The Waste Lands

  "What are those?" she asked in a low voice. "Chips of stone?"

  "Look again," Roland said.

  She did, and saw that they were bones. The bones of small animals, maybe. She hoped.

  Eddie switched the sharpened stick to his left hand, dried the palm of his right against his shirt, and then switched it back again. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from his dry throat. He cleared it and tried again. "I think I'm supposed to go in and draw something in the dirt."

  Roland nodded. "Now?"

  "Soon." He looked into Roland's face. "There's something here, isn't there? Something we can't see."

  "It's not here right now," Roland said. "At least, I don't think it is. But it will come. Our khef--our lifeforce--will draw it. And, of course, it will be jealous of its place. Give me my gun back, Eddie."

  Eddie unbuckled the belt and handed it over. Then he turned back to the circle of 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 Detta's trademark. "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 f'git."

  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. He 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 abnormality, 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, moving 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 remarkably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really had been a mansion--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 growing 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 the building, now held up not by nails but only by the nameless and somehow filthy clusters of vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on the 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 careful . . . 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 reflectio
ns 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 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 sharpened stick out in 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, directionless 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 makeshift 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 blue jeans. 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 witch-grass 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 the 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: I 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: we
t 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 bannister 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 somebody passing on the sidewalk shout "Hey, you! You're not supposed to be in there--can't-cha read?"

  But he knew why. Pedestrians stuck mostly to the other side of this street, and those who 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 honkytonks and roadhouses along Ridgeline Road outside of Nutley and on Route 88 down by the power-lines, outside 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.