Black House (56 page)

“I mean, I love you.”

“In your way, you love me. But you know what? Just by coming here, you made me more than I was. There’s this sort of
beam
that comes out of you, and I just locked on to that beam. Jack, you
lived
there, and all I could do was peek at it for a little while. That’s enough, though. I’m satisfied. You and Ward D, you let me travel.”

“What you have inside you lets you travel.”

“Okay, three cheers for a well-examined spell of craziness. Now it’s time. You have to be a coppiceman. I can only come halfway, but you’ll need all your strength.”

“I think your strength is going to surprise you.”

“Take my hands and do it, Jack. Go over. She’s waiting, and I have to give you to her. You know her name, don’t you?”

He opens his mouth, but cannot speak. A force that seems to come from the center of the earth surges into his body, rolling electricity through his bloodstream, tightening his scalp, sealing his trembling fingers to Judy Marshall’s, which also tremble. A feeling of tremendous lightness and mobility gathers within all the hollow spaces of his body; at the same time he has never been so aware of his body’s obduracy, its resistance to flight. When they leave, he thinks, it’ll be like a rocket launch. The floor seems to vibrate beneath his feet.

He manages to look down the length of his arms to Judy Marshall, who leans back with her head parallel to the shaking floor, eyes closed, smiling in a trance of accomplishment. A band of shivery white light surrounds her. Her beautiful knees, her legs shining beneath the hem of the old blue garment, her bare feet planted. That light shivers around him, too.
All of this comes from her,
Jack thinks,
and from—

A rushing sound fills the air, and the Georgia O’Keeffe prints fly off the walls. The low couch dances away from the wall; papers swirl up from the jittering desk. A skinny halogen lamp crashes to the ground. All through the hospital, on every floor, in every room and ward, beds vibrate, television sets go black, instruments rattle in their rattling trays, lights flicker. Toys drop from the gift-shop shelves, and the tall lilies skid across the marble in their vases. On the fifth floor, light bulbs detonate into showers of golden sparks.

The hurricane noise builds, builds, and with a great whooshing sound becomes a wide, white sheet of light, which immediately vanishes into a pinpoint and is gone. Gone, too, is Jack Sawyer; and gone from the closet is Wendell Green.

Sucked
into the Territories, blown out of one world and
sucked
into another, blasted and dragged, man, we’re a hundred levels up from the simple, well-known flip.
Jack is lying down, looking up at a ripped white sheet that flaps like a torn sail. A quarter of a second ago, he saw another white sheet, one made of pure light and not literal, like this one. The soft, fragrant air blesses him. At first, he is conscious only that his right hand is being held, then that an astonishing woman lies beside him. Judy Marshall. No, not Judy Marshall, whom he does love, in his way, but another astonishing woman, who once whispered to Judy through a wall of night and has lately drawn a great deal closer. He had been about to speak her name when—

Into his field of vision moves a lovely face both like and unlike Judy’s. It was turned on the same lathe, baked in the same kiln, chiseled by the same besotted sculptor, but more delicately, with a lighter, more caressing touch. Jack cannot move for wonder. He is barely capable of breathing. This woman whose face is above him now, smiling down with a tender impatience, has never borne a child, never traveled beyond her native Territories, never flown in an airplane, driven a car, switched on a television, scooped ice ready-made from the freezer, or used a microwave: and she is radiant with spirit and inner grace. She is, he sees, lit from within.

Humor, tenderness, compassion, intelligence, strength, glow in her eyes and speak from the curves of her mouth, from the very molding of her face. He knows her name, and her name is perfect for her. It seems to Jack that he has fallen in love with this woman in an instant, that he enlisted in her cause on the spot, and at last he finds he can speak her perfect name:

Sophie.

21

“S
OPHIE.
”

Still holding her hand, he gets to his feet, pulling her up with him. His legs are trembling. His eyes feel hot and too large for their sockets. He is terrified and exalted in equal, perfectly equal, measure. His heart is hammering, but oh the beats are sweet. The second time he tries, he manages to say her name a little louder, but there’s still not much to his voice, and his lips are so numb they might have been rubbed with ice. He sounds like a man just coming back from a hard punch in the gut.

