Black House

by Stephen King

  “I bet there’s nothing in there at all. Except maybe … I don’t know … a roll of Tums, or something. Eating people’s got to give you indigestion.”

  Nonetheless, Ty captures the bag with his foot again, and again begins the laborious job of sliding it up the wall far enough so that perhaps his stretching fingers can grasp it.

  Dale Gilbertson has lived in the Coulee Country his entire life, and he’s used to greenery. To him trees and lawns and fields that roll all the way to the horizon are the norm. Perhaps this is why he looks at the charred and smoking lands that surround Conger Road with such distaste and growing dismay.

  “What is this place?” he asks Jack. The words come out in little puffs. The Sawyer Gang has no golf cart and must hoof it. In fact, Jack has set a pace quite a bit faster than Ty drove the E-Z-Go.

  “I don’t exactly know,” Jack says. “I saw a place like it a long time ago. It was called the Blasted Lands. It—”

  A greenish man with plated skin suddenly leaps at them from behind a tumble of huge boulders. In one hand he holds a stumpy whip—what Jack believes is actually called a quirt. “Bahhrrr!” this apparition cries, sounding weirdly like Richard Sloat when Richard laughs.

  Jack raises Ty’s bat and looks at the apparition questioningly—Did you want some of this? Apparently the apparition does not. It stands where it is for a moment, then turns and flees. As it disappears back into the maze of boulders, Jack sees that twisted thorns grow in a ragged line down both of its Achilles tendons.

  “They don’t like Wonderboy,” Beezer says, looking appreciatively at the bat. It is still a bat, just as the 9mm’s and .357 Rugers are still pistols and they are still they: Jack, Dale, Beezer, Doc. And Jack decides he isn’t much surprised by that. Parkus told him that this wasn’t about Twinners, told him that during their palaver near the hospital tent. This place may be adjacent to the Territories, but it’s not the Territories. Jack had forgotten that.

  Well, yes—but I’ve had a few other things on my mind.

  “I don’t know if you boys have taken a close look at the wall on the far side of this charming country lane,” Doc says, “but those large white stones actually appear to be skulls.”

  Beezer gives the wall of skulls a cursory glance, then looks ahead again. “What worries me is that thing,” he says. Over the broken teeth of the horizon rises a great complication of steel, glass, and machinery. It disappears into the clouds. They can see the tiny figures who surge and struggle there, can hear the crack of the whips. From this distance they sound like the pop of .22 rifles. “What’s that, Jack?”

  Jack’s first thought is that he’s looking at the Crimson King’s Breakers, but no—there are too many of them. Yonder building is some sort of factory or power plant, powered by slaves. By children not talented enough to qualify as Breakers. A vast outrage rises in his heart. As if sensing it, the drone of t`e bees grows louder behind him.

  Speedq’s voice, whispering in his head: Save your anger, Jack—your first jgb is that little `oy. And time has grown very, very short.

  “Oh Christ,” Dale says, and points. “Is that what I think it is/”

  The gibbet hangs like a skeleton over the slanting road.

  Doc says, “If you’re thinking gallows, I believe you win the stainless steel flatware and get to go on to the next round.”

  “Look ad all the shoes,” Dale says. “Why would they pile the shoes up like that?”

  “God knowc,” Beezer says. “Just the custom of the country, I guess. How close are we, Jack? Do you have any idea at all?”

  Jack looks at the road ahead of them, then at the road leading away to the left, the one with the ancient gallows on its corner. “Close,” he says. “I think we’re—”

  Then, from ahead of them, the shrieks begin. They are the cries of a child who has been pushed to the edge of madness. Or perhaps over it.

  Ty Marshall can hear the approaching drone of the bees but believes it is only in his head, that it is no more than the sound of his own growing anxiety. He doesn’t know how many times he’s tried to slide Burny’s leather bag up the side of the shed; he’s lost count. It does not occur to him that removing the odd cap—the one that looks like cloth and feels like metal—might improve his coordination, for he’s forgotten all about the cap. All he knows is that he’s tired and sweating and trembling, probably in shock, and if he doesn’t manage to snag the bag this time, he’ll probably just give up.

