by Stephen King
(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn't he, Mom? Jack had said. Yes, very funny, Jack-O, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)
"Boy!" the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack's lolling head snapped on his neck. "Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . ."
"I'm okay," Jack said--his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. "Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break."
The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.
"Okay," Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could--Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.
He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they'd had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.
He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby's entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby's back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.
If his mother hadn't come in to check on him almost immediately . . .
Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.
Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told him it had been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.
At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.
At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer had almost died in his crib . . . and Morgan Sloat had been there.
His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.
Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.
2
"Now come on," the Captain said.
"All right," Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. "All right, let's g--"
"Shhhh!" The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pair. Soldiers' boots.
One voice cut through the babble: ". . . didn't know he had a son."
"Well," a second answered, "bastards sire bastards--a fact you should well know, Simon."
There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this--the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying names: queerboy and humpa-jumpa and morphadite. Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband of laughter exactly like this.
"Cork it! Cork it up!"--a third voice. "If he hears you, you'll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!"
Mutters.
A muffled burst of laughter.
Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.
Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening . . . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might really be. Even a kid like him knew that.
"You heard enough?" the Captain said. "We've got to move." He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.
Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, go west, is that correct?
He changed, Jack thought. He changed twice.
Once when Jack showed him the shark's tooth that had been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west. He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?
I can't say . . . I can't tell you what to do.
To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.
He wants to get out of here because he's afraid we'll be caught, Jack thought. But there's more, isn't there? He's afraid of me. Afraid of--
"Come on," the Captain said. "Come on, for Jason's sake."
"Whose sake?" Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and half-led, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.
"This isn't the way we came," Jack whispered.
"Don't want to go past those fellows we saw coming in," the Captain whispered back. "Morgan's men. Did you see the tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?"
"Yes." Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he had looked dimly familiar.
"Osmond," the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.
The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes, perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.
"Osmond is Morgan's right-hand man," the Captain grunted. "He sees too much, and I'd just as soon he didn't see you twice, boy."
"What do you mean?"
"Hsssst!" He clamped Jack's aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway. To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain--except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost netlike, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome. "Now cry," the Captain breathed warmly in Jack's ear.
He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still predominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a confused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women's faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded him of nuns' wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.
"Never again!" the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. "Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I'll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!"
And under his breat
h, the Captain hissed, "They'll all remember and they'll all talk, so cry, dammit!"
And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy--she was lying in her coffin and wearing the wedding dress she had worn in Drag Strip Rumble (RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack's mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin--and the coffin itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log--a Viking's coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother's wedding dress from Drag Strip Rumble and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick out in Sharp's of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood--not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break--at least, not until they were both dead.
Through the tears he saw a giant of a man in billowing whites rush across the room toward them. He wore a red bandanna instead of a puffy chef's hat on his head, but Jack thought its purpose was the same--to identify the wearer as the boss of the kitchen. He was also brandishing a wicked-looking three-tined wooden fork.
"Ged-OUT!" the chef screeched at them, and the voice emerging from that huge barrel chest was absurdly flutelike--it was the voice of a willowy gay giving a shoe-clerk a piece of his mind. But there was nothing absurd about the fork; it looked deadly.
The women scattered before his charge like birds. The bottom-most pie dropped out of the pie-woman's rack and she uttered a high, despairing cry as it broke apart on the boards. Strawberry juice splattered and ran, the red as fresh and bright as arterial blood.
"GED-DOUT MY KIDCHEN, YOU SLUGS! DIS IS NO SHORDCUD! DIS IS NO RAZE-TRAG! DIS IS MY KIDCHEN AND IF YOU CAD'T REMEMBER DAT, I'LL BY GOD THE CARBENDER CARVE YOUR AZZES FOR YOU!"
He jabbed the fork at them, simultaneously half-turning his head and squinching his eyes mostly shut, as if in spite of his tough talk the thought of hot flowing blood was just too gauche to be borne. The Captain removed the hand that had been on the scruff of Jack's neck and reached out--almost casually, it seemed to Jack. A moment later the chef was on the floor, all six and a half feet of him. The meat-fork was lying in a puddle of strawberry sauce and chunks of white unbaked pastry. The chef rolled back and forth, clutching his broken right wrist and screaming in that high, flutelike voice. The news he screamed out to the room in general was certainly woeful enough: he was dead, the Captain had surely murdered him (pronounced mur-dirt in the chef's odd, almost Teutonic accent); he was at the very least crippled, the cruel and heartless Captain of the Outer Guards having destroyed his good right hand and thus his livelihood, and so ensuring a miserable beggar's life for him in the years to come; the Captain had inflicted terrible pain on him, a pain beyond belief, such as was not to be borne--
"Shut up!" the Captain roared, and the chef did. Immediately. He lay on the floor like a great baby, his right hand curled on his chest, his red bandanna drunkenly askew so that one ear (a small black pearl was set in the center of the lobe) showed, his fat cheeks quivering. The kitchen women gasped and twittered as the Captain bent over the dreaded chief ogre of the steaming cave where they spent their days and nights. Jack, still weeping, caught a glimpse of a black boy (brown boy, his mind amended) standing at one end of the largest brazier. The boy's mouth was open, his face as comically surprised as a face in a minstrel show, but he kept turning the crank in his hands, and the haunch suspended over the glowing coals kept revolving.
