Sloat disappeared behind the thickening curtain of snow; Jack heard his wet laughter. 4 She struggled out of her invalids bed and crossed to the window. She looked out at the dead December beach, which was lit by a single streetlight on the boardwalk. Suddenly a gull alighted on the sill outside the window. A string of gristle hung from one side of its beak, and in that moment she thought of Sloat. The gull looked like Sloat. Lily first recoiled, and then came back. She felt a wholly ridiculous anger. A gull couldnt look like Sloat, and a gull couldnt invade her territory . . . it wasnt right. She tapped the cold glass. The bird fluffed its wings briefly but did not fly. And she heard a thought come from its cold mind, heard it as clearly as a radio wave Jacks dying, Lily . . . Jacks dyyyyyinn . . . It bent its head forward. Tapped on the glass as deliberately as Poes raven. Dyyyyyyinnnn . . . NO! she shrieked at it. FUCK OFF, SLOAT! She did not simply tap this time but slammed her fist forward, driving it through the glass. The gull fluttered backward, squawking, almost falling. Frigid air funnelled in through the hole in the window. Blood was dripping from Lilys handno; no, not just dripping. It was running. She had cut herself quite badly in two places. She picked shards of glass out of the pad on the side of her palm and then wiped her hand against the bodice of her nightdress. DIDNT EXPECT THAT, DID YOU, FUCKHEAD? she screamed at the bird, which was circling restlessly over the gardens. She burst into tears. Now leave him alone! Leave him alone! LEAVE MY SON ALONE! She was covered all over in blood. Cold air blew in the pane she had shattered. And outside she saw the first flakes of snow come swirling down from the sky and into the white glow of that streetlight. 5 Look out, Jacky. Soft. On the left. Jack pivoted that way, holding the Talisman up like a searchlight. It sent out a beam of light filled with falling snow. Nothing else. Darkness . . . snow . . . the sound of the ocean. Wrong side, Jacky. He spun to the right, feet slipping in the icing of snow. Closer. He had been closer. Jack held up the Talisman. Come and get it, Bloat! You havent got a chance, Jack. I can take you anytime I want to. Behind him . . . and closer still. But when he raised the blazing Talisman, there was no Sloat to be seen. Snow roared into his face. He inhaled it and began to cough on the cold. Sloat tittered from directly in front of him. Jack recoiled and almost tripped over Speedy. Hoohoo, Jacky! A hand came out of the darkness on his left and tore at Jacks ear. He turned in that direction, heart pumping wildly, eyes bulging. He slipped and went to one knee. Richard uttered a thick, snoring moan somewhere close by. Overhead, a cannonade of thunder went off in the darkness Sloat had somehow brought down. Throw it at me! Sloat taunted. He danced forward out of that stormy, exposuresalljammeduptogether dark. He was snapping the fingers of his right hand and wagging the tin key at Jack with the left. The gestures had a jerky, eccentric syncopation. To Jack, Sloat looked crazily like some oldtime Latin bandleaderXavier Cugat, perhaps. Throw it at me, why dont you? Shooting gallery, Jack! Clay pigeon! Big old Uncle Morgan! What do you say, Jack? Have a go? Throw the ball and win a Kewpie doll! And Jack discovered he had pulled the Talisman back to his right shoulder, apparently intending to do just that. Hes spooking you, trying to panic you, trying to get you to cough it up, to Sloat faded back into the murk. Snow flew in dustdevils. Jack wheeled nervously around but could see Sloat nowhere. Maybe hes taken off. Maybe Wassa matta, Jacky? No, he was still here. Somewhere. On the left. I laughed when your dear old daddy died, Jacky. I laughed in his face. When his motor finally quit I felt The voice warbled. Faded for a moment. Came back. On the right. Jack whirled that way, not understanding what was going on, his nerves increasingly frayed. my heart flew like a bird on the wing. It flew like this, Jackyboy. A rock came out of the darkaimed not at Jack but at the glass ball. He dodged. Got a murky glimpse of Sloat. Gone again. A pause . . . then Sloat was back, and playing a new record. Fucked your mother, Jacky, the voice teased from behind him. A fat hot hand snatched at the seat of his pants. Jack whirled around, this time almost stumbling over Richard. Tearshot, painful, outragedbegan to squeeze out of his eyes. He hated them, but here they were, and nothing in the world would deny them. The wind screamed like a dragon in a windtunnel. The magics in you, Speedy had said, but where was the magic now? Where oh where oh where? You shut up about my mom! Fucked her a lot, Sloat added with smug cheeriness. On the right again. A fat, dancing shape in the dark. Fucked her by invitation, Jacky! Behind him! Close! Jack spun. Held up the Talisman. It flashed a white slice of light. Sloat danced back out of it, but not before Jack had seen a grimace of pain and anger. That light had touched Sloat, had hurt him. Never mind what hes sayingits all lies and you know it is. But how can he do that? Hes like Edgar Bergen. No . . . hes like Indians in the dark, closing in on the wagon train. How can he do it? Singed my whiskers a little that time, Jacky, Sloat said, and chuckled fruitily. He sounded a bit out of breath, but not enough. Not nearly enough. Jack was panting like a dog on a hot summer day, his eyes frantic as he searched the stormy blackness for Sloat. But Ill not hold it against you, Jacky Now, lets see. What were we talking about? Oh yes. Your mother . . . A little warble . . . a little fade . . . and then a stone came whistling out of the darkness on the right and struck Jacks temple. He whirled, but Sloat was gone again, skipping nimbly back into the snow. Shed wrap those long legs around me until I howled for mercy! Sloat declared from behind Jack and to the right OWWWWOOOOOO! Dont let him get you dont let him psych you out dont But he couldnt help it. It was his mother this dirty man was talking about; his mother. You stop it! You shut up! Sloat was in front of him nowso close Jack should have been able to see him clearly in spite of the swirling snow, but there was only a glimmer, like a face seen underwater at night Another stone zoomed out of the dark and struck Jack in the back of the head. He staggered forward and nearly tripped over Richard againa Richard who was rapidly disappearing under a mantle of snow. He saw stars . . . and understood what was happening. Sloats flipping! Flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back! Jack turned in an unsteady circle, like a man beset with a hundred enemies instead of just one. Lightningfire licked out of the dark in a narrow greenishblue ray. He reached toward it with the Talisman, hoping to deflect it back at Sloat. Too late. It winked out. Then how come I dont see him over there? Over there in the Territories? The answer came to him in a dazzling flash . . . and as if in response, the Talisman flashed a gorgeous fan of white lightit cut the snowy light like the headlamp of a locomotive. I dont see him over there, dont respond to him over there, because Im NOT over there! Jasons gone . . . and Im singlenatured! Sloats flipping onto a beach where theres no one but Morgan of Orris and a dead or dying man named ParkusRichard isnt there either, because Morgan of Orriss son, Rushton, died a long time ago and Richards singlenatured, too! When I flipped before, the Talisman was there . . . but Richard wasnt! Morgans flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back . . . trying to freak me out. . . . Hoohoo! Jackyboy! The left. Over here! The right. But Jack wasnt listening for the place anymore. He was looking into the Talisman, waiting for the downbeat. The most important downbeat of his life. From behind. This time he would come from behind. The Talisman flashed out, a strong lamp in the snow. Jack pivoted . . . and as he pivoted he flipped into the Territories, into bright sunlight. And there was Morgan of Orris, big as life and twice as ugly. For a moment he didnt realize Jack had tumbled to the trick; he was limping rapidly around to a place which would be behind Jack when he flipped back into the American Territories. There was a nasty littleboy grin on his face. His cloak popped and billowed behind him. His left boot dragged, and Jack saw the sand was covered with those dragging hashmarks all around him. Morgan had been running around him in a harrying circle, all the while goading Jack with obscene lies about his mother, throwing stones, and flipping back and forth. Jack shouted I SEE YOU! at the top of his lungs. Morgan stared around at him in utter stunned shock, one hand curled around that silver rod. SEE YOU! Jack shouted again. Should we go around one more time, Bloat? Morgan of Orris flicked the end of the rod at him, his face altering in a second from that rubbery simpleminded expression of shock to a much more characteristic look of craftof a clever man quickly seeing all the possibilities in a situation. His eyes narrowed. Jack almost, in that second when Morgan of Orris looked down his lethal silver rod at him and narrowed his eyes into gunsights, flipped back into the American Territories, and that would have killed him. But an instant before prudence or panic caused him in effect to jump in front of a moving truck, the same insight that had told him that Morgan was flipping between worlds saved him againJack had learned the ways of his adversary. He held his ground, again waiting for that almost mystical downbeat. For a fraction of a second Jack Sawyer held his breath. If Morgan had been a shade less proud of his deviousness, he might well have murdered Jack Sawyer, which he so dearly wished to do, at that moment. But instead, just as Jack had thought it would, Morgans image abruptly departed the Territories. Jack inhaled. Speedys body (Parkuss body, Jack realized) lay motionless a short distance away. The downbeat came. Jack exhaled and flipped back. A new streak of glass divided the sand on the Point Venuti beach, glimmeringly reflecting the sudden beam of white light which emanated from the Talisman. Missed one, did you? Morgan Sloat whispered out of the darkness. Snow pelted Jack, cold wind froze his limbs, his throat, his forehead. A cars length away, Sloats face hung before him, the forehead drawn up into its familiar corrugations, the bloody mouth open. He was extending the key toward Jack in the storm, and a ridge of powdery snow adhered to the brown sleeve of his suit. Jack saw a black trail of blood oozing from the left nostril of the incongruously small nose. Sloats eyes, bloodshot with pain, shone through the dark air. 6 Richard Sloat confusedly opened his eyes. Every part of him was cold. At first he thought, quite without emotion of any kind, that he was dead. He had fallen down somewhere, probably down those steep, tricky steps at the back of the Thayer School grandstand. Now he was cold and dead and nothing more could happen to him. He experienced a second of dizzying relief. His head offered him a fresh surge of pain, and he felt warm blood ooze out over his cold handboth of these sensations evidence that, whatever he might welcome at the moment, Richard Llewellyn Sloat was not yet dead. He was only a wounded suffering creature. The whole top of his head seemed to have been sliced off. He had no proper idea of where he was. It was cold. His eyes focused long enough to report to him that he was lying down in the snow. Winter had happened. More snow dumped on him from out of the sky. Then he heard his fathers voice, and everything returned to him. Richard kept his hand on top of his head, but very slowly tilted his chin so that he could look in the direction of his fathers voice. Jack Sawyer was holding the Talismanthat was the next thing Richard took in. The Talisman was unbroken. He felt the return of a portion of that relief he had experienced when hed thought he was dead. Even without his glasses, Richard could see that Jack had an undefeated, unbowed look that moved him very deeply. Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero. Jack was just Jack now, Richard now saw. That extraordinary extra quality, as of a movie star deigning to walk around as a shabbily dressed twelveyearold, had gone. This made his heroism all the more impressive to Richard. His father smiled rapaciously. But that was not his father. His father had been hollowed out a long time agohollowed out by his envy of Phil Sawyer, by the greed of his ambitions. We can keep on going around like this forever, Jack said. Im never going to give you the Talisman, and youre never going to be able to destroy it with that gadget of yours. Give up. The point of the key in his fathers hand slowly moved across and down, and it, like his fathers greedy needful face, pointed straight at him. First Ill blow Richard apart, his father said. Do you really want to see your pal Richard turned into bacon? Hmmmm? Do you? And of course I wont hesitate to do the same favor for that pest beside him. Jack and Sloat exchanged short glances. His father was not kidding, Richard knew. He would kill him if Jack did not surrender the Talisman. And then he would kill the old black man, Speedy. Dont do it, he managed to whisper. Stuff him, Jack. Tell him to screw himself. Jack almost deranged Richard by winking at him. Just drop the Talisman, he heard his father say. Richard watched in horror as Jack tilted the palms of his hands and let the Talisman tumble out. 7 Jack, no! Jack didnt look around at Richard. You dont own a thing unless you can give it up, his mind hammered at him. You dont own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you dont learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going headfirst into the rocks like a Titan II that didnt fire off right. You learned these things, or you died somewhere out in the world where there was no clear light. No more killing, he said in the snowfilled darkness of this California beach afternoon. He should have felt utterly exhaustedit had been, all told, a fourday run of horrors, and now, at the end, he had coughed up the ball like a freshman quarterback with a lot to learn. Had thrown it all away. Yet it was the sure voice of Anders he heard, Anders who had knelt before JackJason with his kilt spread out around him and his head bowed Anders saying A wi be well, a wi be well, and a manner a things wi be well. The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required. No more slaughter. Go on and break it if you can, he said. Im sorry for you. It was that last which surely destroyed Morgan Sloat. If he had retained a shred of rational thought, he would have unearthed a stone from the unearthly snow and smashed the Talisman . . . as it could have been smashed, in its simple unjacketed vulnerability. Instead, he turned the key on it. As he did so, his mind was filled with loving, hateful memories of Jerry Bledsoe, and Jerry Bledsoes wife. Jerry Bledsoe, whom he had killed, and Nita Bledsoe, who should have been Lily Cavanaugh . . . Lily, who had slapped him so hard his nose bled the one time when, drunk, he had tried to touch her. Fire sang outgreenblue fire spanning out from the cheapjack barrel of the tin key. It arrowed out at the Talisman, struck it, spread over it, turning it into a burning sun. Every color was there for a moment . . . for a moment every world was there. Then it was gone. The Talisman swallowed the fire from Morgans key. Ate it whole. Darkness came back. Jacks feet slid out from under him and he sat down with a thud on Speedy Parkers limply splayed calves. Speedy made a grunting noise and twitched. There was a twosecond lag when everything held static . . . and then fire suddenly blew back out of the Talisman in a flood. Jacks eyes opened wide in spite of his frantic, tortured thought (itll blind you! Jack! itll) and the altered geography of Point Venuti was lit up as if the God of All Universes had bent forward to snap a picture. Jack saw the Agincourt, slumped and halfdestroyed; he saw the collapsed Highlands that were now the Lowlands; he saw Richard on his back; he saw Speedy lying on his belly with his face turned to one side. Speedy was smiling. Then Morgan Sloat was driven backward and enveloped in a field of fire from his own keyfire that had been absorbed inside the Talisman as the flashes of light from Sunlight Gardeners telescopic sight had been absorbedand which was returned to him a thousandfold. A hole opened between the worldsa hole the size of the tunnel leading into Oatleyand Jack saw Sloat, his handsome brown suit burning, one skeletal, tallowy hand still clutching the key, driven through that hole. Sloats eyes were boiling in their sockets, but they were wide . . . they were aware. And as he passed, Jack saw him changesaw the cloak appear like the wings of a bat that has swooped through the flame of a torch, saw his burning boots, his burning hair. Saw the key become a thing like a miniature lightningrod. Saw . . . daylight! 8 It came back in a flood. Jack rolled away from it on the snowy beach, dazzled. In his earsears deep inside his headhe heard Morgan Sloats dying scream as he was driven back through all the worlds that were, into oblivion. Jack? Richard was sitting up woozily, holding his head. Jack, what happened? I think I fell down the stadium steps. Speedy was twitching in the snow, and now he did a sort of girls pushup and looked toward Jack. His eyes were exhausted . . . but his face was clear of blemishes. Good job, Jack, he said, and grinned. Good He fell partway forward again, panting. Rainbow, Jack thought woozily. He stood up and then fell down again. Freezing snow coated his face and then began to melt like tears. He pushed himself to his knees, then stood up again. The field of his vision was filled with spots . . . but he saw the enormous burned swatch in the snow where Morgan had stood. It tailed away like a teardrop. Rainbow! Jack Sawyer shouted, and raised his hands to the sky, weeping and laughing. Rainbow! Rainbow! He went to the Talisman, and picked it up, still weeping. He took it to Richard Sloat, who had been Rushton; to Speedy Parker, who was what he was. He healed them. Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 46 Another Journey 1 He healed them, but he was never able to recall exactly how that had gone, or any of the specific detailsfor a while the Talisman had blazed and sung in his hands, and he had the vaguest possible memory of its fires actually seeming to flow out over them until they glowed in a bath of light. That was all he could bring back. At the end of it, the glorious light in the Talisman faded . . . faded . . . went out. Jack, thinking of his mother, uttered a hoarse, wailing cry. Speedy staggered over to him through the melting snow and put an arm around Jacks shoulders. It be back, Travellin Jack, Speedy said. He smiled, but he looked twice as tired as Jack. Speedy had been healed . . . but he was still not well. This world is killing him, Jack thought dimly. At least, its killing the part of him thats Speedy Parker. The Talisman healed him . . . but he is still dying. You did for it, Speedy said, and you wanna believe that its gonna do for you. Dont worry. Come on over here, Jack. Come on over to where your frien be layin. Jack did. Richard was sleeping in the melting snow. That horrid loose flap of skin was gone, but there was a long white streak of scalp showing in his hair nowa streak of scalp from which no hair would ever grow. Take his han. Why? What for? Were gonna flip. Jack looked at Speedy questioningly, but Speedy offered no explanation. He only nodded, as if to say Yes; you heard me right. Well, Jack thought, I trusted him this far He reached down and took Richards hand. Speedy held Jacks other hand. With hardly a tug at all, the three of them went over. 2 It was as Jack had intuitedthe figure standing beside him over here, on this black sand that was stitched everywhere by Morgan of Orriss dragging foot, looked hale and hearty and healthy. Jack stared with aweand some uneaseat this stranger who looked a bit like Speedy Parkers younger brother. SpeedyMr. Parkus, I meanwhat are you You boys need rest, Parkus said. You for sure, this other young squire even more. He came closer to dying than anyone will ever know but himself . . . and I dont think hes the type to do much admitting, even to himself. Yeah, Jack said. You got that right. Hell rest better over here, Parkus told Jack, and struck off up the beach, away from the castle, carrying Richard. Jack stumbled along as best he could, but gradually found himself falling behind. He was quickly out of breath, his legs rubbery. His head ached with reaction from the final battleshock hangover, he supposed. Why . . . where . . . That was all he could pant. He held the Talisman against his chest. It was dull now, its exterior sooty and opaque and uninteresting. Just up a little way, Parkus said. You and your friend dont want to rest where he was, do you? And, exhausted as he was, Jack shook his head. Parkus glanced back over his shoulder, then looked sadly at Jack. It stinks of his evil back there, he said, and it stinks of your world, Jack. To me, they smell too much alike for comfort. He set off again, Richard in his arms. 3 Forty yards up the beach he stopped. Here the black sand had moderated to a lighter colornot white, but a medium gray. Parkus set Richard down gently. Jack sprawled beside him. The sand was warmblessedly warm. No snow here. Parkus sat beside him, crosslegged. Youre going to have a sleep now, he said. Might be tomorrow before you wake up. Wont anybody bother you, if so. Take a look. Parkus waved his arm toward the place where Point Venuti had been in the American Territories. Jack first saw the black castle, one entire side of it crumbled and burst, as if there had been a tremendous explosion inside. Now the castle looked almost pedestrian. Its menace was burnt out, its illicit treasure borne away. It was only stones piled up in patterns. Looking farther, Jack saw that the earthquake had not been so violent over hereand there had been less to destroy. He saw a few overturned huts that looked as if they had been built mostly of driftwood; he saw a number of burst coaches that might or might not have been Cadillacs back in the American Territories; here and there he could see a fallen, shaggy body. Those who were here and survived have now