Reddish little flares winked on and off in the murky sky.
Below the two-block-square area of burned houses and feeding trees, a dead stoplight hung over an empty intersection. Across the intersection, the side of a charred building still showed letters reading UH OH! BETTER GET MAA over a pocked, blistered picture of the front end of a car protruding through a plate-glass window. The fire had gone no farther, but Jack wished that it had. Point Venuti was a blighted town; and fire was better than rot. The building with the half-destroyed advertisement for Maaco paint stood first in a row of shops. The Dangerous Planet Bookstore, Tea & Sympathy, Ferdy's Wholefood Healthstore, Neon Village: Jack could read only a few of the names of the shops, for above most of them the paint had long ago flaked and curdled off the facades. These shops appeared to be closed, as abandoned as the factories and warehouses up the hill. Even from where he stood, Jack could see that the plate-glass windows had been broken so long ago they were like empty eyeglass frames, blank idiot eyes. Smears of paint decorated the fronts of the shops, red and black and yellow, oddly bright and scarlike in the dull gray air. A naked woman, so starved Jack could have counted her ribs, twisted slowly and ceremoniously as a weathervane in the littered street before the shops. Above her pale body with its drooping breasts and mop of pubic hair, her face had been painted blazing orange. Orange, too, was her hair. Jack stopped moving and watched the insane woman with the painted face and dyed hair raise her arms, twist her upper body as deliberately as one doing a Tai Chi movement, kick her left foot out over the flyblown corpse of a dog, and freeze into position like a statue. An emblem of all Point Venuti, the madwoman held her posture. Slowly the foot came down, and the skinny body revolved.
Past the woman, past the row of empty shops, Main Street turned residential--at least Jack supposed that it had once been residential. Here, too, bright scars of paint defaced the buildings, tiny two-story houses once bright white, now covered with the slashes of paint and graffiti. One slogan jumped out at him: YOU'RE DEAD NOW, scrawled up the side of an isolated peeling building that had surely once been a boarding house. The words had been there a long time.
JASON, I NEED YOU, the Talisman boomed out at him in a language both above and beneath speech.
"I can't," Richard whispered beside him. "Jack, I know I can't."
After the row of peeling, hopeless-looking houses, the road dipped again, and Jack could see only the backs of a pair of black Cadillac limousines, one on either side of Main Street, parked with their noses pointed downhill, motors running. Like a trick photograph, looking impossibly large, impossibly sinister, the top--half? third?--of the black hotel reared up over the back ends of the Cadillacs and the despairing little houses. It seemed to float, cut off by the curve of the final hill. "I can't go in there," Richard repeated.
"I'm not even sure we can get past those trees," Jack said. "Hold your water, Richie."
Richard uttered an odd, snuffling noise which it took Jack a second to recognize as the sound of crying. He put his arm over Richard's shoulder. The hotel owned the landscape--that much was obvious. The black hotel owned Point Venuti, the air above it, the ground beneath. Looking at it, Jack saw the weathervanes spin in contradictory directions, the turrets and gambrels rise like warts into the gray air. The Agincourt did look as if it were made of stone--thousand-year-old stone, black as tar. In one of the upper windows, a light suddenly flashed--to Jack, it was as if the hotel had winked at him, secretly amused to find him at last so near. A dim figure seemed to glide away from the window: a second later the reflection of a cloud swam across the glass.
From somewhere inside, the Talisman trilled out its song only Jack could hear.
3
"I think it grew," Richard breathed. He had forgotten to scratch since he had seen the hotel floating past the final hill. Tears ran over and through the raised red bumps on his cheeks, and Jack saw that his eyes were now completely encased by the raised rash--Richard didn't have to squint to squint anymore. "It's impossible, but the hotel used to be smaller, Jack. I'm sure of it."
"Right now, nothing's impossible," Jack said, almost unnecessarily--they had long ago passed into the realm of the impossible. And the Agincourt was so large, so dominating, that it was wildly out of scale with the rest of the town.
