This little stretch of 35? Nothing but a nice, comfortable woodland. Let me tell you, Senator, Sonny Cantinaro has seen Harko, and this ain’t no Harko. This don’t even come close. It might as well be in another world. What meets Sonny’s appraising eye and increasingly impatient spirit is about a mile and a quarter of beautiful wooded landscape. You could call it a mini-forest. He thinks it would be cool to come out here by himself one day, tuck the Harley out of sight, and just walk around through the great oaks and pines, that big pad of felt beneath his feet, digging the birds and the crazy squirrels.
Sonny gazes at and through the sentinel trees on the far side of the road, enjoying his anticipation of the pleasure to come, and a flash of white jumps out at him from the darkness beside a huge oak tree. Caught up in the vision of walking alone under that green canopy, he almost dismisses it as a trick of the light, a brief illusion. Then he remembers what he is supposed to be looking for, and he slows down and leans sideways and sees, emerging from the tangle of underbrush at the base of the oak, a rusty bullet hole and a large, black letter N. Sonny swerves across the road, and the N expands into NO. He doesn’t believe it, but there it is, Mouse’s goddamn sign. He rolls ahead another foot, and the entire phrase comes into view.
Sonny puts the bike in neutral and plants one foot on the ground. The darkness next to the oak stretches like a web to the next tree at the side of the road, which is also an oak, though not as huge. Behind him, Doc and the Kaiser cross the road and come to a halt. He ignores them and looks at Beezer and Mouse, who are already some thirty feet up the road, intently scanning the trees.
“Hey,” he shouts. Beezer and Mouse do not hear him.
“Hey! Stop!”
“You got it?” Doc calls out.
“Go up to those assholes and bring them back,” Sonny says.
“It’s here?” Doc asks, peering into the trees.
“What, you think I found a body? Of course it’s here.”
Doc speeds up, stops just behind Sonny, and stares at the woods.
“Doc, you see it?” Kaiser Bill shouts, and he speeds up, too.
“Nope,” Doc says.
“You can’t see it from there,” Sonny tells him. “Will you please get your ass in gear and tell Beezer to come back here?”
“Why don’t you do it, instead?” Doc says.
“Because if I leave this spot, I might not ever be able to fucking find it again,” Sonny says.
Mouse and Beezer, now about sixty feet up the road, continue blithely on their way.
“Well, I still don’t see it,” Doc says.
Sonny sighs. “Come up alongside me.” Doc walks his Fat Boy to a point parallel with Sonny’s bike, then moves a couple of inches ahead. “There,” Sonny says, pointing at the sign.
Doc squints and leans over, putting his head above Sonny’s handlebars. “Where? Oh, I see it now. It’s all beat to hell.”
The top half of the sign curls over and shades the bottom half. Some antisocial lad has happened along and creased the sign with his baseball bat. His older brothers, more advanced in the ways of crime, had tried to kill it with their .22 rifles, and he was just delivering the coup de grâce.
“Where’s the road supposed to be?” Doc asks.
Sonny, who is a little troubled about this point, indicates the flat sheet of darkness to the right of the sign and extending to the next, smaller oak tree. As he looks at it, the darkness loses its two-dimensionality and deepens backward like a cave, or a black hole softly punched through the air. The cave, the black hole, melts and widens into the earthen road, about five and a half feet wide, that it must have been all along.
“That sure as hell is it,” says Kaiser Bill. “I don’t know how all of us could have missed it the first time.”
Sonny and Doc glance at each other, realizing that the Kaiser came along too late to watch the road seem to materialize out of a black wall with the thickness of a sheet of paper.
“It’s kind of tricky,” Sonny says.
“Your eyes have to adjust,” Doc says.
“Okay,” says Kaiser Bill, “but if you two want to argue about who tells Mouse and the Beeze, let me put you out of your misery.” He jams his bike into gear and tears off like a World War I messenger with a hot dispatch from the front. By now a long way up the road, Mouse and Beezer come to a halt and look back, having apparently heard the sound of his bike.
“I guess that’s it,” Sonny says, with an uneasy glance at Doc. “Our eyes had to adjust.”
“Couldn’t be anything else.”
Less convinced than they would like to be, both men let it drop in favor of watching Kaiser Bill conversing with Beezer and Mouse. The Kaiser points at Sonny and Doc, Beezer points. Then Mouse points at them, and the Kaiser points again. It looks like a discussion in an extremely unevolved version of sign language. When everybody has gotten the point, Kaiser Bill spins his bike around and comes roaring back down the road with Beezer and Mouse on his tail.
There is always that feeling of disorder, of misrule, when Beezer is not in the lead.
The Kaiser stops on the side of the narrow road. Beezer and Mouse halt beside him, and Mouse winds up stationed directly in front of the opening in the woods.
“Shouldn’t have been
that
hard to see,” Beezer says. “But there she is, anyhow. I was beginning to have my doubts, Mousie.”
“Uh-huh,” says Mouse. His customary manner, that of an intellectual roughneck with a playful take on the world, has lost all of its buoyancy. Beneath his biker’s fair-weather sunburn, his skin looks pale and curdlike.
“I want to tell you guys the truth,” Beezer says. “If Sawyer is right about this place, the creepy fuck who built it could have set up booby traps and all sorts of surprises. It was a long time ago, but if he really is the Fisherman, he has more reason than ever to keep people away from his crib. So we gotta watch our backs. The best way to do that is to go in strong, and go in ready. Put your weapons where you can reach them in a hurry, all right?”
Beezer opens one of his saddlebags and draws out a Colt 9mm pistol with ivory grips and a blue-steel barrel. He chambers a round and unlocks the safety. Under his gaze, Sonny pulls his massive .357 Magnum from his bag, Doc a Colt identical to Beezer’s, and Kaiser Bill an old S&W .38 Special he has owned since the late seventies. They shove the weapons, which until this moment have seen use only on firing ranges, into the pockets of their leather jackets. Mouse, who does not own a gun, pats the various knives he has secreted in the small of his back, in the hip and front pockets of his jeans, and sheathed within both of his boots.
“Okay,” Beezer says. “Anybody in there is going to hear us coming no matter what we do, and maybe already
has
heard us, so there’s no point in being sneaky about this. I want a fast, aggressive entrance—just what you guys are good at. We can use speed to our advantage. Depending on what happens, we get as close to the house as possible.”
“What if nothing happens?” asks the Kaiser. “Like, if we roll on in there and just keep going until we get to the house? I mean, I don’t see any particular reason to be spooked here. Okay, something bad happened to Mouse, but . . . you know. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen all over again.”
“Then we enjoy the ride,” Beezer says.
“Don’t you want to take a look inside?” the Kaiser asks. “He might have kids in there.”
“
He
might be in there,” Beezer tells him. “If he is, no matter what I said to Sawyer, we’re bringing him out. Alive would be better than dead, but I wouldn’t mind putting him in a serious state of bad health.”
He gets a rumble of approval. Mouse does not contribute to this wordless, but otherwise universal agreement; he lowers his head and tightens his hands on the grips of his bike.
“Because Mouse has been here before, he goes in on point. Doc and I’ll be right behind him, with Sonny and the Kaiser covering our asses.” Beezer glances at them and says, “Stay about six, eight feet back, all right?”
Don’t put Mouse on point; you have to go in first,
speaks in Sonny’s mind, but he says, “All right, Beeze.”
“Line up,” Beezer says.
They move their bikes into the positions Beezer has specified. Anyone driving fast along Highway 35 would have to hit his brakes to avoid running into at least two beefy men on motorcycles, but the road stays empty. Everyone, including Mouse, guns his engine and prepares to move. Sonny slaps his fist against the Kaiser’s and looks back at that dark tunnel into the woods.
A big crow flaps onto a low-hanging branch, cocks its head, and seems to fix Sonny’s eyes with its own. The crow must be looking at all of them, Sonny knows, but he cannot shake the illusion that the crow is staring directly at him, and that its black insatiable eyes are dancing with malice. The uncomfortable feeling that the crow is amused by the sight of him bent over his bike makes Sonny think of his Magnum.
Turn you into a mess of bloody feathers, baby.
Without unfolding its wings, the crow hops backward and disappears into the oak leaves.
“GO!” Beezer shouts.
The moment Mouse charges in, Little Nancy’s rotting hands clamp down on his shoulders. Her thin bones press down on the leather hard enough to leave bruises on his skin. Although he knows this is impossible—you cannot get rid of what does not exist—the sudden flare of pain causes him to try to shake her off. He twitches his shoulders and wiggles the handlebars, and the bike wobbles. As the bike dips, Little Nancy digs in harder. When Mouse rights himself, she pulls herself forward, wraps her bony arms around his chest, and flattens her body against his back. Her skull grinds against the nape of his neck; her teeth bite down on his skin.