  I’d probably go with Mr. Munshun if he just promised me a glass of water, Ty thinks. But he does have Judy’s toughness bred in his bones, and some of Sophie’s regal insistence, as well. And, ignoring the ache in his thigh, he again begins sliding the bag up the wall, at the same time stretching down with his right hand.

  Ten anches … eight … the closest he’s gotten so far …

  The bag slips do the left. It’s going to fall off his foot. Again.

  “,No,” Ty says softly. “Not this time.”

  He presses his snaaker harder against the wood, then begins to raise it again.

  Shx inches … four inches … three and the bag starts to tilt farther and farther to the left, it’s going to fall off—

  “No!” Ty yells, and bends forward in a strenuous bow. His back creaks. So does his tortured left shoulder. But his fingers graze across the bag … and then snag it. He brings it toward him and then damned near drops it after all!

  “No way, Burny,” he pants, first juggling the leather sack and then clutching it against his chest. “You don’t fool me with that old trick, no way in hell do you fool me with that one.” He bites the corner of the bag with his teeth. The stink of it is awful, rotten—eau de Burnside. He ignores it and pulls the bag open. At first he thinks it’s empty, and lets out a low, sobbing cry. Then he sees a single silver gleam. Crying through his clenched teeth, Ty reaches into the dangling bag with his right hand and brings the key out.

  Can’t drop it, he thinks. If I drop it, I’ll lose my mind. I really will.

  He doesn’t drop it. He raises it above his head, sticks it in the little hole on the side of the cuff holding his left wrist, and turns it. The cuff springs open.

  Slowly, slowly, Ty draws his hand through the shackle. The handcuffs fall to the shed’s dirt floor. As he stands there, a queerly persuasive idea occurs to Ty: he’s really still back in Black House, asleep on the ragged futon with the slop bucket in one corner of his cell and the dish of reheated Dinty Moore beef stew in the other. This is just his exhausted mind giving him a little hope. A last vacation before he goes into the stewpot himself.

  From outside comes the clank of the Big Combination and the screams of the children who march, march, march on their bleeding footsies, running it. Somewhere is Mr. Munshun, who wants to take him someplace even worse than this.

  It’s no dream. Ty doesn’t know where he’ll go from here or how he’ll ever get back to his own world, but the first step is getting out of this shed and this general vicinity. Moving on trembling legs, like an accident victim getting out of bed for the first time after a long stay, Ty Marshall steps over Burny’s sprawled corpse and out of the shed. The day is overcast, the landscape sterile, and even here that rickety skyscraper of pain and toil dominates the view, but still Ty feels an immense gladness just to be in the light again. To be free. It is not until he stands with the shed behind him that he truly realizes how completely he expected to die there. For a moment Ty closes his eyes and turns his face up to the gray sky. Thus he never sees the figure that has been standing to one side of the shed, prudently waiting to make sure Ty is still wearing the cap when he comes out. Once he’s sure he is, Lord Malshun—this is as close to his real name as we can come—steps forward. His grotesque face is like the bowl of a huge serving spoon upholstered in skin. The one eye bulges freakishly. The red lips grin. When he drops his arms around the boy, Ty begins to shriek—not just in fear and surprise, but in outrage. He has worked so hard to be free, so dreadfully hard.

  �
�Hush,” Lord Malshun whispers, and when Ty continues to loose his wild screams (on the upper levels of the Big Combination, some of the children turn toward those cries until the brutish ogres who serve as foremen whip them back to business), the abbala`’q lord speaks again, a sifgle word in the Dark Speech. “Pnung.”

  Ty goes limp. Had Lord Malshun not been hugging him from behind, he would have fallen. Guttural moans of protest continue to issue from the child’s drooling, slack mouth, but the screams have ceased. Lord Malshtn cocks hic long, spoon-shaped face toward the Big Combination, and grins. Life is good! Then he peers into the shed—briefly, but with great interest.

  “Did for him,” Lord Malshun says. “And with the cap on, too. Amazing boy! The King wants to meet you in person before you go to Din-tah, you know. He may give you cake and coffee. Imagine, young Tyler! Cake and coffee with the abbalah! Cake and coffee with the King!”

  “… don’t want go … want to go home … my maaaa …” These words spill out loose and low, like blood from a mortal wound.

