Black House Read online

  “I’m afraid he’s a little above himself,” Jack replies. “Old Wendell here’s a news vulture.”

  Wendell turns his head a bit. He refuses to lift his eyes, but his lip curls in a sneer that may be more reflexive than real. “Heard. That.” He struggles. The lip curls again, and this time the sneer seems less reflexive. It is, in fact, a snarl. “Gol. Gol. Gol-den boy. Holly. Wood.”

  “He’s managed to retain at least some of his charm and his joi de vivre,” Jack says. “Will he be okay here?”

  “Not much with ary brain in its head comes near the Little Sisters’ tent,” Parkus says. “He’ll be okay. And if he smells somethin’ tasty on the breeze and comes for a look-see, why, I guess we can feed him.” He turns toward Wendell. “We’re going just over yonder. If you want to come and visit, why, you just up and do her. Understand me, Mr. News Hawk?”

  “Wen. Dell. Green.”

  “Wendell Green, yessir.” Parkus looks at the others. “Come on. Let’s mosey.”

  “We mustn’t forget him,” Sophie murmurs, with a look back. “It will be dark in a few hours.”

  “No,” Parkus agrees as they top the nearest rise. “Wouldn’t do to leave him beside that tent after dark. That wouldn’t do at all.”

  There’s more foliage in the declivity on the far side of the rise—even a little ribbon of creek, presumably on its way to the river Jack can hear in the distance—but it still looks more like northern Nevada than western Wisconsin. Yet in a way, Jack thinks, that makes sense. The last one had been no ordinary flip. He feels like a stone that has been skipped all the way across a lake, and as for poor Wendell—

  To the right of where they descend the far side of the draw, a horse has been tethered in the shade of what Jack thinks is a Joshua tree. About twenty yards down the draw to the left is a circle of eroded stones. Inside it a fire, not yet lit, has been carefully laid. Jack doesn’t like the look of the place much—the stones remind him of ancient teeth. Nor is he alone in his dislike. Sophie stops, her grip on his fingers tightening.

  “Parkus, do we have to go in there? Please say we don’t.”

  Parkus turns to her with a kindly smile Jack knows well: a Speedy Parker smile for sure.

  “The Speaking Demon’s been gone from this circle many the long age, darling,” he says. “And you know that such as yon are best for stories.”

  “Yet—”

  “Now’s no time to give in to the willies,” Parkus tells her. He speaks with a trace of impatience, and “willies” isn’t precisely the word he uses, but only how Jack’s mind translates it. “You waited for him to come in the Little Sisters’ hospital tent—”

  “Only because she was there on the other side—”

  “—and now I want you to come along.” All at once he seems taller to Jack. His eyes flash. Jack thinks: A gunslinger. Yes, I suppose he could be a gunslinger. Like in one of Mom’s old movies, only for real.

  “All right,” she says, low. “If we must.” Then she looks at Jack. “I wonder if you’d put your arm around me?”

  Jack, we may be sure, is happy to oblige.

  As they step between two of the stones, Jack seems to hear an ugly twist of whispered words. Among them, one voice is momentarily clear, seeming to leave a trail of slime behind it as it enters his ear: Drudge drudge drudge, oho the bledding foodzies, soon he cummz, my good friend Munshun, and such a prize I have for him, oho, oho—

  Jack looks at his old friend as Parkus hunkers by a tow sack and loosens the drawstring at the top. “He’s close, isn’t he? The Fisherman. And Black House, that’s close, too.”

  “Yep,” Parkus says, and from the sack he spills the gutted corpses of a dozen plump dead birds.

  Thoughts of Irma Freneau reenter Jack’s head at the sight of the grouse, and he thinks he won’t be able to eat. Watching as Parkus and Sophie skewer the birds on greensticks reinforces this idea. But after the fire is lit and the birds begin to brown, his stomach weighs in, insisting that the grouse smell wonderful and will probably taste even better. Over here, he remembers, everything always does.

  “And here we are, in the speaking circle,” Parkus says. His smiles have been put away for the nonce. He looks at Jack and Sophie, who sit side by side and still holding hands, with somber gravity. His guitar has been propped against a nearby rock. Beside it, Sacred and Profane sleeps with its two heads tucked into its feathers, dreaming its no doubt bifurcated dreams. “The Demon may be long gone, but the legends say such things leave a residue that may lighten the tongue.”

