"I can still walk," Richard said. "But is this what he meant? Is this the understanding I was supposed to get, or have, or whatever the hell . . . ?"
"You've got something new on your face," Jack said. "You want to rest for a while?"
"Naw," Richard said, still speaking from the bottom of a muddy barrel. "And I can feel that rash. It itches. I think I got it all over my back, too."
"Let me see," Jack said. Richard stopped in the middle of the road, obedient as a dog. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The red spots blazed on his forehead and temples. Jack stepped behind him, raised his jacket, and lifted the back of his stained and dirty blue button-down shirt. The spots were smaller here, not as raised or as angry-looking; they spread from Richard's thin shoulder blades to the small of his back, no larger than ticks.
Richard let out a big dispirited unconscious sigh.
"You got em there, but it's not so bad," Jack said.
"Thanks," Richard said. He inhaled, lifted his head. Overhead the gray sky seemed heavy enough to come crashing to earth. The ocean seethed against the rocks, far down the rough slope. "It's only a couple of miles, really," Richard said. "I'll make it."
"I'll piggyback you when you need it," Jack said, unwittingly exposing his conviction that before long Richard would need to be carried again.
Richard shook his head and made an inefficient stab at shoving his shirt back in his trousers. "Sometimes I think I . . . sometimes I think I can't--"
"We're going to go into that hotel, Richard," Jack said, putting his arm through Richard's and half-forcing him to step forward. "You and me. Together. I don't have the faintest idea of what happens once we get in there, but you and I are going in. No matter who tries to stop us. Just remember that."
Richard gave him a look half-fearful, half-grateful. Now Jack could see the irregular outlines of future bumps crowding beneath the surface of Richard's cheeks. Again he was conscious of a powerful force pulling at him, forcing him along as he had forced Richard.
"You mean my father," Richard said. He blinked, and Jack thought he was trying not to cry--exhaustion had magnified Richard's emotions.
"I mean everything," Jack said, not quite truthfully. "Let's get going, old pal."
"But what am I supposed to understand? I don't get--" Richard looked around, blinking his unprotected eyes. Most of the world, Jack remembered, was a blur to Richard.
"You understand a lot more already, Richie," Jack pointed out.
And then for a moment a disconcertingly bitter smile twisted Richard's mouth. He had been made to understand a great deal more than he had ever wished to know, and his friend found himself momentarily wishing that he had run away from Thayer School in the middle of the night by himself. But the moment in which he might have preserved Richard's innocence was far behind him, if it had ever really existed--Richard was a necessary part of Jack's mission. He felt strong hands fold around his heart: Jason's hands, the Talisman's hands.
"We're on our way," he said, and Richard settled back into the rhythm of his strides.
"We're going to see my dad down there in Point Venuti, aren't we?" he asked.
Jack said, "I'm going to take care of you, Richard. You're the herd now."
"What?"
"Nobody's going to hurt you, not unless you scratch yourself to death."
Richard muttered to himself as they plodded along. His hands slid over his inflamed temples, rubbing and rubbing. Now and then he dug his fingers in his hair, scratched himself like a dog, and grunted in an only partially fulfilled satisfaction.
3
Shortly after Richard lifted his shirt, revealing the red blotches on his back, they saw the first of the Territories trees. It grew on the inland side of the highway, its tangle of dark branches and column of thick, irregular bark emerging from a reddish, waxy tangle of poison ivy. Knotholes in the bark gaped, mouths or eyes, at the boys. Down in the thick mat of poison ivy a rustling, rustling of unsatisfied roots agitated the waxy leaves above them, as if a breeze blew through them. Jack said, "Let's cross the road," and hoped that Richard had not seen the tree. Behind him he could still hear the thick, rubbery roots prowling through the stems of the ivy.
Is that a BOY? Could that be a BOY up there? A SPECIAL boy perhaps?