  Lord Malshun draws a finger across Ty’s lips, and they press together behind his touch. “Hush,” says the abbalah’s talent scout again. “Few things in life are more annoying than a noisy traveling companion. And we have a long trip ahead of us. Far from your home and friends and family … ah, but don’t cry.” For Malshun has observed the tears that have begun to leak from the corners of the limp boy’s eyes and roll down the planes of his cheeks. “Don’t cry, little Ty. You’ll make new friends. The Chief Breaker, for instance. All the boys like the Chief Breaker. His name is Mr. Brautigan. Perhaps he’ll tell you tales of his many escapes. How funny they are! Perfectly killing! And now we must go! Cake and coffee with the King! Hold that thought!”

  Lord Malshun is stout and rather bowlegged (his legs are, in fact, a good deal shorter than his grotesquely long face), but he is strong. He tucks Ty under his arm as if the boy weighed no more than two or three sheets bundled together. He looks back at Burny one last time, without much regret—there’s a young fellow in upstate New York who shows great promise, and Burny was pretty well played out, anyway.

  Lord Malshun cocks his head sideways and utters his almost soundless chuffing laugh. Then he sets out, not neglecting to give the boy’s cap a good hard yank. The boy is not just a Breaker; he’s perhaps the most powerful one to ever live. Luckily, he doesn’t realize his own powers yet. Probably nothing would happen if the cap did fall off, yet it’s best not to take chances.

  Bustling—even humming a bit under his breath—Lord Malshun reaches the end of the draw, turns left onto Conger Road for the half-mile stroll back to Station House Road, and stops dead in his tracks. Standing in his way are four men from what Lord Malshun thinks of as Ter-tah. This is a slang term, and not a flattering one. In the Book of Good Farming, Ter is that period of Full-Earth in which breeding stock is serviced. Lord Malshun sees the world beyond the front door of Black House as a kind of vast caldo largo, a living soup into which he may dip his ladle—always on the abbalah’s behalf, of course!—whenever he likes.

  Four men from the Ter? Malshun’s lip twists in contempt, causing upheavals all along the length of his face. What are they doing here? Whatever can they hope to accomplish here?

  The smile begins to falter when he sees the stick one of them carries. It’s glowing with a shifting light that is many colors but somehow always white at its core. A blinding light. Lord Malshun knows only one thing that has ever glowed with such light and that is the Globe of Forever, known by at least one small, wandering boy as the Talisman. That boy once touched it, and as Laura DeLoessian could have told him—as Jack himself now knows—the touch of the Talisman never completely fades.

  The smile drops away entirely when Lord Malshun realizes that the man with the club was that boy. He has come again to annoy them, but if he thinks he will take back the prize of prizes, he’s quite mistaken. It’s only a stick, after all, not the Globe itself; perhaps a little of the Globe’s residual power still lives within the man, but surely not much. Surely there can be no more than dust, after all the intervening years.

  And dust is what my life would be worth if I let them take this boy from me, Lord Malshun thinks. I must—

  His single eye is drawn to the black thunderhead hanging behind the men from the Ter. It gives off a vast, sleepy drone. Bees? Bees with stingers? Bees with stingers between him and Station House Road?

  Well, he will deal with them. In time. First is the business of these annoying men.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” Lord Malshun says in his most pleasant voice. The bogus German accent is gone; now he sounds like a bogus English aristocrat in a West End stage comedy from the 1950s. Or perhaps the World War II Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. “It’s wonderful that you should come so far to visit, perfectly wonderful, and on such a rotten day, too. Yet I’m afraid most days are rotten here, the Dins of End-World were simply made for the pathetic fallacy, you know, and—dash it all—I can’t stay. I’m afraid these are time-delivery goods, here.”

  Lord Malshun raises Ty and shakes him. Although Ty’s eyes are open and he’s obviously aware, his arms and legs flop as bonelessly as those of a rag doll.

  “Put him down, Munshun,” says the one with the club, and Lord Malshun realizes with growing dismay that he could have trouble with this one. He really could. Yet his smile widens, exposing the full, ghoulish range of his teeth. They are pointed and tip inward. Anything bitten by them would tear itself to shreds trying to pull free of that bony trap.

