Black House

through the windshield of his DAREmobile as if terrified by the chaos around him.

The end of the lane is like a war zone now. Danny strides into the screaming mob and shoves a few people aside on his way to Doc and his old Sunday school teacher, who looks shaken but not at all injured. “Well, Danny, my goodness,” the minister says. “I’m certainly glad to see you here.”

Doc glares at the two of them. “You know each other?”

“Reverend Hovdahl, this is Doc,” Danny says. “Doc, this is Reverend Hovdahl, the pastor at Mount Hebron Lutheran.”

“Holy moly,” says Doc, and immediately begins to pat the little man’s lapels and tug at the hem of his jacket, as if to pull him into shape. “Sorry, Reverend, I hope I didn’t hurt you none.”

The state cops and the Mad Hungarian manage at last to squeeze out of the crowd. The sound level decreases to a mild hubbub—one way or another, Doc’s friends have silenced the loudest members of the opposition.

“Fortunately, the window is wider than I am,” the reverend says.

“Say, maybe I could come over and talk to you someday,” says Doc. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about first-century Christianity lately. You know, Geza Vermes, John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen, stuff like that. I’d like to bounce some ideas off you.”

Whatever Reverend Hovdahl intends to say is obliterated by the sudden explosion of noise from the other end of the lane. A woman’s voice rises like a banshee’s, in an inhuman screeching that shivers the hairs on the nape of Danny’s neck. It sounds to him as though escaped lunatics a thousand times more dangerous than the Thunder Five are raving through the landscape. What the devil could have happened up there?

“ ‘Hello boys’?” Unable to contain his indignation, Bobby Dulac turns to stare first at Dale, then at Jack. His voice rises, hardens. “Is this shit for real? ‘Hello boys’ ?”

Dale coughs into his fist and shrugs. “He wanted us to find her.”

“Well, of course,” Jack says. “He told us to come here.”

“Why would he do that, though?” Bobby asks.

“He’s proud of his work.” From some dim crossroads in Jack’s memory, an ugly voice says, Stay out of it. You mess with me and I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere. Whose voice had that been? With no more evidence than his conviction, Jack understands that if he could place that voice, he would put a name to the Fisherman. He cannot; all Jack Sawyer can do at this moment is remember a stink worse than the foul cloud that fills this crumbling building—a hideous smell that came from the southwest of another world. That was the Fisherman, too, or whatever the Fisherman was in that world.

A thought worthy of the former rising star of the LAPD’s Homicide Division awakens in his mind, and he says, “Dale, I think you should let Henry hear that 911 tape.”

“I don’t get it. What for?”

“Henry’s tuned in to stuff even bats can’t hear. Even if he doesn’t recognize the voice, he’ll learn a hundred times more than what we know now.”

“Well, Uncle Henry never forgets a voice, that’s true. Okay, let’s get out of here. The M.E. and the evidence wagon should show up in a couple of minutes.”

Trailing behind the other two men, Jack thinks of Tyler Marshall’s Brewers cap and where he found it—that world he has spent more than half his life denying, and his return to which this morning continues to send shocks through his system. The Fisherman left the cap for him in the Territories, the land he had first heard of when Jacky was six—when Jacky was six, and Daddy played the horn. It is all coming back to him, that immense adventure, not because he wishes it, but because it has to come back: forces outside himself are picking him up by the scruff of his neck and carrying him forward. Forward into his own past! The Fisherman is proud of his handiwork, yes, the Fisherman is deliberately taunting them—a truth so obvious none of the three men had to speak it aloud—but really the Fisherman is baiting only Jack Sawyer, who alone has seen the Territories. And if that’s true, as it has to be, then—

—then the Territories and all they contain are involved somehow in these wretched crimes, and he has been thrust into a drama of enormous consequence he cannot possibly grasp right now. The Tower. The Beam. He had seen this in his mother’s handwriting, something about the Tower falling and the Beams breaking: these things are parts of the puzzle, whatever they mean, as is Jack’s gut conviction that Tyler Marshall is still alive, tucked away in some pocket of the other world. The recognition that he can never speak of all this to anyone else, not even Henry Leyden, makes him feel intensely alone.

Jack’s thoughts blow away in the noisy chaos that erupts alongside and in front of the shack. It sounds like an Indian attack in a cowboy movie, whooping and yelling and the sound of running feet. A woman sends up a shrill scream eerily like the blip-blips of the police siren he had half-noted a few moments ago. Dale mutters “Jeez,” and breaks into a run, followed by Bobby and Jack.

Outside, what appears to be a half dozen crazy people are racing around in the weedy gravel in front of Ed’s. Dit Jesperson and Beezer, still too stunned to react, watch them caper back and forth. The crazy people make an amazing amount of noise. One man yells, “KILL THE FISHERMAN! KILL THE DIRTY BASTARD!” Another is shouting “LAW ’N’ ORDER ’N’ FREE BEER!” A scrawny character in bib overalls picks up “FREE BEER! WE WANT FREE BEER!” A harpy too old for her tank top and blue jeans skitters around waving her arms and screeching at the top of her lungs. The grins on their faces indicate that these people are engaged in some dimwitted prank. They are having the time of their lives.

Up from the end of the lane comes a State Police car, with the Mad Hungarian’s DARE Pontiac right behind it. In the middle of the chaos, Henry Leyden tilts his head and smiles to himself.

When he sees his chief take off after one of the men, fat Dit Jesperson lurches into action and spots Doodles Sanger, against whom he has borne a grudge ever since she turned him down late one night in the Nelson Hotel. Dit recognizes Teddy Runkleman, the tall galoot with the broken nose Dale is chasing; and he knows Freddy Saknessum, but Freddy is undoubtedly too fast for him and, besides, Dit has the feeling that if he put his hands on Freddy Saknessum, about eight hours later he would probably come down with something really nasty. Bobby Dulac is on the skinny guy’s case, so Doodles is Dit’s target, and he looks forward to pulling her down into the weeds and making her pay for calling him what she did, six years ago in the Nelson’s filthy bar. (In front of maybe a dozen of French Landing’s most raffish characters, Doodles had compared him to the then chief’s smelly, waddling old mongrel, Tubby.)