Black House

Fred had shown him a couple, a Deere and a Honda, inquired after his family, and then asked (casually, he hoped), Hey, Doc, tell me something—do you think it’s possible for a person to just go crazy? Without any warning, like?

Skarda had given him a sharper look than Fred had really liked. Are we talking about an adult or an adolescent, Fred?

Well, we’re not talking about anyone, actually. Big, hearty laugh—unconvincing to Fred’s own ears, and judging from Pat Skarda’s look, not very convincing to him, either. Not anyone real, anyway. But as a hypothetical case, let’s say an adult.

Skarda had thought about it, then shook his head. There are few absolutes in medicine, even fewer in psychiatric medicine. That said, I have to tell you that I think it’s very unlikely for a person to “just go crazy.” It may be a fairly rapid process, but it is a process. We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but that’s rarely the case. Mental dysfunction—neurotic or psychotic behavior—takes time to develop, and there are usually signs. How’s your mom these days, Fred?

Mom? Oh hey, she’s fine. Right in the pink.

And Judy?

It had taken him a moment to get a smile started, but once he did, he managed a big one. Big and guileless. Judy? She’s in the pink, too, Doc. Of course she is. Steady as she goes.

Sure. Steady as she goes. Just showing a few signs, that was all.

Maybe they’ll pass, he thinks. Those good old endorphins are finally kicking in, and all at once this seems plausible. Optimism is a more normal state for Fred, who does not believe in slippage, and a little smile breaks on his face—the day’s first. Maybe the signs will pass. Maybe whatever’s wrong with her will blow out as fast as it blew in. Maybe it’s even, you know, a menstrual thing. Like PMS.

God, if that was all it was, what a relief! In the meantime, there’s Ty to think about. He has to have a talk with Tyler about the buddy system, because while Fred doesn’t believe what Wendell Green is apparently trying to insinuate, that the ghost of a fabulous turn-of-the-century cannibal and all-around boogerman named Albert Fish has for some reason turned up here in Coulee Country, someone is certainly out there, and this someone has murdered two little children and done unspeakable (at least unless you’re Wendell Green, it seems) things to the bodies.

Thighs, torso, and buttocks bitten, Fred thinks, and runs faster, although now he’s getting a stitch in his side. Yet this bears repeating: he does not believe that these horrors can actually touch his son, nor does he see how they can have caused Judy’s condition, since her oddities started while Amy St. Pierre was still alive, Johnny Irkenham too, both of them presumably playing happily in their respective backyards.

Maybe this, maybe that . . . but enough of Fred and his worries, all right? Let us rise from the environs of his troubled head and precede him back to No. 16, Robin Hood Lane—let’s go directly to the source of his troubles.

The upstairs window of the connubial bedroom is open, and the screen is certainly no problem; we strain ourselves right through, entering with the breeze and the first sounds of the awakening day.

The sounds of French Landing awakening do not awaken Judy Marshall. Nope, she has been starey-eyed since three, conning the shadows for she doesn’t know what, fleeing dreams too horrible to remember. Yet she does remember some things, little as she wants to.

“Saw the eye again,” she remarks to the empty room. Her tongue comes out and with no Fred around to watch her (she knows he’s watching, she is beset but not stupid), it does not just pet at her philtrum but slathers it in a great big wipe, like a dog licking its chops after a bowl of scraps. “It’s a red eye. His eye. Eye of the King.”

She looks up at the shadows of the trees outside. They dance on the ceiling, making shapes and faces, shapes and faces.

“Eye of the King,” she repeats, and now it starts with the hands: kneading and twisting and squeezing and digging. “Abbalah! Foxes down foxholes! Abbalah-doon, the Crimson King! Rats in their ratholes! Abbalah Munshun! The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money!”

She shakes her head from side to side. Oh, these voices, out of the darkness they come, and sometimes she awakens with a vision burning behind her eyes, a vision of a vast slaty tower standing in a field of roses. A field of blood. Then the talking begins, the speaking in tongues, testification, words she can’t understand let alone control, a mixed stream of English and gibberish.

“Trudge, trudge, trudge,” she says. “The little ones are trudging on their bleeding footsies . . . oh for Christ’s sake, won’t this ever stop?”

