Black House (60 page)

“Don’t. Touch. Me.” And then, in a nearly poetic rush: “Fucking Hollywood asshole!”

“Believe me, if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t. And I plan to wash my hands just as soon as I get the chance.”

He looks up at Sophie and sees all the Judy in her. All the
beauty
in her. “I love you,” he says.

Before she can reply, he seizes Wendell’s hand, closes his eyes, and flips.

22

T
HIS TIME THERE’S
something that isn’t quite silence: a lovely white rushing he has heard once before. In the summer of 1997, Jack went up way north to Vacaville with an LAPD skydiving club called the P.F. Flyers. It was a dare, one of those stupid things you got yourself into as a result of too many beers too late at night and then couldn’t get yourself out of again. Not with any grace. Which was to say, not without looking like a chickenshit. He expected to be frightened; instead, he was exalted. Yet he had never done it again, and now he knows why: he had come too close to remembering, and some frightened part of him must have known it. It was the sound before you pulled the ripcord—that lonely white rushing of the wind past your ears. Nothing else to hear but the soft, rapid beat of your heart and—maybe—the click in your ears as you swallowed saliva that was in free fall, just like the rest of you.

Pull the ripcord, Jack,
he thinks.
Time to pull the ripcord, or the landing’s going to be awfully damn hard.

Now there’s a new sound, low at first but quickly swelling to a tooth-rattling bray.
Fire alarm,
he thinks, and then:
No, it’s a
symphony
of fire alarms.
At the same moment, Wendell Green’s hand is snatched out of his grip. He hears a faint, squawking cry as his fellow sky diver is swept away, and then there’s a smell—

Honeysuckle—

No, it’s her hair—

—and Jack gasps against a weight on his chest and his diaphragm, a feeling that the wind has been knocked out of him. There are hands on him, one on his shoulder, the other at the small of his back. Hair tickling his cheek. The sound of alarms. The sound of people yelling in confusion. Running footfalls that clack and echo.

“jack jack jack are you all right”

“Ask a queen for a date, get knocked into the middle of next week,” he mutters. Why is it so dark? Has he been blinded? Is he ready for that intellectually rewarding and financially remunerative job as an ump at Miller Park?

“Jack!”
A palm smacks his cheek. Hard.

No, not blind. His eyes are just shut. He pops them open and Judy is bending over him, her face inches from his. Without thinking, he closes his left hand in the hair at the nape of her neck, brings her face down to his, and kisses her. She exhales into his mouth—a surprised reverse gasp that inflates his lungs with her electricity—and then kisses him back. He has never been kissed with such intensity in his entire life. His hand goes to the breast beneath her nightdress, and he feels the frenzied gallop of her heart
—If she were to run faster, she’d catch her feet and fall,
Jack thinks—beneath its firm rise. At the same moment her hand slips inside his shirt, which has somehow come unbuttoned, and tweaks his nipple. It’s as hard and hot as the slap. As she does it, her tongue darts into his mouth in one quick plunge, there and gone, like a bee into a flower. He tightens his grip on the nape of her neck and God knows what would have happened next, but at that moment something falls over in the corridor with a huge crash of glass and someone screams. The voice is high and almost sexless with panic, but Jack believes it’s Ethan Evans, the sullen young person from the hall.
“Get back here! Stop running, goldarnit!”
Of course it’s Ethan; only a graduate of Mount Hebron Lutheran Sunday school would use
goldarnit,
even in extremis.

Jack pulls away from Judy. She pulls away from him. They are on the floor. Judy’s nightdress is all the way up to her waist, exposing plain white nylon underwear. Jack’s shirt is open, and so are his pants. His shoes are still on, but on the wrong feet, from the feel of them. Nearby, the glass-topped coffee table is overturned and the journals that were on it are scattered. Some seem to have been literally blown out of their bindings.

More screams from the corridor, plus a few cackles and mad ululations. Ethan Evans continues to yell at stampeding mental patients, and now a woman is yelling as well—Head Nurse Rack, perhaps. The alarms bray on and on.

All at once a door bursts open and Wendell Green gallops into the room. Behind him is a closet with clothes scattered everywhere, the spare items of Dr. Spiegleman’s wardrobe all ahoo. In one hand Wendell’s holding his Panasonic minicorder. In the other he has several gleaming tubular objects. Jack is willing to bet they’re double-A Duracells.

