Black House by Stephen King

Sophie ignores this. She is looking at the silent, sleeping man in the other room.

“Condemned to live in such a pleasant land as this . . .” She turns to him. “It is a pleasant land, isn’t it, sirrah? Still a pleasant land, in spite of all?”

Parkus smiles and bows. Around his neck, a shark’s tooth swings at the end of a fine gold necklace. “Indeed it is.”

She nods briskly. “So living here might not be so terrible.”

He says nothing. After a moment or two, her assumed briskness departs, and her shoulders sag.

“I’d hate it,” she says in a small voice. “To be barred from my own world except for occasional brief visits . . . paroles . . . to have to leave at the first cough or twinge in my chest . . . I’d hate it.”

Parkus shrugs. “He’ll have to accept what is. Like it or not, his gills are gone. He’s a creature of the Territories now. And God the Carpenter knows there’s work for him over here. The business of the Tower is moving toward its climax. I believe Jack Sawyer may have a part to play in that, although I can’t say for sure. In any case, when he heals, he won’t want for work. He’s a coppiceman, and there’s always work for such.”

She looks through the slit in the wall, her lovely face troubled.

“You must help him, dear,” Parkus says.

“I love him,” she says, speaking very low.

“And he loves you. But what’s coming will be difficult.”

“Why must that be, Parkus? Why must life always demand so much and give so little?”

He draws her into his arms and she goes willingly, her face pressed against his chest.

In the dark behind the chamber in which Jack Sawyer sleeps, Parkus answers her question with a single word:

Ka.

Epilogue

SHE SITS BY his bed on the first night of Full-Earth Moon, ten days after her conversation with Parkus in the secret passageway. Outside the pavilion, she can hear children singing “The Green Corn A-Dayo.” On her lap is a scrap of embroidery. It is summer, still summer, and the air is sweet with summer’s mystery.

And in this billowing room where his mother’s Twinner once lay, Jack Sawyer opens his eyes.

Sophie lays aside her embroidery, leans forward, and puts her lips soft against the shell of his ear.

“Welcome back,” she says. “My heart, my life, and my love: welcome back.”

April 14, 2001

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

STEPHEN KING is the author of more than thirty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.

PETER STRAUB is the author of fourteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, the director of Project Read To Me.

ALSO BY STEPHEN KING

NOVELS

Carrie

’Salem’s Lot

The Shining

The Stand

The Dead Zone

Firestarter

Cujo

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

Christine

Pet Sematary

Cycle of the Werewolf

The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

It

The Eyes of the Dragon

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Tower II:The Drawing of the Three

The Dark Tower III:The Waste Lands

The Dark Half

Needful Things

Gerald’s Game

Dolores Claiborne

Insomnia

Rose Madder

Desperation

Wizard & Glass

Bag of Bones

The Girl Who LovedTom Gordon

Hearts in Atlantis

Dreamcatcher

The Green Mile

Storm of the Century

E-BOOKS

Riding the Bullet

The Plant

AS RICHARD BACHMAN

Rage

The Long Walk

Roadwork

The Running Man

Thinner

The Regulators

NONFICTION

Danse Macabre

On Writing

Secret Windows

COLLECTIONS

Nightshift

Different Seasons

Skeleton Crew

Four Past Midnight

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Six Stories

SCREENPLAYS

Creepshow

Cat’s Eye

Silver Bullet

Maximum Overdrive

Pet Sematary

Golden Years

Sleepwalkers

Storm of the Century

ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

NOVELS

Mr. X

The Hellfire Club

The Throat

Mrs. God

Mystery

Koko

The Talisman (with Stephen King)

Floating Dragon

Shadowland

Ghost Story

If You Could See Me Now

Julia

Under Venus

Marriages

POETRY

Open Air

Leeson Park & Belsize Square

COLLECTIONS

Magic Terror

Wild Animals

Houses Without Doors

Peter Straub’s Ghosts (editor)

Letter from the Editor

In November 1999, our publisher, Ann Godoff, called me into her office and handed me a piece of paper. She said, “We’re bidding on this book. We’ll know tomorrow if we get it.” The book was a sequel to The Talisman, the 1984 bestseller by Stephen King and Peter Straub. “If we do,” Ann continued, “you’ll be the editor.” I had been at Random House four years by then, starting as an editorial assistant, and, needless to say, most of my negotiations didn’t involve the kind of numbers I was seeing on that piece of paper. I think I nodded mutely, went back to my office, and pondered my incredible luck. Random House got the book, of course, and I have been asked dozens of times since then, “What’s it like to work with these guys?” The answer is: a lot of fun.

