by Stephen King
“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’YAMBA)
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.
Only Dale Gilbertson—who hasn’t been to the Territories, hasn’t been close to Black House, and who is not Ty Marshall’s father—is unaffected. Yet even he feels something rise in his head, something like an interior shout. The world trembles. All at once there seems to be more color in it, more dimension.
“What was that?” he shouts. “Good or bad? Good or bad? What the hell is going on here?”
For a moment none of them answer. They are too dazed to answer.
While a swarm of bees is floating a squeeze bottle of honey along the top of a bar in another world, Burny is telling Ty Marshall to face the wall, goddamnit, just face the wall.
They are in a foul little shack. The sounds of clashing machinery are much closer. Ty can also hear screams and sobs and harsh yells and what can only be the whistling crack of whips. They are very near the Big Combination now. Ty has seen it, a great crisscrossing confusion of metal rising into the clouds from a smoking pit about half a mile east. It looks like a madman’s conception of a skyscraper, a Rube Goldberg collection of chutes and cables and belts and platforms, everything run by the marching, staggering children who roll the belts and pull the great levers. Red-tinged smoke rises from it in stinking fumes.
Twice as the golf cart rolled slowly along, Ty at the wheel and Burny leaning askew in the passenger seat with the Taser pointed, squads of freakish green men passed them. Their features were scrambled, their skin plated and reptilian. They wore half-cured leather tunics from which tufts of fur still started in places. Most carried spears; several had whips.
Overseers, Burny said. They keep the wheels of progress turning. He began to laugh, but the laugh turned into a groan and the groan into a harsh and breathless shriek of pain.
Good, Ty thought coldly. And then, for the first time employing a favorite word of Ebbie Wexler’s: Die soon, you motherfucker.
About two miles from the back of Black House, they came to a huge wooden platform on their left. A gantrylike thing jutted up from it. A long post projected out from the top, almost to the road. A number of frayed rope ends dangled from it, twitching in the hot and sulfurous breeze. Under the platform, on dead ground that never felt the sun, were litters of bones and ancient piles of white dust. To one side was a great mound of shoes. Why they’d take the clothes and leave the shoes was a question Ty probably couldn’t have answered even had he not been wearing the cap (sbecial toyz for sbecial boyz), but a disjointed phrase popped into his head: custom of the country. He had an idea that was something his father sometimes said, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even remember his father’s face, not clearly.
The gibbet was surrounded by crows. They jostled one another and turned to follow the humming progress of the E-Z-Go. None was the special crow, the one with the name Ty could no longer remember, but he knew why they were here. They were waiting for fresh flesh to pluck, that’s what they were doing. Waiting for newly dead eyes to gobble. Not to mention the bare toesies of the shoe-deprived dead.
Beyond the pile of discarded, rotting footwear, a broken track led off to the north, over a fuming hill.
“Station House Road,” Burny said. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Ty at that point, was perhaps edging into delirium. Yet still the Taser pointed at Ty’s neck, never wavering. “That’s where I’m supposed to be taking the special boy.” Taging the sbecial bouy. “That’s where the special ones go. Mr. Munshun’s gone to get the mono. The End-World mono. Once there were two others. Patricia … and Blaine. They’re gone. Went crazy. Committed suicide.”
Ty drove the cart and remained silent, but he had to believe old Burn-Burn was the one who had gone crazy (crazier, he reminded himself). He knew about monorails, had even ridden one at Disney World in Orlando, but monorails named Blaine and Patricia? That was stupid.
Station House Road fell behind them. Ahead, the rusty red and iron gray of the Big Combination drew closer. Ty could see moving ants on cruelly inclined belts. Children. Some from other worlds, perhaps—worlds adjacent to this one—but many from his own. Kids whose faces appeared for a while on milk cartons and then disappeared forever. Kept a little longer in the hearts of their parents, of course, but eventually growing dusty even there, turning from vivid memories into old photographs. Kids presumed dead, buried somewhere in shallow graves by perverts who had used them and then discarded them. Instead, they were here. Some of them, anyway. Many of them. Struggling to yank the levers and turn the wheels and move the belts while the yellow-eyed, green-skinned overseers cracked their whips.
As Ty watched, one of the ant specks fell down the side of the convoluted, steam-wreathed building. He thought he could hear a faint scream. Or perhaps it was a cry of relief?