“Yes.”

“Sophie.”

“Yes.”

“Sophie.”

“Yes.”

There’s something weirdly familiar about this, him saying the name over and over and her giving back that simple affirmation. Familiar and funny. And it comes to him: there’s a scene almost identical to this in
The Terror of Deadwood Gulch,
after one of the Lazy 8 Saloon’s patrons has knocked Bill Towns unconscious with a whiskey bottle. Lily, in her role as sweet Nancy O’Neal, tosses a bucket of water in his face, and when he sits up, they—

“This is funny,” Jack says. “It’s a good bit. We should be laughing.”

With the slightest of smiles, Sophie says, “Yes.”

“Laughing our fool heads off.”

“Yes.”

“Our
tarnal
heads off.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not speaking English anymore, am I?”

“No.”

He sees two things in her blue eyes. The first is that she doesn’t know the word
English.
The second is that she knows exactly what he means.

“Sophie.”

“Yes.”

“Sophie-Sophie-Sophie.”

Trying to get the reality of it. Trying to pound it home like a nail.

A smile lights her face and enriches her mouth. Jack thinks of how it would be to kiss that mouth, and his knees feel weak. All at once he is fourteen again, and wondering if he dares give his date a peck good-night after he walks her home.

“Yes-yes-yes,” she says, the smile strengthening. And then: “Have you got it yet? Do you understand that you’re here and how you got here?”

Above and around him, billows of gauzy white cloth flap and sigh like living breath. Half a dozen conflicting drafts gently touch his face and make him aware that he carried a coat of sweat from the other world, and that it stinks. He arms it off his brow and cheeks in quick gestures, not wanting to lose sight of her for longer than a moment at a time.

They are in a tent of some kind. It’s huge—many-chambered—and Jack thinks briefly of the pavilion in which the Queen of the Territories, his mother’s Twinner, lay dying. That place had been rich with many colors, filled with many rooms, redolent of incense and sorrow (for the Queen’s death had seemed inevitable, sure—only a matter of time). This one is ramshackle and ragged. The walls and the ceiling are full of holes, and where the white material remains whole, it’s so thin that Jack can actually see the slope of land outside, and the trees that dress it. Rags flutter from the edges of some of the holes when the wind blows. Directly over his head he can see a shadowy maroon shape. Some sort of cross.

“Jack, do you understand how you—”

“Yes. I flipped.” Although that isn’t the word that comes out of his mouth. The literal meaning of the word that comes out seems to be
horizon road.
“And it seems that I sucked a fair number of Spiegleman’s accessories with me.” He bends and picks up a flat stone with a flower carved on it. “I believe that in my world, this was a Georgia O’Keeffe print. And that—” He points to a blackened, fireless torch leaning against one of the pavilion’s fragile walls. “I think that was a—” But there are no words for it in this world, and what comes out of his mouth sounds as ugly as a curse in German: “—halogen lamp.”

She frowns. “Hal-do-jen . . . limp? Lemp?”

He feels his numb lips rise in a little grin. “Never mind.”

“But you are all right.”

He understands that she needs him to be all right, and so he’ll say that he is, but he’s not. He is sick and glad to be sick. He is one lovestruck daddy, and wouldn’t have it any other way. If you discount how he felt about his mother—a very different kind of love, despite what the Freudians might think—it’s the first time for him. Oh, he certainly
thought
he had been in and out of love, but that was before today. Before the cool blue of her eyes, her smile, and even the way the shadows thrown by the decaying tent fleet across her face like schools of fish. At this moment he would try to fly off a mountain for her if she asked, or walk through a forest fire, or bring her polar ice to cool her tea, and those things do
not
constitute being all right.

But she needs him to be.

Tyler
needs him to be.

I am a coppiceman,
he thinks. At first the concept seems insubstantial compared to her beauty—to her simple
reality—
but then it begins to take hold. As it always has. What else brought him here, after all? Brought him against his will and all his best intentions?

“Jack?”

