Black House (50 page)

“I suppose I can guess,” Jack says.

“You could even do your job behind it. For sure, you could
drive,
man. Get on your hog, go anywhere you could think of. Doing anything normal was a piece of cake. You weren’t fucked up, you were operating way beyond your max.”

“Timothy Leary wasn’t
all
wrong,” Doc says.

“God, that was great stuff,” Mouse says. “We did it until there was no more to do, and then the whole thing was over. The
whole
acid thing. If you couldn’t get that stuff, there was no point in taking anything else. I never knew where it came from.”

“You don’t want to know where it came from,” says Beezer. “Trust me.”

“So you were doing this acid when you saw Black House,” Jack says.

“Sure. That’s why I saw the lights.”

Very slowly, Beezer asks, “Where is it, Mouse?”

“I don’t exactly know. But hold on, Beezer, let me talk. That was the summer I was tight with Little Nancy Hale, remember?”

“Sure,” Beezer says. “That was a damn shame.” He glances at Jack. “Little Nancy died right after that summer.”

“Tore me apart,” Mouse says. “It was like she turned allergic to air and sunlight, all of a sudden. Sick all the time. Rashes all over her body. She couldn’t stand being outside, because the light hurt her eyes. Doc couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her, so we took her to the big hospital in La Riviere, but they couldn’t find what was wrong, either. We talked to a couple of guys at Mayo, but they weren’t any help. She died
hard,
man. Broke your heart to see it happen. Broke mine, for sure.”

He falls silent for a long moment, during which he stares down at his gut and his knees and no one else says a word. “All right,” Mouse finally says, raising his head. “Here’s what I remember. On this Saturday, Little Nancy and I were tripping on the Ultimate, just riding around to some places we liked. We went to the riverfront park in La Riviere, drove over to Dog Island and Lookout Point. We came back this direction and went up on the bluff—beautiful, man. After that, we didn’t feel like going home, so we just wheeled around. Little Nancy noticed this
NO TRESPASSING
sign I must have passed about a thousand times before without seeing it.”

He looks at Jack Sawyer. “I can’t say for certain, but I think it was on 35.”

Jack nods.

“If we hadn’t been on the Ultimate, I don’t think she ever would have seen that sign, either. Oh man, it’s all coming back to me. ‘What’s that?’ she says, and I swear, I had to look two or three times before I saw that sign—it was all beat-up and bent, with a couple rusty bullet holes in it. Sort of leaning back into the trees. ‘Somebody wants to keep us off that road,’ Little Nancy says. ‘What are they hiding up there, anyhow?’ Something like that. ‘What road?’ I ask, and then I see it. It’s hardly even what you could call a road. About wide enough for a car to fit in, if you have a compact. Thick trees on both sides. Hell, I didn’t think anything interesting was hidden up there, unless it was an old shack. Besides that, I didn’t like the way it looked.” He glances at Beezer.

“What do you mean, you didn’t like the way it looked?” Beezer asks. “I’ve seen you go into places you damn well knew were no good. Or are you getting
mystical
on me, Mouse?”

“Call it what you fucking want, I’m telling you how it was. It was like that sign was saying
KEEP OUT IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU.
Gave me a bad feeling.”

“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.

“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

J
ACK 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.

Beezer looks at him, and his eyes crackle. “You know anywhere else there’s enough trees to call it a woods?”

Sonny backs down immediately. Beezer is never going to give up and go back to the Sand Bar. Beezer is in this for keeps. Most of that has to do with Amy, but some of it relates to Jack Sawyer. Sawyer impressed the shit out of Beezer the other night, that’s what happened, and now Beezer thinks everything the guy says is golden. To Sonny, this makes no sense at all, but Beezer’s the one who calls the shots, so for now, Sonny guesses, they will all run around like junior G-men for a while. If this adopt-a-cop program goes on for more than a couple of days, Sonny plans to have a little chat with Mouse and the Kaiser. Doc will always side with Beezer no matter what, but the other two are capable of listening to reason.

“All right, then,” Beezer says. “Scratch from here to Queen Street. We
know
there’s no fuckin’ road along that stretch. We’ll go back the way we came, give it one more shot. Single file the whole way. Mouse, you’re point man again.”

Mouse nods and prepares himself to feel those hands on his shoulders again. Gunning his Fat Boy, he rolls forward and takes his place at the head of the line. Beezer moves in behind him, and Sonny follows Beezer, with Doc and the Kaiser in the last two slots.

Five pairs of eyes,
Sonny thinks.
If we don’t see it this time, we never will. And we won’t, because that damned road is halfway across the state. When Mouse and his old lady got buzzed on the Ultimate, they could go for hundreds of miles and think they’d taken a spin around the block.

