The Waste Lands dt-3 Read online

  They were very close now. Jake shrank against the side of the building. His head was down, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. He didn’t know why it seemed so vitally important that he not be noticed, but it did. Henry didn’t matter, one way or the other, but-

  The younger one, isn’t supposed to remember me, he thought. I don’t know why, exactly, but he’s not.

  They passed him without so much as a glance, the one Henry had called Eddie walking on the outside, dribbling the basketball along the gutter.

  “You gotta admit she looked funny,” Henry was saying. “Ole Be-Bop Maryanne, jumpin for her newspaper. Woof! Woof!”

  Eddie looked up at his brother with an expression that wanted to be reproachful… and then he gave up and dissolved into laughter. Jake saw the unconditional love in that upturned face and guessed that Eddie would forgive a lot in his big brother before giving it up as a bad job.

  “So are we going?” Eddie asked now. “You said we could. After school.”

  “I said maybe. I dunno if I wanna walk all the way over there. Mom’ll be home, by now, too. Maybe we just oughtta forget it. Go upstairs and watch some tube.”

  They were now ten feet ahead of Jake and pulling away.

  “Ah, come on! You said!”

  Beyond the building the two boys were currently passing was a chainlink fence with an open gate in it. Beyond it, Jake saw, was the playground of which he had dreamed last night… a version of it, anyway. It wasn’t surrounded by trees, and there was no odd subway kiosk with diagonal slashes of yellow and black across the front, but the cracked concrete was the same. So were the faded yellow foul lines.

  “Well… maybe. I dunno.” Jake realized Henry was teasing again. Eddie didn’t, though; he was too anxious about wherever it was he wanted to go. “Let’s shoot some hoops while I think it over.”

  He stole the ball from his younger brother, dribbled clumsily onto the playground, and went for a lay-up that hit high on the backboard and bounced back without even touching the rim of the hoop. Henry was good at stealing newspapers from teenage girls, Jake thought, but on the basketball court he sucked the big one.

  Eddie walked in through the gate, unbuttoned his corduroy pants, and slipped them down. Beneath them were the faded madras shorts he had been wearing in Jake’s dream.

  “Oh, is he wearing his shortie panties?” Henry said. “Ain’t they cuuute?” He waited until his brother balanced himself on one leg to pull off his cords, then flung the basketball at him. Eddie managed to bat it away, probably saving himself a bloody nose, but he lost his balance and fell clumsily to the concrete. He didn’t cut himself, but he could have done so, Jake saw; a great deal of broken glass glittered in the sun along the chainlink.

  “Come on, Henry, quit it,” he said, but with no real reproach. Jake guessed I Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else-someone like the blonde ticket-seller.

  “Turn on, Henwy, twit it.”

  Eddie got to his feet and trotted out onto the court. The ball had struck the chainlink fence and bounced back to Henry. Henry now tried to dribble past his younger brother. Eddie’s hand went out, lightning-quick but oddly delicate, and stole the ball. He easily ducked under Henry’s outstretched, flailing arm and went for the basket. Henry dogged him, frowning thunderously, but he might as well have been taking a nap. Eddie went up, knees bent, feet neatly cocked, and laid the ball in. Henry grabbed it and dribbled out to the stripe.

  Shouldn’t have done that, Eddie, Jake thought. He was standing just beyond the place where the fence ended, watching the two boys. This seemed safe enough, at least for the moment. He was wearing his dad’s sunglasses, and the two boys were so involved in what they were doing that they wouldn’t have noticed if President Carter had strolled up to watch. Jake doubted if Henry knew who President Carter was, anyway.

  He expected Henry to foul his brother, perhaps heavily, as a payback for the steal, but he had underestimated Eddie’s guile. Henry offered a head-fake that wouldn’t have fooled Jake’s mother, but Eddie appeared to fall for it. Henry broke past him and drove for the basket, gaily travelling the ball most of the way. Jake was quite sure Eddie could have caught him easily and stolen the ball again, but instead of doing so, the lad hung back. Henry laid it up-clumsily-and the ball bounced off the rim again. Eddie grabbed it… and then let it squirt through his fingers. Henry snatched it, turned, and put it through the netless hoop.

