by Stephen King
But she needs him to be.
Tyler needs him to be.
I am a coppiceman, he thinks. At first the concept seems insubstantial compared to her beauty—to her simple reality—but then it begins to take hold. As it always has. What else brought him here, after all? Brought him against his will and all his best intentions?
“Jack?”
“Yes, I’m all right. I’ve flipped before.” But never into the presence of such beauty, he thinks. That’s the problem. You’re the problem, my lady.
“Yes. To come and go is your talent. One of your talents. So I have been told.”
“By whom?”
“Shortly,” she says. “Shortly. There’s a great deal to do, and yet I think I need a moment. You … rather take my breath away.”
Jack is fiercely glad to know it. He sees he is still holding her hand, and he kisses it, as Judy kissed his hands in the world on the other side of the wall from this one, and when he does, he sees the fine mesh of bandage on the tips of three of her fingers. He wishes he dared to take her in his arms, but she daunts him: her beauty and her presence. She is slightly taller than Judy—a matter of two inches, surely no more—and her hair is lighter, the golden shade of unrefined honey spilling from a broken comb. She is wearing a simple cotton robe, white trimmed with a blue that matches her eyes. The narrow V-neck frames her throat. The hem falls to just below her knees. Her legs are bare but she’s wearing a silver anklet on one of them, so slim it’s almost invisible. She is fuller-breasted than Judy, her hips a bit wider. Sisters, you might think, except that they have the same spray of freckles across the nose and the same white line of scar across the back of the left hand. Different mishaps caused that scar, Jack has no doubt, but he also has no doubt that those mishaps occurred at the same hour of the same day.
“You’re her Twinner. Judy Marshall’s Twinner.” Only the word that comes out of his mouth isn’t Twinner; incredibly, dopily, it seems to be harp. Later he will think of how the strings of a harp lie close together, only a finger’s touch apart, and he will decide that word isn’t so foolish after all.
She looks down, her mouth drooping, then raises her head again and tries to smile. “Judy. On the other side of the wall. When we were children, Jack, we spoke together often. Even when we grew up, although then we spoke in each other’s dreams.” He is alarmed to see tears forming in her eyes and then slipping down her cheeks. “Have I driven her mad? Run her to lunacy? Please say I haven’t.”
“Nah,” Jack says. “She’s on a tightrope, but she hasn’t fallen off yet. She’s tough, that one.”
“You have to bring her Tyler back to her,” Sophie tells him. “For both of us. I’ve never had a child. I cannot have a child. I was … mistreated, you see. When I was young. Mistreated by one you knew well.”
A terrible certainty forms in Jack’s mind. Around them, the ruined pavilion flaps and sighs in the wonderfully fragrant breeze.
“Was it Morgan? Morgan of Orris?”
She bows her head, and perhaps this is just as well. Jack’s face is, at that moment, pulled into an ugly snarl. In that moment he wishes he could kill Morgan Sloat’s Twinner all over again. He thinks to ask her how she was mistreated, and then realizes he doesn’t have to.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve,” she says … as Jack has known she would say. It happened that same year, the year when Jacky was twelve and came here to save his mother. Or did he come here? Is this really the Territories? Somehow it doesn’t feel the same. Almost … but not quite.
It doesn’t surprise him that Morgan would rape a child of twelve, and do it in a way that would keep her from ever having children. Not at all. Morgan Sloat, sometimes known as Morgan of Orris, wanted to rule not just one world or two, but the entire universe. What are a few raped children to a man with such ambitions?
She gently slips her thumbs across the skin beneath his eyes. It’s like being brushed with feathers. She’s looking at him with something like wonder. “Why do you weep, Jack?”
“The past,” he says. “Isn’t that always what does it?” And thinks of his mother, sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette, and listening while the radio plays “Crazy Arms.” Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the hurt is, all you can’t get over.
“Perhaps so,” she allows. “But there’s no time to think about the past today. It’s the future we must think about today.”
“Yes, but if I could ask just a few questions … ?”
“All right, but only a few.”
