Black House (73 page)

And what of Tyler Marshall, who has existed through most of these many pages as little more than a rumor? How badly has he been hurt? How frightened is he? Has he managed to retain his sanity?

As to his physical condition, he’s got a concussion, but that’s already healing. The Fisherman has otherwise done no more than stroke his arm and his buttocks (a creepy touch that made Tyler think of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”). Mentally . . . would you be shocked to hear that, while Mr. Munshun is goading Burny onward, Fred and Judy’s boy is
happy
?

He is. He is happy. And why not? He’s at Miller Park.

The Milwaukee Brewers have confounded all the pundits this year, all the doomsayers who proclaimed they’d be in the cellar by July Fourth. Well, it’s still relatively early, but the Fourth has come and gone and the Brew Crew has returned to Miller tied for first place with Cincinnati. They are in the hunt, in large part due to the bat of Richie Sexson, who came over to Milwaukee from the Cleveland Indians and who has been “really pickin’ taters,” in the pungent terminology of George Rathbun.

They are in the hunt, and
Ty is at the game! EXCELLENT!
Not only is he there, he’s got a front-row seat. Next to him—big, sweating, red-faced, a Kingsland beer in one hand and another tucked away beneath his seat for emergencies—is the Gorgeous George himself, bellowing at the top of his leather lungs. Jeromy Burnitz of the Crew has just been called out at first on a bang-bang play, and while there can be no doubt that the Cincinnati shortstop handled the ball well and got rid of it fast, there can also be no doubt (at least not in George Rathbun’s mind) that Burnitz was safe! He rises in the twilight, his sweaty bald pate glowing beneath a sweetly lavender sky, a foamy rill of beer rolling up one cocked forearm, his blue eyes twinkling (you can tell he sees a lot with those eyes, just about everything), and Ty waits for it, they all wait for it, and here it is, that avatar of summer in the Coulee Country, that wonderful bray that means everything is okay, terror has been denied, and slippage has been canceled.

“COME ON, UMP, GIVE US A BREAK! GIVE US A FREEEEAKIN’ BRAYYYYK! EVEN A BLIND MAN COULD SEE HE WAS SAFE!”

The crowd on the first-base side goes wild at the sound of that cry, none wilder than the fourteen or so people sitting behind the banner reading
MILLER PARK WELCOMES GEORGE RATHBUN AND THE WINNERS OF THIS YEAR’S KDCU BREWER BASH.
Ty is jumping up and down, laughing, waving his Brew Crew hat. What makes this doubly boss is that he thought he forgot to enter the contest this year. He guesses his father (or perhaps his mother) entered it for him . . . and he won! Not the grand prize, which was getting to be the Brew Crew’s batboy for the entire Cincinnati series, but what he got (besides this excellent seat with the other winners, that is) is, in his opinion, even better. Of course Richie Sexson isn’t Mark McGwire
—nobody
can hit the tar out of the ball like Big Mac—but Sexson has been awesome for the Brewers this year, just
awesome,
and Tyler Marshall has won—

Someone is shaking his foot.

Ty attempts to pull away, not wanting to lose this dream (this most excellent refuge from the horror that has befallen him), but the hand is relentless. It shakes. It shakes and shakes.

“Way-gup,” a voice snarls, and the dream begins to darken.

George Rathbun turns to Ty, and the boy sees an amazing thing: the eyes that were such a shrewd, sharp blue only a few seconds ago have gone dull and milky.
Cripe, he’s
blind, Ty thinks.
George Rathbun really
is
a—

“Way-gup,” the growling voice says. It’s closer now. In a moment the dream will wink out entirely.

Before it does, George speaks to him. The voice is quiet, totally unlike the sportscaster’s usual brash bellow. “Help’s on the way,” he says. “So be cool, you little cat. Be—”

“Way
-GUP,
you shit!”

The grip on his ankle is crushing, paralyzing. With a cry of protest, Ty opens his eyes. This is how he rejoins the world, and our tale.

He remembers where he is immediately. It’s a cell with reddish-gray iron bars halfway along a stone corridor lit with cobwebby electric bulbs. There’s a dish of some sort of stew in one corner. In the other is a bucket in which he is supposed to pee (or take a dump if he has to—so far he hasn’t, thank goodness). The only other thing in the room is a raggedy old futon from which Burny has just dragged him.

“All right,” Burny says. “Awake at last. That’s good. Now get up. On your feet, asswipe. I don’t have time to fuck with you.”

