Black House

by Stephen King

  Potter doesn’t reply, just sits looking at his hands. But he nods. He’s old, he’s sick and getting sicker, but he’s four counties over from stupid.

  “The person who led Railsback was almost certainly the same person who left the Polaroids of the dead children in your closet.”

  “Yar, makes sense. And if he had pictures of the dead kiddies, he was prob’ly the one who made ’em dead.”

  “Right. So I have to wonder—”

  Potter waves an impatient hand. “I guess I know what you got to wonder. Who there is around these parts who’d like to see Chicago Potsie strung up by the neck. Or the balls.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Don’t want to put a stick in your spokes, sonny, but I can’t think of nobody.”

  “No?” Jack raises his eyebrows. “Never did business around here, built a house or laid out a golf course?”

  Potter raises his head and gives Jack a grin. “Course I did. How else d’you think I knew how nice it is? Specially in the summer? You know the part of town they call Libertyville? Got all those ‘ye olde’ streets like Camelot and Avalon?”

  Jack nods.

  “I built half of those. Back in the seventies. There was a fella around then … some moke I knew from Chicago … or thought I knew… . Was he in the business?” This last seems to be Potter addressing Potter. In any case, he gives his head a brief shake. “Can’t remember. Doesn’t matter, anyway. How could it? Fella was gettin’ on then, must be dead now. It was a long time ago.”

  But Jack, who interrogates as Jerry Lee Lewis once played the piano, thinks it does matter. In the usually dim section of his mind where intuition keeps its headquarters, lights are coming on. Not a lot yet, but maybe more than just a few.

  “A moke,” he says, as if he has never heard the word before. “What’s that?”

  Potter gives him a brief, irritated look. “A citizen who … well, not exactly a citizen. Someone who knows people who are connected. Or maybe sometimes connected people call him. Maybe they do each other favors. A moke. It’s not the world’s best thing to be.”

  No, Jack thinks, but moking can get you a Cadillac with that nice smooth ride.

  “Were you ever a moke, George?” Got to get a little more intimate now. This is not a question Jack can address to a Mr. Potter.

  “Maybe,” Potter says after a grudging, considering pause. “Maybe I was. Back in Chi. In Chi, you had to scratch backs and wet beaks if you wanted to land the big contracts. I don’t know how it is there now, but in those days, a clean contractor was a poor contractor. You know?”

  Jack nods.

  “The biggest deal I ever made was a housing development on the South Side of Chicago. Just like in that song about bad, bad Leroy Brown.” Potter chuckles rustily. For a moment he’s not thinking about cancer, or false accusations, or almost being lynched. He’s living in the past, and it may be a little sleazy, but it’s better than the present—the bunk chained to the wall, the steel toilet, the cancer spreading through his guts.

  “Man, that one was big, I kid you not. Lots of federal money, but the local hotshots decided where the dough went home at night. And me and this other guy, this moke, we were in a horse race—”

  He breaks off, looking at Jack with wide eyes.

  “Holy shit, what are you, magic?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I’m just sitting here.”

  “That guy was the guy who showed up here. That was the moke!”

  “I’m not following you, George.” But Jack thinks he is. And although he’s starting to get excited, he shows it no more than he did when the bartender told him about Kinderling’s little nose-pinching trick.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Potter says. “Guy had plenty of reasons not to like yours truly, but he’s got to be dead. He’d be in his eighties, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Tell me about him,” Jack says.

  “He was a moke,” Potter repeats, as if this explains everything. “And he must have got in trouble in Chicago or somewhere around Chicago, because when he showed up here, I’m pretty sure he was using a different name.”

  “When did you swink him on the housing-development deal, George?”

  Potter smiles, and something about the size of his teeth and the way they seem to jut from the gums allows Jack to see how fast death is rushing toward this man. He feels a little shiver of gooseflesh, but he returns the smile easily enough. This is also how he works.

  “If we’re gonna talk about mokin’ and swinkin’, you better call me Potsie.”

  “All right, Potsie. When did you swink this guy in Chicago?”

