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    Black House
    Black House
    Black House
    Ebook879 pages17 hours

    Black House

    By Stephen King and Peter Straub

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Talisman, “an intelligent…suspenseful page-turner” (The Wall Street Journal) from “two master craftsmen, each at the top of his game” (The Washington Post).

    Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother and her Territories “Twinner” from an agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories, and was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories.

    When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decades ago by a madman named Albert Fish, the killer is dubbed “the Fishman,” and Jack’s buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help the inexperienced force find him. But are these new killings merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack’s inexplicable waking dreams—if that is what they are—of robins’ eggs and red feathers? It’s almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As this cryptic message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he may find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted tract of forest, there to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPocket Books
    Release dateNov 6, 2012
    ISBN9781451698374
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch (May 2025), the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Black House

    4/5

    165 ratings53 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a mixed bag. Some reviewers absolutely loved it, considering it one of their all-time favorites. They found it exciting and couldn't put it down. However, there were negative reviews as well. Some readers felt that the book was a bad parody of the authors' own writing, with annoying narration and caricature-like characters. They also found the gore and scatological descriptions to be gratuitous and tasteless. Despite the mixed reviews, many readers still recommend this book and praise Stephen King's mastery of storytelling.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Good, classic King, but not the thrilling saga The Talisman was.
    • 4/5
      This was a good follow up to the Talisman. But it was not as you would expect...there was a lot more in "real world" rather than the "other world." and this lead the way to thinking that this was a different book. I found that the set up for a potential third book rather obvious and they could have done a better job of making it less so...even though I would read it if it came out!
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this book. So much so that I was disappointed in the following collaboration. Anyway, I'm not one to read books by multiple authors, I usually find the mixing of styles to be jarring to read. This book, however, was nicely written and didn't make me feel like I was reading two different stories.
    • 4/5
      If you can get through the first 150 pages it becomes a good book which races to the final conclusion.
    • 5/5
      Stephen King is a master of his craft as always.
    • 5/5
      Awesome! Easy read. although the ending was sad in its own way... couldn't let good well alone.
    • 5/5
      If anything, this sequel was even better than The Talisman!
    • 5/5
      After reading the Dark Tower series for the second time, I sought out the Dark Tower Universe books which lead me to Black House. After reading The Talisman I began reading Black House and while I felt the first 10-15% of the book were dreadfully boring compared to The Talisman I know that King always delivers, and he delivered big time.
      **SPOILER ALERT**
      I am always a sucker for nods and winks, with Ted Brautigan from HiA, the massive insights to End-World, and Mid-World and with Parkus being a fully-realized Gunslinger, The Crimson King, and more to do with nasty 'ol Ka I think any fan of The Gunslinger, and Dark Tower will enjoy the adventures of Jack Sawyer and I hope we get another book with Jason DeLoessian.
    • 5/5
      Great book difficult to put down, both creepy, and like science fiction at the same time.
    • 5/5
      Really Loved this book, one of my all time favorites!
    • 5/5
      I couldnt put it down. One of my new favorites
    • 5/5
      Solid choice here highly recommend. Check it out won't be disappointed
    • 5/5
      Soooo good! I liked The Talisman better. I can't wait for the next talisman book!
    • 1/5
      This book reads as though the authors deliberately sat down to collaborate on a bad parody of their own writing, knowing that it would be published anyway very likely to glowing reviews. The little 'postmodernism' of the narrator directly addressing the reader is particularly annoying. The characters resemble caricatures of stereotypes. The gore and scatological descriptions are gratuitous and tasteless. I liked both authors much more before I read this book than I do now. I sincerely wish I had not read this one. My respect for both authors is considerably diminished. I can't imagine this book being written as anything besides a joke. Again, in poor taste.
    • 5/5
      Almost as good as the first
    • 4/5
      a little long
    • 4/5
      This being my 54th book by SK, makes me one of em long time readers that SK talks about in his other books. So not one of his best works but not entirely a bad one either. So I had to concentrate reel hard to keep up with what was happening with the story, many re-reads were required as I lost track from time to time, this is not typical of SK books where once you start it is tunnel vision and you are immersed in the world that is created for you and you have to pull yourself out to come up for air so to speak. The start was pretty slow as well, and I wondered whether this was going to be the first SK book that I did not complete/like, reading some of the reviews here I would have not been the first to give up. So I dropped a star as a result of these criticisms. Having said that I pressed on and boy was I glad, as the story opens up and reveals itself, the twists and turns, and the plot draws you in. The character's are well developed and I really enjoyed the relationship between Jack and Henry especially the music references which is always like a hidden mickey and I stop pause lookup the song using my trusty music app which for me further enhances the enjoyment of the book and the telling of the story and I have learned a number of new songs that I enjoyed and will continue to enjoy in future. As a result every time I hear a song from the books it all comes come back like watching a movie in super fast speed, isn't it amazing how the mind and memory works! So should you read this book, well for me due to the investment that I have made in SK books so far its a no brainer but for the casual reader I not sure that the investment in time (+/-26hurs listening) is really worthwhile. Not sure if the story has been made into a series or movie yet but if I was you I would rather watch that.
    • 3/5
      I actually give this book 3.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      I've always considered Stephen King as the ultimate "Master of Horror". Team the Master up with Peter Straub ...another noteworthy horror writer and you should have a winner..right? Unfortuantly Black House just falls short. The killer is perverse,but not frightening at all. Actually he is more comical than ominous, and his thoughts read more like mischievous adolescent rage than visions in a psychotic mind. The fact that he is not in complete control of the evil occurring throughout the county also diminishes his character’s powers as evil. Overall The plot is predictable and the characters have neither the fear-factor of the clown from "It", nor the sheer evil presence of Tak from "Desperation". Even the dead cat from Pet Sematary had more punch. I expected more from these two authors. Worth 3 stars but no more IMO.
    • 4/5
      Even a blind man can see that this book is much better than it's predecessor, The Talisman! Jack Sawyer is back! Now he is a coppiceman and he must stop the Fisherman! And Gorg and Mr. Munshun too! This is a darn good read all on its own, for the first 400+ pages or so. Then it gets all Dark Towery, but still good. And top notch ending too!
    • 3/5
      Black House is the sequel to The Talisman. It doesn't feel like it, though. The style is very different, and slightly odd, emphasising the nature of the reader as observer. It feels to me like that gimmick gets fairly tired and also made me keep some distance from the characters, instead of losing myself in them as usual. It's also different in tone to The Talisman: it feels darker. I know a lot of bad things happen in The Talisman, but Black House has more of it. I didn't like it as much, even though I read it much faster. It was nice to see Jack Sawyer again, but so much time has passed for him that he doesn't quite feel like the boy we knew at all. I didn't really care about his love story, either: I didn't really see the point in it, plot-wise. That goes for several other points in this book -- sometimes it was just too wordy.

