Black House

simply crack in his grip. “I’ll be there fast as I can.”

“Better be. Others . . . already forgot. Not me.” Mouse chuckles. The sound is ghastly beyond belief, a whiff straight out of an open grave. “I got . . . the memory serum, you know? It’s eatin’ me up . . . eatin’ me alive . . . but I got it.”

There’s the rustling sound of the phone changing hands again, then a new voice. A woman’s. Jack assumes it’s Bear Girl.

“You got them moving,” she says. “You brought it to this. Don’t let it be for nothing.”

There is a click in his ear. Jack tosses the cell phone onto the seat and decides that maybe seventy isn’t too fast, after all.

A few minutes later (they seem like very long minutes to Jack), he’s squinting against the glare of the sun on Tamarack Creek. From here he can almost see his house, and Henry’s.

Henry.

Jack thumps the side of his thumb lightly against his breast pocket and hears the rattle of the cassette tape he took from the machine in Spiegleman’s office. There’s not much reason to turn it over to Henry now; given what Potter told him last night and what Mouse is holding on to tell him today, this tape and the 911 tape have been rendered more or less redundant. Besides, he’s got to hurry to Nailhouse Row. There’s a train getting ready to leave the station, and Mouse Baumann is very likely going to be on it.

And yet . . .

“I’m worried about him,” Jack says softly. “Even a blind man could see I’m worried about Henry.”

The brilliant summer sun, now sliding down the afternoon side of the sky, reflects off the creek and sends shimmers of light dancing across his face. Each time this light crosses his eyes, they seem to burn.

Henry isn’t the only one Jack’s worried about, either. He’s got a bad feeling about all of his new French Landing friends and acquaintances, from Dale Gilbertson and Fred Marshall right down to such bit players as old Steamy McKay, an elderly gent who makes his living shining shoes outside the public library, and Ardis Walker, who runs the ramshackle bait shop down by the river. In his imagination, all these people now seem made of glass. If the Fisherman decides to sing high C, they’ll vibrate and then shatter to powder. Only it’s not really the Fisherman he’s worried about anymore.

This is a case, he reminds himself. Even with all the Territories weirdness thrown in, it’s still a case, and it’s not the first one you’ve ever been on where everything suddenly started to seem too big. Where all the shadows seemed to be too long.

True enough, but usually that funhouse sense of false perspective fades away once he starts to get a handle on things. This time it’s worse, and worse by far. He knows why, too. The Fisherman’s long shadow is a thing called Mr. Munshun, an immortal talent scout from some other plane of existence. Nor is even that the end, because Mr. Munshun also casts a shadow. A red one.

“Abbalah,” Jack mutters. “Abbalah-doon and Mr. Munshun and the Crow Gorg, just three old pals walking together on night’s Plutonian shore.” For some reason this makes him think of the Walrus and the Carpenter from Alice. What was it they took for a walk in the moonlight? Clams? Mussels? Jack’s damned if he can remember, although one line surfaces and resonates in his mind, spoken in his mother’s voice: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.”

The abbalah is presumably hanging out in his court (the part of him that isn’t imprisoned in Speedy’s Dark Tower, that is), but the Fisherman and Mr. Munshun could be anywhere. Do they know Jack Sawyer has been meddling? Of course they do. By today, that is common knowledge. Might they try to slow him down by doing something nasty to one of his friends? A certain blind sportscaster-headbanger-bebopper, for instance?

Yes indeed. And now, perhaps because he’s been sensitized to it, he can once more feel that nasty pulse coming out of the southwestern landscape, the one he sensed when he flipped over for the first time in his adult life. When the road curves southeast, he almost loses it. Then, when the Ram points its nose southwest again, the poisonous throb regains strength, beating into his head like the onset of a migraine headache.

That’s Black House you feel, only it’s not a house, not really. It’s a wormhole in the apple of existence, leading all the way down into the furnace-lands. It’s a door. Maybe it was only standing ajar before today, before Beezer and his pals turned up there, but now it’s wide open and letting in one hell of a draft. Ty needs to be brought back, yes . . . but that door needs to be shut, as well. Before God knows what awful things come snarling through.

Jack abruptly swings the Ram onto Tamarack Road. The tires scream. His seat belt locks, and for a moment he thinks the truck may overturn. It stays up, though, and he goes flying toward Norway Valley Road. Mouse will just have to hang on a little bit longer; he’s not going to leave Henry way out here on his own. His pal doesn’t know it, but he’s going on a little field trip to Nailhouse Row. Until this situation stabilizes, it seems to Jack that the buddy system is very much in order.

Which would have been all well and good if Henry had been at home, but he’s not. Elvena Morton, dust mop in hand, comes in response to Jack’s repeated jabbing at the doorbell.

“He’s been over at KDCU, doing commercials,” Elvena says. “Dropped him off myself. I don’t know why he doesn’t just do them in his studio here, something about the sound effects, I think he might have said. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you that.”

The bitch of it is, Henry did. Cousin Buddy’s Rib Crib. The old ball and chain. Beautiful downtown La Riviere. All that. He even told Jack that Elvena Morton was going to drive him. A few things have happened to Jack since that conversation—he’s reencountered his old childhood friend, he’s fallen in love with Judy Marshall’s Twinner, and just by the way he’s been filled in on your basic Secret of All Existence—but none of that keeps him from turning his left hand into a fist and then slamming himself directly between the eyes with it. Given how fast things are now moving, making this needless detour strikes him as an almost unforgivable lapse.

Mrs. Morton is regarding him with wide-eyed alarm.

“Are you going to be picking him up, Mrs. Morton?”

“No, he’s going for a drink with someone from ESPN. Henry said the fellow would bring him back afterward.” She lowers her voice to the timbre of confidentiality at which secrets are somehow best communicated. “Henry didn’t come right out and say so, but I think there may be big things ahead for George Rathbun. Ver-ry big