Black House

by Stephen King

  True enough, but usually that funhouse sense of false perspective fades away once he starts to get a handle on things. This time it’s worse, and worse by far. He knows why, too. The Fisherman’s long shadow is a thing called Mr. Munshun, an immortal talent scout from some other plane of existence. Nor is even that the end, because Mr. Munshun also casts a shadow. A red one.

  “Abbalah,” Jack mutters. “Abbalah-doon and Mr. Munshun and the Crow Gorg, just three old pals walking together on night’s Plutonian shore.” For some reason this makes him think of the Walrus and the Carpenter from Alice. What was it they took for a walk in the moonlight? Clams? Mussels? Jack’s damned if he can remember, although one line surfaces and resonates in his mind, spoken in his mother’s voice: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.”

  The abbalah is presumably hanging out in his court (the part of him that isn’t imprisoned in Speedy’s Dark Tower, that is), but the Fisherman and Mr. Munshun could be anywhere. Do they know Jack Sawyer has been meddling? Of course they do. By today, that is common knowledge. Might they try to slow him down by doing something nasty to one of his friends? A certain blind sportscaster-headbanger-bebopper, for instance?

  Yes indeed. And now, perhaps because he’s been sensitized to it, he can once more feel that nasty pulse coming out of the southwestern landscape, the one he sensed when he flipped over for the first time in his adult life. When the road curves southeast, he almost loses it. Then, when the Ram points its nose southwest again, the poisonous throb regains strength, beating into his head like the onset of a migraine headache.

  That’s Black House you feel, only it’s not a house, not really. It’s a wormhole in the apple of existence, leading all the way down into the furnace-lands. It’s a door. Maybe it was only standing ajar before today, before Beezer and his pals turned up there, but now it’s wide open and letting in one hell of a draft. Ty needs to be brought back, yes … but that door needs to be shut, as well. Before God knows what awful things come snarling through.

  Jack abruptly swings the Ram onto Tamarack Road. The tires scream. His seat belt locks, and for a moment he thinks the truck may overturn. It stays up, though, and he goes flying toward Norway Valley Road. Mouse will just have to hang on a little bit longer; he’s not going to leave Henry way out here on his own. His pal doesn’t know it, but he’s going on a little field trip to Nailhouse Row. Until this situation stabilizes, it seems to Jack that the buddy system is very much in order.

  Which would have been all well and good if Henry had been at home, but he’s not. Elvena Morton, dust mop in hand, comes in response to Jack’s repeated jabbing at the doorbell.

  “He’s been over at KDCU, doing commercials,” Elvena says. “Dropped him off myself. I don’t know why he doesn’t just do them in his studio here, something about the sound effects, I think he might have said. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you that.”

  The bitch of it is, Henry did. Cousin Buddy’s Rib Crib. The old ball and chain. Beautiful downtown La Riviere. All that. He even told Jack that Elvena Morton was going to drive him. A few things have happened to Jack since that conversation—he’s reencountered his old childhood friend, he’s fallen in love with Judy Marshall’s Twinner, and just by the way he’s been filled in on your basic Secret of All Existence—but none of that keeps him from turning his left hand into a fist and then slamming himself directly between the eyes with it. Given how fast things are now moving, making this needless detour strikes him as an almost unforgivable lapse.

  Mrs. Morton is regarding him with wide-eyed alarm.

  “Are you going to be picking him up, Mrs. Morton?”

  “No, he’s going for a drink with someone from ESPN. Henry said the fellow would bring him back afterward.” She lowers her voice to the timbre of confidentiality at which secrets are somehow best communicated. “Henry didn’t come right out and say so, but I think there may be big things ahead for George Rathbun. Ver-ry big things.”

  Badger Barrage going national? Jack wouldn’t be entirely surprised, but he has no time to be delighted for Henry now. He hands Mrs. Morton the cassette tape, mostly so he won’t feel this was an entirely wasted trip. “Leave this for him where …”

  He stops. Mrs. Morton is looking at him with knowing amusement. Where he’ll be sure to see it is what Jack almost said. Another mental miscue. Big-city detective, indeed.

