sirens, so maybe nobody had gotten shot . . . but, Jack re-
membered, cold, the millhand who looked like Randolph
Scott was still down in the men’s can.
Jack went into the chilly, beer-smelling storeroom, knelt
by the kegs, and felt around for his pack. Again there was that suffocating certainty, as his fingers encountered nothing but thin air and the dirty concrete floor, that one of them—
Smokey or Lori—had seen him hide the pack and had taken
it. All the better to keep you in Oatley, my dear. Then relief, almost as suffocating as the fear, when his fingers touched the nylon. Jack donned the pack and looked longingly toward the loading door at the back of the storeroom. He would much
rather use that door—he didn’t want to go down to the fire-
door at the end of the hall. That was too close to the men’s bathroom. But if he opened the loading door, a red light
would go on at the bar. Even if Smokey was still sorting out the ruckus on the floor, Lori would see that light and tell him.
So . . .
He went to the door which gave on the back corridor. He
eased it open a crack and applied one eye. The corridor was empty. All right, that was cool. Randolph Scott had tapped a kidney and gone back to where the action was while Jack was getting his backpack. Great.
Yeah, except maybe he’s still in there. You want to meet him in the hall, Jacky? Want to watch his eyes turn yellow again?
Wait until you’re sure.
But he couldn’t do that. Because Smokey would see he
wasn’t out in the Tap, helping Lori and Gloria swab tables, or behind the bar, unloading the dishwasher. He would come
back here to finish teaching Jack what his place was in the great scheme of things. So—
So what? Get going!
Maybe he’s in there waiting for you, Jacky . . . maybe he’s going to jump out just like a big bad Jack-in-the-Box . . .
The lady or the tiger? Smokey or the millhand? Jack hesi-
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tated a moment longer in an agony of indecision. That the
man with the yellow eyes was still in the bathroom was a possibility; that Smokey would be back was a certainty.
Jack opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hall-
way. The pack on his back seemed to gain weight—an elo-
quent accusation of his planned escape to anyone who might
see it. He started down the hallway, moving grotesquely on
tiptoe in spite of the thundering music and the roar of the crowd, his heart hammering in his chest.
I was six, Jacky was six.
So what? Why did that keep coming back?
Six.
The corridor seemed longer. It was like walking on a
treadmill. The fire-door at the far end seemed to draw closer only by agonizing degrees. Sweat now coated his brow and
his upper lip. His gaze flicked steadily toward the door to the right, with the black outline of a dog on it. Beneath this outline was the word POINTERS. And at the end of the corridor, a door of fading, peeling red. The sign on the door said EMERGENCY USE ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND! In fact, the alarm bell
had been broken for two years. Lori had told him so when
Jack had hesitated about using the door to take out the trash.
Finally almost there. Directly opposite POINTERS.
He’s in there, I know he is . . . and if he jumps out I’ll scream . . . I . . . I’ll . . .
Jack put out a trembling right hand and touched the crash-
bar of the emergency door. It felt blessedly cool to his touch.
For one moment he really believed he would simply fly out of the pitcher plant and into the night . . . free.
Then the door behind him suddenly banged open, the door to SETTERS, and a hand grabbed his backpack. Jack uttered a high-pitched, despairing shriek of a trapped animal and
lunged at the emergency door, heedless of the pack and the
magic juice inside it. If the straps had broken he would have simply gone fleeing through the trashy, weedy vacant lot behind the Tap, and never mind anything else.
But the straps were tough nylon and didn’t break. The door
opened a little way, revealing a brief dark wedge of the night, and then thumped shut again. Jack was pulled into the
women’s room. He was whirled around and then thrown back-
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ward. If he had hit the wall dead on, the bottle of magic juice would undoubtedly have shattered in the pack, drenching his few clothes and good old Rand McNally with the odor of rotting grapes. Instead, he hit the room’s one wash-basin with the small of his back. The pain was giant, excruciating.
The millhand was walking toward him slowly, hitching up
his jeans with hands that had begun to twist and thicken.
“You were supposed to be gone, kid,” he said, his voice
roughening, becoming at every moment more like the snarl of an animal.
Jack began to edge to his left, his eyes never leaving the
man’s face. His eyes now seemed almost transparent, not just yellow but lighted from within . . . the eyes of a hideous Halloween jack-o’-lantern.
“But you can trust old Elroy,” the cowboy-thing said, and
now it grinned to reveal a mouthful of curving teeth, some
of them jaggedly broken off, some black with rot. Jack
screamed. “Oh, you can trust Elroy,” it said, its words now hardly discernible from a doglike growl. “He ain’t gonna hurt you too bad.
“You’ll be all right,” it growled, moving toward Jack,
“you’ll be all right, oh yeah, you’ll . . .” It continued to talk, but Jack could no longer tell what it was saying. Now it was only snarling.
Jack’s foot hit the tall wastecan by the door. As the cowboy thing reached for him with its hooflike hands, Jack grabbed the can and threw it. The can bounced off the Elroy-thing’s chest. Jack tore open the bathroom door and lunged to the
left, toward the emergency door. He slammed into the crash-
bar, aware that Elroy was right behind him. He lurched into the dark behind the Oatley Tap.
There was a colony of overloaded garbage cans to the right
of the door. Jack blindly swept three of them behind him,
heard them clash and rattle—and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.
He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was
even a moment to realize— Oh dear Jesus a tail it’s got something like a tail—that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.
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Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back,
trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion—
—Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God
please—
—of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and
flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out
what it was saying. “Now I’m not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I’m gonna kill you . . . after.”
Hearing it with his ears? Or in his head?
It didn’t matter. The space between this world and that had shrunk from a universe to a mere membrane.
The Elroy-thing snarled and came toward him, now un-
steady and awkward on its rear feet, its clothes bulging in all the wrong places, its tongue swinging from its fanged mouth.
Here was the vacant lot behind Smokey Updike’s Oatley Tap,
yes, here it was at last, choked with weeds and blown trash—
a rusty bedspring here, the grille of a 1957 Ford over there, and a ghastly sickle moon like a bent bone in the sky overhead, turning every shard of broken glass into a dead and staring eye, and this hadn’t begun in New Hampshire, had it? No.
It hadn’t begun when his mother got sick, or with the appearance of Lester Parker. It had begun when—
Jacky was six. When we all lived in California and no one lived anywhere else and Jacky was—
He fumbled at the straps of his pack.