"Hold on!" he screamed. "Hold on, Richard, here we go!"
He had time to think: Now the shoe is on the other foot; now it's Richard who is the herd, who is my passenger. God help us both.
"Jack, what's happening?" Richard shrieked. "What are you doing? Stop it! STOP IT! STOP--"
Richard was still shrieking, but Jack no longer heard him--suddenly, triumphantly, that feeling of creeping doom cracked open like a black egg and his brain filled up with light--light and a sweet purity of air; air so pure that you could smell the radish a man pulled out of his garden half a mile away. Suddenly Jack felt as if he could simply push off and jump all the way across the quad . . . or fly, like those men with the wings strapped to their backs.
Oh, there was light and clear air replacing that foul, garbagey stench and a sensation of crossing voids of darkness, and for a moment everything in him seemed clear and full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
So Jack Sawyer flipped into the Territories again, this time while running headlong across the degenerating Thayer campus, with the sound of cracked bells and snarling dogs filling the air.
And this time he dragged Morgan Sloat's son Richard with him.
Interlude
Sloat in This World/Orris in the Territories (III)
Shortly after seven a.m. on the morning following Jack and Richard's flip out from Thayer, Morgan Sloat drew up to the curb just outside the main gates of Thayer School. He parked. The space was marked with a HANDICAPPED ONLY sign. Sloat glanced at it indifferently, then reached into his pocket, drew out a vial of cocaine, and used some of it. In a few moments the world seemed to gain color and vitality. It was wonderful stuff. He wondered if it would grow in the Territories, and if it would be more potent over there.
Gardener himself had awakened Sloat in his Beverly Hills home at two in the morning to tell him what had happened--it had been midnight in Springfield. Gardener's voice had been trembling. He was obviously terrified that Morgan would fly into a rage, and furious that he had missed Jack Sawyer by less than an hour.
"That boy . . . that bad, bad boy . . ."
Sloat had not flown into a rage. Indeed, he had felt extraordinary calm. He felt a sense of predestination which he suspected came from that other part of him--what he thought of as "his Orris-ness" in a half-understood pun on royalty.
"Be calm," Sloat had soothed. "I'll be there as soon as I can. Hang in there, baby."
He had broken the connection before Gardener could say any more, and lain back on the bed. He had crossed his hands on his stomach and closed his eyes. There was a moment of weightlessness . . . just a moment . . . and then he felt a sensation of movement beneath him. He heard the creak of leather traces, the groan and thump of rough iron springs, the curses of his driver.
He had opened his eyes as Morgan of Orris.
As always, his first reaction was pure delight: this made coke seem like baby aspirin. His chest was narrower, his weight less. Morgan Sloat's heartbeat ran anywhere from eighty-five beats a minute to a hundred and twenty when he was pissed off; Orris's rarely went higher than sixty-five or so. Morgan Sloat's eyesight was tested at 20/20, but Morgan of Orris nonetheless saw better. He could see and trace the course of every minute crack in the sidewall of the diligence, could marvel over the fineness of the mesh curtains which blew through the windows. Cocaine had clogged Sloat's nose, dulling his sense of smell; Orris's nose was totally clear and he could smell dust and earth and air with perfect fidelity--it was as if he could sense and appreciate every molecule.
Behind him he had left an empty double bed still marked with the shape of his large body. Here he was sitting on a bench seat plusher than the seat in any Rolls-Royce ever made, riding west toward the end of the Outposts, toward a place which was called Outpost Depot. Toward a man named Anders. He knew these things, knew exactly where he was, because Orris was still here, inside his head--speaking to him the way the right side of the brain may speak to the rational left during daydreams, in a low but perfectly clear voice. Sloat had spoken to Orris in this same low undervoice on the few occasions when Orris had Migrated to what Jack had come to think of as the American Territories. When one Migrated and entered the body of one's Twinner, the result was a kind of benign possession. Sloat had read of more violent cases of possession, and although the subject did not greatly interest him, he guessed that the poor, unlucky slobs so afflicted had been taken over by mad hitchhikers from other worlds--or perhaps it was the American world itself which had driven them mad. That seemed more than possible; it had certainly done a number on poor old Orris's head the first two or three times he had popped over, although he had been wildly excited as well as terrified.