gone, Parkus said. They know what has happened, they know Orris is dead, and theyll not trouble you more. The evil that was here has gone. Do you know that? Can you feel it? Yes, Jack whispered. But . . . Mr. Parkus . . . youre not . . . not . . . Going? Yes. Very soon. You and your friend are going to have a good sleep, but you and I must have a bit of a talk first. It wont take long, so I want you to try and get your head up off your chest, at least for the moment. With some effort, Jack got his head up and his eyes allwell, mostof the way open again. Parkus nodded. When you wake up, strike east . . . but dont flip! You stay right here for a while. Stay in the Territories. Theres going to be too much going on over there on your siderescue units, news crews, Jason knows what else. At least the snow will melt before anybody knows its there, except for a few people wholl be dismissed as crackpots Why do you have to go? I just got to ramble some now, Jack. Theres a lot of work to be done over here. News of Morgans death will already be travelling east. Travelling fast. Im behind that news right now, and Ive got to get ahead of it if I can. I want to get back to the Outposts . . . and the east . . . before a lot of pretty bad folks start to head out for other places. He looked out at the ocean, his eyes as cold and gray as flint. When the bill comes due, people have to pay. Morgans gone, but theres still a debt owing. Youre something like a policeman over here, arent you? Parkus nodded. I am what youd call the Judge General and Lord High Executioner all rolled into one. Over here, that is. He put a strong, warm hand on Jacks head. Over there, Im just this fella who goes around from place to place, does a few odd jobs, strums a few tunes. And sometimes, believe me, I like that a lot better. He smiled again, and this time he was Speedy. And you be seein that guy from time to time, Jacky. Yeah, from time to time and place to place. In a shoppin center, maybe, or a park. He winked at Jack. But Speedys . . . not well, Jack said. Whatever was wrong with him, it was something the Talisman couldnt touch. Speedys old, Parkus said. Hes my age, but your world made him older than me. Just the same, hes still got a few years left in him. Maybe quite a few. Feel no fret, Jack. You promise? Jack asked. Parkus grinned. Yeahbob. Jack grinned tiredly back. You and your friend head out to the east. Go until you reckon youve done five miles. You get over those low hills and then youll be fineeasy walking. Look for a big treebiggest damn tree youve ever seen. You get to that big old tree, Jack, and you take Richards hand, and you flip back. Youll come out next to a giant redwood with a tunnel cut through the bottom of it to let the road through. The roads Route Seventeen, and youll be on the outskirts of a little town in northern California called Storyville. Walk into town. Theres a Mobil station at the blinkerlight. And then? Parkus shrugged. Dont know, not for sure. Could be, Jack, youll meet someone youll recognize. But how will we get h Shhh, Parkus said, and put a hand on Jacks forehead exactly as his mother had done when he was (babybunting, daddys gone ahunting, and all that good shit, lala, go to sleep, Jacky, alls well and alls well and) very small. Enough questions. All will be well with you and Richard now, I think. Jack lay down. He cradled the dark ball in the crook of one arm. Each of his eyelids now seemed to have a cinderblock attached to it. You have been brave and true, Jack, Parkus said with calm gravity. I wish you were my own son . . . and I salute you for your courage. And your faith. There are people in many worlds who owe you a great debt of gratitude. And in some way or other, I think most of them sense that. Jack managed a smile. Stay a little while, he managed to say. All right, Parkus said. Until you sleep. Feel no fret, Jack. Nothing will harm you here. My mom always said But before he finished the thought, sleep had claimed him. 4 And sleep continued to claim him, in some mysterious wise, the next day when he was technically awakeor if not sleep, then a protective numbing faculty of the mind which turned most of that day slow and dreamlike. He and Richard, who was similarly slowmoving and tentative, stood beneath the tallest tree in the world. All about them spangles of light lay across the floor of the forest. Ten grown men holding hands could not have reached around it. The tree soared up, massive and apart in a forest of tall trees it was a leviathan, a pure example of Territories exuberance. Feel no fret, Parkus had said, even while he threatened to fade hazily away like the Cheshire Cat. Jack tilted his head to stare up toward the top of the tree. He did not quite know this, but he was emotionally exhausted. The immensity of the tree aroused only a flicker of wonder in him. Jack rested a hand against the surprisingly smooth bark. I killed the man who killed my father, he said to himself. He clutched the dark, seemingly dead ball of the Talisman in his other hand. Richard was staring upward at the giant head of the tree, a skyscrapers height above them. Morgan was dead, Gardener too, and the snow must have melted from the beach by now. Yet not all of it was gone. Jack felt as though a whole beachful of snow filled his head. He had thought oncea thousand years ago, it seemed nowthat if he could ever actually get his hands around the Talisman, he would be so inundated with triumph and excitement and awe that hed have to fizz over. Instead he now felt only the tiniest hint of all that. It was snowing in his head, and he could see no farther than Parkuss instructions. He realized that the enormous tree was holding him up. Take my hand, he said to Richard. But how are we going to get home? Richard asked. Feel no fret, he said, and closed his hand around Richards. Jack Sawyer didnt need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was brave and true. Jack Sawyer was a playedout twelveyearold boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him. 5 The forest had contracted; now it was an American forest. The roof of gently moving boughs was noticeably lower, the trees about them conspicuously smaller than in the part of the Territories forest to which Parkus had directed them. Jack was dimly conscious of this alteration in the scale of everything about him before he saw the twolane blacktop road in front of him but twentiethcentury reality kicked him almost immediately in the shins, for as soon as he saw the road he heard the eggbeater sound of a small motor and instinctively drew himself and Richard back just before a white little Renault Le Car zipped by him. The car sped past and went through the tunnel cut into the trunk of the redwood (which was slightly more than half the size of its Territories counterpart). But at least one adult and two children in the Renault were not looking at the redwoods they had come to see all the way from New Hampshire (Live Free or Die!). The woman and the two small children in the back seat had swivelled around to gawp at Jack and Richard. Their mouths were small black caves, open wide. They had just seen two boys appear beside the road like ghosts, miraculously and instantaneously forming out of nothing, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock after beaming down from the Enterprise. You okay to walk for a little while? Sure, Richard said. Jack stepped onto the surface of Route 17 and walked through the huge hole in the tree. He might be dreaming all this, he thought. He might be still on the Territories beach, Richard knocked out beside him, both of them under Parkuss kindly gaze. My mom always said . . . My mom always said . . . 6 Moving as if through thick fog (though that day in that part of northern California was in fact sunny and dry), Jack Sawyer led Richard Sloat out of the redwood forest and down a sloping road past dry December meadows. . . . that the most important person in any movie is usually the cameraman . . . His body needed more sleep. His mind needed a vacation. . . . that vermouth is the ruination of a good martini . . . Richard followed silently along, brooding. He was so much slower that Jack had to stop still on the side of the road and wait for Richard to catch up with him. A little town that must have been Storyville was visible a halfmile or so ahead. A few low white buildings sat on either side of the road. ANTIQUES, read the sign atop one of them. Past the buildings a blinking stoplight hung over an empty intersection. Jack could see the corner of the MOBIL sign outside the gas station. Richard trudged along, his head so far down his chin nearly rested on his chest. When Richard drew nearer, Jack finally saw that his friend was weeping. Jack put his arm around Richards shoulders. I want you to know something, he said.


What? Richards small face was tearstreaked but defiant. I love you, Jack said. Richards eyes snapped back to the surface of the road. Jack kept his arm over his friends shoulders. In a moment Richard looked uplooked straight at Jackand nodded. And that was like something Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer once or twice really had said to her son JackO, there are times you dont have to spill your guts out of your mouth. Were on our way, Richie, Jack said. He waited for Richard to wipe his eyes. I guess somebodys supposed to meet us up there at the Mobil station. Hitler, maybe? Richard pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. In a moment he was ready again, and the two boys walked into Storyville together. 7 It was a Cadillac, parked on the shady side of the Mobil stationan El Dorado with a boomerang TV antenna on the back. It looked as big as a housetrailer and as dark as death. Oh, Jack, baaaad shit, Richard moaned, and grabbed at Jacks shoulder. His eyes were wide, his mouth trembling. Jack felt adrenaline whippet into his system again. It didnt pump him up any longer. It only made him feel tired. There had been too much, too much, too much. Clasping the dark junkshop crystal ball that the Talisman had become, Jack started down the hill toward the Mobil station. Jack! Richard screamed weakly from behind him. What the hell are you doing? Its one of THEM! Same cars as at Thayer! Same cars as in Point Venuti! Parkus told us to come here, Jack said. Youre crazy, chum, Richard whispered. I know it. But thisll be all right. Youll see. And dont call me chum. The Caddys door swung open and a heavily muscled leg clad in faded blue denim swung out. Unease became active terror when he saw that the toe of the drivers black engineer boot had been cut off so long, hairy toes could stick out. Richard squeaked beside him like a fieldmouse. It was a Wolf, all rightJack knew that even before the guy turned around. He stood almost seven feet tall. His hair was long, shaggy, and not very clean. It hung in tangles to his collar. There were a couple of burdocks in it. Then the big figure turned, Jack saw a flash of orange eyesand suddenly terror became joy. Jack sprinted toward the big figure down there, heedless of the gas station attendant who had come out to stare at him, and the idlers in front of the general store. His hair flew back from his forehead; his battered sneakers thumped and flapped; his face was split by a dizzy grin; his eyes shone like the Talisman itself. Bib overalls Oshkosh, by gosh. Round rimless spectacles John Lennon glasses. And a wide, welcoming grin. Wolf! Jack Sawyer screamed. Wolf, youre alive! Wolf, youre alive! He was still five feet from Wolf when he leaped. And Wolf caught him with neat, casual ease, grinning delightedly. Jack Sawyer! Wolf! Look at this! Just like Parkus said! Im here at this Godpounding place that smells like shit in a swamp, and youre here, too! Jack and his friend! Wolf! Good! Great! Wolf! It was the Wolfs smell that told Jack this wasnt his Wolf, just as it was the smell that told him this Wolf was some sort of relation . . . surely a very close one. I knew your litterbrother, Jack said, still in the Wolfs shaggy, strong arms. Now, looking at this face, he could see it was older and wiser. But still kind. My brother Wolf, Wolf said, and put Jack down. He reached out one hand and touched the Talisman with the tip of one finger. His face was full of awed reverence. When he touched it, one bright spark appeared and shot deep into the globes dull depths like a tumbling comet. He drew in a breath, looked at Jack, and grinned. Jack grinned back. Richard now arrived, staring at both of them with wonder and caution. There are good Wolfs as well as bad in the Territories Jack began. Lots of good Wolfs, Wolf interjected. He stuck out his hand to Richard. Richard pulled back for a second and then shook it. The set of his mouth as his hand was swallowed made Jack believe Richard expected the sort of treatment Wolf had accorded Heck Bast a long time ago. This is my Wolfs litterbrother, Jack said proudly. He cleared his throat, not knowing exactly how to express his feelings for this beings brother. Did Wolfs understand condolence? Was it part of their ritual? I loved your brother, he said. He saved my life. Except for Richard here, he was just about the best friend I ever had, I guess. Im sorry he died. Hes in the moon now, Wolfs brother said. Hell be back. Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon. Come on. Want to get away from this stinking place. Richard looked puzzled, but Jack understood and more than sympathizedthe Mobil station seemed surrounded with a hot, oily aroma of fried hydrocarbons. It was like a brown shroud you could see through. The Wolf went to the Cadillac and opened the rear door like a chauffeurwhich was, Jack supposed, exactly what he was. Jack? Richard looked frightened. Its okay, Jack said. But where To my mother, I think, Jack said. All the way across the country to Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. Going first class. Come on, Richie. They walked to the car. Shoved over to one side of the wide back seat was a scruffy old guitar case. Jack felt his heart leap up again. Speedy! He turned to Wolfs litterbrother. Is Speedy coming with us? Dont know anyone speedy, the Wolf said. Had an uncle who was sort of speedy, then he pulled up lameWolf!and couldnt even keep up with the herd anymore. Jack pointed at the guitar case. Where did that come from? Wolf grinned, showing many big teeth. Parkus, he said. Left this for you, too. Almost forgot. From his back pocket he took a very old postcard. On the front was a carousel filled with a great many familiar horsesElla Speed and Silver Lady among thembut the ladies in the foreground were wearing bustles, the boys knickers, many of the men derby hats and Rollie Fingers moustaches. The card felt silky with age. He turned it over, first reading the print up the middle ARCADIA BEACH CAROUSEL, JULY 4TH, 1894. It was Speedynot Parkuswho had scratched two sentences in the message space. His hand was sprawling, not very literate; he had written with a soft, blunt pencil. You done great wonders, Jack. Use what you need of whats in the casekeep the rest or throw it away. Jack put the postcard in his hip pocket and got into the back of the Cadillac, sliding across the plush seat. One of the catches on the old guitar case was broken. He unsnapped the other three. Richard had gotten in after Jack. Holy crow! he whispered. The guitar case was stuffed with twentydollar bills. 8 Wolf took them home, and although Jack grew hazy about many of that autumns events in a very short time, each moment of that trip was emblazoned on his mind for the rest of his life. He and Richard sat in the back of the El Dorado and Wolf drove them east and east and east. Wolf knew the roads and Wolf drove them. He sometimes played Creedence Clearwater Revival tapesRun Through the Jungle seemed to be his favoriteat a volume just short of earshattering. Then he would spend long periods of time listening to the tonal variations in the wind as he worked the button that controlled his wing window. This seemed to fascinate him completely. East, east, eastinto the sunrise each morning, into the mysterious deepening blue dusk of each coming night, listening first to John Fogerty and then to the wind, John Fogerty again and then the wind again. They ate at Stuckeys. They ate at Burger Kings. They stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the latter, Jack and Richard got dinners; Wolf got a FamilyStyle Bucket and ate all twentyone pieces. From the sounds, he ate most of the bones as well. This made Jack think of Wolf and the popcorn. Where had that been? Muncie. The outskirts of Munciethe Town Line Sixplex. Just before they had gotten their asses slammed into the Sunlight Home. He grinned . . . and then felt something like an arrow slip into his heart. He looked out the window so Richard wouldnt see the gleam of his tears. They stopped on the second night in Julesburg, Colorado, and Wolf cooked them a huge picnic supper on a portable barbecue he produced from the trunk. They ate in a snowy field by starlight, bundled up in heavy parkas bought out of the guitarcase stash. A meteorshower flashed overhead, and Wolf danced in the snow like a child. I love that guy, Richard said thoughtfully. Yeah, me too. You should have met his brother. I wish I had. Richard began to gather up the trash. What he said next flummoxed Jack almost completely. Im forgetting a lot of stuff, Jack. What do you mean? Just that. Every mile I remember a little less about what happened. Its all getting misty. And I think . . . I think thats the way I want it. Look, are you really sure your mothers okay? Three times Jack had tried to call his mother. There was no answer. He was not too worried about this. Things were okay. He hoped. When he got there, she would be there. Sick . . . but still alive. He hoped. Yes. Then how come she doesnt answer the phone? Sloat played some tricks with the phones, Jack said. He played some tricks with the help at the Alhambra, too, I bet. Shes still okay. Sick . . . but okay. Still there. I can feel her. And if this healing thing works Richard grimaced a little, then plunged. You still . . . I mean, you still think shed let me . . . you know, stay with you guys? No, Jack said, helping Richard pick up the remains of supper. Shell want to see you in an orphanage, probably. Or maybe in jail. Dont be a dork, Richard, of course you can stay with us. Well . . . after all my father did . . . That was your dad, Richie, Jack said simply. Not you. And you wont always be reminding me? You know . . . jogging my memory? Not if you want to forget. I do, Jack. I really do. Wolf was coming back. You guys ready? Wolf! All ready, Jack said. Listen, Wolf, how about that Scott Hamilton tape I got in Cheyenne? Sure, Jack. Then how about some Creedence?  Run Through the Jungle, right? Good tune, Jack! Heavy! Wolf! Godpounding heavy tune! You bet, Wolf. He rolled his eyes at Richard. Richard rolled his back, and grinned. The next day they rolled across Nebraska and Iowa; a day later they tooled past the gutted ruin of the Sunlight Home. Jack thought Wolf had taken them past it on purpose, that he perhaps wanted to see the place where his brother had died. He turned up the Creedence tape in the cassette player as loud as it would go, but Jack still thought he heard the sound of Wolf sobbing. Timesuspended swatches of time. Jack seemed almost to be floating, and there was a feeling of suspension, triumph, valediction. Work honorably discharged. Around sunset of the fifth day, they crossed into New England. 47 Journeys End 1 The whole long drive from California to New England seemed, once they had got so far, to have taken place in a single long afternoon and evening. An afternoon that lasted days, an evening perhaps lifelong, bulging with sunsets and music and emotions. Great humping balls of fire, Jack thought, Im really out of it, when he happened for the second time in what he assumed to be about an hour to look at the discreet little clock set in the dashboardand discovered that three hours had winked past him. Was it even the same day? Run Through the Jungle pumped through the air; Wolf bobbed his head in time, grinning unstoppably, infallibly finding the best roads; the rear window showing the whole sky opening in great bands of twilight color, purple and blue and that particular deep plangent red of the downgoing sun. Jack could remember every detail of this long long journey, every word, every meal, every nuance of the music, Zoot Sims or John Fogerty or simply Wolf delighting himself with the noises of the air, but the true span of time had warped itself in his mind to a concentration like a diamonds. He slept in the cushiony backseat and opened his eyes on light or darkness, on sunlight or stars. Among the things he remembered with particular sharpness, once they had crossed into New England and the Talisman began to glow again, signalling the return of normal timeor perhaps the return of time itself to Jack Sawyerwere the faces of people peering into the back seat of the El Dorado (people in parking lots, a sailor and an oxfaced girl in a convertible at a stoplight in a sunny little town in Iowa, a skinny Ohio kid wearing Breaking Awaystyle bicycle gear) in order to see if maybe Mick Jagger or Frank Sinatra had decided to pay them a call. Nope, just us, folks. Sleep kept stealing him away. Once he awoke (Colorado? Illinois?) to the thumping of rock music, Wolf snapping his fingers while keeping the big car rolling smoothly, a bursting sky of orange and purple and blue, and saw that Richard had somewhere acquired a book and was reading it with the aid of the El Dorados recessed passenger light. The book was Brocas Brain. Richard always knew what time it was. Jack rolled his eyes upward and let the music, the evening colors, take him. They had done it, they had done everything . . . everything except what they would have to do in an empty little resort town in New Hampshire. Five days, or one long, dreaming twilight? Run Through the Jungle. Zoot Simss tenor saxophone saying Heres a story for you, do you like this story? Richard was his brother, his brother. Time returned to him about when the Talisman came back to life, during the magical sunset of the fifth day. Oatley, Jack thought on the sixth day. I could have shown Richard the Oatley tunnel, and whatevers left of the Tap, I could have shown Wolf which way to go . . . but he did not want to see Oatley again, there was no satisfaction or pleasure in