by Stephen King
Lily's bed was not so grand, and she did not in the least resemble a Queen. Illness had subtracted her good looks, had skinned down her face and aged her a quick twenty years. Sloat let his eyes roam appreciatively over the prominent ridges of bone about her eyes, the tortoiselike shell of her forehead. Her ravaged body barely made a lump beneath the sheets and blankets. Sloat knew that the Alhambra had been well paid to leave Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer alone, for it was he who had paid them. They no longer bothered to send heat up to her room. She was the hotel's only guest. Besides the desk clerk and cook, the only employees still in the Alhambra were three Portuguese maids who spent all their time cleaning the lobby--it must have been the maids who kept Lily piled high with blankets. Sloat himself had commandeered the suite across the hall, and ordered the desk clerk and the maids to keep a close eye on Lily.
To see if she would open her eyes, he said, "You're looking better, Lily. I really think I see signs of improvement."
Without moving anything but her mouth, Lily said, "I don't know why you pretend to be human, Sloat."
"I'm the best friend you have," Sloat responded.
Now she did open her eyes, and they were not dull enough to suit him. "Get out of here," she whispered. "You're obscene."
"I'm trying to help you, and I wish you'd remember that. I have all the papers, Lily. All you have to do is sign them. Once you do, you and your son are taken care of for life." Sloat regarded Lily with an expression of satisfied gloom. "I haven't had much luck in locating Jack, by the way. Spoken to him lately?"
"You know I haven't," she said. And did not weep, as he had hoped.
"I really do think the boy ought to be here, don't you?"
"Piss up a stick," Lily said.
"I think I will use your bathroom, if you don't mind," he said, and stood up. Lily closed her eyes again, ignoring him. "I hope he's staying out of trouble, anyhow," Sloat said, slowly walking down the side of the bed. "Terrible things happen to boys on the road." Lily still did not respond. "Things I hate to think about." He reached the end of the bed and continued on to the bathroom door. Lily lay under her sheets and blankets like a crumpled piece of tissue paper. Sloat went into the bathroom.
He rubbed his hands together, gently closed the door, and turned on both taps over the sink. From the pocket of his suitcoat he extracted a small brown two-gram vial, from his inner jacket pocket a small case containing a mirror, a razor blade, and a short brass straw. Onto the mirror he tapped about an eighth of a gram of the purest Peruvian Flake cocaine he'd been able to find. Then he chopped it ritualistically with his blade, forming it into two stubby lines. He snorted the lines through the brass straw, gasped, inhaled sharply, and held his breath for a second or two. "Aah." His nasal passages opened up as wide as tunnels. Way back there, a drip began to deliver the goodies. Sloat ran his hands under the water, then for the sake of his nose drew a little of the moisture on his thumb and index finger up into his nostrils. He dried his hands and his face.
That lovely train, he allowed himself to think, that lovely lovely train, I bet I'm prouder of it than I am of my own son.
Morgan Sloat revelled in the vision of his precious train, which was the same in both worlds and the first concrete manifestation of his long-held plan to import modern technology into the Territories, arriving in Point Venuti loaded with its useful cargo. Point Venuti! Sloat smiled as the coke blasted through his brain, bringing its usual message that all would be well, all would be well. Little Jacky Sawyer would be a very lucky boy ever to leave the odd little town of Point Venuti. In fact, he'd be lucky ever to get there in the first place, considering that he'd have to make his way across the Blasted Lands. But the drug reminded Sloat that in some ways he'd prefer Jack to make it to dangerous, warped little Point Venuti, he'd even prefer Jack to survive his exposure to the black hotel, which was not merely boards and nails, bricks and stone, but was also somehow alive . . . because it was possible that he might walk out with the Talisman in his thieving little hands. And if that were to happen . . .
Yes, if that absolutely wonderful event were to take place, all would indeed be well.
And both Jack Sawyer and the Talisman would be broken in half.
And he, Morgan Sloat, would finally have the canvas his talents deserved. For a second he saw himself spreading his arms over starry vastnesses, over worlds folded together like lovers on a bed, over all that the Talisman protected, and all that he had coveted so when he'd bought the Agincourt, years back. Jack could get all that for him. Sweetness. Glory.