  “Like kissing the Blarney Stone, maybe,” Jack suggests.

  Parkus shakes his head. “No blarney today.”

  Jack says, “If only we were dealing with an ordinary scumbag. That I could handle.”

  Sophie looks at him, puzzled.

  “He means a dust-off artist,” Parkus tells her. “A hardcase.” He looks at Jack. “And in one way, that is what you’re dealing with. Carl Bierstone isn’t much—an ordinary monster, let’s say. Which is not to say he couldn’t do with a spot of killing. But as for what’s going on in French Landing, he has been used. Possessed, you’d say in your world, Jack. Taken by the spirits, we’d say in the Territories—”

  “Or brought low by pigs,” Sophie adds.

  “Yes.” Parkus is nodding. “In the world just beyond this borderland—Mid-World—they would say he has been infested by a demon. But a demon far greater than the poor, tattered spirit that once lived in this circle of stones.”

  Jack hardly hears that. His eyes are glowing. It sounded something like beer stein, George Potter told him last night, a thousand years ago. That’s not it, but it’s close.

  “Carl Bierstone,” he says. He raises a clenched fist, then shakes it in triumph. “That was his name in Chicago. Burnside here in French Landing. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly. Where is he, Speedy? Save me some time h—”

  “Shut … up,” Parkus says.

  The tone is low and almost deadly. Jack can feel Sophie shrink against him. He does a little shrinking himself. This sounds nothing like his old friend, nothing at all. You have to stop thinking of him as Speedy, Jack tells himself. That’s not who he is or ever was. That was just a character he played, someone who could both soothe and charm a scared kid on the run with his mother.

  Parkus turns the birds, which are now browned nicely on one side and spitting juice into the fire.

  “I’m sorry to speak harsh to you, Jack, but you have to realize that your Fisherman is pretty small fry compared to what’s really going on.”

  Why don’t you tell Tansy Freneau he’s small fry? Why don’t you tell Beezer St. Pierre?

  Jack thinks these things, but doesn’t say them out loud. He’s more than a little afraid of the light he saw in Parkus’s eyes.

  “Nor is it about Twinners,” Parkus says. “You got to get that idea out of your mind. That’s just something that has to do with your world and the world of the Territories—a link. You can’t kill some hardcase over here and end the career of your cannibal over there. And if you kill him over there, in Wisconsin, the thing inside will just jump to another host.”

  “The thing—?”

  “When it was in Albert Fish, Fish called it the Monday Man. Fellow you’re after calls it Mr. Munshun. Both are only ways of trying to say something that can’t be pronounced by any earthly tongue on any earthly world.”

  “How many worlds are there, Speedy?”

  “Many,” Parkus says, looking into the fire. “And this business concerns every one of them. Why else do you think I’ve been after you like I have? Sending you feathers, sending you robins’ eggs, doing every damned thing I could to make you wake up.”

  Jack thinks of Judy, scratching on walls until the tips of her fingers were bloody, and feels ashamed. Speedy has been doing much the same thing, it seems. “Wake up, wake up, you dunderhead,” he says.

  Parkus seems caught between reproof and a smile. “For sure you must have seen me in the case t
hat sent you running out of L.A.”

  “Ah, man—why do you think I went?”

  “You ran like Jonah, when God told him to go preach against the wickedness in Nineveh. Thought I was gonna have to send a whale to come and swallow you up.”

  “I feel swallowed,” Jack tells him.

  In a small voice, Sophie says: “I do, too.”

  “We’ve all been swallowed,” says the man with the gun on his hip. “We’re in the belly of the beast, like it or not. It’s ka, which is destiny and fate. Your Fisherman, Jack, is now your ka. Our ka. This is more than murder. Much more.”

  And Jack sees something that frankly scares the shit out of him. Lester Parker, a.k.a. Speedy, a.k.a. Parkus, is himself scared almost to death.

  “This business concerns the Dark Tower,” he says.

