Black House

by Stephen King

  “Put him down,” he says. “Last chance, my friend.”

  Lord Malshun lifts the boy hioher. “Go on!” he shouts. “Shoot a bolt of energy out of that thing! I know you can0do it! But you’ll hit the boy, too! You’ll hit the boy, t—”

  A line of pure white fire jumps from the head of the Richie Sexson bat; it is as thin as the lead$of a pencil. It strikes Lord Malshun’s single eye and cooks it in its socket/ The thing utters a shriek—it never thought Jack would call its bluff, not a creature from the ter, no matter how temporarily elevated—and it jerks forward, opening its jaws to bite, even in death.

  Before it can, another bolt of white light, this one from the beaten silver commitment ring on Beezer St. Pierre’s left hand, shoots out and strikes the abbalah’s emissary square in the mouth. The red plush of Lord Malshun’s red lips bursts into flame … and still he staggers upright in the road, the Big Combination a skeletal skyscraper behind him, trying to bite, trying to end the life of Judy Marshall’s gifted son.

  Dale leaps forward, grabs the boy around the waist and the shoulders, and yanks him away, reeling toward the side of the road. His honest face is pale and grim and set. “Finish him, Jack!” Dale bawls. “Finish the sonofabitch!”

  Jack steps forward to where the blinded, howling, charred thing reels back and forth in the Conger Road, his bony vest smoking, his long white hands groping. Jack cocks the bat back on his right shoulder and sets his grip all the way down to the knob. No choking up this afternoon; this afternoon he’s wielding a bat that blazes with glowing white fire, and he’d be a fool not to swing for the fences.

  “Batter up, sweetheart,” he says, and uncoils a swing that would have done credit to Richie Sexson himself. Or Big Mac. There is a punky, fleshy sound as the bat, still accelerating, connects with the side of Lord Malshun’s huge head. It caves in like the rind of a rotted watermelon, and a spray of bright crimson flies out. A moment later the head simply explodes, spattering them all with its gore.

  “Looks like the King’s gonna have to find a new boy,” Beezer says softly. He wipes his face, looks at a handful of blood and shriveling tissue, then wipes it casually on his faded jeans. “Home run, Jack. Even a blind man could see that.”

  Dale, cradling Tyler, says: “Game over, case closed, zip up your fly.”

  French Landing’s police chief sets Ty carefully on his feet. The boy looks up at him, then at Jack. A bleary sort of light is dawning in his eyes. It might be relief; it might be actual comprehension.

  “Bat,” he says. His voice is husky and hoarse, almost impossible for them to understand. He clears his throat and tries again. “Bat. Dreamed about it.”

  “Did you?” Jack kneels in front of the boy and holds the bat out. Ty shows no inclination to actually take possession of the Richie Sexson wonder bat, but he touches it with one hand. Strokes the bat’s gore-spattered barrel. His eyes look only at Jack. It’s as if he’s trying to get the sense of him. The truth of him. To understand that he has, after all, been rescued.

  “George,” the boy says. “George. Rathbun. Really is blind.”

  “Yes,” Jack says. “But sometimes blind isn’t blind. Do you know that, Tyler?”

  The boy nods. Jack has never in his life seen anyone who looks so fundamentally exhausted, so shocked and lost, so completely worn out.

  “Want,” the boy says. He licks his lips and clears his throat again. “Want … drink. Water. Want mother. See my mother.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me, ” Doc”says. He is looking unea{ily at the splattered remains of the creature they still think of as Mr. Munshun. “Let’s get this young fellow back to Wisconsin before some of Old One Eye’s friends show up.”

  “Right,” Beezer says. “Burning Black House to the groune is also o~ my personal agenda. I’ll throw the first match. Or maybe I can shoot fire out of my ring again. I’d like that. First thing, though, is to make tracks.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Dale says. “I don’t think Ty’s going to be able to walk either very far or very fast, but we can take turns giving him piggyb—”

  “No,” Jack says.

  They look at him with varying degrees of surprise and consternation.

  “Jack,” Beezer says. He speaks with an odd gentleness. “There’s such a thing as overstaying your welcome, man.”

  “We aren’t finished,” Jack tells him. Then he shakes his head and corrects himself. “Ty’s not finished.”

