Black House (63 page)

“Is he—” Jack begins, and then Mouse’s eyes open. Whatever Jack meant to ask leaves his head entirely. Around the hazel irises, Mouse’s eyes have gone an uneasy, shifting scarlet. It’s as if the man is looking into a terrible radioactive sunset. From the inner corners of his eyes, some sort of black scum is oozing.

“
The Book of Philosophical Transformation
addresses most current dialectics,” Mouse says, speaking mellowly and lucidly, “and Machiavelli also speaks to these questions.” Jack can almost picture him in a lecture hall. Until his teeth begin to chatter, that is.

“Mouse, it’s Jack Sawyer.” No recognition in those weird red-and-hazel eyes. The black gunk at the corners of them seems to twitch, however, as if it is somehow sentient. Listening to him.

“It’s Hollywood,” Beezer murmurs. “The cop. Remember?”

One of Mouse’s hands lies on the plaid blanket. Jack takes it, and stifles a cry of surprise when it closes over his with amazing strength. It’s hot, too. As hot as a biscuit just out of the oven. Mouse lets out a long, gasping sigh, and the stench is fetid—bad meat, decayed flowers.
He’s rotting,
Jack thinks.
Rotting from the inside out. Oh Christ, help me through this.

Christ may not, but the memory of Sophie might. Jack tries to fix her eyes in his memory, that lovely, level, clear blue gaze.

“Listen,” Mouse says.

“I’m listening.”

Mouse seems to gather himself. Beneath the blanket, his body shivers in a loose, uncoordinated way that Jack guesses is next door to a seizure. Somewhere a clock is ticking. Somewhere a dog is barking. A boat hoots on the Mississippi. Other than these sounds, all is silence. Jack can remember only one other such suspension of the world’s business in his entire life, and that was when he was in a Beverly Hills hospital, waiting for his mother to finish the long business of dying. Somewhere Ty Marshall is waiting to be rescued. Hoping to be rescued, at least. Somewhere there are Breakers hard at work, trying to destroy the axle upon which all existence spins. Here is only this eternal room with its feeble fans and noxious vapors.

Mouse’s eyes close, then open again. They fix upon the newcomer, and Jack is suddenly sure some great truth is going to be confided. The ice cube is gone from his mouth; Jack supposes he crunched it up and swallowed it without even realizing, but he doesn’t dare take another.

“Go on, buddy,” Doc says. “You get it out and then I’ll load you up with another hypo of dope. The good stuff. Maybe you’ll sleep.”

Mouse pays no heed. His mutating eyes hold Jack’s. His hand holds Jack’s, tightening still more. Jack can almost feel the bones of his fingers grinding together.

“Don’t . . . go out and buy top-of-the-line equipment,” Mouse says, and sighs out another excruciatingly foul breath from his rotting lungs.

“Don’t . . . ?”

“Most people give up brewing after . . . a year or two. Even dedicated . . . dedicated hobbyists. Making beer is not . . . is not for pussies.”

Jack looks around at Beezer, who looks back impassively. “He’s in and out. Be patient. Wait on him.”

Mouse’s grip tightens yet more, then loosens just as Jack is deciding he can take it no longer.

“Get a big pot,” Mouse advises him. His eyes bulge. The reddish shadows come and go, come and go, fleeting across the curved landscape of his corneas, and Jack thinks,
That’s
its
shadow. The shadow of the Crimson King. Mouse has already got one foot in its court.
“Five gallons . . . at least. You find the best ones are in . . . seafood supply stores. And for a fermentation vessel . . . plastic water-cooler jugs are good . . . they’re lighter than glass, and
.
.
.
I’m burning up. Christ, Beez, I’m burning up!
”

“Fuck this, I’m going to shoot it to him,” Doc says, and snaps open his bag.

Beezer grabs his arm. “Not yet.”

Bloody tears begin to slip out of Mouse’s eyes. The black goo seems to be forming into tiny tendrils. These reach greedily downward, as if trying to catch the moisture and drink it.

“Fermentation lock and stopper,” Mouse whispers. “Thomas Merton is shit, never let anyone tell you different. No real thought there. You have to let the gases escape while keeping dust out. Jerry Garcia wasn’t God. Kurt Cobain wasn’t God. The perfume he smells is not that of his dead wife. He’s caught the eye of the King.
Gorg-ten-abbalah, ee-lee-lee.
The opopanax is dead, long live the opopanax.”

