Black House js-2 Read online

  And, after another moment, Young and Heavyset put the tire iron down.

  Fred wasn’t aware that a crowd had gathered until he heard the spontaneous applause from perhaps thirty onlookers. He joined in, never more proud of her than he was at that moment. And for the first time, Judy looked startled. She hung in there, though, startled or not. She got the two of them together, tugging Mr. Middle-Aged Suit forward by one arm, and actually hectored them into shaking hands. By the time the cops arrived, Young and Heavyset and Mr. Middle-Aged Suit were sitting side by side on the curb, studying each other’s insurance papers. Case closed.

  Fred and Judy walked on toward the campus, holding hands again. For two blocks Fred didn’t speak. Was he in awe of her? He supposes now that he was. At last he said: That was amazing.

  She gave him an uncomfortable little look, an uncomfortable little smile. No it wasn’t, she said. If you want to call it something, call it good citizenship. I could see that guy getting ready to send himself to jail. I didn’t want that to happen. Or the other guy to be hurt.

  Yet she said that last almost as an afterthought, and Fred for the first time sensed not only her courage but her unflinching Viking’s heart. She was on the side of Young and Heavyset because . . . well, because the other fellow had been afraid.

  Weren’t you worried, though? he asked her. He had still been so stunned by what he’d seen that it hadn’t crossed his mind—yet—to think he should be a little ashamed; after all, it was his girlfriend who’d stepped in instead of him, and that wasn’t the Gospel According to Hollywood. Weren’t you afraid that in the heat of the moment the guy with the tire iron would take a swing at you?

  Judy’s eyes had grown puzzled. It never crossed my mind, she said.

  Camelot eventually debouches into Chase Street, where there is a pleasant little gleam of the Mississippi on clear days like this one, but Fred doesn’t go that far. He turns at the top of Liberty Heights and starts back the way he came, his shirt now soaked with sweat. Usually the run makes him feel better, but not today, at least not yet. The fearless Judy of that afternoon on the corner of State and Gorham is so unlike the shifty-eyed, sometimes disconnected Judy who now lives in his house—the nap-taking, hand-wringing Judy—that Fred has actually spoken to Pat Skarda about it. Yesterday, this was, when the doc was in Goltz’s, looking at riding lawn mowers.

  Fred had shown him a couple, a Deere and a Honda, inquired after his family, and then asked (casually, he hoped), Hey, Doc, tell me something—do you think it’s possible for a person to just go crazy? Without any warning, like?

  Skarda had given him a sharper look than Fred had really liked. Are we talking about an adult or an adolescent, Fred?

  Well, we’re not talking about anyone, actually. Big, hearty laugh—unconvincing to Fred’s own ears, and judging from Pat Skarda’s look, not very convincing to him, either. Not anyone real, anyway. But as a hypothetical case, let’s say an adult.

  Skarda had thought about it, then shook his head. There are few absolutes in medicine, even fewer in psychiatric medicine. That said, I have to tell you that I think it’s very unlikely for a person to “just go crazy.” It may be a fairly rapid process, but it is a process. We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but that’s rarely the case. Mental dysfunction—neurotic or psychotic behavior—takes time to develop, and there are usually signs. How’s your mom these days, Fred?

  Mom? Oh hey, she’s fine. Right in the pink.

  And Judy?

  It had taken him a moment to get a smile started, but once he did, he managed a big one. Big and guileless. Judy? She’s in the pink, too, Doc. Of course she is. Steady as she goes.

  Sure. Steady as she goes. Just showing a few signs, that was all.

  Maybe they’ll pass, he thinks. Those good old endorphins are finally kicking in, and all at once this seems plausible. Optimism is a more normal state for Fred, who does not believe in slippage, and a little smile breaks on his face—the day’s first. Maybe the signs will pass. Maybe whatever’s wrong with her will blow out as fast as it blew in. Maybe it’s even, you know, a menstrual thing. Like PMS.

  God, if that was all it was, what a relief! In the meantime, there’s Ty to think about. He has to have a talk with Tyler about the buddy system, because while Fred doesn’t believe what Wendell Green is apparently trying to insinuate, that the ghost of a fabulous turn-of-the-century cannibal and all-around boogerman named Albert Fish has for some reason turned up here in Coulee Country, someone is certainly out there, and this someone has murdered two little children and done unspeakable (at least unless you’re Wendell Green, it seems) things to the bodies.

