Black House (Page 135)

"But I don’t ever want to find that door, because I don’t want to go there," Tansy says in a singsong voice. "Night’s Plutonian shore is a bad world. Everything’s on fire there."

"How do you know that?"

"Gorg told me," she whispers. Tansy’s gaze skitters away from him and fastens on the Scooby-Doo glass. "Gorg likes fire. But not because it makes him warm. Because it burns things up, and that makes him happy. Gorg said . . ." She shakes her head and lifts the glass to her mouth. Instead of drinking from it, she tilts the liquid toward the lip of the glass and laps at it with her tongue. Her eyes slide up to meet his again. "I think my tea is magic."

I bet you do, Jack thinks, and his heart nearly bursts for delicate lost Tansy.

"You can’t cry in here," she tells him. "You looked like you wanted to cry, but you can’t. Mrs. Normandie doesn’t allow it. You can kiss me, though. Do you want to kiss me?"

"Of course I do," he says. "But Mrs. Normandie doesn’t allow kissing, either."

"Oh, well." Tansy laps again at her drink. "We can do it later, when she leaves the room. And you can put your arms around me, like Lester Moon. And everything Lester does, you can do. With me."

"Thank you," Jack says. "Tansy, can you tell me some of the other things Gorg said?"

She cants her head and pushes her lips in and out. "He said he came here through a burning hole. With folded-back edges. And he said I was a mother, and I had to help my daughter. In the poem, her name is Lenore, but her real name is Irma. And he said . . . he said a mean old man ate her leg, but there were worse things that could have happened to my Irma."

For a couple of seconds, Tansy seems to recede into herself, to vanish behind her stationary surface. Her mouth remains half open; she does not even blink. When she returns from where she has gone, it is like watching a statue slowly come to life. Her voice is almost too soft to be heard. "I was supposed to fix that old man, fix him but good. Only you gave me my beautiful lilies, and he wasn’t the right man, was he?"

Jack feels like screaming.

"He said there were worse things," Tansy says in a whisper of disbelief. "But he didn’t say what they were. He showed me, instead. And when I saw, I thought my eyes burned up. Even though I could still see."

"What did you see?"

"A big, big place all made of fire," Tansy says. "Going way high up." She falls silent, and an internal temblor runs through her, beginning in her face and moving down and out through her fingers. "Irma isn’t there. No, she isn’t. She got dead, and a mean old man ate her leg. He sent me a letter, but I never got it. So Gorg read it to me. I don’t want to think about that letter." She sounds like a little girl describing something she has heard about thirdhand, or has invented. A thick curtain lies between Tansy and what she has seen and heard, and that curtain allows her to function. Jack again wonders what will happen to her when the lilies die.

"And now," she says, "if you’re not going to kiss me, it’s time you left. I want to be alone for a while."

Surprised by her decisiveness, Jack stands up and begins to say something polite and meaningless. Tansy waves him toward the door.

Outside, the air seems heavy with bad odors and unseen chemicals. The lilies from the Territories retained more power than Jack had imagined, enough to sweeten and purify Tansy’s air. The ground beneath Jack’s feet has been baked dry, and a parched sourness hangs in the atmosphere. Jack has nearly to force himself to breathe as he walks toward his truck, but the more he breathes, the more quickly he will readjust to the ordinary world. His world, though now it feels poisoned. He wants to do one thing only: drive up Highway 93 to Judy Marshall’s lookout point and keep on going, through Arden and into the parking lot, past the hospital doors, past the barriers of Dr. Spiegleman and Warden Jane Bond, until he can find himself once again in the life-giving presence of Judy Marshall herself.

He almost thinks he loves Judy Marshall. Maybe he does love her. He knows he needs her: Judy is his door and his key. His door, his key. Whatever that means, it is the truth. All right, the woman he needs is married to the extremely nice Fred Marshall, but he doesn’t want to marry her; in fact, he doesn’t even want to sleep with her, not exactly — he just wants to stand before her and see what happens. Something will happen, that’s for sure, but when he tries to picture it, all he sees is an explosion of tiny red feathers, hardly the image he was hoping for.

Feeling unsteady, Jack props himself on the cab of his truck with one hand while he grabs the door handle with the other. Both surfaces sear his hands, and he waves them in the air for a little while. When he gets into the cab, the seat is hot, too. He rolls down his window and, with a twinge of loss, notices that the world smells normal to him again. It smells fine. It smells like summer. Where is he going to go? That is an interesting question, he thinks, but after he gets back on the road and travels no more than a hundred feet, the low, gray wooden shape of the Sand Bar appears on his left, and without hesitating he turns into the absurdly extensive parking lot, as if he knew where he was going all along. Looking for a shady spot, Jack cruises around to the back of the building and sees the Bar’s single hint of landscaping, a broad maple tree that rises out of the asphalt at the far end of the lot. He guides the Ram into the maple’s shadow and gets out, leaving the windows cranked down. Waves of heat ripple upward from the only other two cars in the lot.

It is 11:20 A.M. He is getting hungry, too, since his breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee and a slice of toast smeared with marmalade, and that was three hours ago. Jack has the feeling that the afternoon is going to be a long one. He might as well have something to eat while he waits for the bikers.