“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.”
Jack realizes that he has been neatly rebuked, but coming from her, it doesn’t sting. He allows himself to be led through room after room of the great and ancient hospital. As they go, he gets a sense of how really huge this place is. He also realizes that, in spite of the fresh breezes, he can detect a faint, unpleasant undersmell, something that might be a mixture of fermented wine and spoiled meat. As to what sort of meat, Jack is afraid he can guess pretty well. After visiting over a hundred homicide crime scenes, he should be able to.
It would have been impolite to break away while Jack was meeting the love of his life (not to mention bad narrative business), so we didn’t. Now, however, let us slip through the thin walls of the hospital tent. Outside is a dry but not unpleasant landscape of red rocks, broom sage, desert flowers that look a bit like sego lilies, stunted pines, and a few barrel cacti. Somewhere not too far distant is the steady cool sigh of a river. The hospital pavilion rustles and flaps as dreamily as the sails of a ship riding down the sweet chute of the trade winds. As we float along the great ruined tent’s east side in our effortless and peculiarly pleasant way, we notice a strew of litter. There are more rocks with drawings etched on them, there is a beautifully made copper rose that has been twisted out of shape as if by some great heat, there is a small rag rug that looks as if it has been chopped in two by a meat cleaver. There’s other stuff as well, stuff that has resisted any change in its cyclonic passage from one world to the other. We see the blackened husk of a television picture tube lying in a scatter of broken glass, several Duracell AA batteries, a comb, and—perhaps oddest—a pair of white nylon panties with the word Sunday written on one side in demure pink script. There has been a collision of worlds; here, along the east side of the hospital pavilion, is an intermingled detritus that attests to how hard that collision was.