the other, both fitting the ambience of the room perfectly—
and it had been Orris sitting behind the wheel of a 1952
bullet-nosed Ford, Orris wearing the brown double-breasted
suit and the John Penske tie, Orris who was reaching down toward his crotch, not in pain but in slightly disgusted curiosity—Orris who had, of course, never worn undershorts.
There had been a moment, he remembered, when the Ford
had nearly driven up onto the sidewalk, and then Morgan
Sloat—now very much the undermind—had taken over that
part of the operation and Orris had been free to go along his way, goggling at everything, nearly half-mad with delight.
And what remained of Morgan Sloat had also been delighted;
he had been delighted the way a man is delighted when he
shows a friend around his new home for the first time and
finds that his friend likes it as much as he likes it himself.
Orris had cruised into a Fat Boy Drive-in, and after some
fumbling with Morgan’s unfamiliar paper money, he had or-
dered a hamburger and french fries and a chocolate thick-
shake, the words coming easily out of his mouth—welling up
from that undermind as water wells up from a spring. Orris’s first bite of the hamburger had been tentative . . . and then he had gobbled the rest with the speed of Wolf gobbling his first Whopper. He had crammed the fries into his mouth with one
hand while dialling the radio with the other, picking up an enticing babble of bop and Perry Como and some big band and
early rhythm and blues. He had sucked down the shake and
then had ordered more of everything.
Halfway through the second burger he—Sloat as well as
Orris—began to feel sick. Suddenly the fried onions had
seemed too strong, too cloying; suddenly the smell of car exhaust was everywhere. His arms had suddenly begun to itch
madly. He pulled off the coat of the double-breasted suit (the second thick-shake, this one mocha, fell unheeded to one
side, dribbling ice cream across the Ford’s seat) and looked at his arms. Ugly red blotches with red centers were growing
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there, and spreading. His stomach lurched, he leaned out the window, and even as he puked into the tray that was fixed
there, he had felt Orris fleeing from him, going back into his own world. . . .
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Hmmmm?” Startled out of his reverie, Sloat looked
around. A tall blond boy, obviously an upperclassman, was
standing there. He was dressed prep—an impeccable blue
flannel blazer worn over an open-collared shirt and a pair of faded Levi’s.
He brushed hair out of his eyes which had that same dazed,
dreaming look. “I’m Etheridge, sir. I just wondered if I could help you. You looked . . . lost.”
Sloat smiled. He thought of saying—but did not— No,
that’s how you look, my friend. Everything was all right. The Sawyer brat was still on the loose, but Sloat knew where he was going and that meant that Jacky was on a chain. It was invisible, but it was still a chain.
“Lost in the past, that’s all,” he said. “Old times. I’m not a stranger here, Mr. Etheridge, if that’s what you’re worried about. My son’s a student. Richard Sloat.”
Etheridge’s eyes grew even dreamier for a moment—
puzzled, lost. Then they cleared. “Sure. Richard!” he exclaimed.
“I’ll be going up to see the headmaster in a bit. I just
wanted to have a poke around first.”
“Well, I guess that’s fine.” Etheridge looked at his watch.
“I have table-duty this morning, so if you’re sure you’re
okay . . .”
“I’m sure.”
Etheridge gave him a nod, a rather vague smile, and started off.
Sloat watched him go, and then he surveyed the ground
between Nelson House and here. Noted the broken window
again. A straight shot. It was fair—more than fair—to assume that, somewhere between Nelson House and this octagonal
brick building, the two boys had Migrated into the Territories.
If he liked, he could follow them. Just step inside—there was no lock on the door—and disappear. Reappear wherever
Orris’s body happened to be at this moment. It would be
somewhere close; perhaps even, in fact, in front of the depot-keeper himself. No nonsense about Migrating to a spot which
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might be a hundred miles away from the point of interest in Territories geography and no way to cover the intervening
distance but by wagon or, worse, what his father had called shanks’ mare.
The boys would already have gone on, in all likelihood.
Into the Blasted Lands. If so, the Blasted Lands would finish them. And Sunlight Gardener’s Twinner, Osmond, would be
more than capable of squeezing out all the information that Anders knew. Osmond and his horrid son. No need to Migrate at all.
Except maybe for a look-see. For the pleasure and refresh-
ment of becoming Orris again, if only for a few seconds.
And to Make Sure, of course. His entire life, from child-
hood onward, had been an exercise in Making Sure.
He looked around once to assure himself that Etheridge
had not lingered; then he opened the door of The Depot and
went inside.
The smell was stale, dark, and incredibly nostalgic—the
smell of old makeup and canvas flats. For a moment he had
the crazy idea that he had done something even more incredible than Migrating; he felt that he might have travelled back through time to those undergraduate days when he and Phil
Sawyer had been theater-mad college students.
Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw the unfa-
miliar, almost mawkish props—a plaster bust of Pallas for a production of The Raven, an extravagantly gilt birdcage, a bookcase full of false bindings—and remembered that he was
in the Thayer School excuse for a “little theater.”
He paused for a moment, breathing deeply of the dust; he
turned his eyes up to one dusty sunray falling through a small window. The light wavered and was suddenly a deeper gold,
the color of lamplight. He was in the Territories. Just like that, he was in the Territories. There was a moment of almost staggering exhilaration at the speed of the change. Usually there was a pause, a sense of sideslipping from one place to another. This caesura seemed to be in direct proportion to the distance between the physical bodies of his two selves, Sloat and Orris. Once, when he had Migrated from Japan, where he
was negotiating a deal with the Shaw brothers for a terrible novel about Hollywood stars menaced by a crazed ninja, the
pause had gone on so long that he had feared he might be lost
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forever somewhere in the empty, senseless purgatory that exists between the worlds. But this time they had been close . . .
so close! It was like those few times, he thought
(Orris thought)
when a man and woman achieve orgasm at the exact same
instant and die in sex together.
The smell of dried paint and canvas was replaced with the
light, pleasant smell of Territories burning-oil. The lamp on the table was guttering low, sending out dark membranes of
smoke. To his left a table was set, the remains of a meal congealing on the rough plates. Three plates.
Orris stepped forward, dragging his clubfoot a little as always. He tipped one of the plates up, let the guttering lamplight skate queasily across the grease. Who ate from this one?
Was it Anders, or Jason, or Richard . . . the boy who would also have been Rushton if my son had lived?
Rushton had drowned while swimming in a pond not far
from the Great House. There had been a picnic. Orris and his wife had drunk a quantity of wine. The sun had been hot. The boy, little more than an infant, had been napping. Orris and his wife had made love and then they had also fallen asleep in the sweet afternoon sunshine. He had been awakened by the
child’s cries. Rushton had awakened and gone down to the
water. He had been able to dog-paddle a little, just enough to get well out beyond his depth before panicking. Orris had
limped to the water, dived in, and swum as fast as he could out to where the boy floundered. It was his foot, his damned foot, that had hampered him and perhaps cost his son his life.
When he reached the boy, he had been sinking. Orris had
managed to catch him by the hair and pull him to shore . . .
but by then Rushton had been blue and dead.
Margaret had died by her own hand less than six weeks
later.
Seven months after that, Morgan Sloat’s own young son
had nearly drowned in a Westwood YMCA pool during a