Albert was delirious with ecstasy. For the first time in his life he felt that he might survive his mother’s love.
7
They all looked around when the bells began to ring. Some
laughed, some frowned, a few burst into tears. A pair of dogs howled from somewhere, and that was passing strange because no dogs were allowed on campus.
The tune the bells rang was not in the computerized sched-
ule of tunes—the disgruntled head custodian later verified it.
A campus wag suggested in that week’s issue of the school
paper that some eager beaver had programmed the tune with
Christmas vacation in mind.
It had been “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
8
Although she had believed herself far too old to catch pregnant, no blood had come to the mother of Jack Sawyer’s Wolf at the time of the Change some twelve months ago. Three
months ago she had given birth to triplets—two litter-sisters and one litter-brother. Her labor had been hard, and the fore-knowledge that one of her older children was about to die had been upon her. That child, she knew, had gone into the Other Place to protect the herd, and he would die in that Other
Place, and she would never see him anymore. This was very
hard, and she had wept in more than the pain of her delivery.
Yet now, as she slept with her new young beneath a full
moon, all of them safely away from the herd for the time being, she rolled over with a smile on her face and pulled the newest litter-brother to her and began to lick him. Still sleep-
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ing himself, the Wolfling put his arms around his mother’s
shaggy neck and pressed his cheek against her downy breast, and now they both smiled; in her alien sleep a human thought arose: God pounds his nails well and true. And the moonlight of that lovely world where all smells were good shone down
on the two of them as they slept in each other’s arms with the litter-sisters nearby.
9
In the town of Goslin, Ohio (not far from Amanda, and some
thirty miles south of Columbus), a man named Buddy Parkins
was shovelling chickenshit in a henhouse at dusk. A cheese-
cloth mask was tied over his mouth and nose to keep the
choking white cloud of powdered guano he was raising from
getting up his nose and into his mouth. The air reeked of ammonia. The stink had given him a headache. He also had a
backache, because he was tall and the henhouse wasn’t. All
things considered, he would have to say that this was one
bitch-kitty of a job. He had three sons, and every damned one of them seemed to be unavailable when the henhouse needed
to be swamped out. Only thing to be said about it was that he was almost done, and—
The kid! Jesus Christ! That kid!
He suddenly remembered the boy who had called himself
Lewis Farren with total clarity and a stunned kind of love.
The boy who had claimed to be going to his aunt, Helen
Vaughan, in the town of Buckeye Lake; the boy who had
turned to Buddy when Buddy had asked him if he was run-
ning away and had in that turning, revealed a face filled with honest goodness and an unexpected, amazing beauty—a
beauty that had made Buddy think of rainbows glimpsed at
the end of storms, and sunsets at the end of days that have groaned and sweated with work that has been well done and
not scamped.
He straightened up with a gasp and bonked his head on the
henhouse beams hard enough to make his eyes water . . . but he was grinning crazily all the same. Oh my God, that boy is THERE, he’s THERE, Buddy Parkins thought, and although he had no idea of where “there” was, he was suddenly overtaken by a sweet, violent feeling of absolute adventure; never,
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since reading Treasure Island at the age of twelve and cupping a girl’s breast in his hand for the first time at fourteen, had he felt so staggered, so excited, so full of warm joy. He began to laugh. He dropped his shovel, and while the hens
stared at him with stupid amazement, Buddy Parkins danced
a shuffling jig in the chickenshit, laughing behind his mask and snapping his fingers.
“He’s there!” Buddy Parkins yelled to the chickens, laugh-
ing. “By diddly-damn, he’s there, he made it after all, he’s there and he’s got it! ”
Later, he almost thought—almost, but never quite—that he
must have somehow gotten high on the stench of the chicken-
dust. That wasn’t all, dammit, that wasn’t. He had had some kind of revelation, but he could no longer remember what it had been . . . he supposed it was like that British poet some high-school English teacher had told them about: the guy had taken a big dose of opium and had started to write some poems about a make-believe Chink whorehouse while he was
stoned . . . except when he came down to earth again he
couldn’t finish it.
Like that, he thought, but somehow he knew it wasn’t; and although he couldn’t remember exactly what had caused the
joy, he, like Donny Keegan, never forgot the way the joy had come, all deliciously unbidden—he never forgot that sweet,
violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of
having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.
10
There’s an old Bobby Darin song which goes: “And the
ground coughs up some roots/wearing denim shirts and
boots,/haul em away . . . haul em away.” This was a song the children in the area of Cayuga, Indiana, could have related to enthusiastically, if it hadn’t been popular quite a bit before their time. The Sunlight Home had been empty for only a little more than a week, and already it had gotten a reputation with the local kids as a haunted house. Considering the grisly remains the payloaders had found near the rock wall at the
back of Far Field, this was not surprising. The local Realtor’s FOR SALE sign looked as if it had been standing on the lawn
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for a year instead of just nine days, and the Realtor had already dropped the price once and was thinking about doing it again.
As it happened, he would not have to. As the first snow be-
gan to spit down from the leaden skies over Cayuga (and as
Jack Sawyer was touching the Talisman some two thousand
miles away), the LP tanks behind the kitchen exploded. A
workman from Eastern Indiana Gas and Electric had come
the week before and had sucked all the gas back into his
truck, and he would have sworn you could have crawled right inside one of those tanks and lit up a cigarette, but they exploded anyway—they exploded at the exact moment the win-
dows of the Oatley Tap were exploding out into the street
(along with a number of patrons wearing denim shirts and
boots . . . and Elmira rescue units hauled em away).
The Sunlight Home burned to the ground in almost no
time at all.
Can you gimme hallelujah?
11
In all worlds, something shifted and settled into a slightly new position like a great beast . . . but in Point Venuti the beast was in the earth; it had been awakened and was roaring. It did not go to sleep for the next seventy-nine seconds, according to the Institute of Seismology at CalTech.
The earthquake had begun.
44
The Earthquake
1
It was some time before Jack became aware that the Agin-
court was shaking itself to pieces around him, and this was not surprising. He was transported with wonder. In one sense he was not in the Agincourt at all, not in Point Venuti, not in
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Mendocino County, not in California, not in the American
Territories, not in those other Territories; but he was in them, and in an infinite number of other worlds as well, and all at the same time. Nor was he simply in one place in all those
worlds; he was in them everywhere because he was those worlds. The Talisman, it seemed, was much more than even
his father had believed. It was not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves—the worlds, and the
spaces between those worlds.
Here was enough transcendentalism to drive even a cave-
dwelling Tibetan holy man insane. Jack Sawyer was every-
where; Jack Sawyer was everything. A blade of grass on a
world fifty thousand worlds down the chain from earth died of thirst on an inconsequential plain somewhere in the center of a continent which roughly corresponded in position to Africa; Jack died with that blade of grass. In another world, dragons were copulating in the center of a cloud high above the planet, and the fiery breath of their ecstasy mixed with the cold air and precipitated rain and floods on the ground below. Jack