Black House js-2 Read online

  “I’m all right,” Judy had called back, and then she had laughed. The laugh was shrill, ending in a tittery gasp. Enid had found this laugh somehow even more upsetting than the screams. “It was all a dream. Even Ty was a dream.”

  “Did you cut yourself, dear?” Enid had called through the letter slot. “Did you fall down?”

  “There was no creel,” Judy had called back. She might have said keel, but Enid was quite sure it was creel. “I dreamed that, too.” Then, Enid reluctantly told Fred, Judy Marshall had begun crying. It had been very upsetting, listening to that sound come to her through the letter slot. It had even made the dog whine.

  Enid had called through one more time, asking if she could come in and make sure Judy wasn’t hurt.

  “Go away!” Judy had called back. In the midst of her crying, she’d laughed again—an angry, distracted laugh. “You’re a dream, too. This whole world is a dream.” Then there had been the sound of shattering glass, as if she had struck a coffee mug or water tumbler and knocked it to the floor. Or thrown it at the wall.

  “I didn’t call the police, because she sounded all right,” Enid told Fred (Fred standing with the phone jammed up against one ear and his hand plastered over the other to cut out all the yammering mechanical sounds, which he ordinarily enjoys and which at that moment seemed to go into his head like chrome spikes). “Physically all right, anyway. But Fred . . . I think you ought to go home and check on her.”

  All of Judy’s recent oddities went through his mind in a whirl. So did Pat Skarda’s words. Mental dysfunction.... We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but there are usually signs...

  And he has seen the signs, hasn’t he?

  Seen them and done nothing.

  Fred parks his car, a sensible Ford Explorer, in the driveway and hurries up the steps, already calling his wife’s name. There is no answer. Even when he has stepped through the front door (he pushes it open so hard the brass letter slot gives a nonsensical little clack), there is no answer. The air-conditioned interior of the house feels too cold on his skin and he realizes he’s sweating.

  “Judy? Jude?”

  Still no answer. He hurries down the hall to the kitchen, where he is most apt to find her if he comes home for something in the middle of the day.

  The kitchen is sun-washed and empty. The table and the counter are clean; the appliances gleam; two coffee cups have been placed in the dish drainer, winking sun from their freshly washed surfaces. More sun winks from a heap of broken glass in the corner. Fred sees a flower decal on one piece and realizes it was the vase on the windowsill.

  “Judy?” he calls again. He can feel the blood hammering in his throat and at his temples.

  She doesn’t answer him, but he hears her upstairs, beginning to sing.

  “Rock-a-bye baby...on the treetop...when the wind blows...”

  Fred recognizes it, and instead of feeling relieved at the sound of her voice, his flesh goes even colder. She used to sing it to Tyler when their son was little. Ty’s lullabye. Fred hasn’t heard that particular ditty come out of her mouth in years.

  He goes back down the hall to the stairs, now seeing what he missed on his first trip. The Andrew Wyeth print, Christina’s World, has been taken down and set against the baseboard heater. The wallpaper below the picture hook has been scraped away in several places, revealing the plasterboard beneath. Fred, colder than ever, knows that Judy did this. It isn’t intuition, exactly; not deduction, either. Call it the telepathy of the long married.

  Floating down from above, beautiful and on-key yet at the same time perfectly empty: “...the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall...”

  Fred is up the stairs two at a time, calling her name.

  The upper hall is a scary mess. This is where they have hung the gallery of their past: Fred and Judy outside Madison Shoes, a blues club they sometimes went to when there was nothing interesting going on at the Chocolate Watchband; Fred and Judy dancing the first dance at their wedding reception while their folks happily looked on; Judy in a hospital bed, exhausted but smiling, holding the wrapped bundle that was Ty; the photo of the Marshall family farm that she always sniffed at; more.

  Most of these framed photographs have been taken down. Some, like the one of the farm, have been thrown down. Glass litters the hall in sparkling sprays. And she has been at the wallpaper behind half a dozen. In the spot where the picture of Judy and Ty in the hospital had hung, the paper has been torn almost completely away, and he can see where she scraped at the wallboard beneath. Some of the scratches are dappled with drying spots of blood.