“Yes, I’m all right. I’ve flipped before.”
But never into the presence of such beauty,
he thinks.
That’s the problem.
You’re
the problem, my lady.

“Yes. To come and go is your talent.
One
of your talents. So I have been told.”

“By whom?”

“Shortly,” she says. “Shortly. There’s a great deal to do, and yet I think I need a moment. You . . . rather take my breath away.”

Jack is fiercely glad to know it. He sees he is still holding her hand, and he kisses it, as Judy kissed his hands in the world on the other side of the wall from this one, and when he does, he sees the fine mesh of bandage on the tips of three of her fingers. He wishes he dared to take her in his arms, but she daunts him: her beauty and her presence. She is slightly taller than Judy—a matter of two inches, surely no more—and her hair is lighter, the golden shade of unrefined honey spilling from a broken comb. She is wearing a simple cotton robe, white trimmed with a blue that matches her eyes. The narrow V-neck frames her throat. The hem falls to just below her knees. Her legs are bare but she’s wearing a silver anklet on one of them, so slim it’s almost invisible. She is fuller-breasted than Judy, her hips a bit wider.
Sisters,
you might think, except that they have the same spray of freckles across the nose and the same white line of scar across the back of the left hand. Different mishaps caused that scar, Jack has no doubt, but he also has no doubt that those mishaps occurred at the same hour of the same day.

“You’re her Twinner. Judy Marshall’s Twinner.” Only the word that comes out of his mouth isn’t
Twinner;
incredibly, dopily, it seems to be
harp.
Later he will think of how the strings of a harp lie close together, only a finger’s touch apart, and he will decide that word isn’t so foolish after all.

She looks down, her mouth drooping, then raises her head again and tries to smile. “
Judy.
On the other side of the wall. When we were children, Jack, we spoke together often. Even when we grew up, although then we spoke in each other’s dreams.” He is alarmed to see tears forming in her eyes and then slipping down her cheeks. “Have I driven her mad? Run her to lunacy? Please say I haven’t.”

“Nah,” Jack says. “She’s on a tightrope, but she hasn’t fallen off yet. She’s tough, that one.”

“You have to bring her Tyler back to her,” Sophie tells him. “For both of us. I’ve never had a child. I
cannot
have a child. I was . . . mistreated, you see. When I was young. Mistreated by one you knew well.”

A terrible certainty forms in Jack’s mind. Around them, the ruined pavilion flaps and sighs in the wonderfully fragrant breeze.

“Was it Morgan? Morgan of Orris?”

She bows her head, and perhaps this is just as well. Jack’s face is, at that moment, pulled into an ugly snarl. In that moment he wishes he could kill Morgan Sloat’s Twinner all over again. He thinks to ask her how she was mistreated, and then realizes he doesn’t have to.

“How old were you?”

“Twelve,” she says . . . as Jack has known she would say. It happened that same year, the year when Jacky was twelve and came here to save his mother. Or
did
he come here? Is this really the Territories? Somehow it doesn’t feel the same. Almost . . . but not quite.

It doesn’t surprise him that Morgan would rape a child of twelve, and do it in a way that would keep her from ever having children. Not at all. Morgan Sloat, sometimes known as Morgan of Orris, wanted to rule not just one world or two, but the entire universe. What are a few raped children to a man with such ambitions?

She gently slips her thumbs across the skin beneath his eyes. It’s like being brushed with feathers. She’s looking at him with something like wonder. “Why do you weep, Jack?”

“The past,” he says. “Isn’t that always what does it?” And thinks of his mother, sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette, and listening while the radio plays “Crazy Arms.” Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the hurt is, all you can’t get over.

“Perhaps so,” she allows. “But there’s no time to think about the past today. It’s the future we must think about today.”

“Yes, but if I could ask just a few questions . . . ?”

“All right, but only a few.”

Jack opens his mouth, tries to speak, and makes a comical little gaping expression when nothing comes out. Then he laughs. “You take my breath away, too,” he tells her. “I have to be honest about that.”

