by Stephen King
There is a high-pitched crack, so loud and piercing that Dale and Beez both draw back, wincing. Beezer actually covers his ears. A gap appears at the top of the door and races along it left to right. At the door’s upper right corner, the gap pivots and plunges straight down, creating a crack through which a musty draft blows. Jack catches a whiff of something both sour and familiar: the deathsmell they first encountered at Ed’s Eats.
Jack reaches for the knob and tries it. It turns freely in his hand. He opens the way to Black House.
But before he can invite them in, Doc Amberson begins to scream.
Someone—maybe it’s Ebbie, maybe T.J., maybe goofy old Ronnie Metzger—is yanking Ty’s arm. It hurts like a son of a gun, but that’s not the worst. The arm yanker is also making this weird humming noise that seems to vibrate deep inside his head. There’s a clanking noise as well
(the Big Combination, that’s the Big Combination)
but that humming . . . ! Man, that humming hurts.
“Quit it,” Ty mumbles. “Quit it, Ebbie or I’ll—”
Faint screams seep through that electric buzzing sound, and Ty Marshall opens his eyes. There’s no merciful period of grace when he’s unsure about where he is or what’s happened to him. It all comes back with the force of some terrible picture—a car accident with dead people lying around, say—that is shoved into your face before you can look away.
He’d held on until the old man was dead; had obeyed the voice of his mother and kept his head. But once he started shouting for help, panic had come back and swallowed him. Or maybe it was shock. Or both. In any case, he’d passed out while still screaming for help. How long has he hung here by his shackled left arm, unconscious? It’s impossible to tell from the light spilling through the shed door; that seems unchanged. So do the various clankings and groanings of the huge machine, and Ty understands that it goes on forever, along with the screams of the children and the crack of the whips as the unspeakable guards press the work ever onward. The Big Combination never shuts down. It runs on blood and terror and never takes a day off.
But that buzzing—that juicy electric buzzing, like the world’s biggest Norelco razor—what the hell is that?
Mr. Munshun’s gone to get the mono. Burny’s voice in his head. A vile whisper. The End-World mono.
A terrible dismay steals into Ty’s heart. He has no doubt at all that what he hears is that very monorail, even now pulling under the canopy at the end of Station House Road. Mr. Munshun will look for his boy, his sbecial bouy, and when he doesn’t see him (nor Burn-Burn, either), will he come searching?
“Course he will,” Ty croaks. “Oh boy. Suck an elf.”
He looks up at his left hand. It would be so easy to yank it back through the oversized shackle if not for the handcuff. He yanks downward several times anyway, but the cuff only clashes against the shackle. The other cuff, the one Burny was reaching for when Ty grabbed his balls, dangles and twitches, making the boy think of the gibbet at this end of Station House Road.
That eye-watering, tooth-rattling buzz suddenly cuts out.
He’s shut it down. Now he’s looking for me in the station, making sure I’m not there. And when he is sure, what then? Does he know about this place? Sure he does.
Ty’s dismay is turning into an icy chill of horror. Burny would deny it. Burny would say that the shack down here in this dry wash was his secret, a place special to him. In his lunatic arrogance, it would never have occurred to him how well that mistaken idea might serve his supposed friend’s purpose.
His mother speaks in Ty’s head again, and this time he’s reasonably sure it really is his mother. You can’t depend on anyone else. They might come in time, but they might not. You have to assume they won’t. You have to get out of this yourself.
But how?
Ty looks at the twisted body of the old man, lying on the bloody dirt with his head almost out the door. The thought of Mr. Munshun tries to intrude, Burny’s friend hurrying down Station House Road even now (or maybe driving in his own E-Z-Go golf cart), wanting to scoop him up and take him to the abbalah. Tyler pushes the image away. It will lead him back to panic, and he can’t afford any more of that. He’s all out of time.
“I can’t reach him,” Ty says. “If the key’s in his pocket, I’m finished. Case closed, game over, zip up your f—”
His eye happens on something lying on the floor. It’s the sack the old man was carrying. The one with the cap in it. And the handcuffs.
If the handcuffs were in it, maybe the key’s in there, too.
