WAY TO HADES, she pushed through it with no hesitation at all. Here red isinglass topped the passage like a tinted skylight, imparting a rosy glow I thought far too pleasant for Hades.
We went on for what felt like a very long time, and I realized I could no longer hear the calliope, the hearty bong! of the Test Your Strength bell, or Sara and the Red-Tops. Nor was that exactly surprising. We must have walked a quarter of a mile. How could any county fair Ghost House be so big?
We came to three doors then, one on the left, one on the right, and one set into the end of the corridor. On one a little red tricycle was painted. On the door facing it was my green IBM
typewriter. The picture on the door at the end looked older, somehow — faded and dowdy. It showed a child’s sled. That’s Scooter Larribee’s, I thought. That’s the one Devore stole. A rash of gooseflesh broke out on my arms and back.
‘Well,’ Kyra said brightly, ‘here are our toys.’ She lifted Strickland, presumably so he could see the red trike.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess so.’
‘Thank you for taking me away,’ she said. ‘Those were scary men but the spookyhouse was fun.
Nighty-night. Stricken says nighty-night, too.’ It still came out sounding exotic — tiu — like the Vietnamese word for sublime happiness.
Before I could say another word, she had pushed open the door with the trike on it and stepped through. It snapped shut behind her, and as it did I saw the ribbon from her hat. It was hanging out of the bib pocket of the overalls I was wearing. I looked at it a moment, then tried the knob of the door she had just gone through. It wouldn’t turn, and when I slapped my hand against the wood it was like slapping some hard and fabulously dense metal. I stepped back, then cocked my head in the direction from which we’d come. There was nothing. Total silence.
This is the between-time, I thought . When people talk about ‘slipping through the cracks,’ this is what they really mean. This is the place where they really go.
You better get going yourself, Jo told me. If you don’t want to find yourself trapped here, maybe forever, you better get going yourself.
I tried the knob of the door with the typewriter painted on it. It turned easily. Behind it was another narrow corridor — more wooden walls and the sweet smell of pine. I didn’t want to go in there, something about it made me think of a long coffin, but there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I went, and the door slammed shut behind me.
Christ, I thought. I’m in the dark, in a closed-in place . . . it’s time for one of Michael Noonan’ s world-famous panic attacks.
But no bands clamped themselves over my chest, and although my heart-rate was high and my muscles were still jacked on adrenaline, I was under control. Also, I realized, it wasn’t entirely dark.
I could only see a little, but enough to make out the walls and the plank floor. I wrapped the dark blue ribbon from Ki’s hat around my wrist, tucking one end underneath so it wouldn’t come loose.
Then I began to move forward.
I went on for a long time, the corridor turning this way and that, seemingly at random. I felt like a microbe slipping through an intestine. At last I came to a pair of wooden arched doorways. I stood before them, wondering which was the correct choice, and realized I could hear Bunter’s bell faintly through the one to my left. I went that way and as I walked, the bell grew steadily louder. At some point the sound of the bell was joined by the mutter of thunder. The autumn cool had left the
air and it was hot again — stifling. I looked down and saw that the biballs and clodhopper shoes were gone. I was wearing thermal underwear and itchy socks.
Twice more I came to choices, and each time I picked the opening through which I could hear Bunter’s bell. As I stood before the second pair of doorways, I heard a voice somewhere in the dark say quite clearly: ‘No, the President’s wife wasn’t hit. That’s his blood on her stockings.’
I walked on, then stopped when I realized my feet and ankles no longer itched, that my thighs were no longer sweating into the longjohns. I was wearing the Jockey shorts I usually slept in. I looked up and saw I was in my own living room, threading my way carefully around the furniture as you do in the dark, trying like hell not to stub your stupid toe. I could see a little better; faint milky light was coming in through the windows. I reached the counter which separates the living room from the kitchen and looked over it at the waggy-cat clock. It was five past five.
I went to the sink and turned on the water. When I reached for a glass I saw I was still wearing the ribbon from Ki’s straw hat on my wrist. I unwound it and put it on the counter between the coffee-maker and the kitchen TV. Then I drew myself some cold water, drank it down, and made my way cautiously along the north-wing corridor by the pallid yellow glow of the bathroom nightlight. I peed ( you-rinated, I could hear Ki saying), then went into the bedroom. The sheets were rumpled, but the bed didn’t have the orgiastic look of the morning after my dream of Sara, Mattie, and Jo. Why would it? I’d gotten out of it and had myself a little sleepwalk. An extraordinarily vivid dream of the Fryeburg Fair.
Except that was bullshit, and not just because I had the blue silk ribbon from Ki’s hat. None of it had the quality of dreams on waking, where what seemed plausible becomes immediately ridiculous and all the colors — both those bright and those ominous — fade at once. I raised my hands to my face, cupped them over my nose, and breathed deeply. Pine. When I looked, I even saw a little smear of sap on one pinky finger.
I sat on the bed, thought about dictating what I’d just experienced into the Memo-Scriber, then flopped back on the pillows instead. I was too tired. Thunder rumbled. I closed my eyes, began to drift away, and then a scream ripped through the house. It was as sharp as the neck of a broken bottle. I sat up with a yell, clutching at my chest.
It was Jo. I had never heard her scream like that in our life together, but I knew who it was, just the same. ‘Stop hurting her!’ I shouted into the darkness. ‘Whoever you are, stop hurting her! ‘
She screamed again, as if something with a knife, clamp, or hot poker took a malicious delight in disobeying me. It seemed to come from a distance this time, and her third scream, while just as agonized as the first two, was farther away still. They were diminishing as the little boy’s sobbing had diminished.
A fourth scream floated out of the dark, then Sara was silent. Breathless, the house breathed around me. Alive in the heat, aware in the faint sound of dawn thunder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I was finally able to get into the zone, but couldn’t do anything once I got there. I keep a steno pad handy for notes — character lists, page references, date chronologies — and I doodled in there a little bit, but the sheet of paper in the IBM remained blank. There was no thundering heartbeat, no throbbing eyes or difficulty breathing — no panic attack, in other words — but there was no story, either. Andy Drake, John Shackleford, Ray Garraty, the beautiful Regina Whiting . . . they stood with their backs turned, refusing to speak or move. The manuscript was sitting in its accustomed place on the left side of the typewriter, the pages held down with a pretty chunk of quartz I’d found on the lane, but nothing was happening. Zilch.
I recognized an irony here, perhaps even a moral. For years I had fled the problems of the real world, escaping into various Narnias of my imagination. Now the real world had filled up with bewildering thickets, there were things with teeth in some of them, and the wardrobe was locked against me.
Kyra, I had printed, putting her name inside a scalloped shape that was supposed to be a cabbage rose. Below it I had drawn a piece of bread with a beret tipped rakishly on the top crust. Noonan’s conception of French toast. The letters L.B. surrounded with curlicues. A shirt with a rudimentary duck on it. Beside this I had printed QUACK QUACK. Below QUACK QUACK I had written Ought to fly away ‘Bon Voyage.’