  “Munshun? Munshun? No one here by that name. Or Mr. Monday either, for that matter. All gone, cheerio, ta-ta, toodle-oo. As for putting down the lad, couldn’t do that, dear boy, simply couldn’t. I’ve made commitments, you know. And really, you fellows should count yourselves fortunate. Your local reign of terror is over! Huzzah! The Fisherman is dead—dispatched by this boy right here, in fact, this perfectly admirable boy.” He gives Ty another shake, always being careful to keep the head raised. Wouldn’t want that cap falling off, oh no.

  The bees trouble him.

  Who has sent the bees?

  “The boy’s mother is in an insane asylum,” says the man with the stick. That stick is glowing more fiercely than ever, Lord Malshun realizes with deepening fear. He now feels very afraid, and with fear comes anger. Is it possible they could take him? Really take the boy? “She’s in an asylum, and she wants her son back.”

  If so, it’s a corpse they’ll have for their trouble.

  Afraid or not, Lord Malshun’s grin widens even further. (Dale Gilbertson has a sudden, nightmarish vision: William F. Buckley, Jr., with one eye and a face five feet long.) He lifts Ty’s limp body close to his mouth and bites a series of needly little nips in the air less than an inch from the exposed neck.

  “Have her husband stick his prick in her and make another ’un, old son—I’m sure he can do it. They live in Ter-tah, after all. Women get pregnant in Ter-tah just walking down the street.”

  One of the bearded men says, “She’s partial to this one.”

  “But so am I, dear boy. So am I.” Lord Malshun actually nips Ty’s skin this time and blood flows, as if from a shaving cut. Behind them, the Big Combination grinds on and on, but the screams have ceased. It’s as if the children driving the machine realize that something has changed or might change; that the world has come to a balancing point.

  The man with the glowing stick takes a step forward. Lord Malshun cringes back in spite of himself. It’s a mistake to show weakness and fear, he knows this but can’t help it. For this is no ordinary tah. This is someone like one of the old gunslingers, those warriors of the High.

  “Take another step and I’ll tear his throat open, dear boy. I’d hate doing that, would hate it awfully, but never doubt that I’ll do it.”

  “You’d be dead yourself two seconds later,” the man with the stick says. He seems completely unafraid, either for himself or for Ty. “Is that what you want?”

  Actually, given
the choice between dying and going back to the Crimson King empty-handed, death is what Lord Malshun would choose, yes. But it may not come to that. The quieting word worked on the boy, and it will work on at least three of these—the ordinary three. With them lying open-eyed and insensible on the road, Lord Malshun can deal with the fourth. It’s Sawyer, of course. That’s his name. As for the bees, surely he has enough protective words to get him up Station House Road to the mono. And if he’s stung a few times, what of that?

  “Is it what you want?” Sawyer asks.

  Lord Malshun smiles. “Pnung!”0he cries, cnd behind Jack Sawyer, Dale, Beezer, and Doc fall still.

  Lord Malshun’s smile widens into a grin. “Now what are you going to do, my meddling friend? What are you going to do with no friends to jack you u—”

  Armand “Beezer” St. Pierre steps fovward. The first step is an effort, but after thqt it’s easy. His0own cold little smile exposes the teeth inside his beard. “You’re responsible for the death of my daughter,” he says. “Maybe you didn’t do it yourself, but you egged Burnside on to it. Didn’t you? I’m her father, asshole. You think you can stop me with a single word?”

  Doc lurches to his friend’s side.

  “You fucked up my town,” Dale Gilbertson growls. He also moves forward.

  Lord Malshun stares at them in disbelief. The Dark Speech hasn’t stopped them. Not any of them. They are blocking the road! They dare to block his proposed route of progress!

  “I’ll kill him!” he growls at Jack. “I’ll kill him. So what do you say, sunshine? What’s it going to be?”

  And so here it is, at long last: the showdown. We cannot watch it from above, alas, as the crow with whom we have hitched so many rides (all unknown by Gorg, we assure you) is dead, but even(standing off to one side, we recognize!this archetypal scene from ten thousand movies—at least a dozen of them starring Lily Cavanaugh.

  Jack lgvels vhe bat, the one even Beezer has recognized as Wonderboy. He holds it with the knob pressyng into the underside of his forearm and the barrel pointing directly at Lord Malshun’s head.