Black House

by Stephen King

  Jack pulls away from Judy. She pulls away from him. They are on the floor. Judy’s nightdress is all the way up to her waist, exposing plain white nylon underwear. Jack’s shirt is open, and so are his pants. His shoes are still on, but on the wrong feet, from the feel of them. Nearby, the glass-topped coffee table is overturned and the journals that were on it are scattered. Some seem to have been literally blown out of their bindings.

  More screams from the corridor, plus a few cackles and mad ululations. Ethan Evans continues to yell at stampeding mental patients, and now a woman is yelling as well—Head Nurse Rack, perhaps. The alarms bray on and on.

  All at once a door bursts open and Wendell Green gallops into the room. Behind him is a closet with clothes scattered everywhere, the spare items of Dr. Spiegleman’s wardrobe all ahoo. In one hand Wendell’s holding his Panasonic minicorder. In the other he has several gleaming tubular objects. Jack is willing to bet they’re double-A Duracells.

  Jack’s clothes have been unbuttoned (or perhaps blown open), but Wendell has fared much worse. His shirt is in tatters. His belly hangs over a pair of white boxer shorts, severely pee-stained in front. He is dragging his brown gabardine slacks by one foot. They slide across the carpet like a shed snakeskin. And although his socks are on, the left one appears to have been turned inside out.

  “What did you do?” Wendell blares. “Oh you Hollywood son of a bitch, WHAT DID YOU DO TO M—”

  He stops. His mouth drops open. His eyes widen. Jack notes that the reporter’s hair appears to be standing out like the quills on a porcupine.

  Wendell, meanwhile, is noting Jack Sawyer and Judy Marshall, embracing on the glass-and paper-littered floor, with their clothes disarranged. They aren’t quite in flagrante delicious, but if Wendell ever saw two people on the verge, dese are dem. His mind is whirling and filled with impossible memories, his balance is shot, his stomach is chugging like a washing machine that has been overloaded with clothes and suds; he desperately needs something to hold on to. He needs news. Even better, he needs scandal. And here, lying in front of him on the floor, are both.

  “RAPE!” Wendell bellows at the top of his lungs. A mad, relieved grin twists up the corners of his mouth. “SAWYER BEAT ME UP AND NOW HE’S RAPING A MENTAL PATIENT!” It doesn’t look much like rape to Wendell, in all truth, but who ever yelled CONSENSUAL SEX! at the top of his lungs and attracted any attention?

  “Shut that idiot up,” Judy says. She yanks down the hem of her nightgown and prepares to stand.

  “Watch out,” Jack says. “Broken glass everywhere.”

  “I’m okay,” she snaps. Then, turning to Wendell with that perfect fearlessness Fred knew so well: “Shut up! I don’t know who you are, but quit that bellowing! Nobody’s being—”

  Wendell backs away from Hollywood Sawyer, dragging his pants along with him. Why doesn’t someone come? he thinks. Why doesn’t someone come before he shoots me, or something? In his frenzy and near hysteria, Wendell has either not registered the alarms and general outcry or believes them to be going on inside his head, just a little more false information to go with his absurd “memories” of a black gunslinger, a beautiful woman in a robe, and Wendell Green himself crouching in the dust and eating a half-cooked bird like a caveman.

  “Keep away from me, Sawyer,” he says, backing up with his hands held out in front of him. “I have an extremely hungry lawyer. Caveet-emporer, you asshole, lay one finger on me and he and I will strip you of everything you—OW! OW!”

  Wendell has stepped on a piece of broken glass, Jack sees—probably from one of the prints that formerly decorated the walls and are now decorating the floor. He takes one more off-balance lurch backward, this time steps on his own trailing slacks, and goes sprawling into the leather recliner where Dr. Spiegleman presumably sits while quizzing his patients on their troubled childhoods.

  La Riviere’s premier muckraker stares at the approaching Neanderthal with wide, horrified eyes, then throws the minicorder at him. Jack sees that it’s covered with scratches. He bats it away.

  “RAPE!” Wendell squeals. “HE’S RAPING ONE OF THE LOONIES! HE’S—”

  Jack pops him on the point of the chin, pulling the punch just a little at the last moment, delivering it with almost scientific force. Wendell flops back in Dr. Spiegleman’s recliner, eyes rolling up, feet twitching as if to some tasty beat that only the semiconscious can truly appreciate.

