Stephen King - Black House

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Black House

By Stephen King and Peter Straub

BY STEPHEN KING

Novel s

Carrie

'Salem 's Lot

The Shining

The Stand

The Dead Zone

Firestarter

Cujo

The Dark Tower:

The Gunslinger

Christine

Cycle of the Werewolf

Pet Sematary

The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

It

The Eyes of the Dragon

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Tower II:

The Drawing of the Three

The Dark Half

The Dark Tower III:

The Waste Lands

Needful Things

Gerald 's Game

Dolores Claiborne

Insomnia

Rose Madder

The Green Mile

Desperation

The Dark Tower IV:

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (1 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Wizard &Glass

Bag of Bones

Storm of the Century

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Hearts in Atlantis

Dreamcatcher

Black House (with Peter Straub)

E-books

Riding the Bullet

The Plant

Non-fiction

Danse Macabre

On Writing

Secret Windows

As Richard Bachman

Rage

The Long Walk

Roadwork

The Running Man

Thinner

The Regulators

Collections

Nightshift

Different Seasons

Skeleton Crew

Four Past Midnight

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Six Stories

Screenplays

Creepshow

Cat 's Eye

Silver Bullet

Maximum Overdrive

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (2 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Pet Sematary

Golden Years

Sleepwalkers

Storm of the Century

BY PETER STRAUB

Novels

Marriages

Under Venus

Julia

If You Could See Me Now

Ghost Story

Shadowland

Floating Dragon

The Talisman (with Stephen King)

Koko

Mystery

Mrs.God

The Throat

The Hellfire Club

Mr.X

Black House (with Stephen King)

Poetry

Open Air

Leeson Park &Belsize Square

Collections

Wild Animals

Houses Without Doors

Peter Straub's Ghosts (editor)

Magic Terror

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters, with the exception of a few well-

known historical figures, are products of the authors' imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Where real-life historical figures

appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not

intended to depict the actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (3 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Permission acknowledgments

I CAN'T GET STARTED, by Ira Gershwin andVernon Duke

All Rights o/b/o Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp.

WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

QUEEN OF THE WORLD, by Gary Louris, Tim O'Reagan, Bob Ezrin

& Under-Cut-Music Publ. Co. (PRS).

All Rights o/b/o Absinthe Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.

WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN COMES BOB, BOB BOBBIN' ALONG

Written by Harry Woods

All rights controlled by Callicoon Music.

HarperCollins Publishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith,

London W6 8JB

www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Published in the USA by

Random House 2001

Copyright (c) Stephen King and Peter Straub 2001

Stephen King and Peter Straub assert the moral right to

be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (4 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

ISBN 0 00 710042 6

Set in Bembo

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

Permission of the publishers.

For David Gernert and Ralph Vicinanza

You take me to a place I never go,

You send me kisses made of gold,

I'll place a crown upon your curls,

All hail the Queen of the World!

- The Jayhawks

Right Here and Now . . .

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (5 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Part One

WELCOME TO COULEE

COUNTRY

1

RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-

sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle,

above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural

border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new

millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies

ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six A.M., and the sun stands low in the

cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the

future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind

men of us all.

Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from

the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of

the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the

comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee

Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity

and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away.

Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the backyards and

roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These

unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers,

mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs

would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were

constructed as cheaply as possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the

fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been

replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired,

bushy-bearded, swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than the full

complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like most assumptions, this one embodies

an uneasy half-truth.

The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after

they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the

Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the

Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see "the world's largest six-pack," storage tanks painted over

with gigantic Kingsland Old-Time Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (6 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates

majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university

hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five: the name strikes them as

sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is "the Hegelian Scum." These gentlemen form an

interesting crew, and we will make their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the

hand-painted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned

buildings. The posters say: FISHERMAN, YOU BETTER PRAY TO YOUR STINKING GOD WE

DON'T CATCH YOU FIRST! REMEMBER AMY!

From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn, unpainted

facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blank-

faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its filmy picture window, a few

other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous.

These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward

territory although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher

horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the

rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water mark left

behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and

Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street.

Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transformation into

the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar &

Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Stutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business

in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of

shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video,

Regal Clothing, Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines and

greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the

Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall

Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into one-story wooden structures fronted with signs

advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becomes a highway that glides

eastward past a 7-Eleven, the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership

known locally as Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields. If we rise another hundred feet

into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted

hills furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level until you have come upon them,

meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields, and little towns - one of them, Centralia, no more than a

scattering of buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93.

Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of the night.

No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along

Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and pickup trucks that will begin

to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a mannerly little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn

behind the windows in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding

streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick buildings of two stories each

house, in west-east order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, M.D., the

local general practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (7 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son Funeral Home, now owned by a vast, funereal

empire centered in St. Louis; and the French Landing Post Office.

Separated from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear, the building at the

end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of red brick and two stories high but

longer than its immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron bars block the rear second-floor windows, and two

of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters

FLPD on their sides. The presence of police cars and barred windows seems incongruous in this rural

fastness - what sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely nothing worse than a little

shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight.

As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life, a red van with the words LA

RIVIERE HERALD on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the

mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into

gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings

have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors.

Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings.

The post office does not get a paper.

What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The

door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man in a pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne

belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest gleam in

the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as

newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at

the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far

enough to suggest that he is trying to read the headlines through the plastic. Evidently this technique

does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with

unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little

distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly,

and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the

interesting spectacle presented by Officer Dulac, go inside behind him.

A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal

stairs, one going down to a small locker room, shower stalls, and a firing range, the other upward to an

interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied. Somewhere near, a radio talk

show is playing at a level that seems too loud for a peaceful morning.

Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready room he has

just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden

table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant

noise. From the nearby studio of KDCU-AM, Your Talk Voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly

rabid George Rathbun has settled into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George

sounds too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy is just flat-out noisy -

that's part of his appeal.

Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebble-glass window on

which has been painted DALE GILBERTSON, CHIEF OF POLICE. Dale will not be in for another half

hour or so.

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (8 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

Two metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces

us, Tom Lund, a fair-haired officer of roughly his partner's age but without his appearance of having

been struck gleaming from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two fingers of

Bobby Dulac's right hand.

"All right," Lund says. "Okay. The latest installment."

"You thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here. I don't want to read

the damn thing."

Not deigning to look at the newspaper, Bobby sends the new day's issue of the La Riviere Herald

sailing in a flat, fast arc across ten feet of wooden floor with an athletic snap of his wrist, spins

rightward, takes a long stride, and positions himself in front of the wooden table a moment before Tom

Lund fields his throw. Bobby glares at the two names and various details scrawled on the long

chalkboard hanging on the wall behind the table. He is not pleased, Bobby Dulac; he looks as though he

might burst out of his uniform through the sheer force of his anger.

Fat and happy in the KDCU studio, George Rathbun yells, "Caller, gimme a break, willya, and get

your prescription fixed! Are we talking about the same game here? Caller - "

"Maybe Wendell got some sense and decided to lay off," Tom Lund says.

"Wendell," Bobby says. Because Lund can see only the sleek, dark back of his head, the little sneering

thing he does with his lip wastes motion, but he does it anyway.

"Caller, let me ask you this one question, and in all sincerity, I want you to be honest with me. Did

you actually see last night's game?"

"I didn't know Wendell was a big buddy of yours," Bobby says. "I didn't know you ever got as far

south as La Riviere. Here I was thinking your idea of a big night out was a pitcher of beer and trying to

break one hundred at the Arden Bowl-A-Drome, and now I find out you hang out with newspaper

reporters in college towns. Probably get down and dirty with the Wisconsin Rat, too, that guy on

KWLA. Do you pick up a lot of punk babes that way?"

The caller says he missed the first inning on account of he had to pick up his kid after a special

counseling session at Mount Hebron, but he sure saw everything after that.

"Did I say Wendell Green was a friend of mine?" asks Tom Lund. Over Bobby's left shoulder he can

see the first of the names on the chalkboard. His gaze helplessly focuses on it. "It's just, I met him after

the Kinderling case, and the guy didn't seem so bad. Actually, I kind of liked him. Actually, I wound up

feeling sorry for him. He wanted to do an interview with Hollywood, and Hollywood turned him down

flat."

Well, naturally he saw the extra innings, the hapless caller says, that's how he knows Pokey Reese

was safe.

