Black House (27 page)

Above him, the sky is an infinitely clear dark blue. Around him, the hay and timothy is rib-high instead of ankle-high; there has been no Bunny Boettcher in this part of creation to cut it. In fact, there is no house back the way he came, only a picturesque old barn with a windmill standing off to one side.

Where are the flying men?
Jack thinks, looking up into the sky, then shakes his head briskly. No flying men; no two-headed parrots; no werewolves. All that was Seabrook Island stuff, a neurosis he picked up from his mother and even passed on to Richard for a while. It was all nothing but
.
.
.
ba-haaa
.
.
.
bullshit.

He accepts this, knowing at the same time that the real bullshit would be not believing what’s all around him. The smell of the grass, now so strong and sweet, mixed with the more flowery smell of clover and the deeper, basso profundo smell of black earth. The endless sound of the crickets in this grass, living their unthinking cricket lives. The fluttering white field moths. The unblemished cheek of the sky, not marked by a single telephone wire or electrical cable or jet contrail.

What strikes Jack most deeply, however, is the perfection of the field around him. There’s a matted circle where he fell on his knees, the dew-heavy grass crushed to the ground. But there is no path
leading
to the circle, not a mark of passage through the wet and tender grass. He might have dropped out of the sky. That’s impossible, of course, more Seabrook Island stuff, but—

“I
did
sort of fall out of the sky, though,” Jack says in a remarkably steady voice. “I came here from Wisconsin. I
flipped
here.”

Richard’s voice protests this strenuously, exploding in a flurry of
hrrumph
s and
ba-haaa
s, but Jack hardly notices. It’s just good old Rational Richard, doing his Rational Richard thing inside his head. Richard had lived through stuff like this once before and come out the other side with his mind more or less intact . . . but he’d been twelve. They’d both been twelve that fall, and when you’re twelve, the mind and body are more elastic.

Jack has been turning in a slow circle, seeing nothing but open fields (the mist over them now fading to a faint haze in the day’s growing warmth) and blue-gray woods beyond them. Now there’s something else. To the southwest, there’s a dirt road about a mile away. Beyond it, at the horizon or perhaps just beyond, the perfect summer sky is a little stained with smoke.

Not woodstoves,
Jack thinks,
not in July, but maybe small manufactories. And
.
.
.

He hears a whistle—three long blasts made faint with distance. His heart seems to grow large in his chest, and the corners of his mouth stretch up in a kind of helpless grin.

“The Mississippi’s that way, by God,” he says, and around him the field moths seem to dance their agreement, lace of the morning. “That’s the Mississippi, or whatever they call it over here. And the whistle, friends and neighbors—”

Two more blasts roll across the making summer day. They are faint with distance, yes, but up close they would be mighty. Jack knows this.

“That’s a riverboat. A damn big one. Maybe a paddle wheeler.”

Jack begins to walk toward the road, telling himself that this is all a dream, not believing a bit of that but using it as an acrobat uses his balance pole. After he’s gone a hundred yards or so, he turns and looks back. A dark line cuts through the timothy, beginning at the place where he landed and cutting straight to where he is. It is the mark of his passage. The
only
mark of it. Far to the left (in fact almost behind him now) are the barn and the windmill.
That’s my house and garage,
Jack thinks.
At least that’s what they are in the world of Chevrolets, Mideast warfare, and the
Oprah Winfrey
show.

He walks on, and has almost reached the road when he realizes there is more than smoke in the southwest. There is a kind of vibration, as well. It beats into his head like the start of a migraine headache. And it’s strangely variable. If he stands with his face pointed dead south, that unpleasant pulse is less. Turn east and it’s gone. North and it’s
almost
gone. Then, as he continues to turn, it comes all the way back to full. Worse than ever now that he’s noticed it, the way the buzz of a fly or the knock of a radiator in a hotel room is worse after you really start to notice it.

Jack turns another slow, full circle. South, and the vibration sinks. East, it’s gone. North, it’s starting to come back. West, it’s coming on strong. Southwest and he’s locked in like the
SEEK
button on a car radio. Pow, pow, pow. A black and nasty vibration like a headache, a smell like ancient smoke . . .

