to watch and then go to bed. Henry may be a bullying shit, but they’ve got a life, those two,
one that makes sense . . . and they’re going back to it. I wonder if they have any idea of how
lucky they are. Eddie might, I suppose.
Jake turned, adjusted the straps of his pack, and crossed Rhinehold Street.
25
SUSANNAH SENSED MOVEMENT IN the empty grassland beyond the circle of
standing stones: a sighing, whispering rush.
“Something comin,” she said tautly. “Comin fast.”
“Be careful,” Eddie said, “but keep it off me. You understand? Keep it off me.”
“I hear you, Eddie. You just do your own thing.”
Eddie nodded. He knelt in the center of the ring, holding the sharp- ened stick outin front
of him as if assessing its point. Then he lowered it and drew a dark straight line in the dirt.
“Roland, watch out for her. . .”
“I will if I can, Eddie.”
“. . . but keep it off me. Jake’s coming. Crazy little mother’s really coming.”
Susannah could now see the grasses due north of the speaking ring parting in a long dark
line, creating a furrow that lanced straight at the circle of stones.
“Get ready,” Roland said. “It’ll go for Eddie. One of us will have to ambush it.”
Susannah reared up on her haunches like a snake coming out of a Hindu fakir’s basket. Her
hands, rolled into hard brown fists, were held at the sides of her face. Her eyes blazed. “I’m ready,” she said and then shouted: “Come on, big boy! You come on right now! Run like
it’s yo birfday!”
The rain began to fall harder as the demon which lived here re-entered its circle in a
booming rush. Susannah had just time to sense thick and merciless masculinity—it came to
her as an eyewatering smell of gin and juniper—and then it shot toward the center of the
circle. She closed her eyes and reached for it, not with her arms or her mind but with all the
female force which lived at the core of her: Hey, big boy! Where you goan? D’pussy be
ovah heah!
It whirled. She felt its surprise . . . and then its raw hunger, as full and urgent as a pulsing artery. It leaped upon her like a rapist springing from the mouth of an alley.
Susannah howled and rocked backward, cords standing out on her neck. The dress she
wore first flattened against her breasts and belly, and then began to tear itself to shreds. She could hear a pointless, direc- tionless panting, as if the air itself had decided to rut with her.
“Suze!” Eddie shouted, and began to get to his feet.
“No!” she screamed back. “Do it! I got this sumbitch right where . . . right where I want him! Go on, Eddie! Bring the kid! Bring—” Coldness battered at the tender flesh between
her legs. She grunted, fell backward . . then supported herself with one hand and thrust
defiantly forward and upward. “Bring him through!”
Eddie looked uncertainly at Roland, who nodded. Eddie glanced at Susannah again, his
eyes full of dark pain and darker fear, and then deliberately turned his back on both of them
and fell to his knees again. He reached forward with the sharpened stick which had become
a make- shift pencil, ignoring the cold rain falling on his arms and the back of his neck. The
stick began to move, making lines and angles, creating a shape Roland knew at once.
It was a door.
26
JAKE REACHED OUT, PUT his hands on the splintery gate, and pushed. It swung slowly open on screaming, rust-clotted hinges. Ahead of him was an uneven brick path. Beyond
the path was the porch. Beyond the porch was the door. It had been boarded shut.
He walked slowly toward the house, heart telegraphing fast dots and dashes in his throat.
Weeds had grown up between the buckled bricks. He could hear them rustling against his
bluejeans. All his senses seemed to have been turned up two notches. You’re not really
going in there, are you? a panic-stricken voice in his head asked.
And the answer that occurred to him seemed both totally nuts and perfectly reasonable: All
things serve the Beam.
The sign on the lawn read
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!
The yellowing, rust-stained square of paper nailed to one of the boards crisscrossing the
front door was more succinct:
BY ORDER OF NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED
Jake paused at the foot of the steps, looking up at the door. He had heard voices in the
vacant lot and now he could hear them again . . . but this was a choir of the damned, a
babble of insane threats and equally insane promises. Yet he thought it was all one voice.
The voice of the house; the voice of some monstrous doorkeeper, roused from its long
unpeaceful sleep.
He thought briefly of his father’s Ruger, even considered pulling it out of his pack, but
what good would it do? Behind him, traffic passed back and forth on Rhinehold Street and
a woman was yelling for her daughter to stop holding hands with that boy and bring in the
wash, but here was another world, one ruled by some bleak being over whom guns could
have no power.
Be true, Jake—stand.
“Okay,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “Okay, I’ll try. But you better not drop me again.”
Slowly, he began to mount the porch steps.
27
THE BOARDS WHICH BARRED the door were old and rotten, the nails rusty. Jake
grabbed hold of the top set at the point where they crossed each other and yanked. They
came free with a squall that was the gate all over again. He tossed them over the porch rail
and into an ancient flowerbed where only witchgrass and dogweed grew. He bent, grasped
the lower crossing . . . and paused for a moment.
A hollow sound came through the door; the sound of some animal slobbering hungrily
from deep inside a concrete pipe. Jake felt a sick sheen of sweat begin to break out on his
cheeks and forehead. He was so frightened that he no longer felt precisely real; he seemed
to have become a character in someone else’s bad dream.
The evil choir, the evil presence, was behind this door. The sound of it seeped out like
syrup.
He yanked at die lower boards. They came free easily.
Of course. It wants me to come in. It’s hungry, and I’m supposed to be the main course.
A snatch of poetry occurred to him suddenly, something Ms. Avery had read to them. It
was supposed to be about the plight of modern man, who was cut off from all his roots and
traditions, but to Jake it suddenly seemed that the man who had written that poem must
have seen this house: / will show you something different from either/Your shadow in the
morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/I will show
you . . .
“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust,” Jake muttered, and put his hand on the doorknob.
And as he did, that clear sense of relief and surety flooded him again, the feeling that this
was it, this time the door would open on that other world, he would see a sky untouched by
smog and industrial smoke, and, on the far horizon, not the mountains but the hazy blue
spires of some gorgeous unknown city.
He closed his fingers around the silver key in his pocket, hoping the door was locked so he
could use it. It wasn’t. The hinges screamed and flakes of rust sifted down from their slowly
revolving cylinders as the door opened. The smell of decay struck Jake like a physical blow:
wet wood, spongy plaster, rotting laths, ancient stuffing. Below these smells was
another—the smell of some beast’s lair. Ahead was a dank, shadowy hallway. To the left, a
staircase pitched and yawed its crazy way into the upper shadows. Its collapsed banister lay
splintered on the hallway floor, but Jake was not foolish enough to think it was just
splinters he was looking at. There were bones in that litter, as well—the bones of small animals. Some did not look precisely like animal bones, and these Jake would not look at
overlong; he knew he would never summon the courage to go further if he did. He paused
on the threshold, screwing himself up to take the first step. He heard a faint, muffled sound,
very hard and very rapid, and realized it was his own teeth chattering in his head.
Why doesn’t someone stop me? he thought wildly. Why doesn’t some- body passing on the
sidewalk shout “Hey, you! You’re not supposed to be in there—can•tcha read?”
But he knew why. Pedestrians stuck mostly to the other side of this street, and those who