The Talisman

11

The Death of Jerry Bledsoe

1

was six . . . when it really started, Daddy, when the engines that eventually pulled him to Oatley and beyond began to chug away. There had been loud saxophone music. Six. Jacky was six. At first his attention had been entirely on the toy his father had given him, a scale model of a London taxi—the toy car was heavy as a brick, and on the smooth wooden floors of the new office a good push sent it rumbling straight across the room. Late afternoon, first grade all the way on the other side of August, a neat new car that rolled like a tank on the strip of bare wood behind the couch, a contented, relaxed feeling in the air-conditioned office . . . no more work to do, no more phone calls that couldn’t wait until the next day. Jack pushed the heavy toy taxi down the strip of bare wood, barely able to hear the rumbling of the solid rubber tires under the soloing of a saxophone. The black car struck one of the legs of the couch, spun sideways, and stopped. Jack crawled down and Uncle Morgan had parked himself in one of the chairs on the other side of the couch. Each man nursed a drink; soon they would put down their glasses, switch off the turntable and the amplifier, and go downstairs to their cars.

when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California

“Who’s playing that sax?” he heard Uncle Morgan ask, and, half in a reverie, heard that familiar voice in a new way: something whispery and hidden in Morgan Sloat’s voice coiled into Jacky’s ear. He touched the top of the toy taxi and his fingers were as cold as if it were of ice, not English steel.

“That’s Dexter Gordon, is who that is,” his father answered. His voice was as lazy and friendly as it always was, and Jack slipped his hand around the heavy taxi.

“Good record.”

“Daddy Plays the Horn. It is a nice old record, isn’t it?”

“I’ll have to look for it.” And then Jack thought he knew what that strangeness in Uncle Morgan’s voice was all about—Uncle Morgan didn’t really like jazz at all, he just pretended to in front of Jack’s father. Jack had known this fact about Morgan Sloat for most of his childhood, and he thought it was silly that his father couldn’t see it too. Uncle Morgan was never going to look for a record called Daddy Plays the Horn, he was just flattering Phil Sawyer—and maybe the reason Phil Sawyer didn’t see it was that like everyone else he never paid quite enough attention to Morgan Sloat. Uncle Morgan, smart and ambitious (“smart as a wolverine, sneaky as a courthouse lawyer,” Lily said), good old Uncle Morgan deflected observation—your eye just sort of naturally slid off him. When he was a kid, Jacky would have bet, his teachers would have had trouble even remembering his name.

“Imagine what this guy would be like over there,” Uncle Morgan said, for once fully claiming Jack’s attention. That falsity still played through his voice, but it was not Sloat’s hypocrisy that jerked up Jacky’s head and tightened his fingers on his heavy toy—the words over there had sailed straight into his brain and now were gonging like chimes. Because over there was the country of Jack’s Daydreams. He had known that immediately. His father and Uncle Morgan had forgotten that he was behind the couch, and they were going to talk about the Daydreams.

His father knew about the Daydream-country. Jack could never have mentioned the Daydreams to either his father or his mother, but his father knew about the Daydreams because he had to—simple as that. And the next step, felt along Jack’s emotions more than consciously expressed, was that his dad helped keep the Daydreams safe.

But for some reason, equally difficult to translate from emotion into language, the conjunction of Morgan Sloat and the Daydreams made the boy uneasy.

“Hey?” Uncle Morgan said. “This guy would really turn em around, wouldn’t he? They’d probably make him Duke of the Blasted Lands, or something.”

“Well, probably not that,” Phil Sawyer said. “Not if they liked him as much as we do.”

But Uncle Morgan doesn’t like him, Dad, Jacky thought, suddenly clear that this was important. He doesn’t like him at all, not really, he thinks that music is too loud, he thinks it takes something from him. . . .

“Oh, you know a lot more about it than I do,” Uncle Morgan said in a voice that sounded easy and relaxed.

“Well, I’ve been there more often. But you’re doing a good job of catching up.” Jacky heard that his father was smiling.

