10
Although he had begun to look wan and tired again, Richard talked for the next hour as they walked down the tracks and into the steadily strengthening smell of the Pacific Ocean. He spilled out a flood of reminiscences that had been bottled up inside of him for years. Although his face didn't reveal it, Jack was stunned with amazement . . . and a deep, welling pity for the lonely child, eager for the last scrap of his father's affection, that Richard was revealing to him, inadvertently or otherwise.
He looked at Richard's pallor, the sores on his cheeks and forehead and around his mouth; listened to that tentative, almost whispering voice that nevertheless did not hesitate or falter now that the chance to tell all these things had finally come; and was glad once more that Morgan Sloat had never been his father.
He told Jack that he remembered landmarks all along this part of the railroad. They could see the roof of a barn over the trees at one point, with a faded ad for Chesterfield Kings on it.
' 'Twenty great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes,' ' Richard said, smiling. 'Only, in those days you could see the whole barn.'
He pointed out a big pine with a double top, and fifteen minutes later told Jack, 'There used to be a rock on the other side of this hill that looked just like a frog. Let's see if it's still there.'
It was, and Jack supposed it did look like a frog. A little. If you stretched your imagination. And maybe it helps to be three. Or four. Or seven. Or however old he was.
Richard had loved the railroad, and had thought Camp Readiness was really neat, with its track to run on and its hurdles to jump over and its ropes to climb. But he hadn't liked Point Venuti itself. After some self-prodding, Richard even remembered the name of the motel at which he and his father had stayed during their time in the little coastal town. The Kingsland Motel, he said . . . and Jack found that name did not surprise him much at all.
The Kingsland Motel, Richard said, was just down the road from the old hotel his father always seemed interested in. Richard could see the hotel from his window, and he didn't like it. It was a huge, rambling place with turrets and gables and gambrels and cupolas and towers; brass weathervanes in strange shapes twirled from all of the latter. They twirled even when there was no wind, Richard said - he could clearly remember standing at the window of his room and watching them go around and around and around, strange brass creations shaped like crescent moons and scarab beetles and Chinese ideograms, winking in the sun while the ocean foamed and roared below.
Ah yes, doc, it all comes back to me now, Jack thought.
'It was deserted?' Jack asked.
'Yes. For sale.'
'What was its name?'
'The Agincourt.' Richard paused, then added another child's color - the one most small children are apt to leave in the box. 'It was black. It was made of wood, but the wood looked like stone. Old black stone. And that's what my father and his friends called it. The Black Hotel.'
11
It was partly - but not entirely - to divert Richard that Jack asked, 'Did your father buy that hotel? Like he did Camp Readiness?'
Richard thought about it awhile and then nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'I think he did. After a while. There was a For Sale sign on the gates in front of the place when he first started taking me there, but one time when we went there it was just gone.'
'But you never stayed there?'
'God, no!' Richard shuddered. 'The only way he could have gotten me in there would have been with a towing chain . . . even then I might not have gone.'
'Never even went in?'
'No. Never did, never will.'
Ah, Richie-boy, didn't anyone ever teach you to never say never?
'That goes for your father as well? He never even went in?'
'Not to my knowledge,' Richard said in his best professorial voice. His forefinger went to the bridge of his nose, as if to push up the glasses that weren't there. 'I'd be willing to bet he never went in. He was as scared of it as I was. But with me, that's all I felt . . . just scared. For my father, there was something more. He was . . .'
'Was what?'
Reluctantly, Richard said, 'He was obsessed with the place, I think.'
Richard paused, eyes vague, thinking back. 'He'd go and stand in front of it every day we were in Point Venuti. And I don't mean just for a couple of minutes, or something like that - he'd stand in front of it for, like, three hours. Sometimes more. He was alone most of those times. But not always. He had . . . strange friends.'