Jack opens his mouth, tries to speak, and makes a comical little gaping expression when nothing comes out. Then he laughs. “You take my breath away, too,” he tells her. “I have to be honest about that.”
A faint tinge of color rises in Sophie’s cheeks, and she looks down. She opens her lips to say something … then presses them together again. Jack wishes she had spoken and is glad she hasn’t, both at the same time. He squeezes her hands gently, and she looks up at him, blue eyes wide.
“Did I know you? When you were twelve?”
She shakes her head.
“But I saw you.”
“Perhaps. In the great pavilion. My mother was one of the Good Queen’s handmaidens. I was another … the youngest. You could have seen me then. I think you did see me.”
Jack takes a moment to digest the wonder of this, then goes on. Time is short. They both know this. He can almost feel it fleeting.
“You and Judy are Twinners, but neither of you travel—she’s never been in your head over here and you’ve never been in her head, over there. You … talk through a wall.”
“Yes.”
“When she wrote things, that was you, whispering through the wall.”
“Yes. I knew how hard I was pushing her, but I had to. Had to! It’s not just a question of restoring her child to her, important as that may be. There are larger considerations.”
“Such as?”
She shakes her head. “I am not the one to tell you. The one who will is much greater than I.”
He studies the tiny dressings that cover the tips of her fingers, and muses on how hard Sophie and Judy have tried to get through that wall to each other. Morgan Sloat could apparently become Morgan of Orris at will. As a boy of twelve, Jack had met others with that same talent. Not him; he was single-natured and had always been Jack in both worlds. Judy and Sophie, however, have proved incapable of flipping back and forth in any fashion. Something’s been left out of them, and they could only whisper through the wall between the worlds. There must be sadder things, but at this moment he can’t think of a single one.
Jack looks around at the ruined tent, which seems to breathe with sunshine and shadow. Rags flap. In the next room, through a hole in the gauzy cloth wall, he sees a few overturned cots. “What is this place?” he asks.
She smiles. “To some, a hospital.”
“Oh?” He looks up and once more takes note of the cross. Maroon now, but undoubtedly once red. A red cross, stupid, he thinks. “Oh! But isn’t it a little … well … old?”
Sophie’s smile widens, and Jack realizes it’s ironic. Whatever sort of hospital this is, or was, he’s guessing it bears little or no resemblance to the ones on General Hospital or ER. “Yes, Jack. Very old. Once there were a dozen or more of these tents in the Territories, On-World, and Mid-World; now there are only a few. Mayhap just this one. Today it’s here. Tomorrow …” Sophie raises her hands, then lowers them. “Anywhere! Perhaps even on Judy’s side of the wall.”
“Sort of like a traveling medicine show.”
This is supposed to be a joke, and he’s startled when she first nods, then laughs and claps her hands. “Yes! Yes, indeed! Although you wouldn’t want to be treated here.”
What exactly is she trying to say? “I suppose not,” he agrees, looking at the rotting walls, tattered ceiling panels, and ancient support posts. “Doesn’t exactly look sterile.”
Seriously (but her eyes are sparkling),
Sophie says: “Yet if you were a patient, you would think it beautiful out of all measure. And you would think your nurses, the Little Sisters, the most beautiful any poor patient ever had.”
Jack looks around. “Where are they?”
“The Little Sisters don’t come out when the sun shines. And if we wish to continue our lives with the blessing, Jack, we’ll be gone our separate ways from here long before dark.”
It pains him to hear her talk of separate ways, even though he knows it’s inevitable. The pain doesn’t dampen his curiosity, however; once a coppiceman, it seems, always a coppiceman.
“Why?”
“Because the Little Sisters are vampires, and their patients never get well.”
Startled, uneasy, Jack looks around for signs of them. Certainly disbelief doesn’t cross his mind—a world that can spawn werewolves can spawn anything, he supposes.
She touches his wrist. A little tremble of desire goes through him.
“Don’t fear, Jack—they also serve the Beam. All things serve the Beam.”
“What beam?”
