As Jack had known instantly, the movie is The Terror of Deadwood Gulch, a 1950 comic Western in which the then-famous and still fondly remembered Bill Towns, a sort of poor man's Bob Hope, played a cowardly gambler and cardsharp who arrives in the little Potemkin community of Deadwood Gulch, Arizona, and is soon mistaken for a notorious gunfighter. As the beautiful, quick-witted owner of a saloon called the Lazy 8, the lively center of village social life, Lily Cavanaugh is much appreciated by the crowd of cowpokes, loungers, ranchers, merchants, lawmen, and riffraff who fill her place every night. She makes her patrons check their revolvers at the door and mind their manners, which tend toward the opopanax. In the scene playing now, which is about half an hour into the movie, Lily is alone in her saloon, trying to get rid of a persistent bee.
A bee for the Queen of the B's, Jack thinks, and smiles.
At the buzzing nuisance, Lily flaps a cleaning rag, a flyswatter, a mop, a broom, a gun belt. The bee eludes her every effort, zooming here and there, from the bar to a card table, to the top of a whiskey bottle, the tops of three other bottles all in a row, the lid of the upright piano, often waiting while its adversary comes sneaking up by subtle indirection, then taking off a second before the latest weapon slams down. It is a lovely little sequence that verges on slapstick, and when Jacky was six, six, six, or maybe seven, half hysterical with laughter at the sight of his competent mother failing repeatedly to vanquish this flying annoyance and suddenly curious as to how the movie guys had made the insect do all these things, his mother had explained that it was not a real bee but an enchanted one produced by the special-effects department.
Lester Moon says, "I could never figure out how they got the bee to go where they wanted. Like, what did they do, train it?"
"First they filmed her alone on the set," Jack says, having concluded that, after all, Stinky Cheese is a pretty decent fellow with great taste in actresses. "Special effects put the bee in later. It isn't a real bee, it's a drawing ¡ª an animation. You really can't tell, can you?"
"No way. Are you sure? How do you know that, anyhow?"
"I read it in a book somewhere," Jack says, using his all-purpose response to such questions.
Resplendent in fancy cardsharp getup, Bill Towns saunters through the Lazy 8's swinging doors and leers at its proprietress without noticing that she is edging toward the bee now once again installed upon the shiny bar. He has romance in mind, and he swaggers when he walks.
I see you came back for more, hotshot, Lily says. You must like the place.
Baby, this is the sweetest joint west of the wide Missouri. Reminds me of the place where I beat Black Jack McGurk to the draw. Poor Black Jack. He never did know when to fold 'em.
With a noise like the revving of a B-52, the enchanted bee, a creature of fiction inside the fiction, launches itself at Bill Towns's slickly behat-ted head. The comedian's face turns rubbery with comic terror. He waves his arms, he jigs, he screeches. The enchanted bee performs aeronautic stunts around the panicky pseudogunfighter. Towns's splendid hat falls off; his hair disarranges itself. He edges toward a table and, with a final flurry of hand waving, dives under it and begs for help.
Eye fixed on the ambling bee, Lily walks to the bar and picks up a glass and a folded newspaper. She approaches the table, watching the bee walking around in circles. She jumps forward and lowers the glass, trapping the bee. It flies up and bumps the bottom of the glass. Lily tilts the glass, slides the folded paper underneath it, and raises her hands, holding the newspaper against the top of the glass.
The camera pulls back, and we see the cowardly gambler peeking out from under the table as Lily pushes the doors open and releases the bee.
Behind him, Lester Moon says, "Cheeseburger's ready, mister. "
For the next half hour, Jack eats his burger and tries to lose himself in the movie. The burger is great, world-class, with that juicy taste you can get only from a greased-up griddle, and the fries are perfect, golden and crunchy on the outside, but his concentration keeps wandering from The Terror of Deadwood Gulch. The problem is not that he has seen the movie perhaps a dozen times; the problem is Tansy Freneau. Certain things she said trouble him. The more he thinks about them, the less he understands what is going on.
According to Tansy, the crow ¡ª the raven ¡ª named Gorg came from a world alongside and outside the world we know. She had to be talking about the Territories. Using a phrase from Poe's "The Raven," she called this other world "Night's Plutonian shore," which was pretty good for someone like Tansy, but did not seem in any way applicable to the magical Territories. Gorg had told Tansy that everything in his world was on fire, and not even the Blasted Lands met that description. Jack could remember the Blasted Lands and the odd train that had taken him and Rational Richard, then a sick, wasted Rational Richard, across that vast red desert. Strange creatures had lived there, alligator-men and birds with the faces of bearded monkeys, but it had certainly not been on fire. The Blasted Lan
ds were the product of some past disaster, not the site of a present conflagration. What had Tansy said? A big, big place made all of fire . . . going way high up. What had she seen, to what landscape had Gorg opened her eyes? It sounded like a great burning tower, or a tall building consumed by fire. A burning tower, a burning building in a burning world ¡ª how could that world be the Territories?
