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REMEMBER THOSE news vans that drove into the parking lot behind the police station? And Wendell Green’s contribution to the exciteht knocked him into the Land of Nod? Once the crews inside the vans took in the see inevitability of a riot, we can be sure they rose to the occasion, for the next ht dominates television screens across the state By nine o’clock, people in Racine and Milwaukee, people in Madison and Delafield, and people who live so far north in the state that they need satellite dishes to get any television at all are looking up fros, and their buttered Englishoff a large, florid reporter’s budding career as a de him with a blunt instrument And we may also be sure of one other e watched as widely and co co about several matters at once, Jack Saatches it all on a little portable TV placed on his kitchen counter He hopes that Dale Gilbertson will not revoke Arnold Hrabowski’s suspension, although he strongly suspects that the Mad Hungarian will soon be back in uniforood: he is too soft-hearted to listen to Arnie’s pleas ¡ª and after last night, even a blindto plead ¡ª without relenting Jack also hopes that the awful Wendell Green will get fired or race Reporters are not supposed to thrust theood old loud for blood like a olf However, Jack has the depressing feeling that Wendell Green will talk his way out of his present difficulties (that is, lie his way out of the Andy Rails-back’s description of the creepy oldthe doorknobs on the third floor of the Nelson Hotel

There he was, the Fisheriven form at last An old man in a blue robe and one slipper striped black and yellow, like a bumblebee Andy Railsback had wondered if this unpleasant-looking old party had wandered away fro notion, Jack thought If "Chue Potter’s room, Maxton’s would be a perfect hidey-hole for hi the news on the Sony in his hotel rooh what he sees there afflicts hier, shame, and humiliation ¡ª that makes his stomach boil The knot on his head throbs, and every ti up behind hiers into the thick, curly hair at the back of his head and gently palpates it The da feels about the size of a ripe tomato and just as ready to burst He’s lucky not to have a concussion That pipsqueak could have killed hie, maybe he took a tiny step across a professional boundary; he never claiuys, they piss hiuy covering the Fisher the citizens what they need to know? Who’s been putting hiave the guy his name? Not those blow-dried airheads Bucky and Stacey, those wanna-be news reporters and local anchors who smile into the camera to show off their capped teeth, that’s for sure Wendell Green is a legend around here, a star, the closest thing to a giant of journalism ever to come out of western Wisconsin Even over in Madison, the name Wendell Green stands forwell, unquestioned excellence And if the naold standard now, just wait until he rides the Fisherman’s blood-spattered shoulders all the way to a Pulitzer Prize

So Monday o into the office and pacify his editor Big deal It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last Good reporters make waves; nobody admits it, but that’s the deal, that’s the fine print nobody reads until it’s too late When he walks into his editor’s office, he knohat he’s going to say: Biggest story of the day, and did you see any other reporters there? And when he has the editor eating out of his hand again, which will take about ten minutes flat, he intends to drop in on a Goltz’s salesman named Fred Marshall One of Wendell’s ested that Mr Marshall has so information about his special, special baby, the Fisher wife, Paula, is watching the news in a postcoital glow and thinking that she is right: he really should call Chief Gilbertson and ask to be taken off suspension

Wondering with half his e Potter’s old adversary, Dale Gilbertson watches Bucky and Stacey cut away yet again to the spectacle of the Mad Hungarian taking care of Wendell Green and thinks that he really should reinstate the little guy Would you look at the beautiful swing Arnie took? Dale can’t help it ¡ª that swing really brightens up his day It’s like watching Mark McGwire, like watching Tiger Woods

Alone in her dark little house off the highway, Wanda Kinderling, to e haveto the radio Why is she listening to the radio? So her cable bill and buying another half gallon of Aristocrat vodka, and sorry, Bucky and Stacey, but Wanda followed her bliss, she ith her heart Without cable service, her television set brings in little more than snow and a heavy dark line that scrolls up over her screen in an endless loop Wanda always hated Bucky and Stacey anyhow, along with almost everyone else on television, especially if they looked content and well groo news prograroomed since her husband, Thorny, was accused of terrible crihty show-off Jack Sawyer Jack Sawyer ruined her life, and Wanda is not about to forgive or forget

