Black House (74 page)

Ty pushes down on the accelerator. The golf cart jerks forward. The old man lurches, curses, and waves the Taser threateningly.

“It would be easier if I could take off the cap,” Ty says. “Please, I’m pretty sure that if you’d just let me—”

“No! Cap stays!
Drive!
”

Ty pushes down gently on the accelerator. The E-Z-Go rolls across the patio, its brand-new rubber tires crunching on broken shards of brick. There’s a bump as they leave the pavement and go rolling up the driveway. Heavy fronds—they feel damp, sweaty—brush Tyler’s arms. He cringes. The golf cart swerves. Burny jabs the Taser at the boy, snarling.

“Next time you get the juice! It’s a promise!”

A snake goes writhing across the overgrown gravel up ahead, and Ty utters a little scream through his clenched teeth. He doesn’t like snakes, didn’t even want to touch the harmless little corn snake Mrs. Locher brought to school, and this thing is the size of a python, with ruby eyes and fangs that prop its mouth open in a perpetual snarl.

“Go! Drive!” The Taser, waving in his face. The cap, buzzing faintly in his ears.
Behind
his ears.

The drive curves to the left. Some sort of tree burdened with what look like tentacles leans over them. The tips of the tentacles tickle across Ty’s shoulders and the goose-prickled, hair-on-end nape of his neck.

Ourr boyy
.
.
.

He hears this in his head in spite of the cap. It’s faint, it’s distant, but it’s there.

Ourrrrr boyyyyy
.
.
.
yesssss
.
.
.
ourrrrs
.
.
.

Burny is grinning. “Hear ’em, don’tcha? They like you. So do I. We’re all friends here, don’t you see?” The grin becomes a grimace. He clutches his bloody middle again. “Goddamned blind old fool!” he gasps.

Then, suddenly, the trees are gone. The golf cart rolls out onto a sullen, crumbling plain. The bushes dwindle and Ty sees that farther along they give way entirely to a crumbled, rocky scree: hills rise and fall beneath that sullen gray sky. A few birds of enormous size wheel lazily. A shaggy, slump-shouldered creature staggers down a narrow defile and is gone from sight before Ty can see exactly what it is . . . not that he wanted to. The thud and pound of machinery is stronger, shaking the earth. The crump of pile drivers; the clash of ancient gears; the squall of cogs. Tyler can feel the golf cart’s steering wheel thrumming in his hands. Ahead of them the driveway ends in a wide road of beaten earth. Along the far side of it is a wall of round white stones.

“That thing you hear, that’s the Crimson King’s power plant,” Burny says. He speaks with pride, but there is more than a tinge of fear beneath it. “The Big Combination. A million children have died on its belts, and a zillion more to come, for all I know. But that’s not for you, Tyler. You might have a future after all. First, though, I’ll have my piece of you. Yes indeed.”

His blood-streaked hand reaches out and caresses the top of Ty’s buttock.

“A good agent’s entitled to ten percent. Even an old buzzard like me knows that.”

The hand draws back. Good thing. Ty has been on the verge of screaming, holding the sound back only by thinking of sitting at Miller Park with good old George Rathbun.
If I’d really entered the Brewer Bash,
he thinks,
none of this would have happened.

But he thinks that may not actually be true. Some things are meant to be, that’s all.
Meant.

He just hopes that what this horrible old creature wants is not one of them.

“Turn left,” Burny grunts, settling back. “Three miles. Give or take.” And, as Tyler makes the turn, he realizes the ribbons of mist rising from the ground aren’t mist at all. They’re ribbons of smoke.

“Sheol,” Burny says, as if reading his mind. “And this is the only way through it—Conger Road. Get off it and there are things out there that’d pull you to pieces just to hear you scream. My friend told me where to take you, but there might be just a
leedle
change of plan.” His pain-wracked face takes on a sulky cast. Ty thinks it makes him look extraordinarily stupid. “He hurt me. Pulled my guts. I don’t trust him.” And, in a horrible child’s singsong: “Carl Bierstone don’t trust Mr. Munshun! Not no more! Not no more!”

Ty says nothing. He concentrates on keeping the golf cart in the middle of Conger Road. He risks one look back, but the house, in its ephemeral wallow of tropical greenery, is gone, blocked from view by the first of the eroded hills.

“He’ll have what’s his, but I’ll have what’s mine. Do you hear me, boy?” When Ty says nothing, Burny brandishes the Taser.
“Do you hear me, you asswipe monkey?”

“Yeah,” Ty says. “Yeah, sure.”
Why don’t you die? God, if You’re there, why don’t You just reach down and put Your finger on his rotten heart and stop it from beating?

