Black House js-2

by Stephen King

  And it is their proposed visit to Judy of which Fred is speaking, Jack realizes. He quits trying to interrupt and simply listens, frowning down at the note he has written to himself as he does so. Tower and Beams. What kind of beams? Sunbeams? Hornbeams? Raise high the roof beam, carpenters?

  “—know I said I’d pick you up at nine but Dr. Spiegleman that’s her doctor up there Spiegleman his name is he said she had a very bad night with a lot of yelling and screaming and then trying to get up the wallpaper and eat it and maybe a seizure of some kind so they’re trying her on a new medication he might have said Pamizene or Patizone I didn’t write it down Spiegleman called me fifteen minutes ago I wonder if those guys ever sleep and said we should be able to see her around four he thinks she’ll be more stabilized by four and we could see her then so could I pick you up at three or maybe you have—”

  “Three would be fine,” Jack says quietly.

  “—other stuff to do other plans I’d understand that but I could come by if you don’t it’s mostly that I don’t want to go alone—”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” Jack said. “We’ll go in my pickup.”

  “—thought maybe I’d hear from Ty or from whoever snatched him like maybe a ransom demand but no one called only Spiegleman he’s my wife’s doctor up there at—”

  “Fred, I’m going to find your boy.”

  Jack is appalled at this bald assurance, at the suicidal confidence he hears in his own voice, but it serves at least one purpose: bringing Fred’s flood of dead words to an end. There is blessed silence from the other end of the line.

  At last, Fred speaks in a trembling whisper. “Oh, sir. If only I could believe that.”

  “I want you to try,” Jack says. “And maybe we can find your wife’s mind while we’re at it.”

  Maybe both are in the same place, he thinks, but this he does not say.

  Liquid sounds come from the other end of the line. Fred has begun to cry.

  “Fred.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re coming to my place at three.”

  “Yes.” A mighty sniff; a miserable cry that is mostly choked back. Jack has some comprehension of how empty Fred Marshall’s house must feel at this moment, and even that dim understanding is bad enough.

  “My place in Norway Valley. Come past Roy’s Store, over Tamarack Creek—”

  “I know where it is.” A faint edge of impatience has crept into Fred’s voice. Jack is very glad to hear it.

  “Good. I’ll see you.”

  “You bet.” Jack hears a ghost of Fred’s salesman cheer, and it twists his heart.

  “What time?”

  “Th-three?” Then, with marginal assurance: “Three.”

  “That’s right. We’ll take my truck. Maybe have a bite of supper at Gertie’s Kitchen on our way back. Good-bye, Fred.”

  “Good-bye, sir. And thank you.”

  Jack hangs up the phone. Looks a moment longer at his memory’s reproduction of his mother’s handwriting and wonders what you’d call such a thing in cop-speak. Autoforgery? He snorts, then crumples the note up and starts getting dressed. He will drink a glass of juice, then go out walking for an hour or so. Blow all the bad dreams out of his head. And blow away the sound of Fred Marshall’s awful droning voice while he’s at it. Then, after a shower, he might or might not call Dale Gilbertson and ask if there have been any developments. If he’s really going to get involved in this, there’ll be a lot of paperwork to catch up on . . . he’ll want to reinterview the parents . . . take a look at the old folks’ home close to where the Marshall kid disappeared . . .

  With his mind full of such thoughts (pleasant thoughts, actually, although if this had been suggested to him, he would have strenuously denied it), Jack almost stumbles over the box sitting on the welcome mat just outside his front door. It’s where Buck Evitz, the postman, leaves packages when he has packages to leave, but it’s not gone six-thirty yet, and Buck won’t be along in his little blue truck for another three hours.

  Jack bends down and cautiously picks the package up. It’s the size of a shoe box, covered with brown paper that has been cut raggedly and secured not with tape but with big drools of red sealing wax. In addition to this, there are complicated loops of white string secured with a child’s oversized bow. There’s a cluster of stamps in the upper corner, ten or a dozen, featuring various birds. (No robins, however; Jack notes this with understandable relief.) There’s something not right about those stamps, but at first Jack doesn’t see what it is. He’s too focused on the address, which is spectacularly not right. There’s no box number, no RFD number, no zip code. No name, not really. The address consists of a single word, scrawled in large capital letters:

  JACKY

  Looking at those bedraggled letters, Jack imagines a fisted hand clutching a Sharpie marker; narrowed eyes; a tongue poked from the corner of some lunatic’s mouth. His heartbeat has sped up to double-time. “I’m not liking this,” he breathes. “I am so not liking this.”

  And of course there are perfectly good reasons, coppiceman reasons, not to. It is a shoe box; he can feel the edge of the top right through the brown paper, and nutters have been known to put bombs in shoe boxes. He’d be crazy to open it, but he has an idea he will open it, just the same. If it blows him sky-high, at least he’ll be able to opt out of the Fisherman investigation.

  Jack raises the package to listen for ticking, fully aware that ticking bombs are as out-of-date as Betty Boop cartoons. He hears nothing, but he does see what’s wrong with the stamps, which aren’t stamps at all. Someone has carefully cut the front panels from a dozen or so cafeteria sugar packets and taped them to this wrapped shoe box. A grunt of humorless laughter escapes Jack. Some nut sent him this, all right. Some nut in a locked facility, with easier access to sugar packets than to stamps. But how has it gotten here? Who left it (with the fake stamps uncanceled) while he was dreaming his confused dreams? And who, in this part of the world, could possibly know him as Jacky? His Jacky days are long gone.

  No they ain’t, Travelin’ Jack, a voice whispers. Not by half. Time to stop your sobbin’ and get bob-bob-bobbin’ along, boy. Start by seein’ what’s in that box.

  Resolutely ignoring his own mental voice, which tells him he’s being dangerously stupid, Jack snaps the twine and uses his thumbnail to cut through the sloppy blobs of red wax. Who uses sealing wax in this day and age, anyway? He sets the wrapping paper aside. Something else for the forensics boys, maybe.

  It isn’t a shoe box but a sneaker box. A New Balance sneaker box, to be exact. Size 5. A child’s size. And at that, Jack’s heart speeds up to triple-time. He feels beads of cold sweat springing up on his forehead. His gorge and sphincter are both tightening up. This is also familiar. It is how coppicemen get cocked and locked, ready to look at something awful. And this will be awful. Jack has no doubt about it, and no doubt about who the package is from.

  This is my last chance to back out, he thinks. After this it’s all aboard and heigh-ho for the...the wherever.

  But even that is a lie, he realizes. Dale will be looking for him at the police station on Sumner Street by noon. Fred Marshall is coming to Jack’s place at three o’clock and they are going to see the Mad Housewife of Robin Hood Lane. The backout point has already come and gone. Jack still isn’t sure how it happened, but it looks like he’s back in harness. And if Henry Leyden has the temerity to congratulate him on this, Jack thinks, he’ll probably kick Henry’s blind ass for him.

  A voice from his dream whispers up from beneath the floorboards of Jack’s consciousness like a whiff of rotten air—I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere—but this bothers him less than the madness inherent in the sugar-pack stamps and the laboriously printed letters of his old nickname. He has dealt with crazies before. Not to mention his share of threats.

  He sits down on the steps with the sneaker box on his thighs. Beyond him, in the north field, all is still and gra
y. Bunny Boettcher, son of Tom Tom, came and did the second cutting only a week ago, and now a fine mist hangs above the ankle-high stubble. Above it, the sky has just begun to brighten. Not a single cloud as yet marks its calm no-color. Somewhere a bird calls out. Jack breathes deeply and thinks, If this is where I go out, I could do worse. A lot worse.

  Then, very carefully, he takes the lid off the box and sets it aside. Nothing explodes. But it looks as if someone has filled the New Balance sneaker box with night. Then he realizes that it’s been packed with shiny black crow feathers, and his arms roughen with goose bumps.

  He reaches toward them, then hesitates. He wants to touch those feathers about as much as he’d want to touch the corpse of a half-decayed plague victim, but there’s something beneath them. He can see it. Should he get some gloves? There are gloves in the front hall closet—

  “Fuck the gloves,” Jack says, and dumps the box onto the brown paper wrapping lying beside him on the porch. There’s a flood of feathers, which swirl a bit even in the perfectly still morning air. Then a thump as the object around which the feathers were packed lands on Jack’s porch. The smell hits Jack’s nose a moment later, an odor like rotting baloney.

