“Come on. Check it out.” Damian moved over, bringing his face up close. “They chewed me right down to the marrow.” His eyes were black sockets; the rats had eaten the eyeballs. Jeanette didn’t want to look, wanted to close her own eyes, but if she did, she knew sleep would be waiting.
“What kind of a mother lets her son’s daddy be done by like this? Kills him and lets the rats chew on him like he was a goddam Butterfinger?”
“Jeanette,” Evie said. “Hey. Over here.”
“Never mind that bitch, Jeanie,” Damian said. A rat pup fell out of his mouth as he spoke. It landed in Jeanette’s lap. She screamed and slapped at it, but it wasn’t there. “I need your attention. Eyes on me, moron.”
Evie said, “I’m glad you stayed awake, Jeanette. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me. Something’s happening on the other side and—well, I thought I’d be happy about it, but maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. On the off-chance this thing goes on long enough, I’d like for there to be a fair hearing.”
“What are you talking about?” Jeanette’s throat ached. Her everything ached.
“Do you want to see Bobby again?”
“Of course I want to see him,” Jeanette said, ignoring Damian. It was getting easier to do that. “Of course I want to see my boy.”
“All right, then. Listen carefully. There are secret ways between the two worlds—tunnels. Each woman who goes to sleep passes through one of them, but there’s another—a very special one—that begins at a very special tree. That’s the only one that goes both ways. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“You will,” Evie said. “There’s a woman on the other side of that tunnel, and she’s going to close it unless someone stops her. I respect her position, I think it’s perfectly valid, the male species has performed abysmally on this side of the Tree, no amount of grade inflation can alter that conclusion, but everyone deserves a say. One woman, one vote. Elaine Nutting can’t be allowed to make the decision for everyone.”
Evie’s face was at the bars of her cell. Verdant tendrils had grown up around her temples. Her eyes were auburn-colored tiger eyes. Moths had gathered in her hair, collecting themselves into a fluttering band. She was a monster, Jeanette thought, and beautiful.
“What does that have to do with Bobby?”
“If the Tree burns, the tunnel closes. No one can ever come back. Not you, not any other woman, Jeanette. The end will become inevitable.”
“Nope, nope, nope. It’s already inevitable,” Damian said. “Go to sleep, Jeanie.”
“Can you just shut up! You’re dead!” Jeanette screamed at him. “I’m sorry I killed you, and I would do anything to take it back, but you were cruel to me, and it’s done, so will you just shut your fucking mouth!”
The declaration echoed around the narrow confines of A Wing. Damian was not there.
“Well put,” Evie said. “Courageous! Now listen to me, Jeanette: I want you to close your eyes. You’ll go through the tunnel—your tunnel—but you won’t remember.”
This part Jeanette thought she understood. “Because I’ll be sleeping?”
“Exactly! Once you’re on the other side, you’re going to feel better than you have in quite a long time. I want you to follow the fox. He’ll take you where you need to go. Remember: Bobby and Tree. The one depends on the other.”
Jeanette let her eyes shut. Bobby, she reminded herself. Bobby and the Tree and the tunnel that went both ways. The one some woman named Elaine wanted to close by an act of burning. Follow the fox. She counted one-two-three-four-five and everything was the same. Except for Evie, that was, who had turned into a Green Lady. As if she were a tree herself.
Then she felt a tickle along her check, a swab of the lightest lace.
After the shot, they heard Bert Miller bellow and wail and keep wailing as his companion dragged him away. Clint borrowed Willy Burke’s riflescope to take a look. The yellow-clad figure on the ground was clutching his thigh and the other guy was hauling him underneath his armpits.
“Good. Thanks.” Clint returned the rifle to Wettermore. Willy Burke was eyeing both of them with careful consideration: part admiration and part caution.
Clint went back inside. The rear door that let into the small gymnasium was propped open with a brick.
To lower visibility from the outside, they had trimmed the lights to just the red-tinted emergency bulbs. These cast small scarlet spots around the edges of the hardwood floor where inmates played half-court basketball. Clint stopped under the hoop and steadied himself against the padded wall. His heart was pumping. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t happy, but he was here.
Clint warned himself about the euphoria he was feeling, but it didn’t temper the pleasant thrumming in his limbs. He was either becoming walled off from himself or returning to himself. He didn’t know which. What he knew was that he had the milkshake, and Geary wasn’t going to take it away from him. That Geary was wrong almost didn’t matter.
Aurora wasn’t a virus, it was an enchantment, and Evie Black was like no woman—no human—who had ever existed. You couldn’t fix something that was beyond human understanding with a hammer, which was what Frank Geary and Terry Coombs and the other men outside the prison presumed they could do. This required a different approach. It was obvious to Clint and should have been to them, because they weren’t all stupid men, but for some reason it wasn’t, and that meant he was going to have to use his own hammer to block theirs.
They started it! How childish! And how true!
The cycle of this logic went around on rusty, squalling wheels. Clint punched the padded wall several times and wished it were a man under his knuckles. He thought of pyrotherapy: the fever cure. For awhile, it had been cutting edge treatment, except giving malaria to your patients was awfully heavy medicine. Sometimes it saved them, and sometimes it finished them. Was Evie a pyrotherapist or the pyrotherapy? Was she possibly doctor and treatment both?
Or, by ordering Billy Wettermore to fire that shot to the leg of Selectman Bert Miller, had he himself administered the first dose?
Footsteps clicked across the floor from the direction of the gymnasium. Angel was just leaving the abandoned Booth with a set of cell keys. She gripped them in her right hand, the longest key protruding between the knuckles of her index finger and her middle finger. She had once stabbed a sloppy old cowboy in an Ohio parking lot in the ear with a sharpened key. It had not killed the cowboy, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. Angel, feeling kind, had merely taken from the man his wallet, his dimestore wedding ring, his scratch tickets, and silver belt buckle; she had allowed him to keep his life.
Dr. Norcross walked by the glassed wall of the Booth without stopping. Angel weighed coming up behind him and plunging the key in the untrustworthy quack’s jugular. She loved the idea. Unfortunately, she had made a promise to Evie not to kill anyone until daylight, and Angel was profoundly wary of crossing the witch.
She allowed the doctor to pass.
Angel headed for C Wing and the cell that was home to Maura and Kayleigh. The shape that was clearly Maura, short and stout, lay on the outside of the bottom bunk, where someone had placed her after she had gone night-night in A Wing. Kayleigh was on the inside of the bunk. Angel had no clue what Evie had meant when she said that “their souls were dead,” but it encouraged caution.
She used the tip of a key to slice through the webbing that covered Maura’s face. The material separated with a purr, and Maura’s pudgy, red-cheeked features emerged. They could have served as the model for an illustration on the box of some “down home” brand sold in little backwater stores—“Mama Maura’s Cornbread” or “Dunbarton Soothing Syrup.” Angel jumped away into the hall, ready to flee if Maura went for her.