      One thing I loved a lot about this book, though, was Henry Leyden. I believed in him as a character, and in Jack's feelings for him, and I nearly cried when he was hurt. Some of the deaths in this book do still hit you hard, but I didn't find many of the characters all that memorable. More could have been done with Dale and the Beez, etc. But Henry was brilliant.

      I also didn't like the constant references to the Dark Tower. Maybe if I'd finished reading that series, I'd enjoy the little nods to it, but it felt like it wasn't necessary for this story, didn't quite fit, and I feel like Stephen King is far too much in love with that creation of his.

      I feel like if this book had been pared down a bit, or characters like Henry getting bigger parts, or more characters like Henry, I'd have enjoyed it a lot. As it was, it was fun enough to read, but it wasn't The Talisman or particularly like The Talisman, and I'm not sure if I'd have read it without that connection.

      (Probably. Who am I kidding? I'm reading basically everything Stephen King has written.)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Audio version. I remember the first time I read this, I found the style of the narration incredibly irritating. If this had not been a Stephen King story, I'd have abandoned it before finishing the first chapter. But it *is* SK, and more importantly, the sequel to The Talisman. So I had to finish it. Rereading it many years later, it's still irritating, but Frank Muller's sublime voice makes it better. A little. And of course the story overcomes the obnoxious style and adds to the Dark Tower universe. But I'm sure glad this is the only story where we fly over scenes and observe them with the narrator. Bleh.
    • 2/5
      I'm not really a Stephen King fan I think. It had a decent beginning and ending, but it was bogged down by too much trivial, strange information.
    • 2/5
      King's most schitzophrenic book. I started this book 3 times before I finally made it past the first 100 pages of inexplicable narration (I'm sure this was Straub's contribution). Then it becomes a terrific supernatural police procedural. The last act is a Dark Tower tie-in that is just bizarre. Not looking forward to a 3rd book in this series.
    • 3/5
      I like thorough characterization as much as the next person, but is it really necessary to see the same scene from five different points of view when all those different points of view are having the same damn reaction? And the constant smug references to Bleak House got a little thin after a while. Other than that, pretty solid Stephen King fare, lots of Dark Tower references and some marginally-to-mildly-creepy stuff. Decent time-waster.
    • 3/5
      Six-word review: The crime is not the mystery.Extended review:Fie. Either this author doesn't play fair or the marketers, promoters, and cover blurb writers are misrepresenting her work.This second novel in the series billed as "Simon Serrailler mysteries" shows us a good deal more of the difficult, elusive character of Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler than did the first installment, in which he was little more than a peripheral presence. But here again we don't see him solving any crimes. I'm starting to wonder if we ever will.Structured similarly to the first novel of the series, this book unfolds episodically from the points of view of several characters each in their turn, not always giving any indication as to which of them is important or why. I almost said "important to the plot," except that as before there isn't much of a plot.There's nothing wrong with a character-driven story, and this one is certainly that. But again, a novel billed as a mystery and featuring police detectives as principal characters gives rise to certain expectations. If I'm disappointed in the conclusion, the author may not be at fault, but I must ask: is the genre label correctly applied?If I say much more, I will be guilty of publishing spoilers. So I'll just add that my appetite for continuing with the series has diminished. Perhaps my curiosity about the development of the Serrailler character himself will be enough to lure me on, and perhaps it won't. If I continue, however, it will be without my usual confidence that the conventional promises will be fulfilled.
    • 4/5
      Sorry to say, this book sat on my shelf for far too long, a real sin since both Stephen King and Peter Straub are just about my favorite writers ever. King, of course, is the King of Horror, but I think Straub is his equal, if not his better. Straub’s GHOST STORY and FLOATIING DRAGON are among the finest reading experiences of my life. Each man has a distinct style, King is the true populist and master of gore; Straub is the more elegant and subtle writer, but he knows how to deliver a real shock to the reader. And for us horror fans, when these two masters of the genre teamed back in the 80’s to write, THE TALISMAN, an epic fantasy of alternate worlds with great undertones of horror, it was pure heaven. BLACK HOUSE, a sequel of sorts, was written fifteen years later and came out in 2001; in it, the boy hero of that earlier book, Jack Sawyer, is a grown man in his 30’s, a retired cop living in the small Wisconsin town of French Landing, his memories of that childhood adventure (when he traveled across The Territories to save his dying mother) are long forgotten. But the past won’t stay buried, as French Landing is plagued by a child killer reminiscent of the infamous Albert Fish, so much so that he has been nicknamed, The Fisherman, and the harried local police chief calls on Jack to help solve this horrific case. Soon, Jack is on the trail of the killer with the help of blind local Deejay and a motorcycle gang of philosophers, and regaining his memories of his 13 year old self in The Territories. He will need to do so because The Fisherman is a creature of this alternate realm as well, where he serves the will of The Crimson King, a malevolent character from King’s THE DARK TOWER series. In the end, if Jack is to save the young son of a woman he has fallen in love with, Jack Sawyer, will have enter the Black House, a portal to the malign world at the center of the Dark Tower, and save not only The Fisherman’s latest victim, but save a universe of worlds as well. It has been many a year since I first read THE TALISMAN, and BLACK HOUSE is not a straight up sequel, but any reader who has not read the former book will have trouble getting through the latter. Some people might be put off by the style of the book, where the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader; not just any author could pull this off, but I think King and Straub do it expertly. Fans of the writers will try and dissect the book to find out what is King and what is Straub; the Wisconsin setting has been used by Straub in other books (a character from his IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW is referenced), while the aged monstrous child-killer, Charles Burnside, could easily be a creation of King. Both writers have a incredible talent for creating a fictional place, especially small American towns where evil is rampant just out of sight, and we get know French Landing so well, including its seedy bars and boarding houses, along with a convenience store, a nursing home and the streets that lead into the countryside. And both writer’s uncanny touch at characterization is well in evidence, as even minor characters are vividly realized; among them, Chipper Maxton, the dishonest nursing home owner; Wendell Green, a hateful reporter; Beezer St. Pierre, grieving father and head of the motorcycle gang; Tyler Marshall, one of the bravest little boys anyone will ever meet between the pages of a novel. I think everyone’s favorite will be Henry Leydon, the blind radio man and one cool cat. A lot of readers will find this book to be overwritten, scenes go on for pages and pages as the writers take their time getting where they are going, but nobody uses words like King and Straub and to such great effect. The plot of a small town overwhelmed by an evil force is a horror story trope by now, but it is one practically invented by King and Straub. Even if the book, which comes in at more than 600 pages, is a little dense and may take some effort to get into, it is well worth it, for BLACK HOUSE is a great horror read. King and Straub have promised a third Jack Sawyer book, after sixteen years of waiting, I think it is about time.
    • 3/5
      this book is supposedly the sequel to the talisman - sure if you say so...i was expecting to be riveted, horrified, swept away. instead i was just expectant.and ultimately disappointed.a dull read considering the powerhouse authors involved. peter straub obviously penned the lion's share of this tale. he should have let stephen take the wheel a bit more. talisman was a five star read. this one, sadly, a three.
    • 4/5
      ** spoiler alert ** I was really looking forward to reading this book since I loved The Talisman so much. But I was kind of disappointed. The Talisman was written in King's voice which is part of the reason I loved it so much. But King's voice is somewhat absent at the beginning of Black House. It steadily grows stronger throughout the book though and it made the ending great although sad. I've never read anything else by Straub and I don't think I will. His writing just sounds so.... fake. And forced. And the beginning doesn't flow like it did in The Talisman.Black House is also mostly horror unlike The Talisman, which was sci-fi. It's incredibly gory.The storyline was amazing. I felt all the feelings I'm sure the authors wanted the reader to. I could have cried when Henry died and at the end when Jack couldn't go back to his home world. And every time they mentioned Black House or Burnside eating all those kids, I got chills up my spine.If it wasn't for Straub this book would have gotten five stars. That said, everything else earned it four.
    • 4/5
      Interesting read. It might have been useful to have read Talisman first, which I haven't.

