Black House

Gilbertson. At 11:25, he and a dubious, newly educated Dale—a Dale who badly wants to see some evidence of his friend’s crazy tale—leave the chief’s car parked beneath the single tree in the Sand Bar’s lot and walk across the hot asphalt past two leaning Harleys and toward the rear entrance.

PART FOUR

Black House

and Beyond

26

WE HAVE HAD our little conversation about slippage, and it’s too late in the game to belabor the point more than a little, but wouldn’t you say that most houses are an attempt to hold slippage back? To impose at least the illusion of normality and sanity on the world? Think of Libertyville, with its corny but endearing street names—Camelot and Avalon and Maid Marian Way. And think of that sweet little honey of a home in Libertyville where Fred, Judy, and Tyler Marshall once lived together. What else would you call 16 Robin Hood Lane but an ode to the everyday, a paean to the prosaic? We could say the same thing about Dale Gilbertson’s home, or Jack’s, or Henry’s, couldn’t we? Most of the homes in the vicinity of French Landing, really. The destructive hurricane that has blown through the town doesn’t change the fact that the homes stand as brave bulwarks against slippage, as noble as they are humble. They are places of sanity.

Black House—like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, like the turn-of-the-century monstrosity in Seattle known as Rose Red—is not sane. It is not entirely of this world. It’s hard to look at from the outside—the eyes play continual tricks—but if one can hold it steady for a few seconds, one sees a three-story dwelling of perfectly ordinary size. The color is unusual, yes—that dead black exterior, even the windows swabbed black—and it has a crouching, leaning aspect that would raise uneasy thoughts about its structural integrity, but if one could appraise it with the glammer of those other worlds stripped away, it would look almost as ordinary as Fred and Judy’s place . . . if not so well maintained.

Inside, however, it is different.

Inside, Black House is large.

Black House is, in fact, almost infinite.

Certainly it is no place to get lost, although from time to time people have—hoboes and the occasional unfortunate runaway child, as well as Charles Burnside/Carl Bierstone’s victims—and relics here and there mark their passing: bits of clothing, pitiful scratchings on the walls of gigantic rooms with strange dimensions, the occasional heap of bones. Here and there the visitor may see a skull, such as the ones that washed up on the banks of the Hanover River during Fritz Haarman’s reign of terror in the early 1920s.

This is not a place where you want to get lost.

Let us pass through rooms and nooks and corridors and crannies, safe in the knowledge that we can return to the outside world, the sane antislippage world, anytime we want (and yet we are still uneasy as we pass down flights of stairs that seem all but endless and along corridors that dwindle to a point in the distance). We hear an eternal low humming and the faint clash of weird machinery. We hear the idiot whistle of a constant wind either outside or on the floors above and below us. Sometimes we hear a faint, houndly barking that is undoubtedly the abbalah’s devil dog, the one that did for poor old Mouse. Sometimes we hear the sardonic caw of a crow and understand that Gorg is here, too—somewhere.

We pass through rooms of ruin and rooms that are still furnished with a pale and rotten grandeur. Many of these are surely bigger than the whole house in which they hide. And eventually we come to a humble sitting room furnished with an elderly horsehair sofa and chairs of fading red velvet. There is a smell of noisome cooking in the air. (Somewhere close by is a kitchen we must never visit . . . not, that is, if we ever wish to sleep without nightmares again.) The electrical fixtures in here are at least seventy years old. How can that be, we ask, if Black House was built in the 1970s? The answer is simple: much of Black House—most of Black House—has been here much longer. The draperies in this room are heavy and faded. Except for the yellowed news clippings that have been taped to the ugly green wallpaper, it is a room that would not be out of place on the ground floor of the Nelson Hotel. It’s a place that is simultaneously sinister and oddly banal, a fitting mirror for the imagination of the old monster who has gone to earth here, who lies sleeping on the horsehair sofa with the front of his shirt turning a sinister red. Black House is not his, although in his pathological grandiosity he believes differently (and Mr. Munshun has not disabused him of this belief). This one room, however, is.

The clippings around him tell us all we need to know of Charles “Chummy” Burnside’s lethal fascinations.

YES, I ATE HER, FISH DECLARES: New York Herald Tribune

BILLY GAFFNEY PLAYMATE AVERS “IT WAS THE GRAY MAN TOOK BILLY, IT WAS THE BOGEYMAN”: New York World Telegram

GRACE BUDD HORROR CONTINUES: FISH CONFESSES! : Long Island Star

FISH ADMITS “ROASTING, EATING” WM GAFFNEY: New York American

FRITZ HAARMAN, SO-CALLED “BUTCHER OF HANOVER,” EXECUTED FOR MURDER OF 24: New York World

WEREWOLF DECLARES: “I WAS DRIVEN BY LOVE, NOT LUST.” HAARMAN DIES UNREPENTANT: The Guardian

CANNIBAL OF HANOVER’S LAST LETTER: “YOU CANNOT KILL ME, I SHALL BE AMONG YOU FOR ETERNITY”: New York World

Wendell Green would love this stuff, would he not?

And there are more. God help us, there are so many more. Even Jeffrey Dahmer is here, declaring I WANTED ZOMBIES.

The figure on the couch begins to groan and stir.

“Way-gup, Burny!” This seems to come from thin air, not his mouth . . . although his lips move, like those of a second-rate ventriloquist.

Burny groans. His head turns to the left. “No . . . need to sleep. Everything . . . hurts.”