Black House js-2 Read online

  “What?” Doc asks.

  “I can’t say,” Mouse tells him. “I don’t answer medical questions from guys all covered in puke.”

  “Can you ride?”

  “Fuck yes, Beezer—you ever know me when I couldn’t ride?”

  Beezer and Sonny each take a side and, with excruciating effort, lift Mouse to his feet. When they release his arms, Mouse lumbers sideways a few steps. “This is not right,” he says.

  “That’s brilliant,” says Beezer.

  “Beeze, old buddy, you know your eyes are, like, bright red? You look like fuckin’ Dracula.”

  To the extent that hurry is possible, they are hurrying. Doc wants to get a look at Mouse’s leg; Beezer wants to make sure that Kaiser Bill is still alive; and all of them want to get out of this place and back into normal air and sunlight. Their heads pound, and their muscles ache from strain. None of them can be sure that the dog-thing is not preparing for another charge.

  As they speak, Sonny has been picking up Mouse’s Fat Boy and rolling it toward its owner. Mouse takes the handles and pushes his machine forward, wincing as he goes. Beezer and Doc rescue their bikes, and six feet along Sonny pulls his upright out of a snarl of weeds.

  Beezer realizes that when he was at the curve in the road, he failed to look for Black House. He remembers Mouse saying, This shit doesn’t want to be seen, and he thinks Mouse got it just about right: the Fisherman did not want them there, and the Fisherman did not want his house to be seen. Everything else was spinning around in his head the way his Electra Glide had spun over after that ugly voice spoke up in his mind. Beezer is certain of one thing, however: Jack Sawyer is not going to hold out on him any longer.

  Then a terrible thought strikes him, and he asks, “Did anything funny—anything really strange—happen to you guys before the dog from hell jumped out of the woods? Besides the physical stuff, I mean.”

  He looks at Doc, and Doc blushes. Hello? Beezer thinks.

  Mouse says, “Go fuck yourself. I’m not gonna talk about that.”

  “I’m with Mouse,” Sonny says.

  “I guess the answer is yes,” Beezer says.

  Kaiser Bill is lying by the side of the road with his eyes closed and the front of his body wet with blood from mouth to waist. The air is still gray and sticky; their bodies seem to weigh a thousand pounds, the bikes to roll on leaden wheels. Sonny walks his bike up beside the Kaiser’s supine body and kicks him, not all that gently, in the ribs.

  The Kaiser opens his eyes and groans. “Fuck, Sonny,” he says. “You kicked me.” His eyelids flutter, and he lifts his head off the ground and notices the blood soaking into his clothing. “What happened? Am I shot?”

  “You conducted yourself like a hero,” Sonny says. “How do you feel?”

  “Lousy. Where was I hit?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Sonny says. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”

  The others file past. Kaiser Bill manages to get to his feet and, after another epic struggle, hauls his bike upright beside him. He pushes it down the track after the others, marveling at the pain in his head and the quantity of blood on his body. When he comes out through the last of the trees and joins his friends on Highway 35, the sudden brightness stabs his eyes, his body feels light enough to float away, and he nearly passes out all over again. “I don’t think I did get shot,” he says.

  No one pays any attention to the Kaiser. Doc is asking Mouse if he wants to go to the hospital.

  “No hospital, man. Hospitals kill people.”

  “At least let me take a look at your leg.”

  “Fine, look.”

  Doc kneels at the side of the road and tugs the cuff of Mouse’s jeans up to the bottom of his knee. He probes with surprisingly delicate fingers, and Mouse winces.

  “Mouse,” he says, “I’ve never seen a dog bite like this before.”

  “Never saw a dog like that before, either.”

  The Kaiser says, “What dog?”

  “There’s something funny about this wound,” Doc says. “You need antibiotics, and you need them right away.”

  “Don’t you have antibiotics?”

  “Sure, I do.”

  “Then let’s go back to Beezer’s place, and you can stick me full of needles.”

  “Whatever you say,” says Doc.

