He reached out and grasped the phone. His hand went numb.
He put it to his ear. His ear went numb.
"Oatley Tap," he said into that deadly blackness, and his mouth went numb.
The voice that came out of the phone was the cracked, rasping croak of something long dead, some creature which could never be seen by the living: the sight of it would drive a living person insane, or strike him dead with frost-etchings on his lips and staring eyes blinded by cataracts of ice. "Jack," this scabrous, rattling voice whispered up out of the earpiece, and his face went numb, the way it did when you needed to spend a heavy day in the dentist's chair and the guy needled you up with a little too much Novocain. "You get your ass back home, Jack."
From far away, a distance of light-years, it seemed, he could hear his voice repeating: "Oatley Tap, is anyone there? Hello? . . . Hello? . . ."
Cold, so cold.
His throat was numb. He drew breath and his lungs seemed to freeze. Soon the chambers of his heart would ice up and he would simply drop dead.
That chilly voice whispered, "Bad things can happen to a boy alone on the road, Jack. Ask anybody."
He hung the phone up with a quick, clumsy reaching gesture. He pulled his hand back and then stood looking at the phone.
"Was it the asshole, Jack?" Lori asked, and her voice was distant . . . but a little closer than his own voice had seemed a few moments ago. The world was coming back. On the handset of the pay phone he could see the shape of his hand, outlined in a glittering rime of frost. As he looked, the frost began to melt and run down the black plastic.
3
That was the night--Thursday night--that Jack first saw Genny County's answer to Randolph Scott. The crowd was a little smaller than it had been Wednesday night--very much a day-before-payday crowd--but there were still enough men present to fill the bar and spill over into the tables and booths.
They were town men from a rural area where the plows were now probably rusting forgotten in back sheds, men who perhaps wanted to be farmers but had forgotten how. There were a lot of John Deere caps in evidence, but to Jack, very few of these men looked as if they would be at home riding a tractor. These were men in gray chinos and brown chinos and green chinos; men with their names stitched on blue shirts in gold thread; men in square-toed Dingo Boots and men in great big clumping Survivors. These men carried their keys on their belts. These men had wrinkles but no laugh-lines; their mouths were dour. These men wore cowboy hats and when Jack looked at the bar from in back of the stools, there were as many as eight who looked like Charlie Daniels in the chewing-tobacco ads. But these men didn't chew; these men smoked cigarettes, and a lot of them.
Jack was cleaning the bubble front of the jukebox when Digger Atwell came in. The juke was turned off; the Yankees were on the cable, and the men at the bar were watching intently. The night before, Atwell had been in the Oatley male's version of sports clothes (chinos, khaki shirt with a lot of pens in one of the two big pockets, steel-toed workboots). Tonight he was wearing a blue cop's uniform. A large gun with wood grips hung in a holster on his creaking leather belt.
He glanced at Jack, who thought of Smokey saying I've heard that ole Digger's got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly, and flinched back as if guilty of something. Digger Atwell grinned a wide, slow grin. "Decided to stick around for a while, boy?"
"Yes, sir," Jack muttered, and squirted more Windex onto the juke's bubble front, although it was already as clean as it was going to get. He was only waiting for Atwell to go away. After a while, Atwell did. Jack turned to watch the beefy cop cross to the bar . . . and that was when the man at the far left end of the bar turned around and looked at him.
Randolph Scott, Jack thought at once, that's just who he looks like.
But in spite of the rangy and uncompromising lines of his face, the real Randolph Scott had had an undeniable look of heroism; if his good looks had been harsh, they had also been part of a face that could smile. This man looked both bored and somehow crazy.
And with real fright, Jack realized the man was looking at him, at Jack. Nor had he simply turned around during the commercial to see who might be in the bar; he had turned around to look at Jack. Jack knew this was so.
The phone. The ringing phone.
With a tremendous effort, Jack pulled his gaze away. He looked back into the bubble front of the juke and saw his own frightened face hovering, ghostlike, over the records inside.
The telephone began to shriek on the wall.