“Oh, I’ve learned a few things, Phil. But really, you know—I’ll never get over being grateful to you for showing all that to me.” The two syllables of grateful filled with smoke and the sound of breaking glass.

But all of these little warnings could not do more than dent Jack’s intense, almost blissful satisfaction. They were talking about the Daydreams. It was magical, that such a thing was possible. What they said was beyond him, their terms and vocabulary were too adult, but six-year-old Jack experienced again the wonder and joy of the Daydreams, and was at least old enough to understand the direction of their conversation. The Daydreams were real, and Jacky somehow shared them with his father. That was half his joy.

2

“Let me just get some things straight,” Uncle Morgan said, and Jacky saw the word straight as a pair of lines knotting around each other like snakes. “They have magic like we have physics, right? We’re talking about an agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science.”

“Sure,” Phil Sawyer said.

“And presumably they’ve gone on like that for centuries. Their lives have never changed very much.”

“Except for political upheavals, that’s right.”

Then Uncle Morgan’s voice tightened, and the excitement he tried to conceal cracked little whips within his consonants. “Well, forget about the political stuff. Suppose we think about us for a change. You’ll say—and I’d agree with you, Phil—that we’ve done pretty well out of the Territories already, and that we’d have to be careful about how we introduce changes there. I have no problems at all with that position. I feel the same way myself.”

Jacky could feel his father’s silence.

“Okay,” Sloat continued. “Let’s go with the concept that, within a situation basically advantageous to ourselves, we can spread the benefits around to anybody on our side. We don’t sacrifice the advantage, but we’re not greedy about the bounty it brings. We owe these people, Phil. Look what they’ve done for us. I think we could put ourselves into a really synergistic situation over there. Our energy can feed their energy and come up with stuff we’ve never even thought of, Phil. And we end up looking generous, which we are—but which also doesn’t hurt us.” He would be frowning forward, the palms of his hands pressed together. “Of course I don’t have a total window on this situation, you know that, but I think the synergy alone is worth the price of admission, to tell you the truth. But Phil—can you imagine how much fucking clout we’d swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea? I think it’d be awesome. Awesome.” The damp, squashy sound of his clapping hands. “I don’t want to catch you unprepared or anything, but I thought it might be time for us to think along those lines—to think, Territories-wise, about increasing our involvement.”

Phil Sawyer still said nothing. Uncle Morgan slapped his hands together again. Finally Phil Sawyer said, in a noncommittal voice, “You want to think about increasing our involvement.”

“I think it’s the way to go. And I can give you chapter and verse, Phil, but I shouldn’t have to. You can probably remember as well I can what it was like before we started going there together. Hey, maybe we could have made it all on our own, and maybe we would have, but as for me, I’m grateful not to be representing a couple of broken-down strippers and Little Timmy Tiptoe anymore.”

“Hold on,” Jack’s father said.

“Airplanes,” Uncle Morgan said. “Think airplanes.”

“Hold on, hold on there, Morgan, I have a lot of ideas that apparently have yet to occur to you.”

“I’m always ready for new ideas,” Morgan said, and his voice was smoky again.

“Okay. I think we have to be careful about what we do over there, partner. I think anything major—any real changes we bring about—just might turn around and bite our asses back here. Everything has consequences, and some of those consequences might be on the uncomfortable side.”

“Like what?” Uncle Morgan asked.

“Like war.”

“That’s nuts, Phil. We’ve never seen anything . . . unless you mean Bledsoe. . . .”

“I do mean Bledsoe. Was that a coincidence?”

Bledsoe? Jack wondered. He had heard the name before; but it was vague.

“Well, that’s a long way from war, to put it mildly, and I don’t concede the connection anyhow.”

“All right. Do you remember hearing about how a Stranger assassinated the old King over there—a long time ago? You ever hear about that?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Uncle Morgan said, and Jack heard again the falseness in his voice.