“Never mind.” The hand on his wrist tightens. “The one who can answer your questions will be here soon, if he’s not already.” She gives him a sideways look that contains a glimmer of a smile. “And after you hear him, you’ll be more apt to ask questions that matter.”
Jack realizes that he has been neatly rebuked, but coming from her, it doesn’t sting. He allows himself to be led through room after room of the great and ancient hospital. As they go, he gets a sense of how really huge this place is. He also realizes that, in spite of the fresh breezes, he can detect a faint, unpleasant undersmell, something that might be a mixture of fermented wine and spoiled meat. As to what sort of meat, Jack is afraid he can guess pretty well. After visiting over a hundred homicide crime scenes, he should be able to.
It would have been impolite to break away while Jack was meeting the love of his life (not to mention bad narrative business), so we didn’t. Now, however, let us slip through the thin walls of the hospital tent. Outside is a dry but not unpleasant landscape of red rocks, broom sage, desert flowers that look a bit like sego lilies, stunted pines, and a few barrel cacti. Somewhere not too far distant is the steady cool sigh of a river. The hospital pavilion rustles and flaps as dreamily as the sails of a ship riding down the sweet chute of the trade winds. As we float along the great ruined tent’s east side in our effortless and peculiarly pleasant way, we notice a strew of litter. There are more rocks with drawings etched on them, there is a beautifully made copper rose that has been twisted out of shape as if by some great heat, there is a small rag rug that looks as if it has been chopped in two by a meat cleaver. There’s other stuff as well, stuff that has resisted any change in its cyclonic passage from one world to the other. We see the blackened husk of a television picture tube lying in a scatter of broken glass, several Duracell AA batteries, a comb, and—perhaps oddest—a pair of white nylon panties with the word Sunday written on one side in demure pink script. There has been a collision of worlds; here, along the east side of the hospital pavilion, is an intermingled detritus that attests to how hard that collision was.
At the end of that littery plume of exhaust—the head of the comet, we might say—sits a man we recognize. We’re not used to seeing him in such an ugly brown robe (and he clearly doesn’t know how to wear such a garment, because if we look at him from the wrong angle, we can see much more than we want to), or wearing sandals instead of wing tips, or with his hair pulled back into a rough horsetail and secured with a hank of rawhide, but this is undoubtedly Wendell Green. He is muttering to himself. Drool drizzles from the corners of his mouth. He is looking fixedly at an untidy crumple of foolscap in his right hand. He ignores all the more cataclysmic changes that have occurred around him and focuses on just this one. If he can figure out how his Panasonic minicorder turned into a little pile of ancient paper, perhaps he’ll move on to the other stuff. Not until then.
Wendell (we’ll continue to call him Wendell, shall we, and not worry about any name he might or might not have in this little corner of existence, since he doesn’t know it or want to) spies the Duracell AA batteries. He crawls to them, picks them up, and begins trying to stick them into the little pile of foolscap. It doesn’t work, of course, but that doesn’t keep Wendell from trying. As George Rathbun might say, “Give that boy a flyswatter and he’d try to catch dinner with it.”
“Geh,” says the Coulee Country’s favorite investigative reporter, repeatedly poking the batteries at the foolscap. “Geh … in. Geh … in! Gah-damnit, geh in th—”
A sound—the approaching jingle of what can only be, God help us, spurs—breaks into Wendell’s concentration, and he looks up with wide, bulging eyes. His sanity may not be gone forever, but it’s certainly taken the wife and kids and gone to Disney World. Nor is the current vision before his eyes apt to coax it back anytime soon.
Once in our world there was a fine black actor named Woody Strode. (Lily knew him; acted with him, as a matter of fact, in a late-sixties American International stinkeroo called Execution Express.) The man now approaching the place where Wendell Green crouches with his batteries and his handful of foolscap looks remarkably like that actor. He is wearing faded jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a neck scarf, and a heavy revolver on a wide leather gun belt in which four dozen or so shells twinkle. His head is bald, his eyes deep-set. Slung over one shoulder by a strap of intricate design is a guitar. Sitting on the other is what appears to be a parrot. The parrot has two heads.