The architectural extravagance of the black hotel, all the turrets and brass weathervanes attached to fluted towers, the cupolas and gambrels which should have made it a playful fantasy, instead made it menacing, nightmarish. It looked as though it belonged in some kind of anti-Disneyland where Donald Duck had strangled Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Mickey shot Minnie Mouse full of heroin.
"I'm afraid," Richard said; and JASON COME NOW, sang out the Talisman.
"Just stick close to me, pal, and we'll go through that place like grease through a goose."
JASON COME NOW!
The clump of Territories trees just ahead rustled as Jack stepped forward.
Richard, frightened, hung back--it might have been, Jack realized, that Richard was nearly blind by now, deprived of his glasses and with his eyes gradually being squeezed shut. He reached behind him and pulled Richard forward, feeling as he did so how thin Richard's hand and wrist had become.
Richard came stumbling along. His skinny wrist burned in Jack's hand. "Whatever you do, don't slow down," Jack said. "All we have to do is get by them."
"I can't," Richard sobbed.
"Do you want me to carry you? I'm being serious, Richard. I mean, this could be a lot worse. I bet if we hadn't blown so many of his troops away back there, he'd have guards every fifty feet."
"You couldn't move fast enough if you carried me. I'd slow you down."
What in the Sam Hill do you think you're doing now? went through Jack's mind, but he said, "Stay on my far side and go like hell, Richie. When I say three. Got it? One . . . two . . . three!"
He jerked Richard's arm and began sprinting past the trees. Richard stumbled, gasped, then managed to right himself and keep on moving without falling down. Geysers of dust appeared at the base of the trees, a commotion of shredding earth and scrambling things that looked like enormous beetles, shiny as shoe polish. A small brown bird took off out of the weeds near the clump of conspiring trees, and a limber root like an elephant's trunk whipped out of the dust and snatched it from the air.
Another root snaked toward Jack's left ankle, but fell short. The mouths in the coarse bark howled and screamed.
(LOVERRR? LOVER BOYYY?)
Jack clenched his teeth together and tried to force Richard Sloat to fly. The heads of the complicated trees had begun to sway and bow. Whole nests and families of roots were slithering toward the white line, moving as though they had independent wills. Richard faltered, then unambiguously slowed as he turned his head to look past Jack toward the reaching trees.
"Move!" Jack yelled, and yanked at Richard's arm. The red lumps felt like hot stones buried beneath the skin. He hauled away at Richard, seeing too many of the whickering roots crawl gleefully toward them across the white line.
Jack put his arm around Richard's waist at the same instant that a long root whistled through the air and wrapped itself around Richard's arm.
"Jesus!" Richard yelled. "Jason! It got me! It got me!"
In horror Jack saw the tip of the root, a blind worm's head, lift up and stare at him. It twitched almost lazily in the air, then wound itself once again around Richard's burning arm. Other roots came sliding toward them across the road.
Jack yanked Richard back as hard as he could, and gained another six inches. The root around Richard's arm grew taut. Jack locked his arms around Richard's waist and hauled him mercilessly backward. Richard let out an unearthly, floating scream. For a second, Jack was afraid that Richard's shoulder had separated, but a voice large within him said PULL! and he dug in his heels and pulled back even harder.
Then they both nearly went tumbling into a nest of crawling roots, for the single tendril around Richard's arm had neatly snapped. J
ack stayed on his feet only by back-pedalling frantically, bending over at the waist to keep Richard, too, off the road. In this way they got past the last of the trees just as they heard the rending, snapping sounds they had heard once before. This time, Jack did not have to tell Richard to run for it.
The nearest tree came roaring up out of the ground and fell with a ground-shaking thud only three or four feet behind Richard. The others crashed to the surface of the road behind it, waving their roots like wild hair.
"You saved my life," Richard said. He was crying again, more from weakness and exhaustion and shock than from fear.
"From now on, my old pal, you ride piggyback," Jack said, panting, and bent down to help Richard get on his back.
4
"I should have told you," Richard was whispering. His face burned against Jack's neck, his mouth against Jack's ear. "I don't want you to hate me, but I wouldn't blame you if you did, really I wouldn't. I know I should have told you." He seemed to weigh no more than the husk of himself, as if nothing were left inside him.
