Those were railroad tracks. And although it was impossi-
ble to tell direction in the darkness, Jack thought he knew in which direction those tracks would travel:
West.
2
“Come on,” Jack said.
“I don’t want to go up there,” Richard said.
“Why not?”
“Too much crazy stuff going on.” Richard wet his lips.
“Could be anything up there in that building. Dogs. Crazy
people.” He wet his lips again. “Bugs.”
“I told you, we’re in the Territories now. The craziness has all blown away—it’s clean here. Hell, Richard, can’t you smell it?”
“There are no such things as Territories,” Richard said thinly.
“Look around you.”
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“No,” Richard said. His voice was thinner than ever, the
voice of an infuriatingly stubborn child.
Jack snatched up a handful of the heavily bearded grass.
“Look at this!”
Richard turned his head.
Jack had to actively restrain an urge to shake him.
Instead of doing that, he tossed the grass away, counted
mentally to ten, and then started up the hill. He looked down and saw that he was now wearing something like leather
chaps. Richard was dressed in much the same way, and he had a red bandanna around his neck that looked like something
out of a Frederic Remington painting. Jack reached up to his own neck and felt a similar bandanna. He ran his hands down along his body and discovered that Myles P. Kiger’s wonderfully warm coat was now something very like a Mexican
serape. I bet I look like an advertisement for Taco Bell, he thought, and grinned.
An expression of utter panic came over Richard’s face
when Jack started up the hill, leaving him alone at the bottom.
“Where are you going?”
Jack looked at Richard and came back. He put his hands on
Richard’s shoulders and looked soberly into Richard’s eyes.
“We can’t stay here,” he said. “Some of them must have
seen us flip. It may be that they can’t come right after us, or it may be that they can. I don’t know. I know as much about the laws governing all of this as a kid of five knows about
magnetism—and all a kid of five knows on the subject is that sometimes magnets attract and sometimes they repel. But for the time being, that’s all I have to know. We have to get out of here. End of story.”
“I’m dreaming all this, I know I am.”
Jack nodded toward the ramshackle wooden building.
“You can come or you can stay here. If you want to stay here, I’ll come back for you after I check the place out.”
“None of this is happening,” Richard said. His naked,
glassesless eyes were wide and flat and somehow dusty. He
looked for a moment up at the black Territories sky with its strange and unfamiliar sprawl of stars, shuddered, and looked away. “I have a fever. It’s the flu. There’s been a lot of flu around. This is a delirium. You’re guest-starring in my delirium, Jack.”
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“Well, I’ll send somebody around to the Delirium Actors’
Guild with my AFTRA card when I get a chance,” Jack said. “In the meantime, why don’t you just stay here, Richard? If none of this is happening, then you have nothing to worry about.”
He started away again, thinking that it would take only a
few more of these Alice-at-the-tea-party conversations with Richard to convince him that he was crazy, as well.
He was halfway up the hill when Richard joined him.
“I would have come back for you,” Jack said.
“I know,” Richard said. “I just thought that I might as well come along. As long as all of this is a dream, anyway.”
“Well, keep your mouth shut if there’s anyone up there,”
Jack said. “I think there is—I think I saw someone looking
out that front window at me.”
“What are you going to do?” Richard asked.
Jack smiled. “Play it by ear, Richie-boy,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been doing ever since I left New Hampshire. Playing it by ear.”
3
They reached the porch. Richard clutched Jack’s shoulder
with panicky strength. Jack turned toward him wearily;
Richard’s patented Kansas City Clutch was something else
that was getting old in a big hurry.
“What?” Jack asked.
“This is a dream, all right,” Richard said, “and I can prove it.”
“How?”
“We’re not talking English anymore, Jack! We’re talking some language, and we’re speaking it perfectly, but it’s not English!”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Weird, isn’t it?”
He started up the steps again, leaving Richard standing be-
low him, gape-mouthed.
4
After a moment or two, Richard recovered and scrambled up
the steps after Jack. The boards were warped and loose and
splintery. Stalks of that richly bearded grain-grass grew up
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through some of them. Off in the deep darkness, both boys
could hear the sleepy hum of insects—it was not the reedy
scratch of crickets but a sweeter sound—so much was sweeter over here, Jack thought.
The outside lamp was now behind them; their shadows ran
ahead of them across the porch and then made right-angles to climb the door. There was an old, faded sign on that door. For a moment it seemed to Jack to be written in strange Cyrillic letters, as indecipherable as Russian. Then they came clear, and the word was no surprise. DEPOT.
Jack raised his hand to knock, then shook his head a little.
No. He would not knock. This was not a private dwelling; the sign said DEPOT, and that was a word he associated with public buildings—places to wait for Greyhound buses and Am-
trak trains, loading zones for the Friendly Skies.
He pushed the door open. Friendly lamplight and a decid-
edly unfriendly voice came out onto the porch together.
“Get away, ye devil!” the cracked voice screeched. “Get away, I’m going in the morning! I swear! The train’s in the shed! Go away! I swore I’d go and I will go, s’now YE go . . .
go and leave me some peace!”
Jack frowned. Richard gaped. The room was clean but
very old. The boards were so warped that the walls seemed almost to ripple. A picture of a stagecoach which looked almost as big as a whaling ship hung on one wall. An ancient
counter, its flat surface almost as ripply as the walls, ran across the middle of the room, splitting it in two. Behind it, on the far wall, was a slate board with STAGE ARRIVES written above one column and STAGE LEAVES written above the other.
Looking at the ancient board, Jack guessed it had been a good long time since any information had been written there; he
thought that if someone tried to write on it with even a piece of soft chalk, the slate would crack in pieces and fall to the weathered floor.
Standing on one side of the counter was the biggest hour-
glass Jack had ever seen—it was as big as a magnum of
champagne and filled with green sand.
“Leave me alone, can’t you? I’ve promised ye I’d go, and I will! Please, Morgan! For yer mercy! I’ve promised, and if ye don’t believe me, look in the shed! The train is ready, I swear the train is ready!”
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501
There was a good deal more gabble and gobble in this
same vein. The large, elderly man spouting it was cringing in the far right-hand corner of the room. Jack guessed the old-ster’s height at six-three at least—even in his present servile posture, The Depot’s low ceiling was only four inches or so above his head. He might have been seventy; he might have
been a fairly well-preserved eighty. A snowy white beard began under his eyes and cascaded down over his breast in a
spray of baby fine hair. His shoulders were broad, although now so slumped that they looked as if someone had broken
them by forcing him to carry heavy weights over the course of many long years. Deep crow’s-feet radiated out from the corners of his eyes; deep fissures undulated on his forehead. His complexion was waxy-yellow. He was wearing a white kilt
shot through with bright scarlet threads, and he was obviously scared almost to death. He was brandishing a stout staff, but with no authority at all.
Jack glanced sharply around at Richard when the old man
mentioned the name of Richard’s father, but Richard was currently beyond noticing such fine points.
“I am not who you think I am,” Jack said, advancing to-
ward the old man.
“Get away!” he shrieked. “None of yer guff! I guess the devil can put on a pleasing face! Get away! I’ll do it! She’s ready to go, first thing in the morning! I said I’d do it and I mean to, now get away, can’t ye?”
The knapsack was now a haversack hanging from Jack’s