reached this far west, Morgan had sent out a crew of
grotesque, twisted slaves from the ore-pits back east; these slaves were tended by stolen Wolfs and other, stranger creatures. Their foreman was a terrible man who carried a whip; he had been here almost constantly when the work began, but then he had disappeared. Anders, who had spent most of
those terrible weeks and months cowering in his house, which
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was some five miles south of here, had been delighted to see him go. He had heard rumors that Morgan had called the man
with the whip back east, where affairs were reaching some
great point of climax; Anders didn’t know if this was true or not, and didn’t care. He was simply glad that the man, who
was sometimes accompanied by a scrawny, somehow
gruesome-looking little boy, was gone.
“His name,” Jack demanded. “What was his name?”
“My Lord, I don’t know. The Wolfs called him He of the
Lashes. The slaves just called him the devil. I’d say they were both right.”
“Did he dress like a dandy? Velvet coats? Shoes with
buckles on the tops, maybe?”
Anders was nodding.
“Did he wear a lot of strong perfume?”
“Aye! Aye, he did!”
“And the whip had little rawhide strings with metal caps
on them.”
“Aye, my Lord. An evil whip. And he was fearsome good
with it, aye, he was.”
It was Osmond. It was Sunlight Gardener. He was here,
overseeing some project for Morgan . . . then the Queen got sick and Osmond was called back to the summer palace,
where I first made his cheerful acquaintance.
“His son,” Jack said. “What did his son look like?”
“Skinny,” Anders said slowly. “One eye was afloat. That’s
all I can remember. He . . . my Lord, the Whipman’s son was hard to see. The Wolfs seemed more afraid of him than of his father, although the son carried no whip. They said he was
dim.”
“Dim,” Jack mused.
“Yes. It is their word for one who is hard to see, no matter how hard ye look for that one. Invisibility is impossible—so the Wolfs say—but one can make himself dim if only he knows the trick of it. Most Wolfs do, and this little whoreson knew it, too. So all I remember is how thin he was, and that floating eye, and that he was as ugly as black, syphilitic sin.”
Anders paused.
“He liked to hurt things. Little things. He used to take
them under the porch and I’d hear the most awful
screams. . . .” Anders shuddered. “That was one of the rea-
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sons I kept to my house, you know. I don’t like to hear wee animals in pain. Makes me feel turrible bad, it does.”
Everything Anders said raised a hundred fresh questions in
Jack’s mind. He would particularly have liked to know all that Anders knew about the Wolfs—just hearing of them woke simultaneous pleasure and a deep, dully painful longing for his Wolf in his heart.
But time was short; this man was scheduled to drive west
into the Blasted Lands in the morning, a horde of crazy scholars led by Morgan himself might burst through from what the liveryman called the Other Place at any moment, Richard
might wake up and want to know who this Morgan was they
were discussing, and who this dim fellow was—this dim fellow who sounded suspiciously like the fellow who had lived
next door to him in Nelson House.
“They came,” he prompted, “this crew came, and Osmond
was their foreman—at least until he was called away or whenever he had to lead the devotions at night-chapel back in Indiana—”
“My Lord?” Anders’s face was again ponderous with puz-
zlement.
“They came, and they built . . . what?” He was sure he al-
ready knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear Anders himself say it.
“Why, the tracks,” Anders said. “The tracks going west
into the Blasted Lands. The tracks I must travel myself tomorrow.” He shuddered.
“No,” Jack said. A hot, terrible excitement exploded in his chest like a sun, and he rose to his feet. Again there was that click in his head, that terrible, persuasive feeling of great things coming together.
Anders fell on his knees with a crash as a terrible, beautiful light filled Jack’s face. Richard stirred at the sound and sat sleepily up.
“Not you,” Jack said. “Me. And him.” He pointed at
Richard.
“Jack?” Richard looked at him with sleepy, nearsighted
confusion. “What are you talking about? And why is that man sniffing the floor?”
“My Lord . . . yer will, of course . . . but I don’t understand. . . .”
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“Not you,” Jack said, “us. We’ll take the train for you.”
“But my Lord, why?” Anders managed, not yet daring to
look up.
Jack Sawyer looked out into the darkness.
“Because,” he said, “I think there’s something at the end of the tracks—at the end of the tracks or near the end—that I
have to get.”
Interlude
Sloat in This World (IV)
On the tenth of December, a bundled-up Morgan Sloat was
sitting on the uncomfortable little wooden chair beside Lily Sawyer’s bed—he was cold, so he had his heavy cashmere
coat wrapped around him and his hands thrust deep into its
pockets, but he was having a much better time than his ap-
pearance suggested. Lily was dying. She was going out, away, to that place from which you never came back, not even if you were a Queen in a football field–sized bed.
Lily’s bed was not so grand, and she did not in the least resemble a Queen. Illness had subtracted her good looks, had
skinned down her face and aged her a quick twenty years.
Sloat let his eyes roam appreciatively over the prominent
ridges of bone about her eyes, the tortoiselike shell of her forehead. Her ravaged body barely made a lump beneath the
sheets and blankets. Sloat knew that the Alhambra had been
well paid to leave Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer alone, for it was he who had paid them. They no longer bothered to send heat up
to her room. She was the hotel’s only guest. Besides the desk clerk and cook, the only employees still in the Alhambra were three Portuguese maids who spent all their time cleaning the lobby—it must have been the maids who kept Lily piled high
with blankets. Sloat himself had commandeered the suite
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across the hall, and ordered the desk clerk and the maids to keep a close eye on Lily.
To see if she would open her eyes, he said, “You’re looking better, Lily. I really think I see signs of improvement.”
Without moving anything but her mouth, Lily said, “I don’t
know why you pretend to be human, Sloat.”
“I’m the best friend you have,” Sloat responded.
Now she did open her eyes, and they were not dull enough
to suit him. “Get out of here,” she whispered. “You’re ob-
scene.”
“I’m trying to help you, and I wish you’d remember that. I
have all the papers, Lily. All you have to do is sign them.
Once you do, you and your son are taken care of for life.”
Sloat regarded Lily with an expression of satisfied gloom. “I haven’t had much luck in locating Jack, by the way. Spoken to him lately?”
“You know I haven’t,” she said. And did not weep, as he
had hoped.
“I really do think the boy ought to be here, don’t you?”
“Piss up a stick,” Lily said.
“I think I will use your bathroom, if you don’t mind,” he said, and stood up. Lily closed her eyes again, ignoring him.
“I hope he’s staying out of trouble, anyhow,” Sloat said,
slowly walking down the side of the bed. “Terrible things
happen to boys on the road.” Lily still did not respond.
“Things I hate to think about.” He reached the end of the bed and continued on to the bathroom door. Lily lay under her
sheets and blankets like a crumpled piece of tissue paper.
Sloat went into the bathroom.
He rubbed his hands together, gently closed the door, and
turned on both taps over the sink. From the pocket of his suit-coat he extracted a small brown two-gram vial, from his inner jacket pocket a small case containing a mirror, a razor blade, and a short brass straw. Onto the mirror he tapped about an eighth of a gram of the purest Peruvian Flake cocaine he’d been able to find. Then he chopped it ritualistically with his blade, forming it into two stubby lines. He snorted the lines through the brass straw, gasped, inhaled sharply, and held his breath for a second or two. “Aah.” His nasal passages opened up as wide as tunnels. Way back there, a drip began to deliver the goodies.