Black House

26

WE HAVE HAD our little conversation about slippage, and it's too late in the game to belabor the point more than a little, but wouldn't you say that most houses are an attempt to hold slippage back? To impose at least the illusion of normality and sanity on the world? Think of Libertyville, with its corny but endearing street names ¡ª Camelot and Avalon and Maid Marian Way. And think of that sweet little honey of a home in Libertyville where Fred, Judy, and Tyler Marshall once lived together. What else would you call 16 Robin Hood Lane but an ode to the everyday, a paean to the prosaic? We could say the same thing about Dale Gilbertson's home, or Jack's, or Henry's, couldn't we? Most of the homes in the vicinity of French Landing, really. The destructive hurricane that has blown through the town doesn't change the fact that the homes stand as brave bulwarks against slippage, as noble as they are humble. They are places of sanity.

Black House ¡ª like Shirley Jackson's Hill House, like the turn-of-the-century monstrosity in Seattle known as Rose Red ¡ª is not sane. It is not entirely of this world. It's hard to look at from the outside ¡ª the eyes play continual tricks ¡ª but if one can hold it steady for a few seconds, one sees a three-story dwelling of perfectly ordinary size. The color is unusual, yes ¡ª that dead black exterior, even the windows swabbed black ¡ª and it has a crouching, leaning aspect that would raise uneasy thoughts about its structural integrity, but if one could appraise it with the glammer of those other worlds stripped away, it would look almost as ordinary as Fred and Judy's place . . . if not so well maintained.

Inside, however, it is different.

Inside, Black House is large.

Black House is, in fact, almost infinite.

Certainly it is no place to get lost, although from time to time people have ¡ª hoboes and the occasional unfortunate runaway child, as well as Charles Burnside/Carl Bierstone's victims ¡ª and relics here and there mark their passing: bits of clothing, pitiful scratchings on the walls of gigantic rooms with strange dimensions, the occasional heap of bones. Here and there the visitor may see a skull, such as the ones that washed up on the banks of the Hanover River during Fritz Haarman's reign of terror in the early 1920s.

This is not a place where you want to get lost.

Let us pass through rooms and nooks and corridors and crannies, safe in the knowledge that we can return to the outside world, the sane anti-slippage world, anytime we want (and yet we are still uneasy as we pass down flights of stairs that seem all but endless and along corridors that dwindle to a point in the distance). We hear an eternal low humming and the faint clash of weird machinery. We hear the idiot whistle of a constant wind either outside or on the floors above and below us. Sometimes we hear a faint, houndly barking that is undoubtedly the abbalah's devil dog, the one that did for poor old Mouse. Sometimes we hear the sardonic caw of a crow and understand that Gorg is here, too ¡ª somewhere.

We pass through rooms of ruin and rooms that are still furnished with a pale and rotten grandeur. Many of these are surely bigger than the whole house in which they hide. And eventually we come to a humble sitting room furnished with an elderly horsehair sofa and chairs of fading red velvet. There is a smell of noisome cooking in the air. (Somewhere close by is a kitchen we must never visit . . . not, that is, if we ever wish to sleep without nightmares again. ) The electrical fixtures in here are at least seventy years old. How can that be, we ask, if Black House was built in the 1970s? The answer is simple: much of Black House ¡ª most of Black House ¡ª has been here much longer. The draperies in this room are heavy and faded. Except for the yellowed news clippings that have been taped to the ugly green wallpaper, it is a room that would not be out of place on the ground floor of the Nelson Hotel. It's a place that is simultaneously sinister and oddly banal, a fitting mirror for the imagination of the old monster who has gone to earth here, who lies sleeping on the horsehair sofa with the front of his shirt turning a sinister red. Black House is not his, although in his pathological grandiosity he believes differently (and Mr. Munshun has not disabused him of this belief ). This one room, however, is.

The clippings around him tell us all we need to know of Charles "Chummy" Burnside's lethal fascinations.

YES, I ATE HER, FISH DECLARES: New York Herald Tribune

BILLY GAFFNEY PLAYMATE AVERS "IT WAS THE GRAY MAN TOOK BILLY, IT WAS THE BOGEYMAN": New York World Telegram

GRACE BUDD HORROR CONTINUES: FISH CONFESSES!: Long Island Star

FISH ADMITS "ROASTING, EATING" WM GAFFNEY: New York American

FRITZ HAARMAN, SO-CALLED "BUTCHER OF HANOVER," EXECUTED FOR MURDER OF 24: New York World

WEREWOLF DECLARES: "I WAS DRIVEN BY LOVE, NOT LUST. " HAARMAN DIES

UNREPENTANT: The Guardian

CANNIBAL OF HANOVER'S LAST LETTER: "YOU CANNOT KILL ME, I SHALL BE

AMONG YOU FOR ETERNITY": New York World

Wendell Green would love this stuff, would he not?

