The smell, however, was as bad as ever. The door opened into the back of the animal lab. The four long rows of cages, running the length of the room, glinted blue and black in what light managed to filter through the steel mesh on the windows. Jack left the door open behind him—for all he knew, he'd need it later—and crept up one of the aisles. As he passed one of the dogs’ cages, the animal inside—a collie—started to bark. Jack stopped, whispered, “It's okay, boy, it's okay,” and for a moment me dog did stop. But the second he moved on, the barking started again, louder, the dog was even beating its tail against the side of its cage, thumping the metal like a drum. The other animals were awakened by the noise: the pigeons started warbling and flapping their wings; the monkey gibbered and rattled his bars; the rats began madly scurrying in circles. The whole lab, it seemed, had erupted around Jack.
He was just a few feet from the hall door when he heard footsteps approaching from the outside. He turned quickly and retreated to one of the aisles. But the tails of his overcoat, flapping behind him, somehow snared one of the cages, and brought it crashing down onto the floor. The top of the cage flipped off, just as the door to the lab flew open and the overhead lights came on. Jack, crouching down below the level of the cages, held his breath and waited.
“Who's in here?”
Tulley's voice—he would recognize it anywhere.
“Potter? Cazenovia?”
Jack inched back down the aisle.
There was a long pause, then Tulley said, with tremendous satisfaction, “So it's you, asshole. You made good time.”
Jack was eye to eye with a batch of hamsters.
“Sprague wants you.”
He could hear Tulley's shoes squeaking, slowly, across the floor. Jack ducked around to the back of the aisle.
“But I want you first.”
Jack flattened himself against a stack of cages. What should he do now? What could he do?
“Come on, asshole . . . come on out.”
Tulley was pacing back and forth across the front of the room. Jack could tell from the way his voice moved.
“I ain't got all night.”
He should create a diversion, Jack thought . . . something to get Tulley's attention long enough for him to sprint for the door to the hall.
“Your girlfriend don't either.”
Jack's heart nearly stopped at the mention of Nancy.
“You know, she's not bad-lookin’, for a Chink.”
He was coming down the aisle now, the one in which Jack
had knocked over the cage.
Jack fumbled at the latch of the cage behind him, then swept out the pigeons inside it. Two of them shot up toward the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. There was a loud, but muffled, pop, and in the same instant one of the birds exploded in a puff of feathers and blood. Spattered bits of it rained down on Jack.
“Target practice,” Tulley joked.
Jesus Christ—he had a gun. Jack remembered what Nancy had told him when he'd first come to the institute—that Tulley was an ex-con Sprague had given a job to.
“And I see you.”
Jack turned his head slowly, and saw that Tulley was aiming the gun at him, from about ten feet away, through the back of the empty pigeon cage.
“So just get up . . . and keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
Jack stood, holding his hands out at waist level, palms up.
“You ain't so tough now, asshole, now it's just you and me.” The gun was a gleaming black, with a gray funnel that Jack took to be a silencer, fitted over the front of the barrel. “No more cheap shots, like that one you took out in Jersey.”
Tulley was standing with the gun trained casually on Jack's abdomen, his stumpy legs held far apart. Behind him Jack thought he detected something, on the floor, move.
“Wouldn't I like to waste you,” Tulley said, apparently weighing his chances of getting away with it.
“Could be kinda messy,” Jack said, just trying to buy some time. Behind Tulley, he saw that movement again—something black and green, slithering toward them both.
“Messy's no problem,” Tulley said, “not with Sprague around. He can make anything disappear.”
It was a snake, a big one—it must have been in the cage Jack had knocked over. Jack pointed to it with one finger and said, “You ought to look behind you, Tulley.”
“Yeah, right—what kind of dumb shit do you take me for?”
The snake raised its head, tongue flicking, just behind Tulley's left ankle—it must be hopping mad, Jack thought, after the tumbling it took.
“So don't believe me . . . it's your ass,” Jack said.
The snake drew its entire length into a loose coil and hissed malevolently. Tulley heard it and glanced behind him.