  “The Mad Hungarian couldn’t have done better,” Jack murmurs. It occurs to him that Wendell ought to treat himself to a complete neurological workup in the not too distant future. His head has put in a hard couple of days.

  The door to the hall bursts open. Jack steps in front of the recliner to hide Wendell, stuffing his shirt into his pants (at some point he’s zipped his fly, thank God). A candy striper pokes her fluffy head into Dr. Spiegleman’s office. Although she’s probably eighteen, her panic makes her look about twelve.

  “Who’s yelling in here?” she asks. “Who’s hurt?”

  Jack has no idea what to say, but Judy manages like a pro. “It was a patient,” she says. “Mr. Lackley, I think. He came in, yelled that we were all going to be raped, and then ran out again.”

  “You have to leave at once,” the candy striper tells them. “Don’t listen to that idiot Ethan. And don’t use the elevator. We think it was an earthquake.”

  “Right away,” Jack says crisply, and although he doesn’t move, it’s good enough for the candy striper; she heads out. Judy crosses quickly to the door. It closes but won’t latch. The frame has been subtly twisted out of true.

  There was a clock on the wall. Jack looks toward it, but it’s fallen face-down to the floor. He goes to Judy and takes her by the arms. “How long was I over there?”

  “Not long,” she says, “but what an exit you made! Ka-pow! Did you get anything?” Her eyes plead with him.

  “Enough to know I have to go back to French Landing right away,” he tells her. Enough to know that I love you—that I’ll always love you, in this world or any other.

  “Tyler … is he alive?” She reverses his grip so she is holding him. Sophie did exactly the same thing in Faraway, Jack remembers. “Is my son alive?”

  “Yes. And I’m going to get him for you.”

  His eye happens on Spiegleman’s desk, which has danced its way into the room and stands with all its drawers open. He sees something interesting in one of those drawers and hurries across the carpet, crunching on broken glass and kicking aside one of the prints.

  In the top drawer to the left of the desk’s kneehole is a tape recorder, considerably bigger than Wendell Green’s trusty Panasonic, and a torn piece of brown wrapping paper. Jack snatches up the paper first. Scrawled across the front in draggling letters he’s seen at both Ed’s Eats and on his own front porch is this:

  Deliver to JUDY MARSHALL

  also known as SOPHIE

  There are what appear to be stamps in the upper corner of the torn sheet. Jack doesn’t need to examine them closely to know that they are really cut from sugar packets, and that they were affixed by a dangerous old dodderer named Charles Burnside. But the Fisherman’s identity no longer matters much, and Speedy knew it. Neither does his location, because Jack has an idea Chummy Burnside can flip to a new one pretty much at will.

  But he can’t take the real doorway with him. The doorway to the furnace-lands, to Mr. Munshun, to Ty. If Beezer and his pals found that—

  Jack drops the wrapping paper back into the drawer, hits the EJECT button on the tape recorder, and pops out the cassette tape inside. He sticks it in his pocket and heads for the door.

  “Jack.”

  He looks back at her. Beyond them, fire alarms honk and blat, lunatics scream and laugh, staff runs to and fro. Their eyes meet. In the clear blue light of Judy’s regard, Jack can almost touch that other world with its sweet smells and strange constellations.

  “Is it wonderful over there? As wonderful as in my dreams?”

  �
��It’s wonderful,” he tells her. “And you are, too. Hang in there, okay?”

  Halfway down the hallway, Jack comes upon a nasty sight: Ethan Evans, the young man who once had Wanda Kinderling as his Sunday school teacher, has laid hold of a disoriented old woman by her fat upper arms and is shaking her back and forth. The old woman’s frizzy hair flies around her head.

  “Shut up!” young Mr. Evans is shouting at her. “Shut up, you crazy old cow! You’re not going anywhere except back to your dadblame room!”

  Something about his sneer makes it obvious that even now, with the world turned upside down, young Mr. Evans is enjoying both his power to command and his Christian duty to brutalize. This is only enough to make Jack angry. What infuriates him is the look of terrified incomprehension on the old woman’s face. It makes him think of boys he once lived with long ago, in a place called the Sunlight Home.

