And it’s all just a game, he thought and suddenly felt sure of it. A game, or maybe not even that—maybe it was only
practice for a game, the way that all the sweat and trembling exhaustion in the Wilshire loft that day had just been practice.
Practice for a show that only a few people would probably
care to attend and which would probably close quickly.
Joy, he thought again, standing now, his face turned up to look at the flying men in the distance, the wind spilling his hair across his forehead. His time of innocence was fast approaching its end (and, if pressed, even Jack would have reluctantly agreed that he felt such an end approaching—a boy couldn’t go on the road for long, couldn’t go through many
experiences such as the one he had gone through in Oatley,
and expect to remain an innocent), but in those moments as
he stood looking into the sky, innocence seemed to sur-
rounded him, like the young fisherman during his brief mo-
ment of epiphany in the Elizabeth Bishop poem, everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
Joy—damn, but that’s a cheerful little word.
Feeling better than he had since all of this began—and
only God knew just how long ago that had been—Jack set off along the Western Road again, his step light, his face
wreathed in that same silly, splendid grin. Every now and
then he looked back over his shoulder, and he was able to see the fliers for a very long time. The Territories air was so clear it almost seemed to magnify. And even after he could no
longer see them, that feeling of joy remained, like a rainbow inside his head.
7
When the sun began to go down, Jack realized he was putting off his return to the other world—to the American Territories—and not just because of how terrible the magic juice
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tasted, either. He was putting it off because he didn’t want to leave here.
A streamlet had flowed out of the grasslands (where small
groves of trees had again begun to appear—billowy trees with oddly flat tops, like eucalyptus trees) and had hooked a right so that it flowed along beside the road. Farther off, to the right and ahead, was a huge body of water. It was so huge, in fact, that until the last hour or so Jack had thought it was a patch of sky that somehow had a slightly bluer color than the rest. But it wasn’t sky; it was a lake. A great lake, he thought, smiling at the pun. He guessed that in the other world that would be Lake Ontario.
He felt good. He was headed in the right direction—maybe
a little too far north, but he had no doubt that the Western Road would bend away from that direction soon enough. That
feeling of almost manic joy—what he had defined as cheer-
fulness—had mellowed to a lovely sort of calm serenity, a
feeling that seemed as clear as the Territories air. Only one thing marred his good feeling, and that was the memory
(six, is six, Jack was six)
of Jerry Bledsoe. Why had his mind given him such a hard
time about coughing that memory up?
No—not the memory . . . the two memories. First me and
Richard hearing Mrs. Feeny telling her sister that the electricity came out and cooked him, that it melted his glasses all over his nose, that she heard Mr. Sloat talking on the phone and he said so . . . and then being behind the couch, not really meaning to snoop or eavesdrop, and hearing my dad say
“Everything has consequences, and some of those conse-
quences might be on the uncomfortable side.” And something surely made Jerry Bledsoe uncomfortable, didn’t it? When your glasses end up melted all over your nose, I’d say you’d been through something mildly uncomfortable, yes. . . .
Jack stopped. Stopped dead.
What are you trying to say?
You know what I’m trying to say, Jack. Your father was
gone that day—he and Morgan both. They were over here.
Where, over here? I think they were at the same spot over here where their building is in California, over in the American Territories. And they did something, or one of them did.
Maybe something big, maybe no more than tossing a rock . . .
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or burying an apple core in the dirt. And it somehow . . . it echoed over there. It echoed over there and it killed Jerry Bledsoe.
Jack shivered. Oh yes, he supposed he knew why it had
taken his mind so long to cough up the memory—the toy taxi, the murmur of the men’s voices, Dexter Gordon blowing his
horn. It hadn’t wanted to cough it up. Because
(who plays those changes daddy)
it suggested that just by being over here he could be doing something terrible in the other world. Starting World War III?
No, probably not. He hadn’t assassinated any kings lately,
young or old. But how much had it taken to set up the echo
which had fried Jerry Bledsoe? Had Uncle Morgan shot
Jerry’s Twinner (if Jerry had had one)? Tried to sell some Territories bigwig on the concept of electricity? Or had it been just some little thing . . . something no more earth-shattering than buying a chunk of meat in a rural market-town? Who
played those changes? What played those changes?
A nice flood, a sweet fire.
Suddenly Jack’s mouth was as dry as salt.
He crossed to the little stream by the side of the road,
dropped to his knees, and put a hand down to scoop up water.
His hand froze suddenly. The smooth-running stream had taken on the colors of the coming sunset . . . but these colors suddenly suffused with red, so that it seemed to be a stream of blood rather than water running beside the road. Then it went black. A moment later it had become transparent and Jack saw—
A little mewling sound escaped him as he saw Morgan’s
diligence roaring along the Western Road, pulled by its foaming baker’s dozen of black-plumed horses. Jack saw with al-
most swooning terror that the driver sitting up high in the peak-seat, his booted feet on the splashboard and a ceaselessly cracking whip in one hand, was Elroy. But it was not a hand at all that held that whip. It was some sort of hoof. Elroy was driving that nightmare coach, Elroy grinning with a
mouth that was filled with dead fangs, Elroy who just couldn’t wait to find Jack Sawyer again and split open Jack Sawyer’s belly and pull out Jack Sawyer’s intestines.
Jack knelt before the stream, eyes bulging, mouth quiver-
ing with dismay and horror. He had seen one final thing in
this vision, not a large thing, no, but by implication it was the
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most frightful thing of all: the eyes of the horses seemed to glow. They seemed to glow because they were full of light—
full of the sunset.
The diligence was travelling west along this same road . . .
and it was after him.
Crawling, not sure he could stand even if he had to, Jack
retreated from the stream and lurched clumsily out into the road. He fell flat in the dust, Speedy’s bottle and the mirror the rug salesman had given him digging into his guts. He
turned his head sideways so that his right cheek and ear were pressed tightly against the surface of the Western Road.
He could feel the steady rumble in the hard, dry earth. It
was distant . . . but coming closer.
Elroy up on top . . . Morgan inside. Morgan Sloat? Morgan
of Orris? Didn’t matter. Both were one.
He broke the hypnotic effect of that rumbling in the earth
with an effort and got up again. He took Speedy’s bottle—the same over here in the Territories as in the U.S.A.—out of his jerkin and pulled as much of the moss-plug out of the neck as he could, never minding the shower of particles into the little bit of liquid remaining—no more than a couple of inches now.
He looked nervously to his left, as if expecting to see the black diligence appear at the horizon, the sunset-filled eyes of the horses glowing like weird lanterns. Of course he saw nothing.
Horizons were closer over here in the Territories, as he had already noticed, and sounds travelled farther. Morgan’s dili-
gence had to be ten miles to the east, maybe as much as twenty.
Still right on top of me, Jack thought, and raised the bottle to his lips. A bare second before he drank from it, his mind shouted, Hey, wait a minute! Wait a minute, dummy, you want to get killed? He would look cute, wouldn’t he, standing in the middle of the Western Road and then flipping back into