Black House

by Stephen King

  “We’re in the oldest part of the building now,” Fred says.

  “You must want to get Judy out of here as soon as possible.”

  “Well, sure, soon as Pat Skarda thinks she’s ready. But you’ll be surprised; Judy kind of likes it in here. I think it’s helping. What she told me was, she feels completely safe, and the ones that can talk, some of them are extremely interesting. It’s like being on a cruise, she says.”

  Jack laughs in surprise and disbelief, and Fred Marshall touches his shoulder and says, “Does that mean she’s a lot better or a lot worse?”

  At the end of the corridor, they emerge directly into a good-sized room that seems to have been preserved unaltered for a hundred years. Dark brown wainscoting rises four feet from the dark brown wooden floor. Far up in the gray wall to their right, two tall, narrow windows framed like paintings admit filtered gray light. A man seated behind a polished wooden counter pushes a button that unlocks a double-sized metal door with a WARD D sign and a small window of reinforced glass. “You can go in, Mr. Marshall, but who is he?”

  “His name is Jack Sawyer. He’s here with me.”

  “Is he either a relative or a medical professional?”

  “No, but my wife wants to see him.”

  “Wait here a moment.” The attendant disappears through the metal door and locks it behind him with a prisonlike clang. A minute later, the attendant reappears with a nurse whose heavy, lined face, big arms and hands, and thick legs make her look like a man in drag. She introduces herself as Jane Bond, the head nurse of Ward D, a combination of words and circumstances that irresistibly suggest at least a couple of nicknames. The nurse subjects Fred and Jack, then only Jack, to a barrage of questions before she vanishes back behind the great door.

  “Ward Bond,” Jack says, unable not to.

  “We call her Warden Bond,” says the attendant. “She’s tough, but on the other hand, she’s unfair.” He coughs and stares up at the high windows. “We got this orderly, calls her Double-oh Zero.”

  A few minutes later, Head Nurse Warden Bond, Agent OO Zero, swings open the metal door and says, “You may enter now, but pay attention to what I say.”

  At first, the ward resembles a huge airport hangar divided into a section with a row of padded benches, a section with round tables and plastic chairs, and a third section where two long tables are stacked with drawing paper, boxes of crayons, and watercolor sets. In the vast space, these furnishings look like dollhouse furniture. Here and there on the cement floor, painted a smooth, anonymous shade of gray, lie padded rectangular mats; twenty feet above the floor, small, barred windows punctuate the far wall, of red brick long ago given a couple of coats of white paint. In a glass enclosure to the left of the door, a nurse behind a desk looks up from a book. Far down to the right, well past the tables with art supplies, three locked metal doors open into worlds of their own. The sense of being in a hangar gradually yields to a sense of a benign but inflexible imprisonment.

  A low hum of voices comes from the twenty to thirty men and women scattered throughout the enormous room. Only a very few of these men and women are talking to visible companions. They pace in circles, stand frozen in place, lie curled like infants on the mats; they count on their fingers and scribble in notebooks; they twitch, yawn, weep, stare into space and into themselves. Some of them wear green hospital robes, others civilian clothes of all kinds: Tshirts and shorts, sweat suits, running outfits, ordinary shirts and slacks, jerseys and pants. No one wears a belt, and none of the shoes have laces. Two muscular men with close-cropped hair and in brilliant white Tshirts sit at one of the round tables with the air of patient watchdogs. Jack tries to locate Judy Marshall, but he cannot pick her out.

  “I asked for your attention, Mr. Sawyer.”

  “Sorry,” Jack says. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so big.”