  “That much is easy,” Potter says. “It was summer when the bids went out, but the hotshots were still bellerin’ about how the hippies came to town the year before and gave the cops and the mayor a black eye. So I’d say 1969. What happened was I’d done the building commissioner a big favor, and I’d done another for this old woman who swung weight on this special Equal Opportunity Housing Commission that Mayor Daley had set up. So when the bids went out, mine got special consideration. This other guy—the moke—I have no doubt that his bid was lower. He knew his way around, and he musta had his own contacts, but that time I had the inside track.”

  He smiles. The gruesome teeth appear, then disappear again.

  “Moke’s bid? Somehow gets lost. Comes in too late. Bad luck. Chicago Potsie nails the job. Then, four years later, the moke shows up here, bidding on the Libertyville job. Only that time when I beat him, everything was square-john. I pulled no strings. I met him in the bar at the Nelson Hotel the night after the contract was awarded, just by accident. And he says, ‘You were that guy in Chicago.’ And I say, ‘There are lots of guys in Chicago.’ Now this guy was a moke, but he was a scary moke. He had a kind of smell about him. I can’t put it any better than that. Anyway, I was big and strong in those days, I could be mean, but I was pretty meek that time. Even after a drink or two, I was pretty meek.

  “ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘there are a lot of guys in Chicago, but only one who diddled me. I still got a sore ass from that, Potsie, and I got a long memory.’

  “Any other time, any other guy, I might have asked how good his memory stayed after he got his head knocked on the floor, but with him I just took it. No more words passed between us. He walked out. I don’t think I ever saw him again, but I heard about him from time to time while I was working the Libertyville job. Mostly from my subs. Seems like the moke was building a house of his own in French Landing. For his retirement. Not that he was old enough to retire back then, but he was gettin’ up a little. Fifties, I’d say … and that was in ’72.”

  “He was building a house here in town,” Jack muses.

  “Yeah. It had a name, too, like one of those English houses. The Birches, Lake House, Beardsley Manor, you know.”

  “What name?”

  “Shit, I can’t even remember the moke’s name, how do you expect me to remember the name of the house he built? But one thing I do remember: none of the subs liked it. It got a reputation.”

  “Bad?”

  “The worst. There were accidents. One guy cut his hand clean off on a band saw, almost bled to death before they got him to the hospital. Another guy fell off a scaffolding and ended up paralyzed … what they call a quad. You know what that is?”

  Jack nods.

  “Only house I ever heard of people were calling haunted even before it was all the way built. I got the idea that he had to finish most of it himself.”

  “What else did they say about this place?” Jack puts the question idly, as if he doesn’t care much one way or the other, but he cares a lot. He has never heard of a so-called haunted house in French Landing. He knows he hasn’t been here anywhere near long enough to hear all the tales and legends, but something like this … you’d think something like this would pop out of the deck early.

  “Ah, man, I can’t remember. Just that …” He pauses, eyes distant. Outside the building, the crowd is fi
nally beginning to disperse. Jack wonders how Dale is doing with Brown and Black. The time seems to be racing, and he hasn’t gotten what he needs from Potter. What he’s gotten so far is just enough to tantalize.

  “One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone,” Potter says abruptly. “He said the house was a little way off the road, in a clearing, and it should have gotten sun at least five hours a day in the summer, but it somehow … didn’t. He said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale, and they didn’t like it. And sometimes they heard a dog growling in the woods. Sounded like a big one. A mean one. But they never saw it. You know how it is, I imagine. Stories get started, and then they just kinda feed on themselves …”

  Potter’s shoulders suddenly slump. His head lowers.

  “Man, that’s all I can remember.”

  “What was the moke’s name when he was in Chicago?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  Jack suddenly thrusts his open hands under Potter’s nose. With his head lowered, Potter doesn’t see them until they’re right there, and he recoils, gasping. He gets a noseful of the dying smell on Jack’s skin.

  “What … ? Jesus, what’s that?” Potter seizes one of Jack’s hands and sniffs again, greedily. “Boy, that’s nice. What is it?”

