"And you'd be helping me find the man who killed your daughter."
"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 a madness of grief and rage.
"Does Gorg look like a person, or like something else?"
Tansy shakes her head from side to side with great slowness. She is composing herself again, reinstating a personality that can ignore her real emotions. "Gorg does not look like a person. Not at all."
"You said he gave you the feather you were wearing. Does he look like a bird?"
"Gorg doesn't look like a bird, he is a bird. And do you know what 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 came from Night's Plutonian shore. That's from a poem Mrs. Normandie taught us in the sixth grade. 'The Raven,' by Edgar Allan Poe."
Tansy straightens up, having passed on this nugget of literary history. Jack guesses that Mrs. Normandie probably wore the same satisfied, pedagogic 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 comes into his mind, he wants to see her again, so strongly 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 Airstream; he wants to put off the Thunder Five and speed up the highway 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 me," she whispers. Tansy's gaze skitters away from him and fastens on the Scooby-Doo glass. "Gorg likes fire. But not because it makes him warm. Because it burns things up, and that makes him happy. Gorg said . . ." She shakes her head and lifts the glass to her mouth. Instead of drinking from it, she tilts the liquid toward the lip of the glass and laps at it with her tongue. Her eyes slide up to meet his again. "I think my tea is magic."
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. Normandie doesn't allow it. You can kiss me, though. Do you want to kiss me?"
"Of course I do," he says. "But Mrs. Normandie doesn't allow kissing, either."
"Oh, well." Tansy laps again at her drink. "We can do it later, when she leaves the room. And you can put your arms around me, like Lester Moon. And everything Lester does, you can do. With me."
"Thank you," Jack says. "Tansy, can you tell me some of the other things Gorg said?"
She cants her head and pushes her lips in and out. "He said he came here through a burning hole. With folded-back edges. And he said I was a mother, and I had to help my daughter. In the poem, her name is Lenore, but her real name is Irma. And he said . . . he said a mean old man ate her leg, but there were worse 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 from where she has gone, it is like watching a statue slowly come to life. Her voice is almost too soft to be heard. "I was supposed to fix that old man, fix him but good. Only you gave me my beautiful lilies, and he wasn't the right man, was he?"
Jack feels like screaming.
"He said there were worse things," Tansy says in a whisper of disbelief. "But he didn't say what they were. He showed me, instead. And when I saw, I thought my eyes burned up. Even though I could still see."