Tyler gets up. A wave of dizziness rolls through him and he puts his hand to the top of his head. There is a spongy, crusted place there. Touching it sends a bolt of pain all the way down to his jaws, which clench. But it also drives the dizziness away. He looks at his hand. There are flakes of scab and dried blood on his palm.
That’s where he hit me with his damned rock. Any harder, and I would have been playing a harp.

But the old man has been hurt somehow, too. His shirt is covered with blood; his wrinkled ogre’s face is waxy and pallid. Behind him, the cell door is open. Ty measures the distance to the hallway, hoping he’s not being too obvious about it. But Burny has been in this game a long time. He has had more than one liddle one dry to esscabe on hiz bledding foodzies, oh ho.

He reaches into his bag and brings out a black gadget with a pistol grip and a stainless steel nozzle at the tip.

“Know what this is, Tyler?” Burny asks.

“Taser,” Ty says. “Isn’t it?”

Burny grins, revealing the stumps of his teeth. “Smart boy! A TV-watching boy, I’ll be bound. It’s a Taser, yes. But a special type—it’ll drop a cow at thirty yards. Understand? You try to run, boy, I’ll bring you down like a ton of bricks. Come out here.”

Ty steps out of the cell. He has no idea where this horrible old man means to take him, but there’s a certain relief just in being free of the cell. The futon was the worst. He knows, somehow, that he hasn’t been the only kid to cry himself to sleep on it with an aching heart and an aching, lumpy head, nor the tenth.

Nor, probably, the fiftieth.

“Turn to your left.”

Ty does. Now the old man is behind him. A moment later, he feels the bony fingers grip the right cheek of his bottom. It’s not the first time the old man has done this (each time it happens he’s reminded again of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” asking the lost children to stick their arms out of their cage), but this time his touch is different. Weaker.

Die soon,
Ty thinks, and the thought—its cold collectedness—is very, very Judy.
Die soon, old man, so I don’t have to.

“This one is mine,” the old man says . . . but he sounds out of breath, no longer quite sure of himself. “I’ll bake half, fry the rest. With bacon.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to eat much,” Ty says, surprised at the calmness of his own voice. “Looks like somebody ventilated your stomach pretty g—”

There is a crackling, accompanied by a hideous, jittery burning sensation in his left shoulder. Ty screams and staggers against the wall across the corridor from his cell, trying to clutch the wounded place, trying not to cry, trying to hold on to just a little of his beautiful dream about being at the game with George Rathbun and the other KDCU Brewer Bash winners. He knows he actually did forget to enter this year, but in dreams such things don’t matter. That’s what’s so beautiful about them.

Oh, but it hurts so
bad.
And despite all his efforts—all the Judy Marshall in him—the tears begin to flow.

“You want another un?” the old man gasps. He sounds both sick and hysterical, and even a kid Ty’s age knows that’s a dangerous combination. “You want another un, just for good luck?”

“No,” Ty gasps. “Don’t zap me again, please don’t.”

“Then start walkin’! And no more smart goddamn remarks!”

Ty starts to walk. Somewhere he can hear water dripping. Somewhere, very faint, he can hear the laughing caw of a crow—probably the same one that tricked him, and how he’d like to have Ebbie’s .22 and blow its evil shiny black feathers off. The outside world seems light-years away. But George Rathbun told him help was on the way, and sometimes the things you heard in dreams came true. His very own mother told him that once, and long before she started to go all wonky in the head, too.

They come to a stairway that seems to circle down forever. Up from the depths comes a smell of sulfur and a roast of heat. Faintly he can hear what might be screams and moans. The clank of machinery is louder. There are ominous creaking sounds that might be belts and chains.

Ty pauses, thinking the old guy won’t zap him again unless he absolutely has to. Because Ty might fall down this long circular staircase. Might hit the place on his head the old guy already clipped with the rock, or break his neck, or tumble right off the side. And the old guy wants him alive, at least for now. Ty doesn’t know why, but he knows this intuition is true.

“Where are we going, mister?”

“You’ll find out,” Burny says in his tight, out-of-breath voice. “And if you think I don’t dare zap you while we’re on the stairs, my little friend, you’re very mistaken. Now get walking.”

Tyler Marshall starts down the stairs, descending past vast galleries and balconies, around and down, around and down. Sometimes the air smells of putrid cabbage. Sometimes it smells of burned candles. Sometimes of wet rot. He counts a hundred and fifty steps, then stops counting. His thighs are burning. Behind him, the old man is gasping, and twice he stumbles, cursing and holding the ancient banister.

