This is not a place where you want to get lost.
Let us pass through rooms and nooks and corridors and crannies, safe in the knowledge that we can return to the outside world, the sane anti-slippage world, anytime we want (and yet we are still uneasy as we pass down flights of stairs that seem all but endless and along corridors that dwindle to a point in the distance). We hear an eternal low humming and the faint clash of weird machinery. We hear the idiot whistle of a constant wind either outside or on the floors above and below us. Sometimes we hear a faint, houndly barking that is undoubtedly the abbalah's devil dog, the one that did for poor old Mouse. Sometimes we hear the sardonic caw of a crow and understand that Gorg is here, too — somewhere.
We pass through rooms of ruin and rooms that are still furnished with a pale and rotten grandeur. Many of these are surely bigger than the whole house in which they hide. And eventually we come to a humble sitting room furnished with an elderly horsehair sofa and chairs of fading red velvet. There is a smell of noisome cooking in the air. (Somewhere close by is a kitchen we must never visit . . . not, that is, if we ever wish to sleep without nightmares again.) The electrical fixtures in here are at least seventy years old. How can that be, we ask, if Black House was built in the 1970s? The answer is simple: much of Black House — most of Black House — has been here much longer. The draperies in this room are heavy and faded. Except for the yellowed news clippings that have been taped to the ugly green wallpaper, it is a room that would not be out of place on the ground floor of the Nelson Hotel. It's a place that is simultaneously sinister and oddly banal, a fitting mirror for the imagination of the old monster who has gone to earth here, who lies sleeping on the horsehair sofa with the front of his shirt turning a sinister red. Black House is not his, although in his pathological grandiosity he believes differently (and Mr. Munshun has not disabused him of this belief ). This one room, however, is.
The clippings around him tell us all we need to know of Charles "Chummy" Burnside's lethal fascinations.
YES, I ATE HER, FISH DECLARES: New York Herald Tribune
BILLY GAFFNEY PLAYMATE AVERS "IT WAS THE GRAY MAN TOOK BILLY, IT WAS THE BOGEYMAN": New York World Telegram
GRACE BUDD HORROR CONTINUES: FISH CONFESSES!: Long Island Star
FISH ADMITS "ROASTING, EATING" WM GAFFNEY: New York American
FRITZ HAARMAN, SO-CALLED "BUTCHER OF HANOVER," EXECUTED FOR MURDER OF 24: New York World
WEREWOLF DECLARES: "I WAS DRIVEN BY LOVE, NOT LUST." HAARMAN DIES
UNREPENTANT: The Guardian
CANNIBAL OF HANOVER'S LAST LETTER: "YOU CANNOT KILL ME, I SHALL BE
AMONG YOU FOR ETERNITY": New York World
Wendell Green would love this stuff, would he not?
And there are more. God help us, there are so many more. Even Jeffrey Dahmer is here, declaring I WANTED ZOMBIES.
The figure on the couch begins to groan and stir.
"Way-gup, Burny!" This seems to come from thin air, not his mouth . . . although his lips move, like those of a second-rate ventriloquist.
Burny groans. His head turns to the left. "No . . . need to sleep. Everything . . . hurts."
The head turns to the right in a gesture of negation and Mr. Munshun speaks again. "Way-gup, dey vill be gummink. You must move der buu-uoy."
The head switches back the other way. Sleeping, Burny thinks Mr. Munshun is still safe inside his head. He has forgotten things are different here in Black House. Foolish Burny, now nearing the end of his usefulness! But not quite there yet.
"Can't . . . lea' me 'lone . . . stomach hurts . . . the blind man . . . f**king blind man hurt my stomach . . ."