A faint tinge of color rises in Sophie’s cheeks, and she looks down. She opens her lips to say something . . . then presses them together again. Jack wishes she had spoken and is glad she hasn’t, both at the same time. He squeezes her hands gently, and she looks up at him, blue eyes wide.

“Did I know you? When you were twelve?”

She shakes her head.

“But I saw you.”

“Perhaps. In the great pavilion. My mother was one of the Good Queen’s handmaidens. I was another . . . the youngest. You could have seen me then. I think you
did
see me.”

Jack takes a moment to digest the wonder of this, then goes on. Time is short. They both know this. He can almost feel it fleeting.

“You and Judy are Twinners, but neither of you travel—she’s never been in your head over here and you’ve never been in
her
head, over there. You . . . talk through a wall.”

“Yes.”

“When she wrote things, that was you, whispering through the wall.”

“Yes. I knew how hard I was pushing her, but I had to.
Had
to! It’s not just a question of restoring her child to her, important as that may be. There are larger considerations.”

“Such as?”

She shakes her head. “I am not the one to tell you. The one who will is much greater than I.”

He studies the tiny dressings that cover the tips of her fingers, and muses on how hard Sophie and Judy have tried to get through that wall to each other. Morgan Sloat could apparently become Morgan of Orris at will. As a boy of twelve, Jack had met others with that same talent. Not him; he was single-natured and had always been Jack in both worlds. Judy and Sophie, however, have proved incapable of flipping back and forth in any fashion. Something’s been left out of them, and they could only whisper through the wall between the worlds. There must be sadder things, but at this moment he can’t think of a single one.

Jack looks around at the ruined tent, which seems to breathe with sunshine and shadow. Rags flap. In the next room, through a hole in the gauzy cloth wall, he sees a few overturned cots. “What
is
this place?” he asks.

She smiles. “To some, a hospital.”

“Oh?” He looks up and once more takes note of the cross. Maroon now, but undoubtedly once red.
A red cross, stupid,
he thinks. “Oh! But isn’t it a little . . . well . . . old?”

Sophie’s smile widens, and Jack realizes it’s ironic. Whatever sort of hospital this is, or was, he’s guessing it bears little or no resemblance to the ones on
General Hospital
or
ER.
“Yes, Jack.
Very
old. Once there were a dozen or more of these tents in the Territories, On-World, and Mid-World; now there are only a few. Mayhap just this one. Today it’s here. Tomorrow . . .” Sophie raises her hands, then lowers them. “Anywhere! Perhaps even on Judy’s side of the wall.”

“Sort of like a traveling medicine show.”

This is supposed to be a joke, and he’s startled when she first nods, then laughs and claps her hands. “Yes! Yes, indeed! Although you wouldn’t want to be treated here.”

What exactly is she trying to say? “I suppose not,” he agrees, looking at the rotting walls, tattered ceiling panels, and ancient support posts. “Doesn’t exactly look sterile.”

Seriously (but her eyes are sparkling), Sophie says: “Yet if you were a patient, you would think it beautiful out of all measure. And you would think your nurses, the Little Sisters, the most beautiful any poor patient ever had.”

Jack looks around. “Where are they?”

“The Little Sisters don’t come out when the sun shines. And if we wish to continue our lives with the blessing, Jack, we’ll be gone our separate ways from here long before dark.”

It pains him to hear her talk of separate ways, even though he knows it’s inevitable. The pain doesn’t dampen his curiosity, however; once a coppiceman, it seems, always a coppiceman.

“Why?”

“Because the Little Sisters are vampires, and their patients never get well.”

Startled, uneasy, Jack looks around for signs of them. Certainly disbelief doesn’t cross his mind—a world that can spawn werewolves can spawn anything, he supposes.

She touches his wrist. A little tremble of desire goes through him.

“Don’t fear, Jack—they also serve the Beam.
All
things serve the Beam.”

“What beam?”

“Never mind.” The hand on his wrist tightens. “The one who can answer your questions will be here soon, if he’s not already.” She gives him a sideways look that contains a glimmer of a smile. “And after you hear him, you’ll be more apt to ask questions that matter.”