Golden State Room, directly opposite the Forty-Niner Room.
Five paces farther up toward the double doors with the
painted birds was the Mendocino Room (hacked into a lower
panel of the mahogany door: YOUR MOTHER DIED SCREAMING!).
Far down the corridor—impossibly far!—was watery light.
The lobby.
Clank.
Jack wheeled around fast, and caught a glimmer of move-
ment just beyond one of the peaked doorways in the stone
throat of this corridor—
(?stones?) (?peaked doorways?)
Jack blinked uneasily. The corridor was lined with dark
mahogany panelling which had now begun to rot in the
oceanside damp. No stone. And the doors giving on the
Golden State Room and the Forty-Niner Room and the Men-
docino Room were just doors, sensibly rectangular and with
no peaks. Yet for one moment he had seemed to see openings
like modified cathedral arches. Filling these openings had
been iron drop-gates—the sort that could be raised or lowered by turning a windlass. Drop-gates with hungry-looking iron
spikes at the bottom. When the gate was lowered to block the entrance, the spikes fitted neatly into holes in the floor.
No stone archways, Jack-O. See for yourself. Just door-
ways. You saw drop-gates like that in the Tower of London, on that tour you went on with Mom and Uncle Tommy, three
years ago. You’re just freaking a little, that’s all . . .
But the feeling in the pit of his stomach was unmistakable.
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They were there, all right. I flipped—for just a second I was in the Territories.
Clank.
Jack whirled back the other way, sweat breaking out on his
cheeks and forehead, hair beginning to stiffen on the nape of his neck.
He saw it again—a flash of something metallic in the shad-
ows of one of those rooms. He saw huge stones as black as
sin, their rough surfaces splotched with green moss. Nasty, soft-looking albino bugs squirmed in and out of the large
pores of the decaying mortar between the stones. Empty
sconces stood at fifteen- or twenty-foot intervals. The torches that the sconces had once held were long since gone.
Clank.
This time he didn’t even blink. The world sideslipped be-
fore his eyes, wavering like an object seen through clear running water. The walls were blackish mahogany again instead
of stone blocks. The doors were doors and not latticed-iron drop-gates. The two worlds, which had been separated by a
membrane as thin as a lady’s silk stocking, had now actually begun to overlap.
And, Jack realized dimly, his Jason-side had begun to over-
lap with his Jack-side—some third being which was an amal-
gamation of both was emerging.
I don’t know what that combination is, exactly, but I hope it’s strong—because there are things behind those doors . . .
behind all of them.
Jack began to sidle up the hallway again toward the lobby.
Clank.
This time the worlds didn’t change; solid doors remained
solid doors and he saw no movement.
Right behind there, though. Right behind—
Now he heard something behind the painted double
doors—written in the sky above the marsh scene were the
words HERON BAR. It was the sound of some large rusty ma-
chine that had been set in motion. Jack swung toward
(Jason swung toward)
toward that opening door
(that rising drop-gate)
his hand plunging into
(the poke)
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the pocket
(he wore on the belt of his jerkin)
of his jeans and closing around the guitar-pick Speedy had
given him so long ago.
(and closing arouind the shark’s tooth)
He waited to see what would come out of the Heron Bar,
and the walls of the hotel whispered dimly: We have ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. You should have left while there was still time . . .
. . .because now, little boy, your time is up.
5
Clank . . . THUD!
Clank . . . THUD!
Clank . . . THUD!
The noise was large and clumsy and metallic. There was
something relentless and inhuman about it which frightened
Jack more badly than a more human sound would have done.
It moved and shuffled its way forward with its own slow
idiot rhythm:
Clank . . . THUD!
Clank . . . THUD!
There was a long pause. Jack waited, pressed against the
far wall a few feet to the right of the painted doors, his nerves so tightly wound they seemed to hum. Nothing at all happened for a long time. Jack began to hope the clanker had
fallen back through some interdimensional trapdoor and into the world it had come from. He became aware that his back
ached from his artificially still and tautly erect posture. He slumped.
Then there was a splintering crash, and a huge mailed fist
with blunt two-inch spikes sprouting from the knuckles
slammed through the peeling blue sky on the door. Jack
shrank back against the wall again, gaping.
And, helplessly, flipped into the Territories.
6
Standing on the other side of the drop-gate was a figure in blackish, rusty armor. Its cylindrical helmet was broken only
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by a black horizontal eye-slit no more than an inch wide. The helmet was topped by a frowzy red plume—white bugs
squirmed in and out of it. They were the same sort, Jason saw, as those which had come out of the walls first in Albert the Blob’s room and then all over Thayer School. The helmet
ended in a coif of mail which draped the rusty knight’s shoulders like a lady’s stole. The upper arms and forearms were
plated with heavy steel brassards. They were joined at the elbows with cubitieres. These were crusted with layers of
ancient filth, and when the knight moved, the cubitieres
squealed like the high, demanding voices of unpleasant children.
Its armored fists were crazy with spikes.
Jason stood against the stone wall, looking at it, unable in fact to look away; his mouth was dry as fever and his eyeballs seemed to be swelling rhythmically in their sockets in time to his heartbeat.
In the knight’s right hand was le martel de fer—a battle-hammer with a rusty thirty-pound forged-steel head, as mute as murder.
The drop-gate; remember that the drop-gate is between
you and it—
But then, although no human hand was near it, the wind-
lass began to turn; the iron chain, each link as long as Jack’s forearm, began to wind around the drum, and the gate began
to rise.
7
The mailed fist was withdrawn from the door, leaving a splintered hole that changed the mural at once from faded pastoral romantic to surrealist bar-sinister: it now looked as if some apocalyptic hunter, disappointed by his day in the marshes, had put a load of birdshot through the sky itself in a fit of pique. Then the head of the battle-hammer exploded through
the door in a huge blunt swipe, obliterating one of the two herons struggling to achieve liftoff. Jack raised his hand in front of his face to protect it from splinters. The martel de fer was withdrawn. There was another brief pause, almost long
enough for Jack to think about running again. Then the spiked fist tore through again. It twisted first one way and then the
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other, widening the hole, then withdrew. A second later the hammer slammed through the middle of a reed-bed and a
large chunk of the right-hand door fell to the carpet.
Jack could now see the hulking armored figure in the shad-
ows of the Heron Bar. The armor was not the same as that
worn by the figure confronting Jason in the black castle; that one wore a helmet which was nearly cylindrical, with a red
plume. This one wore a helmet that looked like the polished head of a steel bird. Horns rose from either side, sprouting from the helmet at roughly ear level. Jack saw a breastplate, a kilt of plate-mail, a hemming of chain-mail below that. The hammer was the same in both worlds, and in both worlds the
knight-Twinners dropped them at the same instant, as if in
contempt—who would need a battle-hammer to deal with
such a puny opponent as this?
Run! Jack, run!
That’s right, the hotel whispered. Run! That’s what fushing feeves are supposed to do! Run! RUN!
But he would not run. He might die, but he would not
run—because that sly, whispering voice was right. Running
was exactly what fushing feeves did.
But I’m no thief, Jack thought grimly. That thing may kill me, but I won’t run. Because I’m no thief.
“I won’t run!” Jack shouted at the blank, polished-steel bird-face. “I’m no thief! Do you hear me? I’ve come for what’s mine and I’M NO THIEF!”
A groaning scream came from the breathing-holes at the
bottom of the bird-helmet. The knight raised its spiked fists and brought them down, one on the sagging left door, one on the sagging right. The pastoral marsh-world painted there was destroyed. The hinges snapped . . . and as the doors fell toward him, Jack actually saw the one painted heron who re-