Jack’s clothes have been unbuttoned (or perhaps blown open), but Wendell has fared much worse. His shirt is in tatters. His belly hangs over a pair of white boxer shorts, severely pee-stained in front. He is dragging his brown gabardine slacks by one foot. They slide across the carpet like a shed snakeskin. And although his socks are on, the left one appears to have been turned inside out.

“What did you do?”
Wendell blares.
“Oh you Hollywood son of a bitch, WHAT DID YOU DO TO M—”

He stops. His mouth drops open. His eyes widen. Jack notes that the reporter’s hair appears to be standing out like the quills on a porcupine.

Wendell, meanwhile, is noting Jack Sawyer and Judy Marshall, embracing on the glass- and paper-littered floor, with their clothes disarranged. They aren’t quite in flagrante delicious, but if Wendell ever saw two people on the verge, dese are dem. His mind is whirling and filled with impossible memories, his balance is shot, his stomach is chugging like a washing machine that has been overloaded with clothes and suds; he desperately needs something to hold on to. He needs news. Even better, he needs
scandal.
And here, lying in front of him on the floor, are both.

“RAPE!”
Wendell bellows at the top of his lungs. A mad, relieved grin twists up the corners of his mouth.
“SAWYER BEAT ME UP AND NOW HE’S RAPING A MENTAL PATIENT!”
It doesn’t look much like rape to Wendell, in all truth, but who ever yelled
CONSENSUAL SEX!
at the top of his lungs and attracted any attention?

“Shut that idiot up,” Judy says. She yanks down the hem of her nightgown and prepares to stand.

“Watch out,” Jack says. “Broken glass everywhere.”

“I’m okay,” she snaps. Then, turning to Wendell with that perfect fearlessness Fred knew so well: “Shut up! I don’t know who you are, but quit that bellowing! Nobody’s being—”

Wendell backs away from Hollywood Sawyer, dragging his pants along with him.
Why doesn’t someone come?
he thinks.
Why doesn’t someone come before he shoots me, or something?
In his frenzy and near hysteria, Wendell has either not registered the alarms and general outcry or believes them to be going on inside his head, just a little more false information to go with his absurd “memories” of a black gunslinger, a beautiful woman in a robe, and Wendell Green himself crouching in the dust and eating a half-cooked bird like a caveman.

“Keep away from me, Sawyer,” he says, backing up with his hands held out in front of him. “I have an extremely hungry lawyer. Caveet-emporer, you asshole, lay one finger on me and he and I will strip you of everything you—OW!
OW!
”

Wendell has stepped on a piece of broken glass, Jack sees—probably from one of the prints that formerly decorated the walls and are now decorating the floor. He takes one more off-balance lurch backward, this time steps on his own trailing slacks, and goes sprawling into the leather recliner where Dr. Spiegleman presumably sits while quizzing his patients on their troubled childhoods.

La Riviere’s premier muckraker stares at the approaching Neanderthal with wide, horrified eyes, then throws the minicorder at him. Jack sees that it’s covered with scratches. He bats it away.

“RAPE!”
Wendell squeals.
“HE’S RAPING ONE OF THE LOONIES! HE’S—”

Jack pops him on the point of the chin, pulling the punch just a little at the last moment, delivering it with almost scientific force. Wendell flops back in Dr. Spiegleman’s recliner, eyes rolling up, feet twitching as if to some tasty beat that only the semiconscious can truly appreciate.

“The Mad Hungarian couldn’t have done better,” Jack murmurs. It occurs to him that Wendell ought to treat himself to a complete neurological workup in the not too distant future. His head has put in a hard couple of days.

The door to the hall bursts open. Jack steps in front of the recliner to hide Wendell, stuffing his shirt into his pants (at some point he’s zipped his fly, thank God). A candy striper pokes her fluffy head into Dr. Spiegleman’s office. Although she’s probably eighteen, her panic makes her look about twelve.

“Who’s yelling in here?” she asks. “Who’s hurt?”

Jack has no idea what to say, but Judy manages like a pro. “It was a patient,” she says. “Mr. Lackley, I think. He came in, yelled that we were all going to be raped, and then ran out again.”

“You have to leave at once,” the candy striper tells them. “Don’t listen to that idiot Ethan. And don’t use the elevator. We think it was an earthquake.”

“Right away,” Jack says crisply, and although he doesn’t move, it’s good enough for the candy striper; she heads out. Judy crosses quickly to the door. It closes but won’t latch. The frame has been subtly twisted out of true.