  “I’ll leave it by the soundboard in his studio,” she says. “He’ll find it there. Jack, maybe it’s none of my business, but you don’t look all right. You’re very pale, and I’d swear you’ve lost ten pounds since last week. Also …” She looks a bit embarrassed. “Your shoes are on the wrong feet.”

  So they are. He makes the necessary change, standing first on one foot and then the other. “It’s been a tough forty-eight hours, but I’m hanging in there, Mrs. M.”

  “It’s the Fisherman business, isn’t it?”

  He nods. “And I have to go. The fat, as they say, is in the fire.” He turns, reconsiders, turns back. “Leave him a message on the kitchen tape recorder, would you? Tell him to call me on my cell. Just as soon as he gets in.” Then, one thought leading to another, he points to the unmarked cassette tape in her hand. “Don’t play that, all right?”

  Mrs. Morton looks shocked. “I’d never do such a thing! It would be like opening someone else’s mail!”

  Jack nods and gives her a scrap of a smile. “Good.”

  “Is it … him on the tape? Is it the Fisherman?”

  “Yes,” Jack says. “It’s him.” And there are worse things waiting, he thinks but doesn’t say. Worse things by far.

  He hurries back to his truck, not quite running.

  Twenty minutes later Jack parks in front of the babyshit brown two-story at 1 Nailhouse Row. Nailhouse Row and the dirty snarl of streets around it strike him as unnaturally silent under the sun of this hot summer afternoon. A mongrel dog (it is, in fact, the old fellow we saw in the doorway of the Nelson Hotel just last night) goes limping across the intersection of Ames and County Road Oo, but that’s about the extent of the traffic. Jack has an unpleasant vision of the Walrus and the Carpenter toddling along the east bank of the Mississippi with the hypnotized residents of Nailhouse Row following along behind them. Toddling along toward the fire. And the cooking pot.

  He takes two or three deep breaths, trying to steady himself. Not far out of town—close to the road leading to Ed’s Eats, in fact—that nasty buzzing in his head peaked, turning into something like a dark scream. For a few moments there it was so strong Jack wondered if he was perhaps going to drive right off the road, and he slowed the Ram to forty. Then, blessedly, it began to move around toward the back of his head and fade. He didn’t see the NO TRESPASSING sign that marks the overgrown road leading to Black House, didn’t even look for it, but he knew it was there. The question is whether or not he’ll be able to approach it when the time comes without simply exploding.

  “Come on,” he tells himself. “No time for this shit.”

  He gets out of the truck and starts up the cracked cement walk. There’s a fading hopscotch diagram there, and Jack swerves to avoid it without even thinking, knowing it’s one of the few remaining artifacts which testify that a little person named Amy St. Pierre once briefly trod the boards of existence. The porch steps are dry and splintery. He’s vilely thirsty and thinks, Man, I’d kill for a glass of water, or a nice cold—

  The door flies open, cracking against the side of the house like a pistol shot in the sunny silence, and Beezer comes running out.

  “Christ almighty, I didn’t think you were ever gonna get here!”

  Looking into Beezer’s alarmed, agonized eyes, Jack realizes that he will never tell this guy that he might be able to find Black House without Mouse’s help, that thanks to his time in the Territories he has a kind of range finder in his head. No, not even if they live the rest of their lives as close friends, the kind who usually tell each other everything. The Beez has suffered
like Job, and he doesn’t need to find out that his friend’s agony may have been in vain.

  “Is he still alive, Beezer?”

  “By an inch. Maybe an inch and a quarter. It’s just me and Doc and Bear Girl now. Sonny and Kaiser Bill got scared, ran off like a couple of whipped dogs. March your boots in here, sunshine.” Not that Beezer gives Jack any choice; he grabs him by the shoulder and hauls him into the little two-story on Nailhouse Row like luggage.

  23

  “ONE MORE!” says the guy from ESPN.

  It sounds more like an order than a request, and although Henry can’t see the fellow, he knows this particular homeboy never played a sport in his life, pro or otherwise. He has the lardy, slightly oily aroma of someone who has been overweight almost from the jump. Sports is perhaps his compensation, with the power to still memories of clothes bought in the Husky section at Sears and all those childhood rhymes like “Fatty-fatty, two-by-four, had to do it on the floor, couldn’t get through the bathroom door.”