    Book preview

    Black House - Stephen King

    RIGHT HERE AND NOW…

    ONE

    WELCOME TO COULEE COUNTY

    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 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 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.

    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."

    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 when him and Hollywood put the cuffs on Mr. Thornberg Kinderling, which was the biggest case in this county for maybe thirty years, I can’t claim any credit, but at least I pulled my weight. I helped put some of the pieces together."

    One of the pieces, Bobby says.

    I reminded Dale about the girl bartender at the Taproom, and Dale told Hollywood, and Hollywood talked to the girl, and that was a big, big piece. It helped get him. So don’t you talk to me that way.

    Bobby Dulac assumes a look of completely hypothetical contrition. Sorry, Tom. I guess I’m kind of wound up and beat to shit at the same time. What he thinks is: So you got a couple years on me and you once gave Dale this crappy little bit of information, so what, I’m a better cop than you’ll ever be. How heroic were you last night, anyhow?

    At 11:15 the previous night, Armand Beezer St. Pierre and his fellow travelers in the Thunder Five had roared up from Nailhouse Row to surge into the police station and demand of its three occupants, each of whom had worked an eighteen-hour shift, exact details of the progress they were making on the issue that most concerned them all. What the hell was going on here? What about the third one, huh, what about Irma Freneau? Had they found her yet? Did these clowns have anything, or were they still just blowing smoke? You need help? Beezer roared, Then deputize us, we’ll give you all the goddamn help you need and then some. A giant named Mouse had strolled smirking up to Bobby Dulac and kept on strolling, jumbo belly to six-pack belly, until Bobby was backed up against a filing cabinet, whereupon the giant Mouse had mysteriously inquired, in a cloud of beer and marijuana, whether Bobby had ever dipped into the works of a gentleman named Jacques Derrida. When Bobby replied that he had never heard of the gentleman, Mouse said, No shit, Sherlock, and stepped aside to glare at the names on the chalkboard. Half an hour later, Beezer, Mouse, and their companions were sent away unsatisfied, undeputized, but pacified, and Dale Gilbertson said he had to go home and get some sleep, but Tom ought to remain, just in case. The regular night men had both found excuses not to come in. Bobby said he would stay, too, no problem, Chief, which is why we find these two men in the station so early in the morning.

    Give it to me, says Bobby Dulac.

    Lund picks up the paper, turns it around, and holds it out for Bobby to see: FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN FRENCH LANDING AREA, reads the headline over an article that takes up three columns on the top left-hand side of the front page. The columns of type have been printed against a background of pale blue, and a black border separates them from the remainder of the page. Beneath the head, in smaller print, runs the line Identity of Psycho Killer Baffles Police. Underneath the subhead, a line in even smaller print attributes the article to Wendell Green, with the support of the editorial staff.

    The Fisherman, Bobby says. "Right from the start, your friend has his thumb up his butt. The Fisherman, the Fisherman, the Fisherman. If I all of a sudden turned into a fifty-foot ape and started stomping on buildings, would you call me King Kong? Lund lowers the newspaper and smiles. Okay, Bobby allows, bad example. Say I held up a couple banks. Would you call me John Dillinger?"

    Well, says Lund, smiling even more broadly, they say Dillinger’s tool was so humongous, they put it in a jar in the Smithsonian. So…

    Read me the first sentence, Bobby says.

