Black House

"Course he will," Ty croaks. "Oh boy. Suck an elf."

He looks up at his left hand. It would be so easy to yank it back through the oversized shackle if not for the handcuff. He yanks downward several times anyway, but the cuff only clashes against the shackle. The other cuff, the one Burny was reaching for when Ty grabbed his balls, dangles and twitches, making the boy think of the gibbet at this end of Station House Road.

That eye-watering, tooth-rattling buzz suddenly cuts out.

He’s shut it down. Now he’s looking for me in the station, making sure I’m not there. And when he is sure, what then? Does he know about this place? Sure he does.

Ty’s dismay is turning into an icy chill of horror. Burny would deny it. Burny would say that the shack down here in this dry wash was his secret, a place special to him. In his lunatic arrogance, it would never have occurred to him how well that mistaken idea might serve his supposed friend’s purpose.

His mother speaks in Ty’s head again, and this time he’s reasonably sure it really is his mother. You can’t depend on anyone else. They might come in time, but they might not. You have to assume they won’t. You have to get out of this yourself.

But how?

Ty looks at the twisted body of the old man, lying on the bloody dirt with his head almost out the door. The thought of Mr. Munshun tries to intrude, Burny’s friend hurrying down Station House Road even now (or maybe driving in his own E-Z-Go golf cart), wanting to scoop him up and take him to the abbalah. Tyler pushes the image away. It will lead him back to panic, and he can’t afford any more of that. He’s all out of time.

"I can’t reach him," Ty says. "If the key’s in his pocket, I’m finished. Case closed, game over, zip up your f — "

His eye happens on something lying on the floor. It’s the sack the old man was carrying. The one with the cap in it. And the handcuffs.

If the handcuffs were in it, maybe the key’s in there, too.

Ty reaches forward with his left foot, stretching as far as he can. It’s no good. He can’t quite reach the bag. He’s at least four inches short. Four inches short and Mr. Munshun is coming, coming.

Ty can almost smell him.

Doc shrieks and shrieks, distantly aware that the others are shouting at him to stop, it’s all right, there’s nothing to be afraid of, distantly aware that he is hurting his throat, probably making it bleed. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that when Hollywood swung open the front door of Black House, he exposed the official greeter.

The official greeter is Daisy Temperly, Doc’s brown-eyed girl. She’s wearing a pretty pink dress. Her skin is pale as paper, except on the right side of her forehead, where a flap of skin falls down, exposing the red skull beneath.

"Come in, Doc," Daisy says. "We can talk about how you killed me. And you can sing. You can sing to me." She smiles. The smile becomes a grin. The grin exposes a mouthful of bulging vampire teeth. "You can sing to me forever."

Doc takes a blunder-step backward, turns to flee, and that is when Jack grabs him and shakes him. Doc Amberson is a hefty fellow — two-sixty out of the shower, more like two-eighty when dressed in full Road Warrior regalia as he is now — but Jack shakes him easily, snapping the big man’s head back and forth. Doc’s long hair flops and flies.

"They’re all illusions," Jack says. "Picture-shows designed to keep out unwanted guests like us. I don’t know what you saw, Doc, but it’s not there."

Doc looks cautiously past Jack’s shoulder. For a moment he sees a pink, diminishing whirl — it’s like the coming of the devil dog, only backward — and then it’s gone. He looks up at Jack. Tears are rolling slowly down his sunburned face.

"I didn’t mean to kill her," he says. "I loved her. But I was tired that night. Very tired. Do you know about being tired, Hollywood?"

"Yes," Jack says. "And if we get out of this, I intend to sleep for a week. But for now . . ." He looks from Doc to Beezer. From Beezer to Dale. "We’re going to see more stuff. The house will use your worst memories against you: the things you did wrong, the people you hurt. But on the whole, I’m encouraged. I think a lot of the poison went out of this place when Burny died. All we have to do is find our way through to the other side."

"Jack," Dale says. He is standing in the doorway, in the very spot where Daisy greeted her old physician. His eyes are very large.

"What?"

"Finding our way through . . . that might be easier said than done." They gather around him. Beyond the door is a gigantic circular foyer, a place so big it makes Jack think fleetingly of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the floor is an acre of poison-green carpet entwined with scenes of torture and blasphemy. Doors open off this room everywhere. In addition, Jack counts four sets of crisscrossing stairways. He blinks and there are six. Blinks again and there are a dozen, as bewildering to the eye as an Escher drawing.

He can hear the deep idiot drone that is the voice of Black House. He can hear something else, as well: laughter.

Come in, Black House is telling them. Come in and wander these rooms forever.

Jack blinks and sees a thousand stairways, some moving, bulging in and out. Doors stand open on galleries of paintings, galleries of sculpture, on whirling vortexes, on emptiness.

"What do we do now?" Dale asks bleakly. "What the hell do we do now?"

Ty has never seen Burny’s friend, but as he hangs from the shackle, he finds he can imagine him quite easily. In this world, Mr. Munshun is a real creature . . . but not a human being. Ty sees a shuffling, busy figure in a black suit and a flowing red tie bustling down Station House Road. This creature has a vast white face dominated by a red mouth and a single blurry eye. The abbalah’s emissary and chief deputy looks, in the gaze of Ty’s imagination, like Humpty-Dumpty gone bad. It wears a vest buttoned with bones.