"You see?" Doc is asking, and his voice seems to come from a great distance. "This ain't the chicken pox, my friend, although it looked a little like that while it was still getting cranked up. He's already exhibiting red spots on his left leg . . . his belly . . . his balls. That's pretty much what the skin around the bite looked like when we first got him back here, just some redness and swelling. I thought, ‘Shit, ain't nothin' to this, I got enough Zithromax to put this on the run before sundown.' Well, you see what good the Zithro did. You see what good anything did. It's eating through the couch, and I'm guessing that when it finishes with the couch, it'll go right to work on the floor. This shit is hungry. So was it worth it, Hollywood? I guess only you and Mouse know the answer to that."
"He still knows where the house is," Beezer says. "Me, I don't have a clue, even though we just came from there. You, either. Do you?"
Doc shakes his head.
"But Mouse, he knows."
"Susie, honey," Doc says to Bear Girl. "Bring another blanket, would you? This one's damn near et through."
Bear Girl goes willingly enough. Jack gets to his feet. His legs are rubbery, but they hold him. "Shield him," he tells Doc. "I'm going out to the kitchen. If I don't get a drink, I'm going to die."
Jack takes on water directly from the sink, swallowing until a spike plants itself in the center of his forehead and he belches like a horse. Then he just stands there, looking out into Beezer and Bear Girl's backyard. A neat little swing set has been planted there in the weedy desolation. It hurts Jack to look at it, but he looks anyway. After the lunacy of Mouse's leg, it seems important to remind himself that he's here for a reason. If the reminder hurts, so much the better.
The sun, now turning gold as it eases itself down toward the Missis-sippi, glares in his eyes. Time hasn't been standing still after all, it seems. Not outside this little house, anyway. Outside 1 Nailhouse Row, time actually seems to have sped up. He's haunted by the idea that coming here was as pointless as detouring to Henry's house; tormented by the thought that Mr. Munshun and his boss, the abbalah, are running him around like a windup toy with a key in its back while they do their work. He can follow that buzz in his head to Black House, so why the hell doesn't he just get back in his truck and do it?
The perfume he smells is not that of his dead wife.
What does that mean? Why does the idea of someone smelling perfume make him so crazy and afraid?
Beezer knocks on the kitchen door, making him jump. Jack's eye fixes on a sampler hung over the kitchen table. Instead of GOD BLESS OUR HOME, it reads HEAVY METAL THUNDER. With a carefully stitched HARLEY-DAVIDSON beneath.
"Get back in here, man," the Beez says. "He's awake again."
Henry's on a path in the woods — or maybe it's a lane — and something is behind him. Each time he turns to see — in this dream he can see, but seeing is no blessing — there's a little more of that something back there. It appears to be a man in evening dress, but the man is frightfully elongated, with spike teeth that jut over a smiling red lower lip. And he seems — is it possible? — to have only one eye.
The first time Henry looks back, the shape is only a milky blur amid the trees. The next time he can make out the uneasy dark swim of its coat and a floating red blotch that might be a tie or an ascot. Up ahead of him is this thing's den, a stinking hole that only coincidentally looks like a house. Its presence buzzes in Henry's head. Instead of pine, the woods pressing in on either side smell of heavy, cloying perfume: My Sin.
It's driving me, he thinks with dismay. Whatever that thing back there is, it's driving me like a steer toward the slaughterhouse.
He thinks of cutting off the lane to his left or right, of using the miracle of his new sight to escape through the woods. Only there are things there, too. Dark, floating shapes like sooty scarves. He can almost see the closest. It's some sort of gigantic dog with a long tongue as red as the apparition's tie and bulging eyes.
Can't let it drive me to the house, he thinks. I have to get out of this before it can get me there . . . but how? How?
It comes to him with startling simplicity. All he has to do is wake up. Because this is a dream. This is just a —
"It's a dream!" Henry cries out, and jerks forward. He's not walking, he's sitting, sitting in his very own easy chair, and pretty soon he's going to have a very wet crotch because he fell asleep with a can of Kingsland Lager balanced there, and —
But there's no spill, because there's no can of beer. He feels cautiously to his right and yep, there it is, on the table with his book, a braille edition of Reflections in a Golden Eye. He must have put it there before first falling asleep and then falling into that horrible nightmare.
Except Henry's pretty sure he didn't do any such thing. He was holding the book and the beer was between his legs, freeing his hands to touch the little upraised dots that tell the story. Something very considerately took both the book and the can after he dropped off, and put them on the table. Something that smells of My Sin perfume.
The air reeks of it.
Henry takes a long, slow breath with his nostrils flared and mouth tightly sealed shut.