Black House

“Hey, hey, hey,” Mouse says, swinging his legs over the side of the pool table and grunting himself upright.

His eyes are screwed shut, and he claps one meaty hand on his forehead. “If I could only remember . . .” He lets out a howl of frustration.

“What?” Beezer’s voice is at twice its normal volume, and the word sounds like a paving stone hitting a cement sidewalk.

“I know I saw that fucking place,” he says. “As soon as you started talking about it, I had this feeling it sounded kinda familiar. It kept hanging at the back of my mind, but it wouldn’t come out. When I tried to think about it—you know, make myself remember—I kept seeing these sparkly lights. When Jack said it was back in the woods, I knew what he was talking about. I had a clear picture of the place. Surrounded by all these sparkling lights.”

“That doesn’t sound much like Black House,” Jack says.

“Sure it does. The lights weren’t really there, I just saw them.” Mouse offers this observation as though it is completely rational.

Sonny utters a bark of laughter, and Beezer shakes his head and says, “Shit.”

“I don’t get it,” Jack says.

Beezer looks at Jack, holds up one finger, and asks Mouse, “Are we talking about July, August, two years ago?”

“Naturally,” Mouse says. “The summer of the Ultimate Acid.” He looks at Jack and smiles. “Two years ago, we got this amazing, amazing acid. Drop a tab, you’re in for five or six hours of the most unbelievable head games. Nobody ever had a bad experience with the stuff. It was all groove, know what I mean?”

“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