Black House

by Stephen King

  But he goes. God help him, he does.

  “Mister?” he calls when he reaches the open door. “Hey, mister, I think you got the wrong room. That’s Mr. Potter’s room. Don’t you—”

  He stops. No sense talking, because the room is empty. How is that possible?

  Andy steps back and tries the knobs of 312 and 313. Both locked up tight, as he knew they would be. With that ascertained, he steps into George Potter’s room and has a good look around—curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. Potter’s digs are a little larger than his, but otherwise not much different: it’s a box with a high ceiling (they made places a man could stand up in back in the old days, you had to say that much for them). The single bed is sagging in the middle but neatly made. On the night table is a bottle of pills (these turn out to be an antidepressant called Zoloft) and a single framed picture of a woman. Andy thinks she took a pretty good whopping with the ugly stick, but Potter must see her differently. He has, after all, put the picture in a place where it’s the first thing he looks at in the morning and the last thing he sees at night.

  “Potter?” Andy asks. “Anyone? Hello?”

  He is suddenly overcome with a sense of someone standing behind him and whirls around, lips drawn back from his dentures in a grinning snarl that is half a cringe. One hand comes up to shield his face from the blow he is suddenly certain will fall … only there’s no one there. Is he lurking behind the corner at the end of this short addendum to the main corridor? No. Andy saw the stranger go scurrying around that corner. No way he could have gotten behind him again … unless he crawled along the ceiling like some kind of fly …

  Andy looks up there, knowing he’s being absurd, giving in to the whim-whams big time, but there’s no one here to see him, so what the hey? And nothing for him to see overhead, either. Just an ordinary tin ceiling, now yellowed by age and decades of cigar and cigarette smoke.

  The radio—oh, excuse me all to hell, rah-dio—is sitting on the windowsill, unmolested. Damn fine one, too, a Bose, the kind Paul Harvey always talks about on his noon show.

  Beyond it, on the other side of the dirty glass, is the fire escape.

  Ah-hah! Andy thinks, and hurries across to the window. One look at the turned thumb lock and his triumphant expression fades. He peers out just the same, and sees a short stretch of wet black iron descending into the fog. No blue robe, no scaly bald pate. Of course not. The knob shaker didn’t go out that way unless he had some magic trick to move the window’s inside thumb lock back into place once he was on the fire escape landing.

  Andy turns, stands where he is a moment, thinking, then drops to his knees and looks under the bed. What he sees is an old tin ashtray with an unopened pack of Pall Malls and a Kingsland Old-Time Lager disposable lighter in it. Nothing else except dust kittens. He puts his hand on the coverlet preparatory to standing up, and his eyes fix on the closet door. It’s standing ajar.

  “There,” Andy breathes, almost too low for his own ears to hear.

  He gets up and crosses to the closet door. The fog may or may not come in on little cat feet, as Carl Sandburg said, but that is certainly how Andy Railsback moves across George Potter’s room. His heart is beating hard again, hard enough to start the prominent vein in the center of his forehead pulsing. The man he saw is in the closet. Logic demands it. Intuition screams it. And if the doorknob shaker’s just a confused old soul who wandered into the Nelson Hotel out of the fog, why hasn’t he spoken to Andy? Why has he concealed himself? Because he may be old but he’s not confused, that’s why. No more confused than Andy is himself. The doorknob shaker’s a fucking thief, and he’s in the closet. He’s maybe holding a knife that he has taken from the pocket of his tatty old robe. Maybe a coat hanger that he’s unwound and turned into a weapon. Maybe he’s just standing there in the dark, eyes wide, fingers hooked into claws. Andy no longer cares. You can scare him, you bet—he’s a retired salesman, not Superman—but if you load enough tension on top of fright you turn it into anger, same as enough pressure turns coal into a diamond. And right now Andy is more pissed off than scared. He closes his fingers around the cool glass knob of the closet door. He squeezes down on it. He takes one breath … a second … steeling himself, getting ready … psyching himself up, the grandkids would say … one more breath, just for good luck, and …

  With a low, stressful sound—half growl and half howl—Andy yanks the closet door wide, setting off a chatter of hangers. He crouches, hands up in fists, looking like some ancient sparring partner from the Gym Time Forgot.