Ty reaches forward with his left foot, stretching as far as he can. It’s no good. He can’t quite reach the bag. He’s at least four inches short. Four inches short and Mr. Munshun is coming, coming.
Ty can almost smell him.
Doc shrieks and shrieks, distantly aware that the others are shouting at him to stop, it’s all right, there’s nothing to be afraid of, distantly aware that he is hurting his throat, probably making it bleed. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that when Hollywood swung open the front door of Black House, he exposed the official greeter.
The official greeter is Daisy Temperly, Doc’s brown-eyed girl. She’s wearing a pretty pink dress. Her skin is pale as paper, except on the right side of her forehead, where a flap of skin falls down, exposing the red skull beneath.
“Come in, Doc,” Daisy says. “We can talk about how you killed me. And you can sing. You can sing to me.” She smiles. The smile becomes a grin. The grin exposes a mouthful of bulging vampire teeth. “You can sing to me forever.”
Doc takes a blunder-step backward, turns to flee, and that is when Jack grabs him and shakes him. Doc Amberson is a hefty fellow—two-sixty out of the shower, more like two-eighty when dressed in full Road Warrior regalia as he is now—but Jack shakes him easily, snapping the big man’s head back and forth. Doc’s long hair flops and flies.
“They’re all illusions,” Jack says. “Picture-shows designed to keep out unwanted guests like us. I don’t know what you saw, Doc, but it’s not there.”
Doc looks cautiously past Jack’s shoulder. For a moment he sees a pink, diminishing whirl—it’s like the coming of the devil dog, only backward—and then it’s gone. He looks up at Jack. Tears are rolling slowly down his sunburned face.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he says. “I loved her. But I was tired that night. Very tired. Do you know about being tired, Hollywood?”
“Yes,” Jack says. “And if we get out of this, I intend to sleep for a week. But for now . . .” He looks from Doc to Beezer. From Beezer to Dale. “We’re going to see more stuff. The house will use your worst memories against you: the things you did wrong, the people you hurt. But on the whole, I’m encouraged. I think a lot of the poison went out of this place when Burny died. All we have to do is find our way through to the other side.”
“Jack,” Dale says. He is standing in the doorway, in the very spot where Daisy greeted her old physician. His eyes are very large.
“What?”
“Finding our way through . . . that might be easier said than done.”
They gather around him. Beyond the door is a gigantic circular foyer, a place so big it makes Jack think fleetingly of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the floor is an acre of poison-green carpet entwined with scenes of torture and blasphemy. Doors open off this room everywhere. In addition, Jack counts four sets of crisscrossing stairways. He blinks and there are six. Blinks again and there are a dozen, as bewildering to the eye as an Escher drawing.
He can hear the deep idiot drone that is the voice of Black House. He can hear something else, as well: laughter.
Come in, Black House is telling them. Come in and wander these rooms forever.
Jack blinks and sees a thousand stairways, some moving, bulging in and out. Doors stand open on galleries of paintings, galleries of sculpture, on whirling vortexes, on emptiness.
“What do we do now?” Dale asks bleakly. “What the hell
do we do now?”
Ty has never seen Burny’s friend, but as he hangs from the shackle, he finds he can imagine him quite easily. In this world, Mr. Munshun is a real creature . . . but not a human being. Ty sees a shuffling, busy figure in a black suit and a flowing red tie bustling down Station House Road. This creature has a vast white face dominated by a red mouth and a single blurry eye. The abbalah’s emissary and chief deputy looks, in the gaze of Ty’s imagination, like Humpty-Dumpty gone bad. It wears a vest buttoned with bones.
Got to get out of here. Got to get that bag...but how?
He looks at Burny again. At the hideous tangle of Burny’s spilled guts. And suddenly the answer comes. He stretches his foot out again, but this time not toward the bag. He hooks the toe of his sneaker under a dirt-smeared loop of Burny’s intestines, instead. He lifts it, pivots, and then kicks softly. The loop of gut leaves the toe of his sneaker.
And loops over the leather bag.
So far, so good. Now if he can only drag it close enough to get his foot on it.