When Burny speaks again, his voice is sly. “You looked at the wall on t’other side, but I don’t think you looked close enough. Better take another gander.”

Tyler looks past the slumped old man. For a moment he doesn’t understand . . . and then he does. The big white stones stretching endlessly away along the far side of Conger Road aren’t stones at all. They’re skulls.

What is this place? Oh God, how he wants his mother! How he wants to go
home
!

Beginning to cry again, his brain numbed and buzzing beneath the cap that looks like cloth but isn’t, Ty pilots the golf cart deeper and deeper into the furnace-lands. Into Sheol.

Rescue—help of any kind—has never seemed so far away.

27

W
HEN JACK AND
Dale step into the air-conditioned cool, the Sand Bar is empty except for three people. Beezer and Doc are at the bar, with soft drinks in front of them—an End Times sign if there ever was one, Jack thinks. Far back in the shadows (any further and he’d be in the dive’s primitive kitchen), Stinky Cheese is lurking. There is a vibe coming off the two bikers, a bad one, and Stinky wants no part of it. For one thing, he’s never seen Beezer and Doc without Mouse, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill. For another . . . oh God, it’s the California detective and the freakin’ chief of police.

The jukebox is dark and dead, but the TV is on and Jack’s not exactly surprised to see that today’s Matinee Movie on AMC features his mother and Woody Strode. He fumbles for the name of the film, and after a moment it comes to him:
Execution Express.

“You don’t want to be in on this, Bea,” Woody says—in this film Lily plays a Boston heiress named Beatrice Lodge, who comes west and turns outlaw, mostly to spite her straitlaced father. “This is looking like the gang’s last ride.”

“Good,” Lily says. Her voice is stony, her eyes stonier. The picture is crap, but as always, she is dead on character. Jack has to smile a little.

“What?” Dale asks him. “The whole world’s gone crazy, so what’s to smile about?”

On TV, Woody Strode says: “What do you mean,
good
? The whole damn world’s gone crazy.”

Jack Sawyer says, very softly: “We’re going to gun down as many as we can. Let them know we were here.”

On the screen, Lily says the same thing to Woody. The two of them are about to step aboard the Execution Express, and heads will roll—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Dale looks at his friend, dazed.

“I know most of her lines,” Jack says, almost apologetically. “She was my mother, you see.”

Before Dale can answer (supposing any answer came to mind), Jack joins Beezer and Doc at the bar. He looks up at the Kingsland Ale clock next to the television: 11:40. It should be high noon—in situations like this, it’s always supposed to be high noon, isn’t it?

“Jack,” Beezer says, and gives him a nod. “How ya doin’, buddy?”

“Not too bad. You boys carrying?”

Doc lifts his vest, disclosing the butt of a pistol. “It’s a Colt 9. Beez has got one of the same. Good iron, all registered and proper.” He glances at Dale. “You along for the ride, are you?”

“It’s my town,” Dale says, “and the Fisherman just murdered my uncle. I don’t understand very much of what Jack’s been telling me, but I know that much. And if he says there’s a chance we can get Judy Marshall’s boy back, I think we’d better try it.” He glances at Jack. “I brought you a service revolver. One of the Ruger automatics. It’s out in the car.”

Jack nods absently. He doesn’t care much about the guns, because once they’re on the other side they’ll almost certainly change into something else. Spears, possibly javelins. Maybe even slingshots. It’s going to be the Execution Express, all right—the Sawyer Gang’s last ride—but he doubts if it’ll be much like the one in this old movie from the sixties. Although he’ll take the Ruger. There might be work for it on this side. One never knows, does one?

“Ready to saddle up?” Beezer asks Jack. His eyes are deep-socketed, haunted. Jack guesses the Beez didn’t get much sleep last night. He glances up at the clock again and decides—for no other reason than pure superstition—that he doesn’t want to start for the Black House just yet, after all. They’ll leave the Sand Bar when the hands on the Kingsland clock stand at straight-up noon, no sooner. The Gary Cooper witching hour.

“Almost,” he says. “Have you got the map, Beez?”

“I got it, but I also got an idea you don’t really need it, do you?”

“Maybe not,” Jack allows, “but I’ll take all the insurance I can get.”

Beezer nods. “I’m down with that. I sent my old lady back to her ma’s in Idaho. After what happened with poor old Mousie, I didn’t have to argue too hard. Never sent her back before, man. Not even the time we had our bad rumble with the Pagans. But I got a terrible feeling about this.” He hesitates, then comes right out with it. “Feel like none of us are coming back.”

Jack puts a hand on Beezer’s meaty forearm. “Not too late to back out. I won’t think any less of you.”

