Maybe they'll pass, he thinks. Those good old endorphins are finally kicking in, and all at once this seems plausible. Optimism is a more normal state for Fred, who does not believe in slippage, and a little smile breaks on his face — the day's first. Maybe the signs will pass. Maybe whatever's wrong with her will blow out as fast as it blew in. Maybe it's even, you know, a menstrual thing. Like PMS.
God, if that was all it was, what a relief ! In the meantime, there's Ty to think about. He has to have a talk with Tyler about the buddy system, because while Fred doesn't believe what Wendell Green is apparently trying to insinuate, that the ghost of a fabulous turn-of-the-century cannibal and all-around boogerman named Albert Fish has for some reason turned up here in Coulee Country, someone is certainly out there, and this someone has murdered two little children and done unspeakable (at least unless you're Wendell Green, it seems) things to the bodies.
Thighs, torso, and bu**ocks bitten, Fred thinks, and runs faster, although now he's getting a stitch in his side. Yet this bears repeating: he does not believe that these horrors can actually touch his son, nor does he see how they can have caused Judy's condition, since her oddities started while Amy St. Pierre was still alive, Johnny Irkenham too, both of them presumably playing happily in their respective backyards.
Maybe this, maybe that . . . but enough of Fred and his worries, all right? Let us rise from the environs of his troubled head and precede him back to No. 16, Robin Hood Lane — let's go directly to the source of his troubles.
The upstairs window of the connubial bedroom is open, and the screen is certainly no problem; we strain ourselves right through, entering with the breeze and the first sounds of the awakening day.
The sounds of French Landing awakening do not awaken Judy Marshall. Nope, she has been starey-eyed since three, conning the shadows for she doesn't know what, fleeing dreams too horrible to remember. Yet she does remember some things, little as she wants to.
"Saw the eye again," she remarks to the empty room. Her tongue comes out and with no Fred around to watch her (she knows he's watching, she is beset but not stupid ), it does not just pet at her philtrum but slathers it in a great big wipe, like a dog licking its chops after a bowl of scraps. "It's a red eye. His eye. Eye of the King."
She looks up at the shadows of the trees outside. They dance on the ceiling, making shapes and faces, shapes and faces.
"Eye of the King," she repeats, and now it starts with the hands: kneading and twisting and squeezing and digging. "Abbalah! Foxes down foxholes! Abbalah-doon, the Crimson King! Rats in their ratholes! Abbalah Munshun! The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money!"
She shakes her head from side to side. Oh, these voices, out of the darkness they come, and sometimes she awakens with a vision burning behind her eyes, a vision of a vast slaty tower standing in a field of roses. A field of blood. Then the talking begins, the speaking in tongues, testification, words she can't understand let alone control, a mixed stream of English and gibberish.
"Trudge, trudge, trudge," she says. "The little ones are trudging on their bleeding footsies . . . oh for Christ's sake, won't this ever stop?"
Her tongue yawns out and licks across the tip of her nose; for a moment her nostrils are plugged with her own spit, and her head roars
— Abbalah, Abbalah-doon, Can-tah Abbalah —
with those terrible foreign words, those terrible impacted images of the Tower and the burning caves beneath, caves through which little ones trudge on bleeding feet. Her mind strains with them, and there is only one thing that will make them stop, only one way to get relief.
Judy Marshall sits up. On the table beside her there is a lamp, a copy of the latest John Grisham novel, a little pad of paper (a birthday present from Ty, each sheet headed HERE'S ANOTHER GREAT IDEA I HAD!), and a ballpoint pen with LA RIVIERE SHERATON printed on the side.
Judy seizes the pen and scribbles on the pad.
No Abbalah no Abbalah-doon no Tower no Breakers no Crimson King only dreams these are just my dreams
It is enough, but pens are also roads to anywhere, and before she can divorce the tip of this one from the birthday pad, it writes one more line:
The Black House is the doorway to Abbalah the entrance to hell Sheol Mun-shun all these worlds and spirits