Black House by Stephen King

In an amazingly small number of seconds, Chipper Maxton’s face registers a tremendous range of feeling states. Ire, surprise, confusion, wounded pride, anger, and disbelief chase across the landscape of his features as Burnside reaches back and produces the hedge clippers. In the office, they seem larger and more aggressive than they did in Henry Leyden’s living room.

To Chipper, the blades look as long as scythes. And when Chipper tears his eyes away from them and raises them to the old man standing before him, he sees a face more demonic than human. Burnside’s eyes gleam red, and his lips curl away from appalling, glistening teeth like shards of broken mirrors.

“Back off, buddy,” Chipper squeaks. “The police are practically in the lobby.”

“I ain’t deaf.” Burny rams one blade into Chipper’s mouth and closes the clippers on his sweaty cheek. Blood shoots across the desk, and Chipper’s eyes expand. Burny yanks on the clippers, and several teeth and a portion of Chipper’s tongue fly from the yawning wound. He pushes himself upright and leans forward to grab the blades. Burnside steps back and lops off half of Chipper’s right hand.

“Damn, that’s sharp,” he says.

Then Maxton comes reeling around the side of the desk, spraying blood in all directions and bellowing like a moose. Burny dodges away, dodges back, and punches the blades into the bulge of the blue button-down shirt over Chipper’s belly. When he tugs them out, Chipper sags, groans, drops to his knees. Blood pours out of him as if from an overturned jug. He falls forward on his elbows. There is no fun left in Chipper Maxton; he shakes his head and mutters something that is a plea to be left alone. A bloodshot, oxlike eye revolves toward Charles Burnside and silently expresses an oddly impersonal desire for mercy.

“Mother of Mercy,” Burny says, “is this the end of Rico?” What a laugh—he hasn’t thought of that movie in years. Chuckling at his own wit, he leans over, positions the blades on either side of Chipper’s neck, and nearly succeeds in cutting off his head.

The sirens turn blaring on to Queen Street. Soon policemen will be running up the walk; soon they will burst into the lobby. Burnside drops the clippers onto Chipper’s broad back and regrets that he does not have the time to piss on his body or take a dump on his head, but Mr. Munshun is grumbling about dime, dime, dime.

“I ain’t stupid, you don’t have to tell me,” Burny says.

He pads out of the office and through Miss Vilas’s cubicle. When he moves out into the lobby, he can see the flashing light bars on the tops of two police cars rolling down the far side of the hedge. They come to a halt not far from where he first put his hand around Tyler Marshall’s slender boy-neck. Burny scoots along a little faster. When he reaches the beginning of the Daisy corridor, two baby-faced policemen burst through the opening in the hedge.

Down the hallway, Butch Yerxa is standing up and rubbing his face. He stares at Burnside and says, “What happened?”

“Get out there,” Burny says. “Take ’em to the office. Maxton’s hurt.”

“Hurt?” Incapable of movement, Butch is gaping at Burnside’s bloody clothes and dripping hands.

“Go!”

Butch stumbles forward, and the two young policemen charge in through the big glass door, from which Rebecca Vilas’s poster has been removed. “The office!” Butch yells, pointing to his right. “The boss is hurt!”

While Yerxa indicates the office door by jabbing his hand at the wall, Charles Burnside scuttles past him. A moment later, he has entered the Daisy wing men’s room and is hotfooting it toward one of the stalls.