His father’s chair squeaked—he was taking his feet off his desk, leaning forward. “The assassination touched off a minor war over there. The followers of the old King had to put down a rebellion led by a couple of disgruntled nobles. These guys saw their chance to take over and run things—seize lands, impound property, throw their enemies in jail, make themselves rich.”

“Hey, be fair,” Morgan broke in. “I heard about this stuff, too. They also wanted to bring some kind of political order to a crazy inefficient system—sometimes you have to be tough, starting out. I can see that.”

“And it’s not for us to make judgments about their politics, I agree. But here’s my point. That little war over there lasted about three weeks. When it was over, maybe a hundred people had been killed. Fewer, probably. Did anyone ever tell you when that war began? What year it was? What day?”

“No,” Uncle Morgan muttered in a sulky voice.

“It was the first of September, 1939. Over here, it was the day Germany invaded Poland.” His father stopped talking, and Jacky, clutching his black toy taxi behind the couch, yawned silently but hugely.

“That’s screwball,” Uncle Morgan finally said. “Their war started ours? Do you really believe that?”

“I do believe that,” Jack’s father said. “I believe a three-week squabble over there in some way sparked off a war here that lasted six years and killed millions of people. Yes.”

“Well . . .” Uncle Morgan said, and Jack could see him beginning to huff and blow.

“There’s more. I’ve talked to lots of people over there about this, and the feeling I get is that the stranger who assassinated the King was a real Stranger, if you see what I mean. Those who saw him got the feeling that he was uncomfortable with Territories clothes. He acted like he was unsure of local customs—he didn’t understand the money right away.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. If they hadn’t torn him to pieces right after he stuck a knife into the King, we could be sure about this, but I’m sure anyhow that he was—”

“Like us.”

“Like us. That’s right. A visitor. Morgan, I don’t think we can mess around too much over there. Because we simply don’t know what the effects will be. To tell you the truth, I think we’re affected all the time by things that go on in the Territories. And should I tell you another crazy thing?”

“Why not?” Sloat answered.

“That’s not the only other world out there.”

3

“Bullshit,” Sloat said.

“I mean it. I’ve had the feeling, once or twice when I was there, that I was near to somewhere else—the Territories’ Territories.”

Yes, Jack thought, that’s right, it has to be, the Daydreams’ Daydreams, someplace even more beautiful, and on the other side of that is the Daydreams’ Daydreams’ Daydreams, and on the other side of that is another place, another world nicer still. . . . He realized for the first time that he had become very sleepy.

The Daydreams’ Daydreams

And then he was almost immediately asleep, the heavy little taxi in his lap, his whole body simultaneously weighty with sleep, anchored to the strip of wooden floor, and so blissfully light.

The conversation must have continued—there must have been much that Jacky missed. He rose and fell, heavy and light, through the second whole side of Daddy Plays the Horn, and during that time Morgan Sloat must at first have argued—gently, but with what squeezings of his fists, what contortions of his forehead!—for his plan; then he must have allowed himself to seem persuadable, then finally persuaded by his partner’s doubts. At the end of this conversation, which returned to the twelve-year-old Jacky Sawyer in the dangerous borderland between Oatley, New York, and a nameless Territories village, Morgan Sloat had allowed himself to seem not only persuaded but positively grateful for the lessons. When Jack woke up, the first thing he heard was his father asking, “Hey, did Jack disappear or something?” and the second thing was Uncle Morgan saying, “Hell, I guess you’re right, Phil. You have a way of seeing right to the heart of things, you’re great the way you do that.”

“Where the hell is Jack?” his father said, and Jack stirred behind the couch, really waking up now. The black taxi thudded to the floor.

“Aha,” Uncle Morgan said. “Little pitchers and big ears, peut-être?”

“You behind there, kiddo?” his father said. Noises of chairs pushing back across the wooden floor, of men standing up.

He said, “Oooh,” and slowly lifted the taxi back into his lap. His legs felt stiff and uncomfortable—when he stood, they would tingle.