Jack has been in the Territories twice in the past forty-eight hours, and what he has seen has been beautiful. More than beautiful ¡ª cleansing. The deepest truth Jack knows about the Territories is that they contain a kind of sacred magic: the magic he saw in Judy Marshall. Because of that magic, the Territories can confer a wondrous blessing on human beings. The life of that extraordinary tough beloved woman making fun of Bill Towns on the big screen before him was saved by an object from the Territories. Because Jack had been in the Territories ¡ª and maybe because he had held the Talisman ¡ª almost every horse he bets on comes in first, every stock he buys triples in value, ever poker hand he holds takes the pot.
So what world is Tansy talking about? And what's all this stuff about Gorg coming here through a burning hole?
When Jack flipped over yesterday, he had sensed something unhappy, something unhealthy, far off to the southwest, and he suspected that was where he would find the Fisherman's Twinner. Kill the Fisherman, kill the Twinner; it didn't matter which he did first, the other one would weaken. But . . .
It still didn't make sense. When you travel between worlds, you just flip ¡ª you don't set a fire at the world's edge and run through it into another one.
A few minutes before twelve, the rumble of motorcycles drowns the voices on the screen. "Um, mister, you might want to take off," says Moon. "That's the ¡ª "
"The Thunder Five," Jack says. "I know. "
"Okay. It's just, they scare the shit out of some of my customers. But as long as you treat 'em right, they act okay. "
"I know. There's nothing to worry about. "
"I mean, if you buy 'em a beer or something, they'll think you're all right. "
Jack gets off his stool and faces the bartender. "Lester, there is no reason to be nervous. They're coming here to meet me. "
Lester blinks. For the first time, Jack notices that his eyebrows are thin, curved wisps, like those of a 1920s vamp. "I'd better start pourin' a pitcher of Kingsland. " He grabs a pitcher from beneath the bar, sets it under the Kingsland Ale tap, and opens the valve. A thick stream of amber liquid rushes into the pitcher and turns to foam.
The sound of the motorcycles builds to an uproar at the front of the building, then cuts off. Beezer St. Pierre bangs through the door, closely followed by Doc, Mouse, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill. They look like Vikings, and Jack is overjoyed to see them.
"Stinky, turn that TV the fuck off," Beezer roars. "And we didn't come here to drink, so empty that pitcher into the drain. The way you pour, it's all head anyhow. And when you're done, get back in the kitchen with your momma. Our business with this man's got nothin' to do with you. "
"Okay, Beezer," Moon says in a shaky voice. "All I need is a second. "
"Then that's what you got," Beezer says.
Beezer and the others line up in front of the bar, some of them staring at Stinky Cheese, some, more kindly, at Jack. Mouse is still wearing his cornrows, and he has daubed some black antiglare substance beneath his eyes, like a football player. Kaiser Bill and Sonny have pulled their manes back into ponytails again. Ale and foam slide out of the pitcher and seep into the drain. "Okay, guys," Moon says. His footsteps retreat along the back of the bar. A door closes.
The members of the Thunder Five separate and spread out in front of Jack. Most of them have crossed their arms on their chests, and muscles bulge.
Jack pushes his plate to the back of the bar, stands up, and says, "Before last night, had any of you guys ever heard of George Potter?"
From his perch on the edge of the pool table nearest to the front door, Jack faces Beezer and Doc, who lean forward on their bar stools. Kaiser Bill, one finger against his lips and his head bowed, stands beside Beezer. Mouse lies stretched out on the second pool table, propping his head up with one hand. Banging his fists together and scowling, Sonny is pacing back and forth between the bar and the jukebox.
"You sure he didn't say 'Bleak House,' like the Dickens novel?" Mouse says.
"I'm sure," says Jack, reminding himself that he should not be surprised every time one of these guys demonstrates that he went to college. "It was 'Black House. ' "
"Jeez, I almost think I . . . " Mouse shakes his head.
"What was the builder's name again?" asks Beezer.
"Burnside. First name probably Charles, sometimes known as 'Chummy. ' A long time ago, he changed it from something like 'Beer Stein. ' "
"Beerstein? Bernstein?"
"You got me," Jack says.
"And you think he's the Fisherman. "
Jack nods. Beezer is staring at him as if trying to see the back of his head.
"How sure are you?"