  Thighs, torso, and buttocks bitten, Fred thinks, and runs faster, although now he’s getting a stitch in his side. Yet this bears repeating: he does not believe that these horrors can actually touch his son, nor does he see how they can have caused Judy’s condition, since her oddities started while Amy St. Pierre was still alive, Johnny Irkenham too, both of them presumably playing happily in their respective backyards.

  Maybe this, maybe that . . . but enough of Fred and his worries, all right? Let us rise from the environs of his troubled head and precede him back to No. 16, Robin Hood Lane—let’s go directly to the source of his troubles.

  The upstairs window of the connubial bedroom is open, and the screen is certainly no problem; we strain ourselves right through, entering with the breeze and the first sounds of the awakening day.

  The sounds of French Landing awakening do not awaken Judy Marshall. Nope, she has been starey-eyed since three, conning the shadows for she doesn’t know what, fleeing dreams too horrible to remember. Yet she does remember some things, little as she wants to.

  “Saw the eye again,” she remarks to the empty room. Her tongue comes out and with no Fred around to watch her (she knows he’s watching, she is beset but not stupid), it does not just pet at her philtrum but slathers it in a great big wipe, like a dog licking its chops after a bowl of scraps. “It’s a red eye. His eye. Eye of the King.”

  She looks up at the shadows of the trees outside. They dance on the ceiling, making shapes and faces, shapes and faces.

  “Eye of the King,” she repeats, and now it starts with the hands: kneading and twisting and squeezing and digging. “Abbalah! Foxes down foxholes! Abbalah-doon, the Crimson King! Rats in their ratholes! Abbalah Munshun! The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money!”

  She shakes her head from side to side. Oh, these voices, out of the darkness they come, and sometimes she awakens with a vision burning behind her eyes, a vision of a vast slaty tower standing in a field of roses. A field of blood. Then the talking begins, the speaking in tongues, testification, words she can’t understand let alone control, a mixed stream of English and gibberish.

  “Trudge, trudge, trudge,” she says. “The little ones are trudging on their bleeding footsies . . . oh for Christ’s sake, won’t this ever stop?”

  Her tongue yawns out and licks across the tip of her nose; for a moment her nostrils are plugged with her own spit, and her head roars

  —Abbalah, Abbalah-doon, Can-tah Abbalah—

  with those terrible foreign words, those terrible impacted images of the Tower and the burning caves beneath, caves through which little ones trudge on bleeding feet. Her mind strains with them, and there is only one thing that will make them stop, only one way to get relief.

  Judy Marshall sits up. On the table beside her there is a lamp, a copy of the latest John Grisham novel, a little pad of paper (a birthday present from Ty, each sheet headed HERE’S ANOTHER GREAT IDEA I HAD!), and a ballpoint pen with LA RIVIERE SHERATON printed on the side.

  Judy seizes the pen and scribbles on the pad.

  No Abbalah no Abbalah-doon no Tower no Breakers no Crimson King only dreams these are just my dreams

  It is enough, but pens are also roads to anywhere, and before she can divorce the tip of this one from the birthday pad, it writes o
ne more line:

  The Black House is the doorway to Abbalah the entrance to hell Sheol Munshun all these worlds and spirits

  No more! Good merciful God, no more! And the worst thing: What if it all begins to make sense?

  She throws the pen back on the table, where it rolls to the base of the lamp and lies still. Then she tears the page from the pad, crumples it, and sticks it in her mouth. She chews furiously, not tearing it but at least mashing it sodden, then swallows. There is an awful moment when it sticks in her throat, but then it goes down. Words and worlds recede and Judy falls back against the pillows, exhausted. Her face is pale and sweaty, her eyes huge with unshed tears, but the moving shadows on the ceiling no longer look like faces to her—the faces of trudging children, of rats in their ratholes, foxes in foxholes, eye of the King, Abbalah-Abbalah-doon! Now they are just the shadows of the trees again. She is Judy DeLois Marshall, wife of Fred, mother of Ty. This is Libertyville, this is French Landing, this is French County, this is Wisconsin, this is America, this is the Northern Hemisphere, this is the world, and there is no other world than this. Let it be so.

