“Naw,” Richard said, still speaking from the bottom of a
muddy barrel. “And I can feel that rash. It itches. I think I got it all over my back, too.”
“Let me see,” Jack said. Richard stopped in the middle of
the road, obedient as a dog. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The red spots blazed on his forehead and temples. Jack stepped behind him, raised his jacket, and lifted
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the back of his stained and dirty blue button-down shirt. The spots were smaller here, not as raised or as angry-looking; they spread from Richard’s thin shoulder blades to the small of his back, no larger than ticks.
Richard let out a big dispirited unconscious sigh.
“You got em there, but it’s not so bad,” Jack said.
“Thanks,” Richard said. He inhaled, lifted his head. Over-
head the gray sky seemed heavy enough to come crashing to
earth. The ocean seethed against the rocks, far down the
rough slope. “It’s only a couple of miles, really,” Richard said.
“I’ll make it.”
“I’ll piggyback you when you need it,” Jack said, unwit-
tingly exposing his conviction that before long Richard would need to be carried again.
Richard shook his head and made an inefficient stab at
shoving his shirt back in his trousers. “Sometimes I think
I . . . sometimes I think I can’t—”
“We’re going to go into that hotel, Richard,” Jack said, putting his arm through Richard’s and half-forcing him to step forward. “You and me. Together. I don’t have the faintest idea of what happens once we get in there, but you and I are going in. No matter who tries to stop us. Just remember that.”
Richard gave him a look half-fearful, half-grateful. Now
Jack could see the irregular outlines of future bumps crowding beneath the surface of Richard’s cheeks. Again he was
conscious of a powerful force pulling at him, forcing him
along as he had forced Richard.
“You mean my father,” Richard said. He blinked, and Jack
thought he was trying not to cry—exhaustion had magnified
Richard’s emotions.
“I mean everything,” Jack said, not quite truthfully. “Let’s get going, old pal.”
“But what am I supposed to understand? I don’t get—”
Richard looked around, blinking his unprotected eyes. Most
of the world, Jack remembered, was a blur to Richard.
“You understand a lot more already, Richie,” Jack pointed
out.
And then for a moment a disconcertingly bitter smile
twisted Richard’s mouth. He had been made to understand a
great deal more than he had ever wished to know, and his
friend found himself momentarily wishing that he had run
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away from Thayer School in the middle of the night by him-
self. But the moment in which he might have preserved
Richard’s innocence was far behind him, if it had ever really existed—Richard was a necessary part of Jack’s mission. He
felt strong hands fold around his heart: Jason’s hands, the Talisman’s hands.
“We’re on our way,” he said, and Richard settled back into
the rhythm of his strides.
“We’re going to see my dad down there in Point Venuti,
aren’t we?” he asked.
Jack said, “I’m going to take care of you, Richard. You’re
the herd now.”
“What?”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you, not unless you scratch your-
self to death.”
Richard muttered to himself as they plodded along. His
hands slid over his inflamed temples, rubbing and rubbing.
Now and then he dug his fingers in his hair, scratched himself like a dog, and grunted in an only partially fulfilled satisfaction.
3
Shortly after Richard lifted his shirt, revealing the red
blotches on his back, they saw the first of the Territories trees.
It grew on the inland side of the highway, its tangle of dark branches and column of thick, irregular bark emerging from a reddish, waxy tangle of poison ivy. Knotholes in the bark
gaped, mouths or eyes, at the boys. Down in the thick mat of poison ivy a rustling, rustling of unsatisfied roots agitated the waxy leaves above them, as if a breeze blew through them.
Jack said, “Let’s cross the road,” and hoped that Richard had not seen the tree. Behind him he could still hear the thick, rubbery roots prowling through the stems of the ivy.
Is that a BOY? Could that be a BOY up there? A SPECIAL
boy perhaps?
Richard’s hands flew from his sides to his shoulders to his temples to his scalp. On his cheeks, the second wave of raised bumps resembled horror-movie makeup—he could have been
a juvenile monster from one of Lily Cavanaugh’s old films.
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Jack saw that on the backs of Richard’s hands the red bumps of the rash had begun to grow together into great red welts.
“Can you really keep going, Richard?” he asked.
Richard nodded. “Sure. For a while.” He squinted back
across the road. “That wasn’t a regular tree, was it? I never saw a tree like that before, not even in a book. It was a Territories tree, wasn’t it?”
“ ’Fraid so,” Jack said.
“That means the Territories are really close, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does.”
“So there’ll be more of those trees up ahead, won’t there?”
“If you know the answers, why ask the questions?” Jack
asked. “Oh Jason, what a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry,
Richie—I guess I was hoping that you didn’t see it. Yeah, I suppose there’ll be more of them up there. Let’s just not get too close to them.”
In any case, Jack thought, “up there” was hardly an accu-
rate way to describe where they were going: the highway slid resolutely down a steady grade, and every hundred feet
seemed to take it farther from the light. Everything seemed invaded by the Territories.
“Could you take a look at my back?” Richard asked.
“Sure.” Jack again lifted Richard’s shirt. He kept himself
from saying anything, though his instinct was to groan.
Richard’s back was now covered with raised red blotches
which seemed almost to radiate heat. “It’s a little worse,” he said.
“I thought it had to be. Only a little, huh?”
“Only a little.”
Before long, Jack thought, Richard was going to look one
hell of a lot like an alligator suitcase—Alligator Boy, son of Elephant Man.
Two of the trees grew together a short way ahead, their warty trunks twisted around each other in a way that suggested violence more than love. As Jack stared at them while they hurried past, he thought he saw the black holes in the bark
mouthing at them, blowing curses or kisses: and he knew that he heard the roots gnashing together at the base of the joined trees. (BOY! A BOY’s out there! OUR boy’s out there!)
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Though it was only mid-afternoon, the air was dark, oddly
grainy, like an old newspaper photograph. Where grass had
grown on the inland side of the highway, where Queen Anne’s lace had bloomed delicately and whitely, low unrecognizable weeds blanketed the earth. With no blossoms and few leaves, they resembled snakes coiled together and smelled faintly of diesel oil. Occasionally the sun flared through the granular murk like a dim orange fire. Jack was reminded of a photograph he had once seen of Gary, Indiana, at night—hellish
flames feeding on poison in a black, poisoned sky. From
down there the Talisman pulled at him as surely as if it were a giant with its hands on his clothes. The nexus of all possible worlds. He would take Richard into that hell—and fight for
his life with all his strength—if he had to haul him along by the ankles. And Richard must have seen this determination in Jack, for, scratching at his sides and shoulders, he toiled along beside him.
I’m going to do this, Jack said to himself, and tried to ignore how greatly he was merely trying to bolster his courage.
If I have to go through a dozen different worlds, I’m going to do it.
4
Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like mug-gers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack
glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton,
once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a leash.
5
A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.
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Point Venuti
1
Point Venuti hung low in the landscape, clinging to the sides of the cliff leading down to the ocean. Behind it, another
range of cliffs rose massively but raggedly into the dark air.
They looked like ancient elephants, hugely wrinkled. The
road led down past high wooden walls until it turned a corner by a long brown metal building that was a factory or warehouse, where it disappeared into a descending series of terraces, the dull roofs of other warehouses. From Jack’s