Part 20 (2/2)

The boy who had brought me here was standing on the faded linoleum by the stove and watching me. Although it had probably been six years since he'd sucked his thumb, he was sucking it now. His eyes were wide and solemn, swimming with tears. Freckles of blood spattered his cheeks and brow. Here was a boy who had just experienced something that would no doubt traumatize him, but he was also a boy who would never grow up to become Hoptoad Harry. Or to write a theme that would make me cry.

”Who are you, mister?” he asked.

”n.o.body.” I walked past him to the door. He deserved more than that, though. The sirens were closer now, but I turned back. ”Your good angel,” I said. Then I slipped out the back door and into Halloween night of 1958.

15.

I walked up Wyemore to Witcham, saw flas.h.i.+ng blue lights heading for Kossuth Street, and kept on walking. Two blocks further into the residential district, I turned right on Gerard Avenue. People were standing out on the sidewalks, turned toward the sound of the sirens.

”Mister, do you know what happened?” a man asked me. He was holding the hand of a sneaker-wearing Snow White.

”I heard kids setting off cherry bombs,” I said. ”Maybe they started a fire.” I kept walking and made sure to keep the left side of my face away from him, because there was a streetlight nearby and my scalp was still oozing blood.

Four blocks down, I turned back toward Witcham. This far south of Kossuth, Witcham Street was dark and quiet. All the available police cars were probably now at the scene. Good. I had almost reached the corner of Grove and Witcham when my knees turned to rubber. I looked around, saw no trick-or-treaters, and sat down on the curb. I couldn't afford to stop, but I had to. I'd thrown up everything in my stomach, I hadn't had anything to eat all day except for one lousy candybar (and couldn't remember if I'd even managed to get all of that down before Turcotte jumped me), and I'd just been through a violent interlude in which I had been wounded-how badly I still didn't know. It was either stop now and let my body regroup or pa.s.s out on the sidewalk.

I put my head between my knees and drew a series of deep slow breaths, as I'd learned in the Red Cross course I'd taken to get a lifeguard certification back in college. At first I kept seeing Tugga Dunning's head as it exploded under the smas.h.i.+ng downward force of the hammer, and that made the faintness worse. Then I thought of Harry, who had been splashed with his brother's blood but was otherwise unhurt. And Ellen, who wasn't deep in a coma from which she would never emerge. And Troy. And Doris. Her badly broken arm might hurt her for the rest of her life, but at least she was going to have a life.

”I did it, Al,” I whispered.

But what had I done in 2011? What had I done to 2011? Those were questions that still had to be answered. If something terrible had happened because of the b.u.t.terfly effect, I could always go back and erase it . . . unless, in changing the course of the Dunning family's lives, I had somehow changed the course of Al Templeton's as well. Suppose the diner was no longer where I'd left it? Suppose it turned out he'd never moved it from Auburn? Or never opened a diner at all? It didn't seem likely . . . but here I was, sitting on a 1958 curb with blood oozing out of my 1958 haircut, and how likely was that?

I rose to my feet, staggered, then got moving. To my right, down Witcham Street, I could see the flash and strobe of blue lights. A crowd had gathered on the corner of Kossuth, but their backs were to me. The church where I'd left my car was just across the street. The Sunliner was alone in the parking lot now, but it looked okay; no Halloween pranksters had let the air out of my tires. Then I saw a yellow square under one of the winds.h.i.+eld wipers. My thoughts flashed to the Yellow Card Man, and my gut tightened. I s.n.a.t.c.hed it, then exhaled a sigh of relief when I read what was written there: JOIN YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS FOR WORs.h.i.+P THIS SUNDAY AT 9 AM NEWCOMERS ALWAYS WELCOME! REMEMBER, ”LIFE IS THE QUESTION, JESUS IS THE ANSWER.”

”I thought hard drugs were the answer, and I could sure use some right now,” I muttered, and unlocked the driver's door. I thought of the paper bag I'd left behind the garage of the house on Wyemore Lane. The cops investigating the area were apt to discover it. Inside they'd find a few candybars, a mostly empty bottle of Kaopectate . . . and a stack of what amounted to adult diapers.

I wondered what they'd make of that.

But not too much.

16.

By the time I reached the turnpike, my head was aching fiercely, but even if this hadn't been before the era of twenty-four-hour convenience stores, I'm not sure I would have dared to stop; my s.h.i.+rt was stiff with drying blood on the lefthand side. At least I'd remembered to fill the gas tank.

Once I tried exploring the gash on my head with the tips of my fingers and was rewarded with a blaze of pain that persuaded me not to make a second attempt.

I did stop at the rest area outside of Augusta. By then it was past ten o'clock and the place was deserted. I turned on the dome light and checked my pupils in the rearview mirror. They looked the same size, which was a relief. There was a snacks vending machine outside the men's privy, where ten cents bought me a cream-stuffed chocolate whoopie pie. I gobbled it as I drove, and my headache abated somewhat.