“Beautiful day,” Burny said faintly. “I’ll enjoy it more when I get something to eat. Having something to eat always … always perks me up.” His ancient eyes studied Ty, tightening a little at the corners with sudden warmth. “Baby butt’s the best eatin’, but yours won’t be bad. Nope, won’t be bad at all. He said to take you to the station, but I ain’t sure he’d give me my share. My...commission. Maybe he’s honest … maybe he’s still my friend … but I think I’ll just take my share first, and make sure. Most agents take their ten percent off the top.” He reached out and poked Ty just below the belt-line. Even through his jeans, the boy could feel the tough, blunt edge of the old man’s nail. “I think I’ll take mine off the bottom.” A wheezy, painful laugh, and Ty was not exactly displeased to see a bright bubble of blood appear between the old man’s cracked lips. “Off the bottom, get it?” The nail poked the side of Ty’s buttock again.
“I get it,” Ty said.
“You’ll be able to break just as well,” Burny said. “It’s just that when you fart, you’ll have to do the old one-cheek sneak every time!” More wheezing laughter. Yes, he sounded delirious, all right—delirious or on the verge of it—yet still the tip of the Taser remained rock-steady. “Keep on going, boy. ’Nother half a mile up the Conger Road. You’ll see a little shack with a tin roof, down in a draw. It’s on the right. It’s a special place. Special to me. Turn in there.”
Ty, with no other choice, obeyed. And now—
“Do what I tell you! Face the fucking wall! Put your hands up and through those loops!”
Ty couldn’t define the word euphemism on a bet, but he knows calling those metal circlets “loops” is bullshit. What’s hanging from the rear wall are shackles.
Panic flutters in his brain like a flock of small birds, threatening to obscure his thoughts. Ty fights to hold on—fights with grim intensity. If he gives in to panic, starts to holler and scream, he’s going to be finished. Either the old man will kill him in the act of carving him up, or the old man’s friend will take him away to some awful place Burny calls Din-tah. In either case, Ty will never see his mother and father again. Or French Landing. But if he can keep his head … wait for his chance …
Ah, but it’s hard. The cap he’s wearing actually helps a little in this respect—it has a dulling effect that helps hold the panic at bay—but it’s still hard. Because he’s not the first kid the old man has brought here, no more than he was the first to spend long, slow hours in that cell back at the old man’s house. There’s a blackened, grease-caked barbecue set up in the left corner of the shed, underneath a tin-plated smoke hole. The grill is hooked up to a couple of gas bottles with LA RIVIERE PROPANE stenciled on the sides. Hung on the wall are oven mitts, spatulas, tongs, basting brushes, and meat forks. There are scissors and tenderizing hammers and at least four keen-bladed carving knives. One of the knives looks almost as long as a ceremonial sword.
Hanging beside that one is
a filthy apron with YOU MAY KISS THE COOK printed on it.
The smell in the air reminds Ty of the VFW picnic his mom and dad took him to the previous Labor Day. Maui Wowie, it had been called, because the people who went were supposed to feel like they were spending the day in Hawaii. There had been a great big barbecue pit in the center of La Follette Park down by the river, tended by women in grass skirts and men wearing loud shirts covered with birds and tropical foliage. Whole pigs had been roasting over a glaring hole in the ground, and the odor had been like the one in this shed. Except the smell in here is stale … and old … and …
And not quite pork, Ty thinks. It’s—
“I should stand here and jaw at you all day, you louse?”
The Taser gives off a crackling sizzle. Tingling, debilitating pain sinks into the side of Ty’s neck. His bladder lets go and he wets his pants. He can’t help it. Is hardly aware of it, in truth. Somewhere (in a galaxy far, far away) a hand that is trembling but still terribly strong thrusts Ty toward the back wall and the shackles that have been welded to steel plates about five and a half feet off the ground.
“There!” Burny cries, and gives a tired, hysterical laugh. “Knew you’d get one for good luck eventually! Smart boy, ain’tcha? Little wisenheimer! Now put your hands through them loops and let’s have no more foolishness about it!”
Ty has put out his hands in order to keep himself from crashing face-first into the shed’s rear wall. His eyes are less than a foot from the wood, and he is getting a very good look at the old layers of blood that coat it. That plate it. The blood has an ancient metallic reek. Beneath his feet, the ground feels spongy. Jellylike. Nasty. This may be an illusion in the physical sense, but Ty knows that what he’s feeling is nonetheless quite real. This is corpse ground. The old man may not prepare his terrible meals here every time—may not have that luxury—but this is the place he likes. As he said, it’s special to him.