  “One-up,” Henry panted. “Play to twelve?”

  “Sure.”

  Jake had seen enough. It would be close, but in the end Henry would win. Eddie would see to it. It would do more than save him from getting lumped up; it would put Henry in a good mood, making him more agreeable to whatever it was Eddie wanted to do.

  Hey Moose-I think your little brother has been playing you like a violin for a long time now, and you don’t have the slightest idea, do you?

  He drew back until the apartment building which stood at the north end of the court cut off his view of the Dean brothers, and their view of him. He leaned against the wall and listened to the thump of the ball on the court. Soon Henry was puffing like Charlie the Choo-Choo going up a steep hill. He would be a smoker, of course; guys like Henry were always smokers.

  The game took almost ten minutes, and by the time Henry claimed victory, the street was filled up with other home-going kids. A few gave Jake curious glances as they passed by.

  “Good game, Henry,” Eddie said.

  “Not bad,” Henry panted. “You’re still falling for the old head-fake.”

  Sure he is, Jake thought. I think he’ll go on falling for it until he’s gained about eighty pounds. Then you might get a surprise.

  “I guess I am. Hey, Henry, can’t we please go look at the place?”

  “Yeah, why not? Let’s do it.”

  “All right!” Eddie yelled. There was the smacking sound of flesh on flesh; probably Eddie giving his brother a high-five. “Boss!”

  “You go on up to the apartment. Tell Mom we’ll be in by four-thirty, quarter of five. But don’t say anything about The Mansion. She’d have a shit-fit. She thinks it’s haunted, too.”

  “You want me to tell her we’re going over Dewey’s?”

  Silence as Henry considered this. “Naw. She might call Mrs. Bunkowski. Tell her… tell her we’re goin down to Dahlie’s to get Hoodsie Rockets. She’ll believe that. Ask her for a coupla bucks, too.”

  “She won’t give me any money. Not two days before payday.”

  “Bullshit. You can get it out of her. Go on, now.”

  “Okay.” But Jake didn’t hear Eddie moving. “Henry?”

  “What?” Impatiently.

  “Is The Mansion haunted, do you think?”

  Jake sidled a little closer to the playground. He didn’t want to be noticed, but he strongly felt that he needed to hear this.

  “Naw. There ain’t no real haunted houses-just in the fuckin movies.”

  “Oh.” There was unmistakable relief in Eddie’s voice.

  “But if there ever was one,” Henry resumed (perhaps he didn’t want his little brother feeling too relieved, Jake thought), “it’d be The Mansion. I heard that a couple of years ago, two kids from Norwood Street went in there to bump uglies and the cops found em with their throats cut and all the blood drained out of their bodies. But there wasn’t any blood on em or around em. Get it? The blood was all gone.”

  “You shittin me?” Eddie breathed.

  “Nope. But that wasn’t the worst thing.”

  “What was?”

  “Their hair was dead white,” Henry said. The voice that drifted to Jake was solemn. He had an idea that Henry wasn’t teasing this time, that this time he believed every word he was saying. (He also doubted that Henry had brains enough to make such a story up.) “Both of em. And their eyes were wide open and staring, like they saw the most gross-awful thing in the world.”

 
; “Aw, gimme a break,” Eddie said, but his voice was soft, awed.

  “You still wanna go?”

  “Sure. As long as we don’t… you know, hafta get too close.”

  “Then go see Mom. And try to get a couple of bucks out of her. I need cigarettes. Take the fuckin ball up, too.”

  Jake drifted backward and stepped into the nearest apartment building entryway just as Eddie came out through the playground gate.

  To his horror, the boy in the yellow T-shirt turned in Jake’s direction. Holy crow! he thought, dismayed. What if this is his building?