  Ah, let it be so.

  Her eyes close, and as she finally slips back to sleep we slip across the room to the door, but just before we get there, Judy Marshall says one other thing—says it as she crosses over the border and into sleep.

  “Burnside is not your name. Where is your hole?”

  The bedroom door is closed and so we use the keyhole, passing through it like a sigh. Down the hall we go, past pictures of Judy’s family and Fred’s, including one photo of the Marshall family farm where Fred and Judy spent a horrible but blessedly short period not long after their marriage. Want some good advice? Don’t talk to Judy Marshall about Fred’s brother, Phil. Just don’t get her started, as George Rathbun would undoubtedly say.

  No keyhole in the door at the end of the hall and so we slide underneath like a telegram and into a room we immediately know is a boy’s room: we can tell from the mingled smells of dirty athletic socks and neat’s-foot oil. It’s small, this room, but it seems bigger than Fred and Judy’s down the hall, very likely because the odor of anxiety is missing. On the walls are pictures of Shaquille O’Neal, Jeromy Burnitz, last year’s Milwaukee Bucks team . . . and Tyler Marshall’s idol, Mark McGwire. McGwire plays for the Cards, and the Cards are the enemy, but hell, it’s not as if the Milwaukee Brewers are actually competition for anything. The Brew Crew were doormats in the American League, and they are likewise doormats in the National. And McGwire . . . well, he’s a hero, isn’t he? He’s strong, he’s modest, and he can hit the baseball a country mile. Even Tyler’s dad, who roots strictly for Wisconsin teams, thinks McGwire is something special. “The greatest hitter in the history of the game,” he called him after the seventy-home-run season, and Tyler, although little more than an infant in that fabled year, has never forgotten this.

  Also on the wall of this little boy who will soon be the Fisherman’s fourth victim (yes, there has already been a third, as we have seen), holding pride of place directly over his bed, is a travel poster showing a great dark castle at the end of a long and misty meadow. At the bottom of the poster, which he has Scotch-taped to the wall (his mom absolutely forbids pushpins), it says COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD in big green letters. Ty is considering taking the poster down long enough to cut this part off. He doesn’t like the poster because he has any interest in Ireland; to him the picture whispers of somewhere else, somewhere Entirely Else. It is like a photograph of some splendid mythical kingdom where there might be unicorns in the forests and dragons in the caves. Never mind Ireland; never mind Harry Potter, either. Hogwarts is fine enough for summer afternoons, but this is a castle in the Kingdom of Entirely Else. It’s the first thing Tyler Marshall sees in the morning, the last thing he sees at night, and that’s just the way he likes it.

  He lies curled on his side in his underwear shorts, a human comma with tousled dark blond hair and a thumb that is close to his mouth, really just an inch or so away from being sucked. He is dreaming—we can see his eyeballs moving back and forth behind his closed lids. His lips move . . . he’s whispering something . . . Abbalah? Is he whispering his mother’s word? Surely not, but . . .

  We lean closer to listen, but before we can hear anything, a circuit in Tyler’s jazzy red clock-radio goes hot, and all at once the voice of George Rathbun fills the room, calling Tyler hence from whatever dreams have been playing themselves out under that tousled thatch.

  “Fans, you gotta listen to me now, how many times have I told you this? If you don’t know Henreid Brothers Furniture of French Landing and Centralia, then you don’t know furniture. That’s right, I’m talking Henreid Brothers, home of the Colonial Blowout. Living-room sets dining-room sets bedroom sets, famous names you know and trust like La-Z-Boy, Breton Woods and Moosehead, EVEN A BLIND MAN CAN SEE THAT HENREID BROTHERS MEANS QUALITY!”

  Ty Marshall is laughing even before he’s got both eyes fully open. He loves George Rathbun; George is absolutely fly.

  And now, without even changing gears from the commercial: “You guys are all ready for the Brewer Bash, ain’tcha? Sent me those postcards with your name, address, and el teléfono on ’em? Hope so, because the contest closed at midnight. If you missed out . . . so solly, Cholly!”

  Ty closes his eyes again and mouths the same word over three times: Shit, shit, shit. He did forget to enter, and now he can only hope that his dad (who knows how forgetful his son can be) remembered and entered the contest for him.