Richard's hands flew from his sides to his shoulders to his temples to his scalp. On his cheeks, the second wave of raised bumps resembled horror-movie makeup--he could have been a juvenile monster from one of Lily Cavanaugh's old films. Jack saw that on the backs of Richard's hands the red bumps of the rash had begun to grow together into great red welts.
"Can you really keep going, Richard?" he asked.
Richard nodded. "Sure. For a while." He squinted back across the road. "That wasn't a regular tree, was it? I never saw a tree like that before, not even in a book. It was a Territories tree, wasn't it?"
" 'Fraid so," Jack said.
"That means the Territories are really close, doesn't it?"
"I guess it does."
"So there'll be more of those trees up ahead, won't there?"
"If you know the answers, why ask the questions?" Jack asked. "Oh Jason, what a dumb thing to say. I'm sorry, Richie--I guess I was hoping that you didn't see it. Yeah, I suppose there'll be more of them up there. Let's just not get too close to them."
In any case, Jack thought, "up there" was hardly an accurate way to describe where they were going: the highway slid resolutely down a steady grade, and every hundred feet seemed to take it farther from the light. Everything seemed invaded by the Territories.
"Could you take a look at my back?" Richard asked.
"Sure." Jack again lifted Richard's shirt. He kept himself from saying anything, though his instinct was to groan. Richard's back was now covered with raised red blotches which seemed almost to radiate heat. "It's a little worse," he said.
"I thought it had to be. Only a little, huh?"
"Only a little."
Before long, Jack thought, Richard was going to look one hell of a lot like an alligator suitcase--Alligator Boy, son of Elephant Man.
Two of the trees grew together a short way ahead, their warty trunks twisted around each other in a way that suggested violence more than love. As Jack stared at them while they hurried past, he thought he saw the black holes in the bark mouthing at them, blowing curses or kisses: and he knew that he heard the roots gnashing together at the base of the joined trees. (BOY! A BOY's out there! OUR boy's out there!)
Though it was only mid-afternoon, the air was dark, oddly grainy, like an old newspaper photograph. Where grass had grown on the inland side of the highway, where Queen Anne's lace had bloomed delicately and whitely, low unrecognizable weeds blanketed the earth. With no blossoms and few leaves, they resembled snakes coiled together and smelled faintly of diesel oil. Occasionally the sun flared through the granular murk like a dim orange fire. Jack was reminded of a photograph he had once seen of Gary, Indiana, at night--hellish flames feeding on poison in a black, poisoned sky. From down there the Talisman pulled at him as surely as if it were a giant with its hands on his clothes. The nexus of all possible worlds. He would take Richard into that hell--and fight for his life with all his strength--if he had to haul him along by the ankles. And Richard must have seen this determination in Jack, for, scratching at his sides and shoulders, he toiled along beside him.
I'm going to do this, Jack said to himself, and tried to ignore how greatly he was merely trying to bolster his courage. If I have to go through a dozen different worlds, I'm going to do it.
4
Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like muggers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton, once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a
leash.
5
A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.
39
Point Venuti
1
Point Venuti hung low in the landscape, clinging to the sides of the cliff leading down to the ocean. Behind it, another range of cliffs rose massively but raggedly into the dark air. They looked like ancient elephants, hugely wrinkled. The road led down past high wooden walls until it turned a corner by a long brown metal building that was a factory or warehouse, where it disappeared into a descending series of terraces, the dull roofs of other warehouses. From Jack's perspective, the road did not reappear again until it began to mount the rise opposite, going uphill and south toward San Francisco. He saw only the stairlike descent of the warehouse roofs, the fenced-in parking lots, and, way off to the right, the wintry gray of the water. No people moved on any portion of the road visible to him; nobody appeared in the row of little windows at the back of the nearest factory. Dust swirled through the empty parking lots. Point Venuti looked deserted, but Jack knew that it was not. Morgan Sloat and his cohorts--those who had survived the surprise arrival of the Territories choo-choo, anyway--would be waiting for the arrival of Travelling Jack and Rational Richard. The Talisman boomed out to Jack, urging him forward, and he said, "Well, this is it, kiddo," and stepped forward.