  Someone has delivered a child’s bloodstained sneaker chez Sawyer on Norway Valley Road. Something has gnawed at it pretty briskly, and even more briskly at what’s inside it. He sees a lining of bloody white cotton—that would be a sock. And inside the sock, tatters of skin. This is a child’s New Balance sneaker with a child’s foot inside it, one that has been badly used by some animal.

  He sent it, Jack thinks. The Fisherman.

  Taunting him. Telling him If you want in, come on in. The water’s fine, Jacky-boy, the water is fine.

  Jack gets up. His heart is hammering, the beats now too close together to count. The beads of sweat on his forehead have swelled and broken and gone running down his face like tears, his lips and hands and feet are numb . . . yet he tells himself he is calm. That he has seen worse, much worse, piled up against bridge abutments and freeway underpasses in L.A. Nor is this his first severed body part. Once, in 1997, he and his partner Kirby Tessier found a single testicle sitting on top of a toilet tank in the Culver City public library like an ancient soft-boiled egg. So he tells himself he is calm.

  He gets up and walks down the porch steps. He walks past the hood of his burgundy-colored Dodge Ram with the world-class sound system inside; he walks past the bird hotel he and Dale put up at the edge of the north field a month or two after Jack moved into this, the most perfect house in the universe. He tells himself he is calm. He tells himself that it’s evidence, that’s all. Just one more loop in the hangman’s noose that the Fisherman will eventually put around his own neck. He tells himself not to think of it as part of a kid, part of a little girl named Irma, but as Exhibit A. He can feel dew wetting his sockless ankles and the cuffs of his pants, knows that any sort of extended stroll through the hay stubble is going to ruin a five-hundred-dollar pair of Gucci loafers. And so what if it does? He’s rich well beyond the point of vulgarity; he can have as many shoes as Imelda Marcos, if he wants. The important thing is he’s calm. Someone brought him a shoe box with a human foot inside it, laid it on his porch in the dark of night, but he’s calm. It’s evidence, that’s all. And he? He is a coppiceman. Evidence is his meat and drink. He just needs to get a little air, needs to clear his nose of the rotted baloney smell that came puffing out of the box—

  Jack makes a strangled gagging, urking sound and begins to hurry on a little faster. There is a sense of approaching climax growing in his mind (my calm mind, he tells himself). Something is getting ready to break . . . or change . . . or change back.

  That last idea is particularly alarming and Jack begins to run across the field, knees lifting higher, arms pumping. His passage draws a dark line through the stubble, a diagonal that starts at the driveway and might end anywhere. Canada, maybe. Or the North Pole. White moths, startled out of their dew-heavy morning doze, flutter up in lacy swirls and then slump back into the cut stubble.

  He runs faster, away from the chewed and bloody sneaker lying on the porch of the perfect house, away from his own horror. But that sense of coming climax stays with him. Faces begin to rise in his mind, each with its own accompanying snippet of sound track. Faces and voices he has ignored for twenty years or more. When these faces rise or those voices mutter, he has until now told himself the old lie, that once there was a frightened boy who caught his mother’s neurotic terror like a cold and made up a story, a grand fantasy with good old Mom-saving Jack Sawyer at its center. None of it was real, and it was forgotten by the time he was sixteen. By then he was calm. Just as he’s calm now, running across his north field like a lunatic, leaving that dark track and those clouds of startled moths behind him, but doing it calmly.

  Narrow face, narrow eyes under a tilted white paper cap: If you can run me out a keg when I need one, you can have the job. Smokey Updike, from Oatley, New York, where they drank the beer and then ate the glass. Oatley, where there’d been something in the tunnel outside of town and where Smokey had kept him prisoner. Until—

  Prying eyes, false smile, brilliant white suit: I’ve met you before, Jack...where? Tell me. Confess. Sunlight Gardener, an Indiana preacher whose name had also been Osmond. Osmond in some other world.