    Tom Lund looks down and reads: ‘As the police in French Landing fail to discover any leads to the identity of the fiendish double murderer and sex criminal this reporter has dubbed the Fisherman, the grim specters of fear, despair, and suspicion run increasingly rampant through the streets of that little town, and from there out into the farms and villages throughout French County, darkening by their touch every portion of the Coulee Country.’

    Just what we need, Bobby says. "Jee-zus!" And in an instant has crossed the room and is leaning over Tom Lund’s shoulder, reading the Herald’s front page with his hand resting on the butt of his Glock, as if ready to drill a hole in the article right here and now.

    " ‘Our traditions of trust and good neighborliness, our habit of extending warmth and generosity to all [writes Wendell Green, editorializing like crazy], are eroding daily under the corrosive onslaught of these dread emotions. Fear, despair, and suspicion are poisonous to the soul of communities large and small, for they turn neighbor against neighbor and make a mockery of civility.

    " ‘Two children have been foully murdered and their remains partially consumed. Now a third child has disappeared. Eight-year-old Amy St. Pierre and seven-year-old Johnny Irkenham fell victim to the passions of a monster in human form. Neither will know the happiness of adolescence or the satisfactions of adulthood. Their grieving parents will never know the grandchildren they would have cherished. The parents of Amy and Johnny’s playmates shelter their children within the safety of their own homes, as do parents whose children never knew the deceased. As a result, summer playgroups and other programs for young children have been canceled in virtually every township and municipality in French County.

    ‘With the disappearance of ten-year-old Irma Freneau seven days after the death of Amy St. Pierre and only three after that of Johnny Irkenham, public patience has grown dangerously thin. As this correspondent has already reported, Merlin Graasheimer, fifty-two, an unemployed farm laborer of no fixed abode, was set upon and beaten by an unidentified group of men in a Grainger side street late Tuesday evening. Another such episode occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning, when Elvar Praetorious, thirty-six, a Swedish tourist traveling alone, was assaulted by three men, again unidentified, while asleep in La Riviere’s Leif Eriksson Park. Graasheimer and Praetorious required only routine medical attention, but future incidents of vigilantism will almost certainly end more seriously.’

    Tom Lund looks down at the next paragraph, which describes the Freneau girl’s abrupt disappearance from a Chase Street sidewalk, and pushes himself away from his desk.

    Bobby Dulac reads silently for a time, then says, "You gotta hear this shit, Tom. This is how he winds up:

    " ‘When will the Fisherman strike again?

    " ‘For he will strike again, my friends, make no mistake.

    ‘And when will French Landing’s chief of police, Dale Gilbertson, do his duty and rescue the citizens of this county from the obscene savagery of the Fisherman and the understandable violence produced by his own inaction?’

    Bobby Dulac stamps to the middle of the room. His color has heightened. He inhales, then exhales a magnificent quantity of oxygen. "How about the next time the Fisherman strikes," Bobby says, how about he goes right up Wendell Green’s flabby rear end?

    I’m with you, says Tom Lund. Can you believe that shinola? ‘Understandable violence’? He’s telling people it’s okay to mess with anyone who looks suspicious!

    Bobby levels an index finger at Lund. "I personally am going to nail this guy. That is a promise. I’ll bring him down, alive or dead. In case Lund may have missed the point, he repeats, Personally."

    Wisely choosing not to speak the words that first come to his mind, Tom Lund nods his head. The finger is still pointing. He says, If you want some help with that, maybe you should talk to Hollywood. Dale didn’t have no luck, but could be you’d do better.

    Bobby waves this notion away. No need. Dale and me… and you, too, of course, we got it covered. But I personally am going to get this guy. That is a guarantee. He pauses for a second. Besides, Hollywood retired when he moved here, or did you forget?

    Hollywood’s too young to retire, Lund says. Even in cop years, the guy is practically a baby. So you must be the next thing to a fetus.

    And on their cackle of shared laughter, we float away and out of the ready room and back into the sky, where we glide one block farther north, to Queen Street.

    Moving a few blocks east we find, beneath us, a low, rambling structure branching out from a central hub that occupies, with its wide, rising breadth of lawn dotted here and there with tall oaks and maples, the whole of a block lined with bushy hedges in need of a good trim. Obviously an institution of some kind, the structure at first resembles a progressive elementary school in which the various wings represent classrooms without walls, the square central hub the dining room and administrative offices. When we drift downward, we hear George Rathbun’s genial bellow rising toward us from several windows. The big glass front door swings open, and a trim woman in cat’s-eye glasses comes out into the bright morning, holding a poster in one hand and a roll of tape in the other. She immediately turns around and, with quick, efficient gestures, fixes the poster to the door. Sunlight reflects from a smoky gemstone the size of a hazelnut on the third finger of her right hand.

    While she takes a moment to admire her work, we can peer over her crisp shoulder and see that the poster announces, in a cheerful burst of hand-drawn balloons, that TODAY IS STRAWBERRY FEST!!!; when the woman walks back inside, we take in the presence, in the portion of the entry visible just beneath the giddy poster, of two or three folded wheelchairs. Beyond the wheelchairs, the woman, whose chestnut hair has been pinned back into an architectural whorl, strides on her high-heeled pumps through a pleasant lobby with blond wooden chairs and matching tables strewn artfully with magazines, marches past a kind of unmanned guardpost or reception desk before a handsome fieldstone wall, and vanishes, with the trace of a skip, through a burnished door marked WILLIAM MAXTON, DIRECTOR.

    What kind of school is this? Why is it open for business, why is it putting on festivals, in the middle of July?

    We could call it a graduate school, for those who reside here have graduated from every stage of their existences but the last, which they live out, day after day, under the careless stewardship of Mr. William Chipper Maxton, Director. This is the Maxton Elder Care Facility, once—in a more innocent time, and before the cosmetic renovations done in the mid-eighties—known as the Maxton Nursing Home, which was owned and managed by its founder, Herbert Maxton, Chipper’s father. Herbert was a decent if wishy-washy man who, it is safe to say, would be appalled by some of the things the sole fruit of his loins gets up to. Chipper never wanted to take over the family playpen, as he calls it, with its freight of gummers, zombies, bed wetters, and droolies, and after getting an accounting degree at UW–La Riviere (with hard-earned minors in promiscuity, gambling, and beer drinking), our boy accepted a position with the Madison, Wisconsin, office of the Internal Revenue Service, largely for the purpose of learning how to steal from the government undetected. Five years with the IRS taught him much that was useful, but when his subsequent career as a freelancer failed to match his ambitions, he yielded to his father’s increasingly frail entreaties and threw in his lot with the undead and the droolies. With a certain grim relish, Chipper acknowledged that despite a woeful shortage of glamour, his father’s business would at least provide him with the opportunity to steal from the clients and the government alike.

