The Talisman (5 page)

The man in dark glasses opened the rear door on Jack’s side.

“HELP ME!” Jack screamed.

The man holding him began to squeeze him down into a shape that would fit into the open door. Jack bucked, still yelling, but the man effortlessly tightened his hold. Jack struck at his hands, then tried to push the hands off him. With horror, he realized that what he felt beneath his fingers was not skin. He twisted his head and saw that clamped to his side and protruding from the black sleeve was a hard, pinching thing like a claw or a jointed talon. Jack screamed again.

From up the street came a loud voice: “Hey, stop messin with that boy! You! Leave that boy alone!”

Jack gasped with relief, and twisted as hard as he could in the man’s arms. Running toward them from the end of the block was a tall thin black man, still shouting. The man holding him dropped Jack to the sidewalk and took off around the back of the car. The front door of one of the houses behind Jack slammed open—another witness.

“Move,
move
,” said the driver, already stepping on the accelerator. White Suit jumped back into the passenger seat, and the car spun its wheels and squealed diagonally across Rodeo Drive, barely missing a long white Clenet driven by a suntanned man in tennis whites. The Clenet’s horn blared.

Jack picked himself up off the sidewalk. He felt dizzy. A bald man in a tan safari suit appeared beside him and said, “Who were they? Did you get their names?”

Jack shook his head.

“How do you feel? We ought to call the police.”

“I want to sit down,” Jack said, and the man backed away a step.

“You want me to call the police?” he asked, and Jack shook his head.

“I can’t believe this,” the man said. “Do you live around here? I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

“I’m Jack Sawyer. My house is just down there.”

“The white house,” the man said, nodding. “You’re Lily Cavanaugh’s kid. I’ll walk you home, if you like.”

“Where’s the other man?” Jack asked him. “The black man—the one who was shouting.”

He took an uneasy step away from the man in the safari suit. Apart from the two of them, the street was empty.

Lester Speedy Parker had been the man running toward him. Speedy had saved his life back then, Jack realized, and ran all the harder toward the hotel.

3

“You get any breakfast?” his mother asked him, spilling a cloud of smoke out of her mouth. She wore a scarf over her hair like a turban, and with her hair hidden that way, her face looked bony and vulnerable to Jack. A half-inch of cigarette smouldered between her second and third fingers, and when she saw him glance at it, she snubbed it out in the ashtray on her dressing table.

“Ah, no, not really,” he said, hovering in the door of her bedroom.

“Give me a clear yes or no,” she said, turning back to the mirror. “The ambiguity is killing me.” Her mirror-wrist and mirror-hand, applying the makeup to Lily’s face, looked stick-thin.

“No,” he said.

“Well, hang on for a second and when your mother has made herself beautiful she’ll take you downstairs and buy you whatever your heart desires.”

“Okay,” he said. “It just seemed so depressing, being there all alone.”

“I swear, what you have to be depressed about . . .” She leaned forward and inspected her face in the mirror. “I don’t suppose you’d mind waiting in the living room, Jacky? I’d rather do this alone. Tribal secrets.”

Jack wordlessly turned away and wandered back into the living room.

When the telephone rang, he jumped about a foot.

“Should I get that?” he called out.

“Thank you,” her cool voice came back.

Jack picked up the receiver and said hello.

“Hey kid, I finally got you,” said Uncle Morgan Sloat. “What in the
world
is going on in your momma’s head? Jesus, we could have a real situation here if somebody doesn’t start paying attention to details. Is she there? Tell her she has to talk to me—I don’t care what she says, she has to talk to me. Trust me, kiddo.”

Jack let the phone dangle in his hand. He wanted to hang up, to get in the car with his mother and drive to another hotel in another state. He did not hang up. He called out, “Mom, Uncle Morgan’s on the phone. He says you have to talk to him.”

She was silent for a moment, and he wished he could have seen her face. Finally she said, “I’ll take it in here, Jacky.”

Jack already knew what he was going to have to do. His mother gently shut her bedroom door; he heard her walking back to the dressing table. She picked up the telephone in her bedroom. “Okay, Jacky,” she called through the door. “Okay,” he called back. Then he put the telephone back to his ear and covered the mouthpiece with his hand so that no one would hear him breathing.

“Great stunt, Lily,” Uncle Morgan said. “Terrific. If you were still in pictures, we could probably get a little mileage out of this. Kind of a ’Why Has This Actress Disappeared?’ thing. But don’t you think it’s time you started acting like a rational person again?”

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“You think you’re hard to find? Give me a break, Lily, I want you to get your ass back to New York. It’s time you stopped running away.”

“Is that what I’m doing, Morgan?”

“You don’t exactly have all the time in the world, Lily, and I don’t have enough time to waste to chase you all over New England. Hey, hold on. Your kid never hung up his phone.”

“Of course he did.”

Jack’s heart had stopped some seconds earlier.

“Get off the line, kid,” Morgan Sloat’s voice said to him.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sloat,” his mother said.

“I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous, lady. You holing up in some seedy resort when you ought to be in the hospital,
that’s
ridiculous. Jesus, don’t you know we have about a million business decisions to make? I care about your son’s education, too, and it’s a damn good thing I do. You seem to have given up on that.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Lily said.

“You don’t want to, but you have to. I’ll come up there and put you in a hospital by force if I have to. We gotta make
arrangements
, Lily. You own half of the company I’m trying to run—and Jack gets your half after you’re gone. I want to make sure Jack’s taken care of. And if you think that taking care of Jack is what you’re doing up there in goddam New Hampshire, then you’re a lot sicker than you know.”

“What do you want, Sloat?” Lily asked in a tired voice.