  Jack Sawyer kneels in Conger Road, thinking: I wasn’t much older than this kid when I took off across America—and the Territories—to save my mother’s life. He knows this is true and at the same time absolutely can’t believe it. Can’t remember what it was to be twelve and never anything else, to be small and terrified, mostly below the world’s notice and running just ahead of all the world’s shadows. It should be over; Ty has been through nine kinds of hell, and he deserves to go home.

  Unfortunately, it’s not over. There’s one more thing to do.

  “Ty.”

  “Want. Home.”

  If there was light in the boy’s eyes, it has gone out now. He wears the dull shockface of refugees at border checkpoints and the gates of deathcamps. His is the emptied visage of someone who has spent too long in the slippery opopanax landscape of slippage. And he is a child, damnit, only a child. He deserves better than what Jack Sawyer is about to serve out. But then, Jack Sawyer once deserved better than what he got and lived to tell the tale. That justifies nothing, of course, but it does give him the courage to be a bastard.

  “Ty.” He grasps the boy’s shoulder.

  “Water. Mother. Home.”

  “No,” Jack says. “Not yet.” He pivots the boy. The spatters of Lord Malshun’s blood on his face are very bright. Jack can sense the men he came with—men who have risked their lives and sanity for him—beginning to frown. Never mind. He has a job to do. He is a coppiceman, and there’s still a crime in progress here.

  “Ty.”

  Nothing. The boy stands slumped. He’s trying to turn himself into meat that does nothing but breathe.

  Jack points at the ugly complication of struts and belts and girders and smoking chimneys. He points at the straining ants. The Big Combination disappears up into the clouds and down into the dead ground. How far in each direction? A mile? Two? Are there children above the clouds, shivering in oxygen masks as they trudge the treadmills and yank the levers and turn the cranks? Children below who bake in the heat of underground fires? Down there in the foxholes and the ratholes where the sun never shines?

  “What is it?” Jack asks him. “What do you call it? What did Burny call it?”

  Nothing from Ty.

  Jack gives the boy a shake. Not a gentle one, either. “What do you call it?”

  “Hey, man,” Doc says. His voice is heavy with disapproval. “There’s no need of that.”

  “Shut up,” Jack says without looking at him. He’s looking at Ty. Trying to see anything in those blue eyes but shocked vacancy. He needs for Ty to see the gigantic, groaning machine that stands yonder. To really see it. For until he does, how can he abominate it? “What is it?”

  After a long pause, Ty says: “Big. The Big. The Big Combination.” The words come out slowly and dreamily, as if he’s talking in his sleep.

  “The Big Combination, yes,” Jack says. “Now stop it.”

  Beezer gasps. Dale says, “Jack, have you gone—” and then falls silent.

  “I. Can’t.” Ty gives him a wounded look, as if to say Jack should know that.

  “You can,” Jack says. “You can and you will. What do you think, Ty? That we’re going to just turn our backs on them and take you back to your mother and she’ll make you Ovaltine and put you to bed and everyone will live happily ever after?” His voice is rising, and he makes no attempt to stop it, even when he sees that Tyler is crying. He shakes the boy again. Tyler cringes, but makes no actual attempt to get away. “Do you think there’s going to be any happily ever after for yo
u while those children go on and on, until they drop and get replaced with new ones? You’ll see their faces in your dreams, Tyler. You’ll see their faces and their dirty little hands and their bleeding feet in your fucking dreams.”

  “Stop it!” Beezer says sharply. “Stop it right now or I’ll kick your ass.”

  Jack turns, and Beezer steps back from the ferocious blaze in his eyes. Looking at Jack Sawyer in this state is like looking into din-tah itself.

  “Tyler.”

  Tyler’s mouth trembles. Tears roll down his dirty, bloody cheeks. “Stop it. I want to go home!”

  “Once you make the Big Combination quit. Then you go home. Not before.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Yes, Tyler. You can.”

  Tyler looks at the Big Combination, and Jack can feel the boy making some puny, faltering effort. Nothing happens. The belts continue to run; the whips continue to pop; the occasional screaming dot tumbles (or jumps) from the rust-ragged south side of the building.