Jack leans more deeply into Mouse’s smell. “Who’s smelling perfume? Who’s caught the eye of the King?”

“The mad King, the bad King, the sad King. Ring-a-ding-ding, all hail the King.”

“Mouse,
who’s
caught the eye of the King?”

Doc says, “I thought you wanted to know about—”

“Who?”
Jack has no idea why this seems important to him, but it does. Is it something someone has said to him recently? Was it Dale? Tansy? Was it, God save us, Wendell Green?

“Racking cane and hose,” Mouse says confidentially. “That’s what you need when the fermentation’s done! And you can’t put beer in screw-top bottles! You—”

Mouse turns his head away from Jack, nestles it cozily in the hollow of his shoulder, opens his mouth, and vomits. Bear Girl screams. The vomit is pus-yellow and speckled with moving black bits like the crud in the corners of Mouse’s eyes. It is alive.

Beezer leaves the room in a hurry, not quite running, and Jack shades Mouse from the brief glare of kitchen sunlight as best he can. The hand clamped on Jack’s loosens a little more.

Jack turns to Doc. “Do you think he’s going?”

Doc shakes his head. “Passed out again. Poor old Mousie ain’t getting off that easy.” He gives Jack a grim, haunted look. “This better be worth it, Mr. Policeman. ’Cause if it ain’t, I’m gonna replumb your sink.”

Beezer comes back with a huge bundle of rags, and he’s put on a pair of green kitchen gloves. Not speaking, he mops up the pool of vomit between Mouse’s shoulder and the backrest of the couch. The black specks have ceased moving, and that’s good. To have not seen them moving in the first place would have been even better. The vomit, Jack notices with dismay, has eaten into the couch’s worn fabric like acid.

“I’m going to pull the blanket down for a second or two,” Doc says, and Bear Girl gets up at once, still holding the bowl with the melting ice. She goes to one of the bookshelves and stands there with her back turned, trembling.

“Doc, is this something I really need to see?”

“I think maybe it is. I don’t think you know what you’re dealing with, even now.” Doc takes hold of the blanket and eases it out from beneath Mouse’s limp hand. Jack sees that more of the black stuff has begun to ooze from beneath the dying man’s fingernails. “Remember that this happened only a couple of hours ago, Mr. Policeman.”

He pulls the blanket down. Standing with her back to them, Susan “Bear Girl” Osgood faces the great works of Western philosophy and begins to cry silently. Jack tries to hold back his scream and cannot.

Henry pays off the taxi, goes into his house, takes a deep and soothing breath of the air-conditioned cool. There is a faint aroma—sweet—and he tells himself it’s just fresh-cut flowers, one of Mrs. Morton’s specialties. He knows better, but wants no more to do with ghosts just now. He is actually feeling better, and he supposes he knows why: it was telling the ESPN guy to take his job and shove it. Nothing more apt to make a fellow’s day, especially when the fellow in question is gainfully employed, possessed of two credit cards that are nowhere near the max-out point, and has a pitcher of cold iced tea in the fridge.

Henry heads kitchenward now, making his way down the hall with one hand held out before him, testing the air for obstacles and displacements. There’s no sound but the whisper of the air conditioner, the hum of the fridge, the clack of his heels on the hardwood . . .

. . . and a sigh.

An amorous sigh.

Henry stands where he is for a moment, then turns cautiously. Is the sweet aroma a little stronger now, especially facing back in this direction, toward the living room and the front door? He thinks yes. And it’s not flowers; no sense fooling himself about that. As always, the nose knows. That’s the aroma of My Sin.

“Rhoda?” he says, and then, lower: “Lark?”

No answer. Of course not. He’s just having the heebie-jeebies, that’s all; those world-famous shaky-shivers, and why not?

“Because I’m the sheik, baby,” Henry says. “The Sheik, the Shake, the Shook.”

No smells. No sexy sighs. And yet he’s haunted by the idea of his wife back in the living room, standing there in perfumed cerements of the grave, watching him silently as he came in and passed blindly before her. His Lark, come back from Noggin Mound Cemetery for a little visit. Maybe to listen to the latest Slobberbone CD.

“Quit it,” he says softly. “Quit it, you dope.”

He goes into his big, well-organized kitchen. On his way through the door he slaps a button on the panel there without even thinking about it. Mrs. Morton’s voice comes from the overhead speaker, which is so high-tech she might almost be in the room.

“Jack Sawyer was by, and he dropped off another tape he wants you to listen to. He said it was . . . you know, that man. That bad man.”

