“Anyone would mess it up, if they didn’t have the last piece of the puzzle. Go out there. See if Mouse can find the house he saw two years ago. Check it out. Don’t go in—to do that, you need me. After you check it out, come back here, and I’ll see you as soon as I can. I should be back before two-thirty, three at the latest.”
“Where are you going in Arden? Maybe I’ll want to call you.”
“French County Lutheran Hospital. Ward D. If you can’t get me, leave a message with a Dr. Spiegleman.”
“Ward D, huh?” Beezer says. “Okay, I guess everybody’s crazy today. And I guess I can be satisfied with only a look at this house, as long as I know that sometime this afternoon, I can count on you to explain all these pieces I’m too stupid to understand.”
“It’ll be soon, Beezer. We’re closing in. And the last thing I’d call you is stupid.”
“I guess you must have been one hell of a cop,” Beezer says. “Even though I think half the stuff you say is crap, I can’t help but believe it.” He turns around and brings his fists down on the bar. “Stinky Cheese! It’s safe now. Drag your pale ass out of the kitchen.”
19
JACK FOLLOWS THE Thunder Five out of the parking lot, and for the moment we will let him go alone on his northward way on Highway 93 toward Judy Marshall’s lookout and Judy Marshall’s locked ward. Like Jack, the bikers are headed toward the unknown, but their unknown lies westward on Highway 35, into the land of the steadily accumulating past, and we want to know what they will find there. These men do not appear to be nervous; they still project the massive confidence with which they burst into the Sand Bar. In truth, they never really display nervousness, for situations that would make other people worried or anxious generally make them get physical. Fear affects them differently than it does other people, too: in the rare moments when they have experienced fear, they’ve tended on the whole to enjoy it. In their eyes, fear represents a God-given opportunity for focusing their collective concentration. Due to their remarkable solidarity, that concentration is formidable. For those of us who are not members of a biker gang or the Marine Corps, solidarity means little more than the compassionate impulse that leads us to comfort a bereft friend; for Beezer and his merry band, solidarity is the assurance that someone’s always got your back. They are on each other’s hands, and they know it. For the Thunder Five, safety really is in numbers.
Yet the encounter toward which they are flying has no precedents or analogues in their experience. Black House is something new, and its newness—the sheer strangeness of Mouse’s story—sinks tendrils down into their guts, one and all.
Eight miles west of Centralia, where the flatland around Potsie’s thirty-year-old development yields to the long stretch of woods that runs all the way to Maxton’s, Mouse and Beezer ride side by side in front of the others. Beezer occasionally looks to his friend, asking a wordless question. The third time that Mouse shakes his head, he follows the gesture with a backward wave of his hand that says Stop bugging me, I’ll tell you when we’re there. Beezer drops back; Sonny, Kaiser Bill, and Doc automatically assume Beezer is giving them a signal, and they string out in a single line.
At the head of the column, Mouse keeps taking his eyes off the highway to inspect the right-hand side of the road. The little road is hard to see, Mouse knows, and by now it will be more overgrown than it was two years ago. He is trying to spot the white of the battered NO TRESPASSING sign. It, too, may be partially hidden by new growth. He slows down to thirty-five. The four men behind him match his change in pace with the smoothness of long practice.
Alone of the Thunder Five, Mouse has already seen their destination, and in the deepest places of his soul he can scarcely believe that he is going there again. At first, the ease and rapidity with which his memories had flown out of their dark vault had pleased him; now, instead of feeling that he has effortlessly reclaimed a lost part of his life, he has the sense of being at the mercy of that lost afternoon. A grave danger then—and he does not doubt that some great and dangerous force had brushed him with a warning hand—is an increased danger now. Memory has returned a miserable conclusion he thrust away long ago: that the hideous structure Jack Sawyer called Black House had killed Little Nancy Hale as surely as if its rafters had fallen in on her. Moral more than physical, Black House’s ugliness exhaled toxic fumes. Little Nancy had been killed by the invisible poisons carried on the warning hand; now Mouse had to look at that knowledge without blinking. He can feel her hands on his shoulders, and their thin bones are covered with rotting flesh.
If I’d been five foot three and weighed one hundred and five pounds instead of being six-two and two hundred and ninety, by now I’d be rotting, too, he thinks.
Mouse may look for the narrow road and the sign beside it with the eyes of a fighter pilot, but someone else has to see them, because he never will. His unconscious has taken a vote, and the decision was unanimous.
Each of the other men, Sonny, Doc, the Kaiser, and even Beezer, have also connected Little Nancy’s death with Black House, and the same speculations about comparative size and weight have passed through their minds. However, Sonny Cantinaro, Doc Amberson, Kaiser Bill Strassner, and especially Beezer St. Pierre assume that whatever poison surrounded Black House had been concocted in a laboratory by human beings who knew what they were doing. These four men derive the old, primitive reassurance from one another’s company that they have enjoyed since college; if anything makes them feel a touch uneasy, it is that Mouse Baumann, not Beezer, leads their column. Even though Beezer let Mouse wave him back, Mouse’s position contains a hint of insurrection, of mutiny: the universe has been subtly disordered.
Twenty yards from the back end of the Maxton property, Sonny decides to put an end to this farce, guns his Softail, roars past his friends, and moves up parallel to Mouse. Mouse glances at him with a trace of worry, and Sonny motions to the side of the road.
When they have all pulled over, Mouse says, “What’s your problem, Sonny?”
“You are,” Sonny says. “Either you missed the turnoff, or your whole story’s all fucked up.”
“I said I wasn’t sure where it is.” He notices with nearly immeasurable relief that Little Nancy’s dead hands no longer grip his shoulders.
“Of course not. You were ripped on acid!”
“Good acid.”
“Well, there’s no road up ahead, I know that much. It’s just trees all the way to the old fucks’ home.”
Mouse ponders the stretch of road ahead as if the road just might be up there, after all, although he knows it is not.
“Shit, Mouse, we’re practically in town. I can see Queen Street from here.”
“Yeah,” Mouse says. “Okay.” If he can get to Queen Street, he thinks, those hands will never fasten on him again.
Beezer walks his Electra Glide up to them and says, “Okay what, Mouse? You agree it’s farther back, or is the road somewhere else?”
Frowning, Mouse turns his head to look back down the highway. “Goddamn. I think it’s along here somewhere, unless I got totally turned around that day.”
“Gee, how could that have happened?” says Sonny. “I looked at every inch of ground we passed, and I sure as hell didn’t see a road. Did you, Beezer? How about a NO TRESPASSING sign, you happen to see one of those?”
“You don’t get it,” Mouse says. “This shit doesn’t want to be seen.”
“Maybe you shoulda gone to Ward D with Sawyer,” Sonny says. “People in there appreciate visionaries.”
“Can it, Sonny,” Beezer says.
“I was there before, and you weren’t,” Mouse says. “Which one of us knows what he’s talking about?”
“I’ve heard enough out of both of you guys,” Beezer says. “Do you still think it’s along here somewhere, Mouse?”
“As far as I can recollect, yeah.”
“Then we missed it. We’ll go back and check again, and if we don’t find it, we’ll look somewhere else. If it’s not here, it’s between two of the valleys along 93, or in the woods on the hill leading up to the lookout. We have plenty of time.”
“What makes you so sure?” Sonny asks. Mild anxiety about what they might come across is making him belligerent. He would just as soon go back to the Sand Bar and down a pitcher of Kingsland while messing with Stinky’s head as waste his time goofing along the highways.