  Tyler looks back at him, and Jack hates the vacant stupidity in the kid’s eyes, loathes it. “I caann’t,” Tyler whines, and Jack wonders how such a puler ever managed to survive over here in the first place. Did he use up all his ability in one mad, willful effort to escape? Is that it? He won’t accept it. Anger blazes up in him and he slaps Tyler. Hard. Dale gasps. Ty’s head rocks to the side, his eyes widening in surprise.

  And the cap flies off his head.

  Jack has been kneeling in front of the boy. Now he is knocked back, sprawling on his ass in the middle of Conger Road. The kid has … what?

  Pushed me. Pushed me with his mind.

  Yes. And Jack is suddenly aware of a new bright force in this dull place, a blazing bundle of light to rival the one that illuminated the Richie Sexson bat.

  “Whoa, shit, what happened?” Doc cries.

  The bees feel it too, perhaps more than the men. Their sleepy drone rises to a strident cry, and the cloud darkens as they pull together. Now it looks like a gigantic dark fist below the pendulous, swag-bellied clouds.

  “Why did you hit me?” Ty shouts at Jack, and Jack is suddenly aware that the boy could kill him at a stroke, if he wanted to. In Wisconsin, this power has been hidden (except from eyes trained to see it). Here, though...here...

  “To wake you up!” Jack shouts back. He pushes himself up. “Was it that?” he points at the cap.

  Ty looks at it, then nods. Yes. The cap. But you didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much the cap was stealing from you until you took it off. Or someone knocked it off your forgetful head. He returns his gaze to Jack. His eyes are wide and level. There is no shock in them now, no dullness. He doesn’t glow, exactly, but he blazes with an inner light they all feel—with a power that dwarfs Lord Malshun’s.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asks. Tyler Marshall: the lioness’s cub.

  Once more Jack points at the Big Combination. “You’re what all this has been about, Ty. You’re a Breaker.” He takes a deep breath and then whispers into the pink cup of the boy’s ear.

  “Break it.”

  Tyler Marshall turns his head and gazes deep into Jack’s eyes. He says, “Break it?”

  Jack nods his head, and Ty looks back at the Big Combination.

  “Okay,” he says, speaking not to Jack but to himself. He blinks, settles his feet, clasps his hands in front of his waist. A tiny wrinkle appears between his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth lift in the suggestion of a smile. “Okay,” Ty whispers.

  For a second, nothing happens.

  Then a rumble emerges from the bowels of the Big Combination. Its upper portion wavers like a heat mirage. The guards hesitate, and the screams of tortured metal rip through the air. Visibly confused, the toiling children look up, look in all directions. The mechanical screaming intensifies, then divides into a hundred different versions of torture. Gears reverse. Cogs jam smoking to a halt; cogs accelerate and strip their teeth. The whole of the Big Combination shivers and quakes. Deep in the earth, boilers detonate, and columns of fire and steam shoot upward, halting, sometimes shredding belts that have run for thousands of years, powered by billions of bleeding footsies.

  It is as if an enormous metal jug has sprung a hundred leaks at once. Jack watches children leap from the lower levels and climb down the exterior of the structure in long, continuous lines. Children pour from the trembling building in dozens of unbroken streams.

  Before the green-skinned whipslingers can make an organized attempt to stop their slaves from escaping, the bees assemble massively around the great foundry. When the guards begin to turn on the children, the bees descend in a furious tide of buzzing wings and needling stings. Some of Ty’s power has passed into them, and their stings are fatal. Guards topple and fall from the unmoving belts and trembling girders. Others turn maddened on their own, whipping and being whipped until they tumble through the dark air.

  The Sawyer Gang does not linger to see the end of the slaughter. The queen bee sails toward them out of the swarming chaos, floats above their upturned heads, and leads them back toward Black House.

  In world upon world—in worlds strung side by side in multiple dimensions throughout infinity—evils shrivel and disperse: despots choke to death on chicken bones; tyrants fall before assassins’ bullets, before the poisoned sweetmeats arrayed by their treacherous mistresses; hooded torturers collapse dying on bloody stone floors. Ty’s deed reverberates through the great, numberless string of universes, revenging evil as it spreads. Three worlds over from ours and in the great city there known as Londinorium, Turner Topham, for two decades a respected member of Parliament and for three a sadistic pedophile, bursts abruptly into flame as he strides along the crowded avenue known as Pick-a-Derry. Two worlds down, a nice-looking young welder named Freddy Garver from the Isle of Irse, another, less seasoned member of Topham’s clan, turns his torch upon his own left hand and incinerates every particle of flesh off his bones.