Beezer mulls it over, then shakes his head. “Amy comes to me in my dreams, sometimes. We talk. How am I gonna talk to her if I don’t stand up for her? No, man, I’m in.”

Jack looks at Doc.

“I’m with Beez,” Doc says. “Sometimes you just gotta stand up. Besides, after what happened to Mouse . . .” He shrugs. “God knows what we might have caught from him. Or fucking around out there at that house. Future might be short after that, no matter what.”

“How’d it turn out with Mouse?” Jack inquires.

Doc gives a short laugh. “Just like he said. Around three o’clock this morning, we just washed old Mousie down the tub drain. Nothing left but foam and hair.” He grimaces as if his stomach is trying to revolt, then quickly downs his glass of Coke.

“If we’re going to do something,” Dale blurts, “let’s just do it.”

Jack glances up at the clock. It’s 11:50 now. “Soon.”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Beezer says abruptly. “I’m not even afraid of that devil dog. It can be hurt if you pour enough bullets into it, we found that out. It’s how that fucking place makes you
feel.
The air gets thick. Your head aches and your muscles get weak.” And then, with a surprisingly good British accent: “Hangovers ain’t in it, old boy.”

“My gut was the worst,” Doc says. “That and . . .” But he falls silent. He doesn’t ever talk about Daisy Temperly, the girl he killed with an errant scratch of ink on a prescription pad, but he can see her now as clearly as the make-believe cowboys on the Sand Bar’s TV. Blond, she was. With brown eyes. Sometimes he’d made her smile (even in her pain) by singing that song to her, the Van Morrison song about the brown-eyed girl.

“I’m going for Mouse,” Doc says. “I
have
to. But that place . . . it’s a sick place. You don’t know, man. You may think you understand, but you don’t.”

“I understand more than you think,” Jack says. Now it’s his turn to stop, to consider. Do Beezer and Doc remember the word Mouse spoke before he died? Do they remember
d’yamba
? They should, they were right there, they saw the books slide off their shelf and hang in the air when Jack spoke that word . . . but Jack is almost sure that if he asked them right now, they’d give him looks that are puzzled, or maybe just blank. Partly because
d’yamba
is hard to remember, like the precise location of the lane that leads from sane antislippage Highway 35 to Black House. Mostly, however, because the word was for him, for Jack Sawyer, the son of Phil and Lily. He is the leader of the Sawyer Gang because he is different. He has traveled, and travel is broadening.

How much of this should he tell them? None of it, probably. But they must believe, and for that to happen he must use Mouse’s word. He knows in his heart that he must be careful about using it
—d’yamba
is like a gun; you can only fire it so many times before it clicks empty—and he hates to use it here, so far from Black House, but he will. Because they must believe. If they don’t, their brave quest to rescue Ty is apt to end with them all kneeling in Black House’s front yard, noses bleeding, eyes bleeding, vomiting and spitting teeth into the poison air. Jack can tell them that most of the poison comes from their own minds, but talk is cheap. They must believe.

Besides, it’s still only 11:53.

“Lester,” he says.

The bartender has been lurking, forgotten, by the swing door into the kitchen. Not eavesdropping—he’s too far away for that—but not wanting to move and attract attention. Now it seems that he’s attracted some anyway.

“Have you got honey?” Jack asks.

“H-honey?”

“Bees make it, Lester. Mokes make money and bees make honey.”

Something like comprehension dawns in Lester’s eyes. “Yeah, sure. I keep it to make Kentucky Getaways. Also—”

“Set it on the bar,” Jack tells him.

Dale stirs restively. “If time’s as short as you think, Jack—”

“This is important.” He watches Lester Moon put a small plastic squeeze bottle of honey on the bar and finds himself thinking of Henry. How Henry would have enjoyed the pocket miracle Jack is about to perform! But of course, he wouldn’t have needed to perform such a trick for Henry. Wouldn’t have needed to waste part of the precious word’s power. Because Henry would have believed at once, just as he had believed he could drive from Trempealeau to French Landing—hell, to the fucking
moon—
if someone just dared to give him the chance and the car keys.

“I’ll bring it to you,” Lester says bravely. “I ain’t afraid.”

“Just set it down on the far end of the bar,” Jack tells him. “That’ll be fine.”