For a while there, working on Black House, I had the best job in publishing. I was the editor of a very big book and my main responsibility was to leave the authors alone and let them do what they do best. I’ve read a little bit of the e-mail correspondence between the two as they were hammering out ideas for the book, and the creative juices were positively pouring—characters, secondary characters, family histories, creepy details, spooky coincidences, spine-tingling situations, you name it, enough for three sequels. At one point, when Peter Straub was planning a visit to Stephen King to nail down some details, King wrote, “I’m really looking forward to getting down to work with you next week, Peter. If ever there were two guys who need to stop generating notes and ideas, it’s us.”

Once they decided what to do with—and to—Jack Sawyer, their protagonist, they started writing. Each would write a while and then e-mail his pages to the other, like a runner passing a baton on to his teammate. They had a general outline for Black House, as they had had for the original Talisman, but in the hands of these writers, anything can happen, outline or not. And, if I may mix my sports metaphors, it’s a bit like watching two fantastic tennis players in the most intense volley of their careers. One of them would describe the actual Black House, for example, and it would fall to the other to, say, describe Jack flipping over to the Territories—the book’s alternate universe—for the first time. One of them would give us our first stomach-churning look at the villainous Burny; the other would conjure the evil Crow Gorg luring the Fisherman’s next victim into a hedge, leaving nothing but a little shoe behind. Did they need an editor pushing them along, guiding them, offering encouragement? Nah, not these guys. The inherent thrill of taking that baton and running with it was all they needed. I think that thrill comes through on every page of the book.

By the time we signed Black House, I had already worked with Peter for a couple of years on a couple of books. We were veterans of several lunches, many late-night e-mails (it used to seem that Peter did nearly all of his work between 2 a.m. and dawn), in-house meetings with publicists and marketing people, dinners with book clubs, even, once, an ungodly early train ride to Baltimore for a book fair where we were guest speakers. As Black House morphed from idea to outline to book,I checked in with Peter now and again to see how it was going. Easy job. He’d say it was going fine and then we’d shoot the breeze and say sayonara for another month or so. At one point, though, I needed to ask Stephen King about something. I had never met him and had e-mailed him only once, briefly, to say how thrilled I was when we acquired the book. My quandary was this: Just what did I call him? Here’s how I finally handled it:

“Dear Steve (may I call you Steve? I usually just refer to you as ‘stephenking’ when left to my own devices as I can’t imagine anything as presumptuous as ‘So Steve said to me the other day’ coming out of my mouth, but it seems most people who know you call you Steve and you don’t strike me as the type who would want to be addressed as Mr. King but I trust you’ll correct me if I’m taking unwelcome liberties):” . . . . and then I asked him whatever it was I had to ask him. He replied along the lines of “For what Random House is doing for this book, you can call me Little Stevie if you want.” Like I said, these guys are fun.

They started sending me pages when they had written about three hundred. They FedExed me a batch over Thanksgiving. They FedExed me some more at home over Christmas. It drove me nuts to read Black House in installments, like reading The Green Mile all over again, because it had such a driving narrative—it’s a genuine page-turner—and because it was really, really scary. They had me hooked from that first paragraph, the eagle’s-eye (or, in this case, crow’s-eye) view of a bucolic Wisconsin town with its evil draft blowing through the open door of Black House. By the time we met reticent, reluctant, retired Jack Sawyer, and sweet little Tyler Marshall went whoosh through that hedge, I was dying to read more. And when Burny takes center stage? As I sat in my office that day, reading the manuscript, I must have looked over my shoulder four times, absolutely certain someone was sneaking up behind me. I was so spooked I had to go hang out with a few colleagues until the goose bumps went away.

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