Ludzie pragną czasami się rozstawać, żeby móc tęsknić, czekać i cieszyć się z powrotem.
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 Nean-
derthal 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 neuro-
logical 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 pa-
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tient,” 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 lis-
ten 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 inter-
esting 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
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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, lu-
natics 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 incompre-
hension 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.