That man trapped her husband He set him up He smeared Thorny’s innocent naood Wanda hopes they never catch the Fisherman, because the Fisherman is exactly what they deserve, those dirty bastards Play dirty, you are dirty, and people like that can go straight to the deepest bowels of hell ¡ª that’s what Wanda Kinderling thinks The Fisherman is retribution ¡ª that’s what Wanda thinks Let him kill a hundred brats, let him kill a thousand, and after that he can start in on their parents Thorny could not have killed those sluts down there in Los Angeles Those were sex murders, and Thorny had no interest in sex, thank the Lord The rest of hiie was about the size of his little finger It was is But Jack Sawyer lived in Los Angeles, didn’t he? So why couldn’t he have killed those sluts, those whores, and blamed it all on Thorny?

The newscaster describes forht, and Wanda Kinderling spits up bile, grabs the glass frouts with three inches of vodka

Gorg, ould seem a natural visitor to the likes of Wanda, pays no attention to the news, for he is far away in Faraway

In his bed at Maxton’s, Charles Burnside is enjoying drea, from elsewhere, and depict a world he has never seen on his own Ragged, enslaved children plod on their bleeding foodzies past leaping flaer wheels oho aha that power the beyoodiful engynes of destructionCo truly vile, soon urine, perfumes the air, as does the leaden stench of despair Lizard de A din of clattering and banging, of crashing and enormous thuds punishes the ears These are the drea ht

Down past the end of Daisy wing, across the handsoh Rebecca Vilas’s little cubicle, Chipper Maxton is concerned with matters considerably more mundane The little TV on a shelf over the safe broadcasts the wondrous i Wendell Green with a nice, clean sweep of his heavy-duty flashlight, but Chipper barely notices the splendid moment He has to come up with the thirteen thousand dollars he owes his bookie, and he has only about half of that sum Yesterday, lovely Rebecca drove to Miller to withdraw most of what he had stashed there, and he can use about two thousand dollars fro as he replaces it before the end of the rand, an a Fortunately, creative bookkeeping is a speciality of Chipper’s, and when he begins to think of his options, he sees his current difficulty as an opportunity

After all, he went into business in the first place to steal asserviced by Ms Vilas, stealing is about the only activity that makes him truly happy The amount is almost irrelevant: as we have seen, Chipper derives asrelatives after the Strawberry Fest as froovernment out of ten or fifteen thousand dollars The thrill lies in getting aith it So he needs six thousand; why not take ten thousand? That way, he can leave his own account untouched and still have an extra two grand to play with He has two sets of books on his computer, and he can easily draw theoff bells during his next state audit, which is co up in about a month Unless the auditors demand the bank records, and even then there are a couple of tricks he can use It’s too bad about the audit, though ¡ª Chipper would like to have a littlethe thirteen thousand wasn’t the proble ti clear in his head, Chipper pulls his keyboard toward him and tells the computer to print out complete statements of both sets of books for the past es will have been fed into the shredder and come out as macaroni

Let us move from one form of insanity to another After the owner of the Holiday Trailer Park has extended a treer to point out the Freneau residence, Jack drives toward it on the dusty path with gathering doubts Tansy’s Airstream is the last and least maintained of a row of four Two of the others have flowers in a bright border around thes that make it look ns of decoration or ile in the beaten earth surrounding it The shades are pulled down An air of ht define, if he stopped to consider it, as slippage In no obvious way, the trailer looks wrong Unhappiness has distorted it, as it can distort a person, and when Jack gets out of his truck and walks toward the cinder blocks placed before the entrance, his doubts increase He can no longer be sure why he has coive Tansy Freneau nothing but his pity, and this thought makes him uneasy

Then it occurs to his, which have to do with the discomfort the trailer arouses in hi else is a rationalization; he has no choice but to keeptouch of the ordinary world he can feel already disappearing around him, and he steps up onto the top happens Maybe she really is still asleep and would prefer to stay that way If he were Tansy, he would stay in bed as long as possible If he were Tansy, he’d stay in bed for weeks Once ain and says, "Tansy? Are you up?"