that. And he was conscious now of how close they had come, of how far they had travelled while he drifted through time like a whistle. Wolf had brought them to the great broad artery of I95, now that they were in Connecticut, and Arcadia Beach lay only a few states away, up the indented New England coast. From now on Jack counted the miles, and the minutes, too. 2 At quarter past five on the evening of December 21st, some three months after Jack Sawyer had set his faceand his hopeson the west, a black El Dorado Cadillac swung into the crushedgravel driveway of the Alhambra Inn and Gardens in the town of Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. In the west, the sunset was a mellow valediction of reds and oranges fading to yellow . . . and blue . . . and royal purple. In the gardens themselves, naked branches clattered together in a bitter winter wind. Amid them, until a day not quite a week ago, had been a tree which caught and ate small animalschipmunks, birds, the desk clerks starveling, slatsided cat. This small tree had died very suddenly. The other growing things in the garden, though skeletal now, still bided with dormant life. The El Dorados steelbelted radials popped and cracked over the gravel. From inside, muffled behind the polarized glass, came the sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The people who know my magic, John Fogerty sang, have filled the land with smoke. The Cadillac stopped in front of the wide double doors. There was only darkness beyond them. The double headlights went out and the long car stood in shadow, tailpipe idling white exhaust, orange parking lights gleaming. Here at the end of day; here at sunset with color fanning up from the western sky in glory. Here Right here and now. 3 The back of the Caddy was lit with faint, uncertain light. The Talisman flickered . . . but its glow was weak, little more than the glow of a dying firefly. Richard turned slowly toward Jack. His face was wan and frightened. He was clutching Carl Sagan with both hands, wringing the paperback the way a washerwoman might wring a sheet. Richards Talisman, Jack thought, and smiled. Jack, do you want No, Jack said. Wait until I call. He opened the rear right door, started to get out of the car, then looked back at Richard. Richard sat small and shrunken in his seat, wringing his paperback in his hand. He looked miserable. Not thinking, Jack came back in for a moment and kissed Richards cheek. Richard put his arms around Jacks neck for a moment, and hugged fiercely. Then he let Jack go. Neither of them said anything. 4 Jack started for the stairs leading up to the lobbylevel . . . and then turned right and walked for a moment to the edge of the driveway instead. There was an iron railing here. Below it, cracked and tiered rock fell to the beach. Farther to his right, standing against the darkling sky, was the Arcadia Funworld roller coaster. Jack lifted his face to the east. The wind that was harrying through the formal gardens lifted his hair away from his forehead and blew it back. He lifted the globe in his hands, as if as an offering to the ocean. 5 On December 21st, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood near the place where the water and the land came together, hands cradling an object of some worth, looking out at the nightsteady Atlantic. He had turned thirteen years old that day, although he did not know it, and he was extraordinarily beautiful. His brown hair was longprobably too longbut the seabreeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow. He stood there thinking about his mother, and about the rooms in this place which they had shared. Was she going to turn on a light up there? He rather suspected she was. Jack turned, eyes flashing wildly in the Talismans light. 6 Lily felt along the wall with one trembling, skeletal hand, groping for the lightswitch. She found it and turned it on. Anyone who had seen her in that moment might well have turned away. In the last week or so, the cancer had begun to sprint inside her, as if sensing that something might be on the way which would spoil all its fun. Lily Cavanaugh now weighed seventyeight pounds. Her skin was sallow, stretched over her skull like parchment. The brown circles under her eyes had turned a dead and final black; the eyes themselves stared from their sockets with fevered, exhausted intelligence. Her bosom was gone. The flesh on her arms was gone. On her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, bedsores had begun to flower. Nor was that all. In the course of the last week, she had contracted pneumonia. In her wasted condition she was, of course, a prime candidate for that or any other respiratory disease. It might have come under the best of circumstances . . . and these were definitely not those. The radiators in the Alhambra had ceased their nightly clankings some time ago. She wasnt sure just how longtime had become as fuzzy and indefinable to her as it had been for Jack in the El Dorado. She only knew the heat had gone out on the same night she had punched her fist through the window, making the gull that had looked like Sloat fly away. In the time since that night the Alhambra had become a deserted coldbox. A crypt in which she would soon die. If Sloat was responsible for what had happened at the Alhambra, he had done one hell of a good job. Everyone was gone. Everyone. No more maids in the halls trundling their squeaky carts. No more whistling maintenance man. No more mealymouthed desk clerk. Sloat had put them all in his pocket and taken them away. Four days agowhen she could not find enough in the room to satisfy even her birdlike appetiteshe had gotten out of bed and had worked her way slowly down the hall to the elevator. She brought a chair with her on this expedition, alternately sitting on it, her head hanging in exhaustion, and using it as a walker. It took her forty minutes to traverse forty feet of corridor to the elevator shaft. She had pushed the button for the car repeatedly, but the car did not come. The buttons did not even light. Fuck a duck, Lily muttered hoarsely, and then slowly worked herself another twenty feet down the hall to the stairwell. Hey! she shouted downstairs, and then broke into a fit of coughing, bent over the back of the chair. Maybe they couldnt hear the yell but they sure as shit must have been able to hear me coughing out whatevers left of my lungs, she thought. But no one came. She yelled again, twice, had another coughing fit, and then started back down the hallway, which looked as long as a stretch of Nebraska turnpike on a clear day. She didnt dare go down those stairs. She would never get back up them. And there was no one down there; not in the lobby, not in The Saddle of Lamb, not in the coffee shop, not anywhere. And the phones were out. At least, the phone in her room was out, and she hadnt heard a single ring anywhere else in this old mausoleum. Not worth it. A bad gamble. She didnt want to freeze to death in the lobby. JackO, she muttered, where the hell are y Then she began to cough again and this one was really bad and in the middle of it she collapsed to one side in a faint, pulling the ugly sittingroom chair over on top of her, and she lay there on the cold floor for nearly an hour, and that was probably when the pneumonia moved into the rapidly declining neighborhood that was Lily Cavanaughs body. Hey there, big C! Im the new kid on the block! You can call me big P! Race you to the finish line! Somehow she had made it back to her room, and since then she had existed in a deepening spiral of fever, listening to her respiration grow louder and louder until her fevered mind began to imagine her lungs as two organic aquariums in which a number of submerged chains were rattling. And yet she held onheld on because part of her mind insisted with crazy, failing certainty that Jack was on his way back from wherever he had been. 7 The beginning of her final coma had been like a dimple in the sanda dimple that begins to spin like a whirlpool. The sound of submerged chains in her chest became a long, dry exhalationHahhhhhhhh . . . Then something had brought her out of that deepening spiral and started her feeling along the wall in the cold darkness for the lightswitch. She got out of bed. She did not have strength enough left to do this; a doctor would have laughed at the idea. And yet she did. She fell back twice, then finally made it to her feet, mouth turned down in a snarl of effort. She groped for the chair, found it, and began to lurch her way across the room to the window. Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the Bs, was gone. This was a walking horror, eaten by cancer, burned by rising fever. She reached the window and looked out. Saw a human shape down thereand a glowing globe. Jack! she tried to scream. Nothing came out but a gravelly whisper. She raised a hand, tried to wave. Faintness (Haahhhhhhhhh . . . ) washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill. Jack! Suddenly the lighted ball in the figures hands flashed up brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jacks face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home. The figure broke into a run. Jack! Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks. 8 Mom! Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the oldfashioned telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awfulit had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window. Mom! He pounded up the stairs, first by twos, then by threes, the Talisman stuttering one burst of pinkred light and then falling dark in his hands. Mom! Down the hallway to their rooms, feet flying, and now, at last, he heard her voiceno brassy bellow or slightly throaty chuckle now; this was the dusty croak of a creature on the outer edge of death. Jacky? Mom! He burst into the room. 9 Down in the car, a nervous Richard Sloat stared upward through his polarized window. What was he doing here, what was Jack doing here? Richards eyes hurt. He strained to see the upper windows in the murky evening. As he bent sideways and stared upward, a blinding white flash erupted from several of the upstairs windows, sending a momentary, almost palpable sheet of dazzling light over the entire front of the hotel. Richard put his head between his knees and moaned. 