Black House

with the knife. This time, he stabs only empty air. A rough hand closes on his elbow, and another grips his shoulder. The hands pull him forward, and to keep upright he rests his knee on the seat of the chair. A long nose bangs against the bridge of his own nose and jars his sunglasses. What follows fills him with disgust: two rows of teeth like broken clamshells fasten on his left cheek and saw through the skin. Blood sluices down his face. The rows of teeth come together and rip away an oval wedge of Henry’s skin, and over the white jolt of pain, which is incredible, worse by far than the pain in his back, he can hear his blood spatter against the old monster’s face. Fear and revulsion, along with an amazing amount of adrenaline, give him the strength to lash out with the knife as he spins away from the man’s grip. The blade connects with some moving part of the Fisherman’s body—an arm, he thinks.

Before he can feel anything like satisfaction, he hears the sound of the hedge clippers slicing the air before they bite into his knife hand. It happens almost before he can take it in: the hedge clippers’ blades tear through his skin, snap the bones, and sever the last two fingers on his right hand.

And then, as if the hedge clippers were the Fisherman’s last contact with him, he is free. Henry’s foot finds the edge of the door, kicks it aside, and he propels his body through the open space. He lands on a floor so sticky his feet slide when he tries to get up. Can all of that blood be his?

The voice he had been studying in another age, another era, comes from the studio door. “You stabbed me, you asswipe moke.”

Henry is not waiting around to listen; Henry is on the move, wishing he did not feel that he was leaving a clear, wide trail of blood behind him. Somehow, he seems to be drenched in the stuff, his shirt is sodden with it, and the back of his legs are wet. Blood continues to gush down his face, and in spite of the adrenaline, Henry can feel his energy dissipating. How much time does he have before he bleeds to death—twenty minutes?

He slides down the hallway and runs into the living room.

I’m not going to get out of this, Henry thinks. I’ve lost too much blood. But at least I can make it through the door and die outside, where the air is fresh.

From the hallway, the Fisherman’s voice reaches him. “I ate part of your cheek, and now I’m going to eat your fingers. Are you listening to me, you moke of an asshole?”

Henry makes it to the door. His hand slips and slips on the knob; the knob resists him. He feels for the lock button, which has been depressed.

“I said, are you listening?” The Fisherman is coming closer, and his voice is full of rage.

All Henry has to do is push the button that unlocks the door and turn the knob. He could be out of the house in a second, but his remaining fingers will not obey orders. All right, I’m going to die, he says to himself. I’ll follow Rhoda, I’ll follow my Lark, my beautiful Lark.

A sound of chewing, complete with smacking lips and crunching noises. “You taste like shit. I’m eating your fingers, and they taste like shit. You know what I like? Know my all-time favorite meal? The buttocks of a tender young child. Albert Fish liked that too, oh yes he did. Mmm-mmm! BABY BUTT! That’s GOOD EATIN’!”

Henry realizes that he has somehow slipped all the way down the unopenable door and is now resting, breathing far too heavily, on his hands and knees. He shoves himself forward and crawls behind the Mission-style sofa, from the comfort of which he had listened to Jack Sawyer reading a great many eloquent words written by Charles Dickens. Among the things he would now never be able to do, he realizes, is find out what finally happens in Bleak House. Another is seeing his friend Jack again.

The Fisherman’s footsteps enter the living room and stop moving. “All right, where the fuck are you, asshole? You can’t hide from me.” The hedge clippers’ blades go snick-snick.

Either the Fisherman has grown as blind as Henry, or the room is too dark for vision. A little bit of hope, a match flame, flares in Henry’s soul. Maybe his adversary will not be able to see the light switches.

“Asshole!” Ahzz-hill. “Damn it, where are you hiding?” Dahmmut, vhey ah you high-dung?

This is fascinating, Henry thinks. The more angry and frustrated the Fisherman gets, the more his accent melts into that weird non-German. It isn’t the South Side of Chicago anymore, but neither is it anything else. It certainly isn’t German, not really. If Henry had heard Dr. Spiegleman’s description of this accent as that of a Frenchman trying to speak English like a German, he would have nodded in smiling agreement. It’s like some kind of outer space German accent, like something that mutated toward German without ever having heard it.

“You hurt me, you stinking pig!” You huhht me, you steenk-ung peek!

The Fisherman lurches toward the easy chair and shoves it over on its side. In his Chicago voice, he says, “I’m gonna find you, buddy, and when I do, I’ll cut your fucking head off.”

A lamp hits the floor. The slippered footsteps move heavily toward the right side of the room. “A blind guy hides in the dark, huh? Oh, that’s cute, that’s really cute. Lemme tell you something. I haven’t tasted a tongue in a while, but I think I’ll try yours.” A small table and the lamp atop it clunk and crash to the floor. “I got some information for you. Tongues are funny. An old guy’s doesn’t taste much different from a young fella’s—though of course the tongue on a kid is twice as good as both. Venn I vas Fridz Hahhmun I ade munny dungs, ha ha.”

Strange—that extraterrestrial version of a German accent bursts out of the Fisherman like a second voice. A fist strikes the wall, and the footsteps plod nearer. Using his elbows, Henry crawls around the far end of the sofa and squirms toward the shelter of a long, low table. The footsteps squish in blood, and when Henry rests his head on his hands, warm blood pumps out against his face. The fiery agony in his fingers almost swallows the pain in his cheek and his back.

“You can’t hide forever,” the Fisherman says. Immediately, he switches to the weird accent and replies, “Eenuff ov dis, Burn-Burn. Vee huv murr impurdund vurk zu do.”

“Hey, you’re the one who called him an ahzz-hill. He hurt me!”

“Fogzes down fogzhulls, oho, radz in radhulls, dey too ahh huhht. My boor loss babbies ahh huhht, aha, vurze vurze vurze dan uz.”

“But what about him?”