  It was. Jake just had time to turn around and began to scan the names beside the rank of buzzers before Eddie Dean brushed past him, so close that Jake could smell the sweat he had worked up on the basketball court. He half-sensed, half-saw the curious glance the boy tossed in his direction. Then Eddie was in the lobby and headed for the elevators with his school-pants bundled under one arm and the scuffed basketball under the other.

  Jake’s heart was thudding heavily in his chest. Shadowing people was a lot harder in real life than it was in the detective novels he sometimes read. He crossed the street and stood between two apartment buildings half a block up. From here he could see both the entrance to the Dean brothers’ building and the playground. The playground was filling up now, mostly with little kids. Henry leaned against the chainlink, smoking a cigarette and trying to look full of teenage angst. Every now and then he would stick out a foot as one of the little kids bolted toward him at an all-out run, and before Eddie returned, he had succeeded in tripping three of them. The last of these went sprawling full-length, smacking his face on the concrete, and ran wailing up the street with a bloody forehead. Henry flicked his cigarette butt after him and laughed cheerfully.

  Just an all-around fun guy, Jake thought.

  After that, the little lads wised up and began giving him a wide berth. Henry strolled out of the playground and down the street to the apartment building Eddie had entered five minutes before. As he reached it, the door opened and Eddie came out. He had changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt; he had also tied a green bandanna, the same one he had been wearing in Jake’s dream, around his forehead. He was waving a couple of dollar bills triumphantly. Henry snatched them, then asked Eddie something. Eddie nodded, and the two boys set off.

  Keeping half a block between himself and them, Jake followed.

  23

  THEY STOOD IN THE high grass at the edge of the Great Road, looking at the speaking ring.

  Stonehenge, Susannah thought, and shuddered. That’s what it looks like. Stonehenge.

  Although the thick grass which covered the plain grew around the bases of the tall gray monoliths, the circle they enclosed was bare earth, littered here and there with white things.

  “What are those?” she asked in a low voice. “Chips of stone?”

  “Look again,” Roland said.

  She did, and saw that they were bones. The bones of small animals, maybe. She hoped.

  Eddie switched the sharpened stick to his left hand, dried the palm of his right against his shirt, and then switched it back again. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from his dry throat. He cleared it and tried again. “I think I’m supposed to go in and draw something in the dirt.”

  Roland nodded. “Now?”

  “Soon.” He looked into Roland’s face. “There’s something here, isn’t there? Something we can’t see.”

  “It’s not here right now,” Roland said. “At least, I don’t think it is. But it will come. Our khef-our life-force-will draw it. And, of course, it will be jealous of its place. Give me my gun back, Eddie.”

  Eddie unbuckled the belt and handed it over. Then he turned back to the circle of twenty-foot-high stones. Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.

  The Mansion-I smelled it there. The day I talked Henry into taking me over to see The Mansion on Rhinehold Street, in Dutch Hill.

  Roland buckled his gunbelt, then bent to knot the tiedown. He looked up at Susannah as he did it. “We may need Detta Walker,” he said. “Is she around?”

  “That bitch always around.” Susannah wrinkled her nose.

  “Good. One of us is going to have to protect Eddie while he does what he’s supposed to do. The other is going to be so much useless baggage. This is a demon’s place. Demons are not human, but they are male and female, just the same. Sex is both their weapon and their weakness. No matter what the sex of the demon may be, it will go for Eddie. To protect its place. To keep its place from being used by an outsider. Do you understand?”

  Susannah nodded. Eddie appeared not to be listening. He had tucked the square of hide containing the key into his shirt and now he was staring into the speaking ring as if hypnotized.

  “There’s no time to say this in a gentle or refined way,” Roland told her. “One of us will-”

  “One of us gonna have to fuck it to keep it off Eddie,” Susannah interrupted. “This the sort of thing can’t ever turn down a free fuck. That’s what you’re gettin at, isn’t it?”

  Roland nodded.

  Her eyes gleamed. They were the eyes of Detta Walker now, both wise and unkind, shining with hard amusement, and her voice slid steadily deeper into the bogus Southern plantation drawl which was Delta’s trademark. “If it’s a girl demon, you git it. But if it’s a boy demon, it’s mine. That about it?”