“Fuck!” He jumped back, swinging the gun around. Fangs bared, the snake leaped at his calf; Tulley shot, and a piece of the linoleum flew up in splinters. Jack grabbed the empty pigeon cage, smashed Tulley in the back of the head with it; he spilled over, the snake still hanging on and lashing in the air. “Get it offa me! Get it off!” Jack vaulted over them, the snake's tail smacking the bottom of his shoe, and ran for the door. The other animals were shrieking and banging and fluttering in their cages. He slammed off the light switch and yanked the steel door shut. The noise died the second the door was closed; with any luck, Jack thought, Sprague might not have heard any of it.
He quickly crossed the hall to the tank room, inched that door open. There was a short entryway, then the control booth; Sprague was bent over the instrument panel, utterly absorbed. Jack had closed the door behind him, and thrown the bolt from the inside, before Sprague heard him and turned around.
“Oh. It's you.” He said it quite matter-of-factly, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. “Tulley was supposed to let me know when you got here.”
“Tulley's busy.”
Sprague gave him a long, level look. “I won't ask you what that means, because I don't really give a damn. What I wanted was to get you to the institute—and now I've done that.”
“And I want Nancy.”
“And I've got her.”
“Where?”
Sprague smiled, slipping his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “That all depends.”
“On what?”
“On your cooperation.” He sighed and sat down again in the swivel chair at the control panel. “I'm sick to death of tracking you down, Logan. My time is precious, and that's a waste of it. I'm about to make history here, and I can't have you obstructing my progress.”
“You wouldn't be able to make anything if it weren't for me.”
Sprague nodded, and with one hand fiddled with a fat orange cable that trailed across the controls. “For now, that's true. But it won't always be that way.”
Though the tank room wasn't lighted, Jack could see, in the reflected glow from the control booth, that some things were different in there—poles were set up at all four corners of the room, and next to the tank, there was a chair, with something draped over it.
“I need to secure your sustained cooperation,’’ Sprague went on, “for at least another month. I need you to live here, at the institute, and accede to whatever experiments I request . . . including, of course, repeated trips to what you call the Other World.”
“I've already told you, I won't do that anymore. Under any circumstances.”
Sprague held one end of the orange cable, with a silver prong, between his fingers. “Of course you will . . . starting tonight. Because if you don't, you'll never see Nancy Liu, alive, again . . . You don't believe me.” He idly fitted the silver prong into a round socket on the control board, then looked up at Jack and smiled. “Would you like to know what I just did?” he said.
Gradually, the things draped over the chair outside had begun to take shape: they were clothes—jeans, leg warmers, a raspberry-colored ski parka.
“I just sent eleven hundred volts into the sensory deprivation tank. And guess who's
inside it.”
Jack waited . . . waited for Sprague to say it was all a joke—a terrible, unconvincing joke; that Nancy was safely ensconced in the office upstairs; that the orange cable he'd just plugged in was simply something harmless—a microphone connection, or an EKG hook-up. But Sprague didn't say anything; he just sat there in the swivel chair, smiling madly, then pulled the plug from the socket again. “I think ten seconds is more than sufficient. Her heart surely stopped after three or four.” He looked at Jack appraisingly. “Don't you have work to do?” He cocked his head toward the tank room.
She couldn't be in there, Jack thought; even Sprague, more insane than he'd ever imagined, couldn't have gone as far as that. But then he looked at her clothes again, and remembered what Tulley—armed—had warned in the animal lab. Without a word, he turned and charged through the open glass door to the other room. Please, God, don't let her be inside the tank. The orange cable slithered across the floor, up and onto the wrestling mats, then in through the slightly opened hatchway. He knocked the chair aside—all of her clothes were there, down to a pair of socks and lacy panties—and yanked the hatch open the rest of the way. Nancy lay in the water, on her back, her eyes closed, her mouth set. Her bare shoulders were oddly raised; then he realized that her arms had been drawn—tied?—behind her. The orange cable disappeared into the dark, salty water.
