Black House

by Stephen King

  “As you see,” Dr. Spiegleman says, “I use this space as both an office and a supplementary consulting room. Most of my patients come in through the waiting room, and I’ll bring Mrs. Marshall in that way. Give me two or three minutes.”

  Jack thanks him, and the doctor hurries out through the door to the waiting room.

  In the little closet, Wendell Green slides his cassette recorder from the pocket of his jacket and presses both it and his ear to the door. His thumb rests on the RECORD button, and his heart is racing. Once again, western Wisconsin’s most distinguished journalist is doing his duty for the man in the street. Too bad it’s so blasted dark in that closet, but being stuffed into a black hole is not the first sacrifice Wendell has made for his sacred calling; besides, all he really needs to see is the little red light on his tape recorder.

  Then, a surprise: although Doctor Spiegleman has left the room, here is his voice, asking for Lieutenant Sawyer. How did that Freudian quack get back in without opening or closing a door, and what happened to Judy Marshall?

  Lieutenant Sawyer, I must speak to you. Pick up the receiver. You have a call, and it sounds urgent.

  Of course—he is on the intercom. Who can be calling Jack Sawyer, and why the urgency? Wendell hopes that Golden Boy will push the telephone’s SPEAKER button, but alas Golden Boy does not, and Wendell must be content with hearing only one side of the conversation.

  “A call?” Jack says. “Who’s it from?”

  “He refused to identify himself,” the doctor says. “Someone you told you’d be visiting Ward D.”

  Beezer, with news of Black House. “How do I take the call?”

  “Just punch the flashing button,” the doctor says. “Line one. I’ll bring in Mrs. Marshall when I see you’re off the line.”

  Jack hits the button and says, “Jack Sawyer.”

  “Thank God,” says Beezer St. Pierre’s honey-and-tobacco voice. “Hey man, you gotta get over to my place, the sooner the better. Everything got messed up.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Oh yeah, we found Black House, all right. It didn’t exactly welcome us. That place wants to stay hidden, and it lets you know. Some of the guys are hurting. Most of us will be okay, but Mouse, I don’t know. He got something terrible from a dog bite, if it was a dog, which I doubt. Doc did what he could, but… . Hell, the guy is out of his mind, and he won’t let us take him to the hospital.”

  “Beezer, why don’t you take him anyway, if that’s what he needs?”

  “We don’t do things that way. Mouse hasn’t stepped inside a hospital since his old man croaked in one. He’s twice as scared of hospitals as of what’s happening to his leg. If we took him to La Riviere General, he’d probably drop dead in the E.R.”

  “And if he didn’t, he’d never forgive you.”

  “You got it. How soon can you be here?”

  “I still have to see the woman I told you about. Maybe an hour—not much longer than that, anyhow.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? Mouse is dying on us. We got a whole lot of things to say to each other.”

  “I agree,” Jack says. “Work with me on this, Beez.” He hangs up, turns to the door near the consulting-room chair, and waits for his world to change.

  What the hell was that all about? Wendell wonders. He has squandered two minutes’ worth of tape on a conversation between Jack Sawyer and the dumb SOB who spoiled the film that should have paid for a nice car and a fancy house on a bluff above the river, and all he got was worthless crap. Wendell deserves the nice car and the fancy house, has earned them thrice over, and his sense of deprivation makes him seethe with resentment. Golden Boys get everything handed to them on diamond-studded salvers, people fall all over themselves to give them stuff they don’t even need, but a legendary, selfless working stiff and gentleman of the press like Wendell Green? It costs Wendell Green twenty bucks to hide in a dark, crowded little closet just to do his job!

  His ears tingle when he hears the door open. The red light burns, the faithful recorder passes the ready tape from spool to spool, and whatever happens now is going to change everything: Wendell’s gut, that infallible organ, his best friend, warms with the assurance that justice will soon be his.

  Dr. Spiegleman’s voice filters through the closet door and registers on the spooling tape: “I’ll leave you two alone now.”