Her tongue yawns out and licks across the tip of her nose; for a moment her nostrils are plugged with her own spit, and her head roars

—Abbalah, Abbalah-doon, Can-tah Abbalah—

with those terrible foreign words, those terrible impacted images of the Tower and the burning caves beneath, caves through which little ones trudge on bleeding feet. Her mind strains with them, and there is only one thing that will make them stop, only one way to get relief.

Judy Marshall sits up. On the table beside her there is a lamp, a copy of the latest John Grisham novel, a little pad of paper (a birthday present from Ty, each sheet headed HERE’S ANOTHER GREAT IDEA I HAD!), and a ballpoint pen with LA RIVIERE SHERATON printed on the side.

Judy seizes the pen and scribbles on the pad.

No Abbalah no Abbalah-doon no Tower no Breakers no Crimson King only dreams these are just my dreams

It is enough, but pens are also roads to anywhere, and before she can divorce the tip of this one from the birthday pad, it writes one more line:

The Black House is the doorway to Abbalah the entrance to hell Sheol Munshun all these worlds and spirits

No more! Good merciful God, no more! And the worst thing: What if it all begins to make sense?

She throws the pen back on the table, where it rolls to the base of the lamp and lies still. Then she tears the page from the pad, crumples it, and sticks it in her mouth. She chews furiously, not tearing it but at least mashing it sodden, then swallows. There is an awful moment when it sticks in her throat, but then it goes down. Words and worlds recede and Judy falls back against the pillows, exhausted. Her face is pale and sweaty, her eyes huge with unshed tears, but the moving shadows on the ceiling no longer look like faces to her—the faces of trudging children, of rats in their ratholes, foxes in foxholes, eye of the King, Abbalah-Abbalah-doon! Now they are just the shadows of the trees again. She is Judy DeLois Marshall, wife of Fred, mother of Ty. This is Libertyville, this is French Landing, this is French County, this is Wisconsin, this is America, this is the Northern Hemisphere, this is the world, and there is no other world than this. Let it be so.

Ah, let it be so.

Her eyes close, and as she finally slips back to sleep we slip across the room to the door, but just before we get there, Judy Marshall says one other thing—says it as she crosses over the border and into sleep.

“Burnside is not your name. Where is your hole?”

The bedroom door is closed and so we use the keyhole, passing through it like a sigh. Down the hall we go, past pictures of Judy’s family and Fred’s, including one photo of the Marshall family farm where Fred and Judy spent a horrible but blessedly short period not long after their marriage. Want some good advice? Don’t talk to Judy Marshall about Fred’s brother, Phil. Just don’t get her started, as George Rathbun would undoubtedly say.

No keyhole in the door at the end of the hall and so we slide underneath like a telegram and into a room we immediately know is a boy’s room: we can tell from the mingled smells of dirty athletic socks and neat’s-foot oil. It’s small, this room, but it seems bigger than Fred and Judy’s down the hall, very likely because the odor of anxiety is missing. On the walls are pictures of Shaquille O’Neal, Jeromy Burnitz, last year’s Milwaukee Bucks team . . . and Tyler Marshall’s idol, Mark McGwire. McGwire plays for the Cards, and the Cards are the enemy, but hell, it’s not as if the Milwaukee Brewers are actually competition for anything. The Brew Crew were doormats in the American League, and they are likewise doormats in the National. And McGwire . . . well, he’s a hero, isn’t he? He’s strong, he’s modest, and he can hit the baseball a country mile. Even Tyler’s dad, who roots strictly for Wisconsin teams, thinks McGwire is something special. “The greatest hitter in the history of the game,” he called him after the seventy-home-run season, and Tyler, although little more than an infant in that fabled year, has never forgotten this.

