No more! Good merciful God, no more! And the worst thing: What if it all begins to make sense?
She throws the pen back on the table, where it rolls to the base of the lamp and lies still. Then she tears the page from the pad, crumples it, and sticks it in her mouth. She chews furiously, not tearing it but at least mashing it sodden, then swallows. There is an awful moment when it sticks in her throat, but then it goes down. Words and worlds recede and Judy falls back against the pillows, exhausted. Her face is pale and sweaty, her eyes huge with unshed tears, but the moving shadows on the ceiling no longer look like faces to her — the faces of trudging children, of rats in their ratholes, foxes in foxholes, eye of the King, Abbalah-Abbalah-doon! Now they are just the shadows of the trees again. She is Judy DeLois Marshall, wife of Fred, mother of Ty. This is Libertyville, this is French Landing, this is French County, this is Wisconsin, this is America, this is the Northern Hemisphere, this is the world, and there is no other world than this. Let it be so.
Ah, let it be so.
Her eyes close, and as she finally slips back to sleep we slip across the room to the door, but just before we get there, Judy Marshall says one other thing — says it as she crosses over the border and into sleep.
"Burnside is not your name. Where is your hole?"
The bedroom door is closed and so we use the keyhole, passing through it like a sigh. Down the hall we go, past pictures of Judy's family and Fred's, including one photo of the Marshall family farm where Fred and Judy spent a horrible but blessedly short period not long after their marriage. Want some good advice? Don't talk to Judy Marshall about Fred's brother, Phil. Just don't get her started, as George Rathbun would undoubtedly say.
No keyhole in the door at the end of the hall and so we slide underneath like a telegram and into a room we immediately know is a boy's room: we can tell from the mingled smells of dirty athletic socks and neat's-foot oil. It's small, this room, but it seems bigger than Fred and Judy's down the hall, very likely because the odor of anxiety is missing. On the walls are pictures of Shaquille O'Neal, Jeromy Burnitz, last year's Milwaukee Bucks team . . . and Tyler Marshall's idol, Mark McGwire. McGwire plays for the Cards, and the Cards are the enemy, but hell, it's not as if the Milwaukee Brewers are actually competition for anything. The Brew Crew were doormats in the American League, and they are likewise doormats in the National. And McGwire . . . well, he's a hero, isn't he? He's strong, he's modest, and he can hit the baseball a country mile. Even Tyler's dad, who roots strictly for Wisconsin teams, thinks McGwire is something special. "The greatest hitter in the history of the game," he called him after the seventy-home-run season, and Tyler, although little more than an infant in that fabled year, has never forgotten this.
Also on the wall of this little boy who will soon be the Fisherman's fourth victim (yes, there has already been a third, as we have seen), holding pride of place directly over his bed, is a travel poster showing a great dark castle at the end of a long and misty meadow. At the bottom of the poster, which he has Scotch-taped to the wall (his mom absolutely forbids pushpins), it says COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD in big green letters. Ty is considering taking the poster down long enough to cut this part off. He doesn't like the poster because he has any interest in Ireland; to him the picture whispers of somewhere else, somewhere Entirely Else. It is like a photograph of some splendid mythical kingdom where there might be unicorns in the forests and dragons in the caves. Never mind Ireland; never mind Harry Potter, either. Hogwarts is fine enough for summer afternoons, but this is a castle in the Kingdom of Entirely Else. It's the first thing Tyler Marshall sees in the morning, the last thing he sees at night, and that's just the way he likes it.
He lies curled on his side in his underwear shorts, a human comma with tousled dark blond hair and a thumb that is close to his mouth, really just an inch or so away from being sucked. He is dreaming — we can see his eyeballs moving back and forth behind his closed lids. His lips move . . . he's whispering something . . . Abbalah? Is he whispering his mother's word? Surely not, but . . .
We lean closer to listen, but before we can hear anything, a circuit in Tyler's jazzy red clock-radio goes hot, and all at once the voice of George Rathbun fills the room, calling Tyler hence from whatever dreams have been playing themselves out under that tousled thatch.