The man at the left end of the bar looked at it . . . and then looked back at Jack, who stood frozen by the jukebox with his bottle of Windex in one hand and a rag in the other, his hair stiffening, his skin freezing.
"If it's that asshole again, I'm gonna get me a whistle to start blowing down the phone when he calls, Smokey," Lori was saying as she walked toward it. "I swear to God I am."
She might have been an actress in a play, and all the customers extras paid the standard SAG rate of thirty-five dollars a day. The only two real people in the world were him and this dreadful cowboy with the big hands and the eyes Jack could not . . . quite . . . see.
Suddenly, shockingly, the cowboy mouthed these words: Get your ass home. And winked.
The phone stopped ringing even as Lori stretched out her hand to it.
Randolph Scott turned around, drained his glass, and yelled, "Bring me another tapper, okay?"
"I'll be damned," Lori said. "That phone's got the ghosts."
4
Later on, in the storeroom, Jack asked Lori who the guy was who looked like Randolph Scott.
"Who looks like who?" she asked.
"An old cowboy actor. He was sitting down at the end of the bar."
She shrugged. "They all look the same to me, Jack. Just a bunch of swinging dicks out for a good time. On Thursday nights they usually pay for it with the little woman's Beano money."
"He calls beers 'tappers.' "
Her eyes lit. "Oh yeah! Him. He looks mean." She said this last with actual appreciation . . . as if admiring the straightness of his nose or the whiteness of his smile.
"Who is he?"
"I don't know his name," Lori said. "He's only been around the last week or two. I guess the mill must be hiring again. It--"
"For Christ's sake, Jack, did I tell you to run me out a keg or not?"
Jack had been in the process of walking one of the big kegs of Busch onto the foot of the hand-dolly. Because his weight and the keg's weight were so close, it was an act requiring a good deal of careful balancing. When Smokey shouted from the doorway, Lori screamed and Jack jumped. He lost control of the keg and it went over on its side, the cap shooting out like a champagne cork, beer following in a white-gold jet. Smokey was still shouting at him but Jack could only stare at the beer, frozen . . . until Smokey popped him one.
When he got back out to the taproom perhaps twenty minutes later, holding a Kleenex against his swelling nose, Randolph Scott had been gone.
5
I'm six.
John Benjamin Sawyer is six.
Six--
Jack shook his head, trying to clear this steady, repeating thought out as the rangy millhand who was not a millhand leaned closer and closer. His eyes . . . yellow and somehow scaly. He--it--blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.
"You were supposed to get gone," it whispered again, and reached toward Jack with hands that were beginning to twist and plate and harden.
The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the Oak Ridge Boys.
"Jack, if you don't quit lollygagging, I'm going to have to make you sorry," Smokey said from behind Randolph Scott. Scott stepped backward. No melting, hardening hooves here; his hands were just hands again--big and powerful, their backs crisscrossed with prominent ridged veins. There was another milky, swirling sort of blink that didn't involve the eyelids at all . . . and then the man's eyes were not yellow but a
simple faded blue. He gave Jack a final glance and then headed toward the men's room.
Smokey came toward Jack now, his paper cap tipped forward, his narrow weasel's head slightly inclined, his lips parted to show his alligator teeth.
"Don't make me speak to you again," Smokey said. "This is your last warning, and don't you think I don't mean it."
As it had against Osmond, Jack's fury suddenly rose up--that sort of fury, closely linked as it is to a sense of hopeless injustice, is perhaps never as strong as it is at twelve--college students sometimes think they feel it, but it is usually little more than an intellectual echo.
This time it boiled over.
"I'm not your dog, so don't you treat me like I am," Jack said, and took a step toward Smokey Updike on legs that were still rubbery with fear.
Surprised--possibly even flabbergasted--by Jack's totally unexpected anger, Smokey backed up a step.
"Jack, I'm warning you--"
"No, man, I'm warning you," Jack heard himself say. "I'm not Lori. I don't want to be hit. And if you hit me, I'm going to hit you back, or something."