  “Grand prize?” George is saying. “ONLY the chance for you or the fav-o-rite young person of your acquaintance to be the Brew Crew’s batboy or batgirl for the entire Cincinnati series. ONLY the chance to win an aut-o-graphed Richie Sexson bat, the LUMBER that holds the LIGHTNING! Not to mention fifty free seats on the first-base side with me, George Rathbun, Coulee Country’s Traveling College of Baseball Knowledge. BUT WHY AM I TELLING YOU THIS? If you missed out, you’re too late. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly! Oh, I know why I brought it up—to make sure you tune in next Friday to see if I speak YOUR NAME over the radio!”

  Ty groans. There are only two chances that George will speak his name over the radio: slim and none. Not that he cared so much about being a batboy, dressed in a baggy Brewers uni and running around in front of all those people at Miller Park, but to own Richie Sexson’s own bat, the lumber with the lightning . . . how boss would that’ve been?

  Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early—it’s summer vacation, after all—and Tyler can’t seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It’s as if there’s some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.

  What George Rathbun says next drives the remaining sleep-fog from Tyler’s brain—it’s like a dash of cold water. “Say there, Coulee, want to talk about the Fisherman?”

  Tyler stops what he’s doing, an odd little chill running up his back and then down his arms. The Fisherman. Some crazy guy killing kids . . . and eating them? Well, he’s heard that rumor, mostly from the bigger kids down at the baseball field or at the French Landing Rec Center, but who would do something so gross? Cannibalism, ack!

  George’s voice drops. “Now I’m going to tell you a little secret, so listen close to your Uncle George.” Tyler sits on his bed, holding his sneakers by the laces and listening closely to his Uncle George, as bidden. It seems odd to hear George Rathbun talking about a subject so . . . so unsporty, but Tyler trusts him. Didn’t George Rathbun predict that the Badgers would go to at least the Elite Eight two years ago, when everyone else said they’d get blown out in the first round of the Big Dance? Yeah, he did. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

  George’s voice drops further, to what is almost a c
onfidential whisper. “The original Fisherman, boys and girls, Albert Fish, has been dead and gone for sixty-seven years, and s’far’s I know, he never got much west of New Jersey. Furthermore, he was probably a DAMYANKEE FAN! SO COOL IT, COULEE COUNTRY! JUST CAAAALM DOWN!”

  Tyler relaxes, smiling, and starts putting on his sneakers. Calm down, you got that right. The day is new, and yeah, okay, his mom’s been a little on the Tinky Winky side lately, but she’ll pull out of it.

  Let us leave on this optimistic note—make like an amoeba and split, as the redoubtable George Rathbun might say. And speaking of George, that ubiquitous voice of the Coulee Country morning, should we not seek him out? Not a bad idea. Let us do so immediately.

  3

  OUT TYLER’S WINDOW we go, away from Libertyville, flying southwest on a diagonal, not lingering now but really flapping those old wings, flying with a purpose. We’re headed toward the heliograph flash of early-morning sun on the Father of Waters, also toward the world’s largest six-pack. Between it and County Road Oo (we can call it Nailhouse Row if we want; we’re practically honorary citizens of French Landing now) is a radio tower, the warning beacon on top now invisible in the bright sunshine of this newborn July day. We smell grass and trees and warming earth, and as we draw closer to the tower, we also smell the yeasty, fecund aroma of beer.

  Next to the radio tower, in the industrial park on the east side of Peninsula Drive, is a little cinder-block building with a parking lot just big enough for half a dozen cars and the Coulee patrol van, an aging Ford Econoline painted candy-apple pink. As the day winds down and afternoon wears into evening, the cylindrical shadows of the six-pack will fall first over the sign on the balding lawn facing the drive, then the building, then the parking lot. KDCU-AM, this sign reads, YOUR TALK VOICE IN COULEE COUNTRY. Spray-painted across it, in a pink that almost matches the patrol van, is a fervent declaration: TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! Later on, Howie Soule, the U-Crew engineer, will clean this off (probably during the Rush Limbaugh show, which is satellite fed and totally automated), but for now it stays, telling us all we need to know about small-town luv in middle America. Looks like we found something nice after all.