“Suze!” Eddie shouted, and began to get to his feet.

“No!” she screamed back. “Do it! I got this sumbitch right where… right where I want him! Go on, Eddie! Bring the kid! Bring-” Coldness battered at the tender flesh between her legs. She grunted, fell backward.. then supported herself with one hand and thrust defiantly forward and upward. “Bring him through!”

Eddie looked uncertainly at Roland, who nodded. Eddie glanced at Susannah again, his eyes full of dark pain and darker fear, and then deliberately turned his back on both of them and fell to his knees again. He reached forward with the sharpened stick which had become a makeshift pencil, ignoring the cold rain falling on his arms and the back of his neck. The stick began to move, making lines and angles, creating a shape Roland knew at once.

It was a door.

26

JAKE REACHED OUT, PUT his hands on the splintery gate, and pushed. It swung slowly open on screaming, rust-clotted hinges. Ahead of him was an uneven brick path. Beyond the path was the porch. Beyond the porch was the door. It had been boarded shut.

He walked slowly toward the house, heart telegraphing fast dots and dashes in his throat. Weeds had grown up between the buckled bricks. He could hear them rustling against his bluejeans. All his senses seemed to have been turned up two notches. You’re not really going in there, are you? a panic-stricken voice in his head asked.

And the answer that occurred to him seemed both totally nuts and perfectly reasonable: All things serve the Beam.

The sign on the lawn read

ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

The yellowing, rust-stained square of paper nailed to one of the boards crisscrossing the front door was more succinct:

BY ORDER OF NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED

Jake paused at the foot of the steps, looking up at the door. He had heard voices in the vacant lot and now he could hear them again… but this was a choir of the damned, a babble of insane threats and equally insane promises. Yet he thought it was all one voice. The voice of the house; the voice of some monstrous doorkeeper, roused from its long unpeaceful sleep.

He thought briefly of his father’s Ruger, even considered pulling it out of his pack, but what good would it do? Behind him, traffic passed back and forth on Rhinehold Street and a woman was yelling for her daughter to stop holding hands with that boy and bring in the wash, but here was another world, one ruled by some bleak being over whom guns could have no power.

Be true, Jake-stand.

“Okay,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “Okay, I’ll try. But you better not drop me again.”

Slowly, he began to mount the porch steps.

27

THE BOARDS WHICH BARRED the door were old and rotten, the nails rusty. Jake grabbed hold of the top set at the point where they crossed each other and yanked. They came free with a squall that was the gate all over again. He tossed them over the porch rail and into an ancient flowerbed where only witchgrass and dogweed grew. He bent, grasped the lower crossing… and paused for a moment.

A hollow sound came through the door; the sound of some animal slobbering hungrily from deep inside a concrete pipe. Jake felt a sick sheen of sweat begin to break out on his cheeks and forehead. He was so frightened that he no longer felt precisely real; he seemed to have become a character in someone else’s bad dream.

The evil choir, the evil presence, was behind this door. The sound of it seeped out like syrup.

He yanked at die lower boards. They came free easily.

Of course. It wants me to come in. It’s hungry, and I’m supposed to be the main course.

A snatch of poetry occurred to him suddenly, something Ms. Avery had read to them. It was supposed to be about the plight of modern man, who was cut off from all his roots and traditions, but to Jake it suddenly seemed that the man who had written that poem must have seen this house: / will show you something different from either/Your shadow in the morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/I will show you…

“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust,” Jake muttered, and put his hand on the doorknob. And as he did, that clear sense of relief and surety flooded him again, the feeling that this was it, this time the door would open on that other world, he would see a sky untouched by smog and industrial smoke, and, on the far horizon, not the mountains but the hazy blue spires of some gorgeous unknown city.

He closed his fingers around the silver key in his pocket, hoping the door was locked so he could use it. It wasn’t. The hinges screamed and flakes of rust sifted down from their slowly revolving cylinders as the door opened. The smell of decay struck Jake like a physical blow: wet wood, spongy plaster, rotting laths, ancient stuffing. Below these smells was another-the smell of some beast’s lair. Ahead was a dank, shadowy hallway. To the left, a staircase pitched and yawed its crazy way into the upper shadows. Its collapsed banister lay splintered on the hallway floor, but Jake was not foolish enough to think it was just splinters he was looking at. There were bones in that litter, as well-the bones of small animals. Some did not look precisely like animal bones, and these Jake would not look at overlong; he knew he would never summon the courage to go further if he did. He paused on the threshold, screwing himself up to take the first step. He heard a faint, muffled sound, very hard and very rapid, and realized it was his own teeth chattering in his head.

Why doesn’t someone stop me? he thought wildly. Why doesn’t somebody passing on the sidewalk shout “Hey, you! You’re not supposed to be in there-can’tcha read?”

But he knew why. Pedestrians stuck mostly to the other side of this street, and those who came near this house did not linger.

Even if someone did happen to look, they wouldn’t see me, because I’m not really here. For better or worse, I’ve already left my world behind. I’ve started to cross over. His world is somewhere ahead. This…

This was the hell between.

Jake stepped into the corridor, and although he screamed when the door swung shut behind him with the sound of a mausoleum door being slammed, he wasn’t surprised.

Down deep, he wasn’t surprised at all.

28

ONCE UPON A TIME there had been a young woman named Detta Walker who liked to frequent the honky-tonks and roadhouses along Ridgeline Road outside of Nutley and on Route 88 down by the power-lines, outside of Amhigh. She had had legs in those days, and, as the song says, she knew how to use them. She would wear some tight cheap dress that looked like silk but wasn’t and dance with the white boys while the band played all those ofay party tunes like “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” and “The Hippy-Hippy Shake.” Eventually she would cut one of the honkeys out of the pack and let him lead her back to his car in the parking lot. There she would make out with him (one of the world’s great soul-kissers was Detta Walker, and no slouch with the old fingernails, either) until he was just about insane… and then she’d shut him down. What happened next? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? That was the game. Some of them wept and begged-all right, but not great. Some of them raved and roared, which was better.

And although she had been slapped upside the head, punched in the eye, spat upon, and once kicked in the ass so hard she had gone sprawling in the gravel parking lot of The Red Windmill, she had never been raped. They had all gone home with the blue balls, every damned ofay one of them. Which meant, in Detta Walker’s book, that she was the reigning champion, the undefeated queen. Of what? Of them. Of all those crewcut, button-down, tightass honkey motherfuckers.