“Bad man, right,” Henry murmurs, opening the refrigerator and enjoying the blast of cold air. His hand goes unerringly to one of three cans of Kingsland Lager stored inside the door. Never mind the iced tea.

“Both of the tapes are in your studio, by the soundboard. Also, Jack wanted you to call him on his cell phone.” Mrs. Morton’s voice takes on a faintly lecturing tone. “If you do speak to him, I hope you tell him to be careful. And be careful yourself.” A pause. “
Also,
don’t forget to eat supper. It’s all ready to go. Second shelf of the fridge, on your left.”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Henry says, but he’s smiling as he opens his beer. He goes to the telephone and dials Jack’s number.

On the seat of the Dodge Ram parked in front of 1 Nailhouse Row, Jack’s cell phone comes to life. This time there’s no one in the cab to be annoyed by its tiny but penetrating tweet.

“The cellular customer you are trying to reach is currently not answering. Please try your call again later.”

Henry hangs up, goes back to the doorway, and pushes another button on the panel there. The voices that deliver the time and temperature are all versions of his own, but he’s programmed a random shuffle pattern into the gadget, so he never knows which one he’s going to get. This time it’s the Wisconsin Rat, screaming crazily into the sunny air-conditioned silence of his house, which has never felt so far from town as it does today:

“Time’s four twenty-two
P.M.!
Outside temperature’s eighty-two! Inside temperature’s seventy! What the hell do you care? What the hell does
anyone
care? Chew it up, eat it up, wash it down,
it aaall—
”

—comes out the same place. Right. Henry thumbs the button again, silencing the Rat’s trademark cry. How did it get late so fast? God, wasn’t it just noon? For that matter, wasn’t he just young, twenty years old and so full of spunk it was practically coming out of his ears? What—

That sigh comes again, derailing his mostly self-mocking train of thought. A sigh? Really? More likely just the air conditioner’s compressor, cutting off. He can tell himself that, anyway.

He can tell himself that if he wants to.

“Is anyone here?” Henry asks. There is a tremble in his voice that he hates, an old man’s palsied quaver. “Is anyone in the house with me?”

For a terrible second he is almost afraid something will answer. Nothing does—of
course
nothing does—and he swallows half the can of beer in three long gulps. He decides he’ll go back into the living room and read for a little while. Maybe Jack will call. Maybe he’ll get himself a little more under control once he has a little fresh alcohol in his system.

And maybe the world will end in the next five minutes,
he thinks.
That way you’ll never have to deal with the voice on those damned tapes waiting in the studio. Those damned tapes lying there on the soundboard like unexploded bombs.

Henry walks slowly back down the hall to the living room with one hand held out before him, telling himself he’s not afraid, not a bit afraid of touching his wife’s dead face.

Jack Sawyer has seen a lot, he’s traveled to places where you can’t rent from Avis and the water tastes like wine, but he’s never encountered anything like Mouse Baumann’s leg. Or, rather, the pestilential, apocalyptic horror show that
was
Mouse Baumann’s leg. Jack’s first impulse once he’s got himself back under something like control is to upbraid Doc for taking off Mouse’s pants. Jack keeps thinking of sausages, and how the casing forces them to keep their shape even after the fry pan’s sizzling on a red-hot burner. This is an undoubtedly stupid comparison,
primo stupido,
but the human mind under pressure puts on some pretty odd jinks and jumps.

There’s still the
shape
of a leg there—sort of—but the flesh has spread away from the bone. The skin is almost completely gone, melted to a runny substance that looks like a mixture of milk and bacon fat. The interwoven mat of muscle beneath what remains of the skin is sagging and undergoing the same cataclysmic metamorphosis. The infected leg is in a kind of undisciplined motion as the solid becomes liquid and the liquid sizzles relentlessly into the couch upon which Mouse is lying. Along with the almost insupportable stench of decay, Jack can smell scorching cloth and melting fabric.

Poking out of this spreading, vaguely leglike mess is a foot that looks remarkably undamaged.
If I wanted to, I could pull it right off
.
.
.
just like a squash off a vine.
The thought gets to him in a way the sight of the grievously wounded leg hasn’t quite been able to, and for a moment Jack can only bow his head, gagging and trying not to vomit down the front of his shirt.

What perhaps saves him is a hand on his back. It’s Beezer, offering what comfort he can. The rowdy color has completely left the Beez’s face. He looks like a motorcyclist come back from the grave in an urban myth.