Black House

He walks down a tricky, descending forest path toward a burning building. Beasts and monsters writhe and bellow on both sides, mostly unseen but now and then flicking out a gnarled hand, a spiky tail, a black, skeletal wing. These he severs with a heavy sword. His arm aches, and his entire body feels weary and sore. Somewhere he is bleeding, but he cannot see or feel the wound, merely the slow movement of blood running down the backs of his legs. The people who were with him at the start of his journey are all dead, and he is — he may be — dying. He wishes he were not so alone, for he is terrified.

The burning building grows taller and taller as he approaches. Screams and cries come from it, and around it lies a grotesque perimeter of dead, blackened trees and smoking ashes. This perimeter widens with every second, as if the building is devouring all of nature, one foot at a time. Everything is lost, and the burning building and the soulless creature who is both its master and its prisoner will triumph, blasted world without end, amen. Din-tah, the great furnace, eating all in its path.

The trees on his right side bend and contort their complaining branches, and a great stirring takes place in the dark, sharply pointed leaves. Groaning, the huge trunks bow, and the branches twine like snakes about one another, bringing into being a solid wall of gray, pointed leaves. From that wall emerges, with terrible slowness, the impression of a gaunt, bony face. Five feet tall from crown to chin, the face bulges out against the layer of leaves, weaving from side to side in search of Jack.

It is everything that has ever terrified him, injured him, wished him ill, either in this world or the Territories. The huge face vaguely resembles a human monster named Elroy who once tried to rape Jack in a wretched bar called the Oatley Tap, then it suggests Morgan of Orris, then Sunlight Gardener, then Charles Burnside, but as it continues its blind seeking from side to side, it suggests all of these malign faces layered on top of one another and melting into one. Utter fear turns Jack to stone.

The face bulging out of the massed leaves searches the downward path, then swings back and ceases its constant, flickering movement from side to side. It is pointed directly at him. The blind eyes see him, the nose without nostrils smells him. A quiver of pleasure runs through the leaves, and the face looms forward, getting larger and larger. Unable to move, Jack looks back over his shoulder to see a putrefying man prop himself up in a narrow bed. The man opens his mouth and shouts, "D’YAMBA!"

Heart thrashing in his chest, a shout dying before it leaves his throat, Jack vaults from his bed and lands on his feet before he quite realizes that he has awakened from a dream. His entire body seems to be trembling. Sweat runs down his forehead and dampens his chest. Gradually, the trembling ceases as he takes in what is really around him: not a giant face looming from an ugly wall of leaves but the familiar confines of his bedroom. Hanging on the wall opposite is a painting he intends to give to Dale Gilbertson. He wipes his face, he calms down. He needs a shower. His watch tells him that it is now 9:47 A.M. He has slept four hours, and it is time to get organized.

Forty-five minutes later, cleaned up, dressed, and fed, Jack calls the police station and asks to speak to Chief Gilbertson. At 11:25, he and a dubious, newly educated Dale — a Dale who badly wants to see some evidence of his friend’s crazy tale — leave the chief’s car parked beneath the single tree in the Sand Bar’s lot and walk across the hot asphalt past two leaning Harleys and toward the rear entrance.

Part Four

BLACK HOUSE

AND BEYOND

26

WE HAVE HAD our little conversation about slippage, and it’s too late in the game to belabor the point more than a little, but wouldn’t you say that most houses are an attempt to hold slippage back? To impose at least the illusion of normality and sanity on the world? Think of Libertyville, with its corny but endearing street names — Camelot and Avalon and Maid Marian Way. And think of that sweet little honey of a home in Libertyville where Fred, Judy, and Tyler Marshall once lived together. What else would you call 16 Robin Hood Lane but an ode to the everyday, a paean to the prosaic? We could say the same thing about Dale Gilbertson’s home, or Jack’s, or Henry’s, couldn’t we? Most of the homes in the vicinity of French Landing, really. The destructive hurricane that has blown through the town doesn’t change the fact that the homes stand as brave bulwarks against slippage, as noble as they are humble. They are places of sanity.

Black House — like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, like the turn-of-the-century monstrosity in Seattle known as Rose Red — is not sane. It is not entirely of this world. It’s hard to look at from the outside — the eyes play continual tricks — but if one can hold it steady for a few seconds, one sees a three-story dwelling of perfectly ordinary size. The color is unusual, yes — that dead black exterior, even the windows swabbed black — and it has a crouching, leaning aspect that would raise uneasy thoughts about its structural integrity, but if one could appraise it with the glammer of those other worlds stripped away, it would look almost as ordinary as Fred and Judy’s place . . . if not so well maintained.

Inside, however, it is different.

Inside, Black House is large.

Black House is, in fact, almost infinite.

Certainly it is no place to get lost, although from time to time people have — hoboes and the occasional unfortunate runaway child, as well as Charles Burnside/Carl Bierstone’s victims — and relics here and there mark their passing: bits of clothing, pitiful scratchings on the walls of gigantic rooms with strange dimensions, the occasional heap of bones. Here and there the visitor may see a skull, such as the ones that washed up on the banks of the Hanover River during Fritz Haarman’s reign of terror in the early 1920s.