Stephen King – The Waste Lands

twenty-foot-high stones. Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that

made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath

half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.

The Mansion—I smelled it there. The day I talked Henry into taking me over to see The

Mansion on Rhinehold Street, in Dutch Hill.

Roland buckled his gunbelt, then bent to knot the tiedown. He looked up at Susannah as he

did it. “We may need Detta Walker,” he said. “Is she around?”

“That bitch always around.” Susannah wrinkled her nose.

“Good. One of us is going to have to protect Eddie while he does what he’s supposed to do.

The other is going to be so much useless baggage. This is a demon’s place. Demons are not

human, but they are male and female, just the same. Sex is both their weapon and their

weakness. No matter what the sex of the demon may be, it will go for Eddie. To protect its

place. To keep its place from being used by an outsider. Do you understand?”

Susannah nodded. Eddie appeared not to be listening. He had tucked the square of hide

containing the key into his shirt and now he was staring into the speaking ring as if

hypnotized.

“There’s no time to say this in a gentle or refined way,” Roland told her. “One of us will—”

“One of us gonna have to fuck it to keep it off Eddie,” Susannah interrupted. “This the sort of thing can’t ever turn down a free fuck. That’s what you’re gettin at, isn’t it?”

Roland nodded.

Her eyes gleamed. They were the eyes of Detta Walker now, both wise and unkind,

shining with hard amusement, and her voice slid steadily deeper into the bogus Southern

plantation drawl which was Delta’s trade- mark. “If it’s a girl demon, you git it. But if it’s a boy demon, it’s mine. That about it?”

Roland nodded.

“What about if it swings both ways? What about that, big boy?”

Roland’s lips twitched in the barest suggestion of a smile. “Then we’ll take it together. Just remember—”

Beside them, in a fainting, distant voice, Eddie murmured: “Not all is silent in the halls of the dead. Behold, the sleeper wakes.” He turned his haunted, terrified eyes on Roland.

“There’s a monster.”

“The demon—”

“No. A monster. Something between the doors—between the worlds. Something that

waits. And it’s opening its eyes.”

Susannah cast a frightened glance at Roland.

“Stand, Eddie,” Roland said. “Be true.”

Eddie drew a deep breath. “I’ll stand until it knocks me down,” he said. “I have to go in now. It’s starting to happen.”

“We all goin in,” Susannah said. She arched her back and slipped out of her wheelchair.

“Any demon want to fuck wit’ me he goan find out he’s fuckin wit’ the finest. I th’ow him a fuck he ain’t never goan fgit.”

As they passed between two of the tall stones and into the speaking circle, it began to rain.

24

As SOON AS JAKE saw the place, he understood two things: first, that he had seen it

before, in dreams so terrible his conscious mind would not let him remember them; second,

that it was a place of death and murder and madness. He was standing on the far corner of

Rhinehold Street and Brooklyn Avenue, seventy yards from Henry and Eddie Dean, but

even from where he was he could feel The Mansion ignoring them and reaching for him

with its eager invisible hands, lie thought there were talons at the ends of those hands.

Sharp ones.

It wants me, and I can’t run away. It’s death to go in … but it’s madness not to. Because

somewhere inside that place is a locked door. I have the key that will open it, and the only

salvation I can hope for is on the other side.

He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormal- ity, with a sinking heart.

It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor.

The Dean brothers had walked across nine blocks of Brooklyn, mov- ing slowly under the

hot afternoon sun, and had finally entered a section of town which had to be Dutch Hill,

given the names on the shops and stores. Now they stood halfway down the block, in front

of The Mansion. It looked as if it had been deserted for years, yet it had suffered

remark- ably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really had been a man- sion

—the

home, perhaps, of a wealthy merchant and his large family. In those long-gone days it must

have been white, but now it was a dirty gray no-color. The windows had been knocked out

and the peeling picket fence which surrounded it had been spray-painted, but the house

itself was still intact.

It slumped in the hot light, a ramshackle slate-roofed revenant grow- ing out of a hummocky trash-littered yard, somehow making Jake think of a dangerous dog which

pretended to be asleep. Its steep roof overhung the front porch like a beetling brow. The

boards of the porch were splintery and warped. Shutters which might once have been green

leaned askew beside the glassless windows; ancient curtains still hung in some of these,

dangling like strips of dead skin. To the left, an elderly trellis leaned away from die

building, now held up not by nails but only by die nameless and somehow filthy clusters of

vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on die door. From

where Jake stood, he could read neither of them.

The house was alive. He knew this, could feel its awareness reaching out from the boards

and the slumping roof, could feel it pouring in rivers from the black sockets of its windows.

The idea of approaching that terrible place filled him with dismay; the idea of actually

going inside filled him with inarticulate horror. Yet he would have to. He could hear a low,

slumbrous buzzing in his ears—the sound of a beehive on a hot summer day—and for a

moment he was afraid he might faint. He closed his eyes . . . and his voice filled his head.

You must come, Jake. This is the path of the Beam, the way of the Tower, and the time of

your Drawing. Be true; stand; come to me.

The fear didn’t pass, but that terrible sense of impending panic did. He opened his eyes

again and saw that he was not the only one who had sensed the power and awakening

sentience of the place. Eddie was trying to pull away from the fence. He turned toward Jake,

who could see Eddie’s eyes, wide and uneasy beneath his green head-band. His big brother

grabbed him and pushed him toward the rusty gate, but the gesture was too half-hearted to

be much of a tease; however thick-headed he might be, Henry liked The Mansion no better

than Eddie did.

They drew away a little and stood looking at the place for a while. Jake could not make out

what they were saying to each other, but the tone of their voices was awed and uneasy. Jake

suddenly remembered Eddie speaking in his dream: Remember there’s danger, though. Be

care- ful . . . and be quick.

Suddenly the real Eddie, the one across the street, raised his voice enough so that Jake

could make out the words. “Can we go home now, Henry? Please? I don’t like it.” His tone was pleading.

“Fuckin little sissy,” Henry said, but Jake thought he heard relief as well as indulgence in Henry’s voice. “Come on.”

They turned away from the ruined house crouching high-shouldered behind its sagging

fence and approached the street. Jake backed up, then turned and looked into the window of

the dispirited little hole-in-the-wall shop called Dutch Hill Used Appliances. He watched

Henry and Eddie, dim and ghostly reflections superimposed on an ancient Hoover vacuum

cleaner, cross Rhinehold Street.

“Are you sure it’s not really haunted?” Eddie asked as they stepped onto the sidewalk on Jake’s side.

“Well, I tell you what,” Henry said. “Now that I been out here again, I’m really not so sure.”

They passed directly behind Jake without looking at him. “Would you go in there?” Eddie asked.

“Not for a million dollars,” Henry replied promptly.

They rounded the corner. Jake stepped away from the window and peeped after them.

They were headed back the way they had come, close together on the sidewalk, Henry

hulking along in his steel-toed shit-kickers, his shoulders already slumped like those of a

much older man, Eddie walking beside him with neat, unconscious grace. Their shadows,

long and trailing out into the street now, mingled amicably together.

They’re going home, Jake thought, and felt a wave of loneliness so strong that he felt it

would crush him. Going to eat supper and do homework and argue over which TV shows