10 She was on the floor beneath the windowhe saw her there finally. The rumpled, somehow dustylooking bed was empty, the whole bedroom, as disordered as a childs room, seemed empty . . . Jacks stomach had frozen and words backed up in his throat. Then the Talisman had shot out another of its great illuminating flashes, in and for an instant turning everything in the room a pure colorless white. She croaked, Jacky? once more, and he bellowed, MOM! seeing her crumpled like a candy wrapper under the window. Thin and lank, her hair trailed on the rooms dirty carpet. Her hands seemed like tiny animal paws, pale and scrabbling. Oh Jesus, Mom, oh jeepers, oh holy moe, he babbled, and somehow moved across the room without taking a step, he floated, he swam across Lilys crowded frozen bedroom in an instant that seemed as sharp to him as an image on a photographic plate. Her hair puddled on the grimy carpet, her small knotty hands. He inhaled the thick odor of illness, of close death. Jack was no doctor, and he was ignorant of most of the things so wrong with Lilys body. But he knew one thinghis mother was dying, her life was falling away through invisible cracks, and she had very little time left. She had uttered his name twice, and that was about all the life left in her would permit. Already beginning to weep, he put his hand on her unconscious head, and set the Talisman on the floor beside her. Her hair felt full of sand and her head was burning. Oh Mom, Mom, he said, and got his hands under her. He still could not see her face. Through her flimsy nightgown her hip felt as hot as the door of a stove. Against his other palm, her left shoulder blade pulsed with an equal warmth. She had no comfortable pads of flesh over her bonesfor a mad second of stopped time it was as though she were a small dirty child somehow left ill and alone. Sudden unbidden tears squirted out of his eyes. He lifted her, and it was like picking up a bundle of clothes. Jack moaned. Lilys arms sprawled loosely, gracelessly. (Richard) Richard had felt . . . not as bad as this, not even when Richard had felt like a dried husk on his back, coming down the final hill into poisoned Point Venuti. There had been little but pimples and a rash left of Richard at that point, but he, too, had burned with fever. But Jack realized with a sort of unthinking horror that there had been more actual life, more substance, to Richard than his mother now possessed. Still, she had called his name. (and Richard had nearly died) She had called his name. He clung to that. She had made it to the window. She had called his name. It was impossible, unthinkable, immoral to imagine that she could die. One of her arms dangled before him like a reed meant to be cut in half by a scythe . . . her wedding ring had fallen off her finger. He was crying steadily, unstoppably, unconsciously. Okay, Mom, he said, okay, its okay now, okay, its okay. From the limp body in his arms came a vibration that might have been assent. He gently placed her on the bed, and she rolled weightlessly sideways. Jack put a knee on the bed and leaned over her. The tired hair fell away from her face. 11 Once, at the very beginning of his journey, he had for a shameful moment seen his mother as an old womana spent, exhausted old woman in a tea shop. As soon as he had recognized her, the illusion had dissipated, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had been restored to her unaging self. For the real, the true Lily Cavanaugh could never have agedshe was eternally a blonde with a quick switchblade of a smile and a gotohell amusement in her face. This had been the Lily Cavanaugh whose picture on a billboard had strengthened her sons heart. The woman on the bed looked very little like the actress on the billboard. Jacks tears momentarily blinded him. Oh dont dont dont, he said, and laid one palm across her yellowed cheek. She did not look as though she had enough strength to lift her hand. He took her tight dry discolored claw of a hand into his own hand. Please please please dont He could not even allow himself to say it. And then he realized how much an effort this shrunken woman had made. She had been looking for him, he understood in a great giddy rush of comprehension. His mother had known he was coming. She had trusted him to return and in a way that must have been connected to the fact of the Talisman itself, she had known the moment of his return. Im here, Mom, he whispered. A wad of wet stuff bubbled from his nostrils. He unceremoniously wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat. He realized for the first time that his entire body was trembling. I brought it back, he said. He experienced a moment of absolute radiant pride, of pure accomplishment. I brought back the Talisman, he said. Gently he set her nutlike hand down on the counterpane. Beside the chair, where he had placed it (every bit as gently) on the floor, the Talisman continued to glow. But its light was faint, hesitant, cloudy. He had healed Richard by simply rolling the globe down the length of his friends body; he had done the same for Speedy. But this was to be something else. He knew that, but not what it was to be . . . unless it was a question of knowing and not wanting to believe. He could not possibly break the Talisman, not even to save his mothers lifethat much he did know. Now the interior of the Talisman slowly filled with a cloudy whiteness. The pulses faded into one another and became a single steady light. Jack placed his hands on it, and the Talisman shot forth a blinding wall of light, rainbow! which seemed nearly to speak. AT LAST! Jack went back across the room toward the bed, the Talisman bouncing and spraying light from floor to wall to ceiling, illuminating the bed fitfully, garishly. As soon as he stood beside his mothers bed, the texture of the Talisman seemed to Jack to subtly alter beneath his fingers. Its glassy hardness shifted somehow, became less slippery, more porous. The tips of his fingers seemed almost to sink into the Talisman. The cloudiness filling it boiled and darkened. And at this moment Jack experienced a strongin fact, passionatefeeling he would have thought was impossible, that day long ago when he had set off for his first days walk in the Territories. He knew that in some unforeseen way the Talisman, the object of so much blood and trouble, was going to alter. It was going to change forever, and he was going to lose it. The Talisman would no longer be his. Its clear skin was clouding over, too, and the entire beautiful grooved gravid surface was softening. The feeling now was not glass but warming plastic. Jack hurriedly set the altering Talisman down in his mothers hands. It knew its job; it had been made for this moment; in some fabulous smithy it had been created to answer the requirements of this particular moment and of none other. He did not know what he expected to happen. An explosion of light? A smell of medicine? Creations big bang? Nothing happened. His mother continued visibly but motionlessly to die. Oh please, Jack blurted, pleaseMomplease His breath solidified in the middle of his chest. A seam, once one of the vertical grooves in the Talisman, had soundlessly opened. Light slowly poured out and pooled over his mothers hands. From the cloudy interior of the loose, emptying ball, more light spilled through the open seam. From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence. 12 But of that Jack was only distractedly conscious. He leaned breathlessly forward and watched the Talisman pour itself out onto his mothers bed. Cloudy brightness welled up within it. Seams and sparks of light enlivened it. His mothers eyes twitched. Oh Mom, he whispered. Oh . . . Graygolden light flooded through the opening in the Talisman and cloudily drifted up his mothers arms. Her sallow, wizened face very slightly frowned.


Jack inhaled unconsciously. (What?) (Music?) The graygolden cloud from the heart of the Talisman was lengthening over his mothers body, coating her in a translucent but slightly opaque, delicately moving membrane. Jack watched this fluid fabric slide across Lilys pitiful chest, down her wasted legs. From the open seam in the Talisman a wondrous odor spilled out with the graygolden cloud, an odor sweet and unsweet, of flowers and earth, wholly good, yeasty; a smell of birth, Jack thought, though he had never attended an actual birth. Jack drew it into his lungs and in the midst of his wonder was gifted with the thought that he himself, JackO Sawyer, was being born at this minuteand then he imagined, with a barely perceptible shock of recognition, that the opening in the Talisman was like a vagina. (He had of course never seen a vagina and had only the most rudimentary idea of its structure.) Jack looked directly into the opening in the distended loosened Talisman. Now he became conscious for the first time of the incredible racket, in some way all mixed up with faint music, of the birds outside the dark windows. (Music? What . . . ?) A small colored ball full of light shot past his vision, flashing in the open seam for a moment, then continued beneath the Talismans cloudy surface as it dove into the shifting moving gaseous interior. Jack blinked. It had resembledAnother followed, and this time he had time to see the demarcation of blue and brown and green on the tiny globe, the coastal shorelines and tiny mountain ranges. On that tiny world, it occurred to him, stood a paralyzed Jack Sawyer looking down at an even tinier colored speck, and on that speck stood a JackO the height of a dust mote staring at a little world the size of an atom. Another world followed the first two, spinning in, out, in, out of the widening cloud within the Talisman. His mother moved her right hand and moaned. Jack began openly to weep. She would live. He knew it now. All had worked as Speedy had said, and the Talisman was forcing life back into his mothers exhausted, diseaseridden body, killing the evil that was killing her. He bent forward, for a moment almost giving in to the image of himself kissing the Talisman which filled his mind. The odors of jasmine and hibiscus and freshly overturned earth filled his nostrils. A tear rolled off the end of his nose and sparkled like a jewel in the shafts of light from the Talisman. He saw a belt of stars drift past the open seam, a beaming yellow sun swimming in vast black space. Music seemed to fill the Talisman, the room, the whole world outside. A womans face, the face of a stranger, moved across the open seam. Childrens faces, too, then the faces of other women. . . . Tears rolled down his own face, for he had seen swimming in the Talisman his mothers own face, the confident wisecracking tender features of the Queen of half a hundred quick movies. When he saw his own face drifting among all the worlds and lives falling toward birth within the Talisman, he thought he would burst with feeling. He expanded. He breathed in light. And became at last aware of the astonishment of noises taking place all about him when he saw his mothers eyes stay open as long, at least, as a blessed two seconds . . . (for alive as birds, as alive as the worlds contained within the Talisman, there came to him the sounds of trombones and trumpets, the cries of saxophones; the joined voices of frogs and turtles and gray doves singing, The people who know my magic have filled the land with smoke; there came to him the voices of Wolfs making Wolfmusic at the moon. Water spanked against the bow of a ship and a fish spanked the surface of a lake with the side of its body and a rainbow spanked the ground and a travelling boy spanked a drop of spittle to tell him which way to go and a spanked baby squinched its face and opened its throat; and there came the huge voice of an orchestra singing with its whole massive heart; and the room filled with the smoky trail of a single voice rising and rising and rising over all these forays of sound. Trucks jammed gears and factory whistles blew and somewhere a tire exploded and somewhere a firecracker loudly spent itself and a lover whispered again and a child squalled and the voice rose and rose and for a short time Jack was unaware