His father laughed. Footsteps came toward him. Morgan Sloat’s red, puffy face appeared over the top of the couch. Jack yawned and pushed his knees into the back of the couch. His father’s face appeared beside Sloat’s. His father was smiling. For a moment, both of those grown-up adult male heads seemed to be floating over the top of the couch. “Let’s move on home, sleepyhead,” his father said. When the boy looked into Uncle Morgan’s face, he saw calculation sink into his skin, slide underneath his jolly-fat-man’s cheeks like a snake beneath a rock. He looked like Richard Sloat’s daddy again, like good old Uncle Morgan who always gave spectacular Christmas and birthday presents, like good old sweaty Uncle Morgan, so easy not to notice. But what had he looked like before? Like a human earthquake, like a man crumbling apart over the fault-line behind his eyes, like something all wound up and waiting to explode. . . .

“How about a little ice cream on the way home, Jack?” Uncle Morgan said to him. “That sound good to you?”

“Uh,” Jack said.

“Yeah, we can stop off at that place in the lobby,” his father said.

“Yummy-yummy-yum,” Uncle Morgan said. “Now we’re really talking about synergy,” and smiled at Jack once more.

This happened when he was six, and in the midst of his weightless tumble through limbo, it happened again—the horrible purple taste of Speedy’s juice backed up into his mouth, into the passages behind his nose, and all of that languid afternoon of six years before replayed itself out in his mind. He saw it just as if the magic juice brought total recall, and so speedily that he lived through that afternoon in the same few seconds which told him that this time the magic juice really was going to make him vomit.

Uncle Morgan’s eyes smoking, and inside Jack, a question smoking too, demanding to finally come out . . .

Who played

What changes what changes

Who plays those changes, daddy?

Who

killed Jerry Bledsoe? The magic juice forced itself into the boy’s mouth, stinging threads of it nauseatingly trickled into his nose, and just as Jack felt loose earth beneath his hands he gave up and vomited rather than drown. What killed Jerry Bledsoe? Foul purple stuff shot from Jack’s mouth, choking him, and he blindly pushed himself backward—his feet and legs snagged in tall stiff weeds. Jack pushed himself up on his hands and knees and waited, patient as a mule, his mouth drooping open, for the second attack. His stomach clenched, and he did not have time to groan before more of the stinking juice burned up through his chest and throat and spattered out of his mouth. Ropey pink strings of saliva hung from his lips, and Jack feebly brushed them away. He wiped his hand on his pants. Jerry Bledsoe, yes. Jerry—who’d always had his name spelled out on his shirt, like a gas-station attendant. Jerry, who had died when— The boy shook his head and wiped his hands across his mouth again. He spat into a nest of saw-toothed wild grass sprouting like a giant’s corsage out of the gray-brown earth. Some dim animal instinct he did not understand made him push loose earth over the pinkish pool of vomit. Another reflex made him brush the palms of his hands against his trousers. Finally he looked up.

He was kneeling, in the last of the evening light, on the edge of a dirt lane. No horrible Elroy-thing pursued him—he had known that immediately. Dogs penned in a wooden, cage-like enclosure barked and snarled at him, thrusting their snouts through the cracks of their jail. On the other side of the fenced-in dogs was a rambling wooden structure and from here too doggy noises rose up into the immense sky. These were unmistakably similar to the noises Jack had just been hearing from the other side of a wall in the Oatley Tap: the sounds of drunken men bellowing at each other. A bar—here it would be an inn or a public house, Jack imagined. Now that he was no longer sickened by Speedy’s juice, he could smell the pervasive, yeasty odors of malt and hops. He could not let the men from the inn discover him.

For a moment he imagined himself running from all those dogs yipping and growling through the cracks in their enclosure, and then he stood up. The sky seemed to tilt over his head, to darken. And back home, in his world, what was happening? A nice little disaster in the middle of Oatley? Maybe a nice little flood, a sweet little fire? Jack slipped quietly backward away from the inn, then began to move sideways through the tall grass. Perhaps sixty yards away, thick candles burned in the windows of the only other building he could see. From somewhere not far off to his right drifted the odor of pigs. When Jack had gone half the distance between the inn and the house, the dogs ceased growling and snapping, and he slowly began walking forward toward the Western Road. The night was dark and moonless.

