Black House

The head turns to the right in a gesture of negation and Mr. Munshun speaks again. “Way-gup, dey vill be gummink. You must move der buuuoy.”

The head switches back the other way. Sleeping, Burny thinks Mr. Munshun is still safe inside his head. He has forgotten things are different here in Black House. Foolish Burny, now nearing the end of his usefulness! But not quite there yet.

“Can’t . . . lea’ me ’lone . . . stomach hurts . . . the blind man . . . fucking blind man hurt my stomach . . .”

But the head turns back the other way and the voice speaks again from the air beside Burny’s right ear. Burny fights it, not wanting to wake and face the full ferocious impact of the pain. The blind man has hurt him much worse than he thought at the time, in the heat of the moment. Burny insists to the nagging voice that the boy is safe where he is, that they’ll never find him even if they can gain access to Black House, that they will become lost in its unknown depth of rooms and hallways and wander until they first go mad and then die. Mr. Munshun, however, knows that one of them is different from any of the others who have happened on this place. Jack Sawyer is acquainted with the infinite, and that makes him a problem. The boy must be taken out the back way and into End-World, into the very shadow of Din-tah, the great furnace. Mr. Munshun tells Burny that he may still be able to have some of the boy before turning him over to the abbalah, but not here. Too dangerous. Sorry.

Burny continues to protest, but this is a battle he will not win, and we know it. Already the stale, cooked-meat air of the room has begun to shift and swirl as the owner of the voice arrives. We see first a whirlpool of black, then a splotch of red—an ascot—and then the beginnings of an impossibly long white face, which is dominated by a single black shark’s eye. This is the real Mr. Munshun, the creature who can only live in Burny’s head outside of Black House and its enchanted environs. Soon he will be entirely here, he will pull Burny into wakefulness (torture him into wakefulness, if necessary), and he will put Burny to use while there is still use to be gotten from him. For Mr. Munshun cannot move Ty from his cell in the Black House.

Once he is in End-World—Burny’s Sheol—things will be different.

At last Burny’s eyes open. His gnarled hands, which have spilled so much blood, now reach down to feel the dampness of his own blood seeping through his shirt. He looks, sees what has bloomed there, and lets out a scream of horror and cowardice. It does not strike him as just that, after murdering so many children, he should have been mortally wounded by a blind man; it strikes him as hideous, unfair.

For the first time he is visited by an extremely unpleasant idea: What if there’s more to pay for the things he has done over the course of his long career? He has seen End-World; he has seen Conger Road, which winds through it to Din-tah. The blasted, burning landscape surrounding Conger Road is like hell, and surely An-tak, the Big Combination, is hell itself. What if such a place waits for him? What if—

There’s a horrible, paralyzing pain in his guts. Mr. Munshun, now almost fully materialized, has reached out and twisted one smoky, not-quite-transparent hand in the wound Henry inflicted with his switchblade knife.

Burny squeals. Tears run down the old child-murderer’s cheeks. “Don’t hurt me!”

“Zen do ass I zay.”

“I can’t,” Burny snivels. “I’m dying. Look at all the blood! Do you think I can get past something like this? I’m eighty-five fucking years old!”

“Duff brayyg, Burn-Burn . . . but dere are zose on z’osser zide who could hill you off your wunds.” Mr. Munshun, like Black House itself, is hard to look at. He shivers in and out of focus. Sometimes that hideously long face (it obscures most of his body, like the bloated head of a caricature on some newspaper’s op-ed page) has two eyes, sometimes just one. Sometimes there seem to be tufted snarls of orange hair leaping up from his distended skull, and sometimes Mr. Munshun appears to be as bald as Yul Brynner. Only the red lips and the fangy pointed teeth that lurk inside them remain fairly constant.

Burny eyes his accomplice with a degree of hope. His hands, meanwhile, continue to explore his stomach, which is now hard and bloated with lumps. He suspects the lumps are clots. Oh, that someone should have hurt him so badly! That wasn’t supposed to happen! That was never supposed to happen! He was supposed to be protected! He was supposed to—

“It iss not even peeyond ze realm of bossibility,” Mr. Munshun says, “zat ze yearz could be rawled avey vrum you jusst as ze stunn vas rawled avey from ze mouse of Cheezus Chrizze’s doom.”

“To be young again,” Burny says, and exhales a low, harsh sigh. His breath stinks of blood and spoilage. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“Of gorse! And soch zings are bossible,” Mr. Munshun says, nodding his grotesquely unstable face. “Soch gifts are ze abbalah’s to giff. But zey are not bromised, Charles, my liddle munching munchkin. But I can make you one bromise.”

The creature in the black evening suit and red ascot leaps forward with dreadful agility. His long-fingered hand darts again into Chummy Burnside’s shirt, this time clenches into a fist, and produces a pain beyond any the old monster has ever dreamed of in his own life . . . although he has inflicted this and more on the innocent.

Mr. Munshun’s reeking countenance pushes up to Burny’s. The single eye glares. “Do you feel dat, Burny? Do you, you mizz-er-a-ble old bag of dirt and zorrow? Ho-ho, ha-ha, of gorse you do! It iss your in-des-tines I haff in my hand! Und if you do not mooff now, schweinhund, I vill rip dem from your bledding body, ho-ho, ha-ha, und vrap dem arund your neg! You vill die knowing you are choking on your own gudz! A trick I learned from Fritz himzelf, Fritz Haarman, who vas so yunk und loff-ly! Now! Vat do you say? Vill you brink him, or vill you choke?”

“I’ll bring him!” Burny screams. “I’ll bring him, only stop, stop, you’re tearing me apart!”

“Brink him to ze station. Ze station, Burn-Burn. Dis one iz nodd for ze radhulls, de fogzhulls—not for ze Com-bin-ay-shun. No bledding foodzies for Dyler; he works for his abbalah vid dis.” A long finger tipped with a brutal black nail goes to the huge forehead and taps it above the eyes (for the moment Burny sees two of them, and then the second is once more gone). “Understand?”

“Yes! Yes!” His guts are on fire. And still the hand in his shirt twists and twists.

The terrible highway of Mr. Munshun’s face hangs before him. “Ze station—where