  “Judy! Judy!”

  Tyler’s door stands open. Fred sprints the length of the upstairs hall with glass crunching under his loafers.

  “...and down will come Tyler, cradle and all.”

  “Judy! Ju—”

  He stands in the door, all words temporarily knocked out of him.

  Ty’s room looks like the aftermath of a rough search in a detective movie. The drawers have been yanked out of his bureau and lie everywhere, most overturned. The bureau itself has been pulled away from the wall. Summer clothes are spread hell to breakfast—jeans and T-shirts and underwear and white athletic socks. The closet door is open and more clothes have been struck from the hangers; that same spousal telepathy tells him she tore Ty’s slacks and button-up shirts down so she could make sure nothing was behind them. The coat of Tyler’s only suit hangs askew from the closet’s doorknob. His posters have been pulled from the walls; Mark McGwire has been torn in half. In every case but one she has left the wallpaper behind the posters alone, but the one exception is a beaut. Behind the rectangle where the poster of the castle hung (COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD), the wallpaper has been almost entirely stripped away. There are more streaks of blood on the wallboard beneath.

  Judy Marshall sits on the bare mattress of her son’s bed. The sheets are heaped in the corner, along with the pillow. The bed itself has been yanked away from the wall. Judy’s head is down. He can’t see her face—her hair is screening it—but she’s wearing shorts and he can see dapples and streaks of blood on her tanned thighs. Her hands are clasped below her knees, out of sight, and Fred is glad. He doesn’t want to see how badly she has hurt herself until he has to. His heart is hammering in his chest, his nervous system is redlining with adrenaline overload, and his mouth tastes like a burnt fuse.

  She begins to sing the chorus of Ty’s lullabye again and he can’t stand it. “Judy, no,” he says, going to her through the strewn minefield that was, only last night when he came in to give Ty a good-night kiss, a reasonably neat little boy’s room. “Stop, honey, it’s okay.”

  For a wonder, she does stop. She raises her head, and when he sees the terrified look in her eyes, he loses what little breath he has left. It’s more than terror. It’s emptiness, as if something inside her has slipped aside and exposed a black hole.

  “Ty’s gone,” she says simply. “I looked behind all the pictures I could . . . I was sure he’d be behind that one, if he was anywhere he’d be behind that one . . .”

  She points toward the place where the Ireland travel poster hung, and he sees that four of the nails on her left hand have been ripped partly or completely away. His stomach does a flip-flop. Her fingers look as if they have been dipped in red ink. If only it was ink, Fred thinks. If only.

  “. . . but of course it’s just a picture. They’re all just pictures. I see that now.” She pauses, then cries: “Abbalah! Munshun! Abbalah-gorg, Abbalah-doon!” Her tongue comes out—comes out to an impossible, cartoonish length—and swipes spittishly across her nose. Fred sees it but cannot believe it. This is like coming into a horror movie halfway through the show, discovering it’s real, and not knowing what to do. What is he supposed to do? When you discover that the woman you love has gone mad—had
a break with reality, at the very least—what are you supposed to do? How the hell do you deal with it?

  But he loves her, has loved her from the first week he knew her, helplessly and completely and without the slightest regret ever after, and now love guides him. He sits down next to her on the bed, puts his arm around her, and simply holds her. He can feel her trembling from the inside out. Her body thrums like a wire.

  “I love you,” he says, surprised at his voice. It’s amazing that seeming calmness can issue from such a crazy cauldron of confusion and fear. “I love you and everything is going to be all right.”

  She looks up at him and something comes back into her eyes. Fred cannot call it sanity (no matter how much he would like to), but it is at least some sort of marginal awareness. She knows where she is and who is with her. For a moment he sees gratitude in her eyes. Then her face cramps in a fresh agony of grief and she begins to weep. It is an exhausted, lost sound that wrenches at him. Nerves, heart, and mind, it wrenches at him.