"Ninety-nine percent. He planted the Polaroids in Potter's room. "
"Damn. " Beezer pushes himself off his stool and walks around to the back of the bar. "I want to make sure nobody forgets the obvious. " He bends down and straightens up with a telephone book in one hand. "Know what I mean?" Beezer opens the directory on the bar, flips a few pages, flips back, and runs his thick finger down a column of names. "No Burnside. Too bad. "
"Good idea, though," Jack says. "This morning, I tried the same thing myself. "
Sonny pauses on his return journey from the jukebox and jabs a finger at Jack. "How long ago was this damn house built?"
"Nearly thirty years ago. During the seventies. "
"Hell, we were all kids then, back in Illinois. How are we supposed to know about that house?"
"You guys get around. I thought there was a pretty good chance you might have seen it. And the place is spooky. People tend to talk about houses like that. " They did in normal cases, at least, Jack thought. In normal cases, spooky houses got that way because they had been empty for a couple of years, or because something terrible had happened in them. In this case, he thought, the house itself was terrible, and the people who otherwise would have talked about it could barely remember seeing it. Judging by Dale's response, Black House had vanished into its own nonexistent shadow.
He says, "Think about this. Try to remember. In the years you've been living in French Landing, have you ever heard of a house that seemed to have a curse on it? Black House caused injuries to the people who built it. The workmen hated the place; they were afraid of it. They said you couldn't see your shadow when you got near it. They were claiming it was haunted while they worked on it! Eventually, they all quit, and Burnside had to finish the job himself. "
"It's off by itself somewhere," Doc says. "Obviously, this thing isn't sitting around in plain view. It's not in some development like Libertyville. You're not going to find it on Robin Hood Lane. "
"Right," Jack says. "I should have mentioned that before. Potter told me it was built a little way off what he called 'the road,' in a kind of clearing. So it's in the woods, Doc, you're right. It's isolated. "
"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 ¡ª you know, make myself remember ¡ª 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 ¡ª 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 ¡ª 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 saying, 'Don't be a pussy, Mouse, let's haul ass,' so I gun it a little bit, and everything feels all weird and shit, but all I can see's this track curving away into the trees and the shit I know isn't there. "
"Like what?" asks Sonny, in what sounds like the spirit of scientific inquiry.
"These dark shapes coming up to the edge of the road and looking out through the trees. A couple of them ran toward me, but I rolled right through them like smoke. I don't know, maybe they were smoke. "
"Fuck that, it was the acid," Beezer says.
"Maybe, but it didn't feel that way. Besides, the Ultimate never turned on you, remember? It wasn't about darkness. Anyhow, right before the shit hit the fan, all of a sudden I was thinking about Kiz Martin. I can remember that, all right. It was like I could practically see her, right in front of me ¡ª the way she looked when they loaded her in the ambulance. "
"Kiz Martin," Beezer says.
Mouse turns to Jack. "Kiz was a girl I went out with when we were all at the university. She used to beg us to let her ride with us, and one day the Kaiser said, okay, she could borrow his bike. Kiz was having a ball, man, she's diggin' it. And then she rolls over some damn little twig, I think it was ¡ª "
"Bigger than a twig," Doc says. "Little branch. Maybe two inches in diameter. "
"Which is just enough to test your balance, especially if you're not used to hogs," Mouse says. "She rolls over this little branch, and the bike flops over, and Kiz flies off and hits the road. My heart damn near stopped, man. "
"I knew she was gone the second I came up close enough to see the angle of her head," says Doc. "There wasn't even any point in trying CPR. We covered her with our jackets, and I rode off to call an ambulance. Ten minutes later, they were loading her in. One of the guys recognized me from my stint in the ER, or they might have given us some trouble. "
"I wondered if you were really a doctor," Jack says.
"Completed my residency in surgery at U. I. , walked away from the whole deal right there. " Doc smiles at him. "Hanging around with these guys, getting into beer brewing, sounded like more fun than spending all day cutting people up. "
"Mouse," Beezer says.
"Yeah. I was just getting to the curve in the little road, and it was like Kiz was standing right in front of me, it was so vivid. Her eyes closed, and her head hanging like a leaf about to fall. Oh man, I said to myself, this is not what I want to see at this particular moment. I could feel it all over again ¡ª the way I felt when Kiz hit the road. Sick dread. That's the word for it, sick dread.
"And we come around the curve, and I hear this dog growling somewhere off in the woods. Not just growling, growling. Like twenty big dogs are out there, and they're all mad as hell. My head starts feeling like it wants to explode. And I look up ahead of me to see if a pack of wolves or something is running toward us, and it takes me a while to realize that the weird shadowy stuff I see up ahead is a house. A black house.