He does as asked. The squeeze bottle is shaped like a bear. It sits there in a beam of six-minutes-to-noon sun. On the television, the gunplay has started. Jack ignores it. He ignores everything, focusing his mind as brightly as a point of light through a magnifying glass. For a moment he allows that tight focus to remain empty, and then he fills it with a single word:

(
D’YAMB
A
)

At once he hears a low buzzing. It swells to a drone. Beezer, Doc, and Dale look around. For a moment nothing happens, and then the sunshiny doorway darkens. It’s almost as if a very small rain cloud has floated into the Sand Bar—

Stinky Cheese lets out a strangled squawk and goes flailing backward. “Wasps!” he shouts. “Them are wasps!
Get clear!
”

But they are not wasps. Doc and Lester Moon might not recognize that, but both Beezer and Dale Gilbertson are country boys. They know bees when they see one. Jack, meanwhile, only looks at the swarm. Sweat has popped out on his forehead. He’s concentrating with all his might on what he wants the bees to do.

They cloud around the squeeze bottle of honey so thickly it almost disappears. Then their humming deepens, and the bottle begins to rise, wobbling from side to side like a tiny missile with a really shitty guidance system. Then, slowly, it wavers its way toward the Sawyer Gang. The squeeze bottle is riding a cushion of bees six inches above the bar.

Jack holds his hand out and open. The squeeze bottle glides into it. Jack closes his fingers. Docking complete.

For a moment the bees rise around his head, their drone competing with Lily, who is shouting: “Save the tall bastard for me! He’s the one who raped Stella!”

Then they stream out the door and are gone.

The Kingsland Ale clock stands at 11:57.

“Holy Mary, mothera God,” Beezer whispers. His eyes are huge, almost popping out of their sockets.

“You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, looks like to me,” Dale says. His voice is unsteady.

From the end of the bar there comes a soft thud. Lester “Stinky Cheese” Moon has, for the first time in his life, fainted.

“We’re going to go now,” Jack says. “Beez, you and Doc lead. We’ll be right behind you in Dale’s car. When you get to the lane and the
NO TRESPASSING
sign,
don’t go in.
Just park your scoots. We’ll go the rest of the way in the car, but first we’re going to put a little of this under our noses.” Jack holds up the squeeze bottle. It’s a plastic version of Winnie-the-Pooh, grimy around the middle where Lester seizes it and squeezes it. “We might even dab some
in
our nostrils. A little sticky, but better than projectile vomiting.”

Confirmation and approval are dawning in Dale’s eyes. “Like putting Vicks under your nose at a murder scene,” he says.

It’s nothing like that at all, but Jack nods. Because this is about
believing.

“Will it work?” Doc asks doubtfully.

“Yes,” Jack replies. “You’ll still feel some discomfort, I don’t doubt that a bit, but it’ll be mild. Then we’re going to cross over to . . . well, to someplace else. After that, all bets are off.”

“I thought the kid was in the house,” Beez says.

“I think he’s probably been moved. And the house . . . it’s a kind of wormhole. It opens on another . . .”
World
is the first word to come into Jack’s mind, but somehow he doesn’t think it
is
a world, not in the Territories sense. “On another place.”

On the TV, Lily has just taken the first of about six bullets. She dies in this one, and as a kid Jack always hated that, but at least she goes down shooting. She takes quite a few of the bastards with her, including the tall one who raped her friend, and that is good. Jack hopes he can do the same. More than anything, however, he hopes he can bring Tyler Marshall back to his mother and father.

Beside the television, the clock flicks from 11:59 to 12:00.

“Come on, boys,” Jack Sawyer says. “Let’s saddle up and ride.”

Beezer and Doc mount their iron horses. Jack and Dale stroll toward the chief of police’s car, then stop as a Ford Explorer bolts into the Sand Bar’s lot, skidding on the gravel and hurrying toward them, pulling a rooster tail of dust into the summer air.

“Oh Christ,” Dale murmurs. Jack can tell from the too small baseball cap sitting ludicrously on the driver’s head that it’s Fred Marshall. But if Ty’s father thinks he’s going to join the rescue mission, he’d better think again.

“Thank God I caught you!” Fred shouts as he all but tumbles from his truck. “Thank God!”

“Who next?” Dale asks softly. “Wendell Green? Tom Cruise? George W. Bush, arm in arm with Miss Fucking Universe?”

Jack barely hears him. Fred is wrestling a long package from the bed of his truck, and all at once Jack is interested. The thing in that package could be a rifle, but somehow he doesn’t think that’s what it is. Jack suddenly feels like a squeeze bottle being levitated by bees, not so much acting as acted upon. He starts forward.

“Hey bro, let’s roll!” Beezer yells. Beneath him, his Harley explodes into life. “Let’s—”

Then Beezer
cries out.
So does Doc, who jerks so hard he almost dumps the bike idling between his thighs. Jack feels something like a bolt of lightning go through his head and he reels forward into Fred, who is also shouting incoherently. For a moment the two of them appear to be either dancing with the long wrapped object Fred has brought them or wrestling over it.