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 the 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: I 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 bannister 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,