Black House

Beezer and Doc mount their iron horses. Jack and Dale stroll toward the chief of police’s car, then stop as a Ford Explorer bolts into the Sand Bar’s lot, skidding on the gravel and hurrying toward them, pulling a rooster tail of dust into the summer air.

“Oh Christ,” Dale murmurs. Jack can tell from the too small baseball cap sitting ludicrously on the driver’s head that it’s Fred Marshall. But if Ty’s father thinks he’s going to join the rescue mission, he’d better think again.

“Thank God I caught you!” Fred shouts as he all but tumbles from his truck. “Thank God!”

“Who next?” Dale asks softly. “Wendell Green? Tom Cruise? George W. Bush, arm in arm with Miss Fucking Universe?”

Jack barely hears him. Fred is wrestling a long package from the bed of his truck, and all at once Jack is interested. The thing in that package could be a rifle, but somehow he doesn’t think that’s what it is. Jack suddenly feels like a squeeze bottle being levitated by bees, not so much acting as acted upon. He starts forward.

“Hey bro, let’s roll!” Beezer yells. Beneath him, his Harley explodes into life. “Let’s—”

Then Beezer cries out. So does Doc, who jerks so hard he almost dumps the bike idling between his thighs. Jack feels something like a bolt of lightning go through his head and he reels forward into Fred, who is also shouting incoherently. For a moment the two of them appear to be either dancing with the long wrapped object Fred has brought them or wrestling over it.

Only Dale Gilbertson—who hasn’t been to the Territories, hasn’t been close to Black House, and who is not Ty Marshall’s father—is unaffected. Yet even he feels something rise in his head, something like an interior shout. The world trembles. All at once there seems to be more color in it, more dimension.

“What was that?” he shouts. “Good or bad? Good or bad? What the hell is going on here? ”

For a moment none of them answer. They are too dazed to answer.

While a swarm of bees is floating a squeeze bottle of honey along the top of a bar in another world, Burny is telling Ty Marshall to face the wall, goddamnit, just face the wall.

They are in a foul little shack. The sounds of clashing machinery are much closer. Ty can also hear screams and sobs and harsh yells and what can only be the whistling crack of whips. They are very near the Big Combination now. Ty has seen it, a great crisscrossing confusion of metal rising into the clouds from a smoking pit about half a mile east. It looks like a madman’s conception of a skyscraper, a Rube Goldberg collection of chutes and cables and belts and platforms, everything run by the marching, staggering children who roll the belts and pull the great levers. Red-tinged smoke rises from it in stinking fumes.

Twice as the golf cart rolled slowly along, Ty at the wheel and Burny leaning askew in the passenger seat with the Taser pointed, squads of freakish green men passed them. Their features were scrambled, their skin plated and reptilian. They wore half-cured leather tunics from which tufts of fur still started in places. Most carried spears; several had whips.

Overseers, Burny said. They keep the wheels of progress turning. He began to laugh, but the laugh turned into a groan and the groan into a harsh and breathless shriek of pain.

Good, Ty thought coldly. And then, for the first time employing a favorite word of Ebbie Wexler’s: Die soon, you motherfucker.

About two miles from the back of Black House, they came to a huge wooden platform on their left. A gantrylike thing jutted up from it. A long post projected out from the top, almost to the road. A number of frayed rope ends dangled from it, twitching in the hot and sulfurous breeze. Under the platform, on dead ground that never felt the sun, were litters of bones and ancient piles of white dust. To one side was a great mound of shoes. Why they’d take the clothes and leave the shoes was a question Ty probably couldn’t have answered even had he not been wearing the cap (sbecial toyz for sbecial boyz), but a disjointed phrase popped into his head: custom of the country. He had an idea that was something his father sometimes said, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even remember his father’s face, not clearly.

The gibbet was surrounded by crows. They jostled one another and turned to follow the humming progress of the E-Z-Go. None was the special crow, the one with the name Ty could no longer remember, but he knew why they were here. They were waiting for fresh flesh to pluck, that’s what they were doing. Waiting for newly dead eyes to gobble. Not to mention the bare toesies of the shoe-deprived dead.

Beyond the pile of discarded, rotting footwear, a broken track led off to the north, over a fuming hill.

“Station House Road,” Burny said. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Ty at that point, was perhaps edging into delirium. Yet still the Taser pointed at Ty’s neck, never wavering. “That’s where I’m supposed to be taking the special boy.” Taging the sbecial bouy. “That’s where the special ones go. Mr. Munshun’s gone to get the mono. The End-World mono. Once there were two others. Patricia . . . and Blaine. They’re gone. Went crazy. Committed suicide.”

Ty drove the cart and remained silent, but he had to believe old Burn-Burn was the one who had gone crazy (crazier, he reminded himself). He knew about monorails, had even ridden one at Disney World in Orlando, but monorails named Blaine and Patricia? That was stupid.

Station House Road fell behind them. Ahead, the rusty red and iron gray of the Big Combination drew closer. Ty could see moving ants on cruelly inclined belts. Children. Some from other worlds, perhaps—worlds adjacent to this one—but many from his own. Kids whose faces appeared for a while on milk cartons and then disappeared forever. Kept a little longer in the hearts of their parents, of course, but eventually growing dusty even there, turning from vivid memories into old photographs. Kids presumed dead, buried somewhere in shallow graves by perverts who had used them and then discarded them. Instead, they were here. Some of them, anyway. Many of them. Struggling to yank the levers and turn the wheels and move the belts while the yellow-eyed, green-skinned overseers cracked their whips.

As Ty watched, one of the ant specks fell down the side of the convoluted, steam-wreathed building. He thought he could hear a faint scream. Or perhaps it was a cry of relief?

“Beautiful day,” Burny said faintly. “I’ll enjoy it more when I get something to eat. Having something to eat always . . . always perks me up.” His ancient eyes studied Ty, tightening a little at the corners with sudden warmth. “Baby butt’s the best eatin’, but yours won’t be bad. Nope, won’t be bad at all. He said to take you to the station, but I ain’t sure he’d give me my share. My . . .