Black House

"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 f**king 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 pu**y, 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."