“No, no,” says Wendell in a mildly scolding voice. “Don’t. Don’t see. Don’t see. That.” He lowers his head and once more begins trying to cram the batteries into the handful of paper.
The shadow of the newcomer falls over Wendell, who resolutely refuses to look up.
“Howdy, stranger,” says the newcomer.
Wendell carries on not looking up.
“My name’s Parkus. I’m the law ’round these parts. What’s your handle?”
Wendell refuses to respond, unless we can call the low grunts issuing from his drool-slicked mouth a response.
“I asked your name.”
“Wen,” says our old acquaintance (we can’t really call him a friend) without looking up. “Wen. Dell. Gree … Green. I … I … I …”
“Take your time,” Parkus says (not without sympathy). “I can wait till your branding iron gets hot.”
“I … news hawk!”
“Oh? That what you are?” Parkus hunkers; Wendell cringes back against the fragile wall of the pavilion. “Well, don’t that just beat the bass drum at the front of the parade? Tell you what, I’ve seen fish hawks, and I’ve seen red hawks, and I’ve seen goshawks, but you’re my first news hawk.”
Wendell looks up, blinking rapidly.
On Parkus’s left shoulder, one head of the parrot says: “God is love.”
“Go fuck your mother,” replies the other head.
“All must seek the river of life,” says the first head.
“Suck my tool,” says the second.
“We grow toward God,” responds the first.
“Piss up a rope,” invites the second.
Although both heads speak equably—even in tones of reasonable discourse—Wendell cringes backward even farther, then looks down and furiously resumes his futile work with the batteries and the handful of paper, which is now disappearing into the sweat-grimy tube of his fist.
“Don’t mind ’em,” Parkus says. “I sure don’t. Hardly hear ’em anymore, and that’s the truth. Shut up, boys.”
The parrot falls silent.
“One head’s Sacred, the other’s Profane,” Parkus says. “I keep ’em around just to remind me that—”
He is interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps, and stands up again in a single lithe and easy movement. Jack and Sophie are approaching, holding hands with the perfect unconsciousness of children on their way to school.
“Speedy!” Jack cri
es, his face breaking into a grin.
“Why, Travelin’ Jack!” Parkus says, with a grin of his own. “Well-met! Look at you, sir—you’re all grown up.”
Jack rushes forward and throws his arms around Parkus, who hugs him back, and heartily. After a moment, Jack holds Parkus at arm’s length and studies him. “You were older—you looked older to me, at least. In both worlds.”
Still smiling, Parkus nods. And when he speaks again, it is in Speedy Parker’s drawl. “Reckon I did look older, Jack. You were just a child, remember.”
“But—”
Parkus waves one hand. “Sometimes I look older, sometimes not so old. It all depends on—”
“Age is wisdom,” one head of the parrot says piously, to which the other responds, “You senile old fuck.”
“—depends on the place and the circumstances,” Parkus concludes, then says: “And I told you boys to shut up. You keep on, I’m apt to wring your scrawny neck.” He turns his attention to Sophie, who is looking at him with wide, wondering eyes, as shy as a doe. “Sophie,” he says. “It’s wonderful to see you, darling. Didn’t I say he’d come? And here he is. Took a little longer than I expected, is all.”
She drops him a deep curtsey, all the way down to one knee, her head bowed. “Thankee-sai,” she says. “Come in peace, gunslinger, and go your course along the Beam with my love.”
At this, Jack feels an odd, deep chill, as if many worlds had spoken in a harmonic tone, low but resonant.
Speedy—so Jack still thinks of him—takes her hand and urges her to her feet. “Stand up, girl, and look me in the eye. I’m no gunslinger here, not in the borderlands, even if I do still carry the old iron from time to time. In any case, we have a lot to talk about. This’s no time for ceremony. Come over the rise with me, you two. We got to make palaver, as the gunslingers say. Or used to say, before the world moved on. I shot a good brace of grouse, and think they’ll cook up just fine.”
“What about—” Jack gestures toward the muttering, crouched heap that is Wendell Green.
“Why, he looks right busy,” Parkus says. “Told me he’s a news hawk.”
