Black House

Dale ignores this completely. “Ohgod,” he says, making it one word. He’s looking at the Baggie that has just emerged from the trash-can liner. There are beads of water clinging to the transparent sides.

“The smell of it!” Henry says with undeniable distress. “Oh, the poor child!”

“You can smell it even through the plastic?” Jack asks.

“Yes indeed. And coming from there.” Henry points at the ruined restaurant and then produces his cigarettes. “If I’d known, I would have brought a jar of Vicks and an El Producto.”

In any case, there’s no need to walk the Baggie with the gruesome artifact inside it past Tom Lund, who has now disappeared behind the ruins with his reel of yellow tape.

“Go on in,” Dale instructs Jack quietly. “Get a look and take care of the thing in that Baggie if you find . . . you know . . . her. I want to speak to Tom.”

Jack steps through the warped, doorless doorway into the thickening stench. Outside, he can hear Dale instructing Tom to send Pam Stevens and Danny Tcheda back down to the end of the access road as soon as they arrive, where they will serve as passport control.

The interior of Ed’s Eats will probably be bright by afternoon, but now it is shadowy, lit mostly by crazed, crisscrossing rays of sun. Galaxies of dust spin lazily through them. Jack steps carefully, wishing he had a flashlight, not wanting to go back and get one from the cruiser until he’s taken care of the foot. (He thinks of this as “redeployment.”) There are human tracks through the dust, trash, and drifts of old gray feathers. The tracks are man-sized. Weaving in and out of them are a dog’s pawprints. Off to his left, Jack spies a neat little pile of droppings. He steps around the rusty remains of an overturned gas grill and follows both sets of tracks around the filthy counter. Outside, the second French Landing cruiser is rolling up. In here, in this darker world, the sound of the flies has become a soft roar and the stench . . . the stench . . .

Jack fishes a handkerchief from his pocket and places it over his nose as he follows the tracks into the kitchen. Here the pawprints multiply and the human footprints disappear completely. Jack thinks grimly of the circle of beaten-down grass he made in the field of that other world, a circle with no path of beaten-down grass leading to it.

Lying against the far wall near a pool of dried blood is what remains of Irma Freneau. The mop of her filthy strawberry-blond hair mercifully obscures her face. Above her on a rusty piece of tin that probably once served as a heat shield for the deep-fat fryers, two words have been written with what Jack feels sure was a black Sharpie marker:

Hello boys

“Ah, fuck,” Dale Gilbertson says from almost directly behind him, and Jack nearly screams.

Outside, the snafu starts almost immediately.

Halfway back down the access road, Danny and Pam (not in the least disappointed to have been assigned guard duty once they have actually seen the slumped ruin of Ed’s and smelled the aroma drifting from it) nearly have a head-on with an old International Harvester pickup that is bucketing toward Ed’s at a good forty miles an hour. Luckily, Pam swings the cruiser to the right and the driver of the pickup—Teddy Runkleman—swings left. The vehicles miss each other by inches and swerve into the grass on either side of this poor excuse for a road. The pickup’s rusty bumper thumps against a small birch.

Pam and Danny get out of their unit, hearts pumping, adrenaline spurting. Four men come spilling out of the pickup’s cab like clowns out of the little car in the circus. Mrs. Morton would recognize them all as regulars at Roy’s Store. Layabouts, she would call them.

“What in the name of God are you doing?” Danny Tcheda roars. His hand drops to the butt of his gun and then falls away a bit reluctantly. He’s getting a headache.

The men (Runkleman is the only one the officers know by name, although between them they recognize the faces of the other three) are goggle-eyed with excitement.

“How many ja find?” one of them spits. Pam can actually see the spittle spraying out in the morning air, a sight she could have done without. “How many’d the bastid kill?”

Pam and Danny exchange a single dismayed look. And before they can reply, holy God, here comes an old Chevrolet Bel Air with another four or five men inside it. No, one of them is a woman. They pull up and spill out, also like clowns from the little car.

But we’re the real clowns, Pam thinks. Us.

Pam and Danny are surrounded by eight semihysterical men and one semihysterical woman, all of them throwing questions.

“Hell, I’m going up there and see for myself!” Teddy Runkleman shouts, almost jubilantly, and Danny realizes the situation is on the verge of spinning out of control. If these fools get the rest of the way up the access road, Dale will first tear him a new asshole and then salt it down.

“HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, ALL OF YOU!” he bawls, and actually draws his gun. It’s a first for him, and he hates the weight of it in his hand—these are ordinary people, after all, not bad guys—but it gets their attention.

“This is a crime scene,” Pam says, finally able to speak in a normal tone of voice. They mutter and look at one another; worst fears confirmed. She steps to the driver of the Chevrolet. “Who are you, sir? A Saknessum? You look like a Saknessum.”

“Freddy,” he admits.

“Well, you get back in your vehicle, Freddy Saknessum, and the rest of you who came with him also get in, and you back the hell right out of here. Don’t bother trying to turn around, you’ll just get stuck.”

“But—” the woman begins. Pam thinks she’s a Sanger, a clan of fools if ever there was one.

“Stow it and go,” Pam tells her.