Two new facets of Point Venuti immediately came into view. The first was the appearance of approximately nine inches of the rear of a Cadillac limousine--Jack saw the glossy black paint, the shiny bumper, part of the right taillight. Jack wished fervently that the renegade Wolf behind the wheel had been one of the Camp Readiness casualties. Then he looked out toward the ocean again. Gray water lathered toward the shore. A slow movement up above the factory and warehouse roofs took his attention in the middle of his next step. COME HERE, the Talisman called in that urgent, magnetic manner. Point Venuti seemed somehow to contract like a hand into a fist. Up above the roofs, and only now visible, a dark but colorless weathervane shaped like the head of a wolf spun erratically back and forth, obeying no wind.
When Jack saw the lawless weathervane tracking left-right, then right-left, and continuing around in a complete circle, he knew that he had just had his first sight of the black hotel--at least a portion of it. From the roofs of the warehouses, from the road ahead, from all of the unseen town, rose an unmistakable feeling of enmity as palpable as a slap in the face. The Territories were bleeding through into Point Venuti, Jack realized; here, reality had been sanded thin. The wolf's head whirled meaninglessly in mid-air, and the Talisman continued to pull at Jack. COME HERE COME HERE COME NOW COME NOW NOW . . . Jack realized that along with its incredible and increasing pull, the Talisman was singing to him. Wordlessly, tunelessly, but singing, a curving rise and fall of whale's melody that would be inaudible to anyone else.
The Talisman knew he had just seen the hotel's weathervane.
Point Venuti might be the most depraved and dangerous place in all North and South America, Jack thought, suddenly bolder by half, but it could not keep him from going into the Agincourt Hotel. He turned to Richard, feeling now as if he had been doing nothing but resting and exercising for a month, and tried not to let his dismay at his friend's condition show in his face. Richard could not stop him, either--if he had to, he'd shove Richard right through the walls of the damned hotel. He saw tormented Richard drag his fingernails through his hair and down the hivelike rash on his temples and cheeks.
"We're going to do this, Richard," he said. "I know we are. I don't care how much crazy bullshit they throw at us. We are going to do this."
"Our troubles are going to have troubles with us," said Richard, quoting--surely unconsciously--from Dr. Seuss. He paused. "I don't know if I can make it. That's the truth. I'm dead on my feet." He gave Jack a look of utterly naked anguish. "What's happening to me, Jack?"
"I don't know, but I know how to stop it." And hoped that that was true.
"Is my father doing this to me?" Richard asked miserably. He ran his hands experimentally over his puffy face. Then he lifted his shirt out of his trousers and examined the red coalescing rash on his stomach. The bumps, shaped vaguely like the state of Oklahoma, began at his waistline and extended around both sides and up nearly to his neck. "It looks like a virus or something. Did my father give it to me?"
"I don't think he did it on purpose, Richie," Jack said. "If that means anything."
"It doesn't," Richard said.
"It's all going to stop. The Seabrook Island Express is coming to the end of the line."
Richard right beside him, Jack stepped forward--and saw the taillights of the Cadillac flash on, then off, before the car slipped forward out of his sight.
There would be no surprise attack this time, no wonderful slam-bang arrival through a fence with a trainful of guns and ammunition, but even if everybody in Point Venuti knew they were coming, Jack was on his way. He felt suddenly as if he had strapped on armor, as if he held a magic sword. Nobody in Point Venuti had the power to harm him, at least not until he got to the Agincourt Hotel. He was on his way, Rational Richard beside him, and all would be well. And before he had taken three more steps, his muscles singing along with the Talisman, he had a better, more accurate image of himself than of a knight going out to do battle. The image came straight from one of his mother's movies, delivered by celestial telegram. It was as if he were on a horse, a broad-brimmed hat on his head and a gun tied to his hip, riding in to clean up Deadwood Gulch.