A little voice from within says, "Up where?"

Uh-oh, Jack thinks, and says, "Out of bed I’ the police, and I told you I’d co toward the door "Are you the ave me the flowers? He was a nice man"

"That was me"

A lock clicks, and the knob revolves The door cracks open A sliver of a faintly olive-skinned face and a single eye shine out of the inner darkness "It is you Co the door just wide enough for hih As soon as he is inside, she sla at the edges of the curtains and theshades deepens the darkness of the long trailer’s interior One soft lamp burns above the sink, and another, just as low, illuminates a little table otherwise occupied by a bottle of coffee brandy, a slass decorated with a picture of a cartoon character, and a scrapbook The circle of light cast by the lamp extends to take in half of a low, fabric-covered chair next to the table Tansy Freneau pushes herself off the door and takes two light, delicate steps toward hiether beneath her chin The eager, slightly glazed expression in her eyes dismays Jack By even the widest, most comprehensive definition of sanity, this woman is not sane He has no idea what to say to her

"Would you care tosit down?" With a hostessy wave of her hand, she indicates a high-backed wooden chair

"If it’s all right with you"

"Why wouldn’t it be all right? I’ to sit down in my chair, why shouldn’t you sit down in that one?"

"Thank you," Jack says, and sits doatching her glide back to the door to check the lock Satisfied, Tansy gives hi alrace of a ballerina When she lowers herself to the chair, he says, "Are you afraid of soht come here, Tansy? Is there someone you want to keep locked out?"

"Oh, yes," she says, and leans forward, pulling her eyebrows together in an exaggerated display of little-girl seriousness "But it isn’t a so to let hiain, not ever But I’ll let you in, because you’re a very nice ave me those beautiful flowers And you’re very handso you want to keep out, Tansy? Are you afraid of Gorg?"

"Yes," she says, primly "Would you care for a cup of tea?"

"No, thank you"

"Well, I’ood tea It tastes sort of like coffee" She raises her eyebrows and gives hi look He shakes his head Without ers of the brandy into her glass and sets the bottle back down on the table The figure on her glass, Jack sees, is Scooby-Doo Tansy sips froirlfriend? I could be your girlfriend, you know, especially if you gave me more of those lovely flowers I put them in a vase" She pronounces the word like a parody of a Boston matron: vahhhz "See?"

On the kitchen counter, the lilies of the vale droop in a mason jar half-filled ater Re to live This world, Jack supposes, is poisoning theoodness they yield to their surroundings subtracts from their essence Tansy, he realizes, has been kept afloat on the residue of the Territories re in the lilies ¡ª when they die, her protective little-girl persona will cruulf her That ; he’d bet his life on it

"I do have a boyfriend, but he doesn’t count His name is Lester Moon Beezer and his friends call him Stinky Cheese, but I don’t knohy Lester isn’t all that stinky, at least not when he’s sober"

"Tell er away frolass, Tansy takes another sip of coffee brandy She frowns "Oh, that’s a real icky thing to talk about"

"I want to know about him, Tansy If you help ain"

"Really?"

"And you’d be helping hter"

"I can’t talk about that now It’s too upsetting" Tansy flutters her free hand over her lap as if sweeping off a crumb Her face contracts, and a new expression moves into her eyes For a second, the desperate, unprotected Tansy rises to the surface, threatening to explode in alook like a person, or like so else?"

