Still thinking these thoughts--and thinking how much better it made him feel to have a plan (even if the plan only encompassed the next two hours or so)--Jack suddenly realized he could hear another vehicle and a great many horses.
Cocking his head, he stopped in the middle of the road. His eyes widened, and two pictures suddenly unspooled behind his eyes with shutterlike speed: the big car the two men had been in--the car that had not been a Mercedes--and then the WILD CHILD van, speeding down the street and away from Uncle Tommy's corpse, blood dripping from the broken plastic fangs of its grille. He saw the hands on the van's steering wheel . . . but they weren't hands. They were weird, articulated hooves.
At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth.
Now, hearing it--the sound still distant but perfectly clear in the pure air--Jack wondered how he could have even thought those other approaching wagons might be Morgan's diligence. He would certainly never make such a mistake again. The sound he heard now was perfectly ominious, thick with a potential for evil--the sound of a hearse, yes, a hearse driven by a devil.
He stood frozen in the road, almost hypnotized, as a rabbit is hypnotized by headlights. The sound grew steadily louder--the thunder of the wheels and hooves, the creak of leather rigging. Now he could hear the driver's voice: "Hee-yah! Heee-yahhh! HEEEEE-YAHHHH!"
He stood in the road, stood there, his head drumming with horror. Can't move, oh dear God oh dear Christ I can't move Mom Mom Muhhhhhmeeeee--!
He stood in the road and the eye of his imagination saw a huge black thing like a stagecoach tearing up the road, pulled by black animals that looked more like pumas than horses; he saw black curtains flapping in and out of the coach's windows; he saw the driver standing on the teeterboard, his hair blown back, his eyes as wild and crazed as those of a psycho with a switchblade.
He saw it coming toward him, never slowing.
He saw it run him down.
That broke the paralysis. He ran to the right, skidding down the side of the road, catching his foot under one of those gnarled roots, falling, rolling. His back, relatively quiet for the last couple of hours, flared with fresh pain, and Jack drew his lips back with a grimace.
He got to his feet and scurried into the woods, hunched over.
He slipped first behind one of the black trees, but the touch of the gnarly trunk--it was a bit like the banyans he had seen while on vacation on Hawaii year before last--was oily and unpleasant. Jack moved to the left and behind the trunk of a pine.
The thunder of the coach and its outriders grew steadily louder. At every second Jack expected the company to flash by toward All-Hands' Village. Jack's fingers squeezed and relaxed on the pine's gummy back. He bit at his lips.
Directly ahead was a narrow but perfectly clear sightline back to the road, a tunnel with sides of leaf and fern and pine needles. And just when Jack had begun to think that Morgan's party would never arrive, a dozen or more mounted soldiers passed heading east, riding at a gallop. The one in the lead carried a banner, but Jack could not make out its device . . . nor was he sure he wanted to. Then the diligence flashed across Jack's narrow sightline.
The moment of its passage was brief--no more than a second, perhaps less than that--but Jack's recall of it was total. The diligence was a gigantic vehicle, surely a dozen feet high. The trunks and bundles lashed with stout cord to the top added another three feet. Each horse in the team which pulled it wore a black plume on its head--these plumes were blown back almost flat in a speed-generated wind. Jack thought later that Morgan must need a new team for every run, because these looked close to the end of their endurance. Foam and blood sprayed back from their working mouths in curds; their eyes rolled crazily, showing arcs of white.
As in his imagining--or his vision--black crepe curtains flew and fluttered through glassless windows. Suddenly a white face appeared in one of those black oblongs, a white face framed in strange, twisted carving-work. The sudden appearance of that face was as shocking as the face of a ghost in the ruined window of a haunted house. It was not the face of Morgan Sloat . . . but it was.
And the owner of that face knew that Jack--or some other danger, just as hated and just as personal--was out there. Jack saw this in the widening of the eyes and the sudden vicious downtwist of the mouth.
Captain Farren had said He'll smell you like a rat, and now Jack thought dismally: I've been smelled, all right. He knows I'm here, and what happens now? He'll stop the whole bunch of them, I bet, and send the soldiers into the woods after me.