"About what?" Jack settled Richard squarely in the center of his back, and again had the unsettling feeling that he was carrying only an empty sack of flesh.
"The man who came to visit my father . . . and Camp Readiness . . . and the closet." Richard's hollow-seeming body trembled against his friend's back. "I should have told you. But I couldn't even tell myself." His breath, hot as his skin, blew agitatedly into Jack's ear.
Jack thought, The Talisman is doing this to him. An instant later he corrected himself. No. The black hotel is doing this to him.
The two limousines which had been parked nose-down at the brow of the next hill had disappeared sometime during the fight with the Territories trees, but the hotel endured, growing larger with every forward step Jack took. The skinny naked woman, another of the hotel's victims, still performed her mad slow dance before the bleak row of shops. The little red flares danced, winked out, danced in the murky air. It was no time at all, neither morning nor afternoon nor night--it was time's Blasted Lands. The Agincourt Hotel did seem made of stone, though Jack knew it was not--the wood seemed to have calcified and thickened, to have blackened of itself, from the inside out. The brass weathervanes, wolf and crow and snake and circular cryptic designs Jack did not recognize, swung about to contradictory winds. Several of the windows flashed a warning at Jack; but that might have been merely a reflection of one of the red flares. He still could not see the bottom of the hill and the Agincourt's ground floor, and would not be able to see them until he had gone past the bookstore, tea shop, and other stores that had escaped the fire. Where was Morgan Sloat?
Where, for that matter, was the whole god-forsaken reception committee? Jack tightened his grip on Richard's sticklike legs, hearing the Talisman call him again, and felt a tougher, stronger being rear up within him.
"Don't hate me because I couldn't . . ." Richard said, his voice trailing off at the end.
JASON, COME NOW COME NOW!
Jack gripped Richard's thin legs and walked down past the burned-over area where so many houses had once stood. The Territories trees which used these wasted blocks as their own private lunch counter whispered and stirred, but they were too far away to trouble Jack.
The woman in the midst of the empty littered street slowly swivelled around as she became aware of the boys' progress down the hill. She was in the midst of a complex exercise, but all suggestion of Tai Chi Chuan left her when she dropped her arms and one outstretched leg and stood stockstill beside a dead dog, watching burdened Jack come down the hill toward her. For a moment she seemed to be a mirage, too hallucinatory to be real, this starved woman with her stick-out hair and face the same brilliant orange; then she awkwardly bolted across the street and into one of the shops without a name. Jack grinned, without knowing he was going to do it--the sense of triumph and of something he could only describe as armored virtue took him so much by surprise.
"Can you really make it there?" Richard gasped, and Jack said, "Right now I can do anything."
He could have carried Richard all the way back to Illinois if the great singing object imprisoned in the hotel had ordered him to do it. Again Jack felt that sense of coming resolution, and thought, It's so dark here because all those worlds are crowded together, jammed up like a triple exposure on film.
5
He sensed the people of Point Venuti before he saw them. They would not attack him--Jack had known that with absolute certainty ever since the madwoman had fled into one of the shops. They were watching him. From beneath porches, through lattices, from the backs of empty rooms, they peered out at him, whether with fear, rage, or frustration he could not tell.
Richard had fallen asleep or passed out on his back, and was breathing in heated harsh little puffs.
Jack skirted the body of the dog and glanced sideways into the hole where the window of the Dangerous Planet Bookstore should have been. At first he saw only the messy macaroni of used hypodermic needles which covered the floor, atop and beside the splayed books spread here and there. On the walls, the tall shelves stood empty as yawns. Then a convulsive movement in the dim back of the store caught his eye, and two pale figures coalesced out of the gloom. Both had beards and long naked bodies in which the tendons stood out like cords. The whites of four mad eyes flashed at him. One of the naked men had only one hand and was grinning. His erection waved before him, a thick pale club. He couldn't have seen that, he told himself. Where was the man's other hand? He glanced back. Now he saw only a tangle of skinny white limbs.