“We won't bother to hook you up to the monitors on this trip,” Sprague announced, over the intercom. He was sitting at the control panel, in a pool of pale violet light; he had also, Jack noticed, closed and bolted the door between the chambers.
Jack grabbed the orange cable, jerked it out of the water, he wrapped the loose end once around his wrist, then pulled on it as hard as he could. There was a fast rattling sound—the glass in the observation window shivered—and the rest of the cable came bursting out of the wall. Pinning the end with the plug beneath one foot, he snapped the cable upward, ripping the plug off.
Sprague looked surprised. “Good thinking,” he said. “But shouldn't you be on your way?”
Jack threw off his overcoat and kicked off his shoes. “I'm coming back,” he said, ominously.
“Not alone, I hope.”
Jack clambered rapidly into the tank—there was barely room for the two of them in there—and lay down beside her, on his back, in the water. His clothes were quickly saturated and clung to his skin. Nancy's naked body was buoyed up, so that she floated half on top of him. He slipped one arm down and around her, the water sloshing against the curved walls of the tank, the fluorescent tube in the ceiling of the lab swimming in and out of view. Suddenly, the light switched off, and the room was plunged into blackness. Nancy's skin felt as cool and smooth and lifeless as marble.
Jack closed his own eyes and breathed deeply. There wasn't a second to spare. He had to banish all thoughts of Sprague, and Tulley, and concentrate—concentrate—on making this journey. Nancy, he thought, Nancy . . . The blackness in the tank faded to gray, then to white. He felt like a rocket bursting from its launch pad, gathering power and speed and direction . . . the red-steel scaffolding, the mountain of sand . . . the increasing heat, and brilliant light . . . the wind, with its babble of urgent voices, rushing past his ears. Nancy, where are you? Where are you now? At even the thought of losing her, his heart felt as if it would break in his chest. He hurtled forward, trying to see in the searing light, to find a shape in the shapeless void. The voices in his ear assumed a greater urgency, a low moaning, an almost coherent pleading. Nancy, no—don't have gone on without me. As the light grew more and more intense he could discern the vague and beating outline of its source. But nothing—not a sign—of Nancy anywhere. Was he doing something wrong? Was it already too late? He called for her, with all his mind and all his heart, but only the beacon—the white-hot, burning light—became more clear to him. He would have to pass through it again, if he ever hoped to find Nancy and return to the living world with her. He was so close now he had to shield his own eyes with his hand, and brace himself for the blazing immersion. The wind had risen to a deafening shriek. He gave himself over to the terrifying light, and once again he felt himself scalded and purified, torn apart and strangely made whole, buffeted and drowned and cleansed and clarified.
But unlike before, there was a rawness, an anger, to the light that embraced him; he felt, more than ever, the magnitude of his transgression, the enormity of his trespass. And in his heart he knew that, if he were allowed to escape alive this time—alive in the sense that the world understood it—it would be the last time such grace, or mercy, would be extended to him.
He found himself expelled, reeling and drained, into that vast and mist-filled terrain; he could hardly tell if he was walking, or floating somehow. But Nancy, he knew, had to be near; she might even be concealed in the vapor that swirled right before his eyes. He opened his lips, parched and numb, to call out for her, but before he could even utter her name, he felt a hand slide deftly into his. His heart leapt with joy. “Nancy!” he breathed. The vapor shaped itself into a face, a long, pretty face, with dark hair streaming to either side. The eyes that gazed so deeply into his were the green of emeralds bathed in light.
“I knew you'd be back.”
“Mother . . . I—”
“I know why you're here . . . Let me help you.”
He felt her grip tighten on his hand, felt himself drawn through the parting mist. They were moving, rapidly, away from the light, away from the heat. He no longer knew what to do; his mother—Eliza?—was smiling confidently, urging him on, nodding assurances. But something was wrong, something made the blood in his veins grow cold. Though there was no way of knowing for sure, he felt—instinctively—that he was traveling farther and farther away from wherever Nancy might be. The air was becoming thicker, and colder, all the time, the mist more clinging, almost damp to the touch. He felt, as he had once before, a growing and inconsolable emptiness within him. He wanted to resist, but didn't know how.