  Up, up in his high, faraway confinement, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut and drops into a chair, grimacing. Something, he knows, something fundamental, has changed in his dreary fiefdom.

  In the wake of the queen bee, Tyler Marshall, his eyes alight and his face without fear, sits astride Jack’s shoulders like a boy king. Behind Jack and his friends, hundreds upon hundreds of children who are fleeing from the disintegrating structure of the Big Combination come streaming on to Conger Road and the desolate fields beside it. Some of these children are from our world; many are not. Children move across the dark, empty plains in ragged armies, advancing toward the entrances to their own universes. Limping battalions of children stagger off like columns of drunken ants.

  The children following the Sawyer Gang are no less ragged than the rest. Half of them are naked, or as good as naked. These children have faces we have seen on milk cartons and flyers headed MISSING and on child-find Web sites, faces from the dreams of heartbroken mothers and desolate fathers. Some of them are laughing, some are weeping, some are doing both. The stronger ones help the weaker ones along. They do not know where they are going, and they do not care. That they are going is enough for them. All they know is that they are free. The great machine that had stolen their strength and their joy and their hope is behind them, and a silken, protective canopy of bees is above them, and they are free.

  At exactly 4:16 P.M., the Sawyer Gang steps out through the front door of Black House. Tyler is now riding on Beezer’s burly shoulders. They descend the steps and stand in front of Dale Gilbertson’s cruiser (there’s a litter of dead bees on the hood and in the well where the windshield wipers hide).

  “Look at the house, Hollywood,” Doc murmurs.

  Jack does. It’s only a house, now—a three-story job that might once have been a respectable ranch but has fallen into disrepair over the years. To make matters worse, someone has slopped it with black paint from top to bottom and stem to stern—even the windows have been blurred with
swipes of that paint. The overall effect is sad and eccentric, but by no means sinister. The house’s slippery shifting shape has solidified, and with the abbalah’s glammer departed, what remains is only the abandoned home of an old fellow who was pretty crazy and extremely dangerous. An old fellow to put beside such human monsters as Dahmer, Haarman, and Albert Fish. The leering, rampant evil that once inhabited this building has been dissipated, blown away, and what remains is as mundane as an old man mumbling in a cell on Death Row. There is something Jack must do to this wretched place—something the dying Mouse made him promise to do.

  “Doc,” Beezer says. “Look yonder.”

  A large dog—large but not monstrous—staggers slowly down the lane that leads back to Highway 35. It looks like a cross between a boxer and a Great Dane. The side of its head and one of its rear paws have been blown away.

  “It’s your devil dog,” the Beez says.

  Doc gapes. “What, that?”

  “That,” Beezer confirms. He draws his 9mm, meaning to put the thing out of its misery, but before he can, it collapses on its side, takes a single deep, shuddering breath, and then lies still. Beezer turns to Jack and Dale. “It’s all a lot smaller with the machine turned off, isn’t it?”

  “I want to see my mother,” Ty says quietly. “Please, may I?”

  “Yes,” Jack says. “Do you mind swinging by your house and picking up your father? I think he might like to go, too.”

  Tyler breaks into a tired grin. “Yes,” he says. “Let’s do that.”

  “You got it,” Jack tells him.

  Dale swings the car carefully around the yard and has reached the beginning of the lane when Ty calls out, “Look! Look, you guys! Here they come!”

  Dale stops, peers in the rearview mirror, and whispers: “Oh, Jack. Holy Mother of God.” He puts the cruiser in park and gets out. They all get out, looking back at Black House. Its shape remains ordinary, but it has not quite given up all of its magic after all, it seems. Somewhere a door—perhaps in the cellar or a bedroom or a dirty and neglected but otherwise perfectly ordinary kitchen—remains open. On this side is the Coulee Country; on the other is Conger Road, the smoking, newly stopped hulk of the Big Combination, and the Din-tah.