"And as for the Wisconsin Rat, I wouldn't know him if I saw him, and I think that so-called music he

plays sounds like the worst bunch of crap I ever heard in my life. How did that scrawny pasty-face creep

get a radio show in the first place? On the college station? What does that tell you about our wonderful

UW-La Riviere, Bobby? What does it say about our whole society? Oh, I forgot, you like that shit."

"No, I like 311 and Korn, and you're so out of it you can't tell the difference between Jonathan Davis

and Dee Dee Ramone, but forget about that, all right?" Slowly, Bobby Dulac turns around and smiles at

his partner. "Stop stalling." His smile is none too pleasant.

"I'm stalling?" Tom Lund widens his eyes in a parody of wounded innocence. "Gee, was it me who

fired the paper across the room? No, I guess not."

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Step...ng%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (9 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt

"If you never laid eyes on the Wisconsin Rat, how come you know what he looks like?"

"Same way I know he has funny-colored hair and a pierced nose. Same way I know he wears a beat-

to-shit black leather jacket day in, day out, rain or shine."

Bobby waited.

"By the way he sounds. People's voices are full of information. A guy says, Looks like it'll turn out to

be a nice day, he tells you his whole life story. Want to know something else about Rat Boy? He hasn't

been to the dentist in six, seven years. His teeth look like shit."

From within KDCU's ugly cement-block structure next to the brewery on Peninsula Drive, via the

radio Dale Gilbertson donated to the station house long before either Tom Lund or Bobby Dulac first put

on their uniforms, comes good old dependable George Rathbun's patented bellow of genial outrage, a

passionate, inclusive uproar that for a hundred miles around causes breakfasting farmers to smile across

their tables at their wives and passing truckers to laugh out loud:

"I swear, caller, and this goes for my last last caller, too, and every single one of you out there, I love

you dearly, that is the honest truth, I love you like my momma loved her turnip patch, but sometimes

you people DRIVE ME CRAZY! Oh, boy. Top of the eleventh inning, two outs!

Six-seven, Reds! Men on second and third. Batter lines to short center field, Reese takes off from third,

good throw to the plate, clean tag, clean tag. A BLIND MAN COULDA MADE THAT CALL!"

"Hey, I thought it was a good tag, and I only heard it on the radio," says Tom Lund.

Both men are stalling, and they know it.

"In fact," shouts the hands-down most popular Talk Voice of the Coulee Country, "let me go out on a

limb here, boys and girls, let me make the following recommendation, okay? Let's replace every umpire

at Miller Park, hey, every umpire in the National League, with BLIND MEN! You know what, my

friends? I guarantee a sixty to seventy percent improvement in the accuracy of their calls. GIVE THE

JOB TO THOSE WHO CAN HANDLE IT - THE BLIND!"

Mirth suffuses Tom Lund's bland face. That George Rathbun, man, he's a hoot. Bobby says, "Come

on, okay?"

Grinning, Lund pulls the folded newspaper out of its wrapper and flattens it on his desk. His face

hardens; without altering its shape, his grin turns stony. "Oh, no. Oh, hell."

"What?"

Lund utters a shapeless groan and shakes his head.

"Jesus. I don't even want to know." Bobby rams his hands into his pockets, then pulls himself

perfectly upright, jerks his right hand free, and clamps it over his eyes. "I'm a blind guy, all right? Make

me an umpire - I don't wanna be a cop anymore."

Lund says nothing.

"It's a headline? Like a banner headline? How bad is it?" Bobby pulls his hand away from his eyes

and holds it suspended in midair.

"Well," Lund tells him, "it looks like Wendell didn't get some sense, after all, and he sure as hell

didn't decide to lay off. I can't believe I said I liked the dipshit."

"Wake up," Bobby says. "Nobody ever told you law enforcement officers and journalists are on

opposite sides of the fence?"

Tom Lund's ample torso tilts over his desk. A thick lateral crease like a scar divides his forehead, and

his stolid cheeks burn crimson. He aims a finger at Bobby Dulac. "This is one thing that really gets me

about you, Bobby. How long have you been here? Five, six months? Dale hired me four years ago, and

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...g%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Black%20House.txt (10 of 390)7/28/2005 9:10:24 PM

Stephen King - Black House

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: