"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 f**king 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 pu**y, 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 — 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 — "
"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 — 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.