Black House (Page 167)

Honeysuckle —

No, it’s her hair —

— and Jack gasps against a weight on his chest and his diaphragm, a feeling that the wind has been knocked out of him. There are hands on him, one on his shoulder, the other at the small of his back. Hair tickling his cheek. The sound of alarms. The sound of people yelling in confusion. Running footfalls that clack and echo.

"jack jack jack are you all right"

"Ask a queen for a date, get knocked into the middle of next week," he mutters. Why is it so dark? Has he been blinded? Is he ready for that intellectually rewarding and financially remunerative job as an ump at Miller Park?

"Jack!" A palm smacks his cheek. Hard.

No, not blind. His eyes are just shut. He pops them open and Judy is bending over him, her face inches from his. Without thinking, he closes his left hand in the hair at the nape of her neck, brings her face down to his, and kisses her. She exhales into his mouth — a surprised reverse gasp that inflates his lungs with her electricity — and then kisses him back. He has never been kissed with such intensity in his entire life. His hand goes to the breast beneath her nightdress, and he feels the frenzied gallop of her heart — If she were to run faster, she’d catch her feet and fall, Jack thinks — beneath its firm rise. At the same moment her hand slips inside his shirt, which has somehow come unbuttoned, and tweaks his nipple. It’s as hard and hot as the slap. As she does it, her tongue darts into his mouth in one quick plunge, there and gone, like a bee into a flower. He tightens his grip on the nape of her neck and God knows what would have happened next, but at that moment something falls over in the corridor with a huge crash of glass and someone screams. The voice is high and almost sexless with panic, but Jack believes it’s Ethan Evans, the sullen young person from the hall. "Get back here! Stop running, goldarnit!" Of course it’s Ethan; only a graduate of Mount Hebron Lutheran Sunday school would use goldarnit, even in extremis.

Jack pulls away from Judy. She pulls away from him. They are on the floor. Judy’s nightdress is all the way up to her waist, exposing plain white nylon underwear. Jack’s shirt is open, and so are his pants. His shoes are still on, but on the wrong feet, from the feel of them. Nearby, the glass-topped coffee table is overturned and the journals that were on it are scattered. Some seem to have been literally blown out of their bindings.

More screams from the corridor, plus a few cackles and mad ululations. Ethan Evans continues to yell at stampeding mental patients, and now a woman is yelling as well — Head Nurse Rack, perhaps. The alarms bray on and on.

All at once a door bursts open and Wendell Green gallops into the room. Behind him is a closet with clothes scattered everywhere, the spare items of Dr. Spiegleman’s wardrobe all ahoo. In one hand Wendell’s holding his Panasonic minicorder. In the other he has several gleaming tubular objects. Jack is willing to bet they’re double-A Duracells.

Jack’s clothes have been unbuttoned (or perhaps blown open), but Wendell has fared much worse. His shirt is in tatters. His belly hangs over a pair of white boxer shorts, severely pee-stained in front. He is dragging his brown gabardine slacks by one foot. They slide across the carpet like a shed snakeskin. And although his socks are on, the left one appears to have been turned inside out.

"What did you do?" Wendell blares. "Oh you Hollywood son of a bitch, WHAT DID YOU DO TO M — "

He stops. His mouth drops open. His eyes widen. Jack notes that the reporter’s hair appears to be standing out like the quills on a porcupine.

Wendell, meanwhile, is noting Jack Sawyer and Judy Marshall, embracing on the glass- and paper-littered floor, with their clothes disarranged. They aren’t quite in flagrante delicious, but if Wendell ever saw two people on the verge, dese are dem. His mind is whirling and filled with impossible memories, his balance is shot, his stomach is chugging like a washing machine that has been overloaded with clothes and suds; he desperately needs something to hold on to. He needs news. Even better, he needs scandal. And here, lying in front of him on the floor, are both.

"RAPE!" Wendell bellows at the top of his lungs. A mad, relieved grin twists up the corners of his mouth. "SAWYER BEAT ME UP AND NOW HE’S RAPING A MENTAL PATIENT!" It doesn’t look much like rape to Wendell, in all truth, but who ever yelled CONSENSUAL SEX! at the top of his lungs and attracted any attention?

"Shut that idiot up," Judy says. She yanks down the hem of her nightgown and prepares to stand.

"Watch out," Jack says. "Broken glass everywhere."

"I’m okay," she snaps. Then, turning to Wendell with that perfect fearlessness Fred knew so well: "Shut up! I don’t know who you are, but quit that bellowing! Nobody’s being — "

Wendell backs away from Hollywood Sawyer, dragging his pants along with him. Why doesn’t someone come? he thinks. Why doesn’t someone come before he shoots me, or something? In his frenzy and near hysteria, Wendell has either not registered the alarms and general outcry or believes them to be going on inside his head, just a little more false information to go with his absurd "memories" of a black gunslinger, a beautiful woman in a robe, and Wendell Green himself crouching in the dust and eating a half-cooked bird like a caveman.

"Keep away from me, Sawyer," he says, backing up with his hands held out in front of him. "I have an extremely hungry lawyer. Caveet-emporer, you ass**le, lay one finger on me and he and I will strip you of everything you — OW! OW!"

Wendell has stepped on a piece of broken glass, Jack sees — probably from one of the prints that formerly decorated the walls and are now decorating the floor. He takes one more off-balance lurch backward, this time steps on his own trailing slacks, and goes sprawling into the leather recliner where Dr. Spiegleman presumably sits while quizzing his patients on their troubled childhoods.