Jerry Bledsoe.

4

There were other houses, though Jack did not see them until he was nearly before them. Except for the noisy drinkers behind him at the inn, here in the country Territories people went to bed when the sun did. No candles burned in these small square windows. Themselves squarish and dark, the houses on either side of the Western Road sat in a puzzling isolation—something was wrong, as in a visual game from a child’s magazine, but Jack could not identify it. Nothing hung upside-down, nothing burned, nothing seemed extravagantly out of place. Most of the houses had thick fuzzy roofs which resembled haystacks with crewcuts, but Jack assumed that these were thatch—he had heard of it, but never seen it before. Morgan, he thought with a sudden thrill of panic, Morgan of Orris, and saw the two of them, the man with long hair and a built-up boot and his father’s sweaty workaholic partner, for a moment jumbled up together—Morgan Sloat with pirate’s hair and a hitch in his walk. But Morgan—this world’s Morgan—was not what was Wrong with This Picture.

Jack was just now passing a short squat one-story building like an inflated rabbit hutch, crazily half-timbered with wide black wooden X’s. A fuzzy crewcut thatch capped this building too. If he were walking out of Oatley—or even running out of Oatley, to be closer to the truth—what would he expect to see in the single dark window of this hutch for giant rabbits? He knew: the dancing glimmer of a television screen. But of course Territories houses did not have television sets inside them, and the absence of that colorful glimmer was not what had puzzled him. It was something else, something so much an aspect of any grouping of houses along a road that its absence left a hole in the landscape. You noticed the hole even if you could not quite identify what was absent.

Television, television sets . . . Jack continued past the half-timbered little building and saw ahead of him, its front door set only inches back from the verge of the road, another gnomishly small dwelling. This one seemed to have a sod, not a thatched, roof, and Jack smiled to himself—this tiny village had reminded him of Hobbiton. Would a Hobbit cable-stringer pull up here and say to the lady of the . . . shack? doghouse? . . . anyhow, would he say, “Ma’am, we’re installing cable in your area, and for a small monthly fee—hitch you up right now—you get fifteen new channels, you get Midnight Blue, you get the all-sports and all-weather channels, you get . . .”?

And that, he suddenly realized, was it. In front of these houses were no poles. No wiring! No TV antennas complicated the sky, no tall wooden poles marched the length of the Western Road, because in the Territories there was no electricity. Which was why he had not permitted himself to identify the absent element. Jerry Bledsoe had been, at least part of the time, Sawyer & Sloat’s electrician and handyman.

5

When his father and Morgan Sloat used that name, Bledsoe, he thought he had never heard it before—though, having remembered it, he must have heard the handyman’s last name once or twice. But Jerry Bledsoe was almost always just Jerry, as it said above the pocket on his workshirt. “Can’t Jerry do something about the air-conditioning?” “Get Jerry to oil the hinges on that door, will you? The squeaks are driving me batshit.” And Jerry would appear, his work-clothes clean and pressed, his thinning rust-red hair combed flat, his glasses round and earnest, and quietly fix whatever was wrong. There was a Mrs. Jerry, who kept the creases sharp and clean in the tan workpants, and several small Jerrys, whom Sawyer & Sloat invariably remembered at Christmas. Jack had been small enough to associate the name Jerry with Tom Cat’s eternal adversary, and so imagined that the handyman and Mrs. Jerry and the little Jerrys lived in a giant mouse-hole, accessible by a curved arch cut into a baseboard.

But who had killed Jerry Bledsoe? His father and Morgan Sloat, always so sweet to the Bledsoe children at Christmas-time?

