Wendell’s last picture shows Dale and Beezer watching with identical dazed expressions as the old fellow mounts the steps to the Winnebago with Jack Sawyer still in his arms. Wendell has no idea how such an old party can carry such a big man—Sawyer is six-two and must go a hundred and ninety at least—but he supposes it’s the same sort of deal that allows a distraught mother to lift up the car or truck beneath which her kid is pinned. And it doesn’t matter. It’s small beans compared to what happens next. Because when a group of men led by Dale, Beez, and Doc burst into the Winnebago (Wendell is at the rear of this group), they find nothing but a single overturned chair and several splashes of Jack Sawyer’s blood in the kitchenette where Jack gave his little gang their final instructions. The trail of blood leads toward the rear, where there’s a foldout bed and a toilet cubicle. And there the drops and splashes simply stop.
Jack and the old man who carried him in here have vanished.
Doc and Beezer are babbling, almost in hysterics. They bounce between questions of where Jack might have gone to distraught recollections of the final few moments on the platform before the shooting started. They can’t seem to let that go, and Dale has an idea it will be quite a while before he can let go of it himself. He realizes now that Jack saw the woman coming, that he was trying to get his hand free of Dale’s so he could respond.
Dale thinks it may be time to quite the chief’s job after all, find some other line of work. Not right now, though. Right now he wants to get Beezer and Doc away from the Color Posse, get them calmed down. He has something to tell them that may help with that.
Tom Lund and Bobby Dulac join him, and the three of them escort Beez and Doc away from the Winnebago, where Special Agent Redding and WSP Detective Black are already establishing a CIP (crime investigation perimeter). Once they’re behind the platform, Dale looks into the stunned faces of the two burly bikers.
“Listen to me,” Dale says.
“I should have stepped in front of him,” Doc says. “I saw her coming, why didn’t I step in front—”
“Shut up and listen!”
Doc shuts up. Tom and Bobby are also listening, their eyes wide.
“That black man said something to me.”
“What?” Beezer asks.
“He said, ‘Let me take him—there may still be a chance.’ ”
Doc, who has treated his share of gunshot wounds, gives a forlorn little chuckle. “And you believed him?”
“Not then, not exactly,” Dale says. “But when we went in there and the place was empty—”
“No back door, either,” Beezer adds.
Doc’s skepticism has faded a little. “You really think . . . ?”
“I do,” Dale Gilbertson says, and wipes his eyes. “I have to hope. And you guys have to help me.”
“All right,” Beezer says. “Then we will.”
And we think that here we must leave them for good, standing under a blue summer sky close to the Father of Waters, standing beside a platform with blood on the boards. Soon life will catch them up again and pull them back into its furious current, but for a few moments they are together, joined in hope for our mutual friend.
Let us leave them so, shall we?
Let us leave them hoping.
Once upon a time
in the Territories . . .
ONCE UPON A TIME (as all the best old stories used to begin when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else), a scarred Captain of the Outer Guards named Farren led a frightened little boy named Jack Sawyer through the Queen’s Pavilion. That small boy did not see the Queen’s court, however; no, he was taken through a maze of corridors behind the scenes, secret and seldom-visited places where spiders spun in the high corners and the warm drafts were heavy with the smells of cooking from the kitchen.
Finally, Farren placed his hands in the boy’s armpits and lifted him up. There’s a panel in front of you now, he whispered—do you remember? I think you were there. I think we both were, although we were younger then, weren’t we? Slide it to the left.
Jack did as he was bidden, and found himself peeking into the Queen’s chamber; the room in which almost everyone expected her to die . . . just as Jack expected his mother to die in her room at the Alhambra Inn and Gardens in New Hampshire. It was a bright, airy room filled with bustling nurses who had assumed a busy and purposeful manner because they had no real idea of how to help their patient. The boy looked through the peephole into this room, at a woman he at first thought was his own mother somehow magically transported to this place, and we looked with him, none of us guessing that years later, grown to a man, Jack Sawyer would be lying in the same bed where he first saw his mother’s Twinner.
Parkus, who has brought him from French Landing to the Inner Baronies, now stands at the panel through which Jack, hoisted by Captain Farren, once looked. Beside him is Sophie of Canna, now known in the Territories as both the Young Queen and Sophie the Good. There are no nurses in the sleeping chamber today; Jack lies silent beneath a slowly turning fan. Where he is not wrapped in bandages, his skin is pale. His closed eyelids are hazed with a delicate purple bruise-blush. The rise and fall of the fine linen sheet drawn up to his chin can hardly be seen . . . but it’s there. He breathes.
For now, at least, he lives.
Speaking quietly, Sophie says, “If he’d never touched the Talisman—”
“If he’d never touched the Talisman, actually held it in his arms, he would have been dead there on that platform before I could even get close to him,” Parkus says. “But of course, if not for the Talisman, he never would have been there in the first place.”
“What chance has he?” She looks at him. Somewhere, in another world, Judy Marshall has already begun to subside back into her ordinary suburban life. There will be no such life for her Twinner, however—hard times have come again in this part of the universe—and her eyes gleam with an imperious, regal light. “Tell me the truth, sir; I would not have a lie.”
“Nor would I give you one, my lady,” he tells her. “I believe that, thanks to the residual protection of the Talisman, he will recover. You’ll be sitting next to him one morning or evening and his eyes will open. Not today, and probably not this week, but soon.”
“And as for returning to his world? The world of his friends?”
Parkus has brought her to this place because the spirit of the boy Jack was still lingers, ghostly and child-sweet. He was here before the road of trials opened ahead of him, and in some ways hardened him. He was here with his innocence still intact. What has surprised him about Jack as a grown man—and touched him in a way Parkus never expected to be touched again—is how much of that innocence still remained in the man the boy has become.
That too is the Talisman’s doing, of course.
“Parkus? Your mind wanders.”
“Not far, my lady; not far. You ask if he may return to his world after being mortally wounded three, perhaps even four times—after being heart-pierced, in fact. I brought him here because all the magic that has touched and changed his life is stronger here; for good or ill, the Territories have been Jack Sawyer’s wellspring since he was a child. And it worked. He lives. But he will wake different. He’ll be like . . .”
Parkus pauses, thinking hard. Sophie waits quietly beside him. Distantly, from the kitchen, comes the bellow of a cook lacing into one of the ’prentices.
“There are animals that live in the sea, breathing with gills,” Parkus says at last. “And over time’s long course, some of them develop lungs. Such creatures can live both under the water and on the land. Yes?”
“So I was taught as a girl,” Sophie agrees patiently.
“But some of these latter creatures lose their gills and can live only on the land. Jack Sawyer is that sort of creature now, I think. You or I could dive into the water and swim beneath the surface for a little while, and he may be able to go back and visit his own world for short periods . . . in time, of course. But if either you or I were to try living beneath the water—”
“We’d drown.”
“Indeed we would. And if Jack were to try living in his own world again, returning to his little house in Norway Valley, for instance, his wounds would return in a space of days or weeks. Perhaps in different forms—his death certificate might specify heart failure, for instance—but it would be Wanda Kinderling’s bullet that killed him, all the same. Wanda Kinderling’s heart shot.” Parkus bares his teeth. “Hateful woman! I believe the abbalah was aware of her no more than I was, but look at the damage she’s caused!”