Another band of soldiers--these protecting Morgan's diligence from the rear--swept by. Jack waited, his hands frozen to the bark of the pine, sure that Morgan would call a halt. But no halt came; soon the heavy thunder of the diligence and its outriders began to fade.
His eyes. That's what's the same. Those dark eyes in that white face. And--
Our boy? YESSSS!
Something slithered over his foot . . . and up his ankle. Jack screamed and floundered backward, thinking it must be a snake. But when he looked down he saw that one of those gray roots had slipped up his foot . . . and now it ringed his calf.
That's impossible, he thought stupidly. Roots don't move--
He pulled back sharply, yanking his leg out of the rough gray manacle the root had formed. There was thin pain in his calf, like the pain of a rope-burn. He raised his eyes and felt sick fear slip into his heart. He thought he knew now why Morgan had sensed him and gone on anyway; Morgan knew that walking in this forest was like walking into a jungle stream infested with piranhas. Why hadn't Captain Farren warned him? All Jack could think was that the scarred Captain must not have known; must never have been this far west.
The grayish roots of those fir-fern hybrids were all moving now--rising, falling, scuttling along the mulchy ground toward him. Ents and Entwives, Jack thought crazily. BAD Ents and Entwives. One particularly thick root, its last six inches dark with earth and damp, rose and wavered in front of him like a cobra piped up from a fakir's basket. OUR boy! YESS!
It darted toward him and Jack backed away from it, aware that the roots had now formed a living screen between him and the safety of the road. He backed into a tree . . . and then lurched away from it, screaming, as its bark began to ripple and twitch against his back--it was like feeling a muscle which has begun to spasm wildly. Jack looked around and saw one of those black trees with the gnarly trunks. Now the trunk was moving, writhing. Those twisted knots of bark formed something like a dreadful runnelled face, one eye widely, blackly open, the other drawn down in a hideous wink. The tree split open lower down with a grinding, rending sound, and whitish-yellow sap began to drool out. OURS! Oh, yesssss!
Roots like fingers slipped between Jack's upper arm and ribcage, as if to tickle.
He tore away, holding on to the last of his rationality with a huge act of will, groping in his jerkin for Speedy's bottle. He was aware--faintly--of a series of gigantic ripping sounds. He supposed the trees were tearing themselves right out of the ground. Tolkien had never been like this.
He got the bottle by the neck and pulled it out. He scrabbled at the cap, and then one of those gray roots slid easily around his neck. A moment later it pulled as bitterly tight as a hangman's noose.
Jack's breath stopped. The bottle tumbled from his fingers as he grappled with the thing that was choking him. He managed to work his fingers under the root. It was not cold and stiff but warm and limber and fleshlike. He struggled with it, aware of the choked gargling sound coming from him and the slick of spittle on his chin.
With a final convulsive effort he tore the root free. It tried to circle his wrist then, and Jack whipped his arm away from it with a cry. He looked down and saw the bottle twisting and bumping away, one of those gray roots coiled about its neck.
Jack leaped for it. Roots grabbed his legs, circled them. He fell heavily to the earth, stretching, reaching, the tips of his fingers digging at the thick black forest soil for an ex
tra inch--
He touched the bottle's slick green side . . . and seized it. He pulled as hard as he could, dimly aware that the roots were all over his legs now, crisscrossing like bonds, holding him firmly. He spun the cap off the bottle. Another root floated down, cobweb-light, and tried to snatch the bottle away from him. Jack pushed it away and raised the bottle to his lips. That smell of sickish fruit suddenly seemed everywhere, a living membrane.
Speedy, please let it work!