Tansy shakes her head fro herself again, reinstating a personality that can ignore her real e does not look like a person Not at all"

"You said he gave you the feather you earing Does he look like a bird?"

"Gorg doesn’t look like a bird, he is a bird And do you knohat kind?" She leans forward again, and her face takes on the expression of a six-year-old girl about to tell the worst thing she knows "A raven That’s what he is, a big, old raven All black But not shiny black" Her eyes widen with the seriousness of what she has to say "He caht’s Plutonian shore That’s frorade ’The Raven,’ by Edgar Allan Poe"

Tansy straightens up, having passed on this nugget of literary history Jack guesses that Mrs Noric expression that is now on Tansy’s face, but without the bright, unhealthy glaze in Tansy’s eyes

"Night’s Plutonian shore is not part of this world," Tansy continues "Did you know that? It’s alongside this world, and outside it You need to find a door, if you want to go there"

This is like talking to Judy Marshall, Jack abruptly realizes, but a Judy without the depth of soul and the unbelievable courage that rescued her from madness The instant that Judy Marshall coly that Judy feels like the one essential key to the puzzle all around him And if she is the key, she is also the door the key opens Jack wants to be out of the dark, warped atmosphere of Tansy’s Airstreahway and over the hill to Arden and the gloomy hospital where radiant Judy Marshall has found freedom in a locked mental ward

"But I don’t ever want to find that door, because I don’t want to go there," Tansy says in a singsong voice "Night’s Plutonian shore is a bad world Everything’s on fire there"

"How do you know that?"

"Gorg told aze skitters away fro likes fire But not because it s up, and thatsaid" She shakes her head and lifts the glass to herfrolass and laps at it with her tongue Her eyes slide up to ic"

I bet you do, Jack thinks, and his heart nearly bursts for delicate lost Tansy

"You can’t cry in here," she tells him "You looked like you wanted to cry, but you can’t Mrs Norh Do you want to kiss me?"

"Of course I do," he says "But Mrs Nor, either"

"Oh, well" Tansy laps again at her drink "We can do it later, when she leaves the room And you can put your ar Lester does, you can do With me"

"Thank you," Jack says "Tansy, can you tellsaid?"

She cants her head and pushes her lips in and out "He said he caes And he said I was a hter In the poem, her name is Lenore, but her real name is Ir, but there orse things that could have happened to my Irma"

For a couple of seconds, Tansy seems to recede into herself, to vanish behind her stationary surface Her mouth remains half open; she does not even blink When she returns fro a statue slowly come to life Her voice is almost too soft to be heard "I was supposed to fix that old ave ht

"He said there orse things," Tansy says in a whisper of disbelief "But he didn’t say what they were He showed ht h I could still see"

"What did you see?"

"A big, big place all h up" She falls silent, and an internal te down and out through her fingers "Irot dead, and a ot it So Gorg read it to me I don’t want to think about that letter" She sounds like a little girl describing so she has heard about thirdhand, or has invented A thick curtain lies between Tansy and what she has seen and heard, and that curtain allows her to function Jack again wonders ill happen to her when the lilies die

"And now," she says, "if you’re not going to kiss me, it’s time you left I want to be alone for a while"

Surprised by her decisiveness, Jack stands up and begins to say soless Tansy waves him toward the door

Outside, the air seems heavy with bad odors and unseen chemicals The lilies froined, enough to sweeten and purify Tansy’s air The ground beneath Jack’s feet has been baked dry, and a parched sourness hangs in the atmosphere Jack has nearly to force himself to breathe as he walks toward his truck, but the more he breathes, the more quickly he will readjust to the ordinary world His world, though now it feels poisoned He wants to do one thing only: drive up Highway 93 to Judy Marshall’s lookout point and keep on going, through Arden and into the parking lot, past the hospital doors, past the barriers of Dr Spiegleain in the life-giving presence of Judy Marshall herself