  The broad, hairy face and frightened eyes of a boy who wasn’t a boy at all: This is a bad place, Jacky, Wolf knows. And it was, it was a very bad place. They put him in a box, put good old Wolf in a box, and finally they killed him. Wolf died of a disease called America.

  “Wolf!” the running man in the field gasps. “Wolf, ah, God, I’m sorry!”

  Faces and voices, all those faces and voices, rising in front of his eyes, dinning into his ears, demanding to be seen and heard, filling him with that sense of climax, every defense on the verge of being washed away like a breakwater before a tidal wave.

  Nausea roars through him and tilts the world. He makes that urking sound again, and this time it fills the back of his throat with a taste he remembers: the taste of cheap, rough wine. And suddenly it’s New Hampshire again, Arcadia Funworld again. He and Speedy are standing beside the carousel again, all those frozen horses (“All carousel horses is named, don’t you know that, Jack?”), and Speedy is holding out a bottle of wine and telling him it’s magic juice, one little sip and he’ll go over, flip over—

  “No!” Jack cries, knowing it’s already too late. “I don’t want to go over!”

  The world tilts the other way and he falls into the grass on his hands and knees with his eyes squeezed shut. He doesn’t need to open them; the richer, deeper smells that suddenly fill his nose tell him everything he needs to know. That, and the sense of coming home after so many dark years when almost every waking motion and decision has in some way been dedicated to canceling (or at least postponing) the arrival of this very moment.

  This is Jack Sawyer, ladies and gentlemen, down on his knees in a vast field of sweet grass under a morning sky untainted by a single particle of pollution. He is weeping. He knows what has happened, and he is weeping. His heart bursts with fear and joy.

  This is Jack Sawyer twenty years along, grown to be a man, and back in the Territories again at last.

  It is the voice of his old friend Richard—sometimes known as Rational Richard—that saves him. Richard as he is now, head of his own law firm (Sloat & Associates, Ltd.), not Richard as he was when Jack perhaps knew him best, during long vacation days on Seabrook Island, in South Carolina. The Richard of Seabrook Island had been imaginative, quick-spoken, fast on his feet, mop-topped, skinny as a morning shadow. The current Richard, Corporate Law Richard, is thinning on top, thick in the middle, much in favor of sitting and Bushmills. Also, he has crushed his imagination, so brilliantly playful in those Seabrook Island days, like a troublesome fly. Richard Sloat’s life has been one of reduction, Jack has sometimes thought, but one thing has been added (probably in law school): t
he pompous, sheeplike sound of hesitation, particularly annoying on the phone, which is now Richard’s vocal signature. This sound starts with the lips closed, then opens out as Richard’s lips spring wide, making him look like an absurd combination of Vienna choirboy and Lord Haw-Haw.

  Now, kneeling with his eyes shut in the vast green reach of what used to be his very own north field, smelling the new, deeper smells that he remembers so well and has longed for so fiercely without even realizing it, Jack hears Richard Sloat begin speaking in the middle of his head. What a relief those words are! He knows it’s only his own mind mimicking Richard’s voice, but it’s still wonderful. If Richard were here, Jack thinks he’d embrace his old friend and say, May you pontificate forever, Richie-boy. Sheep bray and all.

  Rational Richard says: You realize you’re dreaming, Jack, don’t you?... ba-haaaa...the stress of opening that package no doubt...ba-haaaa... no doubt caused you to pass out, and that in turn has caused...ba-HAAAA!...the dream you are having now.

  Down on his knees, eyes still closed and hair hanging in his face, Jack says, “In other words, it’s what we used to call—”

  Correct! What we used to call...ba-haaaa . . . “Seabrook Island stuff.” But Seabrook Island was a long time ago, Jack, so I suggest you open your eyes, get back on your feet, and remind yourself that should you see anything out of the ordinary...b’haa!...it’s not really there.

  “Not really there,” Jack murmurs. He stands up and opens his eyes.

  He knows from the very first look that it is really here, but he holds Richard’s pompous I-look-thirty-five-but-I’m-really-sixty voice in his head, shielding himself with it. Thus he is able to maintain a precarious balance instead of passing out for real, or—perhaps—cracking up entirely.