Trying not to think of the stocky, hurrying figure with the grotesquely long face, Ty gropes out with his foot again. He gets it under the dirty snarl of intestine and begins to pull, slowly and with infinite care.
“It’s impossible,” Beezer says flatly. “Nothing can be this big. You know that, don’t you?”
Jack takes a deep breath, lets it out, takes another, and speaks a single word in a low, firm voice.
“Dee-yamber?” Beez asks suspiciously. “What the hell’s dee-yamber?”
Jack doesn’t bother answering. From the vast dark cloud of droning bees hanging over the clearing (Dale’s cruiser is now nothing but a furry black-gold lump in front of the porch), a single bee emerges. It—she, for this is undoubtedly a queen bee—flies between Dale and Doc, pauses for a moment in front of Beezer, as if considering him (or considering the honey with which he has generously lathered himself), and then hovers in front of Jack. She is plump and aerodynamically unsound and ludicrous and somehow absolutely wonderful. Jack lifts a finger like a professor about to make a point or a bandleader about to deliver the downbeat. The bee lights on the end of it.
“Are you from her?” He asks this question in a low voice—too low for the others to hear, even Beezer, who is standing right next to him. Jack isn’t quite sure who he means. His mother? Laura DeLoessian? Judy? Sophie? Or is there some other She, a counterbalancing force to the Crimson King? This somehow feels right, but he supposes he’ll never know for sure.
In any case, the bee only looks at him with her wide black eyes, wings blurring. And Jack realizes that these are questions to which he needs no answer. He has been a sleepyhead, but now he’s up, he’s out of bed. This house is huge and deep, a place stacked with vileness and layered with secrets, but what of that? He has Ty’s prize bat, he has friends, he has d’yamba, and here is the Queen of the Bees. Those things are enough. He’s good to go. Better—perhaps best of all—he’s glad to go.
Jack raises the tip of his finger to his mouth and blows the bee gently into Black House’s foyer. She circles aimlessly for a moment, and then zips off to the left and through a door with an oddly bloated, obese shape.
“Come on,” Jack says. “We’re in business.”
The other three exchange uneasy glances, then follow him into what has clearly been their destiny all along.
It is impossible to say how long the Sawyer Gang spends in Black House, that hole which spewed the slippery stuff into French Landing and the surrounding towns. It is likewise impossible to say with any clarity what they see there. In a very real sense, touring Black House is like touring the brain of a deranged madman, and in such a mental framework we can expect to find no plan for the future or memory of the past. In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions. So it is not surprising that the things they see in Black House should fade from their minds almost as soon as they are gone from their eyes, leaving behind only vague whispers of unease that might be the distant cry of the opopanax. This amnesia is merciful.
The queen bee leads them, and the other bees follow in a swarm that discolors the air with its vastness and shivers through rooms that have been silent for centuries (for surely we understand—intuitively if not logically—that Black House existed long before Burny built its most recent node in French Landing). At one point the quartet descends a staircase of green glass. In the abyss below the steps, they see circling birds like vultures with the white, screaming faces of lost babies. In a long, narrow room like a Pullman car, living cartoons—two rabbits, a fox, and a stoned-looking frog wearing white gloves—sit around a table catching and eating what appear to be fleas. They are cartoons, 1940s-era black-and-white cartoons, and it hurts Jack’s eyes to look at them because they are also real. The rabbit tips him a knowing wink as the Sawyer Gang goes by, and in the eye that doesn’t close Jack sees flat murder. There is an empty salon filled with voices shouting in some foreign language that sounds like French but isn’t. There is a room filled with vomitous green jungle and lit by a sizzling tropical sun. Hanging from one of the trees is a vast cocoon that appears to hold a baby dragon still wrapped in its own wings. “That can’t be a dragon,” Doc Amberson says in a weirdly reasonable voice. “They either come from eggs or the teeth of other dragons. Maybe both.” They walk down a long corridor that slowly rounds itself off, becomes a tunnel, and then drops them down a long and greasy slide as crazy percussion beats from unseen speakers. To Jack it sounds like Cozy Cole, or maybe Gene Krupa. The sides fall away, and for a moment they are sliding over a chasm that literally seems to have no bottom. “Steer with your hands and feet!” Beezer shouts. “If you don’t want to go over the side, STEER!” They are finally spilled off in what Dale calls the Dirt Room. They struggle over vast piles of filth-smelling earth under a rusty tin ceiling festooned with bare light bulbs. Platoons of tiny greenish-white spiders school back and forth like fish. By the time they reach the far side, they’re all panting and out of breath, their shoes muddy, their clothes filthy. There are three doors here. Their leader is buzzing and doing Immelmann turns in front of the one in the middle. “No way,” Dale says. “I want to trade for what’s behind the curtain.”