He almost thinks he loves Judy Marshall Maybe he does love her He knows he needs her: Judy is his door and his key His door, his key Whatever that ht, the woman he needs is married to the extremely nice Fred Marshall, but he doesn’t want to marry her; in fact, he doesn’t even want to sleep with her, not exactly ¡ª he just wants to stand before her and see what happens So will happen, that’s for sure, but when he tries to picture it, all he sees is an explosion of tiny red feathers, hardly the i unsteady, Jack props hirabs the door handle with the other Both surfaces sear his hands, and he waves theets into the cab, the seat is hot, too He rolls down hisand, with a twinge of loss, notices that the world sain It so? That is an interesting question, he thinks, but after he gets back on the road and travels no ray wooden shape of the Sand Bar appears on his left, and without hesitating he turns into the absurdly extensive parking lot, as if he knehere he was going all along Looking for a shady spot, Jack cruises around to the back of the building and sees the Bar’s single hint of landscaping, a broad maple tree that rises out of the asphalt at the far end of the lot He guides the Ra the s cranked down Waves of heat ripple upward from the only other two cars in the lot

It is 11:20 AM He is getting hungry, too, since his breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee and a slice of toast so Jack has the feeling that the afternoon is going to be a long one Heto eat while he waits for the bikers

The back door of the Sand Bar opens onto a narrow rest-roolea bar at one side and a row of substantial wooden booths on the other Two big pool tables occupy the ainst the wall between thes where it can be seen by everyone, suspended eight or nine feet above the clean wooden floor The sound has been muted on a commercial that never quite identifies the purpose of its product After the glare of the parking lot, the Bar seems pleasantly dark, and while Jack’s eyes adjust, the fe laht

The bartender, whom Jack takes to be the famous Lester "Stinky Cheese" Moon, looks up once as Jack enters, then returns to the copy of the Herald folded open on the bar When Jack takes a stool a few feet to his right, he looks up again Stinky Cheese is not as awful as Jack had expected He is wearing a clean shirt only a few shades whiter than his round, small-featured face and his shaven head Moon has the unmistakable air, half professional and half resentful, of someone who has taken over the family business and suspects he could have done better elsewhere Jack’s intuition tells him that this sense of weary frustration is the source of his nicknaives him the look of one who expects to encounter a nasty s to eat here?" Jack asks him

"It’s all listed on the board" The bartender turns sideways and indicates a white board with er, hot dog, bratwurst, kielbasa, sandwiches, french fries, onion rings The esture is intended to make Jack feel unobservant, and it works

"Sorry, I didn’t see the sign"

The bartender shrugs

"Cheeseburger, medium, with fries, please"

"Lunch don’t start until eleven-thirty, which it says on the board See?" Another half- up in back I could give her the order now, and she’ll start in on it when she’s ready"

Jack thanks hilances up at the television screen and walks down to the end of the bar and disappears around a corner A few seconds later, he returns, looks up at the screen, and asks Jack what he would like to drink

"Ginger ale," Jack says

Watching the screen, Lester Moon squirts ginger ale frolass toward Jack Then he slides his hand down the bar to pick up the remote control and says, "Hope you don’tthis old movie Pretty funny" He punches a button on the remote, and from over his left shoulder Jack hears hisin late today I wish that little rascal would learn how to handle his liquor

Before he can turn sideways to face the screen, Lester Moon is asking hih

"Oh, yes"

"I always liked her when I was a kid"

"Same here," Jack says

As Jack had known instantly, the movie is The Terror of Deadwood Gulch, a 1950 comic Western in which the then-famous and still fondly remembered Bill Towns, a sort of poor ambler and cardsharp who arrives in the little Potemkin community of Deadwood Gulch, Arizona, and is soon hter As the beautiful, quick-witted owner of a saloon called the Lazy 8, the lively center of village social life, Lily Cavanaugh is ers, ranchers, ht She makes her patrons check their revolvers at the door and mind theirnohich is about half an hour into the et rid of a persistent bee

A bee for the Queen of the B’s, Jack thinks, and s, a flyswatter, a un belt The bee eludes her every effort, zoo here and there, from the bar to a card table, to the top of a whiskey bottle, the tops of three other bottles all in a row, the lid of the upright piano, often waiting while its adversary co off a second before the latest weapon slaes on slapstick, and when Jacky was six, six, six, or ht of his co annoyance and suddenly curious as to how the s, his mother had explained that it was not a real bee but an enchanted one produced by the special-effects departot the bee to go where they wanted Like, what did they do, train it?"

"First they fil concluded that, after all, Stinky Cheese is a pretty decent felloith great taste in actresses "Special effects put the bee in later It isn’t a real bee, it’s a drawing ¡ª an animation You really can’t tell, can you?"

"No way Are you sure? How do you know that, anyhow?"

"I read it in a book so his all-purpose response to such questions

Resplendent in fancy cardsharp getup, Bill Towns saunters through the Lazy 8’s swinging doors and leers at its proprietress without noticing that she is edging toward the bee now once again installed upon the shiny bar He has roers when he walks

I see you came back for more, hotshot, Lily says You must like the place

Baby, this is the sweetest joint west of the wide Missouri Reminds me of the place where I beat Black Jack McGurk to the draw Poor Black Jack He never did knohen to fold ’e of a B-52, the enchanted bee, a creature of fiction inside the fiction, launches itself at Bill Towns’s slickly behat-ted head The comedian’s face turns rubbery with cos, he screeches The enchanted bee perforhter Towns’s splendid hat falls off; his hair disarranges itself He edges toward a table and, with a final flurry of hand waving, dives under it and begs for help

Eye fixed on the alass and a folded newspaper She approaches the table, watching the bee walking around in circles She ju the bee It flies up and bulass, slides the folded paper underneath it, and raises her hands, holding the newspaper against the top of the glass

The ca out from under the table as Lily pushes the doors open and releases the bee

Behind hier’s ready, er and tries to lose hireat, world-class, with that juicy taste you can get only froolden and crunchy on the outside, but his concentration keeps wandering from The Terror of Deadwood Gulch The problem is not that he has seen the movie perhaps a dozen tis she said trouble him The oing on

According to Tansy, the crow ¡ª the raven ¡ª naside and outside the world we know She had to be talking about the Territories Using a phrase froht’s Plutonian shore," which was pretty good for someone like Tansy, but did not see had told Tansy that everything in his world was on fire, and not even the Blasted Lands met that description Jack could remember the Blasted Lands and the odd train that had taken him and Rational Richard, then a sick, wasted Rational Richard, across that vast red desert Strange creatures had lived there, alligator-men and birds with the faces of bearded monkeys, but it had certainly not been on fire The Blasted Lands were the product of soration What had Tansy said? A big, big place h up What had she seen, to what landscape had Gorg opened her eyes? It sounded like a great burning tower, or a tall building consu world ¡ª how could that world be the Territories?

Jack has been in the Territories twice in the past forty-eight hours, and what he has seen has been beautiful More than beautiful ¡ª cleansing The deepest truth Jack knows about the Territories is that they contain a kind of sacred ic, the Territories can confer a wondrous blessing on huh beloved wo screen before him was saved by an object from the Territories Because Jack had been in the Territories ¡ª and maybe because he had held the Talisman ¡ª almost every horse he bets on comes in first, every stock he buys triples in value, ever poker hand he holds takes the pot

So orld is Tansy talking about? And what’s all this stuff about Gorg co hole?

When Jack flipped over yesterday, he had sensed so unhealthy, far off to the southwest, and he suspected that here he would find the Fisherman’s Twinner Kill the Fisherman, kill the Twinner; it didn’t matter which he did first, the other one would weaken But

It still didn’t make sense When you travel betorlds, you just flip ¡ª you don’t set a fire at the world’s edge and run through it into another one