that he could not see; but then he could again). Lilys eyes opened wide. They stared up into Jacks face with a startled whereamI expression. It was the expression of a newborn infant who has just been spanked into the world. Then she jerked in a startled breath and a river of worlds and tilted galaxies and universes were pulled up and out of the Talisman as she did. They were pulled up in a stream of rainbow colors. They streamed into her mouth and nose . . . they settled, gleaming, on her sallow skin like droplets of dew, and melted inward. For a moment his mother was all clothed in radiance for a moment his mother was the Talisman. All the disease fled from her face. It did not happen in the manner of a timelapse sequence in a movie. It happened all at once. It happened instantly. She was sick . . . and then she was well. Rosy good health bloomed in her cheeks. Wispy, sparse hair was suddenly full and smooth and rich, the color of dark honey. Jack stared at her as she looked up into his face. Oh . . . oh . . . my GOD . . . Lily whispered. That rainbow radiance was fading nowbut the health remained. Mom? He bent forward. Something crumpled like cellophane under his fingers. It was the brittle husk of the Talisman. He put it aside on the nighttable. He pushed several of her medicine bottles out of the way to do it. Some crashed on the floor, and it didnt matter. She would not be needing the medicines anymore. He put the husk down with gentle reverence, suspectingno, knowingthat even that would be gone very soon. His mother smiled. It was a lovely, fulfilled, somewhat surprised smileHello, world, here I am again! What do you know about that? Jack, you came home, she said at last, and rubbed her eyes as if to make sure it was no mirage. Sure, he said. He tried to smile. It was a pretty good smile in spite of the tears that were pouring down his face. Sure, you bet. I feel . . . a lot better, JackO. Yeah? He smiled, rubbed his wet eyes with the heels of his palms. Thats good, Mom. Her eyes were radiant. Hug me, Jacky. In a room on the fourth floor of a deserted resort hotel on the minuscule New Hampshire seacoast, a thirteenyearold boy named Jack Sawyer leaned forward, closed his eyes, and hugged his mother tightly, smiling. His ordinary life of school and friends and games and music, a life where there were schools to go to and crisp sheets to slide between at night, the ordinary life of a thirteenyearold boy (if the life of such a creature can ever, in its color and riot, be considered ordinary) had been returned to him, he realized. The Talisman had done that for him, too. When he remembered to turn and look for it, the Talisman was gone. Are you ready to continue the magnificent adventure that began with The Talisman? Here, available for the first time, is Chapter 1 of BLACK HOUSE, the longawaited sequel to The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Coming from Random House in hardcover in September 2001. Available wherever books are sold. 1 Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clearsightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsins far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now an early Friday morning in midJuly a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past 6 A.M., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellowwhite ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all. Below, the early sun touches the rivers wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby twostory houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortablelooking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away. Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of HarleyDavidson motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys owners, wildhaired, bushybearded, swagbellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy halftruth. The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see the worlds largest sixpack, storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland OldTime Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the UrbanaChampaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UIUC university hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five the name strikes them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is the Hegelian Scum. These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the handpainted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned buildings. The posters say FISHERMEN, YOU BETTER PRAY TO YOUR STINKING GOD WE DONT CATCH YOU FIRST! REMEMBER AMY! From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn, unpainted facades the color of fog the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blankfaced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its filmy picture window, a few other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the highwater mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street. Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar  Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Stutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and childrens portraits), and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks Bentons Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing, Schmitts Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines and greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into onestory wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7Eleven, the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farmimplement dealership known locally as Goltzs, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields. If we rise another hundred feet into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted hills furry with pines, loamrich valleys invisible from ground level until you have come upon them, meandering rivers, mileslong patchwork fields, and little townsone of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93. Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of the night. No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and pickup trucks that will begin to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a mannerly little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching redbrick buildings of two stories each house, in westeast order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, M.D., the local general practitioner; and Bell  Holland, a twoman law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield  Son Funeral Home, now owned by a vast, funereal empire centered in St. Louis; and the French Landing Post Office. Separated from these by a wide driveway into a goodsized parking lot at the rear, the building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of redbrick and only two stories high but longer than its immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron bars block the rear secondfloor windows, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters FLPD on their sides. The presence of police cars and barred windows seem incongruous in this rural vastnesswhat sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely, nothing worse than shoplifting, drunk driving, and an occasional bar fight. As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of smalltown life, a red van with the words LA RIVIERE HERALD on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the days newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots intead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings. The post office does not get a paper. What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The door opens. A tall, darkhaired young man in a pale blue shortsleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulacs chest gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far enough to suggest that he is trying to read the headlines through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, aboutfaces smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Officer Dulac, go inside behind him. A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to a small locker room, shower stalls, and a firing range, the other upward to an interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied. Somewhere nearby, a radio talk show is playing at a level that seems too loud for a peaceful morning. Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready room he has just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against the wall to our right, beside them a beatup wooden table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant noise. From the nearby studio of KDCUAM, Your Talk Voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settled into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George sounds too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy is just flatout noisythats part of his appeal. Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebbleglass window on which has been painted DALE GILBERTSON, CHIEF OF POLICE. Dale will not be in for another half hour or so. Two metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces us, Tom Lund, a fairhaired officer of roughly his partners age but without his appearance of having been struck gleaming from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two fingers of Bobby Dulacs right hand. All right, Lund says. Okay. The latest installment. You thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here. I dont want to read the damn thing. Not deigning to look at the newspaper, Bobby sends the new days issue of La Riviere Herald sailing in a flat, fast arc across ten feet of wooden floor with an athletic snap of his wrist, spins rightward, takes a long stride, and positions himself in front of the wooden table a moment before Tom Lund fields his throw. Bobby glares at the two names and various details scrawled on the long chalkboard hanging on the wall behind the table. He is not pleased, Bobby Dulac; he looks as though he might burst out of his uniform through the sheer force of his anger. Fat and happy in the KDCU studio, George Rathbun yells, Caller, gimme a break, willya, and get your prescription fixed! Are we talking about the same game here? Caller Maybe Wendell got some sense and decided to lay off, Tom Lund says. Wendell, Bobby says. Because Lund can see only the sleek, dark back of his head, the little sneering thing he does with his lip wastes motion, but he does it anyway. Caller, let me ask you this one question, and in all sincerity, I want you to be honest with me. Did you actually see last nights game? I didnt know Wendell was a big buddy of yours, Bobby says. I didnt know you ever got as far south as La Riviere. Here I was thinking your idea of a big night out was a pitcher of beer and trying to break a hundred at the Arden BowlADrome, and now I find out you hang out with newspaper reporters in college towns. Probably get down and dirty with the Wisconsin Rat, too, that guy on KWLA. Do you pick up a lot of punk babes that way? The caller says he missed the first inning on account of he had to pick up his kid after a special counseling session at Mount Hebron, but he sure saw everything after that. Did I say Wendell Green was a friend of mine? asks Tom Lund. Over Bobbys left shoulder he can see the first of the names on the