  “We’d better be big, Mr. Sawyer. We serve an expanding population.” She waits for an acknowledgment of her significance, and Jack nods. “Very well. I’m going to give you some basic ground rules. If you listen to what I say, your visit here will be as pleasant as possible for all of us. Don’t stare at the patients, and don’t be alarmed by what they say. Don’t act as though you find anything they do or say unusual or distressing. Just be polite, and eventually they will leave you alone. If they ask you for things, do as you choose, within reason. But please refrain from giving them money, any sharp objects, or edibles not previously cleared by one of the physicians—some medications interact adversely with certain kinds of food. At some point, an elderly woman named Estelle Packard will probably come up to you and ask if you are her father. Answer however you like, but if you say no, she will go away disappointed, and if you say yes, you’ll make her day. Do you have any questions, Mr. Sawyer?”

  “Where is Judy Marshall?”

  “She’s on this side, with her back to us on the farthest bench. Can you see her, Mr. Marshall?”

  “I saw her right away,” Fred says. “Have there been any changes since this morning?”

  “Not as far as I know. Her admitting physician, Dr. Spiegleman, will be here in about half an hour, and he might have more information for you. Would you like me to take you and Mr. Sawyer to your wife, or would you prefer going by yourself?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Fred Marshall says. “How long can we stay?”

  “I’m giving you fifteen minutes, twenty max. Judy is still in the eval stage, and I want to keep her stress level at a minimum. She looks pretty peaceful now, but she’s also deeply disconnected and, quite frankly, delusional. I wouldn’t be surprised by another hysterical episode, and we don’t want to prolong her evaluation period by introducing new medication at this point, do we? So please, Mr. Marshall, keep the conversation stress-free, light, and positive.”

  “You think she’s delusional?”

  Nurse Bond smiles pityingly. “In all likelihood, Mr. Marshall, your wife has been delusional for years. Oh, she’s managed to keep it hidden, but ideations like hers don’t spring up overnight, no no. These things take years to construct, and all the time the person can appear to be a normally functioning human being. Then something triggers the psychosis into full-blown expression. In this case, of course, it was your son’s disappearance. By the way, I want to extend my sympathies to you at this time. What a terrible thing to have happened.”

  “Yes, it was,” says Fred Marshall. “But Judy started acting strange even before …”

  “Same thing, I’m afraid. She needed to be comforted, and her delusions—her delusional world—came into plain view, because that world provided exactly the comfort she needed. You must have heard some of it this morning, Mr. Marshall. Did your wife mention anything about going to other worlds?”

  “Going to other worlds?” Jack asks, startled.

  “A fairly typical schizophrenic ideation,” Nurse Bond says. “More than half the people on this ward have similar fantasies.”

  “You think my wife is schizophrenic?”

  Nurse Bond looks past Fred to take a comprehensive inventory of the patients in her domain. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Mr. Marshall, but I have had twenty long years of experience in dealing with the mentally ill. On the basis of that experience, I have to tell you, in my opinion your wife manifests the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. I wish I had better news for you.” She glances back at Fred Marshall. “Of course, Dr. Spiegleman will make the final diagnosis, and he will be able to answer all your questions, explain your treatment options, and so forth.”

  The smile she gives Jack seems to congeal the moment it appears. “I always tell my new visitors it’s tougher on the family than it is on the patient. Some of these people, they don’t have a care in the world. Really, you almost have to envy them.”

  “Sure,” Jack says. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Go on, then,” she says, with a trace of peevishness. “Enjoy your visit.”

  A number of heads turn as they walk slowly across the dusty wooden floo
r to the nearest row of benches; many pairs of eyes track their progress. Curiosity, indifference, confusion, suspicion, pleasure, and an impersonal anger show in the pallid faces. To Jack, it seems as though every patient on the ward is inching toward them.

  A flabby middle-aged man in a bathrobe has begun to cut through the tables, looking as though he fears missing his bus to work. At the end of the nearest bench, a thin old woman with streaming white hair stands up and beseeches Jack with her eyes. Her clasped, upraised hands tremble violently. Jack forces himself not to meet her eyes. When he passes her, she half-croons, half-whispers, “My ducky-wucky was behind the door, but I didn’t know it, and there he was, in all that water.”

  “Um,” Fred says. “Judy told me her baby son drowned in the bath.”

