Black House (Page 168)

La Riviere’s premier muckraker stares at the approaching Nean-derthal with wide, horrified eyes, then throws the minicorder at him. Jack sees that it’s covered with scratches. He bats it away.

"RAPE!" Wendell squeals. "HE’S RAPING ONE OF THE LOONIES! HE’S — "

Jack pops him on the point of the chin, pulling the punch just a little at the last moment, delivering it with almost scientific force. Wendell flops back in Dr. Spiegleman’s recliner, eyes rolling up, feet twitching as if to some tasty beat that only the semiconscious can truly appreciate.

"The Mad Hungarian couldn’t have done better," Jack murmurs. It occurs to him that Wendell ought to treat himself to a complete neurological workup in the not too distant future. His head has put in a hard couple of days.

The door to the hall bursts open. Jack steps in front of the recliner to hide Wendell, stuffing his shirt into his pants (at some point he’s zipped his fly, thank God). A candy striper pokes her fluffy head into Dr. Spiegleman’s office. Although she’s probably eighteen, her panic makes her look about twelve.

"Who’s yelling in here?" she asks. "Who’s hurt?"

Jack has no idea what to say, but Judy manages like a pro. "It was a patient," she says. "Mr. Lackley, I think. He came in, yelled that we were all going to be raped, and then ran out again."

"You have to leave at once," the candy striper tells them. "Don’t listen to that idiot Ethan. And don’t use the elevator. We think it was an earthquake."

"Right away," Jack says crisply, and although he doesn’t move, it’s good enough for the candy striper; she heads out. Judy crosses quickly to the door. It closes but won’t latch. The frame has been subtly twisted out of true.

There was a clock on the wall. Jack looks toward it, but it’s fallen face-down to the floor. He goes to Judy and takes her by the arms. "How long was I over there?"

"Not long," she says, "but what an exit you made! Ka-pow! Did you get anything?" Her eyes plead with him.

"Enough to know I have to go back to French Landing right away," he tells her. Enough to know that I love you — that I’ll always love you, in this world or any other.

"Tyler . . . is he alive?" She reverses his grip so she is holding him. Sophie did exactly the same thing in Faraway, Jack remembers. "Is my son alive?"

"Yes. And I’m going to get him for you."

His eye happens on Spiegleman’s desk, which has danced its way into the room and stands with all its drawers open. He sees something interesting in one of those drawers and hurries across the carpet, crunching on broken glass and kicking aside one of the prints.

In the top drawer to the left of the desk’s kneehole is a tape recorder, considerably bigger than Wendell Green’s trusty Panasonic, and a torn piece of brown wrapping paper. Jack snatches up the paper first. Scrawled across the front in draggling letters he’s seen at both Ed’s Eats and on his own front porch is this:

Deliver to JUDY MARSHALL

also known as SOPHIE

There are what appear to be stamps in the upper corner of the torn sheet. Jack doesn’t need to examine them closely to know that they are really cut from sugar packets, and that they were affixed by a dangerous old dodderer named Charles Burnside. But the Fisherman’s identity no longer matters much, and Speedy knew it. Neither does his location, because Jack has an idea Chummy Burnside can flip to a new one pretty much at will.

But he can’t take the real doorway with him. The doorway to the furnace-lands, to Mr. Munshun, to Ty. If Beezer and his pals found that — 

Jack drops the wrapping paper back into the drawer, hits the EJECT button on the tape recorder, and pops out the cassette tape inside. He sticks it in his pocket and heads for the door.

"Jack."

He looks back at her. Beyond them, fire alarms honk and blat, lunatics scream and laugh, staff runs to and fro. Their eyes meet. In the clear blue light of Judy’s regard, Jack can almost touch that other world with its sweet smells and strange constellations.

"Is it wonderful over there? As wonderful as in my dreams?"

"It’s wonderful," he tells her. "And you are, too. Hang in there, okay?"

Halfway down the hallway, Jack comes upon a nasty sight: Ethan Evans, the young man who once had Wanda Kinderling as his Sunday school teacher, has laid hold of a disoriented old woman by her fat upper arms and is shaking her back and forth. The old woman’s frizzy hair flies around her head.

"Shut up!" young Mr. Evans is shouting at her. "Shut up, you crazy old cow! You’re not going anywhere except back to your dadblame room!"

Something about his sneer makes it obvious that even now, with the world turned upside down, young Mr. Evans is enjoying both his power to command and his Christian duty to brutalize. This is only enough to make Jack angry. What infuriates him is the look of terrified incomprehension on the old woman’s face. It makes him think of boys he once lived with long ago, in a place called the Sunlight Home.

It makes him think of Wolf.

Without pausing or so much as breaking stride (they have entered the endgame phase of the festivities now, and somehow he knows it), Jack drives his fist into young Mr. Evans’s temple. That worthy lets go of his plump and squawking victim, strikes the wall, then slides down it, his eyes wide and dazed.

"Either you didn’t listen in Sunday school or Kinderling’s wife taught you the wrong lessons," Jack says.

"You . . . hit . . . me . . ." young Mr. Evans whispers. He finishes his slow dive splay-legged on the hallway floor halfway between the Records Annex and Ambulatory Ophthalmology.

"Abuse another patient — this one, the one I was just talking to, any of them — and I’ll do a lot more than that," Jack promises young Mr. Evans. Then he’s down the stairs, taking them two at a time, not noticing a handful of johnny-clad patients who stare at him with expressions of puzzled, half-fearful wonder. They look at him as if at a vision who passes them in an envelope of light, some wonder as brilliant as it is mysterious.