It is
too much.
Mouse had known she would reappear, but not that she would put him in a vise. And despite his speed, he has the feeling that he is traveling through a substance heavier and more viscous than air, a kind of syrup that slows him down, holds him back. Both he and the bike seem unnaturally dense, as if gravity exerts a stronger pull on the little road than anywhere else. His head pounds, and already he can hear that dog growling in the woods off to his right. He could take all of that, he supposes, if it were not for what stopped him the last time he drove up this path: a dead woman. Then she was Kiz Martin; now the dead woman is Little Nancy, and she is riding him like a dervish, slapping his head, punching him in the side, battering his ears. He feels her teeth leave his neck and sink into the left shoulder of his jacket. One of her arms whips in front of him, and he enters a deeper level of shock and horror when he realizes that this arm is visible. Rags of skin flutter over long bones; he glimpses white maggots wriggling into the few remaining knots of flesh.
A hand that feels both spongelike and bony flaps onto his cheek and crawls up his face. Mouse cannot keep it together anymore: his mind fills with white panic, and he loses control of the bike. When he heads into the curve that leads to Black House, the wheels are already tilting dangerously, and Mouse’s sideways jerk of revulsion pushes them over beyond the possibility of correction.
As the bike topples, he hears the dog snarling from only a few yards away. The Harley smashes down on his left leg, then skids ahead, and he and his ghastly passenger slide after it. When Mouse sees Black House looming from its dark bower amid the trees, a rotting hand flattens over his eyes. His scream is a bright, thin thread of sound against the fury of the dog.
A few seconds after going in, Beezer feels the air thicken and congeal around him. It’s some
trick,
he tells himself, an illusion produced by the Fisherman’s mind-fuck toxins. Trusting that the others will not be suckered by this illusion, he raises his head and looks over Mouse’s broad back and cornrowed head to see the road curve to the left about fifty feet ahead. The thick air seems to weigh down on his arms and shoulders, and he feels the onset of the mother and father of all headaches, a dull, insistent pain that begins as a sharp twinge behind his eyes and moves thudding deeper into his brain. Beezer gives Doc a half second of attention, and from what he sees, Doc is taking care of business. A glance at the speedometer tells him that he is traveling at thirty-five miles per hour and gathering steam, so they should be doing sixty by the time they come into the curve.
Off to his left, a dog growls. Beezer hauls his pistol out of his pocket and listens to the growling keep pace with them as they speed toward the curve. The band of pain in his head widens and intensifies; it seems to push at his eyes from the inside, making them bulge in their sockets. The big dog—it has to be a dog, what else could it be?—is getting closer, and the fury of its noises makes Beezer see a giant, tossing head with blazing red eyes and ropes of slather whipping from a gaping mouth filled with shark’s teeth.
Two separate things destroy his concentration: the first is that he sees Mouse slamming himself back and forth on his bike as he goes into the curve, as if he is trying to scratch his back on the thickening air; the second is that the pressure behind his eyes triples in force, and immediately after he sees Mouse going into what is surely a fall, the blood vessels in his eyes explode. From deep red, his vision shifts rapidly to absolute black. An ugly voice starts up in his head, saying,
Amy zadt in my lap an huggedt mee. I made opp my mindt to eed hurr. How she dud, dud, dud kick an scrutch. I chokked hurr do deff—
“No!” Beezer shouts, and the voice that is pushing at his eyes drops into a rasping chuckle. For less than a second, he gets a vision of a tall, shadowy creature and a single eye, a flash of teeth beneath a hat or a hood—
—and the world abruptly revolves around him, and he ends up flat on his back with the bike weighing on his chest. Everything he sees is stained a dark, seething red. Mouse is screaming, and when Beezer turns his head in the direction of the screams, he sees a red Mouse lying on a red road with a huge red dog barreling toward him. Beezer cannot find his pistol; it went sailing into the woods. Shouts, screams, and the roar of motorcycles fill his ears. He scrambles out from under the bike yelling he knows not what. A red Doc flashes by on his red bike and almost knocks him down again. He hears a gunshot, then another.