Jack did not look into the windows of any of the other shops, but eyes tracked him as he passed.
Soon he was walking past the tiny two-story houses. YOU'RE DEAD NOW splayed itself on a side wall. He would not look in the windows, he promised himself, he could not.
Orange faces topped with orange hair wagged through a downstairs window.
"Baby," a woman whispered from the next house. "Sweet baby Jason." This time he did look. You're dead now. She stood just on the other side of a broken little window, twiddling the chains that had been inserted in her nipples, smiling at him lopsidedly. Jack stared at her vacant eyes, and the woman dropped her hands and hesitantly backed away from the window. The length of chain drooped between her breasts.
Eyes watched Jack from the backs of dark rooms, between lattices, from crawl spaces beneath porches.
The hotel loomed before him, but no longer straight ahead. The road must have delicately angled, for now the Agincourt stood decidedly off to his left. And did it, in fact, actually loom as commandingly as it had? His Jason-side, or Jason himself, blazed up within Jack, and saw that the black hotel, though still very large, was nothing like mountainous.
COME I NEED YOU NOW, sang out the Talisman. YOU ARE RIGHT IT IS NOT AS GREAT AS IT WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE.
At the top of the last hill he stopped and looked down. There they were, all right, all of them. And there was the black hotel, all of it. Main Street descended to the beach, which was white sand interrupted by big outcroppings of rocks like jagged discolored teeth. The Agincourt reared up a short distance off to his left, flanked on the ocean side by a massive stone breakwater running far out into the water. Before it, stretching out in a line, a dozen long black limousines, some dusty, others as polished as mirrors, sat, their motors running. Streamers of white exhaust, low-flying clouds whiter than the air, drifted out from many of the cars. Men in FBI-agent black suits patrolled along the fence, holding their hands up to their eyes. When Jack saw two red flashes of light stab out before one of the men's faces, he reflexively dodged sideways around the side of the little houses, moving before he was actually conscious that the men carried binoculars.
For a second or two, he must have looked like a beacon, standing upright at the brow of a hill. Knowing that a momentary carelessness had nearly led to his capture, Jack breathed hard for a moment and rested his shoulder against the peeling gray shingles of the house. Jack hitched Richard up to a more
comfortable position on his back.
Anyhow, now he knew that he would somehow have to approach the black hotel from its sea side, which meant getting across the beach unseen.
When he straightened up again, he peeked around the side of the house and looked downhill. Morgan Sloat's reduced army sat in its limousines or, random as ants, milled before the high black fence. For a crazy moment Jack recalled with total precision his first sight of the Queen's summer palace. Then, too, he had stood above a scene crowded with people moving back and forth with apparent randomness. What was it like there, now? On that day--which seemed to have taken place in prehistory, so far must he look back--the crowds before the pavillion, the entire scene, had in spite of all an undeniable aura of peace, of order. That would be gone now, Jack knew. Now Osmond would rule the scene before the great tentlike structure, and those people brave enough to enter the pavillion would scurry in, heads averted. And what of the Queen? Jack wondered. He could not help remembering that shockingly familiar face cradled in the whiteness of bed linen.
And then Jack's heart nearly froze, and the vision of the pavillion and the sick Queen dropped back into a slot in Jack's memory. Sunlight Gardener strolled into Jack's line of vision, a bullhorn in his hand. Wind from the sea blew a thick strand of white hair across his sunglasses. For a second Jack was sure that he could smell his odor of sweet cologne and jungle rot. Jack forgot to breathe for perhaps five seconds, and just stood beside the cracked and peeling shingle wall, staring down as a madman yelled orders to black-suited men, pirouetted, pointed at something hidden from Jack, and made an expressive move of disapproval.
He remembered to breathe.
"Well, we've got an interesting situation here, Richard," Jack said. "We got a hotel that can double its size whenever it wants to, I guess, and down there we also have the world's craziest man."
Richard, who Jack had thought was asleep, surprised him by mumbling something audible only as guffuf.