Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Doc awoke, he was standing by the fetid lakeside, tethered by the waist to John Barrymore Dix with a length of nylon rope. He felt that a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders, if only temporarily. It wasn’t the first time that he had shaken free from a nightmare of grief and personal tragedy.
Nor the hundredth.
Even when he was fully functional, Dr. Theophilus Tanner walked an emotional tightrope.
The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the bosom of his family, from his wife, Emily, from his young children, Rachel and Jolyon, in November 1896. They had removed him against his will to the year 1998, and had kept him prisoner while they experimented with him. He was never to see his loved ones again or to know their fates.
After two years of poking and prodding, of drawing blood and giving him electrical shocks, the whitecoats had decided to be rid of him and his infuriating truculence. In December 2000, just before the world flamed out forever, Doc was sent forward in time to a destination unknown. The grim future he found himself trapped in was called Deathlands.
In terms of his own biological age, Doc Tanner was still in his thirties, but he looked twice that old. A man could only take so much pain, so much loss, so much truth about the real nature of existence. The lack of control over anything that mattered. Once that limit was reached, the only refuge was the abyss of madness. And it was over that bottomless chasm that Doc’s tightrope was stretched.
Though his memories of the most recent events were largely blurred, he retained a few clear images. He recalled the nameless ville the companions had happened upon, and the pit of the dead marked by the upraised hand of the female corpse. He recalled the infant and its mother, whose final, desperate agonies had shocked him into reliving his own mind-shattering loss.
Less clearly, he remembered the start of the companions’ long overland pursuit of the carny villains, and how with every step along that trail, his anger at being trapped in a universe so infinitely perverse seemed to build, and finally to turn inward. More vaguely, he recalled J.B. towing him and caring for him like a child.
Gradually, over the next few minutes, Doc’s full power of thought returned to him. He was a man with a classical education. A highly accomplished scholar of the nineteenth century, a trained scientific observer. As such, he saw that all of his companions seemed to be stricken by the same malady: Ryan, Dean, J.B., Jak, Krysty and Mildred appeared dazed and confused, as did the little girl. And the others, the coldhearts from the carny, were in the same state. The immature stickie was in the worst shape of any of them. Doc had never seen a terrified stickie.
It was an unnerving sight.
He untied the rope from his waist and reached down to help J.B. up from where he lay sprawled in the mud. For his trouble, he was roughly shoved away.
“What’s wrong, John Barrymore?” he said with concern. “Are you injured?”
As he rose, the Armorer pointedly turned his back on Doc.
Doc tried to thank the man who had saved his life, who had protected him, but the Armorer refused to acknowledge his existence. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, J.B.’s eyes were narrowed to slits, and his jaw was set hard. Doc looked at Mildred and Krysty, hoping to get a more friendly reception, if not some sympathy or an explanation for the rejection.
“Dr. Wyeth, Krysty, what in heaven’s name has come over John Barrymore?” he asked.
Evidently the same thing had come over them.
Neither of the women would speak to him. Not a word. They looked through him as if he weren’t even there.
Muttering to himself, Doc bent and retrieved his precious ebony swordstick. J.B. had dutifully carried the antique weapon for him this far, only to let it drop on the bank when he felt its ornate silver lion’s-head handle had landed in the mud along the waterline. He carefully wiped it clean on the hem of his frock coat. Doc then removed himself from the company of his infuriatingly silent friends and leaned against the trunk of one of the stripped trees. For a painful moment he considered the possibility that what he was experiencing was just another mental aberration, another waking nightmare, that this time he had perhaps slipped even more deeply into madness. He was jolted by the memories of seeing the yellow snowfall and the bizarre storm on the lake—snowfall and storm that no longer were in evidence. Memories that supported a diagnosis of insanity.