    Let us flow in through the big glass doors, cross the handsome lobby (noting, as we do so, the mingled odors of air freshener and ammonia that pervade even the public areas of all such institutions), pass through the door bearing Chipper’s name, and find out what that well-arranged young woman is doing here so early.

    Beyond Chipper’s door lies a windowless cubicle equipped with a desk, a coatrack, and a small bookshelf crowded with computer printouts, pamphlets, and flyers. A door stands open beside the desk. Through the opening, we see a much larger office, paneled in the same burnished wood as the director’s door and containing leather chairs, a glass-topped coffee table, and an oatmeal-colored sofa. At its far end looms a vast desk untidily heaped with papers and so deeply polished it seems nearly to glow.

    Our young woman, whose name is Rebecca Vilas, sits perched on the edge of this desk, her legs crossed in a particularly architectural fashion. One knee folds over the other, and the calves form two nicely molded, roughly parallel lines running down to the triangular tips of the black high-heeled pumps, one of which points to four o’clock and the other to six. Rebecca Vilas, we gather, has arranged herself to be seen, has struck a pose intended to be appreciated, though certainly not by us. Behind the cat’s-eye glasses, her eyes look skeptical and amused, but we cannot see what has aroused these emotions. We assume that she is Chipper’s secretary, and this assumption, too, expresses only half of the truth: as the ease and irony of her attitude imply, Ms. Vilas’s duties have long extended beyond the purely secretarial. (We might speculate about the source of that nice ring she is wearing; as long as our minds are in the gutter, we will be right on the money.)

    We float through the open door, follow the direction of Rebecca’s increasingly impatient gaze, and find ourselves staring at the sturdy, khaki-clad rump of her kneeling employer, who has thrust his head and shoulders into a good-sized safe, in which we glimpse stacks of record books and a number of manila envelopes apparently stuffed with currency. A few bills flop out of these envelopes as Chipper pulls them from the safe.

    You did the sign, the poster thing? he asks without turning around.

    Aye, aye, says Rebecca Vilas. And a splendid day it is we shall be havin’ for the great occasion, too, as is only roight and proper. Her Irish accent is surprisingly good, if a bit generic. She has never been anywhere more exotic than Atlantic City, where Chipper used his frequent-flier miles to escort her for five enchanted days two years before. She learned the accent from old movies.

    I hate Strawberry Fest, Chipper says, dredging the last of the envelopes from the safe. "The zombies’ wives and children mill around all afternoon, cranking them up so we have to sedate them into comas just to get some peace. And if you want to know the truth, I hate balloons." He dumps the money onto the carpet and begins to sort the bills into stacks of various denominations.

    Only Oi was wonderin’, in me simple country manner, says Rebecca, why Oi should be requested to appear at the crack o’ dawn on the grand day.

    Know what else I hate? The whole music thing. Singing zombies and that stupid deejay. Symphonic Stan with his big-band records, whoo boy, talk about thrills.

    I assume, Rebecca says, dropping the stage-Irish accent, you want me to do something with that money before the action begins.

    Time for another journey to Miller. An account under a fictitious name in the State Provident Bank in Miller, forty miles away, receives regular deposits of cash skimmed from patients’ funds intended to pay for extra goods and services. Chipper turns around on his knees with his hands full of money and looks up at Rebecca. He sinks back down to his heels and lets his hands fall into his lap. Boy, do you have great legs. Legs like that, you ought to be famous.

    I thought you’d never notice, Rebecca says.

    Chipper Maxton is forty-two years old. He has good teeth, all his hair, a wide, sincere face, and narrow brown eyes that always look a little damp. He also has two kids, Trey, nine, and Ashley, seven and recently diagnosed with ADD, a matter Chipper figures is going to cost him maybe two thousand a year in pills alone. And of course he has a wife, his life’s partner, Marion, thirty-nine years of age, five foot five, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds. In addition to these blessings, as of last night Chipper owes his bookie $13,000, the result of an unwise investment in the Brewers game George Rathbun is still bellowing about. He has noticed, oh, yes he has, Chipper has noticed Ms. Vilas’s splendidly cantilevered legs.

    Before you go over there, he says, I was thinking we could kind of stretch out on the sofa and fool around.

    Ah, Rebecca says. Fool around how, exactly?

    Gobble, gobble, gobble, Chipper says, grinning like a satyr.

    You romantic devil, you, says Rebecca, a remark that utterly escapes her employer. Chipper thinks he actually is being romantic.

    She slides elegantly down from her perch, and Chipper pushes himself inelegantly upright and closes the safe door with his foot. Eyes shining damply, he takes a couple of thuggish, strutting strides across the carpet, wraps one arm around Rebecca Vilas’s slender waist and with the other slides the fat manila envelopes onto the desk. He is yanking at his belt even before he begins to pull Rebecca toward the sofa.

    So can I see him? says clever Rebecca, who understands exactly how to turn her lover’s brains to porridge…

    … and before Chipper obliges her, we do the sensible thing and float out into the lobby, which is still empty. A corridor to the left of the reception desk takes us to two large, blond, glass-inset doors marked DAISY and BLUEBELL, the names of the wings to which they give entrance. Far down the gray length of Bluebell, a man in baggy coveralls dribbles ash from his cigarette onto the tiles over which he is dragging, with exquisite slowness, a filthy mop. We move into Daisy.