Smokey Updike's discomposure was only momentary. He had most assuredly not seen everything--not living in Oatley, he hadn't--but he thought he had, and even for a minor leaguer, sometimes assurance can be enough.
He reached out to grab Jack's collar.
"Don't you smart off to me, Jack," he said, drawing Jack close. "As long as you're in Oatley, my dog is just what you are. As long as you're in Oatley I'll pet you when I want and I'll beat you when I want."
He adminstered a single neck-snapping shake. Jack bit his tongue and cried out. Hectic spots of anger now glowed in Smokey's pale cheeks like cheap rouge.
"You may not think that is so right now, but Jack, it is. As long as you're in Oatley you're my dog, and you'll be in Oatley until I decide to let you go. And we might as well start getting that learned right now."
He pulled his fist back. For a moment the three naked sixty-watt bulbs which hung in this narrow hallway sparkled crazily on the diamond chips of the horseshoe-shaped pinky ring he wore. Then the fist pistoned forward and slammed into the side of Jack's face. He was driven backward into the graffiti-covered wall, the side of his face first flaring and then going numb. The taste of his own blood washed into his mouth.
Smokey looked at him--the close, judgmental stare of a man who might be thinking about buying a heifer or a lottery number. He must not have seen the expression he wanted to see in Jack's eye, because he grabbed the dazed boy again, presumably the better to center him for a second shot.
At that moment a woman shrieked, from the Tap, "No, Glen! No!" There was a tangle of bellowing male voices, most of them alarmed. Another woman screamed--a high, drilling sound. Then a gunshot.
"Shit on toast!" Smokey cried, enunciating each word as carefully as an actor on a Broadway stage. He threw Jack back against the wall, whirled, and slammed out through the swinging door. The gun went off again and there was a scream of pain.
Jack was sure of only one thing--the time had come to get out. Not at the end of tonight's shift, or tomorrow's, or on Sunday morning. Right now.
The uproar seemed to be quieting down. There were no sirens, so maybe nobody had gotten shot . . . but, Jack remembered, cold, the millhand who looked like Randolph Scott was still down in the men's can.
Jack went into the chilly, beer-smelling storeroom, knelt by the kegs, and felt around for his pack. Again there was that suffocating certainty, as his fingers encountered nothing but thin air and the dirty concrete floor, that one of them--Smokey or Lori--had seen him hide the pack and had taken it. All the better to keep you in Oatley, my dear. Then relief, almost as suffocating as the fear, when his fingers touched the nylon. Jack donned the pack and looked longingly toward the loading door at the back of the storeroom. He would much rather use that door--he didn't want to go down to the fire-door at the end of the hall. That was too close to the men's bathroom. But if he opened the loading door, a red light would go on at the bar. Even if Smokey was still sorting out the ruckus on the floor, Lori would see that light and tell him.
So . . .
He went to the door which gave on the back corridor. He eased it open a crack and applied one eye. The corridor was empty. All right, that was cool. Randolph Scott had tapped a kidney and gone back to where the action was while Jack was getting his backpack. Great.
Yeah, except maybe he's still in there. You want to meet him in the hall, Jacky? Want to watch his eyes turn yellow again? Wait until you're sure.
But he couldn't do that. Because Smokey would see he wasn't out in the Tap, helping Lori and Gloria swab tables, or behind the bar, unloading the dishwasher. He would come back here to finish teaching Jack what his place was in the great scheme of things. So--
So what? Get going!
Maybe he's in there waiting for you, Jacky . . . maybe he's going to jump out just like a big bad Jack-in-the-Box . . .
The lady or the tiger? Smokey or the millhand? Jack hesitated a moment longer in an agony of indecision. That the man with the yellow eyes was still in the bathroom was a possibility; that Smokey would be back was a certainty.
Jack opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. The pack on his back seemed to gain weight--an eloquent accusation of his planned escape to anyone who might see it. He started down the hallway, moving grotesquely on tiptoe in spite of the thundering music and the roar of the crowd, his heart hammering in his chest.
I was six, Jacky was six.
