“We all goin in,” Susannah said. She arched her back and slipped out of her wheelchair. “Any demon want to f**k wit’ me he goan find out he’s f**kin wit’ the finest. I th’ow him a f**k he ain’t never goan fgit.” As they passed between two of the tall stones and into the speaking circle, it began to rain.
As SOON AS JAKE saw the place, he understood two things: first, that he had seen it before, in dreams so terrible his conscious mind would not let him remember them; second, that it was a place of death and murder and madness. He was standing on the far corner of Rhinehold Street and Brooklyn Avenue, seventy yards from Henry and Eddie Dean, but even from where he was he could feel The Mansion ignoring them and reaching for him with its eager invisible hands, lie thought there were talons at the ends of those hands. Sharp ones. It wants me, and I can’t run away. It’s death to go in … but it’s madness not to. Because somewhere inside that place is a locked door. I have the key that will open it, and the only salvation I can hope for is on the other side. He stared at The Mansion, a house that almost screamed abnormal-ity, with a sinking heart. It stood in the center of its weedy, rioting yard like a tumor. The Dean brothers had walked across nine blocks of Brooklyn, mov-ing slowly under the hot afternoon sun, and had finally entered a section of town which had to be Dutch Hill, given the names on the shops and stores. Now they stood halfway down the block, in front of The Mansion. It looked as if it had been deserted for years, yet it had suffered remark-ably little vandalism. And once, Jake thought, it really had been a man-sion—the home, perhaps, of a wealthy merchant and his large family. In those long-gone days it must have been white, but now it was a dirty gray no-color. The windows had been knocked out and the peeling picket fence which surrounded it had been spray-painted, but the house itself was still intact.
It slumped in the hot light, a ramshackle slate-roofed revenant grow-ing out of a hummocky trash-littered yard, somehow making Jake think of a dangerous dog which pretended to be asleep. Its steep roof overhung the front porch like a beetling brow. The boards of the porch were splintery and warped. Shutters which might once have been green leaned askew beside the glassless windows; ancient curtains still hung in some of these, dangling like strips of dead skin. To the left, an elderly trellis leaned away from die building, now held up not by nails but only by die nameless and somehow filthy clusters of vine which crawled over it. There was a sign on the lawn and another on die door. From where Jake stood, he could read neither of them.
The house was alive. He knew this, could feel its awareness reaching out from the boards and the slumping roof, could feel it pouring in rivers from the black sockets of its windows. The idea of approaching that terrible place filled him with dismay; the idea of actually going inside filled him with inarticulate horror. Yet he would have to. He could hear a low, slumbrous buzzing in his ears—the sound of a beehive on a hot summer day—and for a moment he was afraid he might faint. He closed his eyes . . . and his voice filled his head. You must come, Jake. This is the path of the Beam, the way of the Tower, and the time of your Drawing. Be true; stand; come to me. The fear didn’t pass, but that terrible sense of impending panic did. He opened his eyes again and saw that he was not the only one who had sensed the power and awakening sentience of the place. Eddie was trying to pull away from the fence. He turned toward Jake, who could see Eddie’s eyes, wide and uneasy beneath his green head-band. His big brother grabbed him and pushed him toward the rusty gate, but the gesture was too half-hearted to be much of a tease; however thick-headed he might be, Henry liked The Mansion no better than Eddie did. They drew away a little and stood looking at the place for a while. Jake could not make out what they were saying to each other, but the tone of their voices was awed and uneasy. Jake suddenly remembered Eddie speaking in his dream: Remember there’s danger, though. Be care-ful . . . and be quick. Suddenly the real Eddie, the one across the street, raised his voice enough so that Jake could make out the words. “Can we go home now, Henry? Please? I don’t like it.” His tone was pleading.
“Fuckin little sissy,” Henry said, but Jake thought he heard relief as well as indulgence in Henry’s voice. “Come on.”
They turned away from the ruined house crouching high-shouldered behind its sagging fence and approached the street. Jake backed up, then turned and looked into the window of the dispirited little hole-in-the-wall shop called Dutch Hill Used Appliances. He watched Henry and Eddie, dim and ghostly reflections superimposed on an ancient Hoover vacuum cleaner, cross Rhinehold Street. “Are you sure it’s not really haunted?” Eddie asked as they stepped onto the sidewalk on Jake’s side.
“Well, I tell you what,” Henry said. “Now that I been out here again, I’m really not so sure.”