As more roots slid over his back and around his waist, turning him helplessly this way and that, Jack drank, cheap wine splattering both of his cheeks. He swallowed, groaning, praying, and it was no good, it wasn't working, his eyes were still closed but he could feel the roots entangling his arms and legs, could feel
8
the water soaking into his jeans and his shirt, could smell
Water? mud and damp, could hear
Jeans? Shirt? the steady croak of frogs and
Jack opened his eyes and saw the orange light of the setting sun reflected from a wide river. Unbroken forest grew on the east side of this river; on the western side, the side that he was on, a long field, now partially obscured with evening ground-mist, rolled down to the water's edge. The ground here was wet and squelchy. Jack was lying at the edge of the water, in the boggiest area of all. Thick weeds still grew here--the hard frosts that would kill them were still a month or more away--and Jack had gotten entangled in them, the way a man awakening from a nightmare may entangle himself in the bedclothes.
He scrambled and stumbled to his feet, wet and slimed with the fragrant mud, the straps of his pack pulling under his arms. He pushed the weedy fragments from his arms and face with horror. He started away from the water, then looked back and saw Speedy's bottle lying in the mud, the cap beside it. Some of the "magic juice" had either run out or been spilled in his struggle with the malignant Territories trees. Now the bottle was no more than a third full.
He stood there a moment, his caked sneakers planted in the oozy muck, looking out at the river. This was his world; this was the good old United States of America. He didn't see the golden arches he had hoped for, or a skyscraper, or an earth satellite blinking overhead in the darkening sky, but he knew where he was as well as he knew his own name. The question was, had he ever been in that other world at all?
He looked around at the unfamiliar river, the likewise unfamiliar countryside, and listened to the distant mellow mooing of cows. He thought: You're somewhere different. This sure isn't Arcadia Beach anymore, Jack-O.
No, it wasn't Arcadia Beach, but he didn't know the area surrounding Arcadia Beach well enough to say for sure that he was more than four or five miles away--just enough inland, say, to no longer be able to smell the Atlantic. He had come back as if waking from a nightmare--was it not possible that was all it had been, the whole thing, from the carter with his load of fly-crawling meat to the living trees? A sort of waking nightmare in which sleepwalking had played a part? It made sense. His mother was dying, and he now thought he had known that for quite a while--the signs had been there, and his subconscious had drawn the correct conclusion even while his conscious mind denied it. That would have contributed the correct atmosphere for an act of self-hypnosis, and that crazy wino Speedy Parker had gotten him in gear. Sure. It all hung together.
Uncle Morgan would have loved it.
Jack shivered and swallowed hard. The swallow hurt. Not the way a sore throat hurts, but the way an abused muscle hurts.
He raised his left hand, the one not holding the bottle, and rubbed his palm gently against his throat. For a moment he looked absurdly like a woman checking for dewlaps or wrinkles. He found a welted abrasion just above his adam's apple. It hadn't bled much, but it was almost too painful to touch. The root that had closed about his throat had done that.
"True," Jack whispered, looking out at the orange water, listening to the twank of the bullfrogs and the mooing, distant cows. "All true."
9
Jack began walking up the slope of the field, setting the river--and the east--at his back. After he had gone half a mile, the steady rub and shift of the pack against his throbbing back (the strokes Osmond had laid on were still there, too, the shifting pack reminded him) triggered a memory. He had refused Speedy's enormous sandwich, but hadn't Speedy slipped the remains into his pack anyway, while Jack was examining the guitar-pick?
His stomach pounced on the idea.
Jack unshipped the pack then and there, standing in a curdle of ground-mist beneath the evening star. He unbuckled one of the flaps, and there was the sandwich, not just a piece or a half, but the whole thing, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Jack's eyes filled with a warmth of tears and he wished that Speedy were here so he could hug him.
Ten minutes ago you were calling him a crazy old wino.
His face flamed at that, but his shame didn't stop him from gobbling the sandwich in half a dozen big bites. He rebuckled his pack and reshouldered it. He went on, feeling better--with that whistling hole in his gut stopped up for the time being, Jack felt himself again.
Not long after, lights twinkled up out of the growing darkness. A farmhouse. A dog began to bark--the heavy bark of a really big fellow--and Jack froze for a moment.
Inside, he thought. Or chained up. I hope.