  Golden Boy: “Thank you, Doctor. I’m very grateful.”

  Dr. Spiegleman: “Thirty minutes, right? That means I’ll be back at, umm, ten past two.”

  Golden Boy: “Fine.”

  The soft closing of the door, the click of the latch. Then long seconds of silence. Why aren’t they talking to each other? But of course … the question answers itself. They’re waiting for fat-ass Spiegleman to move out of hearing range.

  Oh, this is just delicious, that’s what this is! The whisper of Golden Boy’s footsteps moving toward that door all but confirms the sterling reporter’s intuition. O gut of Wendell Green, O Instrument Marvelous and Trustworthy, once more you come through with the journalistic goods! Wendell hears, the machine records, the inevitable next sound: the click of the lock.

  Judy Marshall: “Don’t forget the door behind you.”

  Golden Boy: “How are you?”

  Judy Marshall: “Much, much better, now that you’re here. The door, Jack.”

  Another set of footsteps, another unmistakable sliding into place of a metal bolt.

  Soon-To-Be-Ruined Boy: “I’ve been thinking about you all day. I’ve been thinking about this.”

  The Harlot, the Whore, the Slut: “Is half an hour long enough?”

  Him With Foot In Bear Trap: “If it isn’t, he’ll just have to bang on the doors.”

  Wendell barely restrains himself from crowing with delight. These two people are actually going to have sex together, they are going to rip off their clothes and have at it like animals. Man, talk about your paybacks! When Wendell Green is done with him, Jack Sawyer’s reputation will be lower than the Fisherman’s.

  Judy’s eyes look tired, her hair is limp, and her fingertips wear the startling white of fresh gauze, but besides registering the depth of her feeling, her face glows with the clear, hard-won beauty of the imaginative strength she called upon to earn what she has seen. To Jack, Judy Marshall looks like a queen falsely imprisoned. Instead of disguising her innate nobility of spirit, the hospital gown and the faded nightdress make it all the more apparent. Jack takes his eyes from her long enough to lock the second door, then takes a step toward her.

  He sees that he cannot tell her anything she does not already know. Judy completes the movement he has begun; she moves before him and holds out her hands to be grasped.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he says, taking her hands. “I’ve been thinking about this.”

  Her response takes in everything she has come to see, everything they must do. “Is half an hour long enough?”

  “If it isn’t, he’ll just have to bang on the doors.”

  They smile; she increases the pressure on his hands. “Then let him bang.” With the smallest, slightest tug, she pulls him forward, and Jack’s heart pounds with the expectation of an embrace.

  What she does is far more extraordinary than a mere embrace: she lowers her head and, with two light, dry brushes of her lips, kisses his hands. Then she presses the back of his right hand against her cheek, and steps back. Her eyes kindle. “You know about the tape.”

  He nods.

  “I went mad when I heard it, but sending it to me was a mistake. He pushed me too hard. Because I fell right back into being that child who listened to another child whispering through a wall. I went crazy and I tried to rip the wall apart. I heard my son screaming for my help. And he was there—on the other side of the wall. Where you have to go.”

  “Where we have to go.”

  “Where we have to go. Yes. But I can’t get through the wall, and you can. So you have work to do, the most important work there coul
d be. You have to find Ty, and you have to stop the abbalah. I don’t know what that is, exactly, but stopping it is your job. Am I saying this right: you are a coppiceman?”

  “You’re saying it right,” Jack says. “I am a coppiceman. That’s why it’s my job.”

  “Then this is right, too. You have to get rid of Gorg and his master, Mr. Munshun. That’s not what his name really is, but it’s what it sounds like: Mr. Munshun. When I went mad, and I tried to rip through the world, she told me, and she could whisper straight into my ear. I was so close!”

  What does Wendell Green, ear and whirling tape recorder pressed to the door, make of this conversation? It is hardly what he expected to hear: the animal grunts and moans of desire busily being satisfied. Wendell Green grinds his teeth, he stretches his face into a grimace of frustration.