    The functional parts of Maxton’s are a great deal less attractive than the public areas. Numbered doors line both sides of the corridor. Hand-lettered cards in plastic holders beneath the numerals give the names of the residents. Four doors along, a desk at which a burly male attendant in an unclean white uniform sits dozing upright faces the entrances to the men’s and women’s bathrooms—at Maxton’s, only the most expensive rooms, those on the other side of the lobby, in Asphodel, provide anything but a sink. Dirty mop-swirls harden and dry all up and down the tiled floor, which stretches out before us to improbable length. Here, too, the walls and air seem the same shade of gray. If we look closely at the edges of the hallway, at the juncture of the walls and the ceiling, we see spiderwebs, old stains, accumulations of grime. Pine-Sol, ammonia, urine, and worse scent the atmosphere. As an elderly lady in Bluebell wing likes to say, when you live with a bunch of people who are old and incontinent, you never get far from the smell of caca.

    The rooms themselves vary according to the conditions and capacities of their inhabitants. Since nearly everyone is asleep, we can glance into a few of these quarters. Here in D10, a single room two doors past the dozing aide, old Alice Weathers lies (snoring gently, dreaming of dancing in perfect partnership with Fred Astaire across a white marble floor) surrounded by so much of her former life that she must navigate past the chairs and end tables to maneuver from the door to her bed. Alice still possesses even more of her wits than she does her old furniture, and she cleans her room herself, immaculately. Next door in D12, two old farmers named Thorvaldson and Jesperson, who have not spoken to each other in years, sleep, separated by a thin curtain, in a bright clutter of family photographs and grandchildren’s drawings.

    Farther down the hallway, D18 presents a spectacle completely opposite to the clean, crowded jumble of D10, just as its inhabitant, a man known as Charles Burnside, could be considered the polar opposite of Alice Weathers. In D18, there are no end tables, hutches, overstuffed chairs, gilded mirrors, lamps, woven rugs, or velvet curtains: this barren room contains only a metal bed, a plastic chair, and a chest of drawers. No photographs of children and grandchildren stand atop the chest, and no crayon drawings of blocky houses and stick figures decorate the walls. Mr. Burnside has no interest in housekeeping, and a thin layer of dust covers the floor, the windowsill, and the chest’s bare top. D18 is bereft of history, empty of personality; it seems as brutal and soulless as a prison cell. A powerful smell of excrement contaminates the air.

    For all the entertainment offered by Chipper Maxton and all the charm of Alice Weathers, it is Charles Burnside, Burny, we have most come to see.

    2

    Chipper’s background we know. Alice arrived at Maxton’s from a big house on Gale Street, the old part of Gale Street, where she outlived two husbands, raised five sons, and taught piano to four generations of French Landing children, none of whom ever became professional pianists but who all remember her fondly and think of her with affection. Alice came to this place as most people do, in a car driven by one of her children and with a mixture of reluctance and surrender. She had become too old to live alone in the big house in the old section of Gale Street; she had two grown, married sons who were kind enough, but she could not tolerate adding to their cares. Alice Weathers had spent her entire life in French Landing, and she had no desire to live anywhere else; in a way, she had always known that she would end her days in Maxton’s, which though not at all luxurious was agreeable enough. On the day her son Martin had driven her over to inspect the place, she had realized that she knew at least half the people there.

    Unlike Alice, Charles Burnside, the tall, skinny old man lying covered by a sheet before us in his metal bed, is not in full possession of his wits, nor is he dreaming of Fred Astaire. The veiny expanse of his bald, narrow head curves down to eyebrows like tangles of gray wire, beneath which, on either side of the fleshy hook of his nose, two narrow eyes shine at his north-facing window and the expanse of woods beyond Maxton’s. Alone of all the residents of Daisy wing, Burny is not asleep. His eyes gleam, and his lips are wormed into a bizarre smile—but these details mean nothing, for Charles Burnside’s mind may be as empty as his room. Burny has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for many years, and what looks like an aggressive form of pleasure could be no more than physical satisfaction of a very basic kind. If we had failed to guess that he was the origin of the stench in this room, the stains rising into the sheet that covers him make it clear. He has just evacuated, massively, into his bed, and the very least we can say about his response to the situation is that he does not mind a bit; no sir, shame is not a part of this picture.

    But if—unlike delightful Alice—Burny no longer has a firm grasp on all of his marbles, neither is he a typical Alzheimer’s patient. He might spend a day or two mumbling into his oatmeal like the rest of Chipper’s zombies, then revitalize himself and join the living again. When not undead, he usually manages to get down the hall to the bathroom as necessary, and he spends hours either sneaking off on his own or patrolling the grounds, being unpleasant—in fact, offensive—to all and sundry. Restored from zombiehood, he is sly, secretive, rude, caustic, stubborn, foul-tongued, mean-spirited, and resentful, in other words—in the world according to Chipper—a blood brother to the other old men who reside at Maxton’s. Some of the nurses, aides, and attendants doubt that Burny really does have Alzheimer’s. They think he is faking it, opting out, lying low, deliberately making them work harder while he rests up and gathers his strength for yet another episode of unpleasantness. We can hardly blame them for their suspicion. If Burny has not been misdiagnosed, he is probably the only advanced Alzheimer’s patient in the world to experience prolonged spells of remission.

    In 1996, his seventy-eighth year, the man known as Charles Burnside arrived at Maxton’s in an ambulance from La Riviere General Hospital, not in a vehicle driven by a helpful relative. He had appeared in the emergency room one morning, carrying two heavy suitcases filled with dirty clothing and loudly demanding medical attention. His demands were not coherent, but they were clear. He claimed to have walked a considerable distance to reach the hospital, and he wanted the hospital to take care of him. The distance varied from telling to telling—ten miles, fifteen miles, twenty-five. He either had or had not spent some nights sleeping in fields or by the side of the road. His general condition and the way he smelled suggested that he had been wandering the countryside and sleeping rough for perhaps a week. If he had once had a wallet, he had lost it on his journey. La Riviere General cleaned him up, fed him, gave him a bed, and tried to extract a history. Most of his statements trailed off into disjointed babble, but in the absence of any documents, at least these facts seemed reliable: Burnside had been a carpenter, framer, and plasterer in the area for many years, working for himself and general contractors. An aunt who lived in the town of Blair had given him a room.

    He had walked the eighteen miles from Blair to La Riviere, then? No, he had started his walk somewhere else, he could not remember where, but it was ten miles away, no, twenty-five miles away, some town, and the people in that town were no-good jackass asswipes. What was the name of his aunt? Althea Burnside. What were her address and telephone number? No idea, couldn’t remember. Did his aunt have a job of any kind? Yes, she was a full-time jackass asswipe. But she had permitted him to live in her house? Who? Permitted what? Charles Burnside needed no one’s permission, he did what he damn well wanted. Had his aunt ordered him out of her house? Who are you talking about, you jackass asshole?

    The admitting M.D. entered an initial diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, pending the results of various tests, and the social worker got on the telephone and requested the address and telephone number of an Althea Burnside currently residing in Blair. The telephone company reported no listing for a person of that name in Blair, nor was she listed in Ettrick, Cochrane, Fountain, Sparta, Onalaska, Arden, La Riviere, or any other of the towns and cities within a fifty-mile radius. Widening her net, the social worker consulted the Records Office and the departments of Social Security, Motor Vehicle License, and Taxation for information about Althea and Charles Burnside. Of the two Altheas that popped up out of the system, one owned a diner in Butternut, far to the north of the state, and the other was a black woman who worked in a Milwaukee day-care center. Neither had any connection to the man in La Riviere General. The Charles Burnsides located by the records search were not the social worker’s Charles Burnside. Althea seemed not to exist. Charles, it seemed, was one of those elusive people who go through life without ever paying taxes, registering to vote, applying for a Social Security card, opening a bank account, joining the armed forces, getting a driver’s license, or spending a couple of seasons at the state farm.

    Another round of telephone calls resulted in the elusive Charles Burnside’s classification as a ward of the county and his admission to the Maxton Elder Care Facility until accommodation could be found at the state hospital in Whitehall. The ambulance conveyed Burnside to Maxton’s at the expense of the generous public, and grumpy Chipper slammed him into Daisy wing. Six weeks later, a bed opened up in a ward at the state hospital. Chipper received the telephone call a few minutes after the day’s mail brought him a check, drawn by an Althea Burnside on a bank in De Pere, for Charles Burnside’s maintenance at his facility. Althea Burnside’s address was a De Pere post office box. When the state hospital called, Chipper announced that in the spirit of civic duty he would be happy to continue Mr. Burnside’s status at Maxton Elder Care. The old fellow had just become his favorite patient. Without putting Chipper through any of the usual shenanigans, Burny had doubled his contribution to the income stream.

    For the next six years, the old man slid relentlessly into the darkness of Alzheimer’s. If he was faking, he gave a brilliant performance. Down he went, through the descending way stations of incontinence, incoherence, frequent outbursts of anger, loss of memory, loss of the ability to feed himself, loss of personality. He dwindled into infancy, then into vacuity, and spent his days strapped into a wheelchair. Chipper mourned the inevitable loss of a uniquely cooperative patient. Then, in the summer of the year before these events, the amazing resuscitation occurred. Animation returned to Burny’s slack face, and he began to utter vehement nonsense syllables. Abbalah! Gorg! Munshun! Gorg! He wanted to feed himself, he wanted to exercise his legs, to stagger around and reacquaint himself with his surroundings. Within a week, he was using English words to insist on wearing his own clothes and going to the bathroom by himself. He put on weight, gained strength, once again became a nuisance. Now, often in the same day, he passes back and forth between late-stage Alzheimer’s lifelessness and a guarded, gleaming surliness so healthy in a man of eighty-five it might be called robust. Burny is like a man who went to Lourdes and experienced a cure but left before it was complete. For Chipper, a miracle is a miracle. As long as the old creep stays alive, who cares if he is wandering the grounds or drooping against the restraining strap in his wheelchair?

    We move closer. We try to ignore the stench. We want to see what we can glean from the face of this curious fellow. It was never a pretty face, and now the skin is gray and the cheeks are sunken potholes. Prominent blue veins wind over the gray scalp, spotted as a plover’s egg. The rubbery-looking nose hooks slightly to the right, which adds to the impression of slyness and concealment. The wormy lips curl in a disquieting smile—the smile of an arsonist contemplating a burning building—that may after all be merely a grimace.

    Here is a true American loner, an internal vagrant, a creature of shabby rooms and cheap diners, of aimless journeys resentfully taken, a collector of wounds and injuries lovingly fingered and refingered. Here is a spy with no cause higher than himself. Burny’s real name is Carl Bierstone, and under this name he conducted, in Chicago, from his mid-twenties until the age of forty-six, a secret rampage, an unofficial war, during which he committed wretched deeds for the sake of the pleasures they afforded him. Carl Bierstone is Burny’s great secret, for he cannot allow anyone to know that this former incarnation, this earlier self, still lives inside his skin. Carl Bierstone’s awful pleasures, his foul toys, are also Burny’s, and he must keep them hidden in the darkness, where only he can find them.

    So is that the answer to Clipper’s miracle? That Carl Bierstone found a way to creep out through a seam in Burny’s zombiedom and assume control of the foundering ship? The human soul contains an infinity of rooms, after all, some of them vast, some no bigger than a broom closet, some locked, some few imbued with a radiant light. We bow closer to the veiny scalp, the wandering nose, the wire-brush eyebrows; we lean deeper into the stink to examine those interesting eyes. They are like black neon; they glitter like moonlight on a sodden riverbank. All in all, they look unsettlingly gleeful, but not particularly human. Not much help here.

    Burny’s lips move: he is still smiling, if you can call that rictus a smile, but he has begun to whisper. What is he saying?

    … dey are gowering in their bloody holes and govering their eyes, dey are whimbering in derror, my boor loss babbies…. No, no, dat won’t help, will it? Ah, zee de engynes, yezz, oh dose beeyoodiful beeyoodiful engynes, whad a zight, the beeyoodiful engynes againzt de vire, how they churrn, how dey churrn and burrn…. I zee a hole, yez yez dere id iz oho zo brighd around de etches zo folded back…

    Carl Bierstone may be reporting in, but his babble is not of much help. Let us follow the direction of Burny’s mud-glitter gaze in hopes that it might give us a hint as to what has so excited the old boy. Aroused, too, as we observe from the shape beneath the sheet. He and Chipper seem to be in sync here, since both are standing at the ready, except that instead of the benefit of Rebecca Vilas’s expert attentions, Burny’s only stimulation is the view through his window.