Last Train to Hangtown, he remembered: Lily Cavanaugh, Clint Walker, and Will Hutchins, 1960. So be it.
2
Four or five of the Territories trees struggled out of the hard brown soil beside the first of the abandoned buildings. Maybe they had been there all along, snaking their branches over the road nearly to the white line, maybe not; Jack could not remember seeing them when he first looked down toward the concealed town. It was scarcely more conceivable, though, that he could overlook the trees than he could a pack of wild dogs. He could hear their roots rustling along the surface of the ground as he and Richard approached the warehouse.
(OUR boy? OUR boy?)
"Let's get on the other side of the road," he said to Richard, and took his lumpy hand to lead him across.
As soon as they reached the opposite side of the road, one of the Territories trees visibly stretched out, root and branch, for them. If trees had stomachs, they could have heard its stomach growl. The gnarly branch and the smooth snakelike root whipped across the yellow line, then across half the remaining distance to the boys. Jack prodded gasping Richard in the side with his elbow, then grasped his arm and pulled him along.
(MY MY MY MY BOY! YESSS!!)
A tearing, ripping sound suddenly filled the air, and for a moment Jack thought that Morgan of Orris was raping a passage through the worlds again, becoming Morgan Sloat . . . Morgan Sloat with a final, not-to-be-refused offer involving a machine-gun, a blowtorch, a pair of red-hot pincers . . . but instead of Richard's furious father, the crown of the Territories tree struck the middle of the road, bounced once in a snapping of branches, then rolled over on its side like a dead animal.
"Oh my God," Richard said. "It came right out of the ground after us."
Which was precisely what Jack had been thinking. "Kamikaze tree," he said. "I think things are going to be a little wild here in Point Venuti."
"Because of the black hotel?"
"Sure--but also because of the Talisman." He looked down the road and saw another clump of the carnivorous trees about ten yards down the hill. "The vibes or the atmosphere or whatever the ding-dong you want to call it are all screwed up--because everything's evil and good, black and white, all mixed up."
Jack was keeping his eye on the clump of trees they now slowly approached as he talked, and saw the nearest tree twitch its crown toward them, as if it had heard his voice.
Maybe this whole town is a big Oatley, Jack was thinking, and maybe he would come through after
all--but if there was a tunnel up ahead, the last thing Jack Sawyer was going to do was enter it. He really did not want to meet the Point Venuti version of Elroy.
"I'm afraid," Richard said behind him. "Jack, what if more of those trees can jump out of the ground like that?"
"You know," Jack said, "I've noticed that even when trees are mobile, they can't actually get very far. Even a turkey like you ought to be able to outrun a tree."
He was rounding the last curve in the road, going downhill past the final warehouses. The Talisman called and called, as vocal as the giant's singing harp in "Jack and the Beanstalk." At last Jack came around the curve, and the rest of Point Venuti lay beneath him.
His Jason-side kept him going. Point Venuti might once have been a pleasant little resort town, but those days had passed long ago. Now Point Venuti itself was the Oatley tunnel, and he would have to walk through all of it. The cracked, broken surface of the road dipped toward an area of burned-out houses surrounded by Territories trees--the workers in the empty factories and warehouses would have lived in these small frame houses. Enough was left of one or two of them to show what they had been. The twisted hulks of burned cars lay here and there about the houses, entwined with thick weeds. Through the wasted foundations of the little houses, the roots of the Territories trees slowly prowled. Blackened bricks and boards, upended and smashed bathtubs, twisted pipes littered the burned-out lots. A flash of white caught Jack's eye, but he looked away as soon as he saw that it was the white bone of a disarranged skeleton hooked beneath the tangle of roots. Once children had piloted bikes through these streets, housewives had gathered in kitchens to complain about wages and unemployment, men had waxed their cars in their driveways--all gone, now. A tipped-over swingset, powdery with rust, poked its limbs through rubble and weeds.