He bore to the right, and after a while the dog stopped barking. Keeping the lights of the farmhouse as a guide, Jack soon came out on a narrow blacktop road. He stood looking from right to left, having no idea which way to go.
Well, folks, here's Jack Sawyer, halfway between hoot and holler, wet through to the skin and sneakers packed with mud. Way to go, Jack!
The loneliness and homesickness rose in him again. Jack fought them off. He put a drop of spit on his left index finger, then spanked the drop sharply. The larger of the two halves flew off to the right--or so it seemed to Jack--and so he turned that way and began to walk. Forty minutes later, drooping with weariness (and hungry again, which was somehow worse), he saw a gravel-pit with a shed of some sort standing beyond a chained-off access road.
Jack ducked under the chain and went to the shed. The door was padlocked shut, but he saw that the earth had eroded under one side of the small outbuilding. It was the work of a minute to remove his pack, wriggle under the shed's side, and then pull the pack in after him. The lock on the door actually made him feel safer.
He looked around and saw that he was in with some very old tools--this place hadn't been used in a long time, apparently, and that suited Jack just fine. He stripped to the skin, not liking the feel of his clammy, muddy clothes. He felt the coin Captain Farren had given him in one of his pants pockets, resting there like a giant amid his little bit of more ordinary change. Jack took it out and saw that Farren's coin, with the Queen's head on one side and the winged lion on the other--had become a 1921 silver dollar. He looked fixedly at the profile of Lady Liberty on the cartwheel for some time, and then slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans.
He rooted out fresh clothes, thinking he would put the dirty ones in his pack in the morning--they would be dry then--and perhaps clean them along the way, maybe in a Laundromat, maybe just in a handy stream.
While searching for socks, his hand encountered something slim and hard. Jack pulled it out and saw it was his toothbrush. At once, images of home and safety and rationality--all the things a toothbrush could represent--rose up and overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could beat these emotions down or turn them aside this time. A toothbrush was a thing meant to be seen in a well-lighted bathroom, a thing to be used with cotton pajamas on the body and warm slippers on the feet. It was nothing to come upon in the bottom of your knapsack in a cold, dark toolshed on the edge of a gravel-pit in a deserted rural town whose name you did not even know.
Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his outcast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady so
bs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.
Jack fell asleep before the sobs had entirely run their course. He slept curled around his pack, naked except for clean underpants and socks. The tears had cut clean courses down his dirty cheeks, and he held his toothbrush loosely in one hand.
8
The Oatley Tunnel
1
Six days later, Jack had climbed nearly all the way out of his despair. By the end of his first days on the road, he seemed to himself to have grown from childhood right through adolescence into adulthood--into competence. It was true that he had not returned to the Territories since he had awakened on the western bank of the river, but he could rationalize that, and the slower travelling it involved, by telling himself that he was saving Speedy's juice for when he really needed it.
And anyhow, hadn't Speedy told him to travel mainly on the roads in this world? Just following orders, pal.
When the sun was up and the cars whirled by him thirty, forty miles west and his stomach was full, the Territories seemed unbelievably distant and dreamlike: they were like a movie he was beginning to forget, a temporary fantasy. Sometimes, when Jack leaned back into the passenger seat of some schoolteacher's car and answered the usual questions about the Story, he actually did forget. The Territories left him, and he was again--or nearly so--the boy he had been at the start of the summer.
Especially on the big state highways, when a ride dropped him off near the exit ramp, he usually saw the next car pulling off to the side ten or fifteen minutes after he stuck his thumb into the air. Now he was somewhere near Batavia, way over in the western part of New York State, walking backward down the breakdown lane of I-90, his thumb out again, working his way toward Buffalo--after Buffalo, he would start to swing south. It was a matter, Jack thought, of working out the best way to accomplish something and then just doing it. Rand McNally and the Story had gotten him this far; all he needed was enough luck to find a driver going all the way to Chicago or Denver (or Los Angeles, if we're going to daydream about luck, Jacky-baby), and he could be on his way home again before the middle of October.