Also on the wall of this little boy who will soon be the Fisherman’s fourth victim (yes, there has already been a third, as we have seen), holding pride of place directly over his bed, is a travel poster showing a great dark castle at the end of a long and misty meadow. At the bottom of the poster, which he has Scotch-taped to the wall (his mom absolutely forbids pushpins), it says COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD in big green letters. Ty is considering taking the poster down long enough to cut this part off. He doesn’t like the poster because he has any interest in Ireland; to him the picture whispers of somewhere else, somewhere Entirely Else. It is like a photograph of some splendid mythical kingdom where there might be unicorns in the forests and dragons in the caves. Never mind Ireland; never mind Harry Potter, either. Hogwarts is fine enough for summer afternoons, but this is a castle in the Kingdom of Entirely Else. It’s the first thing Tyler Marshall sees in the morning, the last thing he sees at night, and that’s just the way he likes it.

He lies curled on his side in his underwear shorts, a human comma with tousled dark blond hair and a thumb that is close to his mouth, really just an inch or so away from being sucked. He is dreaming—we can see his eyeballs moving back and forth behind his closed lids. His lips move . . . he’s whispering something . . . Abbalah? Is he whispering his mother’s word? Surely not, but . . .

We lean closer to listen, but before we can hear anything, a circuit in Tyler’s jazzy red clock-radio goes hot, and all at once the voice of George Rathbun fills the room, calling Tyler hence from whatever dreams have been playing themselves out under that tousled thatch.

“Fans, you gotta listen to me now, how many times have I told you this? If you don’t know Henreid Brothers Furniture of French Landing and Centralia, then you don’t know furniture. That’s right, I’m talking Henreid Brothers, home of the Colonial Blowout. Living-room sets dining-room sets bedroom sets, famous names you know and trust like La-Z-Boy, Breton Woods and Moosehead, EVEN A BLIND MAN CAN SEE THAT HENREID BROTHERS MEANS QUALITY!”

Ty Marshall is laughing even before he’s got both eyes fully open. He loves George Rathbun; George is absolutely fly.

And now, without even changing gears from the commercianame = "note" “You guys are all ready for the Brewer Bash, ain’tcha? Sent me those postcards with your name, address, and el teléfono on ’em? Hope so, because the contest closed at midnight. If you missed out . . . so solly, Cholly!”

Ty closes his eyes again and mouths the same word over three times: Shit, shit, shit. He did forget to enter, and now he can only hope that his dad (who knows how forgetful his son can be) remembered and entered the contest for him.

“Grand prize?” George is saying. “ONLY the chance for you or the fav-o-rite young person of your acquaintance to be the Brew Crew’s batboy or batgirl for the entire Cincinnati series. ONLY the chance to win an aut-o-graphed Richie Sexson bat, the LUMBER that holds the LIGHTNING! Not to mention fifty free seats on the first-base side with me, George Rathbun, Coulee Country’s Traveling College of Baseball Knowledge. BUT WHY AM I TELLING YOU THIS? If you missed out, you’re too late. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly! Oh, I know why I brought it up—to make sure you tune in next Friday to see if I speak YOUR NAME over the radio!”

Ty groans. There are only two chances that George will speak his name over the radio: slim and none. Not that he cared so much about being a batboy, dressed in a baggy Brewers uni and running around in front of all those people at Miller Park, but to own Richie Sexson’s own bat, the lumber with the lightning . . . how boss would that’ve been?

Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early—it’s summer vacation, after all—and Tyler can’t seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It’s as if there’s some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.

What George Rathbun says next drives the remaining sleep-fog from Tyler’s brain—it’s like a dash of cold water. “Say there, Coulee, want to talk about the Fisherman?”

Tyler stops what he’s doing, an odd little chill running up his back and then down his arms. The Fisherman. Some crazy guy killing kids . . . and eating them? Well, he’s heard that rumor, mostly from the bigger kids down at the baseball field or at the French Landing Rec Center, but who would do something so gross? Cannibalism, ack!

George’s voice drops. “Now I’m going to tell you a little secret, so listen close to your Uncle George.” Tyler sits on his bed, holding his sneakers by the laces and listening closely to his Uncle George, as bidden. It seems odd to hear George Rathbun talking about a subject so . . . so unsporty, but Tyler trusts him. Didn’t George Rathbun predict that the Badgers would go to at least the Elite Eight two years ago, when everyone else said they’d get blown out in the first round of the Big Dance? Yeah, he did. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

George’s voice drops further, to what is almost a confidential whisper. “The original Fisherman, boys and girls, Albert Fish, has been dead and gone for sixty-seven years, and s’far’s I know, he never got much west of New Jersey. Furthermore, he was probably a DAMYANKEE FAN! SO COOL IT, COULEE COUNTRY! JUST CAAAALM DOWN!”