Jack stepped forward into the darkness of the Western Road, wishing that he had forgotten completely about Sawyer & Sloat’s handyman, that he had fallen asleep as soon as he had crawled behind the couch. Sleep was what he wanted now—wanted it far more than the uncomfortable thoughts which that six-years-dead conversation had aroused in him. Jack promised himself that as soon as he was sure he was at least a couple of miles past the last house, he would find someplace to sleep. A field would do, even a ditch. His legs did not want to move anymore; all his muscles, even his bones, seemed twice their weight.

It had been just after one of those times when Jack had wandered into some enclosed place after his father and found that Phil Sawyer had somehow contrived a disappearance. Later, his father would manage to vanish from his bedroom, from the dining room, from the conference room at Sawyer & Sloat. On this occasion he executed his mystifying trick in the garage beside the house on Rodeo Drive.

Jack, sitting unobserved on the little knob of raised land which was the closest thing to a hill offered by this section of Beverly Hills, saw his father leave their house by the front door, cross the lawn while digging in his pockets for money or keys, and let himself into the garage by the side door. The white door on the right side should have swung up seconds later; but it remained stubbornly closed. Then Jack realized that his father’s car was where it had been all this Saturday morning, parked at the curb directly in front of the house. Lily’s car was gone—she’d plugged a cigarette into her mouth and announced that she was taking herself off to a screening of Dirt Track, the latest film by the director of Death’s Darling, and nobody by God had better try to stop her—and so the garage was empty. For minutes, Jack waited for something to happen. Neither the side door nor the big front doors opened. Eventually Jack slid down off the grassy elevation, went to the garage, and let himself in. The wide familiar space was entirely empty. Dark oil stains patterned the gray cement floor. Tools hung from silver hooks set into the walls. Jack grunted in astonishment, called out, “Dad?” and looked at everything again, just to make sure. This time he saw a cricket hop toward the shadowy protection of a wall, and for a second almost could have believed that magic was real and some malign wizard had happened along and . . . the cricket reached the wall and slipped into an invisible crack. No, his father had not been turned into a cricket. Of course he had not. “Hey,” the boy said—to himself it seemed. He walked backward to the side door and left the garage. Sunlight fell on the lush, springy lawns of Rodeo Drive. He would have called someone, but whom? The police? My daddy walked into the garage and I couldn’t find him in there and now I’m scared. . . .

Two hours later Phil Sawyer came walking up from the Beverly Wilshire end of the street. He carried his jacket over his shoulder, had pulled down the knot of his tie—to Jack, he looked like a man returning from a journey around the world.

Jack jumped down from his anxious elevation and tore toward his father. “You sure cover the ground,” his father said, smiling, and Jack flattened himself against his legs. “I thought you were taking a nap, Travelling Jack.”

They heard the telephone ringing as they came up the walk, and some instinct—perhaps the instinct to keep his father close—made Jacky pray that it had already rung a dozen times, that whoever was calling would hang up before they reached the front door. His father ruffled the hair on his crown, put his big warm hand on the back of his neck, then pulled open the door and made it to the phone in five long strides. “Yes, Morgan,” Jacky heard his father say. “Oh? Bad news? You’d better tell me, yes.” After a long moment of silence in which the boy could hear the tinny, rasping sound of Morgan Sloat’s voice stealing through the telephone wires: “Oh, Jerry. My God. Poor Jerry. I’ll be right over.” Then his father looked straight at him, not smiling, not winking, not doing anything but taking him in. “I’ll come over, Morgan. I’ll have to bring Jack, but he can wait in the car.” Jack felt his muscles relax, and was so relieved that he did not ask why he had to wait in the car, as he would have at any other time.

Phil drove up Rodeo Drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel, turned left onto Sunset, and pointed the car toward the office building. He said nothing.

