Authors: Stephen King
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,
mon capitaine
,” 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 my 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-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 before he begins to pull Rebecca toward the sofa.
“So I can 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 entrance 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 the 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 window sill, 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.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming hardcover edition of
Black House
by Stephen King and Peter Straub. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1984 by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Excerpt from
Black House
by Stephen King and Peter Straub
© 2001 by Stephen King and Peter Straub
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Viking Penguin/G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1984.
Ballantine is a registered trademark and the Ballantine colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
First Ballantine Books Edition: August 2001
eISBN: 978-0-345-45240-5
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