As soon as Rusty was over the worst of his Jabberwock sickness, Sam took him home. She wanted to stay there with him to look after him, but he’d brushed her off, pointed out that she and dozens of other people had ridden the Jabberwock in the past two weeks and not one of them had suffered any permanent ill effects. He’d be fine.
She couldn’t argue with that. But the boy had been traumatized today by way more than a simple Jabberwock ride and when she tried to bring that up, he cut her off.
“Can we … not talk about that, about the rest of it, right now?” His eyes had pleaded, and she got it. You deal with hard stuff when you’re ready, and clearly Rusty wasn’t ready yet to confront the nightmare of Douglas’s death … and what Claire McFarland had said to him. So Sam settled him on his bed with a stack of comic books and somehow managed not to hover over him. And, oh, how she’d wanted to. She’d have put him in her lap if she could have! No, she wouldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t dream of crippling Rusty the way Claire McFarland had crippled her little boy.
Now, as the sun sank down behind the mountains, she sat in E.J.’s room while he slept, trying not to think about … about anything at all. Charlie’d returned to the clinic so she, Sam and Malachi could continue their Jabberwock discussion. But then … Douglas Taylor.
How were they ever going to figure anything out if they were constantly dealing with a crisis?
When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the original objective was to drain the swamp.
True that.
Sam had taken over E.J. duty from Doreen Jaggers when Doreen left to go home to fix dinner for her little girls. Had wanted to sit with E.J. in part because she needed the calm and quiet. Raylynn would be here soon. Malachi was upstairs in E.J.’s apartment, trying to catch a nap since he’d been on night shift last night, and Charlie was … Sam didn’t know where. But if she was still here, maybe when Malachi woke up the three of them could put their heads together and …
Yeah, and what?
Sam needed to go to the bathroom, got up slowly from where she was seated in the chair beside E.J.’s bed and walked quietly toward the door.
“Think I’m asleep, do you?” he said.
His voice was airless, a raw whisper. It was a voice without strength, brittle and fragile. The sound of it broke her heart. She plastered a smile back onto her face and turned around.
“How long have you been playing possum?”
“Seems like … for days.” His eyes looked as weak as his voice sounded. Watery and sick, the eyes of an old person in a nursing home who’d been there so long they didn’t remember anymore what the rest of the world looked and felt like. Tired, resigned eyes. Sick eyes. “What do you know about oxycontin?”
“I know you’re addicted to it.” She hadn’t meant for that to come out as it had, blunt and harsh. She hurried on. “We can deal with addiction later.”
“Yeah, that’s what all the junkies say.”
“E.J., I didn’t mean—”
“Kidding, just kidding. I know you’ve been bumping up the dosage and you haven’t heard me complaining, have you? I’m just wondering …”
She let go of the door handle and went back to sit beside his bed.
“Wondering what?”
“I think it screws with your sense of time, the way a funhouse mirror distorts your image. It’s either that or the rabies has jumped the gun and is at this moment taking over—”
“You don’t have rabies symptoms.” Again, harsh when she hadn’t meant to be.
“Okay, no symptoms. But there are times I lie here and you, Malachi, Charlie and Raylynn are like the ponies on a merry-go-round, revolving in and out so fast it’s a blur. I catch myself straining to hear calliope music. Other times it takes a year to think a whole thought. Time gets stuck in the mud.”
“That’s not the oxycontin. I think it’s … the Jabberwock. Time’s not right. The weather’s not right. The stars aren’t right.”
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto. That it?”
“Yeah, but acknowledging that begs the question, if not Kansas — where?”
“That Oz song the munchkins sang, ‘we get up at twelve and start to work at one. Take an hour for lunch and then at two we’re done….’ That’s what it feels like sometimes. I lie here and time whizzes by.”
“It did whizz by, but now …”
Sam fell silent.
“Come on, spit it out.”
“Okay … the first time we all admitted we’d noticed time was screwy was on Saturday morning at the first meeting of the Breakfast Club.” When she'd first told E.J. about it, he had claimed the part of the nerd. “I told everybody that Rusty’d used his hourglass as a test and that there was still sixteen minutes of sand left in it when the clock on the wall said an hour’d passed.”
“So time really is moving too fast.”
“It was then, but now …” Sam didn’t know where to go with her thoughts, hadn’t mentioned it to the others. But maybe they weren’t telling her they’d noticed it, too. “Now, I think time has slowed down. I haven’t used the hourglass to check.” She looked sheepish. “Mainly because I don’t really want to know. But I’d wager that—”
“Now the sand in the hourglass will run out before the clock says an hour has passed,” E.J. finished for her.