Tyler relaxes, smiling, and starts putting on his sneakers. Calm down, you got that right. The day is new, and yeah, okay, his mom’s been a little on the Tinky Winky side lately, but she’ll pull out of it.

Let us leave on this optimistic note—make like an amoeba and split, as the redoubtable George Rathbun might say. And speaking of George, that ubiquitous voice of the Coulee Country morning, should we not seek him out? Not a bad idea. Let us do so immediately.

3

OUT TYLER’S WINDOW we go, away from Libertyville, flying southwest on a diagonal, not lingering now but really flapping those old wings, flying with a purpose. We’re headed toward the heliograph flash of early-morning sun on the Father of Waters, also toward the world’s largest six-pack. Between it and County Road Oo (we can call it Nailhouse Row if we want; we’re practically honorary citizens of French Landing now) is a radio tower, the warning beacon on top now invisible in the bright sunshine of this newborn July day. We smell grass and trees and warming earth, and as we draw closer to the tower, we also smell the yeasty, fecund aroma of beer.

Next to the radio tower, in the industrial park on the east side of Peninsula Drive, is a little cinder-block building with a parking lot just big enough for half a dozen cars and the Coulee patrol van, an aging Ford Econoline painted candy-apple pink. As the day winds down and afternoon wears into evening, the cylindrical shadows of the six-pack will fall first over the sign on the balding lawn facing the drive, then the building, then the parking lot. KDCU-AM, this sign reads, YOUR TALK VOICE IN COULEE COUNTRY. Spray-painted across it, in a pink that almost matches the patrol van, is a fervent declaration: TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! Later on, Howie Soule, the U-Crew engineer, will clean this off (probably during the Rush Limbaugh show, which is satellite fed and totally automated), but for now it stays, telling us all we need to know about small-town luv in middle America. Looks like we found something nice after all.

Coming out of the station’s side door as we arrive is a slender man dressed in pleated khaki Dockers, a tieless white shirt of Egyptian cotton buttoned all the way to the neck, and maroon braces (they are as slim as he is, those braces, and far too cool to be called suspenders; suspenders are vulgar things worn by such creatures as Chipper Maxton and Sonny Heartfield, down at the funeral home). This silver-haired fellow is also wearing a very sharp straw fedora, antique but beautifully kept. The maroon hatband matches his braces. Aviator-style sunglasses cover his eyes. He takes a position on the grass to the left of the door, beneath a battered speaker that is amping KDCU’s current broadcast: the local news. This will be followed by the Chicago farm report, which gives him ten minutes before he has to settle in behind the mike again.

We watch in growing puzzlement as he produces a pack of American Spirit cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up with a gold lighter. Surely this elegant fellow in the braces, Dockers, and Bass Weejuns cannot be George Rathbun. In our minds we have already built up a picture of George, and it is one of a fellow very different from this. In our mind’s eye we see a guy with a huge belly hanging over the white belt of his checked pants (all those ballpark bratwursts), a brick-red complexion (all those ballpark beers, not to mention all that bellowing at the dastardly umps), and a squat, broad neck (perfect for housing those asbestos vocal cords). The George Rathbun of our imagination—and all of Coulee Country’s, it almost goes without saying—is a pop-eyed, broad-assed, wild-haired, leather-lunged, Rolaids-popping, Chevy-driving, Republican-voting heart attack waiting to happen, a churning urn of sports trivia, mad enthusiasms, crazy prejudices, and high cholesterol.

This fellow is not that fellow. This fellow moves like a dancer. This fellow is iced tea on a hot day, cool as the king of spades.

But say, that’s the joke of it, isn’t it? Uh-huh. The joke of the fat deejay with the skinny voice, only turned inside out. In a very real sense, George Rathbun does not exist at all. He is a hobby in action, a fiction in the flesh, and only one of the slim man’s multiple personalities. The people at KDCU know his real name and think they’re in on the joke (the punch line of course being George’s trademark line, the even-a-blind-man thing), but they don’t know the half of it. Nor is this a metaphorical statement. They know exactly one-third of it, because the man in the Dockers and the straw fedora is actually four people.