  “Ty’s gone,” Judy says. “Gorg fascinated him and the abbalah took him. Abbalah-doon!” The tears course down her cheeks. When she raises her hands to wipe them away, her fingers leave appalling streaks of blood.

  Even though he’s sure Tyler is fine (certainly Fred has had no premonitions today, unless we count his rosy sales prediction about the new Hiler roto), he feels a shudder course through him at the sight of those streaks, and it is not Judy’s condition that causes it but what she’s just said: Ty’s gone. Ty is with his friends; he told Fred just last night that he, Ronnie, T.J., and the less-than-pleasant Wexler boy intended to spend the day “goofing off.” If the other three boys go somewhere Ty doesn’t want to be, he has promised to come directly home. All the bases seem to be covered, yet . . . is there not such a thing as mother’s intuition? Well, he thinks, maybe on the Fox Network.

  He picks Judy up in his arms and is appalled all over again, this time by how light she is. She’s lost maybe twenty pounds since the last time I picked her up like this, he thinks. At least ten. How could I not have noticed? But he knows. Preoccupation with work was part of it; a stubborn refusal to let go of the idea that things were basically all right was the rest of it. Well, he thinks, carrying her out the door (her arms have crept tiredly up and locked themselves around his neck), I’m over that little misconception. And he actually believes this, in spite of his continued blind confidence in his son’s safety.

  Judy hasn’t toured their bedroom during her rampage, and to Fred it looks like a cool oasis of sanity. Judy apparently feels the same way. She gives a tired sigh, and her arms drop away from her husband’s neck. Her tongue comes out, but this time it gives only a feeble little lick at her upper lip. Fred bends and puts her down on the bed. She holds up her hands, looks at them.

  “I cut myself . . . scraped myself . . .”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m going to get something for them.”

  “How . . . ?”

  He sits beside her for a moment. Her head has sunk into the soft double thickness of her pillows, and her eyelids are drooping. He thinks that, beyond the puzzlement in them, he can still see that terrifying blankness. He hopes he is wrong.

  “Don’t you remember?” he asks her gently.

  “No . . . did I fall down?”

  Fred chooses not to answer. He is starting to think again. Not much, he’s not capable of much just yet, but a little. “Honey, what’s a gorg? What’s an abbalah? Is it a person?”

  “Don’t . . . know . . . Ty . . .”

  “Ty’s fine,” he says.

  “No . . .”

  “Yes,” he insists. Perhaps he’s insisting to both of the people in this pretty, tastefully decorated bedroom. “Honeybunch, you just lie there. I want to get a couple of things.”

  Her eyes drift closed. He thinks she will sleep, but her lids struggle slowly back up to half-mast.

  “Lie right there,” he says. “No getting up and wandering around. There’s been enough of that. You scared poor Enid Purvis out of a year’s life. You promise?”

  “Promise . . .” Her eyelids drift back down.

  Fred goes into the adjoining bathroom, ears alert for any movement behind him. He has never seen anyone in his life who looks more bolt-shot than Judy does right now, but mad people are clever, and despite his prodigious capacity for denial in some areas, Fred can no longer fool himself about his wife’s current mental state. Mad? Actually stark raving mad? Probably not. But off the rails, certainly. Temporarily off the rails, he amends as he opens the medicine cabinet.

  He takes the bottle of Mercurochrome, then scans the prescription bottles on the shelf above. There aren’t many. He grabs the one on the far left. Sonata, French Landing Pharmacy, one capsule at bedtime, do not use more than four nights in a row, prescribing physician Patrick J. Skarda, M.D.

  Fred can’t see the entire bed in the medicine-cabinet mirror, but he can see the foot of it . . . and one of Judy’s feet, as well. Still on the bed. Good, good. He shakes out one of the Sonatas, then dumps their toothbrushes out of the glass—he has no intention of going all the way downstairs for a clean glass, does not want to leave her alone that long.

  He fills the glass, then goes back into the bedroom with the water, the pill, and the bottle of Mercurochrome. Her eyes are shut. She is breathing so slowly that he has to put one hand on her chest to make sure she’s breathing at all.