  20

  AROUND THE TIME Mouse and Beezer first fail to see the little road and the NO TRESPASSING sign beside it, Jack Sawyer answers the annoying signal of his cell phone, hoping that his caller will turn out to be Henry Leyden with information about the voice on the 911 tape. Although an identification would be wonderful, he does not expect Henry to I.D. the voice; the Fisherman–Burnside is Potsie’s age, and Jack does not suppose the old villain has much of a social life, here or in the Territories. What Henry can do, however, is to apply his finely tuned ears to the nuances of Burnside’s voice and describe what he hears in it. If we did not know that Jack’s faith in his friend’s capacity to hear distinctions and patterns inaudible to other people was justified, that faith would seem as irrational as the belief in magic: Jack trusts that a refreshed, invigorated Henry Leyden will pick up at least one or two crucial details of history or character that will narrow the search. Anything that Henry picks up will interest Jack.

  If someone else is calling him, he intends to get rid of whoever it is, fast.

  The voice that answers his greeting revises his plans. Fred Marshall wants to talk to him, and Fred is so wound up and incoherent that Jack must ask him to slow down and start over.

  “Judy’s flipping out again,” Fred says. “Just . . . babbling and raving, and getting crazy like before, trying to rip through the walls—oh God, they put her in restraints and she hates that, she wants to help Ty, it’s all because of that tape. Christ, it’s getting to be too much to handle, Jack, Mr. Sawyer, I mean it, and I know I’m running off at the mouth, but I’m really worried.”

  “Don’t tell me someone sent her the 911 tape,” Jack says.

  “No, not . . . what 911 tape? I’m talking about the one that was delivered to the hospital today. Addressed to Judy. Can you believe they let her listen to that thing? I want to strangle Dr. Spiegleman and that nurse, Jane Bond. What’s the matter with these people? The tape comes in, they say, oh goody, here’s a nice tape for you to listen to, Mrs. Marshall, hold on, I’ll be right back with a cassette player. On a mental ward? They don’t even bother to listen to it first? Look, whatever you’re doing, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d let me pick you up, so I could drive you over there. You could talk to her. You’re the only person who can calm her down.”

  “You don’t have to pick me up, because I’m already on the way. What was on the tape?”

  “I don’t get it.” Fred Marshall has become considerably more lucid. “Why are you going there without me?”

  After a second of thought, Jack tells him an outright lie. “I thought you would probably be there already. It’s a pity you weren’t.”

  “I would have had the sense to screen that tape before letting her hear it. Do you know what was on that thing?”

  “The Fisherman,” Jack says.

  “How did you know?”

  “He’s a great communicator,” Jack says. “How bad was it?”

  “You tell me, and then we’ll both know. I’m piecing it together from what I gathered from Judy and what Dr. Spiegleman told me later.” Fred Marshall’s voice begins to waver. “The Fisherman was taunting her. Can you believe that? He said, Your little boy is very lonely. Then he said something like, He’s been begging and begging to call home and say hello to his mommy. Except Judy says he had a weird foreign accent, or a speech impediment, or something, so he wasn’t easy to understand right away. Then he says, Say hello to your mommy, Tyler, and Tyler . . .” Fred’s voice breaks, and Jack can hear him stifling his agony before he begins again. “Tyler, ah, Tyler was apparently too distressed to do much but scream for help.” A long, uncertain inhalation c
omes over the phone. “And he cried, Jack, he cried.” Unable to contain his feelings any longer, Fred weeps openly, unguardedly. His breath rattles in his throat; Jack listens to all the wet, undignified, helpless noises people make when grief and sorrow cancel every other feeling, and his heart moves for Fred Marshall.

  The sobbing relents. “Sorry. Sometimes I think they’ll have to put me in restraints.”

  “Was that the end of the tape?”

  “He got on again.” Fred breathes noisily for a moment, clearing his head. “Boasting about what he was going to do. Dere vill be morrr mur-derts, and morrr afder dat, Choo-dee, we are all goink zu haff sotch fun—Spiegleman quoted this junk to me! The children of French Landing will be harvested like wheat. Havv-uz-ted like wheed. Who talks like that? What kind of person is this?”

  “I wish I knew,” Jack says. “Maybe he was putting on an accent to sound even scarier. Or to disguise his voice.” He’d never disguise his voice, Jack thinks, he’s too delighted with himself to hide behind an accent. “I’ll have to get the tape from the hospital and listen to it myself. And I’ll call you as soon as I have some information.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Marshall says. “I probably made a mistake. Wendell Green came over about an hour ago.”

  “Anything involving Wendell Green is automatically a mistake. So what happened?”

