The Big Dark Sky (99)

She realized there was something that Ganesh Patel might not know and that it could be important for him to hear it. “The Other can read minds.”

Clearly alarmed, he said, “Without doubt? You’re certain? Hey, Artimis, did you hear that?” He held his phone toward Joanna. On the screen was a woman’s face. “Say it again for Artimis?”

“The Other can read minds,” Joanna declared, wondering who the hell Artimis might be. “Just one mind at a time. It said it was never going to do that again because our thoughts disgust it, and maybe that’s true, but it can read minds.”

“Is it here now?” Ganesh asked.

“I don’t . . . I don’t think so.”

“How would you know?”

“I wouldn’t.”

Of all the possible dramatic entrances that might then have occurred, none would have been more likely to convince most of those assembled that Death itself had come among them than did the abrupt entrance of Jimmy Two Eyes. He threw open the door and staggered in from the storm, a bizarre figure to anyone who had never seen him before, brother to the Phantom of the Opera, evidence that Victor Frankenstein might currently be at work in Montana, fantasticated by the Brothers Grimm and now escaped from a book of dark fairy tales. With his deeply hooded and mismatched eyes, he surveyed everyone gathered in the large living room. He swayed as though he must be at the end of his resources, and his gnarled hands worked the air like those of an impassioned preacher calling down God’s wrath or mercy.

In the shocked silence of those in the room, with the wind chorusing beyond the open door, Joanna didn’t know whether to fear Jimmy or pity him, and she was gripped by both emotions. His gaze moved past her to the others. Then, as if belatedly realizing that he had seen her, his attention snapped back to Joanna, one eye as clear and blue as the water in Eden but the other black, bloody, and demonic.

“Please Jojo help Jimmy.”

The fact that he spoke was sufficient to shrink her pity and expand fear into terror, for it seemed to mean that the Other was in him. Then Joanna realized that his voice, while issuing rough and thick-tongued, was not precisely the same as it had been when he’d been used like a puppet, was in fact different enough to suggest that this was his true voice, somehow freed after a lifetime of mute incapacity, and not the voice forced out of him when he’d been the Other’s avatar.

He worked his mouth, rolled his head, strained his throat, and with effort said, “Father hurt. Gone God. To God. Help Jimmy?”

Moving cautiously toward him, Joanna said, “Hector’s dead? What happened to him?”

“The . . . the Thing.”

“Thing?”

“It kill him.” His face screwed into a scowl, and his eyes squeezed shut, and he trembled as if words were coins in a stubborn purse and he were trying hard to shake them loose. “Lake thing.”

As Joanna came face-to-face with Jimmy, his eyes opened, and his deep sockets were cups of tears. People had always said that Jimmy felt nothing that other people felt, nothing except perhaps hunger and weariness and physical pain. So much for both common wisdom and the arrogance of the medical elites.

She put a hand to his tortured face. “Lake thing?”

“It hid the lake.”

“Hides in the lake?”

“Yes.”

Ganesh Patel seemed to materialize beside them. He’d diagnosed Jimmy by his appearance. “Treacher Collins syndrome with additional birth defects.”

“So they say,” Joanna confirmed. “He’s been . . . been my friend since childhood.”

Jimmy’s tears spilled through the fingers with which Joanna stroked his cheek.

“Jimmy, my friend, our friend,” Ganesh said, his voice soft, musical, compelling. “What do you know about the thing in the lake?”

“It hid the lake. It uses.”

Joanna said, “Through Jimmy, it told me that it’s forbidden to control creatures of high intellect, but it has contempt for him and considers him fair game.”

“It’s spoken to you through him?”

“Yes. Earlier today. And often when I was a child. Back then, I thought it was . . . just Jimmy, my secret friend.”

“Forbidden by whom?”

Joanna recalled the picnic in the orchard all those years ago, just her and Jimmy, when he’d said, If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. Now, remembering, she said, “Forbidden by the prince.”

“Prince,” said Jimmy Two Eyes.



Ganesh sensed the Jungian pattern coming to fulfillment.

The room could comfortably hold thirty or more in a cocktail party, but it felt crowded now as seven people gathered close around Jimmy Alvarez with the sense, the urgent expectation, that this extraordinary individual and this woman who had been secret friends in childhood might at this penultimate moment produce the insight that would save them all.

As Joanna Chase met Jimmy’s stare, of necessity shifting her focus from one of his offset eyes to the other, she dredged from memory a moment during a picnic in the orchard, when she was eight years old. She spoke of a game they had played, a story they had made up together. About a prince and his retinue who had been under a spell for a long time, awaiting an awakening. But it really wasn’t a game. Ganesh realized that the Other, through Jimmy, must have been speaking metaphorically, allegorically. The prince might well be the head of an expedition traveling a thousand light-years or more in suspended-animation pods. In this allegory, only Jimmy—only the Other—could wake members of the expedition, the mission. Did that make the Other a king if it had power over a prince? No. So what was it? What was it if not a king, the father of the prince?