  “Come outta there, you fucking—”

  No one there. Four shirts, one jacket, two ties, and three pairs of pants hanging like dead skin. A battered old suitcase that looks as if it has been kicked through every Greyhound Bus terminal in North America. Nothing else. Not a goddamn th—

  But there is. There’s something on the floor beneath the shirts. Several somethings. Almost half a dozen somethings. At first Andy Railsback either doesn’t understand what he’s seeing or doesn’t want to understand. Then it gets through to him, imprints itself on his mind and memory like a hoofprint, and he tries to scream. He can’t. He tries again and nothing comes out but a rusty wheeze from lungs that feel no larger than old prune skins. He tries to turn around and can’t do that, either. He is sure George Potter is coming, and if Potter finds him here, Andy’s life will end. He has seen something George Potter can never allow him to talk about. But he can’t turn. Can’t scream. Can’t take his eyes from the secret in George Potter’s closet.

  Can’t move.

  Because of the fog, nearly full dark has arrived in French Landing unnaturally early; it’s barely six-thirty. The blurry yellow lights of Maxton Elder Care look like the lights of a cruise ship lying becalmed at sea. In Daisy wing, home of the wonderful Alice Weathers and the far less wonderful Charles Burnside, Pete Wexler and Butch Yerxa have both gone home for the day. A broad-shouldered, peroxide blonde named Vera Hutchinson is now on the desk. In front of her is a book entitled E-Z Minute Crosswords. She is currently puzzling over 6 Across: Garfield, for example. Six letters, first is F, third is L, sixth is E. She hates these tricky ones.

  There’s the swoosh of a bathroom door opening. She looks up and sees Charles Burnside come shuffling out of the men’s in his blue robe and a pair of yellow-and-black striped slippers that look like great fuzzy bumblebees. She recognizes them at once.

  “Charlie?” she asks, putting her pencil in her crossword book and closing it.

  Charlie just goes shuffling along, jaw hanging down, a long runner of drool also hanging down. But he has an unpleasant half grin on his face that Vera doesn’t care for. This one may have lost most of his marbles, but the few left in his head are mean marbles. Sometimes she knows that Charlie Burnside genuinely doesn’t hear her when she speaks (or doesn’t understand her), but she’s positive that sometimes he just pretends not to understand. She has an idea this is one of the latter times.

  “Charlie, what are you doing wearing Elmer’s bee slippers? You know his great-granddaughter gave those to him.”

  The old man—Burny to us, Charlie to Vera—just goes shuffling along, in a direction that will eventually take him back to D18. Assuming he stays on course, that is.

  “Charlie, stop.”

  Charlie stops. He stands at the head of Daisy’s corridor like a machine that has been turned off. His jaw hangs. The string of drool snaps, and all at once there’s a little wet spot on the linoleum beside one of those absurd but amusing slippers.

  Vera gets up, goes to him, kneels down before him. If she knew what we know, she’d probably be a lot less willing to put her defenseless white neck within reach of those hanging hands, which are twisted by arthritis but still powerful. But of course she does not.

  She grasps the left bee slipper. “Lift,” she says.

  Charles Burnside lifts his right foot.

  “Oh, quit being such a turkey,” she says. “Other one.”

  Bu
rny lifts his left foot a little, just enough for her to get the slipper off.

  “Now the right one.”

  Unseen by Vera, who is looking at his feet, Burny pulls his penis from the fly of his loose pajama pants and pretends to piss on Vera’s bowed head. His grin widens. At the same time, he lifts his right foot and she removes the other slipper. When she looks back up, Burny’s wrinkled old tool is back where it belongs. He considered baptizing her, he really did, but he has created almost enough mischief for one evening. One more little chore and he’ll be off to the land of dreamy dreams. He’s an old monster now. He needs his rest.

  “All right,” Vera says. “Want to tell me why one of these is dirtier than the other?” No answer. She hasn’t really expected one. “Okay, beautiful. Back to your room or down to the common room, if you want. There’s microwave popcorn and Jell-O pops tonight, I think. They’re showing The Sound of Music. I’ll see that these slippers get back to where they belong, and you taking them will be our little secret. Take them again and I’ll have to report you, though. Capisce?”

  Burny just stands there, vacant … but with that nasty little grin lifting his wrinkled old chops. And that light in his eyes. He capisces, all right.

