ting sun reflected from a wide river. Unbroken forest grew on
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the east side of this river; on the western side, the side that he was on, a long field, now partially obscured with evening
ground-mist, rolled down to the water’s edge. The ground
here was wet and squelchy. Jack was lying at the edge of the water, in the boggiest area of all. Thick weeds still grew
here—the hard frosts that would kill them were still a month or more away—and Jack had gotten entangled in them, the
way a man awakening from a nightmare may entangle himself
in the bedclothes.
He scrambled and stumbled to his feet, wet and slimed
with the fragrant mud, the straps of his pack pulling under his arms. He pushed the weedy fragments from his arms and face
with horror. He started away from the water, then looked back and saw Speedy’s bottle lying in the mud, the cap beside it.
Some of the “magic juice” had either run out or been spilled in his struggle with the malignant Territories trees. Now the bottle was no more than a third full.
He stood there a moment, his caked sneakers planted in
the oozy muck, looking out at the river. This was his world; this was the good old United States of America. He didn’t see the golden arches he had hoped for, or a skyscraper, or an
earth satellite blinking overhead in the darkening sky, but he knew where he was as well as he knew his own name. The
question was, had he ever been in that other world at all?
He looked around at the unfamiliar river, the likewise un-
familiar countryside, and listened to the distant mellow mooing of cows. He thought: You’re somewhere different. This sure isn’t Arcadia Beach anymore, Jack-O.
No, it wasn’t Arcadia Beach, but he didn’t know the area
surrounding Arcadia Beach well enough to say for sure that
he was more than four or five miles away—just enough in-
land, say, to no longer be able to smell the Atlantic. He had come back as if waking from a nightmare—was it not possible that was all it had been, the whole thing, from the carter with his load of fly-crawling meat to the living trees? A sort of waking nightmare in which sleepwalking had played a
part? It made sense. His mother was dying, and he now
thought he had known that for quite a while—the signs had
been there, and his subconscious had drawn the correct con-
clusion even while his conscious mind denied it. That would have contributed the correct atmosphere for an act of self-
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hypnosis, and that crazy wino Speedy Parker had gotten him
in gear. Sure. It all hung together.
Uncle Morgan would have loved it.
Jack shivered and swallowed hard. The swallow hurt. Not
the way a sore throat hurts, but the way an abused muscle
hurts.
He raised his left hand, the one not holding the bottle, and rubbed his palm gently against his throat. For a moment he
looked absurdly like a woman checking for dewlaps or wrin-
kles. He found a welted abrasion just above his adam’s apple.
It hadn’t bled much, but it was almost too painful to touch.
The root that had closed about his throat had done that.
“True,” Jack whispered, looking out at the orange water,
listening to the twank of the bullfrogs and the mooing, distant cows. “All true.”
9
Jack began walking up the slope of the field, setting the
river—and the east—at his back. After he had gone half a
mile, the steady rub and shift of the pack against his throbbing back (the strokes Osmond had laid on were still there, too, the shifting pack reminded him) triggered a memory. He had refused Speedy’s enormous sandwich, but hadn’t Speedy
slipped the remains into his pack anyway, while Jack was examining the guitar-pick?
His stomach pounced on the idea.
Jack unshipped the pack then and there, standing in a cur-
dle of ground-mist beneath the evening star. He unbuckled
one of the flaps, and there was the sandwich, not just a piece or a half, but the whole thing, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Jack’s eyes filled with a warmth of tears and he wished that Speedy were here so he could hug him.
Ten minutes ago you were calling him a crazy old wino.
His face flamed at that, but his shame didn’t stop him from gobbling the sandwich in half a dozen big bites. He rebuckled his pack and reshouldered it. He went on, feeling better—
with that whistling hole in his gut stopped up for the time being, Jack felt himself again.
Not long after, lights twinkled up out of the growing dark-
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ness. A farmhouse. A dog began to bark—the heavy bark of a
really big fellow—and Jack froze for a moment.
Inside, he thought. Or chained up. I hope.
He bore to the right, and after a while the dog stopped
barking. Keeping the lights of the farmhouse as a guide, Jack soon came out on a narrow blacktop road. He stood looking
from right to left, having no idea which way to go.
Well, folks, here’s Jack Sawyer, halfway between hoot and holler, wet through to the skin and sneakers packed with mud.
Way to go, Jack!
The loneliness and homesickness rose in him again. Jack
fought them off. He put a drop of spit on his left index finger, then spanked the drop sharply. The larger of the two halves flew off to the right—or so it seemed to Jack—and so he
turned that way and began to walk. Forty minutes later,
drooping with weariness (and hungry again, which was some-
how worse), he saw a gravel-pit with a shed of some sort
standing beyond a chained-off access road.
Jack ducked under the chain and went to the shed. The
door was padlocked shut, but he saw that the earth had eroded under one side of the small outbuilding. It was the work of a minute to remove his pack, wriggle under the shed’s side, and then pull the pack in after him. The lock on the door actually made him feel safer.
He looked around and saw that he was in with some very
old tools—this place hadn’t been used in a long time, apparently, and that suited Jack just fine. He stripped to the skin, not liking the feel of his clammy, muddy clothes. He felt the coin Captain Farren had given him in one of his pants pockets, resting there like a giant amid his little bit of more ordinary change. Jack took it out and saw that Farren’s coin, with the Queen’s head on one side and the winged lion on the
other—had become a 1921 silver dollar. He looked fixedly at the profile of Lady Liberty on the cartwheel for some time, and then slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans.
He rooted out fresh clothes, thinking he would put the
dirty ones in his pack in the morning—they would be dry
then—and perhaps clean them along the way, maybe in a
Laundromat, maybe just in a handy stream.
While searching for socks, his hand encountered some-
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thing slim and hard. Jack pulled it out and saw it was his toothbrush. At once, images of home and safety and rationality—all the things a toothbrush could represent—rose up and overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could beat these emo-
tions down or turn them aside this time. A toothbrush was a thing meant to be seen in a well-lighted bathroom, a thing to be used with cotton pajamas on the body and warm slippers on
the feet. It was nothing to come upon in the bottom of your knapsack in a cold, dark toolshed on the edge of a gravel-pit in a deserted rural town whose name you did not even know.
Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his out-
cast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did
not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.
Jack fell asleep before the sobs had entirely run their
course. He slept curled around his pack, naked except for
clean underpants and socks. The tears had cut clean courses down his dirty cheeks, and he held his toothbrush loosely in one hand.