Black House

Can’t drop it, he thinks. If I drop it, I’ll lose my mind. I really will.

He doesn’t drop it. He raises it above his head, sticks it in the little hole on the side of the cuff holding his left wrist, and turns it. The cuff springs open.

Slowly, slowly, Ty draws his hand through the shackle. The handcuffs fall to the shed’s dirt floor. As he stands there, a queerly persuasive idea occurs to Ty: he’s really still back in Black House, asleep on the ragged futon with the slop bucket in one corner of his cell and the dish of reheated Dinty Moore beef stew in the other. This is just his exhausted mind giving him a little hope. A last vacation before he goes into the stewpot himself.

From outside comes the clank of the Big Combination and the screams of the children who march, march, march on their bleeding footsies, running it. Somewhere is Mr. Munshun, who wants to take him someplace even worse than this.

It’s no dream. Ty doesn’t know where he’ll go from here or how he’ll ever get back to his own world, but the first step is getting out of this shed and this general vicinity. Moving on trembling legs, like an accident victim getting out of bed for the first time after a long stay, Ty Marshall steps over Burny’s sprawled corpse and out of the shed. The day is overcast, the landscape sterile, and even here that rickety skyscraper of pain and toil dominates the view, but still Ty feels an immense gladness just to be in the light again. To be free. It is not until he stands with the shed behind him that he truly realizes how completely he expected to die there. For a moment Ty closes his eyes and turns his face up to the gray sky. Thus he never sees the figure that has been standing to one side of the shed, prudently waiting to make sure Ty is still wearing the cap when he comes out. Once he’s sure he is, Lord Malshun—this is as close to his real name as we can come—steps forward. His grotesque face is like the bowl of a huge serving spoon upholstered in skin. The one eye bulges freakishly. The red lips grin. When he drops his arms around the boy, Ty begins to shriek—not just in fear and surprise, but in outrage. He has worked so hard to be free, so dreadfully hard.

“Hush,” Lord Malshun whispers, and when Ty continues to loose his wild screams (on the upper levels of the Big Combination, some of the children turn toward those cries until the brutish ogres who serve as foremen whip them back to business), the abbala`’q lord speaks again, a sifgle word in the Dark Speech. “Pnung.”

Ty goes limp. Had Lord Malshun not been hugging him from behind, he would have fallen. Guttural moans of protest continue to issue from the child’s drooling, slack mouth, but the screams have ceased. Lord Malshtn cocks hic long, spoon-shaped face toward the Big Combination, and grins. Life is good! Then he peers into the shed— briefly, but with great interest.

“Did for him,” Lord Malshun says. “And with the cap on, too. Amazing boy! The King wants to meet you in person before you go to Din-tah, you know. He may give you cake and coffee. Imagine, young Tyler! Cake and coffee with the abbalah! Cake and coffee with the King!”

“. . . don’t want go . . . want to go home . . . my maaaa . . .” These words spill out loose and low, like blood from a mortal wound.

Lord Malshun draws a finger across Ty’s lips, and they press together behind his touch. “Hush,” says the abbalah’s talent scout again. “Few things in life are more annoying than a noisy traveling companion. And we have a long trip ahead of us. Far from your home and friends and family . . . ah, but don’t cry.” For Malshun has observed the tears that have begun to leak from the corners of the limp boy’s eyes and roll down the planes of his cheeks. “Don’t cry, little Ty. You’ll make new friends. The Chief Breaker, for instance. All the boys like the Chief Breaker. His name is Mr. Brautigan. Perhaps he’ll tell you tales of his many escapes. How funny they are! Perfectly killing! And now we must go! Cake and coffee with the King! Hold that thought!”

Lord Malshun is stout and rather bowlegged (his legs are, in fact, a good deal shorter than his grotesquely long face), but he is strong. He tucks Ty under his arm as if the boy weighed no more than two or three sheets bundled together. He looks back at Burny one last time, without much regret—there’s a young fellow in upstate New York who shows great promise, and Burny was pretty well played out, anyway.

Lord Malshun cocks his head sideways and utters his almost soundless chuffing laugh. Then he sets out, not neglecting to give the boy’s cap a good hard yank. The boy is not just a Breaker; he’s perhaps the most powerful one to ever live. Luckily, he doesn’t realize his own powers yet. Probably nothing would happen if the cap did fall off, yet it’s best not to take chances.

Bustling—even humming a bit under his breath—Lord Malshun reaches the end of the draw, turns left onto Conger Road for the half-mile stroll back to Station House Road, and stops dead in his tracks. Standing in his way are four men from what Lord Malshun thinks of as Ter-tah. This is a slang term, and not a flattering one. In the Book of Good Farming, Ter is that period of Full-Earth in which breeding stock is serviced. Lord Malshun sees the world beyond the front door of Black House as a kind of vast caldo largo, a living soup into which he may dip his ladle—always on the abbalah’s behalf, of course!—whenever he likes.

Four men from the Ter? Malshun’s lip twists in contempt, causing upheavals all along the length of his face. What are they doing here? Whatever can they hope to accomplish here?

The smile begins to falter when he sees the stick one of them carries. It’s glowing with a shifting light that is many colors but somehow always white at its core. A blinding light. Lord Malshun knows only one thing that has ever glowed with such light and that is the Globe of Forever, known by at least one small, wandering boy as the Talisman. That boy once touched it, and as Laura DeLoessian could have told him—as Jack himself now knows—the touch of the Talisman never completely fades.

The smile drops away entirely when Lord Malshun realizes that the man with the club was that boy. He has come again to annoy them, but if he thinks he will take back the prize of prizes, he’s quite mistaken. It’s only a stick, after all, not the Globe itself; perhaps a little of the Globe’s residual power still lives within the man, but surely not much. Surely there can be no more than dust, after all the intervening years.

And dust is what my life would be worth if I let them take this boy from me, Lord Malshun thinks. I must—

His single eye is drawn to the black thunderhead hanging behind the men from the Ter. It gives off a vast, sleepy drone. Bees? Bees with stingers? Bees with stingers between him and Station House Road?

Well, he will deal with them. In time. First is the business of these annoying men.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Lord Malshun says in his most pleasant voice. The bogus German accent is gone; now he sounds like a bogus English aristocrat in a West End stage comedy from the 1950s. Or perhaps the World War II Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. “It’s wonderful that you should come so far to visit, perfectly wonderful, and on such a rotten day, too. Yet I’m afraid most days are rotten here, the Dins of End-World were simply made for the pathetic fallacy, you know, and—dash it all—I can’t stay. I’m afraid these are time-delivery goods, here.”