  It makes him think of Wolf.

  Without pausing or so much as breaking stride (they have entered the endgame phase of the festivities now, and somehow he knows it), Jack drives his fist into young Mr. Evans’s temple. That worthy lets go of his plump and squawking victim, strikes the wall, then slides down it, his eyes wide and dazed.

  “Either you didn’t listen in Sunday school or Kinderling’s wife taught you the wrong lessons,” Jack says.

  “You … hit … me …” young Mr. Evans whispers. He finishes his slow dive splay-legged on the hallway floor halfway between the Records Annex and Ambulatory Ophthalmology.

  “Abuse another patient—this one, the one I was just talking to, any of them—and I’ll do a lot more than that,” Jack promises young Mr. Evans. Then he’s down the stairs, taking them two at a time, not noticing a handful of johnny-clad patients who stare at him with expressions of puzzled, half-fearful wonder. They look at him as if at a vision who passes them in an envelope of light, some wonder as brilliant as it is mysterious.

  Ten minutes later (long after Judy Marshall has walked composedly back to her room without professional help of any kind), the alarms cut off. An amplified voice—perhaps even Dr. Spiegleman’s own mother wouldn’t have recognized it as her boy’s—begins to blare from the overhead speakers. At this unexpected roar, patients who had pretty much calmed down begin to shriek and cry all over again. The old woman whose mistreatment so angered Jack Sawyer is crouched below the admissions counter with her hands over her head, muttering something about the Russians and Civil Defense.

  “THE EMERGENCY IS OVER!” Spiegleman assures his cast and crew. “THERE IS NO FIRE! PLEASE REPORT TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR! THIS IS DR. SPIEGLEMAN, AND I REPEAT THAT THE EMERGENCY IS OVER!”

  Here comes Wendell Green, weaving his way slowly toward the stairwell, rubbing his chin gently with one hand. He sees young Mr. Evans and offers him a helping hand. For a moment it looks as though Wendell may be pulled over himself, but then young Mr. Evans gets his buttocks against the wall and manages to gain his feet.

  “THE EMERGENCY IS OVER! I REPEAT, THE EMERGENCY IS OVER! NURSES, ORDERLIES, AND DOCTORS, PLEASE ESCORT ALL PATIENTS TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR!”

  Young Mr. Evans eyes the purple bruise rising on Wendell’s chin.

  Wendell eyes the purple bruise rising on the temple of young Mr. Evans.

  “Sawyer?” young Mr. Evans asks.

  “Sawyer,” Wendell confirms.

  “Bastard sucker punched me,” young Mr. Evans confides.

  “Son of a bitch came up behind me,” Wendell says. “The Marshall woman. He had her down.” He lowers his voice. “He was getting ready to rape her.”

  Young Mr. Evans’s whole manner says he is sorrowful but not surprised.

  “Something ought to be done,” Wendell says.

  “You got that right.”

  “People ought to be told.” Gradually, the old fire returns to Wendell’s eyes. People will be told. By him! Because that is what he does, by God! He tells people!

  “Yeah,” young Mr. Evans says. He doesn’t care as much as Wendell does—he lacks Wendell’s burning commitment—but there’s one person he will tell. One person who deserves to be comforted in her lonely hours, who has been left on her own Mount of Olives. One person who will drink up the knowledge of Jack Sawyer’s evil like the very waters of life.

  “This kind of behavior cannot just be swept under the rug,” Wendell says.

  “No way,” young Mr. Evans agrees. “No way, José.”

  Jack has barely cleared the gates of French County Lutheran when his cell phone tweets. He thinks of pulling over to take the call, hears the sound of approaching fire engines, and decides for once to risk driving and talking at the same time. He wants to be out of the area before the local fire brigade shows up and slows him down.

  He flips the little Nokia open. “Sawyer.”

  “Where the fuck are you?” Beezer St. Pierre bellows. “Man, I been hittin’ redial so hard I damn near punched it off the phone!”

