Black House (Page 173)

He puts a hand on Penniman’s forearm. He smiles into Penniman’s unseen face, and feels the muscles beneath his palm relax. Penniman has decided he’s going to get his way. Again.

"You take my drink," Henry says pleasantly, "add it to your drink, and then stick them both up your fat and bepimpled ass. If you need something to hold them in place, why, you can stick your job up there right after them."

Henry turns and walks briskly toward the door, orienting himself with his usual neat precision and holding one hand out in front of him as an insurance policy. Nick Avery has broken into spontaneous applause, but Henry barely hears this and Penniman he has already dismissed from his mind. What occupies him is the smell of My Sin perfume. It fades a little as he steps out into the afternoon heat . . . but is that not an amorous sigh he hears beside his left ear? The sort of sigh his wife sometimes made just before falling asleep after love? His Rhoda? His Lark?

"Hello, the taxi!" he calls from the curb beneath the awning.

"Right here, buddy — what’re you, blind?"

"As a bat," Henry agrees, and walks toward the sound of the voice. He’ll go home, he’ll put his feet up, he’ll have a glass of tea, and then he’ll listen to the damned 911 tape. That as yet unperformed chore may be what’s causing his current case of the heebie-jeebies and shaky-shivers, knowing that he must sit in darkness and listen to the voice of a child-killing cannibal. Surely that must be it, because there’s no reason to be afraid of his Lark, is there? If she were to return — to return and haunt him — she would surely haunt with love.

Wouldn’t she?

Yes, he thinks, and lowers himself into the taxi’s stifling back seat.

"Where to, buddy?"

"Norway Valley Road," Henry says. "It’s a white house with blue trim, standing back from the road. You’ll see it not long after you cross the creek."

Henry settles back in the seat and turns his troubled face toward the open window. French Landing feels strange to him today . . . fraught. Like something that has slipped and slipped until it is now on the verge of simply falling off the table and smashing to pieces on the floor.

Say that she has come back. Say that she has. If it’s love she’s come with, why does the smell of her perfume make me so uneasy? So almost revolted? And why was her touch (her imagined touch, he assures himself) so unpleasant?

Why was her touch so cold?

After the dazzle of the day, the living room of Beezer’s crib is so dark that at first Jack can’t make out anything. Then, when his eyes adjust a little, he sees why: blankets — a double thickness, from the look — have been hung over both of the living-room windows, and the door to the other downstairs room, almost certainly the kitchen, has been closed.

"He can’t stand the light," Beezer says. He keeps his voice low so it won’t carry across to the far side of the room, where the shape of a man lies on a couch. Another man is kneeling beside him.

"Maybe the dog that bit him was rabid," Jack says. He doesn’t believe it.

Beezer shakes his head decisively. "It isn’t a phobic reaction. Doc says it’s physiological. Where light falls on him, his skin starts to melt. You ever hear of anything like that?"

"No." And Jack has never smelled anything like the stench in this room, either. There’s the buzz of not one but two table fans, and he can feel the cross-draft, but that stink is too gluey to move. There’s the reek of spoiled meat — of gangrene in torn flesh — but Jack has smelled that before. It’s the other smell that’s getting to him, something like blood and funeral flowers and feces all mixed up together. He makes a gagging noise, can’t help it, and Beezer looks at him with a certain impatient sympathy.

"Bad, yeah, I know. But it’s like the monkey house at the zoo, man — you get used to it after a while."

The swing door to the other room opens, and a trim little woman with shoulder-length blond hair comes through. She’s carrying a bowl. When the light strikes the figure lying on the couch, Mouse screams. It’s a horribly thick sound, as if the man’s lungs have begun to liquefy. Something — maybe smoke, maybe steam — starts to rise up from the skin of his forehead.

"Hold on, Mouse," the kneeling man says. It’s Doc. Before the kitchen door swings all the way shut again, Jack is able to read what’s pasted to his battered black bag. Somewhere in America there may be another medical man sporting a STEPPENWOLF RULES bumper sticker on the side of his physician’s bag, but probably not in Wisconsin.

The woman kneels beside Doc, who takes a cloth from the basin, wrings it out, and places it on Mouse’s forehead. Mouse gives a shaky groan and begins to shiver all over. Water runs down his cheeks and into his beard. The beard seems to be coming out in mangy patches.

Jack steps forward, telling himself he will get used to the smell, sure he will. Maybe it’s even true. In the meantime he wishes for a little of the Vicks VapoRub most LAPD homicide detectives carry in their glove compartments as a matter of course. A dab under each nostril would be very welcome right now.

There’s a sound system (scruffy) and a pair of speakers in the corners of the room (huge), but no television. Stacked wooden crates filled with books line every wall without a door or a window in it, making the space seem even smaller than it is, almost cryptlike. Jack has a touch of claustrophobia in his makeup, and now this circuit warms up, increasing his discomfort. Most of the books seem to deal with religion and philosophy — he sees Descartes, C. S. Lewis, the Bhagavad-Gita, Steven Avery’s Tenets of Existence — but there’s also a lot of fiction, books on beer making, and (on top of one giant speaker) Albert Goldman’s trash tome about Elvis Presley. On the other speaker is a photograph of a young girl with a splendid smile, freckles, and oceans of reddish-blond hair. Seeing the child who drew the hopscotch grid out front makes Jack Sawyer feel sick with anger and sorrow. Otherworldly beings and causes there may be, but there’s also a sick old f**k prowling around who needs to be stopped. He’d do well to remember that.