"Now listen and I'll give you some advice you won't find in The Book of Good Farming," the Captain said. He bent over the chef until their noses almost touched (his paralyzing grip on Jack's arm--which was now going mercifully numb--never loosened the smallest bit). "Don't you ever . . . don't you ever . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding splinter in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it. One expects temperament from chefs, but temperament does not extend to assaults upon the person of the Captain of the Outer Guards. Do you understand me?"
The chef moaned out a teary, defiant something-or-other. Jack couldn't make it all out--the man's accent seemed to be growing steadily thicker--but it had something to do with the Captain's mother and the dump-dogs beyond the pavillion.
"That may well be," the Captain said. "I never knew the lady. But it certainly doesn't answer my question." He prodded the chef with one dusty, scuffed boot. It was a gentle enough prod, but the chef screeched as if the Captain had drawn his foot back and kicked him as hard as he could. The women twittered again.
"Do we or do we not have an understanding on the subject of chefs and weapons and Captains? Because if we don't, a little more instruction might be in order."
"We do!" the chef gasped. "We do! We do! We--"
"Good. Because I've had to give far too much instruction already today." He shook Jack by the scruff of the neck. "Haven't I, boy?" He shook him again, and Jack uttered a wail that was completely unfeigned. "Well . . . I suppose that's all he can say. The boy's a simpleton. Like his mother."
The Captain threw his dark, gleaming glance around the kitchen.
"Good day, ladies. Queen's blessings upon you."
"And you, good sir," the eldest among them managed, and dropped an awkward, ungraceful curtsey. The others followed suit.
The Captain dragged Jack across the kitchen. Jack's hip bumped the edge of the washing trough with excruciating force and he cried out again. Hot water flew. Smoking droplets hit the boards and ran, hissing, between them. Those women had their hands in that, Jack thought. How do they stand it? Then the Captain, who was almost carrying him by now, shoved Jack through another burlap curtain and into the hallway beyond.
"Phew!" the Captain said in a low voice. "I don't like this, not any of it, it all smells bad."
Left, right, then right again. Jack began to sense that they were approaching the outer walls of the pavillion, and he had time to wonder how the place could seem so much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. Then the Captain was pushing him through a flap and they were in daylight again--mid-afternoon daylight so bright after the shifting dimness of the pavillion that Jack had to wince his eyes shut against a burst of pain.
The Captain never hesitated. Mud squelched and smooched underfoot. There was the smell of hay and horses and shit. Jack opened his eyes again and saw they were crossing what might have been a paddock or a corral or maybe just a barnyard. He saw an open canvas-sided hallway and heard chickens clucking somewhere beyond it. A scrawny man, naked except for a dirty kilt and thong sandals, was tossing hay into an open stall, using a pitchfork with wooden tines to do the job. Inside the stall, a horse not much bigger than a Shetland pony looked moodily out at them. They had already passed the stall when Jack's mind was finally able to accept what his eyes had seen: the horse had two heads.
"Hey!" he said. "Can I look back in that stall? That--"
"No time."
"But that horse had--"
"No time, I said." He raised his voice and shouted: "And if I ever catch you laying about again when there's work to be done, you'll get twice this!"
"You won't!" Jack screamed (in truth he felt as if this scene were getting a bit old).
"I swear you won't! I told you I'd be good!"
Just ahead of them, tall wooden gates loomed in a wall made of wooden posts with the bark still on them--it was like a stockade wall in an old Western (his mother had made a few of those, too). Heavy brackets were screwed into the gates, but the bar the brackets were meant to hold was not in place. It leaned against the woodpile to the left, thick as a railroad crosstie. The gates stood open almost six inches. Some muddled sense of direction in Jack's head suggested that they had worked their way completely around the pavillion to its far side.
"Thank God," the Captain said in a more normal voice. "Now--"
"Captain," a voice called from behind them. The voice was low but carrying, deceptively casual. The Captain stopped in his tracks. It had called just as Jack's scarred companion had been in the act of reaching for the left gate to push it open; it was as if the voice's owner had watched and waited for just that second.
"Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to your . . . ah . . . son."
The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing, halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettling out of place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of--Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him. He's crazy--this was the intuition which leaped spontaneously into his mind. Nuttier than a damned fruitcake.
Osmond took two neat steps toward them. In his left hand he held the rawhide-wrapped haft of a bullwhip. The handle narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder--the whip's central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.