chalkboard. His gaze helplessly focuses on it. Its just, I met him after the Kinderling case, and the guy didnt seem so bad. Actually, I kind of liked him. Actually, I wound up feeling sorry for him. He wanted to do an interview with Hollywood, and Hollywood turned him down flat. Well, naturally he saw the extra innings, the hapless caller says, thats how he knows Pokey Reese was safe. And as for the Wisconsin Rat, I wouldnt know him if I saw him, and I think that socalled music he plays sounds like the worst bunch of crap I ever heard in my life. How did that scrawny pastyface creep get a radio show in the first place? On the college station? What does that tell you about our wonderful UWLa Riviere, Bobby? What does it say about our whole society? Oh, I forgot, you like that shit. No, I like 311 and Korn, and youre so out of it you cant tell the difference between Jonathan Davis and Dee Dee Ramone, but forget about that, all right? Slowly, Bobby Dulac turns around and smiles at his partner. Stop stalling. His smile is none too pleasant. Im stalling? Tom Lund widens his eyes in a parody of wounded innocence. Gee, was it me who fired the paper across the room? No, I guess not. If you never laid eyes on the Wisconsin Rat, how come you know what he looks like? Same way I know he has funnycolored hair and a pierced nose. Same way I know he wears a beattoshit black leather jacket day in, day out, rain or shine. Bobby waited. By the way he sounds. Peoples voices are full of information. A guy says, Looks like itll turn out to be a nice day, he tells you his whole life story. Want to know something else about Rat Boy? He hasnt been to the dentist in six, seven years. His teeth look like shit. From within KDCUs ugly cementblock structure next to the brewery on Peninsula Drive, via the radio Dale Gilbertson donated to the station house long before either Tom Lund or Bobby Dulac first put on their uniforms, comes good old dependable George Rathbuns patented bellow of genial outrage, a passionate, inclusive uproar that for a hundred miles around causes breakfasting farmers to smile across their tables at their wives and passing truckers to laugh out loud I swear, caller, and this goes for my last caller, too, and every single one of you out there, I love you dearly, that is the honest truth, I love you like my momma loved her turnip patch, but sometimes you people DRIVE ME CRAZY! Oh, boy. Bottom of the eleventh inning, two outs! Sixseven, Brewers! Men on second and third. Batter lines to short center field, Reese takes off from third, good throw to the plate, clean tag, clean tag. A BLIND MAN COULDA MADE THAT CALL! Hey, I thought it was a good tag, and I only heard it on the radio, says Tom Lund. Both men are stalling, and they know it. In fact, shouts the handsdown most popular Talk Voice of the Coulee Country, let me go out on a limb here, boys and girls, let me make the following recommendation, okay? Lets replace every umpire at Miller Park, hey, every umpire in the National League, with BLIND MEN! You know what, my friends? I guarantee a sixty to seventy percent improvement in the accuracy of their calls. GIVE THE JOB TO THOSE WHO CAN HANDLE ITTHE BLIND! Mirth suffuses Tom Lunds bland face. That George Rathbun, man, hes a hoot. Bobby says, Come on, okay? Grinning, Lund pulls the folded newspaper out of its wrapper and flattens it on his desk. His face hardens; without altering its shape, his grin turns stony. Oh, no. Oh, hell. What? Lund utters a shapeless groan and shakes his head. Jesus. I dont even want to know. Bobby rams his hands into his pockets, then pulls himself perfectly upright, jerks his right hand free, and clamps it over his eyes. Im a blind guy, all right? Make me an umpireI dont wanna be a cop anymore. Lund says nothing. Its a headline? Like a banner headline? How bad is it? Bobby pulls his hand away from his eyes and holds it suspended in midair. Well, Lund tells him, it looks like Wendell didnt get some sense, after all, and he sure as hell didnt decide to lay off. I cant believe I said I liked the dipshit. Wake up, Bobby says. Nobody ever told you law enforcement officers and journalists are on opposite sides of the fence? Tom Lunds ample torso tilts over his desk. A thick lateral crease like a scar divides his forehead, and his stolid cheeks burn crimson. He aims his finger at Bobby Dulac. This is one thing that really gets me about you, Bobby. How long have you been here? Five, six months? Dale hired me four years ago, and when him and Hollywood put the cuffs on Mr. Thornberg Kinderling, which was the biggest case in this county for maybe thirty years, I cant claim any credit, but at least I pulled my weight. I helped put some of the pieces together. One of the pieces, Bobby says. I reminded Dale about the girl bartender at the Taproom, and Dale told Hollywood, and Hollywood talked to the girl, and that was a big, big piece. It helped get him. So dont you talk to me that way. Bobby Dulac assumes a look of completely hypothetical contrition. Sorry, Tom. I guess Im kind of wound up and beat to shit at the same time. What he thinks is So you got a couple years on me and you once gave Dale this crappy little bit of information. So what? Im a better cop than youll ever be. How heroic were you last night, anyhow? At 1115 the previous night, Armand Beezer St. Pierre and his fellow travelers in the Thunder Five had roared up from Nailhouse Row to surge into the police station and demand of its three occupants, each of whom had worked an eighteenhour shift, exact details of the progress they were making on the issue that most concerned them all. What the hell was going on here? What about the third one, huh, what about Irma Freneau? Had they found her yet? Did these clowns have anything, or were they still just blowing smoke? You need help? Beezer roared. Then deputize us, well give you all the goddamn help you need and then some. A giant named Mouse had strolled smirking up to Bobby Dulac and kept on strolling, jumbo belly to sixpack belly, until Bobby was backed up against a filing cabinet, whereupon the giant Mouse mysteriously inquired, in a cloud of beer and marijuana, whether Bobby had ever dipped into the works of a gentleman named Jacques Derrida. When Bobby replied that he had never heard of the gentleman, Mouse said, No shit, Sherlock, and stepped aside to glare at the names on the chalkboard. Half an hour later, Beezer, Mouse, and their companions were sent away unsatisfied, undeputized, but pacified, and Dale Gilbertson said he had to go home and get some sleep, but Tom ought to remain, just in case. The regular night men had both found excuses not to come in. Bobby said he would stay, too, no problem, Chief, which is why we find these two men in the station so early in the morning. Give it to me, says Bobby Dulac. Lund picks up the paper, turns it around, and holds it out for Bobby to see FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN FRENCH LANDING AREA, reads the headline over an article that takes up three columns on the top lefthand side of the front page. The columns of type have been printed against a background of pale blue, and a black border separates them from the remainder of the page. Beneath the head, in smaller print, runs the line Identity of Psycho Killer Baffles Police. Underneath the subhead, a line in even smaller print attributes the article to Wendell Green, with the support of the editorial staff. The Fisherman, Bobby says. Right from the start, your friend has his thumb up his butt. The Fisherman, the Fisherman, the Fisherman. If I all of a sudden turned into a fiftyfoot ape and started stomping on buildings, would you call me King Kong? Lund lowers the newspaper and smiles. Okay, Bobby allows, bad example. Say I held up a couple banks. Would you call me John Dillinger? Well, says Lund, smiling even more broadly, they say Dillingers tool was so humungous, they put it in a jar in the Smithsonian. So . . . Tom Lund looks down and reads  As the police in French Landing fail to discover any leads to the identity of the fiendish double murderer and sex criminal this reporter has dubbed the Fisherman, the grim specters of fear, despair, and suspicion run increasingly rampant through the streets of that little town, and from there out into the farms and villages throughout French County, darkening by their touch every portion of the Coulee Country.  Just what we need, Bobby says, Jeezus! and in an instant has crossed the room and is leaning over Tom Lunds shoulder, reading the Heralds front page with his hand resting on the butt of his Glock, as if ready to drill a hole in the article right here and now.  Our traditions of trust and good neighborliness, our habit of extending warmth and generosity to all [writes Wendell Green, editorializing like crazy] are eroding daily under the corrosive onslaught of these dread emotions. Fear, despair, and suspicion are poisonous to the soul of communities large and small, for they turn neighbor against neighbor and make a mockery of civility.  Two children have been foully murdered and their remains partially consumed. Now a third child has disappeared. Eightyearold Amy St. Pierre and sevenyearold Johnny Irkenham fell victim to the passions of a monster in human form. Neither will know the happiness of adolescence or the satisfactions of adulthood. Their grieving parents will never know the grandchildren they would have cherished. The parents of Amy and Johnnys playmates shelter their children within the safety of their own homes, as do parents whose children never knew the deceased. As a result, summer playgroups and other programs for young children have been canceled in virtually every township and municipality in French County.  With the disappearance of tenyearold Irma Freneau seven days after the death of Amy St. Pierre and only three after that of Johnny Irkenham, public patience has grown dangerously thin. As this correspondent has already reported, Merlin Graasheimer, fiftytwo, an unemployed farm laborer of no fixed abode, was set upon and beaten by an unidentified group of men in a Fountain side street late Tuesday evening. Another such epidose occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning, when Elvar Praetorious, thirtysix, a Swedish tourist traveling alone, was assaulted by three men, again unidentified, while asleep in La Rivieres Leif Eriksson Park. Graasheimer and Praetorious required only routine medical attention, but future incidents of vigilantism will almost certainly end more seriously.  Tom Lund looks down at the next paragraph, which describes the Freneau girls abrupt disappearance from a Chase Street sidewalk, and pushes himself away from his desk. Bobby Dulac reads silently for a time, then says, You gotta hear this shit, Tom. This is how he winds up  When will the Fisherman strike again?  For he will strike again, my friends, make no mistake.  And when will French Landings chief of police, Dale Gilbertson, do his duty and rescue the citizens of this county from the obscene savagery of the Fisherman and the understandable violence produced by his own inaction?  Bobby Dulac stamps to the middle of the room. His color has heightened. He inhales, then exhales, a magnificent quantity of oxygen.