came near this house did not linger.
Even if someone did happen to look, they wouldn’t see me, because I’m not really here. For
better or worse, I’ve already left my world behind. I’ve started to cross over. His world is
somewhere ahead. This …
This was the hell between.
Jake stepped into the corridor, and although he screamed when the door swung shut
behind him with the sound of a mausoleum door being slammed, he wasn’t surprised.
Down deep, he wasn’t surprised at all.
28
ONCE UPON A TIME there had been a young woman named Detta Walker who liked to
frequent the honky-tonks and roadhouses along Ridgeline Road outside of Nutley and on
Route 88 down by the power-lines, out- side of Amhigh. She had had legs in those days,
and, as the song says, she knew how to use them. She would wear some tight cheap dress
that looked like silk but wasn’t and dance with the white boys while the band played all
those ofay party tunes like “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” and “The Hippy-Hippy
Shake.” Eventually she would cut one of the honkeys out of the pack and let him lead her
back to his car in the parking lot. There she would make out with him (one of the world’s
great soul-kissers was Detta Walker, and no slouch with the old fingernails, either) until he
was just about insane . . . and then she’d shut him down. What happened next? Well, that
was the question, wasn’t it? That was the game. Some of them wept and begged—^all right,
but not great. Some of them raved and roared, which was better.
And although she had been slapped upside the head, punched in the eye, spat upon, and
once kicked in the ass so hard she had gone sprawling in the gravel parking lot of The Red
Windmill, she had never been raped. They had all gone home with the blue balls, every
damned ofay one of them. Which meant, in Detta Walker’s book, that she was the reigning
champion, the undefeated queen. Of what? Of them. Of all those crewcut, button-down, tightass honkey motherfuckers.
Until now.
There was no way to withstand the demon who lived in the speaking ring. No doorhandles
to grab, no car to tumble out of, no building to run back into, no cheek to slap, no face to
claw, no balls to kick if the ofay sumbitch was slow getting the message.
The demon was on her . . . and then, in a flash, it—he—was in her.
She could feel it—him—pressing her backward, even though she could not see it—him.
She could not see its—his—hands, but she could see their work as her dress tore violently
open in several places. Then, suddenly, pain. It felt as though she were being ripped open
down there, and in her agony and surprise she screamed. Eddie looked around, his eyes
narrowing.
“I’m all right!” she yelled. “Go on, Eddie, forget about me! I’m all right!”
But she wasn’t. For the first time since Detta had strode onto the sexual battlefield at the
age of thirteen, she was losing. A horrid, engorged coldness plunged into her; it was like
being fucked with an icicle.
Dimly, she saw Eddie turn away and begin drawing in the dirt again, his expression of
warm concern fading back into the terrible, concen- trated coldness she sometimes felt in
him and saw on his face. Well, that was all right, wasn’t it? She had told him to go on, to
forget her, to do what he needed to do in order to bring the boy over. This was her part of
Jake’s drawing and she had no right to hate either of the men, who had not twisted her
arm—or anything else—to make her do it, but as the coldness froze her and Eddie turned
away from her, she hated them both; could, in fact, have torn their honkey balls off.
Then Roland was with her, his strong hands were on her shoulders and although he didn’t
speak, she heard him: Don’t fight. You can’t win if you fight—you can only die. Sex is its
weapon, Susannah, but it’s also its weakness.
Yes. It was always their weakness. The only difference was that this time she was going to
have to give a little more—but maybe that was all right. Maybe in the end, she would be
able to make this invisible honkey demon pay a little more.
She forced herself to relax her thighs. Immediately they spread apart, pushing long, curved
fans in the dirt. She threw her head back into the rain which was now pelting down and
sensed its face lolling just over hers, eager eyes drinking in every contorted grimace which
passed over her face.
She reached up with one hand, as if to slap . . . and instead, slid it around the nape of her
demon rapist’s neck. It was like cupping a palmful of solid smoke. And did she feel it
twitch backward, surprised at her caress? She tilted her pelvis upward, using her grip on the invisible neck to create the leverage. At the same time she spread her legs even wider,
splitting what remained of her dress up the side-seams. God, it was huge!
“Come on,” she panted. “You ain’t gonna rape me. You ain’t. You want t’fuck me? I fuck you. I give you a fuckin like you ain’t nevah had! Fuck you to death!”
She felt the engorgement within her tremble; felt the demon try, at least momentarily, to
draw back and regroup.
“Unh-unh, honey,” she croaked. She squeezed her thighs inward, pinning it. “De fun jus’
startin•.” She began to flex her butt, humping at the invisible presence. She reached up with her free hand, interlaced all ten fingers, and allowed herself to fall backward with her hips
cocked, her straining arms seeming to hold nothing. She tossed her sweat-damp hair out of
her eyes; her lips split in a sharklike grin.
Let me go! a voice cried out in her mind. But at the same time she could feel the owner of
the voice responding in spite of itself.
“No way, sugar. You wanted it … now you goan get it.” She thrust upward, holding on, concentrating fiercely on the freezing cold inside her. “I’m goan melt that icicle, sugar, and when it’s gone, what you goan do then?” Her lips rose and fell, rose and fell. She squeezed her thighs mercilessly together, closed her eyes, clawed more deeply into the unseen neck,
and prayed that Eddie would be quick.
She didn’t know how long she could do this.
29
THE PROBLEM, JAKE THOUGHT, was simple: somewhere in this dank, terrible place
was a locked door. The right door. All he had to do was find it. But it was hard, because he
could feel the presence in the house gathering. The sound of those dissonant, gabbling
voices was beginning to merge into one sound—a low, grating whisper.
And it was approaching.
A door stood open to the right. Beside it, thumbtacked to the wall, was a faded
daguerreotype which showed a hanged man dangling like a piece of rotten fruit from a dead
tree. Beyond it was a room that had once been a kitchen. The stove was gone, but an
ancient icebox—the land with the circular refrigeration drum on top—stood on the far side
of the hilly, faded linoleum. Its door gaped open. Black, smelly stuff was caked inside and
had trickled down to form a long-congealed puddle on the floor. The kitchen cabinets stood
open. In one he saw what was probably the world’s oldest can of Snow’s Clam Fry-Ettes.
Poking out of another was the head of a dead rat. Its eyes were white and seemingly in
motion, and after a moment Jake realized that the empty sockets were filled with squirming
maggots.
Something fell into his hair with a flabby thump. Jake screamed in surprise, reached for it,
and grasped something that felt like a soft, bris- tle-covered rubber ball. He pulled it free
and saw it was a spider, its bloated body the color of a fresh bruise. Its eyes regarded him
with stupid malevolence. Jake threw it against the wall. It broke open and splattered there,
legs twitching feebly.
Another one dropped onto his neck. Jake felt a sudden painful bite just below the place
where his hair stopped. He ran backward into the hall, tripped over the fallen banister, fell
heavily, and felt the spider pop. Its innards—wet, feverish, and slippery—slid between his
shoulder-blades like warm egg-yoke. Now he could see other spiders in the kitchen
doorway. Some hung on almost invisible silken threads like obscene plumb-bobs; others
simply dropped on the floor in a series of muddy plops and scuttered eagerly over to greet
him.
Jake flailed to his feet, still screaming. He felt something in his mind, something that felt
like a frayed rope, starting to give way. He supposed it was his sanity, and at that