  “It was like he knew all about Tyler and just needed me to confirm it. I thought he must have heard from Dale, or the state troopers. But Dale hasn’t made us public yet, has he?”

  “Wendell has a network of little weasels that feed him information. If he knows anything, that’s how he heard about it. What did you tell him?”

  “More or less everything,” Marshall says. “Including the tape. Oh, God, I’m such a dope. But I thought it’d be all right—I thought it would all get out anyhow.”

  “Fred, did you tell him anything about me?”

  “Only that Judy trusts you and that we’re both grateful for your help. And I think I said that you would probably be going in to see her this afternoon.”

  “Did you mention Ty’s baseball cap?”

  “Do you think I’m nuts? As far as I’m concerned, that stuff is between you and Judy. If I don’t get it, I’m not going to talk about it to Wendell Green. At least I got him to promise to stay away from Judy. He has a great reputation, but I got the feeling he isn’t everything he’s cracked up to be.”

  “You said a mouthful,” Jack says. “I’ll be in touch.”

  When Fred Marshall hangs up, Jack punches in Henry’s number.

  “I may be a little late, Henry. I’m on my way to French County Lutheran. Judy Marshall got a tape from the Fisherman, and if they’ll let me have it, I’ll bring it over. There’s something strange going on here—on Judy’s tape, I guess he has some kind of foreign accent.”

  Henry tells Jack there is no rush. He has not listened to the first tape yet, and now will wait until Jack comes over with the second one. He might hear something useful if he plays them in sequence. At least, he could tell Jack if they were made by the same man. “And don’t worry about me, Jack. In a little while, Mrs. Morton is coming by to take me over to KDCU. George Rathbun butters my bread today, baby—six or seven radio ads. ‘Even a blind man knows you want to treat your honey, your sweetheart, your lovey-dovey, your wife, your best friend through thick and thin, to a mm-mmm fine dinner tonight, and there’s no better place to show your appreciation to the old ball and chain than to take her to Cousin Buddy’s Rib Crib on South Wabash Street in beautiful downtown La Riviere!’ ”

  “ ‘The old ball and chain’?”

  “You pay for George Rathbun, you get George Rathbun, warts and all.”

  Laughing, Jack tells Henry he will see him later that day, and pushes the Ram up to seventy. What is Dale going to do, give him a speeding ticket?

  He parks in front of the hospital instead of driving around to the parking lot, and trots across the concrete with his mind filled with the Territories and Judy Marshall. Things are hurtling forward, picking up pace, and Jack has the sense that everything converges on Judy—no, on Judy and him. The Fisherman has chosen them more purposefully than he did his first three victims: Amy St. Pierre, Johnny Irkenham, and Irma Freneau were simply the right age—any three children would have done—but Tyler was Judy Marshall’s son, and that set him apart. Judy has glimpsed the Territories, Jack has traveled through them, and the Fisherman lives there the way a cancer cell lives in a healthy organism. The Fisherman sent Judy a tape, Jack a grisly present. At Tansy Freneau’s, he had seen Judy as his key and the door it opened, and where did that door lead but into Judy’s Faraway?

  Faraway. God, that’s pretty. Beautiful, in fact.

  Aaah . . . the word evokes Judy Marshall’s face, and when he sees that face, a door in his mind, a door that is his and his alone, flies open, and for a moment Jack Sawyer stops moving altogether, and in shock, dread, and joyous expectation, freezes on the concrete six feet from the hospital’s entrance.

  Through the door in his mind pours a stream of disconnected images: a stalled Ferris wheel, Santa Monica cops milling behind a strip of yellow crime-scene tape, light reflected off a black man’s bald head. Yes, a bald man’s black head, that which he really and truly, in fact most desperately, had not wished to see, so take a good look, kiddo, here it is again. There had been a guitar, but the guitar was elsewhere; the guitar belonged to the magnificent demanding comforting comfortless Speedy Parker, God bless him God damn his eyes God love him Speedy, who touched its strings and sang

  Travelin’ Jack, ole Travelin’ Jack,

  Got a far long way to go,

  Longer way to come back.

  Worlds spin around him, worlds within worlds and other worlds alongside them, separated by a thin membrane composed of a thousand thousand doors, if only you know how to find them. A thousand thousand red feathers, tiny ones, feathers from a robin redbreast, hundreds of robin redbreasts, flew through one of those doors, Speedy’s. Robin, as in robin’s-egg blue, thank you, Speedy, and a song that said Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead.