  “Lilies,” Jack says, but it’s not what he thinks. What he thinks is The memory of my mother. “What was the moke’s name when he was in Chicago?”

  “It … something like beer stein. That’s not it, but it’s close. Best I can do.”

  “Beer stein,” Jack says. “And what was his name when he got to French Landing three years later?”

  Suddenly there are loud, arguing voices on the stairs. “I don’t care!” someone shouts. Jack thinks it’s Black, the more officious one. “It’s our case, he’s our prisoner, and we’re taking him out! Now!”

  Dale: “I’m not arguing. I’m just saying that the paperwork—”

  Brown: “Aw, fuck the paperwork. We’ll take it with us.”

  “What was his name in French Landing, Potsie?”

  “I can’t—” Potsie takes Jack’s hands again. Potsie’s own hands are dry and cold. He smells Jack’s palms, eyes closed. On the long exhale of his breath he says: “Burnside. Chummy Burnside. Not that he was chummy. The nickname was a joke. I think his real handle might have been Charlie.”

  Jack takes his hands back. Charles “Chummy” Burnside. Once known as Beer Stein. Or something like Beer Stein.

  “And the house? What was the name of the house?”

  Brown and Black are coming down the corridor now, with Dale scurrying after them. There’s no time, Jack thinks. Damnit all, if I had even five minutes more—

  And then Potsie says, “Black House. I don’t know if that’s what he called it or what the subs workin’ the job got to calling it, but that was the name, all right.”

  Jack’s eyes widen. The image of Henry Leyden’s cozy living room crosses his mind: sitting with a drink at his elbow and reading about Jarndyce and Jarndyce. “Did you say Bleak House?”

  “Black,” Potsie reiterates impatiently. “Because it really was. It was—”

  “Oh dear to Christ,” one of the state troopers says in a snotty look-what-the-cat-dragged-in voice that makes Jack feel like rearranging his face. It’s Brown, but when Jack glances up, it’s Brown’s partner he looks at. The coincidence of the other trooper’s name makes Jack smile.

  “Hello, boys,” Jack says, getting up from the bunk.

  “What are you doing here, Hollywood?” Black asks.

  “Just batting the breeze and waiting for you,” Jack says, and smiles brilliantly. “I suppose you want this guy.”

  “You’re goddamn right,” Brown growls. “And if you fucked up our case—”

  “Gosh, I don’t think so,” Jack says. It’s a struggle, but he manages to achieve a tone of amiability. Then, to Potsie: “You’ll be safer with them than here in French Landing, sir.”

  George Potter looks vacant again. Resigned. “Don’t matter much either way,” he says, then smiles as a thought occurs to him. “If old Chummy’s still alive, and you run across him, you might ask him if his ass still hurts from that diddling I gave him back in ’69. And tell him old Chicago Potsie says hello.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Brown asks, glowering. He has his cuffs out, and is clearly itching to snap them on George Potter’s wrists.

  “Old times,” Jack says. He stuffs his fragrant hands in his pockets and leaves the cell. He smiles at Brown and Black. “Nothing to concern you boys.”

  Trooper Black turns to Dale. “You’re out of this case,” he says. “Those are words of one syllable. I can’t make it any simpler. So tell me once and mean it forever, Chief: Do you understand?”

  “Of course I do,” Dale said. “Take the case and welcome. But get off the tall white horse, willya? If you expected me to simply stand by and let a crowd of drunks from the Sand Bar take this man out of Lucky’s and lynch him—”

  “Don’t make yourself look any stupider than you already are,” Brown snaps. “They picked his name up off your police calls.”

  “I doubt that,” Dale says quietly, thinking of the doper’s cell phone borrowed out of evidence storage.

  Black grabs Potter’s narrow shoulder, gives it a vicious twist, then thrusts him so hard toward the door at the end of the corridor that the man almost falls down. Potter recovers, his haggard face full of pain and dignity.

  “Troopers,” Jack says.

  He doesn’t speak loudly or angrily, but they both turn.

  “Abuse that prisoner one more time in my sight, and I’ll be on the phone to the Madison shoofly-pies the minute you leave, and believe me, Troopers, they will listen to me. Your attitude is arrogant, coercive, and counterproductive to the resolution of this case. Your interdepartmental cooperation skills are nonexistent. Your demeanor is unprofessional and reflects badly upon the state of Wisconsin. You will either behave yourselves or I guarantee you that by next Friday you will be looking for security jobs.”

  Although his voice remains even throughout, Black and Brown seem to shrink as he speaks. By the time he finishes, they look like a pair of chastened children. Dale is gazing at Jack with awe. Only Potter seems unaffected; he’s gazing down at his cuffed hands with eyes that could be a thousand miles away.

  “Go on, now,” Jack says. “Take your prisoner, take your case records, and get lost.”

  Black opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it again. They leave. When the door closes behind them, Dale looks at Jack and says, very softly: “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t know,” Dale says, “I’m not going to tell you.”

  Jack shrugs. “Potter will keep them occupied, which frees us up to do a little actual work. If there’s a bright side to tonight, that’s it.”

  “What did you get from him? Anything?”

  “A name. Might mean nothing. Charles Burnside. Nicknamed Chummy. Ever heard of him?”

  Dale sticks out his lower lip and pulls it thoughtfully. Then he lets go and shakes his head. “The name itself seems to ring a faint bell, but that might only be because it’s so common. The nickname, no.”

  “He was a builder, a contractor, a wheeler-dealer in Chicago over thirty years ago. According to Potsie, at least.”

  “Potsie,” Dale says. The tape is peeling off a corner of the ONE CALL MEANS ONE CALL sign, and Dale smoothes it back down with the air of a man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. “You and he got pretty chummy, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Jack says. “Burnside’s Chummy. And Trooper Black doesn’t own the Black House.”

  “You’ve gone dotty. What black house?”

  “First, it’s a proper name. Black, capital B, house, capital H. Black House. You ever heard of a house named that around here?”

  Dale laughs. “God, no.”

  Jack smiles back, but all at once it’s his interrogation smile, not h
is I’m-discussing-things-with-my-friend smile. Because he’s a coppiceman now. And he has seen a funny little flicker in Dale Gilbertson’s eyes.

  “Are you sure? Take a minute. Think about it.”

  “Told you, no. People don’t name their houses in these parts. Oh, I guess old Miss Graham and Miss Pentle call their place on the other side of the town library Honeysuckle, because of the honeysuckle bushes all over the fence in front, but that’s the only one in these parts I ever heard named.”

  Again, Jack sees that flicker. Potter is the one who will be charged for murder by the Wisconsin State Police, but Jack didn’t see that deep flicker in Potter’s eyes a single time during their interview. Because Potter was straight with him.

  Dale isn’t being straight.

  But I have to be gentle with him, Jack tells himself. Because he doesn’t know he’s not being straight. How is that possible?

  As if in answer, he hears Chicago Potsie’s voice: One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone … he said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale.

  Memory is a shadow; any cop trying to reconstruct a crime or an accident from the conflicting accounts of eyewitnesses knows it well. Is Potsie’s Black House like this? Something that casts no shadow? Dale’s response (he has now turned full-face to the peeling poster, working on it as seriously as he might work on a heart attack victim in the street, administering CPR right out of the manual until the ambulance arrives) suggests to Jack that it might be something like just that. Three days ago he wouldn’t have allowed himself to consider such an idea, but three days ago he hadn’t returned to the Territories.

  “According to Potsie, this place got a reputation as a haunted house even before it was completely built,” Jack says, pressing a little.

  “Nope.” Dale moves on to the sign about the A.A. and N.A. meetings. He examines the tape studiously, not looking at Jack. “Doesn’t ring the old chimeroo.”

  “Sure? One man almost bled to death. Another took a fall that paralyzed him. People complained—listen to this, Dale, it’s good—according to Potsie, people complained about losing their shadows. Couldn’t see them even at midday, with the sun shining full force. Isn’t that something?”