Black House (Page 198)

This is not a place where you want to get lost.

Let us pass through rooms and nooks and corridors and crannies, safe in the knowledge that we can return to the outside world, the sane anti-slippage world, anytime we want (and yet we are still uneasy as we pass down flights of stairs that seem all but endless and along corridors that dwindle to a point in the distance). We hear an eternal low humming and the faint clash of weird machinery. We hear the idiot whistle of a constant wind either outside or on the floors above and below us. Sometimes we hear a faint, houndly barking that is undoubtedly the abbalah’s devil dog, the one that did for poor old Mouse. Sometimes we hear the sardonic caw of a crow and understand that Gorg is here, too — somewhere.

We pass through rooms of ruin and rooms that are still furnished with a pale and rotten grandeur. Many of these are surely bigger than the whole house in which they hide. And eventually we come to a humble sitting room furnished with an elderly horsehair sofa and chairs of fading red velvet. There is a smell of noisome cooking in the air. (Somewhere close by is a kitchen we must never visit . . . not, that is, if we ever wish to sleep without nightmares again.) The electrical fixtures in here are at least seventy years old. How can that be, we ask, if Black House was built in the 1970s? The answer is simple: much of Black House — most of Black House — has been here much longer. The draperies in this room are heavy and faded. Except for the yellowed news clippings that have been taped to the ugly green wallpaper, it is a room that would not be out of place on the ground floor of the Nelson Hotel. It’s a place that is simultaneously sinister and oddly banal, a fitting mirror for the imagination of the old monster who has gone to earth here, who lies sleeping on the horsehair sofa with the front of his shirt turning a sinister red. Black House is not his, although in his pathological grandiosity he believes differently (and Mr. Munshun has not disabused him of this belief ). This one room, however, is.

The clippings around him tell us all we need to know of Charles "Chummy" Burnside’s lethal fascinations.

YES, I ATE HER, FISH DECLARES: New York Herald Tribune

BILLY GAFFNEY PLAYMATE AVERS "IT WAS THE GRAY MAN TOOK BILLY, IT WAS THE BOGEYMAN": New York World Telegram

GRACE BUDD HORROR CONTINUES: FISH CONFESSES!: Long Island Star

FISH ADMITS "ROASTING, EATING" WM GAFFNEY: New York American

FRITZ HAARMAN, SO-CALLED "BUTCHER OF HANOVER," EXECUTED FOR MURDER OF 24: New York World

WEREWOLF DECLARES: "I WAS DRIVEN BY LOVE, NOT LUST." HAARMAN DIES

UNREPENTANT: The Guardian

CANNIBAL OF HANOVER’S LAST LETTER: "YOU CANNOT KILL ME, I SHALL BE

AMONG YOU FOR ETERNITY": New York World

Wendell Green would love this stuff, would he not?

And there are more. God help us, there are so many more. Even Jeffrey Dahmer is here, declaring I WANTED ZOMBIES.

The figure on the couch begins to groan and stir.

"Way-gup, Burny!" This seems to come from thin air, not his mouth . . . although his lips move, like those of a second-rate ventriloquist.

Burny groans. His head turns to the left. "No . . . need to sleep. Everything . . . hurts."

The head turns to the right in a gesture of negation and Mr. Munshun speaks again. "Way-gup, dey vill be gummink. You must move der buu-uoy."

The head switches back the other way. Sleeping, Burny thinks Mr. Munshun is still safe inside his head. He has forgotten things are different here in Black House. Foolish Burny, now nearing the end of his usefulness! But not quite there yet.

"Can’t . . . lea’ me ‘lone . . . stomach hurts . . . the blind man . . . f**king blind man hurt my stomach . . ."

But the head turns back the other way and the voice speaks again from the air beside Burny’s right ear. Burny fights it, not wanting to wake and face the full ferocious impact of the pain. The blind man has hurt him much worse than he thought at the time, in the heat of the moment. Burny insists to the nagging voice that the boy is safe where he is, that they’ll never find him even if they can gain access to Black House, that they will become lost in its unknown depth of rooms and hallways and wander until they first go mad and then die. Mr. Munshun, however, knows that one of them is different from any of the others who have happened on this place. Jack Sawyer is acquainted with the infinite, and that makes him a problem. The boy must be taken out the back way and into End-World, into the very shadow of Din-tah, the great furnace. Mr. Munshun tells Burny that he may still be able to have some of the boy before turning him over to the abbalah, but not here. Too dangerous. Sorry.

Burny continues to protest, but this is a battle he will not win, and we know it. Already the stale, cooked-meat air of the room has begun to shift and swirl as the owner of the voice arrives. We see first a whirlpool of black, then a splotch of red — an ascot — and then the beginnings of an impossibly long white face, which is dominated by a single black shark’s eye. This is the real Mr. Munshun, the creature who can only live in Burny’s head outside of Black House and its enchanted environs. Soon he will be entirely here, he will pull Burny into wakefulness (torture him into wakefulness, if necessary), and he will put Burny to use while there is still use to be gotten from him. For Mr. Munshun cannot move Ty from his cell in the Black House.

Once he is in End-World — Burny’s Sheol — things will be different.

At last Burny’s eyes open. His gnarled hands, which have spilled so much blood, now reach down to feel the dampness of his own blood seeping through his shirt. He looks, sees what has bloomed there, and lets out a scream of horror and cowardice. It does not strike him as just that, after murdering so many children, he should have been mortally wounded by a blind man; it strikes him as hideous, unfair.