To celebrate this thought, Sloat brought the vial out of his pocket again and did not bother with the ritual of razor and mirror, but simply used the attached little spoon to raise the medicinal white powder to first one nostril, then the other. Sweetness, yes.
Sniffing, he came back into the bedroom. Lily appeared slightly more animated, but his mood now was so good that even this evidence of her continuing life did not darken it. Bright and oddly hollow within their circles of bone, her eyes followed him. "Uncle Bloat has a new loathsome habit," she said.
"And you're dying," he said. "Which one would you choose?"
"Do enough of that stuff, and you'll be dying, too."
Undeterred by her hostility, Sloat returned to the rickety wooden chair. "For God's sake, Lily, grow up," he said. "Everybody does coke now. You're out of touch--you've been out of touch for years. You wanna try some?" He lifted the vial from his pocket and swung it by the chain attached to the little spoon.
"Get out of here."
Sloat waggled the vial closer to her face.
Lily sat up in bed as smartly as a striking snake and spat in his face.
"Bitch!" He recoiled, grabbing for his handkerchief as the wad of spittle slid down his cheek.
"If that crap is so wonderful, why do you have to sneak into the toilet to take it? Don't answer, just leave me alone. I don't want to see you again, Bloat. Take your fat ass out of here."
"You're going to die alone, Lily," he said, now perversely filled with a cold, hard joy. "You're going to die alone, and this comic little town is going to give you a pauper's burial, and your son is going to be killed because he can't possibly handle what's lying in wait for him, and no one will ever hear of either one of you again." He grinned at her. His plump hands were balled into white hairy fists. "Remember Asher Dondorf, Lily? Our client? The sidekick on that series Flanagan and Flanagan? I was reading about him in The Hollywood Reporter--some issue a few weeks ago. Shot himself in his living room, but his aim wasn't too cool, because instead of killing himself he just blew away the roof of his mouth and put himself in a coma. Might hang on for years, I hear, just rotting away." He leaned toward her, his forehead corrugating. "You and good old Asher have a lot in common, it seems to me."
She stonily looked back. Her eyes seemed to have crawled back inside her head, and at that moment she resembled some hard-bitten old frontier woman with a squirrel rifle in one hand and Scripture in the other. "My son is going to save my life," she said. "Jack is going to save my life, and you won't be able to stop him."
"Well, we'll see, won't we?" Sloat answered. "We'll just see about that."
35
The Blasted Lands
1
"But will ye be safe, my Lord?" Anders asked, kneeling down before Jack with his white-and-red kilt pooled out around him like a skirt.
"Jack?" Richard asked, his voice a whiny, irrelevant skirl of sound.
"Would you be safe yourself?" Jack asked.
Anders twisted his big white head sideways and squinted up at Jack as if he had just asked a riddle. He looked like a huge puzzled dog.
"I mean, I'll be about as safe as you would be yourself. That's all I mean."
"But my Lord . . ."
"Jack?" came Richard's querulous voice again. "I fell asleep, and now I should be awake, but we're still in this weird place, so I'm still dreaming . . . but I want to be awake, Jack, I don't want to have this dream anymore. No. I don't want
to."
And that's why you busted your damn glasses, Jack said to himself. Aloud, he said, "This isn't a dream, Richie-boy. We're about to hit the road. We're gonna take a train ride."
"Huh?" Richard said, rubbing his face and sitting up. If Anders resembled a big white dog in skirts, Richard looked like nothing so much as a newly awakened baby.
"My Lord Jason," Anders said. Now he seemed as if he might weep--with relief, Jack thought. "It is yer will? It is yer will to drive that devil-machine through the Blasted Lands?"
"It sure is," Jack said.
"Where are we?" Richard said. "Are you sure they're not following us?"
Jack turned toward him. Richard was sitting up on the undulating yellow floor, blinking stupidly, terror still drifting about him like a fog. "Okay," he said. "I'll answer your question. We're in a section of the Territories called Ellis-Breaks--"
"My head hurts," Richard said. He had closed his eyes.
"And," Jack went on, "we're going to take this man's train all the way through the Blasted Lands to the black hotel, or as close to it as we can get. That's it, Richard. Believe it or not. And the sooner we do it, the sooner we'll get away from whatever just might be trying to find us."