“Yup. But why? Why too fast and then too slow?”
“Raylynn told me this morning that the stars in the sky were screwy last night, too.”
“Yeah, we’ve all noticed that.”
“No, not regular screwy, new screwy. I’d noticed the stars weren’t right long before I went out to Judd’s on Friday. So had Raylynn. But she said that last night the stars — which can’t be real stars because they don’t blink — were all on one side of the sky. Half the sky had stars, the other half was just black.”
Sam hadn’t noticed that. But when she and Charlie had ridden home from the courthouse last night, they hadn’t been attending to random things like stars in the sky.
All she could do was shake her head in confusion. “Why on earth …?”
“I’m the guy with a fever … so don’t listen to me, but …”
He let the thought dangle. Now, it was Sam’s turn to tell E.J. to spit it out.
“Okay, what I was thinking is … the fast-time/slow-time issue, the stars. Perhaps there are other things we haven’t noticed. Is there still an impenetrable Jabberwock wall across every road out of the county? Has anybody actually gone out to check?”
“Well, no. Not that I know of. You think maybe—?”
“I’m just putting it out there, suggesting that it might be the Jabberwock is trying to spin too many plates at once.”
“And that means?”
“Perhaps our J-friend is getting overwhelmed.” E.J.’s voice was brittle and breathy, but there was a light in his eyes. “A whole county — when all it ever took before was a little town with a couple hundred miners. Snatching people and aging their houses a hundred years. The weather and the stars and the time, that’s a lot to keep track of.”
He had rolled over on his side as he talked and now he fell back onto the pillow and spoke through gritted teeth. “I think maybe he’s … slipping.”
As E.J.’d become more engaged in the conversation, he’d gained mental clarity. The effort of trying to put things together was good for his fogged mind, but he had no strength, no stamina. Sam wanted to pursue the point because she thought E.J. just might be onto something, but she let it go because she knew she was tiring him out.
“How about we talk about this later. Rest now. We wouldn’t want your army of antibody soldiers to be too tired to fight off the nasties.”
He lay quiet, clearly wanted to continue but just flat-out didn’t have the strength. “How’s Rusty doing?” he finally asked.
“He’s fine.”
“Let’s try that again. How is Rusty doing?”
Sam slumped back in the chair.
“Physically, his reaction to the Jabberwock … he’s recovering like all the rest of us did. Emotionally … Claire McFarland. If I’d had a tranquilizer gun yesterday, I’d have shot her with it. Or a taser! Maybe even a .22! Accusing Rusty of killing her baby by pushing him into the Jabberwock. She might still be screaming if Malachi -- or maybe her husband, I don't know which -- hadn’t forced the oxy down her.” Sam shook her head. “It’s not a sedative! But …” She thought about the pills she’d given to Duncan Norman for his wife.
What could she do? It was all she had.
“I bet Viola has a whole pharmacy full of illegal joy beans out there in Killarney,” E.J. said. “Shame they’re not the ones we need.”
Right. Rabies vaccine. Rattlesnake antivenom. Those would be the top two. But Pete was getting weaker every day without his chemotherapy. And Grace Tibbits. Sam hadn’t seen or heard from her since she and Reece were in the clinic Friday. Now Reece was … What’d happened to Grace?
E.J. reached over and patted her hand. “You need to go home and get some rest.” It was such a light touch, a feather. So fragile.
There was the sound of voices in the hallway and Sam had gotten extraordinarily adept at reading the emotion in voices when she couldn’t hear the words. Whoever was speaking was alarmed. Another crisis.
She got up to go to the door, but there was a knock on it and Malachi stepped inside out of the hallway.
“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be upstairs sleeping.”
“Lester Peetree came in and woke me up. There’s … a problem.”
Sam turned to E.J.
“I’ll be right ba—”
“You don’t have to go outside to discuss bad news. I’m no help, but it’s miserable just lying here wondering.”
E.J. didn’t even know what he didn’t know. There’d been no reason to tell him Viola Tackett had commandeered the Nower house and hanged an innocent teenager. Rusty and Douglas had turned up here in the Middle of Nowhere, so E.J.’d been aware of that. But the rest of it, Sam didn’t want to worry him.
Malachi took E.J. at his word and told Sam, “Lester noticed the basement door of Bascum’s was ajar — and he was sure he’d closed it after they brought in Douglas. So Lester went to check. Somebody’d broken in.”
“Broke into Bascum’s? What is there to steal at Bascum’s?”
Malachi paused for a breath before he continued and in the eternity of that moment, Sam felt the ground shift beneath her, heard the rumble of a coming earthquake.
“What’s missing is Douglas Taylor. His body. It’s gone.”