“All right,” Burny says. “Awake at last. That’s good. Now get up. On your feet, asswipe. I don’t have time to fuck with you.”
Tyler gets up. A wave of dizziness rolls through him and he puts his hand to the top of his head. There is a spongy, crusted place there. Touching it sends a bolt of pain all the way down to his jaws, which clench. But it also drives the dizziness away. He looks at his hand. There are flakes of scab and dried blood on his palm.
But the old man has been hurt somehow, too. His shirt is covered with blood; his wrinkled ogre’s face is waxy and pallid. Behind him, the cell door is open. Ty measures the distance to the hallway, hoping he’s not being too obvious about it. But Burny has been in this game a long time. He has had more than one liddle one dry to esscabe on hiz bledding foodzies, oh ho.
He reaches into his bag and brings out a black gadget with a pistol grip and a stainless steel nozzle at the tip.
“Know what this is, Tyler?” Burny asks.
“Taser,” Ty says. “Isn’t it?”
Burny grins, revealing the stumps of his teeth. “Smart boy! A TV-watching boy, I’ll be bound. It’s a Taser, yes. But a special type—it’ll drop a cow at thirty yards. Understand? You try to run, boy, I’ll bring you down like a ton of bricks. Come out here.”
Ty steps out of the cell. He has no idea where this horrible old man means to take him, but there’s a certain relief just in being free of the cell. The futon was the worst. He knows, somehow, that he hasn’t been the only kid to cry himself to sleep on it with an aching heart and an aching, lumpy head, nor the tenth.
Nor, probably, the fiftieth.
“Turn to your left.”
Ty does. Now the old man is behind him. A moment later, he feels the bony fingers grip the right cheek of his bottom. It’s not the first time the old man has done this (each time it happens he’s reminded again of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” asking the lost children to stick their arms out of their cage), but this time his touch is different. Weaker.
“This one is mine,” the old man says . . . but he sounds out of breath, no longer quite sure of himself. “I’ll bake half, fry the rest. With bacon.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to eat much,” Ty says, surprised at the calmness of his own voice. “Looks like somebody ventilated your stomach pretty g—”
There is a crackling, accompanied by a hideous, jittery burning sensation in his left shoulder. Ty screams and staggers against the wall across the corridor from his cell, trying to clutch the wounded place, trying not to cry, trying to hold on to just a little of his beautiful dream about being at the game with George Rathbun and the other KDCU Brewer Bash winners. He knows he actually did forget to enter this year, but in dreams such things don’t matter. That’s what’s so beautiful about them.
Oh, but it hurts so
“You want another un?” the old man gasps. He sounds both sick and hysterical, and even a kid Ty’s age knows that’s a dangerous combination. “You want another un, just for good luck?”
“No,” Ty gasps. “Don’t zap me again, please don’t.”
“Then start walkin’! And no more smart goddamn remarks!”
Ty starts to walk. Somewhere he can hear water dripping. Somewhere, very faint, he can hear the laughing caw of a crow—probably the same one that tricked him, and how he’d like to have Ebbie’s .22 and blow its evil shiny black feathers off. The outside world seems light-years away. But George Rathbun told him help was on the way, and sometimes the things you heard in dreams came true. His very own mother told him that once, and long before she started to go all wonky in the head, too.
They come to a stairway that seems to circle down forever. Up from the depths comes a smell of sulfur and a roast of heat. Faintly he can hear what might be screams and moans. The clank of machinery is louder. There are ominous creaking sounds that might be belts and chains.
Ty pauses, thinking the old guy won’t zap him again unless he absolutely has to. Because Ty might fall down this long circular staircase. Might hit the place on his head the old guy already clipped with the rock, or break his neck, or tumble right off the side. And the old guy wants him alive, at least for now. Ty doesn’t know why, but he knows this intuition is true.
“Where are we going, mister?”
“You’ll find out,” Burny says in his tight, out-of-breath voice. “And if you think I don’t dare zap you while we’re on the stairs, my little friend, you’re very mistaken. Now get walking.”
Tyler Marshall starts down the stairs, descending past vast galleries and balconies, around and down, around and down. Sometimes the air smells of putrid cabbage. Sometimes it smells of burned candles. Sometimes of wet rot. He counts a hundred and fifty steps, then stops counting. His thighs are burning. Behind him, the old man is gasping, and twice he stumbles, cursing and holding the ancient banister.
But at last they are at the bottom. They arrive in a circular room with a dirty glass ceiling. Above them, gray sky hangs down like a filthy bag. There are plants oozing out of broken pots, sending greedy feelers across a floor of broken orange bricks. Ahead of them, two doors—French doors, Ty thinks they are called—stand open. Beyond them is a crumbling patio surrounded by ancient trees. Some are palms. Some—the ones with the hanging, ropy vines—might be banyans. Others he doesn’t know. One thing he’s sure of: they are no longer in Wisconsin.
Standing on the patio is an object he knows very well. Something from his own world. Tyler Marshall’s eyes