  Beside Jack, Sophie gives a low, desperate cry of terror and lowers her head. At the same time she raises one hand and forks the sign of the Evil Eye at Parkus, over and over.

  That gentleman doesn’t seem to take it amiss. He simply sets to work turning the birds again on their sticks. “Listen to me, now,” he says. “Listen, and ask as few questions as you can. We still have a chance to get Judy Marshall’s son back, but time is blowing in our teeth.”

  “Talk,” Jack says.

  Parkus talks. At some point in his tale he judges the birds done and serves them out on flat stones. The meat is tender, almost falling off the small bones. Jack eats hungrily, drinking deep of the sweet water from Parkus’s waterskin each time it comes around to him. He wastes no more time comparing dead children to dead grouse. The furnace needs to be stoked, and he stokes it with a will. So does Sophie, eating with her fingers and licking them clean without the slightest reserve or embarrassment. So, in the end, does Wendell Green, although he refuses to enter the circle of old stones. When Parkus tosses him a golden-brown grouse, however, Wendell catches it with remarkable adroitness and buries his face in the moist meat.

  “You asked how many worlds,” Parkus begins. “The answer, in the High Speech, is da fan: worlds beyond telling.” With one of the blackened sticks he draws a figure eight on its side, which Jack recognizes as the Greek symbol for infinity.

  “There is a Tower that binds them in place. Think of it as an axle upon which many wheels spin, if you like. And there is an entity that would bring this Tower down. Ram Abbalah.”

  At these words, the flames of the fire seem to momentarily darken and turn red. Jack wishes he could believe that this is only a trick of his overstrained mind, but cannot. “The Crimson King,” he says.

  “Yes. His physical being is pent in a cell at the top of the Tower, but he has another manifestation, every bit as real, and this lives in Can-tah Abbalah—the Court of the Crimson King.”

  “Two places at once.” Given his journeying between the world of America and the world of the Territories, Jack has little trouble swallowing this concept.

  “Yes.”

  “If he—or it—destroys the Tower, won’t that defeat his purpose? Won’t he destroy his physical being in the process?”

  “Just the opposite: he’ll set it free to wander what will then be chaos … din-tah … the furnace. Some parts of Mid-World have fallen into that furnace already.”

  “How much of this do I actually need to know?” Jack asks. He is aware that time is fleeting by on his side of the wall, as well.

  “Hard telling what you need to know and what you don’t,” Parkus says. “If I leave out the wrong piece of information, maybe all the stars go dark. Not just here, but in a thousand thousand universes. That’s the pure hell of it. Listen, Jack—the King has been trying to destroy the Tower and set himself free for time out of mind. Forever, mayhap. It’s slow work, because the Tower is bound in place by crisscrossing force beams that act on it like guy wires. The Beams have held for millennia, and would hold for millennia to come, but in the last two hundred years—that’s speaking of time as you count it, Jack; to you, Sophie, it would be Full-Earth almost five hundred times over—”

  “So long,” she says. It’s almost a sigh. “So very long.”

  “In the great sweep of things, it’s as short as the gleam of a single match in a dark room. But while good things usually take a long time to develop, evil has a way of popping up full-blown and ready-made, like Jack out of his box. Ka is a friend to evil as well as to good. It embraces both. And, speaking of Jack …” Parkus turns to him. “You’ve heard of the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, of course?”

  Jack nods.

  “On the upper levels of the Tower, there are those who call the last two hundred or so years in your world the Age of Poisoned Thought. That means—”

  “You don’t have to explain it to me,” Jack says. “I knew Morgan Sloat, remember? I knew what he planned for Sophie’s world.” Yes, indeed. The basic plan had been to turn one of the universe’s sweetest honeycombs into first a vacation spot for the rich, then a source of unskilled labor, and finally a waste pit, probably radioactive. If that wasn’t an example of poisoned thought, Jack doesn’t know what is.

  Parkus says, “Rational beings have always harbored telepaths among their number; that’s true in all the worlds. But they’re ordinarily rare creatures. Prodigies, you might say. But since the Age of Poisoned Thought came on your world, Jack—infested it like a demon—such beings have become much more common. Not as common as slow mutants in the Blasted Lands, but common, yes.”

