Black House (Page 157)

Sophie.

21

"SOPHIE."

Still holding her hand, he gets to his feet, pulling her up with him. His legs are trembling. His eyes feel hot and too large for their sockets. He is terrified and exalted in equal, perfectly equal, measure. His heart is hammering, but oh the beats are sweet. The second time he tries, he manages to say her name a little louder, but there’s still not much to his voice, and his lips are so numb they might have been rubbed with ice. He sounds like a man just coming back from a hard punch in the gut.

"Yes."

"Sophie."

"Yes."

"Sophie."

"Yes."

There’s something weirdly familiar about this, him saying the name over and over and her giving back that simple affirmation. Familiar and funny. And it comes to him: there’s a scene almost identical to this in The Terror of Deadwood Gulch, after one of the Lazy 8 Saloon’s patrons has knocked Bill Towns unconscious with a whiskey bottle. Lily, in her role as sweet Nancy O’Neal, tosses a bucket of water in his face, and when he sits up, they —

"This is funny," Jack says. "It’s a good bit. We should be laughing."

With the slightest of smiles, Sophie says, "Yes."

"Laughing our fool heads off."

"Yes."

"Our tarnal heads off."

"Yes."

"I’m not speaking English anymore, am I?"

"No."

He sees two things in her blue eyes. The first is that she doesn’t know the word English. The second is that she knows exactly what he means.

"Sophie."

"Yes."

"Sophie-Sophie-Sophie."

Trying to get the reality of it. Trying to pound it home like a nail. A smile lights her face and enriches her mouth. Jack thinks of how it would be to kiss that mouth, and his knees feel weak. All at once he is fourteen again, and wondering if he dares give his date a peck good-night after he walks her home.

"Yes-yes-yes," she says, the smile strengthening. And then: "Have you got it yet? Do you understand that you’re here and how you got here?"

Above and around him, billows of gauzy white cloth flap and sigh like living breath. Half a dozen conflicting drafts gently touch his face and make him aware that he carried a coat of sweat from the other world, and that it stinks. He arms it off his brow and cheeks in quick gestures, not wanting to lose sight of her for longer than a moment at a time.

They are in a tent of some kind. It’s huge — many-chambered — and Jack thinks briefly of the pavilion in which the Queen of the Territories, his mother’s Twinner, lay dying. That place had been rich with many colors, filled with many rooms, redolent of incense and sorrow (for the Queen’s death had seemed inevitable, sure — only a matter of time). This one is ramshackle and ragged. The walls and the ceiling are full of holes, and where the white material remains whole, it’s so thin that Jack can actually see the slope of land outside, and the trees that dress it. Rags flutter from the edges of some of the holes when the wind blows. Directly over his head he can see a shadowy maroon shape. Some sort of cross.

"Jack, do you understand how you — "

"Yes. I flipped." Although that isn’t the word that comes out of his mouth. The literal meaning of the word that comes out seems to be horizon road. "And it seems that I sucked a fair number of Spiegleman’s accessories with me." He bends and picks up a flat stone with a flower carved on it. "I believe that in my world, this was a Georgia O’Keeffe print. And that — " He points to a blackened, fireless torch leaning against one of the pavilion’s fragile walls. "I think that was a — " But there are no words for it in this world, and what comes out of his mouth sounds as ugly as a curse in German: " — halogen lamp."

She frowns. "Hal-do-jen . . . limp? Lemp?"

He feels his numb lips rise in a little grin. "Never mind."

"But you are all right."

He understands that she needs him to be all right, and so he’ll say that he is, but he’s not. He is sick and glad to be sick. He is one lovestruck daddy, and wouldn’t have it any other way. If you discount how he felt about his mother — a very different kind of love, despite what the Freudians might think — it’s the first time for him. Oh, he certainly thought he had been in and out of love, but that was before today. Before the cool blue of her eyes, her smile, and even the way the shadows thrown by the decaying tent fleet across her face like schools of fish. At this moment he would try to fly off a mountain for her if she asked, or walk through a forest fire, or bring her polar ice to cool her tea, and those things do not constitute being all right.

But she needs him to be.

Tyler needs him to be.

I am a coppiceman, he thinks. At first the concept seems insubstantial compared to her beauty — to her simple reality — but then it begins to take hold. As it always has. What else brought him here, after all? Brought him against his will and all his best intentions?

"Jack?"

"Yes, I’m all right. I’ve flipped before." But never into the presence of such beauty, he thinks. That’s the problem. You’re the problem, my lady.

"Yes. To come and go is your talent. One of your talents. So I have been told."

"By whom?"

"Shortly," she says. "Shortly. There’s a great deal to do, and yet I think I need a moment. You . . . rather take my breath away."

Jack is fiercely glad to know it. He sees he is still holding her hand, and he kisses it, as Judy kissed his hands in the world on the other side of the wall from this one, and when he does, he sees the fine mesh of bandage on the tips of three of her fingers. He wishes he dared to take her in his arms, but she daunts him: her beauty and her presence. She is slightly taller than Judy — a matter of two inches, surely no more — and her hair is lighter, the golden shade of unrefined honey spilling from a broken comb. She is wearing a simple cotton robe, white trimmed with a blue that matches her eyes. The narrow V-neck frames her throat. The hem falls to just below her knees. Her legs are bare but she’s wearing a silver anklet on one of them, so slim it’s almost invisible. She is fuller-breasted than Judy, her hips a bit wider. Sisters, you might think, except that they have the same spray of freckles across the nose and the same white line of scar across the back of the left hand. Different mishaps caused that scar, Jack has no doubt, but he also has no doubt that those mishaps occurred at the same hour of the same day.