  “I’ve been …” But there’s no way he can finish that, not and stay within shouting distance of the truth, that is. Or maybe there is. “I guess I got into one of those dead zones where the cell phone just doesn’t pick up—”

  “Never mind the science lesson, chum. Get your ass over here right now. The actual address is 1 Nailhouse Row—it’s County Road Double-O just south of Chase. It’s the babyshit brown two-story on the corner.”

  “I can find it,” Jack says, and steps down a little harder on the Ram’s gas pedal. “I’m on my way now.”

  “What’s your twenty, man?”

  “Still Arden, but I’m rolling. I can be there in maybe half an hour.”

  “Fuck!” There is an alarming crash-rattle in Jack’s ear as somewhere on Nailhouse Row Beezer slams his fist against something. Probably the nearest wall. “The fuck’s wrong with you, man? Mouse is goin’ down, I mean fast. We’re doin’ our best—those of us who’re still here—but he is goin’ down.” Beezer is panting, and Jack thinks he’s trying not to cry. The thought of Armand St. Pierre in that particular state is alarming. Jack looks at the Ram’s speedometer, sees it’s touching seventy, and eases off a tad. He won’t help anybody by getting himself greased in a road wreck between Arden and Centralia.

  “What do you mean ‘those of us who are still here’?”

  “Never mind, just get your butt down here, if you want to talk to Mouse. And he sure wants to talk to you, because he keeps sayin’ your name.” Beezer lowers his voice. “When he ain’t just ravin’ his ass off, that is. Doc’s doing his best—me and Bear Girl, too—but we’re shovelin’ shit against the tide here.”

  “Tell him to hold on,” Jack says.

  “Fuck that, man—tell him yourself.”

  There’s a rattling sound in Jack’s ear, the faint murmuring of voices. Then another voice, one which hardly sounds human, speaks in his ear. “Got to hurry … got to get over here, man. Thing … bit me. I can feel it in there. Like acid.”

  “Hold on, Mouse,” Jack says. His fingers are dead white on the telephone. He wonders that the case doesn’t simply crack in his grip. “I’ll be there fast as I can.”

  “Better be. Others … already forgot. Not me.” Mouse chuckles. The sound is ghastly beyond belief, a whiff straight out of an open grave. “I got … the memory serum, you know? It’s eatin’ me up … eatin’ me alive … but I got it.”

  There’s the rustling sound of the phone changing hands again, then a new voice. A woman’s. Jack assumes it’s Bear Girl.

  “You got them moving,” she says. “You brought it to this. Don’t let it be for nothing.”

  There is a click in his ear. Jack tosses the cell phone onto the seat and decides that maybe seventy isn’t too fast, after all.

  A few minutes later (they seem like very long minutes to Jack), he’s squinting against the glare of the sun on Tamarack Creek. From here he can almost see his house, and Henry’s.

  Henry.

  Jack thumps the side of his thumb lightly against his breast pock
et and hears the rattle of the cassette tape he took from the machine in Spiegleman’s office. There’s not much reason to turn it over to Henry now; given what Potter told him last night and what Mouse is holding on to tell him today, this tape and the 911 tape have been rendered more or less redundant. Besides, he’s got to hurry to Nailhouse Row. There’s a train getting ready to leave the station, and Mouse Baumann is very likely going to be on it.

  And yet …

  “I’m worried about him,” Jack says softly. “Even a blind man could see I’m worried about Henry.”

  The brilliant summer sun, now sliding down the afternoon side of the sky, reflects off the creek and sends shimmers of light dancing across his face. Each time this light crosses his eyes, they seem to burn.

  Henry isn’t the only one Jack’s worried about, either. He’s got a bad feeling about all of his new French Landing friends and acquaintances, from Dale Gilbertson and Fred Marshall right down to such bit players as old Steamy McKay, an elderly gent who makes his living shining shoes outside the public library, and Ardis Walker, who runs the ramshackle bait shop down by the river. In his imagination, all these people now seem made of glass. If the Fisherman decides to sing high C, they’ll vibrate and then shatter to powder. Only it’s not really the Fisherman he’s worried about anymore.

  This is a case, he reminds himself. Even with all the Territories weirdness thrown in, it’s still a case, and it’s not the first one you’ve ever been on where everything suddenly started to seem too big. Where all the shadows seemed to be too long.