  His name is Penniman. “Just like Little Richard!” he told Henry when they shook hands at the radio station. “Famous rock ’n’ roller from back in the fifties? Maybe you remember him.”

  “Vaguely,” Henry said, as if he hadn’t at one time owned every single Little Richard had ever put out. “I believe he was one of the Founding Fathers.” Penniman laughed uproariously, and in that laugh Henry glimpsed a possible future for himself. But was it a future he wanted? People laughed at Howard Stern, too, and Howard Stern was a dork.

  “One more drink!” Penniman repeats now. They are in the bar of the Oak Tree Inn, where Penniman has tipped the bartender five bucks to switch the TV from bowling on ABC to ESPN, even though there’s nothing on at this hour of the day except golf tips and bass fishing. “One more drink, just to seal the deal!”

  But they don’t have a deal, and Henry isn’t sure he wants to make one. Going national with George Rathbun as part of the ESPN radio package should be attractive, and he doesn’t have any serious problem with changing the name of the show from Badger Barrage to ESPN Sports Barrage—it would still focus primarily on the central and northern areas of the country—but …

  But what?

  Before he can even get to work on the question, he smells it again: My Sin, the perfume his wife used to wear on certain evenings, when she wanted to send a certain signal. Lark was what he used to call her on those certain evenings, when the room was dark and they were both blind to everything but scents and textures and each other.

  Lark.

  “You know, I think I’m going to pass on that drink,” Henry says. “Got some work to do at home. But I’m going to think over your offer. And I mean seriously.”

  “Ah-ah-ah,” Penniman says, and Henry can tell from certain minute disturbances in the air that the man is shaking a finger beneath his nose. Henry wonders how Penniman would react if Henry suddenly darted his head forward and bit off the offending digit at the second knuckle. If Henry showed him a little Coulee Country hospitality Fisherman-style. How loud would Penniman yell? As loud as Little Richard before the instrumental break of “Tutti Frutti,” perhaps? Or not quite as loud as that?

  “Can’t go till I’m ready to take you,” Mr. I’m Fat But It No Longer Matters tells him. “I’m your ride, y’know.” He’s on his fourth gimlet, and his words are slightly slurred. My friend, Henry thinks, I’d poke a ferret up my ass before I’d get into a car with you at the wheel.

  “Actually, I can,” Henry says pleasantly. Nick Avery, the bartender, is having a kick-ass afternoon: the fat guy slipped him five to change the TV channel, and the blind guy slipped him five to call Skeeter’s Taxi while the fat guy was in the bathroom, making a little room.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, ‘Actually, I can.’ Bartender?”

  “He’s outside, sir,” Avery tells him. “Pulled up two minutes ago.”

  There is a hefty creak as Penniman turns on his bar stool. Henry can’t see the man’s frown as he takes in the taxi now idling in the hotel turnaround, but he can sense it.

  “Listen, Henry,” Penniman says. “I think you may lack a certain understanding of your current situation. There are stars in the firmament of sports radio, damned right there are—people like the Fabulous Sports Babe and Tony Kornheiser make six figures a year just in speaking fees, six figures easy—but you ain’t there yet. That door is currently closed to you. But I, my friend, am one helluva doorman. The upshot is that if I say we ought to have one more drink, then—”

  “Bartender,” Henry says quietly, then shakes his head. “I can’t just call you bartender; it might work for Humphrey Bogart but it doesn’t work for me. What’s your name?”

  “Nick Avery, sir.” The last word comes out automatically, but Avery never would have used it when speaking to the other one, never in a million years. Both guys tipped him five, but the one in the dark glasses is the gent. It’s got nothing to do with him being blind, it’s just something he is.

  “Nick, who else is at the bar?”

  Avery looks around. In one of the back booths, two men are drinking beer. In the hall, a bellman is on the phone. At the bar itself, no one at all except for these two guys—one slim, cool, and blind, the other fat, sweaty, and starting to be pissed off.

  “No one, sir.”

  “There’s not a … lady?” Lark, he’s almost said. There’s not a lark?

  “No.”

