Black House (68 page)

Jack has seen photographs of beekeepers aswarm with bees, but this is no photograph and he is no beekeeper. His amazement—really, his sheer pleasure in the unexpectedness of this visitation—stuns him. For as long as the bees cling to him, he forgets Mouse’s terrible death and the next day’s fearsome task. What he does not forget is Sophie; he wishes Beezer and Doc would walk outside, so they could see what is happening, but more than that, he wishes Sophie could see it. Perhaps, by grace of
d’yamba,
she does. Someone is comforting Jack Sawyer, someone is wishing him well. A loving, invisible presence offers him support. It feels like a blessing, that support. Clothed in his glowing black-and-yellow bee suit, Jack has the idea that if he stepped toward the sky, he would be airborne. The bees would carry him over the valleys. They would carry him over the wrinkled hills. Like the winged men in the Territories who carried Sophie, he would fly. Instead of their two, he would have two thousand wings to bear him up.

In our world, Jack remembers, bees return to the hive before nightfall. As if reminded of their daily routine, the bees lift from Jack’s head, his trunk, his arms and legs, not en masse, like a living carpet, but individually and in parties of five and six, wander a short distance above him, then swirl around, shoot like bullets eastward over the houses on the inland side of Nailhouse Row, and disappear one and all into the same dark infinity. Jack becomes aware of their sound only when it disappears with them.

In the seconds before he can once again begin moving toward his truck, he has the feeling that someone is watching over him. He has been . . . what? It comes to him as he turns his key in the Ram’s ignition and flutters the gas pedal: he has been embraced.

Jack has no idea how much he will need the warmth of that embrace, nor of the manner in which it shall be returned to him, during the coming night.

First of all, he is exhausted. He has had the kind of day that
should
end in a surreal event like an embrace by a swarm of bees: Sophie, Wendell Green, Judy Marshall, Parkus—that cataclysm, that deluge!—and the strange death of Mouse Baumann, these things have stretched him taut, left him gasping. His body aches for rest. When he leaves French Landing and drives into the wide, dark countryside, he is tempted to pull over to the side of the road and catch a half-hour nap. The deepening night promises the refreshment of sleep, and that is the problem: he could wind up sleeping in the truck all night, which would leave him feeling bleary and arthritic on a day when he must be at his best.

Right now, he is not at his best—not by a longshot, as his father, Phil Sawyer, used to say. Right now he is running on fumes, another of Phil Sawyer’s pet expressions, but he figures that he can stay awake long enough to visit Henry Leyden. Maybe Henry cut a deal with the guy from ESPN—maybe Henry will move into a wider market and make a lot more money. Henry in no way needs any more money than he has, for Henry’s life seems flawless, but Jack likes the idea of his dear friend Henry suddenly flush with cash. A Henry with extra money to throw around is a Henry Jack would love to see. Imagine the wondrous clothes he could afford! Jack pictures going to New York with him, staying in a nice hotel like the Carlyle or the St. Regis, walking him through half a dozen great men’s stores, helping him pick out whatever he wants.

Just about everything looks good on Henry. He seems to improve all the clothes he wears, no matter what they are, but he has definite, particular tastes. Henry likes a certain classic, even old-fashioned, stylishness. He often dresses himself in pinstripes, windowpane plaids, herringbone tweeds. He likes cotton, linen, and wool. He sometimes wears bow ties, ascots, and little handkerchiefs that puff out of his breast pocket. On his feet, he puts penny loafers, wing tips, cap toes, and low boots of soft, fine leather. He never wears sneakers or jeans, and Jack has never seen him in a T-shirt that has writing on it. The question was, how did a man blind from birth evolve such a specific taste in clothing?

Oh,
Jack realizes,
it was his mother. Of course. He got his taste from his mother.

For some reason, this recognition threatens to bring tears to Jack’s eyes.
I get too emotional when I get this tired,
he says to himself.
Watch out, or you’ll go overboard.
But diagnosing a problem is not the same as fixing it, and he cannot follow his own advice. That Henry Leyden all of his life should have held to his mother’s ideas about men’s clothing strikes Jack as beautiful and moving. It implies a kind of loyalty he admires—unspoken loyalty. Henry probably got a lot from his mother: his quick-wittedness, his love of music, his levelheadedness, his utter lack of self-pity. Levelheadedness and lack of self-pity are a great combination, Jack thinks; they go a long way toward defining courage.

