pendent wills. Richard faltered, then unambiguously slowed
as he turned his head to look past Jack toward the reaching trees.
“Move!” Jack yelled, and yanked at Richard’s arm. The red
lumps felt like hot stones buried beneath the skin. He hauled away at Richard, seeing too many of the whickering roots
crawl gleefully toward them across the white line.
Jack put his arm around Richard’s waist at the same instant that a long root whistled through the air and wrapped itself around Richard’s arm.
“Jesus!” Richard yelled. “Jason! It got me! It got me!”
In horror Jack saw the tip of the root, a blind worm’s head, lift up and stare at him. It twitched almost lazily in the air, then wound itself once again around Richard’s burning arm.
Other roots came sliding toward them across the road.
Jack yanked Richard back as hard as he could, and gained
another six inches. The root around Richard’s arm grew taut.
Jack locked his arms around Richard’s waist and hauled him
mercilessly backward. Richard let out an unearthly, floating scream. For a second, Jack was afraid that Richard’s shoulder had separated, but a voice large within him said PULL! and he dug in his heels and pulled back even harder.
Then they both nearly went tumbling into a nest of crawl-
ing roots, for the single tendril around Richard’s arm had
neatly snapped. Jack stayed on his feet only by back-pedalling frantically, bending over at the waist to keep Richard, too, off the road. In this way they got past the last of the trees just as they heard the rending, snapping sounds they had heard once before. This time, Jack did not have to tell Richard to run for it.
The nearest tree came roaring up out of the ground and fell with a ground-shaking thud only three or four feet behind
Richard. The others crashed to the surface of the road behind it, waving their roots like wild hair.
“You saved my life,” Richard said. He was crying again,
more from weakness and exhaustion and shock than from
fear.
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“From now on, my old pal, you ride piggyback,” Jack said,
panting, and bent down to help Richard get on his back.
4
“I should have told you,” Richard was whispering. His face
burned against Jack’s neck, his mouth against Jack’s ear. “I don’t want you to hate me, but I wouldn’t blame you if you
did, really I wouldn’t. I know I should have told you.” He
seemed to weigh no more than the husk of himself, as if nothing were left inside him.
“About what?” Jack settled Richard squarely in the center
of his back, and again had the unsettling feeling that he was carrying only an empty sack of flesh.
“The man who came to visit my father . . . and Camp
Readiness . . . and the closet.” Richard’s hollow-seeming
body trembled against his friend’s back. “I should have told you. But I couldn’t even tell myself.” His breath, hot as his skin, blew agitatedly into Jack’s ear.
Jack thought, The Talisman is doing this to him. An instant later he corrected himself. No. The black hotel is doing this to him.
The two limousines which had been parked nose-down at
the brow of the next hill had disappeared sometime during the fight with the Territories trees, but the hotel endured, growing larger with every forward step Jack took. The skinny naked
woman, another of the hotel’s victims, still performed her mad slow dance before the bleak row of shops. The little red flares danced, winked out, danced in the murky air. It was no time at all, neither morning nor afternoon nor night—it was time’s
Blasted Lands. The Agincourt Hotel did seem made of stone,
though Jack knew it was not—the wood seemed to have calci-
fied and thickened, to have blackened of itself, from the inside out. The brass weathervanes, wolf and crow and snake and circular cryptic designs Jack did not recognize, swung about to contradictory winds. Several of the windows flashed a warning at Jack; but that might have been merely a reflection of one of the red flares. He still could not see the bottom of the hill and the Agincourt’s ground floor, and would not be able to see them until he had gone past the bookstore, tea shop, and other stores that had escaped the fire. Where was Morgan Sloat?
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609
Where, for that matter, was the whole god-forsaken recep-
tion committee? Jack tightened his grip on Richard’s sticklike legs, hearing the Talisman call him again, and felt a tougher, stronger being rear up within him.
“Don’t hate me because I couldn’t . . .” Richard said, his
voice trailing off at the end.
JASON, COME NOW COME NOW!
Jack gripped Richard’s thin legs and walked down past the
burned-over area where so many houses had once stood. The
Territories trees which used these wasted blocks as their own private lunch counter whispered and stirred, but they were too far away to trouble Jack.
The woman in the midst of the empty littered street slowly
swivelled around as she became aware of the boys’ progress
down the hill. She was in the midst of a complex exercise, but all suggestion of Tai Chi Chuan left her when she dropped her arms and one outstretched leg and stood stockstill beside a dead dog, watching burdened Jack come down the hill toward
her. For a moment she seemed to be a mirage, too hallucina-
tory to be real, this starved woman with her stick-out hair and face the same brilliant orange; then she awkwardly bolted
across the street and into one of the shops without a name.
Jack grinned, without knowing he was going to do it—the
sense of triumph and of something he could only describe as armored virtue took him so much by surprise.
“Can you really make it there?” Richard gasped, and Jack
said, “Right now I can do anything.”
He could have carried Richard all the way back to Illinois
if the great singing object imprisoned in the hotel had ordered him to do it. Again Jack felt that sense of coming resolution, and thought, It’s so dark here because all those worlds are crowded together, jammed up like a triple exposure on film.
5
He sensed the people of Point Venuti before he saw them. They would not attack him—Jack had known that with absolute certainty ever since the madwoman had fled into one of the shops.
They were watching him. From beneath porches, through lat-
tices, from the backs of empty rooms, they peered out at him, whether with fear, rage, or frustration he could not tell.
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Richard had fallen asleep or passed out on his back, and
was breathing in heated harsh little puffs.
Jack skirted the body of the dog and glanced sideways into
the hole where the window of the Dangerous Planet Bookstore should have been. At first he saw only the messy macaroni of used hypodermic needles which covered the floor, atop and beside the splayed books spread here and there. On the walls, the tall shelves stood empty as yawns. Then a convulsive movement in the dim back of the store caught his eye, and two pale figures coalesced out of the gloom. Both had beards and long naked bodies in which the tendons stood out like cords. The whites of four mad eyes flashed at him. One of the naked men had only one hand and was grinning. His erection waved before him, a thick pale club. He couldn’t have seen that, he told himself. Where was the man’s other hand? He glanced back.
Now he saw only a tangle of skinny white limbs.
Jack did not look into the windows of any of the other
shops, but eyes tracked him as he passed.
Soon he was walking past the tiny two-story houses.
YOU’RE DEAD NOW splayed itself on a side wall. He would not look in the windows, he promised himself, he could not.
Orange faces topped with orange hair wagged through a
downstairs window.
“Baby,” a woman whispered from the next house. “Sweet
baby Jason.” This time he did look. You’re dead now. She stood just on the other side of a broken little window, twid-dling the chains that had been inserted in her nipples, smiling at him lopsidedly. Jack stared at her vacant eyes, and the
woman dropped her hands and hesitantly backed away from
the window. The length of chain drooped between her breasts.
Eyes watched Jack from the backs of dark rooms, between
lattices, from crawl spaces beneath porches.
The hotel loomed before him, but no longer straight ahead.
The road must have delicately angled, for now the Agincourt stood decidedly off to his left. And did it, in fact, actually loom as commandingly as it had? His Jason-side, or Jason himself, blazed up within Jack, and saw that the black hotel, though still very large, was nothing like mountainous.