Somehow he drove and, shortly, pulled again to a more deserted curb, and killed the engine. On this block, a sole dim streetlight shone. Half the houses were doorless, windowless.
He sat with only silence between himself and a man who had, at the least, submitted to a grave surgical mutilation in the service of his deity. Ricky looked into Andre's eyes.
That was the first challenge, to establish that he dared to look into Andre's eyes — and he found that he did dare.
'For all you've lost,' Ricky said, queasily referencing the gruesome marvel, '. you seem very. alive.'
'I'm more alive than you will ever be, and when I'm all consumed, I'll be far
Ricky fingered the little bale of cash in his hand. 'If you want me to go on, you have to tell me this.
'Because the One I'm gonna see wants someone new to see Him. He doesn't wanna know you. He wants
'He wants me to know him. And then?'
'And then it's up to you. To walk away, or to see him like I do.'
'And how is that? How do you see him?'
'All the way.'
Ricky's hand absently stroked the gearshift knob. 'The choice is absolutely mine?'
'Your will is your own! Only your knowledge will be changed!'
Ricky slipped the Mustang into gear, and once more the blue beast growled onward. 'Take a right here,' purred Andre. 'We going up to the top of the hills.'
It was the longest 'couple miles' that Ricky had ever driven. The road poured down past the Mustang like time itself, a slow stream of old, and older houses, on steepening blocks gapped by vacant lots, or by derelict cottages whose windows and doors were coffined in grafittied plywood.
They began to wind, and a rising sense of peril woke in Ricky. He was charging up into the sinister unknown! There was just too much missing from this man's body! You couldn't lose all that and still walk around, still fight with knives. could you?
But you could. Just look at him.
The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half-shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights.
As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop- and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crestlines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles. They plunged far below into a thick, surprisingly deep fog that drowned and dimmed the jeweled python of the Hood.
Near the summit, their road entered a deepening gully. At the apex stood a municipal watertank, the dull gloss of its squat cylinder half-sunk in trees and houses.
'We goin to that house there right upside the tank. See that big gray roof pokin from the trees? The driveway goes down through the trees, it's steep an dark. Just roll down slow and easy, kill the engine, an let me get out first an talk to her.'
'Her?'
Andre didn't answer. The road briefly crested before plunging, and Ricky had a last glimpse below of the tentacular hills rooted in the fogbank — and rooted beyond that, he imagined, more deeply still into the black floor of the Bay, as if the tentacles rummaged there for their deep-sunk food.
'Right there,' said Andre, pointing ahead. 'See the gap in the bushes?'
The Mustang crept muttering down the dark leafy tunnel, just as a wind rose, rattling dry oak foliage all around them.
A dim grotto of grassy ground opened below. There was a squat house on it, so dark it was almost a shadow-house. It showed one dim yellow light on the floor of its porch. A lantern, it looked like. A large dark shape loomed on one side of this lantern, and a smaller dark shape lay on the other.
Ricky cut his engine. Andre drew a long, slow breath and got out. Leaves whispered in the silence. Andre's feet crackled across the yard. Ricky could hear the creak of his weight on the porch steps as he climbed them, halfway up to the two dark shapes and their dim shared light. And Ricky could also hear. a growly breathing, wasn't it? Yes. a slow, phlegmy purr of big lungs.
Andre's voice was a new one to Ricky: low and implacable. 'I'm back again, Mamma Hagg. I got the toll. I got the witness.' Then he looked back and said, 'Stand on out here. what's your name again?'
Ricky got out. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to declare himself in this silence, this place! Well, shit. He was here. He might as well say who he was. Loudly: 'Ricky Deuce.'
When he'd said it, he found his eyes could suddenly decipher the smaller dark shape by the lantern: it was a seated black dog, a big one, with the hint of aging frost on his lower jaw, and with his red tongue hanging and gently pulsing by that frosted jaw. The dog was looking steadily back at him, its tongue a bright spoon of greedy tissue scooping up the taste of the night.
It was not the brute's breathing Ricky had heard. It was Momma Hagg's, her voice deep now from the vault of her cavelike lungs:
'Then show the toll, fool.'
Andre bent slightly to hold something toward the hound. And above his bent back, the woman in her turn became visible to Ricky. Within a briar-patch of dreads as pale as mushrooms, her monolithic black face melted in its age, her eyes two tarpools in this terrain of gnarled ebony. The shadowy bulk of her body eclipsed the mighty chair she sat in, though its armrests jutted into view, dark wood intricately carven into the coils and claws and thews of two heraldic monsters. Ricky couldn't make out what they were, but they seemed to snarl beneath the fingers of Momma Hagg's immense hands.
The dog's tongue was licking what Andre held up to it — Ricky's tenspot. The mastiff sniffed and sniffed, then snorted, and licked the bill again, and licked his chops.
'Come on up,' said Momma. 'The two of you.' The big woman's voice had a strange kind of pull to it. Like surf at your legs, its growl dragged you toward her. Ricky approached. Andre mounted to the porch, and Ricky climbed after him. He had the sensation with each step up that he entered a bigger and emptier kind of space. When he stood on the porch, Momma Hagg seemed farther off than he had expected. From her distance wafted the smell of her — an ashen scent like the drenched coals of a bonfire that had included flesh and bones in its fuel. The dog rose.
The porch took too long to cross as they followed the hound. His bright tongue lolling like a casually held torch, with just one back-glance of one crimson eye, the brute led them through a wide, doorless doorframe, and into a high dark interior that gusted out dank salty breath in their faces.
A cold gray light leaked in here, as if the fog that had swallowed the Hood had now climbed the hills, and its glow was seeping into this gaunt house. They trod a rambling, unpartitioned space, the interior all wall-less, while the outer walls were irregularly recessed in alcoves, nooks, and grottos. In some of these stood furniture, oddly forlorn, bulky antique pieces — an armchair, a setee, an escritoire crusted with ancient papers. These stranded little settings — like fossils of foregone transactions whose participants had blown to dust long since — seemed to mark the passage of generations through this rambling gloom.
Ricky had the disorienting sense they had been trekking for a long, long time. He realized that the stranded furniture had a delicately furred and crusted profile in the gray light, like tidepool rocks, and a cold tidal scent touched his nostrils. Realized too, that here and there in those recesses, there were windows. Beyond their panes lay a different shade of darkness, where weedy and barnacled shadows stirred and glinted wetly.
And throughout this shadowy passage, Ricky noted, on every stretch of wall he could discern, wooden wainscottings densely carven. The misty glow put a sheen on the sinuous saliences of this dark chiselwork, which seemed to depict bulbous, serpentine knots of tail and claw and thew — or perhaps woven cephalopodia, braided greedy tentacles, and writhing prey in ragged beaks.
But now the walls had narrowed in, and here were stairs, and up these steep, worn stairs the hound, not pausing, led them. The air of this stairwell was slightly dizzying. The labor of the black beast climbing before them seemed to pull the two men after, as if the beast drew them in an executioner's tumbril. They were lifted, Ricky
