The Waste Lands (Page 71)

Just an all-around fun guy, Jake thought. After that, the little lads wised up and began giving him a wide berth. Henry strolled out of the playground and down the street to the apartment building Eddie had entered five minutes before. As he reached it, the door opened and Eddie came out. He had changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt; he had also tied a green bandanna, the same one he had been wearing in Jake’s dream, around his forehead. He was waving a couple of dollar bills triumphantly. Henry snatched them, then asked Eddie something. Eddie nodded, and the two boys set off.

Keeping half a block between himself and them, Jake followed.

THEY STOOD IN THE high grass at the edge of the Great Road, looking at the speaking ring.

Stonehenge, Susannah thought, and shuddered. That’s what it looks like. Stonehenge.

Although the thick grass which covered the plain grew around the bases of the tall gray monoliths, the circle they enclosed was bare earth, littered here and there with white things.

“What are those?” she asked in a low voice. “Chips of stone?” “Look again,” Roland said.

She did, and saw that they were bones. The bones of small animals, maybe. She hoped.

Eddie switched the sharpened stick to his left hand, dried the palm of his right against his shirt, and then switched it back again. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from his dry throat. He cleared it and tried again. “I think I’m supposed to go in and draw something in the dirt.” Roland nodded. “Now?”

“Soon.” He looked into Roland’s face. “There’s something here, isn’t there? Something we can’t see.”

“It’s not here right now,” Roland said. “At least, I don’t think it is. But it will come. Our khef—our life-force—will draw it. And, of course, it will be jealous of its place. Give me my gun back, Eddie.” Eddie unbuckled the belt and handed it over. Then he turned back to the circle of twenty-foot-high stones. Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.

The Mansion—I smelled it there. The day I talked Henry into taking me over to see The Mansion on Rhinehold Street, in Dutch Hill. Roland buckled his gunbelt, then bent to knot the tiedown. He looked up at Susannah as he did it. “We may need Detta Walker,” he said. “Is she around?” “That bitch always around.” Susannah wrinkled her nose. “Good. One of us is going to have to protect Eddie while he does what he’s supposed to do. The other is going to be so much useless baggage. This is a demon’s place. Demons are not human, but they are male and female, just the same. Sex is both their weapon and their weakness. No matter what the sex of the demon may be, it will go for Eddie. To protect its place. To keep its place from being used by an outsider. Do you understand?” Susannah nodded. Eddie appeared not to be listening. He had tucked the square of hide containing the key into his shirt and now he was staring into the speaking ring as if hypnotized.

“There’s no time to say this in a gentle or refined way,” Roland told her. “One of us will—“

“One of us gonna have to f**k it to keep it off Eddie,” Susannah interrupted. “This the sort of thing can’t ever turn down a free f**k. That’s what you’re gettin at, isn’t it?”

Roland nodded.

Her eyes gleamed. They were the eyes of Detta Walker now, both wise and unkind, shining with hard amusement, and her voice slid steadily deeper into the bogus Southern plantation drawl which was Delta’s trade-mark. “If it’s a girl demon, you git it. But if it’s a boy demon, it’s mine. That about it?” Roland nodded.

“What about if it swings both ways? What about that, big boy?” Roland’s lips twitched in the barest suggestion of a smile. “Then we’ll take it together. Just remember—“

Beside them, in a fainting, distant voice, Eddie murmured: “Not all is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold, the sleeper wakes.” He turned his haunted, terrified eyes on Roland. “There’s a monster.” “The demon—“

“No. A monster. Something between the doors—between the worlds. Something that waits. And it’s opening its eyes.”

Susannah cast a frightened glance at Roland. “Stand, Eddie,” Roland said. “Be true.”

Eddie drew a deep breath. “I’ll stand until it knocks me down,” he said. “I have to go in now. It’s starting to happen.”

“We all goin in,” Susannah said. She arched her back and slipped out of her wheelchair. “Any demon want to f**k wit’ me he goan find out he’s f**kin wit’ the finest. I th’ow him a f**k he ain’t never goan fgit.” As they passed between two of the tall stones and into the speaking circle, it began to rain.

As SOON AS JAKE saw the place, he understood two things: first, that he had seen it before, in dreams so terrible his conscious mind would not let him remember them; second, that it was a place of death and murder and madness. He was standing on the far corner of Rhinehold Street and Brooklyn Avenue, seventy yards from Henry and Eddie Dean, but even from where he was he could feel The Mansion ignoring them and reaching for him with its eager invisible hands, lie thought there were talons at the ends of those hands. Sharp ones. It wants me, and I can’t run away. It’s death to go in … but it’s madness not to. Because somewhere inside that place is a locked door. I have the key that will open it, and the only salvation I can hope for is on the other side. He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormal-ity, with a sinking heart. It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor. The Dean brothers had walked across nine blocks of Brooklyn, mov-ing slowly under the hot afternoon sun, and had finally entered a section of town which had to be Dutch Hill, given the names on the shops and stores. Now they stood halfway down the block, in front of The Mansion. It looked as if it had been deserted for years, yet it had suffered remark-ably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really had been a man-sion—the home, perhaps, of a wealthy merchant and his large family. In those long-gone days it must have been white, but now it was a dirty gray no-color. The windows had been knocked out and the peeling picket fence which surrounded it had been spray-painted, but the house itself was still intact.