  He looks at the sleeping pill, debates, then gives her a shake. “Judy! Jude! Wake up a little, hon. Just long enough to take a pill, okay?”

  She doesn’t even mutter, and Fred sets the Sonata aside. It won’t be necessary after all. He feels some faint optimism at how fast she’s fallen asleep and how deep she has gone. It’s as if some vile sac has popped, discharged its poison, left her weak and tired but possibly okay again. Could that be? Fred doesn’t know, but he’s positive that she isn’t just shamming sleep. All of Judy’s current woes began with insomnia, and the insomnia has been the one constant throughout. Although she’s only been exhibiting distressing symptoms for a couple of months—talking to herself and doing that odd and rather disgusting thing with her tongue, to mention only a couple of items—she hasn’t been sleeping well since January. Hence the Sonata. Now it seems that she has finally tipped over. And is it too much to hope that when she wakes from a normal sleep she’ll be her old normal self again? That her worries about her son’s safety during the summer of the Fisherman have forced her to some sort of climax? Maybe, maybe not . . . but at least it has given Fred some time to think about what he should do next, and he had better use it well. One thing seems to him beyond argument: if Ty is here when his mother wakes up, Ty is going to have a much happier mother. The immediate question is how to locate Tyler as soon as possible.

  His first thought is to call the homes of Ty’s friends. It would be easy; those numbers are posted on the fridge, printed in Judy’s neat back-slanting hand, along with the numbers of the fire department, the police department (including Dale Gilbertson’s private number; he’s an old friend), and French Landing Rescue. But it takes Fred only a moment to realize what a bad idea this is. Ebbie’s mother is dead and his father is an unpleasant moron—Fred met him just once, and once is more than enough. Fred doesn’t much like his wife labeling some people “low-raters” (Who do you think you are, he asked her once, Queen of the doggone Realm?), but in the case of Pete Wexler, the shoe fits. He won’t have any idea of where the boys are today and won’t care.

  Mrs. Metzger and Ellen Renniker might, but having once been a boy on summer vacation himself—the whole world laid at your feet and at least two thousand places to go—Fred doubts it like hell. There’s a chance the boys might be eating lunch (it’s getting to be that time) at the Metzgers’ or Rennikers’, but is that slight chance worth scaring the hell out of two women? Because the killer will be the first thing they think of, just as sure as God made little fishes . . . and fishermen to catch ’em.

  Once more sitting on t
he bed beside his wife, Fred feels his first real tingle of apprehension on his son’s behalf and dismisses it brusquely. This is no time to give in to the heebie-jeebies. He has to remember that his wife’s mental problems and his son’s safety are not linked—except in her mind. His job is to present Ty, front and center and all squared away, thus proving her fears groundless.

  Fred looks at the clock on his side of the bed and sees that it’s quarter past eleven. How the time flies when you’re having fun, he thinks. Beside him, Judy utters a single gaspy snore. It’s a small sound, really quite ladylike, but Fred jumps anyway. How she scared him when he first saw her in Ty’s room! He’s still scared.

  Ty and his friends may come here for lunch. Judy says they often do because the Metzgers don’t have much to eat and Mrs. Renniker usually serves what the boys call “goop,” a mystery dish consisting of noodles and some gray meat. Judy makes them Campbell’s soup and baloney sandwiches, stuff they like. But Ty has money enough to treat them all to McDonald’s out by the little mall on the north side, or they could go into Sonny’s Cruisin’ Restaurant, a cheap diner with a cheesy fifties ambience. And Ty isn’t averse to treating. He’s a generous boy.

  “I’ll wait until lunch,” he murmurs, completely unaware that he is talking as well as thinking. Certainly he doesn’t disturb Judy; she has gone deep. “Then—”

  Then what? He doesn’t know, exactly.

  He goes downstairs, kicks the Mr. Coffee back into gear, and calls work. He asks Ina to tell Ted Goltz he’ll be out the rest of the day—Judy’s sick. The flu, he tells her. Throwing up and everything. He runs down a list of people he was expecting to see that day and tells her to speak to Otto Eisman about handling them. Otto will be on that like white on rice.