Black House

Got to get out of here. Got to get that bag . . . but how?

He looks at Burny again. At the hideous tangle of Burny’s spilled guts. And suddenly the answer comes. He stretches his foot out again, but this time not toward the bag. He hooks the toe of his sneaker under a dirt-smeared loop of Burny’s intestines, instead. He lifts it, pivots, and then kicks softly. The loop of gut leaves the toe of his sneaker.

And loops over the leather bag.

So far, so good. Now if he can only drag it close enough to get his foot on it.

Trying not to think of the stocky, hurrying figure with the grotesquely long face, Ty gropes out with his foot again. He gets it under the dirty snarl of intestine and begins to pull, slowly and with infinite care.

"It’s impossible," Beezer says flatly. "Nothing can be this big. You know that, don’t you?"

Jack takes a deep breath, lets it out, takes another, and speaks a single word in a low, firm voice.

"Dee-yamber?" Beez asks suspiciously. "What the hell’s dee-yamber?"

Jack doesn’t bother answering. From the vast dark cloud of droning bees hanging over the clearing (Dale’s cruiser is now nothing but a furry black-gold lump in front of the porch), a single bee emerges. It — she, for this is undoubtedly a queen bee — flies between Dale and Doc, pauses for a moment in front of Beezer, as if considering him (or considering the honey with which he has generously lathered himself ), and then hovers in front of Jack. She is plump and aerodynamically unsound and ludicrous and somehow absolutely wonderful. Jack lifts a finger like a professor about to make a point or a bandleader about to deliver the downbeat. The bee lights on the end of it.

"Are you from her?" He asks this question in a low voice — too low for the others to hear, even Beezer, who is standing right next to him. Jack isn’t quite sure who he means. His mother? Laura DeLoessian? Judy? Sophie? Or is there some other She, a counterbalancing force to the Crimson King? This somehow feels right, but he supposes he’ll never know for sure.

In any case, the bee only looks at him with her wide black eyes, wings blurring. And Jack realizes that these are questions to which he needs no answer. He has been a sleepyhead, but now he’s up, he’s out of bed. This house is huge and deep, a place stacked with vileness and layered with secrets, but what of that? He has Ty’s prize bat, he has friends, he has d’yamba, and here is the Queen of the Bees. Those things are enough. He’s good to go. Better — perhaps best of all — he’s glad to go.

Jack raises the tip of his finger to his mouth and blows the bee gently into Black House’s foyer. She circles aimlessly for a moment, and then zips off to the left and through a door with an oddly bloated, obese shape.

"Come on," Jack says. "We’re in business."

The other three exchange uneasy glances, then follow him into what has clearly been their destiny all along.

It is impossible to say how long the Sawyer Gang spends in Black House, that hole which spewed the slippery stuff into French Landing and the surrounding towns. It is likewise impossible to say with any clarity what they see there. In a very real sense, touring Black House is like touring the brain of a deranged madman, and in such a mental framework we can expect to find no plan for the future or memory of the past. In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions. So it is not surprising that the things they see in Black House should fade from their minds almost as soon as they are gone from their eyes, leaving behind only vague whispers of unease that might be the distant cry of the opopanax. This amnesia is merciful.

The queen bee leads them, and the other bees follow in a swarm that discolors the air with its vastness and shivers through rooms that have been silent for centuries (for surely we understand — intuitively if not logically — that Black House existed long before Burny built its most recent node in French Landing). At one point the quartet descends a staircase of green glass. In the abyss below the steps, they see circling birds like vultures with the white, screaming faces of lost babies. In a long, narrow room like a Pullman car, living cartoons — two rabbits, a fox, and a stoned-looking frog wearing white gloves — sit around a table catching and eating what appear to be fleas. They are cartoons, 1940s-era black-and-white cartoons, and it hurts Jack’s eyes to look at them because they are also real. The rabbit tips him a knowing wink as the Sawyer Gang goes by, and in the eye that doesn’t close Jack sees flat murder. There is an empty salon filled with voices shouting in some foreign language that sounds like French but isn’t. There is a room filled with vomitous green jungle and lit by a sizzling tropical sun. Hanging from one of the trees is a vast cocoon that appears to hold a baby dragon still wrapped in its own wings. "That can’t be a dragon," Doc Amberson says in a weirdly reasonable voice. "They either come from eggs or the teeth of other dragons. Maybe both." They walk down a long corridor that slowly rounds itself off, becomes a tunnel, and then drops them down a long and greasy slide as crazy percussion beats from unseen speakers. To Jack it sounds like Cozy Cole, or maybe Gene Krupa. The sides fall away, and for a moment they are sliding over a chasm that literally seems to have no bottom. "Steer with your hands and feet!" Beezer shouts. "If you don’t want to go over the side, STEER!" They are finally spilled off in what Dale calls the Dirt Room. They struggle over vast piles of filth-smelling earth under a rusty tin ceiling festooned with bare light bulbs. Platoons of tiny greenish-white spiders school back and forth like fish. By the time they reach the far side, they’re all panting and out of breath, their shoes muddy, their clothes filthy. There are three doors here. Their leader is buzzing and doing Immelmann turns in front of the one in the middle. "No way," Dale says. "I want to trade for what’s behind the curtain."