  Through the side of his eye, Jack has been watching the fuzzy-haired man in the bathrobe rush toward them, openmouthed. When he and Fred reach the back of Judy Marshall’s bench, the man raises one finger, as if signaling the bus to wait for him, and trots forward. Jack watches him approach; nuts to Warden Bond’s advice. He’s not going to let this lunatic climb all over him, no way. The upraised finger comes to within a foot of Jack’s nose, and the man’s murky eyes search his face. The eyes retreat; the mouth snaps shut. Instantly, the man whirls around and darts off, his robe flying, his finger still searching out its target.

  What was that, Jack wonders. Wrong bus?

  Judy Marshall has not moved. She must have heard the man rushing past her, his rapid breath when he stopped, then his flapping departure, but her back is still straight in the loose green robe, her head still faces forward at the same upright angle. She seems detached from everything around her. If her hair were washed, brushed, and combed, if she were conventionally dressed and had a suitcase beside her, she would look exactly like a woman on a bench at the train station, waiting for the hour of departure.

  So even before Jack sees Judy Marshall’s face, before she speaks a single word, there is about her this sense of leave-taking, of journeys begun and begun again—this suggestion of travel, this hint of a possible elsewhere.

  “I’ll tell her we’re here,” Fred whispers, and ducks around the end of the bench to kneel in front of his wife. The back of her head tilts forward over the erect spine as if to answer the tangled combination of heartbreak, love, and anxiety burning in her husband’s handsome face. Dark blond hair mingled with gold lies flat against the girlish curve of Judy Marshall’s skull. Behind her ear, dozens of varicolored strands clump together in a cobwebby knot.

  “How you feeling, sweetie?” Fred softly asks his wife.

  “I’m managing to enjoy myself,” she says. “You know, honey, I should stay here for at least a little while. The head nurse is positive I’m absolutely crazy. Isn’t that convenient?”

  “Jack Sawyer’s here. Would you like to see him?”

  Judy reaches out and pats his upraised knee. “Tell Mr. Sawyer to come around in front, and you sit right here beside me, Fred.”

  Jack is already coming forward, his eyes on Judy Marshall’s once again upright head, which does not turn. Kneeling, Fred has taken her extended hand in both of his, as if he intends to kiss it. He looks like a lovelorn knight before a queen. When he presses her hand to his cheek, Jack sees the white gauze wrapped around the tips of her fingers. Judy’s cheekbone comes into view, then the side of her gravely unsmiling mouth; then her entire profile is visible, as sharp as the crack of ice on the first day of spring. It is the regal, idealized profile on a cameo, or on a coin: the slight upward curve of the lips, the crisp, chiseled downstroke of the nose, the sweep of the jawline, every angle in perfect, tender, oddly familiar alignment with the whole.

  It staggers him, this unexpected beauty; for a fraction of a second it slows him with the deep, grainy nostalgia of its fragmentary, not-quite evocation of another’s face. Grace Kelly? Catherine Deneuve? No, neither of these; it comes to him that Judy’s profile reminds him of someone he has still to meet.

  Then the odd second passes: Fred Marshall gets to his feet, Judy’s face in three-quarter profile loses its regal quality as she watches her husband sit beside her on the bench, and Jack rejects what has just occurred to him as an absurdity.

  She does not raise her eyes until he stands before her. Her hair is dull and messy; beneath the hospital gown she is wearing an old blue lace-trimmed nightdress that looked dowdy when it was new. Despite these disadvantages, Judy Marshall claims him for her own at the moment her eyes meet his.

