Mouse shakes his head wearily. "Don't . . . know."
Beezer reaches over Jack's shoulder and takes the pitiful little scribble of map. "You're going to meet us tomorrow morning at the Sand Bar," he tells Jack. "Get there by eleven-thirty, and we should be turning into that goddamned lane right around noon. In the meantime, maybe I'll just hold on to this. A little insurance policy to make sure you do things Mouse's way."
"Okay," Jack says. He doesn't need the map to find Chummy Burn-side's Black House, but Mouse is almost certainly right: it's probably not the sort of place you want to tackle after dark. He hates to leave Ty Marshall in the furance-lands — it feels wrong in a way that's almost sinful — but he has to remember that there's more at stake here than one little boy lost.
"Beezer, are you sure you want to go back there?"
"Hell no, I don't want to go back," Beezer says, almost indignantly. "But something killed my daughter — my daughter! — and it got here from there! You want to tell me you don't know that's true?"
Jack makes no reply. Of course it's true. And of course he wants Doc and the Beez with him when he turns up the lane to Black House. If they can bear to come, that is.
D'yamba, he thinks. D'yamba. Don't forget.
He turns back to the couch. "Mouse, do you — "
"No," Doc says. "Guess he won't need the Cadillac dope, after all."
"Huh?" Jack peers at the big brewer-biker stupidly. He feels stupid.
Stupid and exhausted.
"Nothin' tickin' but his watch," Doc says, and then he begins to sing. After a moment Beezer joins in, then Bear Girl. Jack steps away from the couch with a thought queerly similar to Henry's: How did it get late so early? Just how in hell did that happen?
"In heaven, there is no beer . . . that's why we drink it here . . . and when . . . we're gone . . . from here . . ."
Jack tiptoes across the room. On the far side, there's a lighted Kingsland Premium Golden Pale Ale bar clock. Our old friend — who is finally looking every year of his age and not quite so lucky — peers at the time with disbelief, not accepting it until he has compared it to his own watch. Almost eight. He has been here for hours.
Almost dark, and the Fisherman still out there someplace. Not to mention his otherworldly playmates.
D'yamba, he thinks again as he opens the door. And, as he steps out onto the splintery porch and closes the door behind him, he speaks aloud with great sincerity into the darkening day: "Speedy, I'd like to wring your neck."
24
D'YAMBA IS A BRIGHT and powerful spell; powerful connections form a web that extends, ramifying, throughout infinity. When Jack Sawyer peels the living poison from Mouse's eyes, d'yamba first shines within the dying man's mind, and that mind momentarily expands into knowledge; down the filaments of the web flows some measure of its shining strength, and soon a touch of d'yamba reaches Henry Leyden. Along the way, the d'yamba brushes Tansy Freneau, who, seated in a windowed alcove of the Sand Bar, observes a wry, beautiful young woman take smiling shape in the pool of light at the far end of the parking lot and realizes, a moment before the young woman vanishes, that she has been given a glimpse of the person her Irma would have become; and it touches Dale Gilbertson, who while driving home from the station experiences a profound, sudden yearning for the presence of Jack Sawyer, a yearning like an ache in his heart, and vows to pursue the Fisherman case to the end with him, no matter what the obstacles; the d'yamba quivers flashing down a filament to Judy Marshall and opens a window into Faraway, where Ty sleeps in an iron-colored cell, awaiting rescue and still alive; within Charles Burnside, it touches the true Fisherman, Mr. Munshun, once known as the Monday Man, just as Burny's knuckles rap the glass. Mr. Munshun feels a subtle drift of cold air infiltrate his chest like a warning, and freezes with rage and hatred at this violation; Charles Burnside, who knows nothing of d'yamba and cannot hate it, picks up his master's emotion and remembers the time when a boy supposed dead in Chicago crept out of a canvas sack and soaked the back seat of his car in incriminating blood. Damnably incriminating blood, a substance that continued to mock him long after he had washed away its visible traces. But Henry Leyden, with whom we began this chain, is visited not by grace or rage; what touches Henry is a kind of informed clarity.