Fall, old man,
Ty chants inside his head.
Fall and die, fall and die.

But at last they are at the bottom. They arrive in a circular room with a dirty glass ceiling. Above them, gray sky hangs down like a filthy bag. There are plants oozing out of broken pots, sending greedy feelers across a floor of broken orange bricks. Ahead of them, two doors—French doors, Ty thinks they are called—stand open. Beyond them is a crumbling patio surrounded by ancient trees. Some are palms. Some—the ones with the hanging, ropy vines—might be banyans. Others he doesn’t know. One thing he’s sure of: they are no longer in Wisconsin.

Standing on the patio is an object he knows very well. Something from his own world. Tyler Marshall’s eyes well up again at the sight of it, which is almost like the sight of a face from home in a hopelessly foreign place.

“Stop, monkey-boy.” The old man sounds out of breath. “Turn around.”

When Tyler does, he’s pleased to see that the blotch on the old man’s shirt has spread even farther. Fingers of blood now stretch all the way to his shoulders, and the waistband of his baggy old blue jeans has gone a muddy black. But the hand holding the Taser is rock-steady.

God damn you,
Tyler thinks.
God damn you to hell.

The old man has put his bag on a little table. He simply stands where he is for a moment, getting his breath. Then he rummages in the bag (something in there utters a faint metallic clink) and brings out a soft brown cap. It’s the kind guys like Sean Connery sometimes wear in the movies. The old man holds it out.

“Put it on. And if you try to grab my hand, I’ll zap you.”

Tyler takes the cap. His fingers, expecting the texture of suede, are surprised by something metallic, almost like tinfoil. He feels an unpleasant buzzing in his hand, like a mild version of the Taser’s jolt. He looks at the old man pleadingly. “Do I have to?”

Burny raises the Taser and bares his teeth in a silent grin.

Reluctantly, Ty puts the cap on.

This time the buzzing fills his head. For a moment he can’t think . . . and then the feeling passes, leaving him with an odd sense of weakness in his muscles and a throbbing at his temples.

“Special boys need special toys,” Burny says, and it comes out
sbecial boyz, sbecial toyz.
As always, Mr. Munshun’s ridiculous accent has rubbed off a little, thickening that touch of South Chicago Henry detected on the 911 tape. “
Now
we can go out.”

Because with the cap on, I’m safe,
Ty thinks, but the idea breaks up and drifts away almost as soon as it comes. He tries to think of his middle name and realizes he can’t. He tries to think of the bad crow’s name and can’t get that, either—was it something like Corgi? No, that’s a kind of dog. The cap is messing him up, he realizes, and that’s what it’s
supposed
to do.

Now they pass through the open doors and onto the patio. The air is redolent with the smell of the trees and bushes that surround the back side of Black House, a smell that is heavy and cloying.
Fleshy,
somehow. The gray sky seems almost low enough to touch. Ty can smell sulfur and something bitter and electric and juicy. The sound of machinery is much louder out here.

The thing Ty recognized sitting on the broken bricks is an E-Z-Go golf cart. The Tiger Woods model.

“My dad sells these,” Ty says. “At Goltz’s, where he works.”

“Where do you think it came from, asswipe? Get in. Behind the wheel.”

Ty looks at him, amazed. His blue eyes, perhaps thanks to the effects of the cap, have grown bloodshot and rather confused. “I’m not old enough to drive.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine. A
baby
could drive this baby. Behind the wheel.”

Ty does as he is told. In truth, he has driven one of these in the lot at Goltz’s, with his father sitting watchfully beside him in the passenger seat. Now the hideous old man is easing himself into that same place, groaning and holding his perforated midsection. The Taser is in the other hand, however, and the steel tip remains pointed at Ty.

The key is in the ignition. Ty turns it. There’s a click from the battery beneath them. The dashboard light reading
CHARGE
glows bright green. Now all he has to do is push the accelerator pedal. And steer, of course.

“Good so far,” the old man says. He takes his right hand off his middle and points with a bloodstained finger. Ty sees a path of discolored gravel—once, before the trees and underbrush encroached, it was probably a driveway—leading away from the house. “Now go. And go slow. Speed and I’ll zap you. Try to crash us and I’ll break your wrist for you. Then you can drive one-handed.”