Black House

He walks on, and has almost reached the road when he realizes there is more than smoke in the southwest. There is a kind of vibration, as well. It beats into his head like the start of a migraine headache. And it’s strangely variable. If he stands with his face pointed dead south, that unpleasant pulse is less. Turn east and it’s gone. North and it’s almost gone. Then, as he continues to turn, it comes all the way back to full. Worse than ever now that he’s noticed it, the way the buzz of a fly or the knock of a radiator in a hotel room is worse after you really start to notice it.

Jack turns another slow, full circle. South, and the vibration sinks. East, it’s gone. North, it’s starting to come back. West, it’s coming on strong. Southwest and he’s locked in like the SEEK button on a car radio. Pow, pow, pow. A black and nasty vibration like a headache, a smell like ancient smoke . . .

"No, no, no, not smoke," Jack says. He’s standing almost up to his chest in summer grass, pants soaked, white moths flittering around his head like a half-assed halo, eyes wide, cheeks once more pale. In this moment he looks twelve again. It is eerie how he has rejoined his younger (and perhaps better) self. "Not smoke, that smells like . . ."

He suddenly makes that urking sound again. Because the smell — not in his nose but in the center of his head — is rotted baloney. The smell of Irma Freneau’s half-rotted, severed foot.

"I’m smelling him," Jack whispers, knowing it’s not a smell he means. He can make that pulse whatever he wants . . . including, he realizes, gone. "I’m smelling the Fisherman. Either him or . . . I don’t know."

He starts walking, and a hundred yards later he stops again. The pulse in his head is indeed gone. It has faded out the way radio stations do when the day warms and the temperature thickens. It’s a relief.

Jack has almost reached the road, which no doubt leads one way to some version of Arden and the other way to versions of Centralia and French Landing, when he hears an irregular drumming sound. He feels it as well, running up his legs like a Gene Krupa backbeat.

He turns to the left, then shouts in mingled surprise and delight. Three enormous brown creatures with long, lolloping ears go leaping past Jack’s position, rising above the grass, sinking back into it, then rising above it again. They look like rabbits crossed with kangaroos. Their protruding black eyes stare with comic terror. Across the road they go, their flat feet (white-furred instead of brown) slapping up dust.

"Christ!" Jack says, half-laughing and half-sobbing. He whacks himself in the center of his forehead with the heel of his palm. "What was that, Richie-boy? Got any comments on that?"

Richie, of course does. He tells Jack that Jack has just suffered an extremely vivid . . . ba-haaa! . . . hallucination.

"Of course," Jack says. "Giant bunny rabbits. Get me to the nearest A.A. meeting." Then, as he steps out onto the road, he looks toward the southwestern horizon again. At the haze of smoke there. A village. And do the residents fear as the shadows of the evening come on? Fear the coming of the night? Fear the creature that is taking their children? Do they need a coppiceman? Of course they do. Of course they —

Something is lying on the road. Jack bends down and picks up a Mil-waukee Brewers baseball cap, jarringly out of place in this world of giant hopping range rabbits, but indubitably real. Judging from the plastic adjustment band in the back, it’s a child’s baseball cap. Jack looks inside, knowing what he’ll find, and there it is, carefully inked on the bill: TY MARSHALL. The cap’s not as wet as Jack’s jeans, which are soaked with morning dew, but it’s not dry, either. It has been lying here on the edge of the road, he thinks, since yesterday. The logical assumption would be that Ty’s abductor brought Ty this way, but Jack doesn’t believe that. Perhaps it is the lingering pulse of vibration that gives rise to a different thought, a different image: the Fisherman, with Ty carefully stashed away, walking out this dirt road. Under his arm is a wrapped shoe box decorated with bogus stamps. On his head is Ty’s baseball hat, kind of balancing there because it’s really too small for the Fisherman. Still, he doesn’t want to change the adjustment band. Doesn’t want Jack to mistake it for a man’s cap, even for a single second. Because he is teasing Jack, inviting Jack into the game.

"Took the boy in our world," Jack mutters. "Escaped with him to this world. Stashed him someplace safe, like a spider stashing a fly. Alive? Dead? Alive, I think. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s just what I want to believe. Leave it. Then he went to wherever he stashed Irma. Took her foot and brought it to me. Brought it through this world, then flipped back to my world to leave it on the porch. Lost the hat on the way, maybe? Lost it off his head?"

Jack doesn’t think so. Jack thinks this f**k, this skell, this world-hopping dirtbag, left the cap on purpose. Knew that if Jack walked this road he’d find it.

Holding the hat to his chest like a Miller Park fan showing respect to the flag during the national anthem, Jack closes his eyes and concentrates. It’s easier than he would have expected, but he supposes some things you never forget — how to peel an orange, how to ride a bike, how to flip back and forth between worlds.

Boy like you don’t need no cheap wine, anyhow, he hears his old friend Speedy Parker say, and there’s the edge of a laugh in Speedy’s voice. At the same time, that sense of vertigo twists through Jack again. A moment later he hears the alarming sound of an oncoming car.

He steps back, opening his eyes as he does so. Catches a glimpse of a tarred road — Norway Valley Road, but —

A horn blares and a dusty old Ford slams by him, the passenger side-view mirror less than nine inches from Jack Sawyer’s nose. Warm air, once again filled with the faint but pungent odor of hydrocarbons, surfs over Jack’s cheeks and brow, along with some farm kid’s indignant voice: