Jack walked as quickly as he could through the dim lobby of the hotel. All the atmosphere of the place forbade running: it was as quiet as a library, and the gray light which fell through the tall mullioned windows softened and blurred the already faded carpets. Jack broke into a trot as he passed the desk, and the stooped ashen-skinned day-clerk chose that second to emerge through an arched wooden passage. The clerk said nothing, but his permanent scowl dragged the corners of his mouth another centimeter downward. It was like being caught running in church. Jack wiped his sleeve across his forehead, made himself walk the rest of the way to the elevators. He punched the button, feeling the desk clerk's frown burning between his shoulder blades. The only time this week that Jack had seen the desk clerk smile had been when the man had recognized his mother. The smile had met only the minimum standards for graciousness.
'I suppose that's how old you have to be to remember Lily Cavanaugh,' she had said to Jack as soon as they were alone in their rooms. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when being identified, recognized from any one of the fifty movies she had made during the fifties and sixties ('Queen of the Bs,' they called her; her own comment: 'Darling of the Drive-ins') - whether by a cabdriver, waiter, or the lady selling blouses at the Wilshire Boulevard Saks - perked her mood for hours. Now even that simple pleasure had gone dry for her.
Jack jigged before the unmoving elevator doors, hearing an impossible and familiar voice lifting to him from a whirling funnel of sand. For a second he saw Thomas Woodbine, solid comfortable Uncle Tommy Woodbine, who was supposed to have been one of his guardians - a strong wall against trouble and confusion - crumpled and dead on La Cienega Boulevard, his teeth like popcorn twenty feet away in the gutter. He stabbed the button again.
Hurry up!
Then he saw something worse - his mother hauled into a waiting car by two impassive men. Suddenly Jack had to urinate. He flattened his palm against the button, and the bent gray man behind the desk uttered a phlegmy sound of disapproval. Jack pressed the edge of his other hand into that magic place just beneath his stomach which lessened the pressure on his bladder. Now he could hear the slow whir of the descending elevator. He closed his eyes, squeezed his legs together. His mother looked uncertain, lost and confused, and the men forced her into the car as easily as they would a weary collie dog. But that was not really happening, he knew; it was a memory - part of it must have been one of the Daydreams - and it had happened not to his mother but to him.
As the mahogany doors of the elevator slid away to reveal a shadowy interior from which his own face met him in a foxed and peeling mirror, that scene from his seventh year wrapped around him once again, and he saw one man's eyes turn to yellow, felt the other's hand alter into something claw-like, hard and inhuman . . . he jumped into the elevator as if he had been jabbed with a fork.
Not possible: the Daydreams were not possible, he had not seen a man's eyes turning from blue to yellow, and his mother was fine and dandy, there was nothing to be scared of, nobody was dying, and danger was what a seagull meant to a clam. He closed his eyes and the elevator toiled upward.
That thing in the sand had laughed at him.
Jack squeezed through the opening as soon as the doors began to part. He trotted past the closed mouths of the other elevators, turned right into the panelled corridor and ran past the sconces and paintings toward their rooms. Here running seemed less a sacrilege. They had 407 and 408, consisting of two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room with a view of the long smooth beach and the vastness of the ocean. His mother had appropriated flowers from somewhere, arranged them in vases, and set her little array of framed photographs beside them. Jack at five, Jack at eleven, Jack as an infant in the arms of his father. His father, Philip Sawyer, at the wheel of the old DeSoto he and Morgan Sloat had driven to California in the unimaginable days when they had been so poor they had often slept in the car.
When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he called out, 'Mom? Mom?'
The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no answer. 'Mom!' The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. 'Mom!' Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother's window showed black waves rolling and rolling toward him.
Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves nondescript, reaching for her . . .
'Mom!' he shouted.
'I hear you, Jack,' came his mother's voice through the bathroom door. 'What on earth . . . ?'
'Oh,' he said, and felt all his muscles relax. 'Oh, sorry. I just didn't know where you were.'
'Taking a bath,' she said. 'Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?' Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom. He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay -
Still okay for now, a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.
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