“I hope you don’t have to spend much time in Oatley, any-
how.”
Jack looked at him questioningly.
“Well, you know the place, don’t you?”
“A little. Not really.”
“Ah, it’s a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink the glass. Like that.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Jack said and got out of the car.
The salesman waved and dropped the Fairlane into drive. In
moments it was only a dark shape speeding toward the low orange sun.
3
For a mile or so the road took him through flat dull countryside—far off, Jack saw small two-story frame houses perched on the edges of fields. The fields were brown and bare, and the houses were not farmhouses. Widely separated, the houses
overlooking the desolate fields existed in a gray moveless quiet broken only by the whine of traffic moving along I-90. No
cows lowed, no horses whinnied—there were no animals, and
no farm equipment. Outside one of the little houses squatted half a dozen junked and rusting cars. These were the houses of
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men who disliked their own species so thoroughly that even
Oatley was too crowded for them. The empty fields gave them the moats they needed around their peeling frame castles.
At length he came to a crossroads. It looked like a cross-
roads in a cartoon, two narrow empty roads bisecting each
other in an absolute nowhere, then stretching on toward an-
other kind of nowhere. Jack had begun to feel insecure about his sense of direction, and he adjusted the pack on his back and moved up toward the tall rusted iron pipe supporting the black rectangles, themselves rusting, of the street names.
Should he have turned left instead of right off the exit ramp?
The sign pointing down the road running parallel to the highway read DOGTOWN ROAD. Dogtown? Jack looked down this
road and saw only endless flatness, fields full of weeds and the black streak of asphalt rolling on. His own particular
streak of asphalt was called MILL ROAD, according to the sign.
About a mile ahead it slipped into a tunnel nearly overgrown by leaning trees and an oddly pubic mat of ivy. A white sign hung in the thickness of ivy, seemingly supported by it. The words were too small to be read. Jack put his right hand in his pocket and clutched the coin Captain Farren had given him.
His stomach talked to him. He was going to need dinner
soon, so he had to move off this spot and find a town where he could earn his meals. Mill Road it was—at least he could go far enough to see what was on the other side of the tunnel.
Jack pushed himself toward it, and the dark opening in the
bank of trees enlarged with every step.
Cool and damp and smelling of brick dust and overturned
earth, the tunnel seemed to take the boy in and then tighten down around him. For a moment Jack feared that he was being led underground—no circle of light ahead showed the
tunnel’s end—but then realized that the asphalt floor was
level. TURN ON LIGHTS, the sign outside the tunnel had read.
Jack bumped into a brick wall and felt grainy powder crumble onto his hands. “Lights,” he said to himself, wishing he had one to turn on. The tunnel must, he realized, bend somewhere along its length. He had cautiously, slowly, carefully, walked straight into the wall, like a blind man with his hands extended. Jack groped his way along the wall. When the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons did something like this, he usually wound up splashed across the front of a truck.
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Something rattled busily along the floor of the tunnel, and Jack froze.
A rat, he thought. Maybe a rabbit out taking a shortcut be-
tween fields. But it had sounded bigger than that.
He heard it again, farther away in the dark, and took an-
other blind step forward. Ahead of him, just once, he heard an intake of breath. And stopped, wondering: Was that an animal? Jack held his fingertips against the damp brick wall, waiting for the exhalation. It had not sounded like an
animal—certainly no rat or rabbit inhaled so deeply. He crept a few inches forward, almost unwilling to admit to himself
that whatever was up there had frightened him.
Jack froze again, hearing a quiet little sound like a raspy chuckle come out of the blackness before him. In the next
second a familiar but unidentifiable smell, coarse, strong, and musky, drifted toward him out of the tunnel.
Jack looked back over his shoulder. The entrance was now
only half-visible, half-obscured by the curve of the wall, a long way off and looking about the size of a rabbit-hole.
“What’s in here?” he called out. “Hey! Anything in here
with me? Anybody?”
He thought he heard something whisper deeper into the
tunnel.
He was not in the Territories, he reminded himself—at the
worst he might have startled some imbecilic dog who had
come into the cool dark for a nap. In that case, he’d be saving its life by waking it up before a car came along. “Hey, dog!”
he yelled. “Dog!”
And was rewarded instantly by the sound of paws trotting
through the tunnel. But were they . . . going out or coming in?
He could not tell, listening to the soft pad pad pad, whether the animal was leaving or approaching. Then it occurred to
him that maybe the noise was coming toward him from be-
hind, and he twisted his neck and looked back and saw that he had moved far enough along so that he could not see that entrance, either.
“Where are you, dog?” he said.
Something scratched the ground only a foot or two behind
him, and Jack jumped forward and struck his shoulder, hard, against the curve of the wall.
He sensed a shape—doglike, perhaps—in the darkness.
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Jack stepped forward—and was stopped short by a sense of
dislocation so great that he imagined himself back in the Territories. The tunnel was filled with that musky, acrid zoo-
odor, and whatever was coming toward him was not a dog.
A gust of cold air smelling of grease and alcohol pushed
toward him. He sensed that shape getting nearer.
Only for an instant he had a glimpse of a face hanging in
the dark, glowing as if with its own sick and fading interior light, a long, bitter face that should have been almost youthful but was not. Sweat, grease, a stink of alcohol on the breath that came from it. Jack flattened himself against the wall, raising his fists, even as the face faded back into the dark.
In the midst of his terror he thought he heard footfalls
softly, quickly covering the ground toward the tunnel’s en-
trance, and turned his face from the square foot of darkness which had spoken to him to look back. Darkness, silence. The tunnel was empty now. Jack squeezed his hands under his
armpits and gently fell back against the brick, taking the blow on his knapsack. A moment later he began to edge forward
again.
As soon as Jack was out of the tunnel, he turned around to
face it. No sounds emerged, no weird creatures slunk toward him. He took three steps forward, peered in. And then his
heart nearly stopped, because coming toward him were two
huge orange eyes. They halved the distance between them-
selves and Jack in seconds. He could not move—his feet were past the ankles in asphalt. Finally he managed to extend his hands, palm-out, in the instinctive gesture of warding-off. The eyes continued toward him, and a horn blasted. Seconds before the car burst out of the tunnel, revealing a red-faced man waving a fist, Jack threw himself out of the way.
“SHIIITHEEAAA . . .” came from the contorted mouth.
Still dazed, Jack turned and watched the car speed down-
hill toward a village that had to be Oatley.
4
Situated in a long depression in the land, Oatley spread itself out meagerly from two principal streets. One, the continua-tion of Mill Road, dipped past an immense and shabby build-
ing set in the midst of a vast parking lot—a factory, Jack
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thought—to become a strip of used-car lots (sagging pen-
nants), fast-food franchises (The Great Tits of America), a bowling alley with a huge neon sign (BOWL-A-RAMA!), grocery stores, gas stations. Past all this, Mill Road became Oatley’s five or six blocks of downtown, a strip of old two-story buildings before which cars were parked nose-in. The other
street was obviously the location of Oatley’s most important houses—large frame buildings with porches and long slanting lawns. Where these streets intersected stood a traffic light winking its red eye in the late afternoon. Another light perhaps eight blocks down changed to green before a high dingy many-windowed building that looked like a mental hospital,