The diligence took a mighty bounce--in the Outposts, you took the roads as you found them and thanked God they were there at all. Orris shifted in his seat and his clubfoot muttered dull pain.
"Hold on steady, God pound you," the driver muttered up above. His whip whistled and popped. "Roll, you sons of dead whores! Roll on!"
Sloat grinned with the pleasure of being here, even though it would only be for moments. He already knew what he needed to know; Orris's voice had muttered it to him. The diligence would arrive at Outpost Depot--Thayer School in the other world--well before morning. It might be possible to take them there if they had lingered; if not, the Blasted Lands awaited them. It hurt and enraged him to think that Richard was now with the Sawyer brat, but if a sacrifice was demanded . . . well, Orris had lost his son and survived.
The only thing that had kept Jack alive this long was the maddening fact of his single nature--when the whelp flipped to a place, he was always in the analogue of the place he had left. Sloat, however, always ended up where Orris was, which might be miles away from where he needed to be . . . as was the case now. He had been lucky at the rest area, but Sawyer had been luckier.
"Your luck will run out soon enough, my little friend," Orris said. The diligence took another terrific bounce. He grimaced, then grinned. If nothing else, the situation was simplifying itself even as the final confrontation took on wider and deeper implications.
Enough.
He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. For just a moment he felt another dull thud of pain in the deformed foot . . . and when he opened his eyes, Sloat was looking up at the ceiling of his apartment. As always, there was a moment when the extra pounds fell into him with sickening weight, when his heart reacted with a surprised double-beat and then sped up.
He had gotten to his feet then and had called West Coast Business Jet. Seventy minutes later he had been leaving LAX. The Lear's steep and abrupt takeoff stance made him feel as it always did--it was as if a blowtorch had been strapped to his ass. They had touched down in Springfield at five-fifty central time, just as Orris would be approaching Outpost Depot in the Territories. Sloat had rented a Hertz sedan and here he was. American travel did have its advantages.
He got out of the car and, just as the morning bells began to ring, he walked onto the Thayer campus his own son had so lately quitted.
Everything was the essence of an early Thayer weekday morning. The chapel bells were playing a normal morning tune, something classical but not quite recognizable which sounded a bit like "Te Deum" but wasn't. Students passed Sloat on their way to the dining hall or to morning workouts. They were perhaps a little more silent than usual, and they shared a look--pale and slightly dazed, as if they had all shared a disquieting dream.
Which, of course, they had, Sloat thought. He stopped for a moment in front of Nelson House, looking at it thoughtfully. They simply didn't know how fundamentally unreal they all were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be. He walked around to the side and watched a maintenance man picking up broken glass that lay on the ground like trumpery diamonds. Beyond his bent back Sloat could see into the Nelson House lounge, where an unusually quiet Albert the Blob was sitting and looking blankly at a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
S
loat started across toward The Depot, his thoughts turning to the first time that Orris had flipped over into this world. He found himself thinking of that time with a nostalgia that was, when one really stopped to think about it, damned near grotesque--after all, he had nearly died. Both of them had nearly died. But it had been in the middle fifties, and now he was in his middle fifties--it made all the difference in the world.
He had been coming back from the office and the sun had been going down in a Los Angeles haze of smudged purples and smokey yellows--this had been in the days before the L.A. smog had really begun to thicken up. He had been on Sunset Boulevard and looking at a billboard advertising a new Peggy Lee record when he had felt a coldness in his mind. It had been as if a wellspring had suddenly opened somewhere in his subconscious, spilling out some alien weirdness that was like . . . like . . .
(like semen)
. . . well, he didn't know exactly what it had been like. Except that it had quickly become warm, gained cognizance, and he had just had time to realize it was he, Orris, and then everything had turned topsy-turvy like a secret door on its gimbal--a bookcase on one side, a Chippendale dresser on the other, both fitting the ambience of the room perfectly--and it had been Orris sitting behind the wheel of a 1952 bullet-nosed Ford, Orris wearing the brown double-breasted suit and the John Penske tie, Orris who was reaching down toward his crotch, not in pain but in slightly disgusted curiosity--Orris who had, of course, never worn undershorts.
