Black House (Page 70)

Oh, but no. When the old cop logic comes back it takes hold like a tumor, even in dreams, and it doesn’t take much of it to realize that this isn’t Santa Monica — it’s too cold and too old. This is the land of ago, when Jacky and the Queen of the B’s fled out of California like the fugitives they had become. And didn’t stop running until they got to the other coast, the place where Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer —

No, I don’t think of this, I never think of this

— had come to die.

"Wake up, wake up you sleepyhead!"

The voice of his old friend.

Friend, my ass. He’s the one who put me on the road of trials, the one who came between me and Richard, my real friend. He’s the one who almost got me killed, almost drove me crazy.

"Wake up, wake up, get out of bed!"

Way-gup, way-gup, way-gup. Time to face the fearsome opopanax. Time to get back to your not-so-sweet used-to-be.

"No," Jacky whispers, and then the midway ends. Ahead is the carousel, sort of like the one on the Santa Monica Pier and sort of like the one he remembers from . . . well, from ago. It is a hybrid, in other words, a dream specialty, neither here nor there. But there’s no mistaking the man who sits beneath one of the frozen rearing horses with his guitar on his knee. Jacky-boy would know that face anywhere, and all the old love rises in his heart. He fights it, but that is a fight few people win, especially not those who have been turned back to the age of twelve.

"Speedy!" he cries.

The old man looks at him and his brown face cracks open in a smile. "Travelin’ Jack!" he says. "How I have missed you, son."

"I’ve missed you, too," he says. "But I don’t travel anymore. I’ve settled down in Wisconsin. This . . ." He gestures at his magically restored boy’s body, clad in jeans and a T-shirt. "This is just a dream."

"Maybe so, maybe not. In any case, you got a mite more traveling to do, Jack. I been telling you that for some time."

"What do you mean?"

Speedy’s grin is sly in the middle, exasperated at the corners. "Don’t play the fool with me, Jacky. Sent you the feathers, didn’t I? Sent you a robin’s egg, didn’t I? Sent you more’n one."

"Why can’t people leave me alone?" Jack asks. His voice is suspiciously close to a whine. Not a pretty sound. "You . . . Henry . . . Dale . . ."

"Quit on it now," Speedy says, growing stern. "Ain’t got no more time to ask you nice. The game has gotten rough. Ain’t it?"

"Speedy — "

"You got your job and I got mine. Same job, too. Don’t you whine at me, Jack, and don’t make me chase you no mo’. You’re a coppice-man, same as ever was."

"I’m retired — "

"Shit on your retired! The kids he killed, that’s bad enough. The kids he might kill if he’s let to go on, that’s worse. But the one he’s got . . ." Speedy leans forward, dark eyes blazing in his dark face. "That boy has got to be brought back, and soon. If you can’t get him back, you got to kill him yourself, little as I like to think of it. Because he’s a Breaker. A powerful one. One more might be all he needs to take it down."

"Who might need?" Jack asks.

"The Crimson King."

"And what is it this Crimson King wants to take down?"

Speedy looks at him a moment, then starts to play that perky tune again instead of answering. "There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ his old sweet song . . ."

"Speedy, I can’t!"

The tune ends in a discordant jangle of strings. Speedy looks at twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer with a coldness that chills the boy inward all the way to the hidden man’s heart. And when he speaks again, Speedy Parker’s faint southern accent has deepened. It has filled with a contempt that is almost liquid.

"You get busy now, hear me? Y’all quit whinin’ and cryin’ and slackin’ off. Y’all pick up yo’ guts from wherever you left ’em and get busy!"

Jack steps back. A heavy hand falls on his shoulder and he thinks, It’s Uncle Morgan. Him or maybe Sunlight Gardener. It’s 1981 and I’ve got to do it all over again — 

But that is a boy’s thought, and this is a man’s dream. Jack Sawyer as he is now thrusts the child’s acquiescing despair away. No, not at all. I deny that. I have put those faces and those places aside. It was hard work, and I won’t see it all undone by a few phantom feathers, a few phantom eggs, and one bad dream. Find yourself another boy, Speedy. This one grew up.

He turns, ready to fight, but no one’s there. Lying behind him on the boardwalk, on its side like a dead pony, is a boy’s bicycle. There’s a license plate on the back reading BIG MAC. Scattered around it are shiny crow’s feathers. And now Jack hears another voice, cold and cracked, ugly and unmistakably evil. He knows it’s the voice of the thing that touched him.

"That’s right, asswipe. Stay out of it. You mess with me and I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere."

A spinning hole opens in the boardwalk just in front of the bike. It widens like a startled eye. It continues to widen, and Jack dives for it. It’s the way back. The way out. The contemptuous voice follows him.

"That’s right, jackoff," it says. "Run! Run from the abbalah! Run from the King! Run for your miserable f**king life!" The voice dissolves into laughter, and it is the mad sound of that laughter which follows Jack Sawyer down into the darkness between worlds.

Hours later, Jack stands naked at his bedroom window, absently scratching his ass and watching the sky lighten in the east. He’s been awake since four. He can’t remember much of his dream (his defenses may be bending, but even now they have not quite broken), yet enough of it lingers for him to be sure of one thing: the corpse on the Santa Monica Pier upset him so badly that he quit his job because it reminded him of someone he once knew.