  An electrical current beginning at his optic nerves seems to pulse downward through his body, and he helplessly concludes that she has to be the most stunningly beautiful woman he has ever seen. He fears that the force of his reaction to her will knock him off his feet, then—even worse!—that she will see what is going on and think him a fool. He desperately does not want to come off as a fool in her eyes. Brooke Greer, Claire Evinrude, Iliana Tedesco, gorgeous as each of them was in her own way, look like little girls in Halloween costumes next to her. Judy Marshall puts his former beloveds on the shelf; she exposes them as whims and fancies, riddled with false ego and a hundred crippling insecurities. Judy’s beauty is not put on in front of a mirror but grows, with breathtaking simplicity, straight from her innermost being: what you see is only the small, visible portion of a far greater, more comprehensive, radiant, and formal quality within.

  Jack can scarcely believe that agreeable, good-hearted Fred Marshall actually had the fantastic luck to marry this woman. Does he know how great, how literally marvelous, she is? Jack would marry her in an instant, if she were single. It seems to him that he fell in love with her as soon as he saw the back of her head.

  But he cannot be in love with her. She is Fred Marshall’s wife and the mother of their son, and he will simply have to live without her.

  She utters a short sentence that passes through him in a vibrating wave of sound. Jack bends forward muttering an apology, and Judy smilingly offers him a sweep of her hand that invites him to sit before her. He folds to the floor and crosses his ankles in front of him, still reverberating from the shock of having first seen her.

  Her face fills beautifully with feeling. She has seen exactly what just happened to him, and it is all right. She does not think less of him for it. Jack opens his mouth to ask a question. Although he does not know what the question is to be, he must ask it. The nature of the question is unimportant. The most idiotic query will serve; he cannot sit here staring at that wondrous face.

  Before he speaks, one version of reality snaps soundlessly into another, and without transition Judy Marshall becomes a tired-looking woman in her mid-thirties with tangled hair and smudges under her eyes who regards him steadily from a bench in a locked mental ward. It should seem like a restoration of his sanity, but it feels instead like a kind of trick, as though Judy Marshall has done this herself, to make their encounter easier on him.

  The words that escape him are as banal as he feared they might be. Jack listens to himself say that it is nice to meet her.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Mr. Sawyer. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you.”

  He looks for a sign that she acknowledges the enormity of the moment that has just passed, but he sees only her smiling warmth. Under the circumstances, that seems like acknowledgment enough. “How are you getting on in here?” he asks, and the balance shifts even more in his direction.

  “The company takes some getting used to, but the people here got lost and couldn’t find their way back, that’s all. Some of them are very intelligent. I’ve had conversations in here that were a lot more interesting than the ones in my church group or the PTA. Maybe I should have come to Ward D sooner! Being here has helped me learn some things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like there are many different ways to get lost, for one, and getting lost is easier to do than anyone ever admits. The people in here can’t hide how they feel, and most of them never found out how to deal with their fear.”
r />   “How are you supposed to deal with that?”

  “Why, you deal with it by taking it on, that’s how! You don’t just say, I’m lost and I don’t know how to get back—you keep on going in the same direction. You put one foot in front of the other until you get more lost. Everybody should know that. Especially you, Jack Sawyer.”

  “Especial—” Before he can finish the question, an elderly woman with a lined, sweet face appears beside him and touches his shoulder.

  “Excuse me.” She tucks her chin toward her throat with the shyness of a child. “I want to ask you a question. Are you my father?”

  Jack smiles at her. “Let me ask you a question first. Is your name Estelle Packard?”

  Eyes shining, the old woman nods.

  “Then yes, I am your father.”

  Estelle Packard clasps her hands in front of her mouth, dips her head in a bow, and shuffles backward, glowing with pleasure. When she is nine or ten feet away, she gives Jack a little bye-bye wave of one hand and twirls away.

  When Jack looks again at Judy Marshall, it is as if she has parted her veil of ordinariness just wide enough to reveal a small portion of her enormous soul. “You’re a very nice man, aren’t you, Jack Sawyer? I wouldn’t have known that right away. You’re a good man, too. Of course, you’re also charming, but charm and decency don’t always go together. Should I tell you a few other things about yourself?”

  Jack looks up at Fred, who is holding his wife’s hand and beaming. “I want you to say whatever you feel like saying.”