There had been a moment, he remembered, when the Ford had nearly driven up onto the sidewalk, and then Morgan Sloat--now very much the undermind--had taken over that part of the operation and Orris had been free to go along his way, goggling at everything, nearly half-mad with delight. And what remained of Morgan Sloat had also been delighted; he had been delighted the way a man is delighted when he shows a friend around his new home for the first time and finds that his friend likes it as much as he likes it himself.
Orris had cruised into a Fat Boy Drive-in, and after some fumbling with Morgan's unfamiliar paper money, he had ordered a hamburger and french fries and a chocolate thickshake, the words coming easily out of his mouth--welling up from that undermind as water wells up from a spring. Orris's first bite of the hamburger had been tentative . . . and then he had gobbled the rest with the speed of Wolf gobbling his first Whopper. He had crammed the fries into his mouth with one hand while dialling the radio with the other, picking up an enticing babble of bop and Perry Como and some big band and early rhythm and blues. He had sucked down the shake and then had ordered more of everything.
Halfway through the second burger he--Sloat as well as Orris--began to feel sick. Suddenly the fried onions had seemed too strong, too cloying; suddenly the smell of car exhaust was everywhere. His arms had suddenly begun to itch madly. He pulled off the coat of the double-breasted suit (the second thickshake, this one mocha, fell unheeded to one side, dribbling ice cream across the Ford's seat) and looked at his arms. Ugly red blotches with red centers were growing there, and spreading. His stomach lurched, he leaned out the window, and even as he puked into the tray that was fixed there, he had felt Orris fleeing from him, going back into his own world. . . .
"Can I help you, sir?"
"Hmmmm?" Startled out of his reverie, Sloat looked around. A tall blond boy, obviously an upperclassman, was standing there. He was dressed prep--an impeccable blue flannel blazer worn over an open-collared shirt and a pair of faded Levi's.
He brushed hair out of his eyes which had that same dazed, dreaming look. "I'm Etheridge, sir. I just wondered if I could help you. You looked . . . lost."
Sloat smiled. He thought of saying--but did not--No, that's how you look, my friend. Everything was all right. The Sawyer brat was still on the loose, but Sloat knew where he was going and that meant that Jacky was on a chain. It was invisible, but it was still a chain.
"Lost in the past, that's all," he said. "Old times. I'm not a stranger here, Mr. Etheridge, if that's what you're worried about. My son's a student. Richard Sloat."
Etheridge's eyes grew even dreamier for a moment--puzzled, lost. Then they cleared. "Sure. Richard!" he exclaimed.
"I'll be going up to see the headmaster in a bit. I just wanted to have a poke around first."
"Well, I guess that's fine." Etheridge looked at his watch. "I have table-duty this morning, so if you're sure you're okay . . ."
"I'm sure."
Etheridge gave him a nod, a rather vague smile, and started off.
Sloat watched him go, and then he surveyed the ground between Nelson House and here. Noted the broken window again. A straight shot. It was fair--more than fair--to assume that, somewhere between Nelson House and this octagonal brick building, the two boys had Migrated into the Territories. If he liked, he could follow them. Just step inside--there was no lock on the door--and disappear. Reappear wherever Orris's body happened to be at this moment. It would be somewhere close; perhaps even, in fact, in front of the depot-keeper himself. No nonsense about Migrating to a spot which might be a hundred miles away from the point of interest in Territories geography and no way to cover the intervening distance but by wagon or, worse, what his father had called shanks' mare.
The boys would already have gone on, in all likelihood. Into the Blasted Lands. If so, the Blasted Lands would finish them. And Sunlight Gardener's Twinner, Osmond, would be more than capable of squeezing out all the information that Anders knew. Osmond and his horrid son. No need to Migrate at all.
