Black House by Stephen King

speaking bee circles back to the window and passes into another world, and, following his lead, we move on, out the window, into the sun, and into the upper air.
    Smells of shit and urine at Maxton Elder Care; the fragile, slick feel of
slippage
at the off-kilter house north of Highway 35; the sound of the flies and the sight of the blood at the former Ed’s Eats. Ag! Yuck! Is there no place here in French Landing, we may ask, where there is something nice under the skin? Where what we see is what we get, so to speak?
    The short answer: no. French Landing should be marked with big road signs at every point of ingress: WARNING ! SLIPPAGE IN PROGRESS ! PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK !
    The magic at work here is Fishermagic. It has rendered “nice” at least temporarily obsolete. But we can go someplace nice
-er,
and if we can we probably should, because we need a break. We may not be able to escape
slippage,
but we can at least visit where no one shits the bed or bleeds on the floor (at least not yet).
    So the bee goes its way and we go ours; ours takes us southwest, over more woods exhaling their fragrance of life and oxygen—there is no air like this air, at least not in this world—and then back to the works of man again.
    This section of town is called Libertyville, so named by the French Landing Town Council in 1976. You won’t believe this, but big-bellied Ed Gilbertson, the Hot Dog King himself, was a member of that bicentennial band of town fathers; those were strange days, pretty mama, strange days indeed. Not as strange as these, however; in French Landing, these are the Fisherdays, the slippery slippage days.
    The streets of Libertyville have names that adults find colorful and children find painful. Some of the latter have been known to call this area of town Faggotyville. Let us descend now, down through the sweet morning air (it’s warming up already; this will be a Strawberry Fest kind of day for sure). We cruise silently over Camelot Street, past the intersection of Camelot and Avalon, and travel on down Avalon to Maid Marian Way. From Maid Marian we progress to—is it any surprise?—Robin Hood Lane.
    Here, at No. 16, a sweet little Cape Cod honey of a home that looks just right for The Decent Hardworking Family On Its Way Up, we find a kitchen window open. There is the smell of coffee and toast, a wonderful combined odor that denies slippage (if only we did not know better; if only we had not seen the dog at work, eating a foot out of a sneaker as a child might eat the hot dog right out of its bun), and we follow the aroma in. It’s nice to be invisible, isn’t it? To watch in our godlike silence. If only what our godlike eyes saw was just a little less goddamn upsetting! But that is by the way. We’re in it now, for better or for worse, and we had better get on about our business. Daylight’s a-wasting, as they say in this part of the world.
    Here in the kitchen of No. 16 is Fred Marshall, whose picture currently graces the Salesman of the Month easel in the showroom of French County Farm Equipment. Fred has also been named Employee of the Year three years out of the last four (two years ago Ted Goltz gave the award to Otto Eisman, just to break the monotony), and when he is on the job no one radiates more charm, personality, or all around
niceness.
You wanted nice? Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Fred Marshall!
    Only now his confident smile is not in evidence, and his hair, always carefully combed on the job, hasn’t yet seen the brush. He’s wearing Nike shorts and a tee with cutoff sleeves instead of his usual pressed khakis and sport shirt. On the counter is the Marshall copy of the
La Riviere Herald,
open to an inside page.
    Fred has his share of problems just lately—or, rather, his wife, Judy, has problems, and what’s hers is his, so said the minister when he joined them in holy wedlock—and what he’s reading isn’t making him feel any better. Far from it. It’s a sidebar to the lead story