For Henry
is
courageous, Jack reminds himself. Henry is damn near fearless. It’s funny, how he talks about being able to drive a car, but Jack feels certain that, if allowed, his friend would unhesitatingly jump behind the wheel of the nearest Chrysler, start the engine, and take off for the highway. He would not exult or show off, such behavior being foreign to his nature; Henry would nod toward the windshield and say things like, “Looks like the corn is nice and tall for this time of year,” and “I’m glad Duane finally got around to painting his house.” And the corn would be tall, and Duane Updahl would have recently painted his house, information delivered to Henry by his mysterious sensory systems.

Jack decides that if he makes it out of Black House alive, he will give Henry the opportunity to take the Ram out for a spin. They might wind up nose-down in a ditch, but it will be worth it for the expression on Henry’s face. Some Saturday afternoon, he’ll get Henry out on Highway 93 and let him drive to the Sand Bar. If Beezer and Doc do not get savaged by weredogs and survive their journey to Black House, they ought to have the chance to enjoy Henry’s conversation, which, odd as it seems, is perfectly suited to theirs. Beezer and Doc
should
know Henry Leyden, they’d love the guy. After a couple of weeks, they’d have him up on a Harley, swooping toward Norway Valley from Centralia.

If only
Henry
could come with them to Black House. The thought pierces Jack with the sadness of an inspired idea that can never be put into practice. Henry would be brave and unfaltering, Jack knows, but what he most likes about the idea is that he and Henry would ever after be able to talk about what they had done. Those talks—the two of them, in one living room or another, snow piling on the roof—would be wonderful, but Jack cannot endanger Henry that way.

“That’s a stupid thing to think about,” Jack says aloud, and realizes that he regrets not having been completely open and unguarded with Henry—that’s where the stupid worry comes from, his stubborn silence. It isn’t what he will be unable to say in the future; it’s what he failed to say in the past. He should have been honest with Henry from the start. He should have told him about the red feathers and the robins’ eggs and his gathering uneasiness. Henry would have helped him open his eyes; he would have helped Jack resolve his own blindness, which was more damaging than Henry’s.

All of that is over, Jack decides. No more secrets. Since he is lucky enough to have Henry’s friendship, he will demonstrate that he values it. From now on, he will tell Henry everything, including the background: the Territories, Speedy Parker, the dead man on the Santa Monica Pier, Tyler Marshall’s baseball cap. Judy Marshall. Sophie. Yes, he has to tell Henry about Sophie—how can he not have done so already? Henry will rejoice with him, and Jack cannot wait to see how he does it. Henry’s rejoicing will be unlike anyone else’s; Henry will impart some delicate, cool, good-hearted topspin to the expression of his delight, thereby increasing Jack’s own delight. What an incredible,
literally
incredible friend! If you were to describe Henry to someone who had never met him, he would sound unbelievable. Someone like
that,
living alone in an outback of the boonies? But there he was, all alone in the entirely obscure area of Norway Valley, French County, Wisconsin, waiting for the latest installment of
Bleak House.
By now, in anticipation of Jack’s arrival, he would have turned on the lights in his kitchen and living room, as he had done for years in honor of his dead, much-loved wife.

Jack thinks:
I must not be so bad, if I have a friend like that.

And he thinks:
I really adore Henry.

Now, even in the darkness, everything seems beautiful to him. The Sand Bar, ablaze with neon lights in its vast expanse of parking lot; the spindly, intermittent trees picked out by his headlights after the turn onto 93; the long, invisible fields; the glowing light bulbs hung like Christmas decorations from the porch of Roy’s Store. The rattle over the first bridge and the sharp turn into the depths of the valley. Set back from the left side of the road, the first of the farmhouses gleam in the darkness, the lights in their windows burning like sacramental candles. Everything seems touched by a higher meaning, everything seems to
speak.
He is traveling, within a hush of sacred silence, through a sacred grove. Jack remembers when Dale first drove him into this valley, and that memory is sacred, too.