And what of Jack Sawyer? We already know. That is, we know he fell asleep in a receptive place between the edge of a cornfield and a hill on the western side of Norway Valley. We know that his body grew lighter, less substantial, cloudy. That it grew vague and translucent. We can suppose that before his body attained transparency, Jack entered a certain nourishing dream. And in that dream, we may suppose, a sky of robin’s-egg blue suggests an infinity of space to the inhabitants of a handsome residential property on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, wherein Jacky is six, six, six, or twelve, twelve, twelve, or both at the same time, and Daddy played cool changes on his horn, horn, horn. (“Darn That Dream,” Henry Shake could tell you, is the last song on Daddy Plays the Horn, by Dexter Gordon—a daddy-o if there ever was.) In that dream, everyone went on a journey and no one went anywhere else, and a traveling boy captured a most marvelous prize, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer captured a bumblebee in a glass. Smiling, she carried it to the swinging doors and launched it into the upper air. So the bumblebee traveled far and away to Faraway, and as it journeyed worlds upon worlds on their mysterious courses trembled and swayed, and Jack, too, journeyed on his own mysterious course into the infinite robin’s-egg blue and, in the bee’s accurate wake, returned to the Territories, where he lay sleeping in a silent field. So in that same darned dream, Jack Sawyer, a person younger than twelve and older than thirty, stunned by both grief and love, is visited in his sleep by a certain woman of tender regard. And she lies down beside him on his bed of sweet grass and takes him in her arms and his grateful body knows the bliss of her touch, her kiss, her deep blessing. What they do, alone in the faraway Territories, is none of our business, but we compound Sophie’s blessing with our own and leave them to what is after all, with the gentlest possible urgency, their business, which blesses this boy and this girl, this man and this woman, this dear couple, as nothing else can, certainly not us.

Return comes as it should, with the clean, rich smells of topsoil and corn, and a rooster’s alarm-clock crowing from the Gilbertson cousins’ farm. A spiderweb shining with dew stitches the loafer on Jack’s left foot to a mossy rock. An ant trundling across Jack’s right wrist carries a blade of grass bearing in the V of its central fold a bright and trembling drop of newly made water. Feeling as wondrously refreshed as if he, too, were newly created, Jack eases the hardworking ant off his wrist, separates his shoe from the spiderweb, and gets to his feet. Dew sparkles in his hair and his eyebrows. Half a mile back across the field, Henry’s meadow curves around Henry’s house. Tiger lilies shiver in the cool morning breeze.

Tiger lilies shiver . . .

When he sees the hood of his pickup nosing out from behind the house, everything comes back to him. Mouse, and the word given him by Mouse. Henry’s house, Henry’s studio, his dying message. By this time, all the police and investigators will have gone, and the house will be empty, echoing with bloodstains. Dale Gilbertson—and probably Troopers Brown and Black—will be looking for him. Jack has no interest in the troopers, but he does want to talk to Dale. It is time to let Dale in on some startling facts. What Jack has to say to Dale is going to peel his eyelids back, but we should remember what the Duke told Dean Martin about the whisking of eggs and the making of omelettes. In the words of Lily Cavanaugh, when the Duke spoke up, ever’-dang-body lissened up, and so must Dale Gilbertson, for Jack wants his faithful and resolute company on the journey through Black House.

Walking past the side of Henry’s house, Jack puts the tips of his fingers to his lips and brushes them against the wood, transferring the kiss. Henry. For all the worlds, for Tyler Marshall, for Judy, for Sophie, and for you, Henry Leyden.

The cell phone in the cab of the Ram claims to have three saved messages, all from Dale, which he deletes unheard. At home, the answering machine’s red light blinks 4-4-4, repeating itself with the ruthless insistence of a hungry infant. Jack pushes PLAYBACK. Four times, an increasingly unhappy Dale Gilbertson begs to know the whereabouts of his friend Jack Sawyer and communicates his great desire to converse with the same gentleman, largely in reference to the murder of his uncle and their friend, Henry, but it wouldn’t hurt to talk about the goddamn slaughter at Maxton’s, would it? And does the name Charles Burnside ring any bells?

Jack looks at his watch and, thinking that it cannot be correct, glances up at the clock in his kitchen. His watch was right after all. It is 5:42 A.M., and the rooster is still crowing behind Randy and Kent Gilbertson’s barn. Tiredness suddenly washes through him, heavier than gravity. Someone is undoubtedly manning the telephone on Sumner Street, but Dale is just as certainly asleep in his bed, and Jack wishes to speak only to Dale. He yawns hugely, like a cat. The newspaper hasn’t even been delivered yet!

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