Black House

A sound of chewing, complete with smacking lips and crunching noises. "You taste like shit. I’m eating your fingers, and they taste like shit. You know what I like? Know my all-time favorite meal? The bu**ocks of a tender young child. Albert Fish liked that too, oh yes he did. Mmm-mmm! BABY BUTT! That’s GOOD EATIN’!"

Henry realizes that he has somehow slipped all the way down the unopenable door and is now resting, breathing far too heavily, on his hands and knees. He shoves himself forward and crawls behind the Mission-style sofa, from the comfort of which he had listened to Jack Sawyer reading a great many eloquent words written by Charles Dickens. Among the things he would now never be able to do, he realizes, is find out what finally happens in Bleak House. Another is seeing his friend Jack again.

The Fisherman’s footsteps enter the living room and stop moving. "All right, where the f**k are you, ass**le? You can’t hide from me." The hedge clippers’ blades go snick-snick.

Either the Fisherman has grown as blind as Henry, or the room is too dark for vision. A little bit of hope, a match flame, flares in Henry’s soul. Maybe his adversary will not be able to see the light switches.

"Asshole!" Ahzz-hill. "Damn it, where are you hiding?" Dahmmut, vhey ah you high-dung?

This is fascinating, Henry thinks. The more angry and frustrated the Fisherman gets, the more his accent melts into that weird non-German. It isn’t the South Side of Chicago anymore, but neither is it anything else. It certainly isn’t German, not really. If Henry had heard Dr. Spiegleman’s description of this accent as that of a Frenchman trying to speak English like a German, he would have nodded in smiling agreement. It’s like some kind of outer space German accent, like something that mutated toward German without ever having heard it.

"You hurt me, you stinking pig!" You huhht me, you steenk-ung peek!

The Fisherman lurches toward the easy chair and shoves it over on its side. In his Chicago voice, he says, "I’m gonna find you, buddy, and when I do, I’ll cut your f**king head off."

A lamp hits the floor. The slippered footsteps move heavily toward the right side of the room. "A blind guy hides in the dark, huh? Oh, that’s cute, that’s really cute. Lemme tell you something. I haven’t tasted a tongue in a while, but I think I’ll try yours." A small table and the lamp atop it clunk and crash to the floor. "I got some information for you. Tongues are funny. An old guy’s doesn’t taste much different from a young fella’s — though of course the tongue on a kid is twice as good as both. Venn I vas Fridz Hahhmun I ade munny dungs, ha ha."

Strange — that extraterrestrial version of a German accent bursts out of the Fisherman like a second voice. A fist strikes the wall, and the footsteps plod nearer. Using his elbows, Henry crawls around the far end of the sofa and squirms toward the shelter of a long, low table. The footsteps squish in blood, and when Henry rests his head on his hands, warm blood pumps out against his face. The fiery agony in his fingers almost swallows the pain in his cheek and his back.

"You can’t hide forever," the Fisherman says. Immediately, he switches to the weird accent and replies, "Eenuff ov dis, Burn-Burn. Vee huv murr impurdund vurk zu do."

"Hey, you’re the one who called him an ahzz-hill. He hurt me!"

"Fogzes down fogzhulls, oho, radz in radhulls, dey too ahh huhht. My boor loss babbies ahh huhht, aha, vurze vurze vurze dan uz."

"But what about him?"

"Hee iz bledding zu deff, bledding zu deff, aha. Led hum dy."

In the darkness, we can just make out what is happening. Charles Burnside appears to be performing an eerie imitation of the two heads of Parkus’s parrot, Sacred and Profane. When he speaks in his own voice, he turns his head to the left; when speaking with the accent of an extraterrestrial, he looks to his right. Watching his head swivel back and forth, we might be watching a comic actor like Jim Carrey or Steve Martin pretending to be the two halves of a split personality — except that this man is not funny. Both of his personalities are awful, and their voices hurt our ears. The greatest difference between them is that left-head, the guttural extraterrestrial, runs the show: his hands hold the wheel of the other’s vehicle, and right-head — our Burny — is essentially a slave. Since the difference between them has become so clear, we begin to get the impression that it will not be long before Mr. Munshun peels off Charles Burnside and discards him like a worn-out sock.

"But I WANT to kill him!" Burny screeches.

"Hee iz alreddy dud, dud, dud. Chack Zawyuh’s hardt iz go-ung do break. Chack Zawyuh vill nod know whud he iz do-ung. Vee go now du Muxtun’z and oho vee kull Chibbuh, yuzz? You vahhnd kull Chibbuh I ding, yuzz?"

Burny snickers. "Yeah. I vahhnd to kill Chipper. I vahhnd to slice that ass**le into little pieces and chew on his bones. And if his snippy bitch is there, I want to cut off her head and suck her juicy little tongue down my throat."

To Henry Leyden, this conversation sounds like insanity, demonic possession, or both. Blood continues to stream out of his back and from the ends of his mutilated fingers, and he is powerless to stop the flow. The smell of all the blood beneath and around him makes him feel nauseated, but nausea is the least of his problems. A light-headed sense of drift, of pleasing numbness — that is his real problem, and his best weapon against it is his own pain. He must remain conscious. Somehow, he must leave a message for Jack.

"Zo vee go now, Burn-Burn, and vee hahhv ah blesh-ah vid Chibbuh, yuzz? End denn . . . oho end denn, denn, denn vee go do de beeyoodiful bee-yoodiful Blagg Huzz, my Burn-Burn, end in Blagg Huzz vee mayyg reddy for de Grimsunn Ging!"