  Roland nodded.

  “What about if it swings both ways? What about that, big boy?”

  Roland’s lips twitched in the barest suggestion of a smile. “Then we’ll take it together. Just remember-”

  Beside them, in a fainting, distant voice, Eddie murmured: “Not all is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold, the sleeper wakes.” He turned his haunted, terrified eyes on Roland. “There’s a monster.”

  “The demon-”

  “No. A monster. Something between the doors-between the worlds. Something that waits. And it’s opening its eyes.”

  Susannah cast a frightened glance at Roland.

  “Stand, Eddie,” Roland said. “Be true.”

  Eddie drew a deep breath. “I’ll stand until it knocks me down,” he said. “I have to go in now. It’s starting to happen.”

  “We all goin in,” Susannah said. She arched her back and slipped out of her wheelchair. “Any demon want to fuck wit’ me he goan find out he’s fuckin wit’ the finest. I th’ow him a fuck he ain’t never goan fgit.”

  As they passed between two of the tall stones and into the speaking circle, it began to rain.

  24

  As SOON AS JAKE saw the place, he understood two things: first, that he had seen it before, in dreams so terrible his conscious mind would not let him remember them; second, that it was a place of death and murder and madness. He was standing on the far corner of Rhinehold Street and Brooklyn Avenue, seventy yards from Henry and Eddie Dean, but even from where he was he could feel The Mansion ignoring them and reaching for him with its eager invisible hands, lie thought there were talons at the ends of those hands. Sharp ones.

  It wants me, and I can’t run away. It’s death to go in… but it’s madness not to. Because somewhere inside that place is a locked door. I have the key that will open it, and the only salvation I can hope for is on the other side.

  He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormality, with a sinking heart. It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor.

  The Dean brothers had walked across nine blocks of Brooklyn, moving slowly under the hot afternoon sun, and had finally entered a section of town which had to be Dutch Hill, given the names on the shops and stores. Now they stood halfway down the block, in front of The Mansion. It looked as if it had been deserted for years, yet it had suffered remarkably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really had been a mansion-the home, perh
aps, of a wealthy merchant and his large family. In those long-gone days it must have been white, but now it was a dirty gray no-color. The windows had been knocked out and the peeling picket fence which surrounded it had been spray-painted, but the house itself was still intact.

  It slumped in the hot light, a ramshackle slate-roofed revenant growing out of a hummocky trash-littered yard, somehow making Jake think of a dangerous dog which pretended to be asleep. Its steep roof overhung the front porch like a beetling brow. The boards of the porch were splintery and warped. Shutters which might once have been green leaned askew beside the glassless windows; ancient curtains still hung in some of these, dangling like strips of dead skin. To the left, an elderly trellis leaned away from die building, now held up not by nails but only by die nameless and somehow filthy clusters of vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on die door. From where Jake stood, he could read neither of them.

  The house was alive. He knew this, could feel its awareness reaching out from the boards and the slumping roof, could feel it pouring in rivers from the black sockets of its windows. The idea of approaching that terrible place filled him with dismay; the idea of actually going inside filled him with inarticulate horror. Yet he would have to. He could hear a low, slumbrous buzzing in his ears-the sound of a beehive on a hot summer day-and for a moment he was afraid he might faint. He closed his eyes… and his voice filled his head.

  You must come, Jake. This is the path of the Beam, the way of the Tower, and the time of your Drawing. Be true; stand; come to me.

  The fear didn’t pass, but that terrible sense of impending panic did. He opened his eyes again and saw that he was not the only one who had sensed the power and awakening sentience of the place. Eddie was trying to pull away from the fence. He turned toward Jake, who could see Eddie’s eyes, wide and uneasy beneath his green head-band. His big brother grabbed him and pushed him toward the rusty gate, but the gesture was too half-hearted to be much of a tease; however thick-headed he might be, Henry liked The Mansion no better than Eddie did.