“No, no, no, not smoke,” Jack says. He’s standing almost up to his chest in summer grass, pants soaked, white moths flittering around his head like a half-assed halo, eyes wide, cheeks once more pale. In this moment he looks twelve again. It is eerie how he has rejoined his younger (and perhaps better) self. “Not smoke, that smells like . . .”

He suddenly makes that urking sound again. Because the smell—not in his nose but in the center of his head—is rotted baloney. The smell of Irma Freneau’s half-rotted, severed foot.

“I’m smelling him,” Jack whispers, knowing it’s not a smell he means. He can make that pulse whatever he wants . . . including, he realizes, gone. “I’m smelling the Fisherman. Either him or . . . I don’t know.”

He starts walking, and a hundred yards later he stops again. The pulse in his head is indeed gone. It has faded out the way radio stations do when the day warms and the temperature thickens. It’s a relief.

Jack has almost reached the road, which no doubt leads one way to some version of Arden and the other way to versions of Centralia and French Landing, when he hears an irregular drumming sound. He feels it as well, running up his legs like a Gene Krupa backbeat.

He turns to the left, then shouts in mingled surprise and delight. Three enormous brown creatures with long, lolloping ears go leaping past Jack’s position, rising above the grass, sinking back into it, then rising above it again. They look like rabbits crossed with kangaroos. Their protruding black eyes stare with comic terror. Across the road they go, their flat feet (white-furred instead of brown) slapping up dust.

“Christ!” Jack says, half-laughing and half-sobbing. He whacks himself in the center of his forehead with the heel of his palm. “What was that, Richie-boy? Got any comments on
that
?”

Richie, of course does. He tells Jack that Jack has just suffered an extremely vivid
.
.
.
ba-haaa!
.
.
.
hallucination.

“Of course,” Jack says. “Giant bunny rabbits. Get me to the nearest A.A. meeting.” Then, as he steps out onto the road, he looks toward the southwestern horizon again. At the haze of smoke there. A village. And do the residents fear as the shadows of the evening come on? Fear the coming of the night? Fear the creature that is taking their children? Do they need a coppiceman? Of course they do. Of course they—

Something is lying on the road. Jack bends down and picks up a Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap, jarringly out of place in this world of giant hopping range rabbits, but indubitably real. Judging from the plastic adjustment band in the back, it’s a child’s baseball cap. Jack looks inside, knowing what he’ll find, and there it is, carefully inked on the bill:
TY MARSHALL.
The cap’s not as wet as Jack’s jeans, which are soaked with morning dew, but it’s not dry, either. It has been lying here on the edge of the road, he thinks, since yesterday. The logical assumption would be that Ty’s abductor brought Ty this way, but Jack doesn’t believe that. Perhaps it is the lingering pulse of vibration that gives rise to a different thought, a different image: the Fisherman, with Ty carefully stashed away, walking out this dirt road. Under his arm is a wrapped shoe box decorated with bogus stamps. On his head is Ty’s baseball hat, kind of balancing there because it’s really too small for the Fisherman. Still, he doesn’t want to change the adjustment band. Doesn’t want Jack to mistake it for a man’s cap, even for a single second. Because he is teasing Jack, inviting Jack into the game.

“Took the boy in our world,” Jack mutters. “Escaped with him to
this
world. Stashed him someplace safe, like a spider stashing a fly. Alive? Dead? Alive, I think. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s just what I want to believe. Leave it. Then he went to wherever he stashed Irma. Took her foot and brought it to me. Brought it through
this
world, then flipped back to
my
world to leave it on the porch. Lost the hat on the way, maybe? Lost it off his head?”

Jack doesn’t think so. Jack thinks this fuck, this skell, this world-hopping dirtbag, left the cap on purpose. Knew that if Jack walked this road he’d find it.

Holding the hat to his chest like a Miller Park fan showing respect to the flag during the national anthem, Jack closes his eyes and concentrates. It’s easier than he would have expected, but he supposes some things you never forget—how to peel an orange, how to ride a bike, how to flip back and forth between worlds.

Boy like you don’t need no cheap wine, anyhow,
he hears his old friend Speedy Parker say, and there’s the edge of a laugh in Speedy’s voice. At the same time, that sense of vertigo twists through Jack again. A moment later he hears the alarming sound of an oncoming car.

He steps back, opening his eyes as he does so. Catches a glimpse of a tarred road—Norway Valley Road, but—

A horn blares and a dusty old Ford slams by him, the passenger side-view mirror less than nine inches from Jack Sawyer’s nose. Warm air, once again filled with the faint but pungent odor of hydrocarbons, surfs over Jack’s cheeks and brow, along with some farm kid’s indignant voice:

“—hell out of the road,
assshollle—
”

“Resent being called an asshole by some cow-college graduate,” Jack says in his best Rational Richard voice, and although he adds a pompous
Ba-haaa!
for good measure, his heart is pumping hard. Man, he’d almost flipped back right in front of that guy!

Please, Jack, spare me,
Richard said.
You dreamed the whole thing.

Jack knows better. Although he looks around himself in total amazement, the core of his heart isn’t amazed at all, no, not even a little bit. He still has the cap, for one thing—Ty Marshall’s Brewers cap. And for another, the bridge across Tamarack Creek is just over the next rise. In the other world, the one where giant rabbits went hopping past you, he has walked maybe a mile. In this one he’s come at least
four.

That’s the way it was before,
he thinks,
that’s the way it was when Jacky was six. When everybody lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.

But that’s wrong. Somehow wrong.

Jack stands at the side of the road that was dirt a few seconds ago and is tarred now, stands looking down into Ty Marshall’s baseball cap and trying to figure out exactly what is wrong and
how
it’s wrong, knowing he probably won’t be able to turn the trick. All that was a long time ago, and besides, he’s worked at burying his admittedly bizarre childhood memories since he was thirteen. More than half his life, in other words. A person can’t dedicate that much time to forgetting, then suddenly just snap his fingers and expect—

Jack snaps his fingers. Says to the warming summer morning: “What happened when Jacky was six?” And answers his own question: “When Jacky was six, Daddy played the horn.”

What does
that
mean?

“Not Daddy,” Jack says suddenly. “Not
my
daddy. Dexter Gordon. The
tune
was called ‘Daddy Played the Horn.’ Or maybe the album. The LP.” He stands there, shaking his head, then nods. “
Plays.
Daddy Plays. ‘
Daddy Plays the Horn.
’ ” And just like that it all comes back. Dexter Gordon playing on the hi-fi. Jacky Sawyer behind the couch, playing with his toy London taxi, so satisfying because of its weight, which somehow made it seem more real than a toy. His father and Richard’s father talking. Phil Sawyer and Morgan Sloat.

Imagine what this guy would be like over there,
Uncle Morgan had said, and that had been Jack Sawyer’s first hint of the Territories. When Jacky was six, Jacky got the word. And—

“When Jacky was twelve, Jacky actually
went
there,” he says.

Ridiculous!
Morgan’s son trumpets.
Utterly
.
.
.
ba-haaa!
.
.
.
ridiculous! Next you’ll be telling me there really
were
men in the sky!

But before Jack can tell his mental version of his old pal that or anything else, another car arrives. This one pulls up beside him. Looking suspiciously out of the driver’s window (the expression is habitual, Jack has found, and means nothing in itself) is Elvena Morton, Henry Leyden’s housekeeper.

“What in the tarnal are you doin’ way down here, Jack Sawyer?” she asks.

He gives her a smile. “Didn’t sleep very well, Mrs. Morton. Thought I’d take a little walk to clear my head.”

“And do you always go walking through the dews and the damps when you want to clear your head?” she asks, casting her eyes down at his jeans, which are wet to the knee and even a bit beyond. “Does that help?”

“I guess I got lost in my own thoughts,” he says.

“I guess you did,” she says. “Get in and I’ll give you a lift most of the way back to your place. Unless, that is, you’ve got a little more head clearing to do.”

Jack has to grin. That’s a good one. Reminds him of his late mother, actually. (When asked by her impatient son what was for dinner and when it would be served, Lily Cavanaugh was apt to say, “Fried farts with onions, wind pudding and air sauce for dessert, come and get it at ha’ past a pickle.”)