"That's a stupid thing to think about," Jack says aloud, and realizes that he regrets not having been completely open and unguarded with Henry — that's where the stupid worry comes from, his stubborn silence. It isn't what he will be unable to say in the future; it's what he failed to say in the past. He should have been honest with Henry from the start. He should have told him about the red feathers and the robins' eggs and his gathering uneasiness. Henry would have helped him open his eyes; he would have helped Jack resolve his own blindness, which was more damaging than Henry's.
All of that is over, Jack decides. No more secrets. Since he is lucky enough to have Henry's friendship, he will demonstrate that he values it. From now on, he will tell Henry everything, including the background: the Territories, Speedy Parker, the dead man on the Santa Monica Pier, Tyler Marshall's baseball cap. Judy Marshall. Sophie. Yes, he has to tell Henry about Sophie — how can he not have done so already? Henry will rejoice with him, and Jack cannot wait to see how he does it. Henry's rejoicing will be unlike anyone else's; Henry will impart some delicate, cool, good-hearted topspin to the expression of his delight, thereby increasing Jack's own delight. What an incredible, literally incredible friend! If you were to describe Henry to someone who had never met him, he would sound unbelievable. Someone like that, living alone in an outback of the boonies? But there he was, all alone in the entirely obscure area of Norway Valley, French County, Wisconsin, waiting for the latest installment of Bleak House. By now, in anticipation of Jack's arrival, he would have turned on the lights in his kitchen and living room, as he had done for years in honor of his dead, much-loved wife.
Jack thinks: I must not be so bad, if I have a friend like that.
And he thinks: I really adore Henry.
Now, even in the darkness, everything seems beautiful to him. The Sand Bar, ablaze with neon lights in its vast expanse of parking lot; the spindly, intermittent trees picked out by his headlights after the turn onto 93; the long, invisible fields; the glowing light bulbs hung like Christmas decorations from the porch of Roy's Store. The rattle over the first bridge and the sharp turn into the depths of the valley. Set back from the left side of the road, the first of the farmhouses gleam in the darkness, the lights in their windows burning like sacramental candles. Everything seems touched by a higher meaning, everything seems to speak. He is traveling, within a hush of sacred silence, through a sacred grove. Jack remembers when Dale first drove him into this valley, and that memory is sacred, too.
Jack does not know it, but tears are coursing down his cheeks. His blood sings in his veins. The pale farmhouses shine half-hidden by the darkness, and out of that darkness leans the stand of tiger lilies that greeted him on his first down-valley journey. The tiger lilies blaze in his headlights, then slip murmuring behind him. Their lost speech joins the speech of the tires rolling eagerly, gently toward Henry Leyden's warm house. Tomorrow he may die, Jack knows, and this may be the last night he will ever see. That he must win does not mean that he will win; proud empires and noble epochs have gone down in defeat, and the Crimson King may burst out of the Tower and rage through world after world, spreading chaos.
They could all die in Black House: he, Beezer, and Doc. If that happens, Tyler Marshall will be not only a Breaker, a slave chained to an oar in a timeless Purgatory, but a super-Breaker, a nuclear-powered Breaker the abbalah will use to turn all the worlds into furnaces filled with burning corpses. Over my dead body, Jack thinks, and laughs a little crazily — it's so literal!
What an extraordinary moment; he is laughing while he rubs tears off his face. The paradox suddenly makes him feel as though he is being torn in half. Beauty and terror, beauty and pain — there is no way out of the conundrum. Exhausted, strung out, Jack cannot hold off his awareness of the world's essential fragility, its constant, unstoppable movement toward death, or the deeper awareness that in that movement lies the source of all its meaning. Do you see all this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.
In the next second, he remembers the swarm of golden bees that descended upon him: it was against this that they comforted him, exactly this, he tells himself. The blessing of blessings that vanish. What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone. It felt true, but it did not feel like all of the truth.
Against the vastness of the night, he sees the giant shape of the Crimson King holding aloft a small boy to use as a burning glass that will ignite the worlds into flaming waste. What Parkus said was right: he cannot destroy the giant, but he may find it possible to rescue the boy.
The bees said: Save Ty Marshall.
The bees said: Love Henry Leyden.
The bees said: Love Sophie.
That is close enough, right enough, for Jack. To the bees, these were all the same sentence. He supposes that the bees might well also have said, Do your job, coppiceman, and that sentence was only slightly different. Well, he would do his job, all right. After having been given such a miracle, he could do nothing else.