Everybody scans the opposite side of the road and the edge of the woods. Five pairs of eyes, as Sonny puts it, register an unbroken line of oaks and pine trees. Mouse has set a pace somewhere between a fast walk and a medium jog, and the trees crawl by. At this speed, they can notice the moss blistering the trunks of the oaks and the bright smears of sunlight on the forest’s floor, which is brownish gray and resembles a layer of rumpled felt. A hidden world of upright trees, shafts of light, and deadfalls extends backward from the first, sentinel row. Within that world, paths that are not paths wind mazelike between the thick trunks and lead to mysterious clearings. Sonny becomes suddenly aware of a tribe of squirrels doing squirrel gymnastics in the map of branches that lace into an intermittent canopy. And with the squirrels, an aviary of birds pops into view.

All of this reminds him of the deep Pennsylvania woods he had explored as a boy, before his parents sold their house and moved to Illinois. Those woods had contained a rapture he had found nowhere else. Sonny’s conviction that Mouse got things wrong and they are looking in the wrong place takes on greater inner density. Earlier, Sonny had spoken about bad places, of which he has seen at least one he was absolutely certain about. In Sonny’s experience,
bad
places, the ones that let you know you were not welcome, tended to be on or near borders.

During the summer after his high school graduation, he and his two best buddies, all of them motorcycle freaks, had taken their bikes to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where he had two cousins cute enough to show off to his friends. Sal and Harry were thrilled with the girls, and the girls thought the bikers were sexy and exotic. After a couple of days spent as a literal fifth wheel (or fifth
and
sixth wheel, depending on what you are counting), Sonny proposed extending their trip by a week and, in the interest of expanding their educations, ballin’ the jack down to Chicago and spending the rest of their money on beer and hookers until they had to go home. Sal and Harry loved the whole idea, and on their third evening in Rice Lake, they packed their rolls on their bikes and roared south, making as much noise as possible. By 10:00 they had managed to get completely lost.

It might have been the beer, it might have been inattention, but for one reason or another they had wandered off the highway and, in the deep black of a rural night, found themselves on the edge of an almost nonexistent town named Harko. Harko could not be found on their gas-station road map, but it had to be close to the Illinois border, on either one side or the other. Harko seemed to consist of an abandoned motel, a collapsing general store, and an empty grain mill. When the boys reached the mill, Sal and Harry groused about being exhausted and hungry and wanted to turn back to spend the night in the motel.

Sonny, who was no less worn out, rode back with them; the second they rolled into the dark forecourt of the motel, he had a bad feeling about the place. The air seemed heavier, the darkness darker than they should have been. To Sonny, it seemed that malign, invisible presences haunted the place. He could all but make them out as they flitted between the cabins. Sal and Harry jeered at his reservations: he was a coward, a fairy, a
girl.
They broke down a door and unrolled their sleeping bags in a bare, dusty rectangular room. He carried his across the street and slept in a field.

Dawn awakened him, and his face was wet with dew. He jumped up, pissed into the high grass, and checked for the motorcycles on the other side of the road. There they were, all three of them, listing over their stands outside a broken door. The dead neon sign at the entrance of the forecourt read
HONEYMOONER’S BOWER.
He walked across the narrow road and swept a hand over the moisture shining black on the seats of the motorcycles. A funny sound came from the room where his friends were sleeping. Already tasting dread, Sonny pushed open the broken door. If he had not initially refused to make sense of what was before him, what he saw in the room would have made him pass out.

His face streaked with blood and tears, Sal Turso was sitting on the floor. Harry Reilly’s severed head rested in his lap, and an ocean of blood soaked the floor and daubed the walls. Harry’s body lay loose and disjointed on top of his blood-soaked sleeping bag. The body was naked; Sal wore only a blood-red T-shirt. Sal raised both his hands—the one holding his prize long-bladed knife and the one holding only a palmful of blood—and lifted his contorted face to Sonny’s frozen gaze.
I don’t know what happened.
His voice was high and screechy, not his.
I don’t remember doing this, how could I have done this? Help me, Sonny. I don’t know what happened.

Unable to speak, Sonny had backed out and flown away on his cycle. He’d had no clear idea of where he was going except that it was out of Harko. Two miles down the road, he came to a little town, a real one, with people in it, and someone finally took him to the sheriff’s office.

Harko:
there
was a bad place. In a way, both of his high school friends had died there, because Sal Turso hanged himself six months after being committed to a state penitentiary for life on a second-degree murder charge. In Harko, you saw no red-winged blackbirds or woodpeckers. Even sparrows steered clear of Harko.