Jack tells him he’s got a future in stand-up comedy, no doubt about it, and then opens the door the bee has chosen for them. Behind it is a huge automated laundry, which Beezer immediately dubs the Hall of Cleanliness. Bunched together, they follow the bee down a humid corridor lined with sudsing washers and humming, shuddering dryers. The air smells like baked bread. The washers—each with a single glaring portholed eye—are stacked up to a height of fifty feet or more. Above them, in an ocean of dusty air, pigeons flock in restless currents. Every now and then they pass piles of bones, or some other sign that human beings came (or were brought) this way. In a hallway they find a scooter overgrown with cobwebs. Farther on, a pair of girl’s in-line skates, thick with dust. In a vast library room, the word LAUGH has been formed with human bones on a mahogany table. In a richly appointed (if obviously neglected) parlor through which the bee leads them in a no-nonsense straight line, Dale and Doc observe that the art on one wall appears to consist of human faces that have been cut off, cured, and then stretched on squares of wood. Huge bewildered eyes have been painted into the empty sockets. Dale thinks he recognizes at least one of the faces: Milton Wanderly, a schoolteacher who dropped out of sight three or four years back. Everyone had assumed that Don Wanderly’s kid brother had simply left town. Well, Dale thinks, he left, all right. Halfway down a stone-throated corridor lined with cells, the bee darts into a squalid little chamber and circles above a ragged futon. At first none of them speak. They don’t need to. Ty was here, and not that long ago. They can almost smell him—his fear. Then Beezer turns to Jack. The blue eyes above the lush red-brown beard are narrowed in fury.
“The old bastard burned him with something. Or
zapped him.”
Jack nods. He can smell that, too, although whether he does so with his nose or his mind he neither knows nor cares. “Burnside won’t be zapping anyone else,” he says.
The queen bee zips between them and whirls impatiently in the corridor. To the left, back the way they came, the corridor is black with bees. They turn to the right instead, and soon the bee is leading them down another seemingly endless stairway. At one point they walk through a brief, drippy drizzle—somewhere above this part of the stairs, a pipe in Black House’s unimaginable guts has perhaps let go. Half a dozen of the risers are wet, and they all see tracks there. They’re too blurry to do a forensics team much good (both Jack and Dale have the same thought), but the Sawyer Gang is encouraged: there’s a big set and a little set, and both sets are relatively fresh. Now they are getting somewhere, by God! They begin to move faster, and behind them the bees descend in a vast humming cloud, like some plague out of the Old Testament.
Time may have ceased to exist for the Sawyer Gang, but for Ty Marshall it has become an agonizing presence. He can’t be sure if his sense of Mr. Munshun’s approach is imagination or precognition, but he’s terribly afraid it’s the latter. He has to get out of this shed, has to, but the damned bag keeps eluding him. He managed to pull it close to him with the loop of intestines; ironically, that was the easy part. The hard part is actually getting hold of the damned thing.
He can’t reach it; no matter how he stretches or how cruelly he tests his left shoulder and shackled left wrist, he comes up at least two feet short. Tears of pain roll down his cheeks. Any moisture lost that way is quickly replaced by the sweat that runs stinging into his eyes from his greasy forehead.
“Foot it,” he says. “Just like soccer.” He looks at the disfigured sprawl in the doorway—his erstwhile tormentor. “Just like soccer, right, Burn-Burn?”
He gets the side of his foot against the bag, pushes it to the wall, and then begins to slide it up the bloodstained wood. At the same time he reaches down . . . now fourteen inches . . . now only a foot . . . reaching . . .