  “You speak of mind readers,” Sophie says, as if wanting to be sure.

  “Yes,” Parkus agrees, “but not just mind readers. Precognates. Teleports—world jumpers like old Travelin’ Jack here, in other words—and telekinetics. Mind readers are the most common, telekinetics the rarest … and the most valuable.”

  “To him, you mean,” Jack says. “To the Crimson King.”

  “Yes. Over the last two hundred years or so, the abbalah has spent a good part of his time gathering a crew of telepathic slaves. Most of them come from Earth and the Territories. All of the telekinetics come from Earth. This collection of slaves—this gulag—is his crowning achievement. We call them Breakers. They …” He trails off, thinking. Then: “Do you know how a galley travels?”

  Sophie nods, but Jack at first has no idea what Parkus is talking about. He has a brief, lunatic vision of a fully equipped kitchen traveling down Route 66.

  “Many oarsmen,” Sophie says, then makes a rowing motion that throws her breasts into charming relief.

  Parkus is nodding. “Usually slaves chained together. They—”

  From outside the circle, Wendell suddenly sticks his own oar in. “Spart. Cus.” He pauses, frowning, then tries it again. “Spart-a-cus.”

  “What’s he on about?” Parkus asks, frowning. “Any idea, Jack?”

  “A movie called Spartacus,” Jack says, “and you’re wrong as usual, Wendell. I believe you’re thinking about Ben-Hur.”

  Looking sulky, Wendell holds out his greasy hands. “More. Meat.”

  Parkus pulls the last grouse from its sizzling stick and tosses it between two of the stones, where Wendell sits with his pallid, greasy face peering from between his knees. “Fresh prey for the news hawk,” he says. “Now do us a favor and shut up.”

  “Or. What.” The old defiant gleam is rising in Wendell’s eyes.

  Parkus draws his shooting iron partway from its holster. The grip, made of sandalwood, is worn, but the barrel gleams murder-bright. He has to say no more; holding his second bird in one hand, Wendell Green hitches up his robe and hies himself back over the rise. Jack is extremely relieved to see him go. Spartacus indeed, he thinks, and snorts.

  “So the Crimson King wants to use these Breakers to destroy the Beams,” Jack says. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s his plan.”

  “You speak as though of the future,” Parkus says mildly. “This is happening now, Jack. Only look at your own world if you want to see the ongoing disintegration. Of the six Beams, only one still holds true. Two others still generate some
holding power. The other three are dead. One of these went out thousands of years ago, in the ordinary course of things. The others … killed by the Breakers. All in two centuries or less.”

  “Christ,” Jack says. He is beginning to understand how Speedy could call the Fisherman small-fry.

  “The job of protecting the Tower and the Beams has always belonged to the ancient war guild of Gilead, called gunslingers in this world and many others. They also generated a powerful psychic force, Jack, one fully capable of countering the Crimson King’s Breakers, but—”

  “The gunslingers are all gone save for one,” Sophie says, looking at the big pistol on Parkus’s hip. And, with timid hope: “Unless you really are one, too, Parkus.”

  “Not I, darling,” he says, “but there’s more than one.”

  “I thought Roland was the last. So the stories say.”

  “He has made at least three others,” Parkus tells her. “I’ve no idea how that can be possible, but I believe it to be true. If Roland were still alone, the Breakers would have toppled the Tower long since. But with the force of these others added to his—”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about,” Jack says. “I did, sort of, but you lost me about two turns back.”

  “There’s no need for you to understand it all in order to do your job,” Parkus says.

  “Thank God for that.”

  “As for what you do need to understand, leave galleys and oarsmen and think in terms of the Western movies your mother used to make. To begin with, imagine a fort in the desert.”

  “This Dark Tower you keep talking about. That’s the fort.”

  “Yes. And surrounding the fort, instead of wild Indians—”

  “The Breakers. Led by Big Chief Abbalah.”

  Sophie murmurs: “The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.”

  Jack feels a light but singularly unpleasant chill shake up his spine: he thinks of rat paws scuttering over broken glass. “What? Why do you say that?”

  Sophie looks at him, flushes, shakes her head, looks down. “It’s what she says, sometimes. Judy. It’s how I hear her, sometimes.”