Jack does not know it, but tears are coursing down his cheeks. His blood sings in his veins. The pale farmhouses shine half-hidden by the darkness, and out of that darkness leans the stand of tiger lilies that greeted him on his first down-valley journey. The tiger lilies blaze in his headlights, then slip murmuring behind him. Their lost speech joins the speech of the tires rolling eagerly, gently toward Henry Leyden’s warm house. Tomorrow he may die, Jack knows, and this may be the last night he will ever see. That he
must
win does not mean that he
will
win; proud empires and noble epochs have gone down in defeat, and the Crimson King may burst out of the Tower and rage through world after world, spreading chaos.

They could all die in Black House: he, Beezer, and Doc. If that happens, Tyler Marshall will be not only a Breaker, a slave chained to an oar in a timeless Purgatory, but a super-Breaker, a nuclear-powered Breaker the abbalah will use to turn all the worlds into furnaces filled with burning corpses.
Over my dead body,
Jack thinks, and laughs a little crazily—it’s so literal!

What an extraordinary moment; he is laughing while he rubs tears off his face. The paradox suddenly makes him feel as though he is being torn in half. Beauty and terror, beauty and pain—there is no way out of the conundrum. Exhausted, strung out, Jack cannot hold off his awareness of the world’s essential fragility, its constant, unstoppable movement toward death, or the deeper awareness that in that movement lies the source of all its meaning. Do you see all this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart
will
stop.

In the next second, he remembers the swarm of golden bees that descended upon him: it was against this that they comforted him, exactly this, he tells himself. The blessing of blessings that vanish. What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone. It felt true, but it did not feel like all of the truth.

Against the vastness of the night, he sees the giant shape of the Crimson King holding aloft a small boy to use as a burning glass that will ignite the worlds into flaming waste. What Parkus said was right: he cannot destroy the giant, but he may find it possible to rescue the boy.

The bees said:
Save Ty Marshall.

The bees said:
Love Henry Leyden.

The bees said:
Love Sophie.

That is close enough, right enough, for Jack. To the bees, these were all the same sentence. He supposes that the bees might well also have said,
Do your job, coppiceman,
and that sentence was only slightly different. Well, he would do his job, all right. After having been given such a miracle, he could do nothing else.

His heart warms as he turns up Henry’s drive. What was Henry but another kind of miracle?

Tonight, Jack gleefully resolves, he is going to give the amazing Henry Leyden a thrill he will never forget. Tonight, he will tell Henry the whole story, the entire long tale of the journey he took in his twelfth year: the Blasted Lands, Rational Richard, the Agincourt, and the Talisman. He will not leave out the Oatley Tap and the Sunlight Home, for these travails will get Henry wonderfully worked up. And Wolf! Henry is going to be crazy about Wolf; Wolf will tickle him right down to the soles of his chocolate-brown suede loafers. As Jack speaks, every word he says will be an apology for having been silent for so long.

And when he has finished telling the whole story, telling it at least as well as he can, the world, this world, will have been transformed, for one person in it besides himself will know everything that happened. Jack can barely imagine what it will feel like to have the dam of his loneliness so
obliterated,
so
destroyed,
but the very thought of it floods him with the anticipation of relief.

Now, this is strange . . . Henry has not turned on his lights, and his house looks dark and empty. He must have fallen asleep.

Smiling, Jack turns off the engine and gets out of the pickup’s cab. Experience tells him that he won’t get more than three paces into the living room before Henry rouses himself and pretends that he has been awake all along. Once, when Jack found him in the dark like this, he said, “I was just resting my eyes.” So what is it going to be tonight? He was planning his Lester Young–Charlie Parker birthday tribute, and he found it easier to concentrate this way? He was thinking about frying up some fish, and he wanted to see if food tasted different if you cooked it in the dark? Whatever it is, it’ll be entertaining. And maybe they will celebrate Henry’s new deal with ESPN!

“Henry?” Jack raps on the door, then opens it and leans in. “Henry, you faker, are you asleep?”

Henry does not respond, and Jack’s question falls into a soundless void. He can see nothing. The room is a two-dimensional pane of blackness. “Hey, Henry, I’m here. And boy, do I have a story for you!”