"Little Nancy is hitting me on the back and rapping my head, screaming at me to stop. Believe me, I can get with the program, because the last thing I want to do is get any closer to that place. I stop the bike, and Little Nancy jumps off and pukes on the side of the
road. She holds her head and she pukes some more. I'm feeling like my legs turned to rubber, like something heavy is pressing on my chest. That thing, whatever it is, is still going nuts in the woods, and it's getting closer. I take another look up at the end of the road, and that ugly damn house is stretching back into the woods, like it's crawling into them, only it's standing still. It gets bigger the more you look at it! Then I see the sparkly lights floating around it, and they look dangerous ¡ª Stay away, they're telling me, get out of here, Mouse. There's another NO TRESPASSING sign leaning against the porch, and that sign, man . . . that sign kind of flashed, like it was saying THIS TIME I MEAN IT, BUDDY.
"My head is splitting in half, but I get Little Nancy on the bike, and she sags against me, like pure dead weight except she's hanging on, and I kick the hog on and spin around and take off. When we get back to my place, she goes to bed and stays there for three days. To me, it seemed like I could hardly remember what happened. The whole thing went kind of dark. In my mind. I hardly had time to think about it anyhow, because Little Nancy got sick and I had to take care of her whenever I wasn't at work. Doc gave her some stuff to get her temperature down, and she got better, so we could drink beer and smoke shit and ride around, like before, but she was never really the same. End of August, she started getting bad again, and I had to put her in the hospital. Second week of September, hard as she was fighting, Little Nancy passed away. "
"How big was Little Nancy?" Jack asks, picturing a woman roughly the size of Mouse.
"Little Nancy Hale was about the size and shape of Tansy Freneau," Mouse says, looking surprised by the question. "If she stood on my hand, I could lift her up with one arm. "
"And you never talked about this with anyone," Jack says.
"How could I talk about it?" Mouse asks. "First, I was crazy with worry about Little Nancy, and then it went clean out of my head. Weird shit will do that to you, man. Instead of sticking in your head, it erases itself. "
"I know exactly what you mean," Jack says.
"I guess I do, too," says Beezer, "but I'd say that the Ultimate kicked the shit out of your reality there for a while. You did see the place, though ¡ª Black House. "
"Damn straight," says Mouse.
Beezer focuses on Jack. "And you say the Fisherman, this creep Burnside, built it. "
Jack nods.
"So maybe he's living there, and he rigged up a bunch of gadgets to scare people away. "
"Could be. "
"Then I think we're gonna let Mouse take us over on Highway 35 and see if he can find that little road he was talking about. Are you coming with us?"
"I can't," Jack says. "I have to see someone in Arden first, someone who I think can also help us. She has another piece of the puzzle, but I can't explain it to you until I see her. "
"This woman knows something?"
"Oh, yes," Jack says. "She knows something. "
"All right," Beezer says, and stands up from his stool. "Your choice. We'll have to talk to you afterward. "
"Beezer, I want to be with you when you go inside Black House. Whatever we have to do in there, whatever we see . . . " Jack pauses, trying to find the right words. Beezer is rocking on his heels, practically jumping out of his skin in his eagerness to hunt down the Fisherman's lair. "You're going to want me there. There's more to this business than you can imagine, Beezer. You're going to know what I'm talking about in a little while, and you'll be able to stand up to it ¡ª I think all of you will ¡ª but if I tried to describe it now, you wouldn't believe me. When the time comes, you'll need me to see you through, if we get through. You'll be glad I was there. We're at a dangerous point here, and none of us wants to mess it up. "
"What makes you think I'll mess it up?" Beezer asks, with deceptive mildness.
"Anyone would mess it up, if they didn't have the last piece of the puzzle. Go out there. See if Mouse can find the house he saw two years ago. Check it out. Don't go in ¡ª to do that, you need me. After you check it out, come back here, and I'll see you as soon as I can. I should be back before two-thirty, three at the latest. "
"Where are you going in Arden? Maybe I'll want to call you. "
"French County Lutheran Hospital. Ward D. If you can't get me, leave a message with a Dr. Spiegleman. "
"Ward D, huh?" Beezer says. "Okay, I guess everybody's crazy today. And I guess I can be satisfied with only a look at this house, as long as I know that sometime this afternoon, I can count on you to explain all these pieces I'm too stupid to understand. "
"It'll be soon, Beezer. We're closing in. And the last thing I'd call you is stupid. "
"I guess you must have been one hell of a cop," Beezer says. "Even though I think half the stuff you say is crap, I can't help but believe it. " He turns around and brings his fists down on the bar. "Stinky Cheese! It's safe now. Drag your pale ass out of the kitchen. "