“Mother—this isn't right,” he mumbled. “This is not where I'll find her.” He tried to withdraw, to pull back, but there was nothing to hang on to, no ground to dig his heels into. “I have to go back,” he said, “I have to go back.”
“You are going back,” his mother said, “back where you belong.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and trying to concentrate, “no.” He found it increasingly hard to collect his thoughts. “There's very little time, very little time.”
His mother laughed, and even tossed her head at this. “Time is the one thing we've got plenty of.”
His eyes, more accustomed to the dimness now, were able at last to pick out a feature in this landscape—a line of demarcation, a bank of boiling black cloud that formed, at the very limit of his vision, a writhing but stationary horizon.
“Time won't matter to you here,” his mother went on. “What's a day, or a month, or a year, when you chalk it up against eternity?”
“But I'm going back,” he said, struggling to catch his breath, “going back, with Nancy.”
“Are you?” she said, her voice suddenly turning bitter and cold. “Are you? That's what I thought too—after the accident. I thought that I was going back. But I never did.” The black rampart was growing closer all the time. “I was only kept alive for your sake . . . I was just the egg that hatched you . . . I was used as your fucking incubator.”
Her fingers fastened like talons around his hand. She seemed to be draining the strength—the very life—right out of him.
“How do you think that felt? Lying there in that hospital bed, month after month, so you could grow, while I withered? How do you think I felt about that?” Her eyes blazed with a green fire. “And then, when you were big enough, and strong enough, to cut it on your own, they ripped the tubes and wires out of me like I was some fucking appliance that nobody needed anymore . . . They never even fixed my broken nose.”
The bank of clouds was rising above them now, curled at the top like some mirac
ulous wave that never fell. There was a strong, cold metallic odor in the air, and a noise that sounded like a million voices wailing incessantly, all at once. Jack tasted despair, as distinctly as if it were wine he'd just drunk.
“But I never hurt you,” he said, the words falling like ashes from his tongue. “I always loved you.”
She threw back her head in what he first thought was laughter, but became, instead, a harrowing scream. “Is this what you loved?” she said, lowering her face again, utterly transformed. The nose was smashed flat, a bloody smudge across her face; her eyes were blackened, sunk deep in their sockets; her flesh was raw, and gouged with shards of glass. “Is this what you loved, Jackie boy?”
Her arms snaked around him, astonishingly strong, and her body rubbed up against him. Her face was only inches away. “Is this what you loved?” she whispered, through broken teeth and torn lips. “Show me.”
She bent her head—there was a gash in the crown of her skull as if it had been cleaved with an ax—and pressed her open lips to his. He felt her tongue, like a living icicle, probe and scour his mouth. She tasted of blood and agony and rot, but he was powerless to resist her, he was unable even to move. She put her hands, cold and hard, against his face, and seemed to suck the breath right out of his body. This, Jack thought, through the terrible and overwhelming sadness, is what it is to die. He felt his strength ebbing like a tide, washing up and into the mighty black wave that towered above him; it was like a wall of water, but made of dust, shadow . . . and something else that he could not discern. It changed its shape and texture constantly, flickering like flame, rising like smoke. As he watched it, hypnotized by the swirling facade, his mother's grasp gradually lessened, her lips came away, she faded back, and into the roiling wall of darkness. It was then he saw what else it was made of. Faces, and bodies—more than he could ever have imagined—rising and falling, twisted and contorted, screaming and pleading and weeping; he saw mouths, open, and eyes, staring; he saw arms reaching out and legs kicking wildly. Bodies merged, and disappeared, and appeared again; he could see them, and see through them, at the same time. The wall went on as far as he could see, stretching away, curved like a crescent moon, rising up toward a black and starless sky, falling away toward . . . what? His eyes were drawn, almost against his will, to the foot of the wall, or where the foot should have been; instead, he saw a vast and bottomless swirling, a black miasma that seemed to drop away forever into . . . what had his mother said, eternity? His own feet were balanced on the very brink of the precipice.
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