  “Listen here,” Penniman says, and Henry thinks he’s never heard anyone so unlike “Little Richard” Penniman in his entire life. This guy is whiter than Moby Dick … and probably about the same size. “We’ve got a lot more to discuss here.” Loh more t’dishcush is how it comes out. “Unless, that is”—Unlesh—“you’re trying to let me know you’re not interested.” Never in a million years, Penniman’s voice says to Henry Leyden’s educated ears. We’re talking about putting a money machine in your living room, sweetheart, your very own private ATM, and there ain’t no way in hell you’re going to turn that down.

  “Nick, you don’t smell perfume? Something very light and old-fashioned? My Sin, perhaps?”

  A flabby hand falls on Henry’s shoulder like a hot-water bottle. “The sin, old buddy, would be for you to refuse to have another drink with me. Even a blindman could see th—”

  “Suggest you get your hand off him,” Avery says, and perhaps Penniman’s ears aren’t entirely deaf to nuance, because the hand leaves Henry’s shoulder at once.

  Then another hand comes in its place, higher up. It touches the back of Henry’s neck in a cold caress that’s there and then gone. Henry draws in breath. The smell of perfume comes with it. Usually scents fade after a period of exposure, as the receptors that caught them temporarily deaden. Not this time, though. Not this smell.

  “No perfume?” Henry almost pleads. The touch of her hand on his neck he can dismiss as a tactile hallucination. But his nose never betrays him.

  Never until now, anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” Avery says. “I can smell beer … peanuts … this man’s gin and his aftershave …”

  Henry nods. The lights above the backbar slide across the dark lenses of his shades as he slips gracefully off his stool.

  “I think you want another drink, my friend,” Penniman says in what he no doubt believes to be a tone of polite menace. “One more drink, just to celebrate, and then I’ll take you home in my Lexus.”

  Henry smells his wife’s perfume. He’s sure of it. And he seemed to feel the touch of his wife’s hand on the back of his neck. Yet suddenly it’s skinny little Morris Rosen he finds himself thinking about—Morris, who wanted him to listen to “Where Did Our Love Go” as done by Dirtysperm. And of course for Henry to play it in his Wisconsin Rat persona. Morris Rosen, who has more integrity in one of his nail-chewed little fingers than this bozo has got in his entire body.

  He puts a hand on Penniman’s forearm. He smiles into Penniman’s unseen face, and feels the muscles beneath his palm relax. Penniman has d
ecided he’s going to get his way. Again.

  “You take my drink,” Henry says pleasantly, “add it to your drink, and then stick them both up your fat and bepimpled ass. If you need something to hold them in place, why, you can stick your job up there right after them.”

  Henry turns and walks briskly toward the door, orienting himself with his usual neat precision and holding one hand out in front of him as an insurance policy. Nick Avery has broken into spontaneous applause, but Henry barely hears this and Penniman he has already dismissed from his mind. What occupies him is the smell of My Sin perfume. It fades a little as he steps out into the afternoon heat … but is that not an amorous sigh he hears beside his left ear? The sort of sigh his wife sometimes made just before falling asleep after love? His Rhoda? His Lark?

  “Hello, the taxi!” he calls from the curb beneath the awning.

  “Right here, buddy—what’re you, blind?”

  “As a bat,” Henry agrees, and walks toward the sound of the voice. He’ll go home, he’ll put his feet up, he’ll have a glass of tea, and then he’ll listen to the damned 911 tape. That as yet unperformed chore may be what’s causing his current case of the heebie-jeebies and shaky-shivers, knowing that he must sit in darkness and listen to the voice of a child-killing cannibal. Surely that must be it, because there’s no reason to be afraid of his Lark, is there? If she were to return—to return and haunt him—she would surely haunt with love.

  Wouldn’t she?

  Yes, he thinks, and lowers himself into the taxi’s stifling back seat.

  “Where to, buddy?”

  “Norway Valley Road,” Henry says. “It’s a white house with blue trim, standing back from the road. You’ll see it not long after you cross the creek.”

  Henry settles back in the seat and turns his troubled face toward the open window. French Landing feels strange to him today … fraught. Like something that has slipped and slipped until it is now on the verge of simply falling off the table and smashing to pieces on the floor.