So what? Why did that keep coming back?
Six.
The corridor seemed longer. It was like walking on a treadmill. The fire-door at the far end seemed to draw closer only by agonizing degrees. Sweat now coated his brow and his upper lip. His gaze flicked steadily toward the door to the right, with the black outline of a dog on it. Beneath this outline was the word POINTERS. And at the end of the corridor, a door of fading, peeling red. The sign on the door said EMERGENCY USE ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND! In fact, the alarm bell had been broken for two years. Lori had told him so when Jack had hesitated about using the door to take out the trash.
Finally almost there. Directly opposite POINTERS.
He's in there, I know he is . . . and if he jumps out I'll scream . . . I . . . I'll . . .
Jack put out a trembling right hand and touched the crash-bar of the emergency door. It felt blessedly cool to his touch. For one moment he really believed he would simply fly out of the pitcher plant and into the night . . . free.
Then the door behind him suddenly banged open, the door to SETTERS, and a hand grabbed his backpack. Jack uttered a high-pitched, despairing shriek of a trapped animal and lunged at the emergency door, heedless of the pack and the magic juice inside it. If the straps had broken he would have simply gone fleeing through the trashy, weedy vacant lot behind the Tap, and never mind anything else.
But the straps were tough nylon and didn't break. The door opened a little way, revealing a brief dark wedge of the night, and then thumped shut again. Jack was pulled into the women's room. He was whirled around and then thrown backward. If he had hit the wall dead on, the bottle of magic juice would undoubtedly have shattered in the pack, drenching his few clothes and good old Rand McNally with the odor of rotting grapes. Instead, he hit the room's one wash-basin with the small of his back. The pain was giant, excruciating.
The millhand was walking toward him slowly, hitching up his jeans with hands that had begun to twist and thicken.
"You were supposed to be gone, kid," he said, his voice roughening, becoming at every moment more like the snarl of an animal.
Jack began to edge to his left, his eyes never leaving the man's face. His eyes now seemed almost transparent, not just yellow but lighted from within . . . the eyes of a hideous Halloween jack-o'-lantern.
"But you can trust old Elroy," the cowboy-thing said, and now it grinned to reveal a mouthful of curving teeth, some of them jaggedly broken off, some black with rot. Jac
k screamed. "Oh, you can trust Elroy," it said, its words now hardly discernible from a doglike growl. "He ain't gonna hurt you too bad.
"You'll be all right," it growled, moving toward Jack, "you'll be all right, oh yeah, you'll . . ." It continued to talk, but Jack could no longer tell what it was saying. Now it was only snarling.
Jack's foot hit the tall wastecan by the door. As the cowboy thing reached for him with its hooflike hands, Jack grabbed the can and threw it. The can bounced off the Elroy-thing's chest. Jack tore open the bathroom door and lunged to the left, toward the emergency door. He slammed into the crash-bar, aware that Elroy was right behind him. He lurched into the dark behind the Oatley Tap.
There was a colony of overloaded garbage cans to the right of the door. Jack blindly swept three of them behind him, heard them clash and rattle--and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.
He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was even a moment to realize--Oh dear Jesus a tail it's got something like a tail--that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.
Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back, trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion--
--Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God please--
--of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out what it was saying. "Now I'm not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I'm gonna kill you . . . after."
Hearing it with his ears? Or in his head?
It didn't matter. The space between this world and that had shrunk from a universe to a mere membrane.
The Elroy-thing snarled and came toward him, now unsteady and awkward on its rear feet, its clothes bulging in all the wrong places, its tongue swinging from its fanged mouth. Here was the vacant lot behind Smokey Updike's Oatley Tap, yes, here it was at last, choked with weeds and blown trash--a rusty bedspring here, the grille of a 1957 Ford over there, and a ghastly sickle moon like a bent bone in the sky overhead, turning every shard of broken glass into a dead and staring eye, and this hadn't begun in New Hampshire, had it? No. It hadn't begun when his mother got sick, or with the appearance of Lester Parker. It had begun when--