“Okay,” Jack says. He doesn’t need the map to find Chummy Burnside’s Black House, but Mouse is almost certainly right: it’s probably not the sort of place you want to tackle after dark. He hates to leave Ty Marshall in the furance-lands—it feels wrong in a way that’s almost sinful—but he has to remember that there’s more at stake here than one little boy lost.
“Beezer, are you sure you want to go back there?”
“Hell no, I don’t want to go back,” Beezer says, almost indignantly. “But something killed my daughter—my daughter!—and it got here from there! You want to tell me you don’t know that’s true?”
Jack makes no reply. Of course it’s true. And of course he wants Doc and the Beez with him when he turns up the lane to Black House. If they can bear to come, that is.
D’yamba, he thinks. D’yamba. Don’t forget.
He turns back to the couch. “Mouse, do you—”
“No,” Doc says. “Guess he won’t need the Cadillac dope, after all.”
“Huh?” Jack peers at the big brewer-biker stupidly. He feels stupid. Stupid and exhausted.
“Nothin’ tickin’ but his watch,” Doc says, and then he begins to sing. After a moment Beezer joins in, then Bear Girl. Jack steps away from the couch with a thought queerly similar to Henry’s: How did it get late so early? Just how in hell did that happen?
“In heaven, there is no beer . . . that’s why we drink it here . . . and when . . . we’re gone . . . from here . . .”
Jack tiptoes across the room. On the far side, there’s a lighted Kingsland Premium Golden Pale Ale bar clock. Our old friend—who is finally looking every year of his age and not quite so lucky—peers at the time with disbelief, not accepting it until he has compared it to his own watch. Almost eight. He has been here for hours.
Almost dark, and the Fisherman still out there someplace. Not to mention his otherworldly playmates.
D’yamba, he thinks again as he opens the door. And, as he steps out onto the splintery porch and closes the door behind him, he speaks aloud with great sincerity into the darkening day: “Speedy, I’d like to wring your neck.”
24
D’YAMBA IS A BRIGHT and powerful spell; powerful connections form a web that extends, ramifying, throughout infinity. When Jack Sawyer peels the living poison from Mouse’s eyes, d’yamba first shines within the dying man’s mind, and that mind momentarily expands into knowledge; down the filaments of the web flows some measure of its shining strength, and soon a touch of d’yamba reaches Henry Leyden. Along the way, the d’yamba brushes Tansy Freneau, who, seated in a windowed alcove of the Sand Bar, observes a wry, beautiful young woman take smiling shape in the pool of light at the far end of the parking lot and realizes, a moment before the young woman vanishes, that she has been given a glimpse of the person her Irma would have become; and it touches Dale Gilbertson, who while driving home from the station experiences a profound, sudden yearning for the presence of Jack Sawyer, a yearning like an ache in his heart, and vows to pursue the Fisherman case to the end with him, no matter what the obstacles; the d’yamba quivers flashing down a filament to Judy Marshall and opens a window into Faraway, where Ty sleeps in an iron-colored cell, awaiting rescue and still alive; within Charles Burnside, it touches the true Fisherman, Mr. Munshun, once known as the Monday Man, just as Burny’s knuckles rap the glass. Mr. Munshun feels a subtle drift of cold air infiltrate his chest like a warning, and freezes with rage and hatred at this violation; Charles Burnside, who knows nothing of d’yamba and cannot hate it, picks up his master’s emotion and remembers the time when a boy supposed dead in Chicago crept out of a canvas sack and soaked the back seat of his car in incriminating blood. Damnably incriminating blood, a substance that continued to mock him long after he had washed away its visible traces. But Henry Leyden, with whom we began this chain, is visited not by grace or rage; what touches Henry is a kind of informed clarity.
Rhoda’s visits, he realizes, were one and all produced by his loneliness. The only thing he heard climbing the steps was his unending need for his wife. And the being on the other side of his studio door is the horrible old man from Maxton’s, who intends to do to Henry the same thing he has done to three children. Who else would appear at this hour and knock on the studio window? Not Dale, not Jack, and certainly not Elvena Morton. Everyone else would stay outside and ring the doorbell.