Except maybe for a look-see. For the pleasure and refreshment of becoming Orris again, if only for a few seconds.
And to Make Sure, of course. His entire life, from childhood onward, had been an exercise in Making Sure.
He looked around once to assure himself that Etheridge had not lingered; then he opened the door of The Depot and went inside.
The smell was stale, dark, and incredibly nostalgic--the smell of old makeup and canvas flats. For a moment he had the crazy idea that he had done something even more incredible than Migrating; he felt that he might have travelled back through time to those undergraduate days when he and Phil Sawyer had been theater-mad college students.
Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw the unfamiliar, almost mawkish props--a plaster bust of Pallas for a production of The Raven, an extravagantly gilt birdcage, a bookcase full of false bindings--and remembered that he was in the Thayer School excuse for a "little theater."
He paused for a moment, breathing deeply of the dust; he turned his eyes up to one dusty sunray falling through a small window. The light wavered and was suddenly a deeper gold, the color of lamplight. He was in the Territories. Just like that, he was in the Territories. There was a moment of almost staggering exhilaration at the speed of the change. Usually there was a pause, a sense of sideslipping from one place to another. This caesura seemed to be in direct proportion to the distance between the physical bodies of his two selves, Sloat and Orris. Once, when he had Migrated from Japan, where he was negotiating a deal with the Shaw brothers for a terrible novel about Hollywood stars menaced by a crazed ninja, the pause had gone on so long that he had feared he might be lost forever somewhere in the empty, senseless purgatory that exists between the worlds. But this time they had been close . . . so close! It was like those few times, he thought
(Orris thought)
when a man and woman achieve orgasm at the exact same instant and die in sex together.
The smell of dried paint and canvas was replaced with the light, pleasant smell of Territories burning-oil. The lamp on the table was guttering low, sending out dark membranes of smoke. To his left a table was set, the remains of a meal congealing on the rough plates. Three plates.
Orris stepped forward, dragging his clubfoot a little as always. He tipped one of the plates up, let the guttering lamplight skate queasily across the grease. Who ate from this one? Was it Anders, or Jason, or Richard . . . the boy who would also have been Rushton if my son had lived?
Rushton had
drowned while swimming in a pond not far from the Great House. There had been a picnic. Orris and his wife had drunk a quantity of wine. The sun had been hot. The boy, little more than an infant, had been napping. Orris and his wife had made love and then they had also fallen asleep in the sweet afternoon sunshine. He had been awakened by the child's cries. Rushton had awakened and gone down to the water. He had been able to dog-paddle a little, just enough to get well out beyond his depth before panicking. Orris had limped to the water, dived in, and swum as fast as he could out to where the boy floundered. It was his foot, his damned foot, that had hampered him and perhaps cost his son his life. When he reached the boy, he had been sinking. Orris had managed to catch him by the hair and pull him to shore . . . but by then Rushton had been blue and dead.
Margaret had died by her own hand less than six weeks later.
Seven months after that, Morgan Sloat's own young son had nearly drowned in a Westwood YMCA pool during a Young Paddlers class. He had been pulled from the pool as blue and dead as Rushton . . . but the lifeguard had applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Richard Sloat had responded.
God pounds His nails, Orris thought, and then a deep, blurry snore snapped his head around.
Anders, the depot-keeper, lay on a pallet in the corner with his kilt rudely pulled up to his breeks. An earthen jug of wine lay overturned nearby. Much of the wine had flowed into his hair.
He snored again, then moaned, as if with bad dreams.
No dream you might have could be as bad as your future now is, Orris thought grimly. He took a step closer, his cloak flapping around him. He looked down on Anders with no pity.
Sloat was able to plan murder, but it had been Orris, time and time again, who had Migrated to carry out the act itself. It had been Orris in Sloat's body who had attempted to smother the infant Jack Sawyer with a pillow while a wrestling announcer droned on and on in the background. Orris who had overseen the assassination of Phil Sawyer in Utah (just as he had overseen the assassination of Phil Sawyer's counterpart, the commoner Prince Philip Sawtelle, in the Territories).