“On account of it was a bad place,” Sonny interrupts. “I’ve seen some bad places. They don’t want you there, and they let you know.”
Beezer shoots him a measured look and says, “I don’t care how evil this bad place is, if it’s where the Fisherman lives, I’m going there.”
“And I’m going with you,” says Mouse, “but just listen. I wanted to bag it and get some fried chicken or something, which combined with the Ultimate would have been like eating the food of Paradise, or whatever Coleridge said, but Little Nancy wanted to go in because she had the same feeling I did. She was a game broad, man. Ornery, too. So I turned in, and Little Nancy’s hanging on in back of me, and she’s saying, ‘Don’t be a pussy, Mouse, let’s haul ass,’ so I gun it a little bit, and everything feels all weird and shit, but all I can see’s this track curving away into the trees and the shit I know isn’t there.”
“Like what?” asks Sonny, in what sounds like the spirit of scientific inquiry.
“These dark shapes coming up to the edge of the road and looking out through the trees. A couple of them ran toward me, but I rolled right through them like smoke. I don’t know, maybe they were smoke.”
“Fuck that, it was the acid,” Beezer says.
“Maybe, but it didn’t feel that way. Besides, the Ultimate never turned on you, remember? It wasn’t about darkness. Anyhow, right before the shit hit the fan, all of a sudden I was thinking about Kiz Martin. I can remember that, all right. It was like I could practically see her, right in front of me—the way she looked when they loaded her in the ambulance.”
“Kiz Martin,” Beezer says.
Mouse turns to Jack. “Kiz was a girl I went out with when we were all at the university. She used to beg us to let her ride with us, and one day the Kaiser said, okay, she could borrow his bike. Kiz was having a ball, man, she’s diggin’ it. And then she rolls over some damn little twig, I think it was—”
“Bigger than a twig,” Doc says. “Little branch. Maybe two inches in diameter.”
“Which is just enough to test your balance, especially if you’re not used to hogs,” Mouse says. “She rolls over this little branch, and the bike flops over, and Kiz flies off and hits the road. My heart damn near stopped, man.”
“I knew she was gone the second I came up close enough to see the angle of her head,” says Doc. “There wasn’t even any point in trying CPR. We covered her with our jackets, and I rode off to call an ambulance. Ten minutes later, they were loading her in. One of the guys recognized me from my stint in the ER, or they might have given us some trouble.”
“I wondered if you were really a doctor,” Jack says.
“Completed my residency in surgery at U.I., walked away from the whole deal right there.” Doc smiles at him. “Hanging around with these guys, getting into beer brewing, sounded like more fun than spending all day cutting people up.”
“Mouse,” Beezer says.
“Yeah. I was just getting to the curve in the little road, and it was like Kiz was standing right in front of me, it was so vivid. Her eyes closed, and her head hanging like a leaf about to fall. Oh man, I said to myself, this is not what I want to see at this particular moment. I could feel it all over again—the way I felt when Kiz hit the road. Sick dread. That’s the word for it, sick dread.
“And we come around the curve, and I hear this dog growling somewhere off in the woods. Not just growling, growling. Like twenty big dogs are out there, and they’re all mad as hell. My head starts feeling like it wants to explode. And I look up ahead of me to see if a pack of wolves or something is running toward us, and it takes me a while to realize that the weird shadowy stuff I see up ahead is a house. A black house.
“Little Nancy is hitting me on the back and rapping my head, screaming at me to stop. Believe me, I can get with the program, because the last thing I want to do is get any closer to that place. I stop the bike, and Little Nancy jumps off and pukes on the side of the road. She holds her head and she pukes some more. I’m feeling like my legs turned to rubber, like something heavy is pressing on my chest. That thing, whatever it is, is still going nuts in the woods, and it’s getting closer. I take another look up at the end of the road, and that ugly damn house is stretching back into the woods, like it’s crawling into them, only it’s standing still. It gets bigger the more you look at it! Then I see the sparkly lights floating around it, and they look dangerous—Stay away, they’re telling me, get out of here, Mouse. There’s another NO TRESPASSING sign leaning against the porch, and that sign, man . . . that sign kind of flashed, like it was saying THIS TIME I MEAN IT, BUDDY.
“My head is splitting in half, but I get Little Nancy on the bike, and she sags against me, like pure dead weight except she’s hanging on, and I kick the hog on and spin around and take off. When we get back to my place, she goes to bed and stays there for three days. To me, it seemed like I could hardly remember what happened. The whole thing went kind of dark. In my mind. I hardly had time to think about it anyhow, because Little Nancy got sick and I had to take care of her whenever I wasn’t at work. Doc gave her some stuff to get her temperature down, and she got better, so we could drink beer and smoke shit and ride around, like before, but she was never really the same. End of August, she started getting bad again, and I had to put her in the hospital. Second week of September, hard as she was fighting, Little Nancy passed away.”
“How big was Little Nancy?” Jack asks, picturing a woman roughly the size of Mouse.
“Little Nancy Hale was about the size and shape of Tansy Freneau,” Mouse says, looking surprised by the question. “If she stood on my hand, I could lift her up with one arm.”
“And you never talked about this with anyone,” Jack says.
“How could I talk about it?” Mouse asks. “First, I was crazy with worry about Little Nancy, and then it went clean out of my head. Weird shit will do that to you, man. Instead of sticking in your head, it erases itself.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Jack says.
“I guess I do, too,” says Beezer, “but I’d say that the Ultimate kicked the shit out of your reality there for a while. You did see the place, though—Black House.”
“Damn straight,” says Mouse.
Beezer focuses on Jack. “And you say the Fisherman, this creep Burnside, built it.”
Jack nods.
“So maybe he’s living there, and he rigged up a bunch of gadgets to scare people away.”
“Could be.”
“Then I think we’re gonna let Mouse take us over on Highway 35 and see if he can find that little road he was talking about. Are you coming with us?”
“I can’t,” Jack says. “I have to see someone in Arden first, someone who I think can also help us. She has another piece of the puzzle, but I can’t explain it to you until I see her.”
“This woman knows something?”
“Oh, yes,” Jack says. “She knows something.”
“All right,” Beezer says, and stands up from his stool. “Your choice. We’ll have to talk to you afterward.”
“Beezer, I want to be with you when you go inside Black House. Whatever we have to do in there, whatever we see . . .” Jack pauses, trying to find the right words. Beezer is rocking on his heels, practically jumping out of his skin in his eagerness to hunt down the Fisherman’s lair. “You’re going to want me there. There’s more to this business than you can imagine, Beezer. You’re going to know what I’m talking about in a little while, and you’ll be able to stand up to it—I think all of you will—but if I tried to describe it now, you wouldn’t believe me. When the time comes, you’ll need me to see you through, if we get through. You’ll be glad I was there. We’re at a dangerous point here, and none of us wants to mess it up.”
“What makes you think I’ll mess it up?” Beezer asks, with deceptive mildness.