In any case, George Rathbun has been the saving of KDCU, the last surviving AM station in a predatory FM market. For five mornings a week, week in and week out, he has been a drive-time bonanza. The U-Crew (as they call themselves) love him just about to death.

Above him, the loudspeaker cackles on: “—still no leads, according to Chief Dale Gilbertson, who has called Herald reporter Wendell Green ‘an out-of-town fearmonger who is more interested in selling papers than in how we do things in French Landing.’

“Meanwhile, in Arden, a house fire has taken the lives of an elderly farmer and his wife. Horst P. Lepplemier and his wife, Gertrude, both eighty-two . . .”

“Horst P. Lepplemier,” says the slim man, drawing on his cigarette with what appears to be great enjoyment. “Try saying that one ten times fast, you moke.”

Behind him and to his right, the door opens again, and although the smoker is still standing directly beneath the speaker, he hears the door perfectly well. The eyes behind the aviator shades have been dead his whole life, but his hearing is exquisite.

The newcomer is pasty-faced and comes blinking into the morning sun like a baby mole that has just been turned out of its burrow by the blade of a passing plow. His head has been shaved except for the Mohawk strip up the center of his skull and the pigtail that starts just above the nape of his neck and hangs to his shoulder blades. The Mohawk has been dyed bright red; the ’tail is electric blue. Dangling from one earlobe is a lightning-bolt earring that looks suspiciously like the Nazi S.S. insignia. He is wearing a torn black T-shirt with a logo that reads SNIVELLING SHITS ’97: THE WE GET HARD FOR JESUS TOUR. In one hand this colorful fellow has a CD jewel box.

“Hello, Morris,” says the slim man in the fedora, still without turning.

Morris pulls in a little gasp, and in his surprise looks like the nice Jewish boy that he actually is. Morris Rosen is the U-Crew’s summer intern from the Oshkosh branch of UW. “Man, I love that unpaid grunt labor!” station manager Tom Wiggins has been heard to say, usually while rubbing his hands together fiendishly. Never has a checkbook been guarded so righteously as the Wigger guards the KDCU checkbook. He is like Smaug the Dragon reclining on his heaps of gold (not that there are heaps of anything in the ’DCU accounts; it bears repeating to say that, as an AM talker, the station is lucky just to be alive).

Morris’s look of surprise—it might be fair to call it uneasy surprise—dissolves into a smile. “Wow, Mr. Leyden! Good grab! What a pair of ears!”

Then he frowns. Even if Mr. Leyden—who’s standing directly beneath the outside honker, can’t forget that—heard someone come out, how in God’s name did he know which someone it was?

“How’d you know it was me?” he asks.

“Only two people around here smell like marijuana in the morning,” Henry Leyden says. “One of them follows his morning smoke with Scope; the other—that’s you, Morris—just lets her rip.”

“Wow,” Morris says respectfully. “That is totally bitchrod.”

“I am totally bitchrod,” Henry agrees. He speaks softly and thoughtfully. “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. In regard to your morning rendezvous with the undeniably tasty Thai stick, may I offer an Appalachian aphorism?”

“Go, dude.” This is Morris’s first real discussion with Henry Leyden, who is every bit the head Morris has been told to expect. Every bit and more. It is no longer so hard to believe that he could have another identity . . . a secret identity, like Bruce Wayne. But still . . . this is just so pimp.

“What we do in our childhood forms as a habit,” Henry says in the same soft, totally un–George Rathbun voice. “That is my advice to you, Morris.”

“Yeah, totally,” Morris says. He has no clue what Mr. Leyden is talking about. But he slowly, shyly, extends the CD jewel box in his hand. For a moment, when Henry makes no move to take it, Morris feels crushed, all at once seven years old again and trying to wow his always-too-busy father with a picture he has spent all afternoon drawing in his room. Then he thinks, He’s blind, dickweed. He may be able to smell pot on your breath and he may have ears like a bat, but how’s he supposed to know you’re holding out a fucking CD?