His father zipped through the oncoming traffic and swung the car into the parking lot beside the office building. Already in the lot were two police cars, a fire truck, Uncle Morgan’s pocket-size white Mercedes convertible, the rusted old Plymouth two-door that had been the handyman’s car. Just inside the entrance Uncle Morgan was talking to a policeman, who shook his head slowly, slowly, in evident sympathy. Morgan Sloat’s right arm squeezed the shoulders of a slim young woman in a dress too large for her who had twisted her face into his chest. Mrs. Jerry, Jack knew, seeing that most of her face was obscured by a white handkerchief she had pressed to her eyes. A behatted, raincoated fireman pushed a mess of twisted metal and plastic, ashes and broken glass into a disorderly heap far past them down the hall. Phil said, “Just sit here for a minute or two, okay, Jacky?” and sprinted toward the entrance. A young Chinese woman sat talking to a policeman on a concrete abutment at the end of the parking lot. Before her lay a crumpled object it took Jack a moment to recognize as a bike. When Jack inhaled, he smelled bitter smoke.

Twenty minutes later, both his father and Uncle Morgan left the building. Still gripping Mrs. Jerry, Uncle Morgan waved goodbye to the Sawyers. He led the woman around to the passenger door of his tiny car. Jack’s father twirled his own car out of the lot and back into the traffic on Sunset.

“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack asked.

“Some kind of freak accident,” his father said. “Electricity—the whole building could’ve gone up in smoke.”

“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack repeated.

“Poor son of a bitch got hurt so bad he’s dead,” said his father.

Jack and Richard Sloat needed two months to really put the story together out of the conversations they overheard. Jack’s mother and Richard’s housekeeper supplied other details—the housekeeper, the goriest.

Jerry Bledsoe had come in on a Saturday to try to iron out some of the kinks in the building’s security system. If he tampered with the delicate system on a weekday, he was sure to confuse or irritate the tenants with the Klaxon alarm whenever he accidentally set it off. The security system was wired into the building’s main electrical board, set behind two large removable walnut panels on the ground floor. Jerry had set down his tools and lifted off the panels, having already seen that the lot was empty and nobody would jump out of his skin when the alarm went off. Then he went downstairs to the telephone in his basement cubicle and told the local precinct house to ignore any signals from the Sawyer & Sloat address until his next telephone call. When he went back upstairs to tackle the mare’s nest of wires coming into the board from all the contact points, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lorette Chang was just riding her bicycle into the building’s lot—she was distributing a leaflet advertising a restaurant which was due to open down the street in fifteen days.

Miss Chang later told the police that she looked through the glass front door and saw a workman enter the hall from the basement. Just before the workman picked up his screwdriver and touched the wiring panel, she felt the parking lot wobble beneath her feet. It was, she assumed, a mini-earthquake: a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Lorette Chang was untroubled by any seismic event that did not actually knock anything down. She saw Jerry Bledsoe set his feet (so he felt it, too, though no one else did), shake his head, then gently insert the tip of the screwdriver into a hive of wires.

And then the entry and downstairs corridor of the Sawyer & Sloat building turned into a holocaust.

The entire wiring panel turned instantly to a solid rectangular body of flame; bluish-yellow arcs of what looked like lightning shot out and encased the workman. Electronic horns bawled and bawled: KA-WHAAAAM! KA-WHAAAM! A ball of fire six feet high fell right out of the wall, slammed the already dead Jerry Bledsoe aside, and rolled down the corridor toward the lobby. The transparent front door blew into flying glass and smoking, twisted pieces of frame. Lorette Chang dropped her bike and sprinted toward the pay telephone across the street. As she told the fire department the building’s address and noticed that her bicycle had been twisted neatly in half by whatever force had burst through the door, Jerry Bledsoe’s roasted corpse still swayed upright back and forth before the devastated panel. Thousands of volts poured through his body, twitching it with regular surges, snapping it back and forth in a steady pulse. All the handyman’s body hair and most of his clothes had fried off, and his skin had become a cooked blotchy gray. His eyeglasses, a solidifying lump of brown plastic, covered his nose like a poultice.

Jerry Bledsoe. Who plays those changes, daddy? Jack made his feet move until he had gone half an hour without seeing another of the little thatched cottages. Unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar patterns lay all over the sky above him—messages in a language he could not read.