4
Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like muggers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton, once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a leash.
5
A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.
39
Point Venuti
1
Point Venuti hung low in the landscape, clinging to the sides of the cliff leading down to the ocean. Behind it, another range of cliffs rose massively but raggedly into the dark air. They looked like ancient elephants, hugely wrinkled. The road led down past high wooden walls until it turned a corner by a long brown metal building that was a factory or warehouse, where it disappeared into a descending series of terraces, the dull roofs of other warehouses. From Jack’s perspective, the road did not reappear again until it began to mount the rise opposite, going uphill and south toward San Francisco. He saw only the stairlike descent of the warehouse roofs, the fenced- in parking lots, and, way off to the right, the wintry gray of the water. No people moved on any portion of the road visible to him; nobody appeared in the row of little windows at the back of the nearest factory. Dust swirled through the empty parking lots. Point Venuti looked deserted, but Jack knew that it was not. Morgan Sloat and his cohorts —those who had survived the surprise arrival of the Territories choo-choo, anyway—would be waiting for the arrival of Travelling Jack and Rational Richard. The Talisman boomed out to Jack, urging him forward, and he said, “Well, this is it, kiddo,” and stepped forward.
Two new facets of Point Venuti immediately came into view. The first was the appearance of approximately nine inches of the rear of a Cadillac limousine—Jack saw the glossy black paint, the shiny bumper, part of the right taillight. Jack wished fervently that the renegade Wolf behind the wheel had been one of the Camp Readiness casualties. Then he looked out toward the ocean again. Gray water lathered toward the shore. A slow movement up above the factory and warehouse roofs took his attention in the middle of his next step. COME HERE, the Talisman called in that urgent, magnetic manner. Point Venuti seemed somehow to contract like a hand into a fist. Up above the roofs, and only now visible, a dark but colorless weathervane shaped like the head of a wolf spun erratically back and forth, obeying no wind.
When Jack saw the lawless weathervane tracking left-right, then right–left, and continuing around in a complete circle, he knew that he had just had his first sight of the black hotel—at least a portion of it. From the roofs of the warehouses, from the road ahead, from all of the unseen town, rose an unmistakable feeling of enmity as palpable as a slap in the face. The Territories were bleeding through into Point Venuti, Jack realized; here, reality had been sanded thin. The wolf’s head whirled meaninglessly in mid-air, and the Talisman continued to pull at Jack. COME HERE COME HERE COME NOW COME NOW NOW . . . Jack realized that along with its incredible and increasing pull, the Talisman was singing to him. Wordlessly, tunelessly, but singing, a curving rise and fall of whale’s melody that would be inaudible to anyone else.
The Talisman knew he had just seen the hotel’s weathervane.
Point Venuti might be the most depraved and dangerous place in all North and South America, Jack thought, suddenly bolder by half, but it could not keep him from going into the Agincourt Hotel. He turned to Richard, feeling now as if he had been doing nothing but resting and exercising for a month, and tried not to let his dismay at his friend’s condition show in his face. Richard could not stop him, either—if he had to, he’d shove Richard right through the walls of the damned hotel. He saw tormented Richard drag his fingernails through his hair and down the hivelike rash on his temples and cheeks.
“We’re going to do this, Richard,” he said. “I know we are. I don’t care how much crazy bullshit they throw at us. We are going to do this.”
“Our troubles are going to have troubles with us,” said Richard, quoting—surely unconsciously—from Dr. Seuss. He paused. “I don’t know if I can make it. That’s the truth. I’m dead on my feet.” He gave Jack a look of utterly naked anguish. “What’s
“I don’t know, but I know how to stop it.” And hoped that that was true.
“Is my father doing this to me?” Richard asked miserably. He ran his hands experimentally over his puffy face. Then he lifted his shirt out of his trousers and examined the red coalescing rash on his stomach. The bumps, shaped vaguely like the state of Oklahoma, began at his waistline and extended around both sides and up nearly to his neck. “It looks like a virus or something. Did my father give it to me?”
“I don’t think he did it on purpose, Richie,” Jack said. “If that means anything.”
“It doesn’t,” Richard said.
“It’s all going to stop. The Seabrook Island Express is coming to the end of the line.”
Richard right beside him, Jack stepped forward—and saw the taillights of the Cadillac flash on, then off, before the car slipped forward out of his sight.
There would be no surprise attack this time, no wonderful slam-bang arrival through a fence with a trainful of guns and ammunition, but even if everybody in Point Venuti knew they were coming, Jack was on his way. He felt suddenly as if he had strapped on armor, as if he held a magic sword. Nobody in Point Venuti had the power to harm him, at least not until he got to the Agincourt Hotel. He was on his way, Rational Richard beside him, and all would be well. And before he had taken three more steps, his muscles singing along with the Talisman, he had a better, more accurate image of himself than of a knight going out to do battle. The image came straight from one of his mother’s movies, delivered by celestial telegram. It was as if he were on a horse, a broad-brimmed hat on his head and a gun tied to his hip, riding in to clean up Deadwood Gulch.
2
Four or five of the Territories trees struggled out of the hard brown soil beside the first of the abandoned buildings. Maybe they had been there all along, snaking their branches over the road nearly to the white line, maybe not; Jack could not remember seeing them when he first looked down toward the concealed town. It was scarcely more conceivable, though, that he could overlook the trees than he could a pack of wild dogs. He could hear their roots rustling along the surface of the ground as he and Richard approached the warehouse.