Hesitantly, a bit frightened by his own temerity, Morris takes Henry’s wrist. He feels the man start a little, but then Leyden allows his hand to be guided to the slender box.

“Ah, a CD,” Henry says. “And what is it, pray tell?”

“You gotta play the seventh track tonight on your show,” Morris says. “Please.”

For the first time, Henry looks alarmed. He takes a drag on his cigarette, then drops it (without even looking—of course, ha ha) into the sand-filled plastic bucket by the door.

“What show could you possibly mean?” he asks.

Instead of answering directly, Morris makes a rapid little smacking noise with his lips, the sound of a small but voracious carnivore eating something tasty. And, to make things worse, he follows it with the Wisconsin Rat’s trademark line, as well known to the folks in Morris’s age group as George Rathbun’s hoarse “Even a blind man” cry is known to their elders: “Chew it up, eat it up, wash it down, it aaallll comes out the same place!”

He doesn’t do it very well, but there’s no question who he’s doing: the one and only Wisconsin Rat, whose evening drive-time program on KWLA-FM is famous in Coulee Country (except the word we probably want is “infamous”). KWLA is the tiny college FM station in La Riviere, hardly more than a smudge on the wallpaper of Wisconsin radio, but the Rat’s audience is huge.

And if anyone found out that the comfortable Brew Crew–rooting, Republican-voting, AM-broadcasting George Rathbun was also the Rat—who had once narrated a gleeful on-air evacuation of his bowels onto a Backstreet Boys CD—there could be trouble. Quite serious, possibly, resounding well beyond the tight-knit little radio community.

“What in God’s name would ever make you think that I’m the Wisconsin Rat, Morris?” Henry asks. “I barely know who you’re talking about. Who put such a weird idea in your head?”

“An informed source,” Morris says craftily.

He won’t give Howie Soule up, not even if they pull out his fingernails with red-hot tongs. Besides, Howie only found out by accident: went into the station crapper one day after Henry left and discovered that Henry’s wallet had fallen out of his back pocket while he was sitting on the throne. You’d have thought a fellow whose other senses were so obviously tightwired would have sensed the absence, but probably Henry’s mind had been on other things—he was obviously a heavy dude who undoubtedly spent his days getting through some heavy thoughts. In any case, there was a KWLA I.D. card in Henry’s wallet (which Howie had thumbed through “in the spirit of friendly curiosity,” as he put it), and on the line marked NAME, someone had stamped a little inkpad drawing of a rat. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

“I have never in my life so much as stepped through the door of KWLA,” Henry says, and this is the absolute truth. He makes the Wisconsin Rat tapes (among others) in his studio at home, then sends them in to the station from the downtown Mail Boxes Etc., where he rents under the name of Joe Strummer. The card with the rat stamped on it was more in the nature of an invitation from the KWLA staff than anything else, one he’s never taken up . . . but he kept the card.

“Have you become anyone else’s informed source, Morris?”

“Huh?”

“Have you told anyone that you think I’m the Wisconsin Rat?”

“No! Course not!” Which, as we all know, is what people always say. Luckily for Henry, in this case it happens to be true. So far, at least, but the day is still young.

“And you won’t, will you? Because rumors have a way of taking root. Just like certain bad habits.” Henry mimes puffing, pulling in smoke.

“I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Morris declares, with perhaps misplaced pride.

“I hope so. Because if you bruited this about, I’d have to kill you.”

Bruited, Morris thinks. Oh man, this guy is complete.

“Kill me, yeah,” Morris says, laughing.

“And eat you,” Henry says. He is not laughing; not even smiling.

“Yeah, right.” Morris laughs again, but this time the laugh sounds strangely forced to his own ears. “Like you’re Hannibal Lecture.”

“No, like I’m the Fisherman,” Henry says. He slowly turns his aviator sunglasses toward Morris. The sun reflects off them, for a moment turning them into rufous eyes of fire. Morris takes a step back without even realizing that he has done so. “Albert Fish liked to start with the ass, did you know that?”

“N—”

“Yes indeed. He claimed that a good piece of young ass was as sweet as a veal cutlet. His exact words. Written in a letter to the mother of one of his victims.”