There was a clock on the wall. Jack looks toward it, but it’s fallen face-down to the floor. He goes to Judy and takes her by the arms. “How long was I over there?”

“Not long,” she says, “but what an exit you made! Ka
-pow!
Did you get anything?” Her eyes plead with him.

“Enough to know I have to go back to French Landing right away,” he tells her.
Enough to know that I love you—that I’ll always love you, in this world or any other.

“Tyler . . . is he alive?” She reverses his grip so she is holding him. Sophie did exactly the same thing in Faraway, Jack remembers.
“Is my son alive?”

“Yes. And I’m going to get him for you.”

His eye happens on Spiegleman’s desk, which has danced its way into the room and stands with all its drawers open. He sees something interesting in one of those drawers and hurries across the carpet, crunching on broken glass and kicking aside one of the prints.

In the top drawer to the left of the desk’s kneehole is a tape recorder, considerably bigger than Wendell Green’s trusty Panasonic, and a torn piece of brown wrapping paper. Jack snatches up the paper first. Scrawled across the front in draggling letters he’s seen at both Ed’s Eats and on his own front porch is this:

Deliver to JUDY MARSHALL
also known as SOPHIE

There are what appear to be stamps in the upper corner of the torn sheet. Jack doesn’t need to examine them closely to know that they are really cut from sugar packets, and that they were affixed by a dangerous old dodderer named Charles Burnside. But the Fisherman’s identity no longer matters much, and Speedy knew it. Neither does his location, because Jack has an idea Chummy Burnside can flip to a new one pretty much at will.

But he can’t take the real doorway with him. The doorway to the furnace-lands, to Mr. Munshun, to Ty. If Beezer and his pals found that—

Jack drops the wrapping paper back into the drawer, hits the
EJECT
button on the tape recorder, and pops out the cassette tape inside. He sticks it in his pocket and heads for the door.

“Jack.”

He looks back at her. Beyond them, fire alarms honk and blat, lunatics scream and laugh, staff runs to and fro. Their eyes meet. In the clear blue light of Judy’s regard, Jack can almost touch that other world with its sweet smells and strange constellations.

“Is it wonderful over there? As wonderful as in my dreams?”

“It’s wonderful,” he tells her. “And you are, too. Hang in there, okay?”

Halfway down the hallway, Jack comes upon a nasty sight: Ethan Evans, the young man who once had Wanda Kinderling as his Sunday school teacher, has laid hold of a disoriented old woman by her fat upper arms and is shaking her back and forth. The old woman’s frizzy hair flies around her head.

“Shut up!”
young Mr. Evans is shouting at her.
“Shut up, you crazy old cow! You’re not going anywhere except back to your dadblame room!”

Something about his sneer makes it obvious that even now, with the world turned upside down, young Mr. Evans is enjoying both his power to command and his Christian duty to brutalize. This is only enough to make Jack angry. What infuriates him is the look of terrified incomprehension on the old woman’s face. It makes him think of boys he once lived with long ago, in a place called the Sunlight Home.

It makes him think of Wolf.

Without pausing or so much as breaking stride (they have entered the endgame phase of the festivities now, and somehow he knows it), Jack drives his fist into young Mr. Evans’s temple. That worthy lets go of his plump and squawking victim, strikes the wall, then slides down it, his eyes wide and dazed.

“Either you didn’t listen in Sunday school or Kinderling’s wife taught you the wrong lessons,” Jack says.

“You . . . hit . . . me . . .” young Mr. Evans whispers. He finishes his slow dive splay-legged on the hallway floor halfway between the Records Annex and Ambulatory Ophthalmology.

“Abuse another patient—this one, the one I was just talking to,
any
of them—and I’ll do a lot more than that,” Jack promises young Mr. Evans. Then he’s down the stairs, taking them two at a time, not noticing a handful of johnny-clad patients who stare at him with expressions of puzzled, half-fearful wonder. They look at him as if at a vision who passes them in an envelope of light, some wonder as brilliant as it is mysterious.

Ten minutes later (long after Judy Marshall has walked composedly back to her room without professional help of any kind), the alarms cut off. An amplified voice—perhaps even Dr. Spiegleman’s own mother wouldn’t have recognized it as her boy’s—begins to blare from the overhead speakers. At this unexpected roar, patients who had pretty much calmed down begin to shriek and cry all over again. The old woman whose mistreatment so angered Jack Sawyer is crouched below the admissions counter with her hands over her head, muttering something about the Russians and Civil Defense.