    The view hardly measures up to Ms. Vilas. Head slightly elevated upon a pillow, Charles Burnside looks raptly out over a brief expanse of lawn to a row of maple trees at the beginning of an extensive woods. Farther back tower the great, leafy heads of oaks. A few birch trunks shine candlelike in the inner darkness. From the height of the oaks and the variety of the trees, we know that we are regarding a remnant of the great climax forest that once blanketed this entire part of the country. Like all of the ancient forest’s traces, the woods extending north and east from Maxton’s speak of profound mysteries in a voice nearly too deep to be heard. Beneath its green canopy, time and serenity embrace bloodshed and death; violence roils on unseen, constantly, absorbed into every aspect of a hushed landscape that never pauses but moves with glacial lack of haste. The spangled, yielding floor covers millions of scattered bones in layer upon layer; all that grows and thrives here thrives on rot. Worlds within worlds churn, and great, systematic universes hum side by side, each ignorantly bringing abundance and catastrophe upon its unguessed-at neighbors.

    Does Burny contemplate these woods, is he enlivened by what he sees in them? Or, for that matter, is he in fact still asleep, and does Carl Bierstone caper behind Charles Burnside’s peculiar eyes?

    Burny whispers, Fogzes down fogzhulls, radz in radhulls, hyenaz over embdy stomachs wail, oho aha dis iz mozt-mozt gladzome my frenz, more an more de liddle wunz drudge drudge drudge oho on bledding foodzies…

    Let’s blow this pop stand, okay?

    Let’s sail away from old Burny’s ugly mouth—enough is enough. Let us seek the fresh air and fly north, over the woods. Foxes down foxholes and rats in ratholes may be wailing, true, that’s how it works, but we are not about to find any starving hyenas in western Wisconsin. Hyenas are always hungry anyhow. No one feels sorry for them, either. You’d have to be a real bleeding heart to pity a creature that does nothing but skulk around the periphery of other species until the moment when, grinning and chuckling, it can plunder their leftovers. Out we go, right through the roof.

    East of Maxton’s, the woods carpet the ground for something like a mile or two before a narrow dirt road curves in from Highway 35 like a careless parting in a thick head of hair. The woods continue for another hundred yards or so, then yield to a thirty-year-old housing development consisting of two streets. Basketball hoops, backyard swing sets, tricycles, bicycles, and vehicles by Fisher-Price clutter the driveways of the modest houses on Schubert and Gale. The children who will make use of them lie abed, dreaming of cotton candy, puppy dogs, home runs, excursions to distant territories, and other delightful infinitudes; also asleep are their anxious parents, doomed to become even more so after reading Wendell Green’s contribution to the front page of the day’s Herald.

    Something catches our eye—that narrow dirt road curving into the woods from Highway 35’s straightaway. More a lane than an actual road, its air of privacy seems at odds with its apparent uselessness. The lane loops off into the woods and, three-fourths of a mile later, comes to an end. What is its point, what is it for? From our height above the earth, the track resembles a faint line sketched by a No. 4 pencil—you practically need an eagle’s eye to see it at all—but someone went to considerable effort to draw this line through the woods. Trees had to be cut and cleared, stumps to be pried from the ground. If one man did it, the work would have taken months of sweaty, muscle-straining labor. The result of all that inhuman effort has the remarkable property of concealing itself, of evading the eye, so that it fades away if attention wanders, and must be located again. We might think of dwarfs and secret dwarf mines, the path to a dragon’s hidden cache of gold—a treasure so safe-guarded that access to it has been camouflaged by a magic spell. No, dwarf mines, dragon treasures, and magic spells are too childish, but when we drop down for a closer examination, we see that a weathered NO TRESPASSING sign stands at the beginning of the lane, proof that something is being guarded, even if it is merely privacy.

    Having noticed the sign, we look again at the end of the lane. In the darkness under the trees down there, one area seems murkier than the rest. Even as it shrinks back into the gloom, this area possesses an unnatural solidity that distinguishes it from the surrounding trees. Aha oho, we say to ourselves in an echo of Burny’s gibberish, what have we here, a wall of some kind? It seems that featureless. When we reach the midpoint in the curve of the lane, a triangular section of darkness all but obscured by the treetops abruptly defines itself as a peaked roof. Not until we are nearly upon it does the entire structure move into definition as a three-story wooden house, oddly shambling in structure, with a sagging front porch. This house has clearly stood empty for a long time, and after taking in its eccentricity, the first thing we notice is its inhospitability to new tenants. A second NO TRESPASSING sign, leaning sideways at an improbable angle against a newel post, merely underlines the impression given by the building itself.

    The peaked roof covers only the central section. To the left, a two-story extension retreats back into the woods. On the right, the building sprouts additions like outsized sheds, more like growths than afterthoughts. In both senses of the word, the building looks unbalanced: an off-kilter mind conceived it, then relentlessly brought it into off-center being. The intractable result deflects inquiry and resists interpretation. An odd, monolithic invulnerability emanates from the bricks and boards, despite the damage done by time and weather. Obviously built in search of seclusion, if not isolation, the house seems still to demand them.

    Oddest of all, from our vantage point the house appears to have been painted a uniform black—not only the boards, but every inch of the exterior, the porch, the trim, the rain gutters, even the windows. Black, from top to bottom. And that cannot be possible; in this guileless, good-hearted corner of the world, not even the most crazily misanthropic builder would turn his house into its own shadow. We float down to just above ground level and move nearer along the narrow lane…

    When we come close enough for reliable judgment, which is uncomfortably close, we find that misanthropy can go further than we had supposed. The house is not black now, but it used to be. What it has faded into makes us feel that we might have been too critical about the original color. The house has become the leaden gray-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hulls of wrecked ships. Black would be preferable to this utter lifelessness.

    We may

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