It was after midnight when I got to Lisbon Falls. Main Street was dark, but both the Worumbo and U.S. Gypsum mills were running full tilt, huffing and chuffing, throwing their stinks into the air and spilling their acid wastes into the river. The cl.u.s.ters of s.h.i.+ning lights made them look like s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps. I parked the Sunliner outside the Kennebec Fruit, where it would stay until someone peeked inside and saw the spots of blood on the seat, driver's door, and steering wheel. Then the police would be called. I supposed they'd dust the Ford for fingerprints. It was possible they'd match prints found on a certain .38 Police Special at a murder scene in Derry. The name George Amberson might emerge in Derry and then down here in the Falls. But if the rabbit-hole was still where I'd left it, George was going to leave no trail to follow, and the fingerprints belonged to a man who wasn't going to be born for another eighteen years.

I opened the trunk, took out the briefcase, and decided to leave everything else. For all I knew, it might end up being sold at the Jolly White Elephant, the secondhand store not far from t.i.tus Chevron. I crossed the street toward the mill's dragon-breath, a shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH that would continue around the clock until Reagan-era free trade rendered pricey American textiles obsolete.

The drying shed was lit by a white fluorescent glow from the dirty dyehouse windows. I spotted the chain blocking off the drying shed from the rest of the courtyard. It was too dark to read the sign hanging from it, and it had been almost two months since I'd seen it, but I remembered what it said: NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED. There was no sign of the Yellow Card Man-or the Orange Card Man, if that's what he was now.

Headlights flooded the courtyard, illuminating me like an ant on a plate. My shadow jumped out long and scrawny in front of me. I froze as a big transport truck trundled toward me. I expected the driver to stop, lean out, and ask me what the h.e.l.l I was doing here. He slowed but didn't stop. Raised a hand to me. I raised mine in return, and he drove on toward the loading docks with dozens of empty barrels clunking around in back. I headed for the chain, took one quick look around, and ducked under it.

I walked down the flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard in my chest. The gash on my head pounded in harmony. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot. Slow, I told myself. Slow. The step is right . . . here.

Only it wasn't. There was nothing but the pavement under my testing, tapping shoe.

I went a little farther, and there was still nothing. It was cold enough to see a thin vapor when I exhaled, but a light, greasy sweat had broken out on my arms and neck. I went a little farther, but was now almost sure I had gone too far. Either the rabbit-hole was gone or it had never been there in the first place, which meant that my whole life as Jake Epping-everything from my prize-winning FFA garden in grammar school to my abandoned novel in college to my marriage to a basically sweet woman who'd almost drowned my love for her in alcohol-had been a crazy hallucination. I'd been George Amberson all along.

I went a little farther, then stopped, breathing hard. Somewhere-maybe in the dyehouse, maybe in one of the weaving rooms-someone shouted ”f.u.c.k me sideways!” I jumped, then jumped again at the bull roar of laughter that followed the exclamation.

Not here.

Gone.

Or never was.

And did I feel disappointment? Terror? Outright panic? None of those, actually. What I felt was a sneaking sense of relief. What I thought was, I could live here. And quite easily. Happily, even.

Was that true? Yes. Yes.

It stank near the mills and on public conveyances where everybody smoked their heads off, but in most places the air smelled incredibly sweet. Incredibly new. Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I'd gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that f.u.c.king thing I'd become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I had no cell phone, and what a relief that had been. Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the majority lock their doors at night? b.a.l.l.s they did. They worried about nuclear war, but I was safe in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into skysc.r.a.pers.

And if my 2011 life wasn't a hallucination (in my heart I knew this), I could still stop Oswald. I just wouldn't know the ultimate result. I thought I could live with that.

Okay. The first thing to do was to return to the Sunliner and get out of Lisbon Falls. I'd drive to Lewiston, find the bus station, and buy a ticket to New York. I'd take a train to Dallas from there . . . or h.e.l.l, why not fly? I still had plenty of cash, and no airline clerk was going to demand a picture ID. All I had to do was fork over the price of a ticket and Trans World Airlines would welcome me aboard.

The relief of this decision was so great that my legs again went rubbery. The weakness wasn't as bad as it had been in Derry, when I'd had to sit down, but I leaned against the drying shed for support. My elbow struck it, making a soft bong sound. And a voice spoke to me out of thin air. Hoa.r.s.e. Almost a growl. A voice from the future, as it were.

”Jake? Is that you?” This was followed by a fusillade of dry, barking coughs.

I almost kept silent. I could have kept silent. Then I thought of how much of his life Al had invested in this project, and how I was now the only thing he had left to hope for.

I turned toward the sound of those coughs and spoke in a low voice. ”Al? Talk to me. Count off.” I could have added, Or just keep coughing.

He began to count. I went toward the sound of the numbers, feeling with my foot. After ten steps-far beyond the place where I had given up-the toe of my shoe simultaneously took a step forward and struck something that stopped it cold. I took one more look around. Took one more breath of the chemical-stenchy air. Then I closed my eyes and started climbing steps I couldn't see. On the fourth one, the chilly night air was replaced with stuffy warmth and the smells of coffee and spices. At least that was the case with my top half. Below the waist, I could still feel the night.

I stood there for maybe three seconds, half in the present and half in the past. Then I opened my eyes, saw Al's haggard, anxious, too-thin face, and stepped back into 2011.

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