  “Go on,” Vera says. “And you better not have dropped a load on the floor in there, you old buzzard.”

  Again she expects no reply, but this time she gets one. Burny’s voice is low but perfectly clear. “Keep a civil tongue, you fat bitch, or I’ll eat it right out of your head.”

  She recoils as if slapped. Burny stands there with his hands dangling and that little grin on his face.

  “Get out of here,” she says. “Or I really will report you.” And a great lot of good that would do. Charlie is one of Maxton’s cash cows, and Vera knows it.

  Charlie recommences his slow walk (Pete Wexler has dubbed this particular gait the Old Fucks’ Shuffle), now in his bare feet. Then he turns back. The bleary lamps of his eyes regard her. “The word you’re looking for is feline. Garfield’s a feline. Got it? Stupid cow.”

  With that he continues his trip down the corridor. Vera stands where she is, looking at him with her own jaw hanging. She has forgotten all about her crossword puzzle.

  In his room, Burny lies down on his bed and slips his hands into the small of his back. From there down he aches like a bugger. Later he will buzz for the fat old bitch, get her to bring him an ibuprofen. For now, though, he has to stay sharp. One more little trick still to do.

  “Found you, Potter,” he murmurs. “Good … old … Potsie.”

  Burny hadn’t been shaking doorknobs at all (not that Andy Railsback will ever know this). He had been feeling for the fellow who diddled him out of a sweet little Chicago housing deal back in the late seventies. South Side, home of the White Sox. Blacktown, in other words. Lots of federal money in that one, and several bushels of Illinois dough as well. Enough skim available to last for years, more angles than on a baseball field, but George “Go Fuck Your Mother” Potter had gotten there first, cash had changed hands beneath the proverbial table, and Charles Burnside (or perhaps then he’d still been Carl Bierstone; it’s hard to remember) had been out in the cold.

  But Burny has kept track of the thief for lo these many years. (Well, not Burny himself, actually, but as we must by now have realized, this is a man with powerful friends.) Old Potsie—what his friends called him in the days when he still had a few—declared bankruptcy in La Riviere back in the nineties, and lost most of what he still had hidden away during the Great Dot-Com Wreck of Double Aught. But that’s not good enough for Burny. Potsie requires further punishment, and the coincidence of that particular fuckhead washing up in this particular fuckhole of a town is just too good to pass up. Burny’s principal motive—a brainless desire to keep stirring the pot, to make sure bad goes to worse—hasn’t changed, but this will serve that purpose, too.

  So he traveled to the Nelson, doing so in a way Jack understands and Judy Marshall has intuited, homing in on Potsie’s room like some ancient bat. And when he sensed Andy Railsback behind him, he was of course delighted. Railsback will save him having to make another anonymous call, and Burny is, in truth, getting tired of doing all their work for them.

  Now, back in his room, all comfy-cozy (except for the arthritis, that is), he turns his mind away from George Potter, and begins to Summon.

  Looking up into the dark, Charles Burnside’s eyes begin to glow in a distinctly unsettling way. “Gorg,” he says. “Gorg t’eelee. Dinnit a abbalah. Samman Tansy. Samman a montah a Irma. Dinnit a abbalah, Gorg. Dinnit a Ram Abbalah.”

  Gorg. Gorg, come. Serve the abbalah. Find Tansy. Find the mother of Irma. Serve the abbalah, Gorg.

  Serve the Crimson King.

  Burny’s eyes slip closed. He goes to sleep with a smile on his face. And beneath their wrinkled lids, his eyes continue to glow like hooded lamps.

  Morty Fine, the night manager of the Nelson Hotel, is half-asleep over his magazine when Andy Railsback comes bursting in, startling him so badly that Morty almost tumbles out of his chair. His magazine falls to the floor with a flat slap.

  “Jesus Christ, Andy, you almost gave me a heart attack!” Morty cries. “You ever hear of knocking, or at least clearing your goddam throat?”

  Andy takes no notice, and Morty realizes the old fella is as white as a sheet. Maybe he’s the one having the heart attack. It wouldn’t be the first time one occurred in the Nelson.

