Globe’s residual power still lives within the man, but surely not much. Surely there can be no more than dust, after all the intervening years.

And dust is what my life would be worth if I let them take this boy from me,
Lord Malshun thinks.
I must—

His single eye is drawn to the black thunderhead hanging behind the men from the Ter. It gives off a vast, sleepy drone. Bees? Bees with stingers? Bees with stingers between him and Station House Road?

Well, he will deal with them. In time. First is the business of these annoying men.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Lord Malshun says in his most pleasant voice. The bogus German accent is gone; now he sounds like a bogus English aristocrat in a West End stage comedy from the 1950s. Or perhaps the World War II Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. “It’s wonderful that you should come so far to visit, perfectly
wonderful,
and on such a rotten day, too. Yet I’m afraid most days
are
rotten here, the Dins of End-World were simply
made
for the pathetic fallacy, you know, and—dash it all—I can’t stay. I’m afraid these are time-delivery goods, here.”

Lord Malshun raises Ty and shakes him. Although Ty’s eyes are open and he’s obviously aware, his arms and legs flop as bonelessly as those of a rag doll.

“Put him down, Munshun,” says the one with the club, and Lord Malshun realizes with growing dismay that he
could
have trouble with this one. He really could. Yet his smile widens, exposing the full, ghoulish range of his teeth. They are pointed and tip inward. Anything bitten by them would tear itself to shreds trying to pull free of that bony trap.

“Munshun?
Munshun?
No one here by that name. Or Mr. Monday either, for that matter. All gone, cheerio, ta-ta, toodle-oo. As for putting down the lad, couldn’t do that, dear boy, simply
couldn’t.
I’ve made commitments, you know. And really, you fellows should count yourselves fortunate. Your local reign of terror is over! Huzzah! The Fisherman is dead—dispatched by this boy right here, in fact, this perfectly admirable boy.” He gives Ty another shake, always being careful to keep the head raised. Wouldn’t want that cap falling off, oh no.

The bees trouble him.

Who has sent the bees?

“The boy’s mother is in an insane asylum,” says the man with the stick. That stick is glowing more fiercely than ever, Lord Malshun realizes with deepening fear. He now feels
very
afraid, and with fear comes anger. Is it possible they could take him? Really take the boy? “She’s in an asylum, and she wants her son back.”

If so, it’s a corpse they’ll have for their trouble.

Afraid or not, Lord Malshun’s grin widens even further. (Dale Gilbertson has a sudden, nightmarish vision: William F. Buckley, Jr., with one eye and a face five feet long.) He lifts Ty’s limp body close to his mouth and bites a series of needly little nips in the air less than an inch from the exposed neck.

“Have her husband stick his prick in her and make another ’un, old son—I’m sure he can do it. They live in Ter-tah, after all. Women get pregnant in Ter-tah just walking down the street.”

One of the bearded men says, “She’s partial to this one.”