Black House (Page 164)

Sophie looks at him, flushes, shakes her head, looks down. "It’s what she says, sometimes. Judy. It’s how I hear her, sometimes."

Parkus seizes one of the charred greensticks and draws in the rocky dust beside the figure-eight shape. "Fort here. Marauding Indians here, led by their merciless, evil — and most likely insane — chief. But over here — " Off to the left, he draws a harsh arrow in the dirt. It points at the rudimentary shapes indicating the fort and the besieging Indians. "What always arrives at the last moment in all the best Lily Cavanaugh Westerns?"

"The cavalry," Jack says. "That’s us, I suppose."

"No," Parkus says. His tone is patient, but Jack suspects it is costing him a great effort to maintain that tone. "The cavalry is Roland of Gilead and his new gunslingers. Or so those of us who want the Tower to stand — or to fall in its own time — dare hope. The Crimson King hopes to hold Roland back, and to finish the job of destroying the Tower while he and his band are still at a distance. That means gathering all the Breakers he can, especially the telekinetics."

"Is Tyler Marshall — "

"Stop interrupting. This is difficult enough without that."

"You used to be a hell of a lot cheerier, Speedy," Jack says reproachfully. For a moment he thinks his old friend is going to give him another tongue-lashing — or perhaps even lose his temper completely and turn him into a frog — but Parkus relaxes a little, and utters a laugh.

Sophie looks up, relieved, and gives Jack’s hand a squeeze.

"Oh, well, maybe you’re right to yank on my cord a little," Parkus says. "Gettin’ all wound up won’t help anything, will it?" He touches the big iron on his hip. "I wouldn’t be surprised if wearin’ this thing has given me a few delusions of grandeur."

"It’s a step or two up from amusement-park janitor," Jack allows.

"In both the Bible — your world, Jack — and the Book of Good Farming — yours, Sophie dear — there’s a scripture that goes something like ‘For in my kingdom there are many mansions.’ Well, in the Court of the Crimson King there are many monsters."

Jack hears a short, hard laugh bolt out of his mouth. His old friend has made a typically tasteless policeman’s joke, it seems.

"They are the King’s courtiers . . . his knights-errant. They have all sorts of tasks, I imagine, but in these last years their chief job has been to find talented Breakers. The more talented the Breaker, the greater the reward."

"They’re headhunters," Jack murmurs, and doesn’t realize the resonance of the term until it’s out of his mouth. He has used it in the business sense, but of course there is another, more literal meaning. Headhunters are cannibals.

"Yes," Parkus agrees. "And they have mortal subcontractors, who work for . . . one doesn’t like to say for the joy of it, but what else could we call it?"

Jack has a nightmarish vision then: a cartoon Albert Fish standing on a New York sidewalk with a sign reading WILL WORK FOR FOOD. He tightens his arm around Sophie. Her blue eyes turn to him, and he looks into them gladly. They soothe him.

"How many Breakers did Albert Fish send his pal Mr. Monday?" Jack wants to know. "Two? Four? A dozen? And do they die off, at least, so the abbalah has to replace them?"

"They don’t," Parkus replies gravely. "They are kept in a place — a basement, yes, or a cavern — where there is essentially no time."

"Purgatory. Christ."

"And it doesn’t matter. Albert Fish is long gone. Mr. Monday is now Mr. Munshun. The deal Mr. Munshun has with your killer is a simple one: this Burnside can kill and eat all the children he wants, as long as they are untalented children. If he should find any who are talented — any Breakers — they are to be turned over to Mr. Munshun at once."

"Who will take them to the abbalah," Sophie murmurs.

"That’s right," Parkus says.

Jack feels that he’s back on relatively solid ground, and is extremely glad to be there. "Since Tyler hasn’t been killed, he must be talented."

" ‘Talented’ is hardly the word. Tyler Marshall is, potentially, one of the two most powerful Breakers in all the history of all the worlds. If I can briefly return to the analogy of the fort surrounded by Indians, then we could say that the Breakers are like fire arrows shot over the walls . . . a new kind of warfare. But Tyler Marshall is no simple fire arrow. He’s more like a guided missile.

"Or a nuclear weapon."

Sophie says, "I don’t know what that is."

"You don’t want to," Jack replies. "Believe me."

He looks down at the scribble of drawings in the dirt. Is he surprised that Tyler should be so powerful? No, not really. Not after experiencing the aura of strength surrounding the boy’s mother. Not after meeting Judy’s Twinner, whose plain dress and manner can’t conceal a character that strikes him as almost regal. She’s beautiful, but he senses that beauty is one of the least important things about her.

"Jack?" Parkus asks him. "You all right?" There’s no time to be anythin’ else, his tone suggests.

"Give me a minute," Jack says.

"We don’t have much t — "

"That has been made perfectly clear to me," Jack says, biting off the words, and he feels Sophie shift in surprise at his tone of voice. "Now give me a minute. Let me do my job."

From beneath a ruffle of green feathers, one of the parrot’s heads mutters: "God loves the poor laborer." The other replies: "Is that why he made so f**king many of them?"