"Etheridge," Richard whispered. "Mr. Dufrey." He looked around the mellow interior of The Depot as if he expected all their pursuers to suddenly pour through the walls. "It's a brain tumor, you know," he said to Jack in a tone of perfect reasonableness. "That's what it is--my headache."
"My Lord Jason," old Anders was saying, bowing so low that his hair settled down on the rippling floorboards. "How good ye are, O High One, how good to yer lowliest servant, how good to those who do not deserve yer blessed presence. . . ." He crawled forward, and Jack saw with horror that he was about to begin that moony foot-kissing all over again.
"Pretty far advanced, too, I'd say," Richard offered.
"Get up, please, Anders," Jack said, stepping back. "Get up, come on, that's enough." The old man continued to crawl forward, babbling with his relief at not having to endure the Blasted Lands. "ARISE!" Jack bellowed.
Anders looked up, his forehead wrinkled. "Yes, my Lord." He slowly got up.
"Bring your brain tumor over here, Richard," Jack said "We're going to see if we can figure out how to drive this damn train."
2
Anders had moved over behind the long, rippling counter, and was rooting in a drawer. "I believe it works on devils, my Lord," he said. "Strange devils, all hurtled down together. They do not appear to live, yet they do. Aye." He fetched out of the drawer the longest, fattest candle that Jack had ever seen. From a box atop the counter Anders selected a foot-long, narrow softwood strip, then lowered one of its ends into a glowing lamp. The strip of wood ignited, and Anders used it to light his enormous candle. Then he waved the "match" back and forth until the flame expired in a curl of smoke.
"Devils?" Jack asked.
"Strange square things--I believe the devils are contained therein. Sometimes how they spit and spark! I shall show this to ye, Lord Jason."
Without another word he swept toward the door, the warm glow of the candle momentarily erasing the wrinkles from his face. Jack followed him outside into the sweetness and amplitude of the deep Territories. He remembered a photograph on the wall of Speedy Parker's office, a photograph even then filled with an inexplicable power, and realized that he was actually near the site of that photograph. Far off rose a familiar-looking mountain. Down the little knoll the fields of grain rolled away in all directions, waving in smooth, wide patterns. Richard Sloat moved hesitantly beside Jack, rubbing his forehead. The silvery bands of metal, out of key with the rest of the landscape, stretched inexorably west.
"The shed is in back, my Lord," Anders said softly, and almost shyly turned away toward the side of The Depot. Jack took another glance at the far-off mountain. Now it looked less like the mountain in Speedy's photograph--newer--a western, not an eastern, mountain.
"What's with that Lord Jason business?" Richard whispered right into his ear. "He thinks he knows you."
"It's hard to explain," Jack said.
Richard tugged at his bandanna, then clamped a hand on Jack's biceps. The old Kansas City Clutch. "What happened to the school, Jack? What happened to the dogs? Where are we?"
"Just come along," Jack said. "You're probably still dreaming."
"Yes," Richard said in the tone of purest relief. "Yes, that's it, isn't it? I'm still asleep. You told me all that crazy stuff about the Territories, and now I'm dreaming about it."
"Yeah," Jack said, and set off after Anders. The old man was holding up the enormous candle like a torch and drifting down the rear side of the knoll toward another, slightly larger, octagonal wooden building. The two boys followed him through the tall yellow grass. Light spilled from another of the transparent globes, revealing that this second building was open at opposite ends, as if two matching faces of the octagon had been neatly sliced away. The silvery train tracks ran through these open ends. Anders reached the large shed and turned around to wait for the boys. With the flaring, sputtering, upheld candle, his long beard and odd clothes, Anders resembled a creature from legend or faery, a sorcerer or wizard.
"It sits here, as it has since it came, and may the demons drive it hence." Anders scowled at the boys, and all his wrinkles deepened. "Invention of hell. A foul thing, d'ye ken." He looked over his shoulder when the boys were before him. Jack saw that Anders did not even like being in the shed with the train. "Half its cargo is aboard, and it, too, stinks of hell."
Jack stepped into the open end of the shed, forcing Anders to follow him. Richard stumbled after, rubbing his eyes. The little train sat pointing west on the tracks--an odd-looking engine, a boxcar, a flatcar covered with a straining tarp. From this last car came the smell Anders so disliked. It was a wrong smell, not of the Territories, both metallic and greasy.
Richard immediately went to one of the interior angles of the shed, sat down on the floor with his back to the wall, and closed his eyes.
"D'ye ken its workings, my Lord?" Anders asked in a low voice.
Jack shook his head and walked up along the tracks to the head of the train. Yes, there were Anders's "demons." They were box batteries, just as Jack had supposed. Sixteen of them, in two rows strung together in a metal container supported by the cab's first four wheels. The entire front part of the train looked like a more sophisticated version of a deliveryboy's bicycle-cart--but where the bicycle itself should have been was a little cab which reminded Jack of something else . . . something he could not immediately identify.
"The demons talk to the upright stick," Anders said from behind him.
Jack hoisted himself up into the little cab. The "stick" Anders had mentioned was a gearshift set in a slot with three notches. Then Jack knew what the little cab resembled. The whole train ran on the same principle as a golf cart. Battery-powered, it had only three gears: forward, neutral, and reverse. It was the only sort of train that might possibly work in the Territories, and Morgan Sloat must have had it specially constructed for him.
"The demons in the boxes spit and spark, and talk to the stick, and the stick moves the train, my Lord." Anders hovered anxiously beside the cab, his face contorting into an astonishing display of wrinkles.
"You were going to leave in the morning?" Jack asked the old man.
"Aye."
"But the train is ready now?"
"Yes, my Lord."
Jack nodded, and jumped down. "What's the cargo?"
"Devil-things," Anders said grimly. "For the bad Wolfs. To take to the black hotel."
I'd be a jump ahead of Morgan Sloat if I left now, Jack thought. And looked uneasily over at Richard, who had managed to put himself asleep again. If it weren't for pig-headed, hypochondriacal Rational Richard, he would never have stumbled onto Sloat's choo-choo; and Sloat would have been able to use the "devil-things"--weapons of some kind, surely--against him as soon as he got near the black hotel. For the hotel wa
s the end of his quest, he was sure of that now. And all of that seemed to argue that Richard, as helpless and annoying as he now was, was going to be more important to his quest than Jack had ever imagined. The son of Sawyer and the son of Sloat: the son of Prince Philip Sawtelle and the son of Morgan of Orris. For an instant the world wheeled above Jack and he snagged a second's insight that Richard might just be essential to whatever he was going to have to do in the black hotel. Then Richard snuffled and let his mouth drop open, and the feeling of momentary comprehension slipped away from Jack.
"Let's have a look at those devil-things," he said. He whirled around and marched back down the length of the train, along the way noticing for the first time that the floor of the octagonal shed was in two sections--most of it was one round circular mass, like an enormous dinner plate. Then there was a break in the wood, and what was beyond the perimeter of the circle extended to the walls. Jack had never heard of a roundhouse, but he understood the concept: the circular part of the floor could turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Normally, trains or coaches came in from the east, and returned in the same direction.
The tarpaulin had been tied down over the cargo with thick brown cord so hairy it looked like steel wool. Jack strained to lift an edge, peered under, saw only blackness. "Help me," he said, turning to Anders.
The old man stepped forward, frowning, and with one strong, deft motion released a knot. The tarpaulin loosened and sagged. Now when Jack lifted its edge, he saw that half of the flatcar held a row of wooden boxes stencilled MACHINE PARTS. Guns, he thought: Morgan is arming his rebel Wolfs. The other half of the space beneath the tarp was occupied by bulky rectangular packages of a squashy-looking substance wrapped in layers of clear plastic sheeting. Jack had no idea what this substance might be, but he was pretty sure it wasn't Wonder Bread. He dropped the tarpaulin and stepped back, and Anders pulled at the thick rope and knotted it again.
"We're going tonight," Jack said, having just decided this.
"But my Lord Jason . . . the Blasted Lands . . . at night . . . d'ye ken--"
"I ken, all right," Jack said. "I ken that I'll need all the surprise I can whip up. Morgan and that man the Wolfs call He of the Lashes are going to be looking for me, and if I show up twelve hours before anybody is expecting this train, Richard and I might get away alive."