  “I love that you’ve let yourself see,” says Jack. “You’re an amazing human being. There isn’t a person in a thousand who could even understand what that means, much less do it.”

  “You talk too much,” Judy says.

  “I mean, I love you.”

  “In your way, you love me. But you know what? Just by coming here, you made me more than I was. There’s this sort of beam that comes out of you, and I just locked on to that beam. Jack, you lived there, and all I could do was peek at it for a little while. That’s enough, though. I’m satisfied. You and Ward D, you let me travel.”

  “What you have inside you lets you travel.”

  “Okay, three cheers for a well-examined spell of craziness. Now it’s time. You have to be a coppiceman. I can only come halfway, but you’ll need all your strength.”

  “I think your strength is going to surprise you.”

  “Take my hands and do it, Jack. Go over. She’s waiting, and I have to give you to her. You know her name, don’t you?”

  He opens his mouth, but cannot speak. A force that seems to come from the center of the earth surges into his body, rolling electricity through his bloodstream, tightening his scalp, sealing his trembling fingers to Judy Marshall’s, which also tremble. A feeling of tremendous lightness and mobility gathers within all the hollow spaces of his body; at the same time he has never been so aware of his body’s obduracy, its resistance to flight. When they leave, he thinks, it’ll be like a rocket launch. The floor seems to vibrate beneath his feet.

  He manages to look down the length of his arms to Judy Marshall, who leans back with her head parallel to the shaking floor, eyes closed, smiling in a trance of accomplishment. A band of shivery white light surrounds her. Her beautiful knees, her legs shining beneath the hem of the old blue garment, her bare feet planted. That light shivers around him, too. All of this comes from her, Jack thinks, and from—

  A rushing sound fills the air, and the Georgia O’Keeffe prints fly off the walls. The low couch dances away from the wall; papers swirl up from the jittering desk. A skinny halogen lamp crashes to the ground. All through the hospital, on every floor, in every room and ward, beds vibrate, television sets go black, instruments rattle in their rattling trays, lights flicker. Toys drop from the gift-shop shelves, and the tall lilies skid across the marble in their vases. On the fifth floor, light bulbs detonate into showers of golden sparks.

  The hurricane noise builds, builds, and with a great whooshing sound becomes a wide, white sheet of light, which immediately vanishes into a pinpoint and is gone. Gone, too, is Jack Sawyer; and gone from the closet is Wendell Green.

  Sucked into the Territories, blown out of one world and sucked into another, blasted and dragged, man, we’re a hundred levels up from the simple, well-known flip. Jack is lying down, looking up at a ripped white sheet that flaps like a torn sail. A quarter of a second ago, he saw another white sheet, one made of pure light and not literal, like this one. The soft, fragrant air blesses him. At first, he is conscious only that his right hand is being held, then that an astonishing woman lies beside him. Judy Marshall. No, not Judy Marshall, whom he does love, in his way, but another astonishing woman, who once whispered to Judy through a wall of night and has lately drawn a great deal closer. He had been about to speak her name when—

  Into his field of vision moves a lovely face both like and unlike Judy’s. It was turned on the same lathe, baked in the same kiln, chiseled by the same besotted sculptor, but more delicately, with a lighter, more caressing touch. Jack cannot move for wonder. He is barely capable of breathing. This woman whose face is above him now, smiling down with a tender impatience, has never borne a child, never traveled beyond her native Territories, never flown in an airplane, driven a car, switched on a television, scooped ice ready-made from the freezer, or used a microwave: and she is radiant with spirit and inner grace. She is, he sees, lit from within.

  Humor, tenderness, compassion, intelligence, strength, glow in her eyes and speak from the curves of her mouth, from the very molding of her face. He knows her name, and her name is perfect for her. It seems to Jack that he has fallen in love with this woman in an instant, that he enlisted in her cause on the spot, and at last he finds he can speak her perfect name:

  Sophie.

  21

  “SOPHIE.”

  Still holding her hand, he gets to his feet, pulling her up with him. His legs are trembling. His eyes feel hot and too large for their sockets. He is terrified and exalted in equal, perfectly equal, measure. His heart is hammering, but oh the beats are sweet. The second time he tries, he manages to say her name a little louder, but there’s still not much to his voice, and his lips are so numb they might have been rubbed with ice. He sounds like a man just coming back from a hard punch in the gut.

  “Yes.”

  “Sophie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sophie.”

  “Yes.”

  There’s something weirdly familiar about this, him saying the name over and over and her giving back that simple affirmation. Familiar and funny. And it comes to him: there’s a scene almost identical to this in The Terror of Deadwood Gulch, after one of the Lazy 8 Saloon’s patrons has knocked Bill Towns unconscious with a whiskey bottle. Lily, in her role as sweet Nancy O’Neal, tosses a bucket of water in his face, and when he sits up, they—

  “This is funny,” Jack says. “It’s a good bit. We should be laughing.”

  With the slightest of smiles, Sophie says, “Yes.”

  “Laughing our fool heads off.”

  “Yes.”

  “Our tarnal heads off.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not speaking English anymore, am I?”

  “No.”

  He sees two things in her blue eyes. The first is that she doesn’t know the word English. The second is that she knows exactly what he means.

  “Sophie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sophie-Sophie-Sophie.”

  Trying to get the reality of it. Trying to pound it home like a nail.

  A smile lights her face and enriches her mouth. Jack thinks of how it would be to kiss that mouth, and his knees feel weak. All at once he is fourteen again, and wondering if he dares give his date a peck good-night after he walks her home.

  “Yes-yes-yes,” she says, the smile strengthening. And then: “Have you got it yet? Do you understand that you’re here and how you got here?”

  Above and around him, billows of gauzy white cloth flap and sigh like living breath. Half a dozen conflicting drafts gently touch his face and make him aware that he carried a coat of sweat from the other world, and that it stinks. He arms it off his brow and cheeks in quick gestures, not wanting to lose sight of her for longer than a moment at a time.

  They are in a tent of some kind. It’s huge—many-chambered—and Jack thinks briefly of the pavilion in which the Queen of the Territories, his mother’s Twinner, lay dying. That place had been rich with many colors, filled with many rooms, redolent of incense and sorrow (for the Queen’s death had seemed inevitable, sure—only a matter of time). This one is ramshackle and ragged. The walls and the ceiling are full of hol
es, and where the white material remains whole, it’s so thin that Jack can actually see the slope of land outside, and the trees that dress it. Rags flutter from the edges of some of the holes when the wind blows. Directly over his head he can see a shadowy maroon shape. Some sort of cross.

  “Jack, do you understand how you—”

  “Yes. I flipped.” Although that isn’t the word that comes out of his mouth. The literal meaning of the word that comes out seems to be horizon road. “And it seems that I sucked a fair number of Spiegleman’s accessories with me.” He bends and picks up a flat stone with a flower carved on it. “I believe that in my world, this was a Georgia O’Keeffe print. And that—” He points to a blackened, fireless torch leaning against one of the pavilion’s fragile walls. “I think that was a—” But there are no words for it in this world, and what comes out of his mouth sounds as ugly as a curse in German: “—halogen lamp.”

  She frowns. “Hal-do-jen … limp? Lemp?”

  He feels his numb lips rise in a little grin. “Never mind.”

  “But you are all right.”

  He understands that she needs him to be all right, and so he’ll say that he is, but he’s not. He is sick and glad to be sick. He is one lovestruck daddy, and wouldn’t have it any other way. If you discount how he felt about his mother—a very different kind of love, despite what the Freudians might think—it’s the first time for him. Oh, he certainly thought he had been in and out of love, but that was before today. Before the cool blue of her eyes, her smile, and even the way the shadows thrown by the decaying tent fleet across her face like schools of fish. At this moment he would try to fly off a mountain for her if she asked, or walk through a forest fire, or bring her polar ice to cool her tea, and those things do not constitute being all right.