And there are more. God help us, there are so many more. Even Jeffrey Dahmer is here, declaring I WANTED ZOMBIES.

The figure on the couch begins to groan and stir.

"Way-gup, Burny!" This seems to come from thin air, not his mouth . . . although his lips move, like those of a second-rate ventriloquist.

Burny groans. His head turns to the left. "No . . . need to sleep. Everything . . . hurts. "

The head turns to the right in a gesture of negation and Mr. Munshun speaks again. "Way-gup, dey vill be gummink. You must move der buu-uoy. "

The head switches back the other way. Sleeping, Burny thinks Mr. Munshun is still safe inside his head. He has forgotten things are different here in Black House. Foolish Burny, now nearing the end of his usefulness! But not quite there yet.

"Can't . . . lea' me 'lone . . . stomach hurts . . . the blind man . . . fucking blind man hurt my stomach . . . "

But the head turns back the other way and the voice speaks again from the air beside Burny's right ear. Burny fights it, not wanting to wake and face the full ferocious impact of the pain. The blind man has hurt him much worse than he thought at the time, in the heat of the moment. Burny insists to the nagging voice that the boy is safe where he is, that they'll never find him even if they can gain access to Black House, that they will become lost in its unknown depth of rooms and hallways and wander until they first go mad and then die. Mr. Munshun, however, knows that one of them is different from any of the others who have happened on this place. Jack Sawyer is acquainted with the infinite, and that makes him a problem. The boy must be taken out the back way and into End-World, into the very shadow of Din-tah, the great furnace. Mr. Munshun tells Burny that he may still be able to have some of the boy before turning him over to the abbalah, but not here. Too dangerous. Sorry.

Burny continues to protest, but this is a battle he will not win, and we know it. Already the stale, cooked-meat air of the room has begun to shift and swirl as the owner of the voice arrives. We see first a whirlpool of black, then a splotch of red ¡ª an ascot ¡ª and then the beginnings of an impossibly long white face, which is dominated by a single black shark's eye. This is the real Mr. Munshun, the creature who can only live in Burny's head outside of Black House and its enchanted environs. Soon he will be entirely here, he will pull Burny into wakefulness (torture him into wakefulness, if necessary), and he will put Burny to use while there is still use to be gotten from him. For Mr. Munshun cannot move Ty from his cell in the Black House.

Once he is in End-World ¡ª Burny's Sheol ¡ª things will be different.

At last Burny's eyes open. His gnarled hands, which have spilled so much blood, now reach down to feel the dampness of his own blood seeping through his shirt. He looks, sees what has bloomed there, and lets out a scream of horror and cowardice. It does not strike him as just that, after murdering so many children, he should have been mortally wounded by a blind man; it strikes him as hideous, unfair.

For the

first time he is visited by an extremely unpleasant idea: What if there's more to pay for the things he has done over the course of his long career? He has seen End-World; he has seen Conger Road, which winds through it to Din-tah. The blasted, burning landscape surrounding Conger Road is like hell, and surely An-tak, the Big Combination, is hell itself. What if such a place waits for him? What if ¡ª

There's a horrible, paralyzing pain in his guts. Mr. Munshun, now almost fully materialized, has reached out and twisted one smoky, not-quite-transparent hand in the wound Henry inflicted with his switchblade knife.

Burny squeals. Tears run down the old child-murderer's cheeks. "Don't hurt me!"

"Zen do ass I zay. "

"I can't," Burny snivels. "I'm dying. Look at all the blood! Do you think I can get past something like this? I'm eighty-five fucking years old!"

"Duff brayyg, Burn-Burn . . . but dere are zose on z'osser zide who could hill you off your wunds. " Mr. Munshun, like Black House itself, is hard to look at. He shivers in and out of focus. Sometimes that hideously long face (it obscures most of his body, like the bloated head of a caricature on some newspaper's op-ed page) has two eyes, sometimes just one. Sometimes there seem to be tufted snarls of orange hair leaping up from his distended skull, and sometimes Mr. Munshun appears to be as bald as Yul Brynner. Only the red lips and the fangy pointed teeth that lurk inside them remain fairly constant.