It takes Henry no more than a couple of seconds to consider his options and work out a rudimentary plan. He supposes himself both quicker and stronger than the Fisherman, who sounded like a man in his mid- to late eighties; and the Fisherman does not know that his would-be victim is aware of his identity. To take advantage of this situation, Henry has to appear puzzled but amiable, as if he is merely curious about his visitor. And once he opens the studio door, which unfortunately he has left unlocked, he will have to act with speed and decisiveness.
Are we up to this? Henry asks himself, and thinks, We’d better be.
Are the lights on? No; because he expected to be alone, he never bothered with the charade of switching them on. The question then becomes: How dark is it outside? Maybe not quite dark enough, Henry imagines—an hour later, he would be able to move through the house entirely unseen and escape through the back door. Now his odds are probably no better than fifty-fifty, but the sun is sinking at the back of his house, and every second he can delay buys him another fraction of darkness in the living room and kitchen.
Perhaps two seconds have passed since the lurking figure rapped on the window, and Henry, who has maintained the perfect composure of one who failed to hear the sound made by his visitor, can stall no longer. Pretending to be lost in thought, with one hand he grips the base of a heavy Excellence in Broadcasting award accepted in absentia by George Rathbun some years before and with the other scoops from a shallow tray before him a switchblade an admirer once left at the university radio station as a tribute to the Wisconsin Rat. Henry uses the knife to unwrap CD jewel boxes, and not long ago, in search of something to do with his hands, he taught himself how to sharpen it. With its blade retracted, the knife resembles an odd, flat fountain pen. Two weapons are twice as good as one, he thinks, especially if your adversary imagines the second weapon to be harmless.
Now it has been four seconds since the rapping came from the window by his side, and in their individual ways both Burny and Mr. Munshun have grown considerably more restive. Mr. Munshun recoils in loathing from the suggestion of d’yamba that has somehow contaminated this otherwise delightful scene. Its appearance can mean one thing only, that some person connected to the blind man managed to get close enough to Black House to have tasted the poisons of its ferocious guardian. And that in turn means that now the hateful Jack Sawyer undoubtedly knows of the existence of Black House and intends to breach its defenses. It is time to destroy the blind man and return home.
Burny registers only an inchoate mixture of hatred and an emotion surprisingly like fear from within his master. Burny feels rage at Henry Leyden’s appropriation of his voice, for he knows it represents a threat; even more than this self-protective impulse, he feels a yearning for the simple but profound pleasure of bloodletting. When Henry has been butchered, Charles Burnside wishes to claim one more victim before flying to Black House and entering a realm he thinks of as Sheol.
His big, misshapen knuckles rap once more against the glass.
Henry turns his head to the window in a flawless imitation of mild surprise. “I thought someone was out there. Who is it? . . . Come on, speak up.” He toggles a switch and speaks into the mike: “If you’re saying anything, I can’t hear you. Give me a second or two to get organized in here, and I’ll be right out.” He faces forward again and hunches over his desk. His left hand seems idly to touch his handsome award; his right hand is hidden from sight. Henry appears to be deep in concentration. In reality, he is listening as hard as he ever has in his life.
He hears the handle on the studio door revolve clockwise with a marvelous slowness. The door whispers open an inch, two inches, three. The floral, musky scent of My Sin invades the studio, seeming to coat a thin chemical film over the mike, the tape canisters, all the dials, and the back of Henry’s deliberately exposed neck. The sole of what sounds like a carpet slipper hushes over the floor. Henry tightens his hands on his weapons and waits for the particular sound that will be his signal. He hears another nearly soundless step, then another, and knows the Fisherman has moved behind him. He carries some weapon of his own, something that cuts through the mist of perfume with the grassy smell of front yards and the smoothness of machine oil. Henry cannot imagine what this is, but the movement of the air tells him it is heavier than a knife. Even a blind man can see that. An awkwardness in the way the Fisherman takes his next oh-so-quiet step suggests to Henry that the old fellow holds this weapon with both of his hands.