  “You gotta call the police,” Andy says. “They’re horrible. Dear Jesus, Morty, they’re the most horrible pictures I ever saw … Polaroids … and oh man, I thought he was going to come back in … come back in any second … but at first I was just froze, and I … I …”

  “Slow down,” Morty says, concerned. “What are you talking about?”

  Andy takes a deep breath and makes a visible effort to get himself under control. “Have you seen Potter?” he asks. “The guy in 314?”

  “Nope,” Morty says, “but most nights he’s in Lucky’s around this time, having a few beers and maybe a hamburger. Although why anybody would eat anything in that place, I don’t know.” Then, perhaps associating one ptomaine palace with another: “Hey, have you heard what the cops found out at Ed’s Eats? Trevor Gordon was by and he said—”

  “Never mind.” Andy sits in the chair on the other side of the desk and stares at Morty with wet, terrified eyes. “Call the police. Do it right now. Tell them that the Fisherman is a man named George Potter, and he lives on the third floor of the Nelson Hotel.” Andy’s face tightens in a hard grimace, then relaxes again. “Right down the hall from yours truly.”

  “Potter? You’re dreaming, Andy. That guy’s nothing but a retired builder. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I don’t know about flies, but he hurt the hell out of some little kids. I seen the Polaroids he took of them. They’re in his closet. They’re the worst things you ever saw.”

  Then Andy does something that amazes Morty and convinces him that this isn’t a joke, and probably not just a mistake, either: Andy Railsback begins to cry.

  Tansy Freneau, a.k.a. Irma Freneau’s grieving mother, is not actually grieving yet. She knows she should be, but grief has been deferred. Right now she feels as if she is floating in a cloud of warm bright wool. The doctor (Pat Skarda’s associate, Norma Whitestone) gave her five milligrams of lorazepam four or five hours ago, but that’s only the start. The Holiday Trailer Park, where Tansy and Irma have lived since Cubby Freneau took off for Green Bay in ninety-eight, is handy to the Sand Bar, and she has a part-time “thing” going with Lester Moon, one of the bartenders. The Thunder Five has dubbed Lester Moon “Stinky Cheese” for some reason, but Tansy unfailingly calls him Lester, which he appreciates almost as much as the occasional boozy grapple in Tansy’s bedroom or out back of the Bar, where there’s a mattress (and a black light) in the storeroom. Around five this evening, Lester ran over with a quart of coffee brandy and four hundred milligrams of OxyContin, all considerately crushed and
ready for snorting. Tansy has done half a dozen lines already, and she is cruising. Looking over old pictures of Irma and just … you know … cruising.

  What a pretty baby she was, Tansy thinks, unaware that not far away, a horrified hotel clerk is looking at a very different picture of her pretty baby, a nightmare Polaroid he will never be able to forget. It is a picture Tansy herself will never have to look at, suggesting that perhaps there is a God in heaven.

  She turns a page (GOLDEN MEMORIES has been stamped on the front of her scrapbook), and here are Tansy and Irma at the Mississippi Electrix company picnic, back when Irma was four and Mississippi Electrix was still a year away from bankruptcy and everything was more or less all right. In the photo, Irma is wading with a bunch of other tykes, her laughing face smeared with chocolate ice cream.

  Looking fixedly at this snapshot, Tansy reaches for her glass of coffee brandy and takes a small sip. And suddenly, from nowhere (or the place from which all our more ominous and unconnected thoughts float out into the light of our regard), she finds herself remembering that stupid Edgar Allan Poe poem they had to memorize in the ninth grade. She hasn’t thought of it in years and has no reason to now, but the words of the opening stanza rise effortlessly and perfectly in her mind. Looking at Irma, she recites them aloud in a toneless, pauseless voice that no doubt would have caused Mrs. Normandie to clutch her stringy white hair and groan. Tansy’s recitation doesn’t affect us that way; instead it gives us a deep and abiding chill. It is like listening to a poetry reading given by a corpse.

  “Once upon a mih’nigh’ dreary while I ponnered weak ’n’ weary over many a quaint ’n’ curris volume of forgotten lore while I nodded nearly nappin’ sun’ly there came a tappin’ as of someone gen’ly rappin’ rappin’ at my chamber door—”

  At this precise moment there comes a soft rapping at the cheap fiberboard door of Tansy Freneau’s Airstream. She looks up, eyes floating, lips pursed and glossed with coffee brandy.