Burny eyes his accomplice with a degree of hope. His hands, meanwhile, continue to explore his stomach, which is now hard and bloated with lumps. He suspects the lumps are clots. Oh, that someone should have hurt him so badly! That wasn't supposed to happen! That was never supposed to happen! He was supposed to be protected! He was supposed to ¡ª

"It iss not even peeyond ze realm of bossibility," Mr. Munshun says, "zat ze yearz could be rawled avey vrum you jusst as ze stunn vas rawled avey from ze mouse of Cheezus Chrizze's doom. "

"To be young again," Burny says, and exhales a low, harsh sigh. His breath stinks of blood and spoilage. "Yes, I'd like that. "

"Of gorse! And soch zings are bossible," Mr. Munshun says, nodding his grotesquely unstable face. "Soch gifts are ze abbalah's to giff. But zey are not bromised, Charles, my liddle munching munchkin. But I can make you one bromise. "

The creature in the black evening suit and red ascot leaps forward with dreadful agility. His long-fingered hand darts again into Chummy Burnside's shirt, this time clenches into a fist, and produces a pain beyond any the old monster has ever dreamed of in his own life . . . although he has inflicted this and more on the innocent.

Mr. Munshun's reeking countenance pushes up to Burny's. The single eye glares. "Do you feel dat, Burny? Do you, you mizz-er-a-ble old bag of dirt and zorrow? Ho-ho, ha-ha, of gorse you do! It iss your in-destines I haff in my hand! Und if you do not mooff now, schweinhund, I vill rip dem from your bledding body, ho-ho, ha-ha, und vrap dem arund your neg! You vill die knowing you are choking on your own gudz! A trick I learned from Fritz himzelf, Fritz Haarman, who vas so yunk und loff-ly! Now! Vat do you say? Vill you brink him, or vill you choke?"

"I'll bring him!" Burny screams. "I'll bring him, only stop, stop, you're tearing me apart!"

"Brink him to ze station. Ze station, Burn-Burn. Dis one iz nodd for ze radhulls, de fogzhulls ¡ª not for ze Com-bin-ay-shun. No bledding foodzies for Dyler; he works for his abbalah vid dis. " A long finger tipped with a brutal black nail goes to the huge forehead and taps it above the eyes (for the moment Burny sees two of them, and then the second is once more gone). "Understand?"

"Yes! Yes!" His guts are on fire. And still the hand in his shirt twists and twists.

The terrible highway of Mr. Munshun's face hangs before him. "Ze station ¡ª where you brought the other sbecial ones. "

"YES!"

Mr. Munshun lets go. He steps back. Mercifully for Burny, he is beginning to grow insubstantial again, to discorporate. Yellowed clippings swim into view not behind him but through him. Yet the single eye hangs in the air above the paling blotch of the ascot.

"Mayg zure he vears za cab. Ziss one ezbeshully must wear za cab. "

Burnside nods eagerly. He still smells faintly of My Sin perfume. "The cap, yes, I have the cap. "

"Be gare-ful, Burny. You are old und hurt. Ze bouy is young und desberate. Flitt of foot. If you let him get avey ¡ª "

In spite of the pain, Burny smiles. One of the children getting away from him! Even one of the special ones! What an idea! "Don't worry," he says. "Just . . . if you speak to him . . . to Abbalah-doon . . . tell him I'm not past it yet. If he makes me better, he won't regret it. And if he makes me young again, I'll bring him a thousand young. A thousand Breakers. "

Fading and fading. Now Mr. Munshun is again just a glow, a milky disturbance on the air of Burny's sitting room deep in the house he abandoned only when he realized he really did need someone to take care of him in his sunset years.

"Bring him just dis vun, Burn-Burn. Bring him just dis vun, und you vill be revarded. "

Mr. Munshun is gone. Burny stands and bends over the horsehair sofa. Doing it squeezes his belly, and the resulting pain makes him scream, but he doesn't stop. He reaches into the darkness and pulls out a battered black leather sack. He grasps its top and leaves the room, limping and clutching at his bleeding, distended belly.

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 ¡ª big, sweating, red-faced, a Kingsland beer in one hand and another tucked away beneath his seat for emergencies ¡ª 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 ¡ª nobody can hit the tar out of the ball like Big Mac ¡ª but Sexson has been awesome for the Brewers this year, just awesome, and Tyler Marshall has won ¡ª

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 ¡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 ¡ª "

"Way-GUP, you shit!"