  Or: Wake up, wake up, you DUNDERHEAD!

  Crazily, Jack hears George Rathbun’s now-not-so genial roar: Eeeven a BLIIIND MAAAN coulda seen THIS one coming, you KNOTHEAD!

  “Oh, yeah?” Jack says out loud. It is a good thing Head Nurse Jane Bond, Warden Bond, Agent OO Zero, cannot hear him. She’s tough, but on the other hand, she’s unfair, and if she were to appear beside him now, she would probably clap him in irons, sedate him, and drag him back to her domain. “Well, I know something you don’t know, old buddy: Judy Marshall has a Twinner, and the Twinner has been whispering through the wall for a considerable old time now. It’s no surprise she finally started to shout.”

  A red-haired teenager in an ARDEN H.S. BASEBALL T-shirt shoves open the literal door six feet from Jack and gives him a wary, disconcerted look. Man, grown-ups are weird, the look says; aren’t I glad I’m a kid? Since he is a high school student and not a mental-health professional, he does not clap our hero in irons and drag him sedated away to the padded room. He simply takes care to steer a wide course around the madman and keeps walking, albeit with a touch of self-conscious stiffness in his gait.

  It is all about Twinners, of course. Rebuking his stupidity, Jack raps his knuckles against the side of his head. He should have seen it before; he should have understood immediately. If he has any excuse, it is that at first he refused to think about the case despite Speedy’s efforts to wake him up, then became so caught up in concentrating on the Fisherman that until this morning, while watching his mother on the Sand Bar’s big TV, he had neglected to consider the monster’s Twinner. In Judy Marshall’s childhood, her Twinner had spoken to her through that membrane between the two worlds; growing more and more alarmed over the past month, the Twinner had all but thrust her arms through the membrane and shaken Judy senseless. Because Jack is single-natured and has no Twinner, the corresponding task fell to Sp
eedy. Now that everything seems to make sense, Jack cannot believe it has taken him so long to see the pattern.

  And this is why he has resented everything that kept him from standing before Judy Marshall: Judy is the doorway to her Twinner, to Tyler, and to the destruction of both the Fisherman and his opposite number in the Territories, the builder of the satanic, fiery structure a crow named Gorg showed Tansy Freneau. Whatever happens on Ward D today, it is going to be world-altering.

  Heart thrumming in anticipation, Jack passes from intense sunlight into the vast ocher space of the lobby. The same bathrobed patients seem to occupy the many chairs; in a distant corner, the same doctors discuss a troublesome case or, who knows, that tricky tenth hole at Arden Country Club; the same golden lilies raise their luxuriant, attentive heads outside the gift shop. This repetition reassures Jack, it hastens his step, for it surrounds and cushions the unforeseeable events awaiting him on the fifth floor.

  The same bored clerk responds to the proffer of the same password with an identical, if not the same, green card stamped VISITOR. The elevator surprisingly similar to one in the Ritz Hôtel on the Place Vendôme obediently trembles upward past floors two, three, and four, in its dowager-like progress pausing to admit a gaunt young doctor who summons the memory of Roderick Usher, then releases Jack on five, where the beautiful ocher light seems a shade or two darker than down there in the huge lobby. From the elevator Jack retraces the steps he took with his guide Fred Marshall down the corridor, through the two sets of double doors and past the way stations of Gerontology and Ambulatory Ophthalmology and Records Annex, getting closer and closer to the unforeseen unforeseeable as the corridors grow narrower and darker, and emerges as before into the century-old room with high, skinny windows and a lot of walnut-colored wood.

  And there the spell breaks, for the attendant seated behind the polished counter, the person currently the guardian of this realm, is taller, younger, and considerably more sullen than his counterpart of the day before. When Jack asks to see Mrs. Marshall, the young person glances in disdain at his VISITOR card and inquires if he should happen to be a relative or—another glance at the card—a medical professional. Neither, Jack admits, but if the young person could trouble himself to inform Nurse Bond that Mr. Sawyer wishes to speak to Mrs. Marshall, Nurse Bond is practically guaranteed to swing open the forbidding metal doors and wave him inward, since that is more or less what she did yesterday.