“You know what I want—I want everybody taken care of. I want what’s fair. I’ll take care of Jack, Lily. I’ll give him fifty thousand dollars a year—you think about that, Lily. I’ll see he goes to a good college. You can’t even keep him in school.”

“Noble Sloat,” his mother said.

“Do you think that’s an answer? Lily, you need help and I’m the only one offering.”

“What’s your cut, Sloat?” his mother asked.

“You know damn well. I get what’s fair. I get what’s coming to me. Your interest in Sawyer and Sloat—I worked my ass off for that company, and it ought to be mine. We could get the paperwork done in a morning, Lily, and then concentrate on getting you taken care of.”

“Like Tommy Woodbine was taken care of,” she said. “Sometimes I think you and Phil were
too
successful, Morgan. Sawyer and Sloat was more manageable before you got into real-estate investments and production deals. Remember when you had only a couple of deadbeat comics and a half-dozen hopeful actors and screenwriters as clients? I liked life better before the megabucks.”

“Manageable, who are you kidding?” Uncle Morgan yelled. “You can’t even manage yourself!” Then he made an effort to calm himself. “And I’ll forget you mentioned Tom Woodbine. That was beneath even you, Lily.”

“I’m going to hang up now, Sloat. Stay away from here. And stay away from Jack.”

“You are going into a hospital, Lily, and this running around is going to—”

His mother hung up in the middle of Uncle Morgan’s sentence; Jack gently put down his own receiver. Then he took a couple of steps closer to the window, as if not to be seen anywhere near the living-room phone. Only silence came from the closed bedroom.

“Mom?” he said.

“Yes, Jacky?” He heard a slight wobble in her voice.

“You okay? Is everything all right?”

“Me? Sure.” Her footsteps came softly to the door, which cracked open. Their eyes met, his blue to her blue. Lily swung the door all the way open. Again their eyes met, for a moment of uncomfortable intensity. “Of course everything’s all right. Why wouldn’t it be?” Their eyes disengaged. Knowledge of some kind had passed between them, but what? Jack wondered if she knew that he had listened to her conversation; then he thought that the knowledge they had just shared was—for the first time—the fact of her illness.

“Well,” he said, embarrassed now. His mother’s disease, that great unspeakable subject, grew obscenely large between them. “I don’t know, exactly. Uncle Morgan seemed . . .” He shrugged.

Lily shivered, and Jack came to another great recognition. His mother was afraid—at least as afraid as he was.

She plugged a cigarette in her mouth and snapped open her lighter. Another stabbing look from her deep eyes. “Don’t pay any attention to that pest, Jack. I’m just irritated because it really doesn’t seem that I’ll ever be able to get away from him. Your Uncle Morgan likes to bully me.” She exhaled gray smoke. “I’m afraid that I don’t have much appetite for breakfast anymore. Why don’t you take yourself downstairs and have a real breakfast this time?”

“Come with me,” he said.

“I’d like to be alone for a while, Jack. Try to understand that.”

Try to understand that.

Trust me.

These things that grown-ups said, meaning something else entirely.

“I’ll be more companionable when you come back,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

And what she was really saying was
I want to scream, I can’t take any more of this, get out, get out!

“Should I bring you anything?”

She shook her head, smiling toughly at him, and he had to leave the room, though he no longer had any stomach for breakfast either. Jack wandered down the corridor to the elevators. Once again, there was only one place to go, but this time he knew it before he ever reached the gloomy lobby and the ashen, censorious desk clerk.

4

Speedy Parker was not in the small red-painted shack of an office; he was not out on the long pier, in the arcade where the two old boys were back playing Skee-Ball as if it were a war they both knew they would lose; he was not in the dusty vacancy beneath the roller coaster. Jack Sawyer turned aimlessly in the harsh sunlight, looking down the empty avenues and deserted public places of the park. Jack’s fear tightened itself up a notch. Suppose something had happened to Speedy? It was impossible, but what if Uncle Morgan had found out about Speedy (found out what, though?) and had . . . Jack mentally saw the
WILD CHILD
van careening around a corner, grinding its gears and picking up speed.

He jerked himself into motion, hardly knowing which way he meant to go. In the bright panic of his mood, he saw Uncle Morgan running past a row of distorting mirrors, turned by them into a series of monstrous and deformed figures. Horns grew on his bald brow, a hump flowered between his fleshy shoulders, his wide fingers became shovels. Jack veered sharply off to the right, and found himself moving toward an oddly shaped, almost round building of white slatlike boards.

From within it he suddenly heard a rhythmic
tap tap tap
. The boy ran toward the sound—a wrench hitting a pipe, a hammer striking an anvil, a noise of work. In the midst of the slats he found a doorknob and pulled open a fragile slat-door.

Jack went forward into striped darkness, and the sound grew louder. The darkness changed form around him, altered its dimensions. He stretched out his hands and touched canvas. This slid aside; instantly, glowing yellow light fell about him. “Travellin Jack,” said Speedy’s voice.

Jack turned toward the voice and saw the custodian seated on the ground beside a partially dismantled merry-go-round. He held a wrench in his hand, and before him a white horse with a foamy mane lay impaled by a long silver stake from pommel to belly. Speedy gently put the wrench on the ground. “Are you ready to talk now, son?” he asked.

4

Jack Goes Over

1

“Yes, I’m ready now,” Jack said in a perfectly calm voice, and then burst into tears.

“Say, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said, dropping his wrench and coming to him. “Say, son, take her easy, take her easy now. . . .”

But Jack couldn’t take her easy. Suddenly it was too much, all of it, too much, and it was cry or just sink under a great wave of blackness—a wave which no bright streak of gold could illuminate. The tears hurt, but he sensed the terror would kill him if he did not cry it out.

“You do your weepin, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said, and put his arms around him. Jack put his hot, swollen face against Speedy’s thin shirt, smelling the man’s smell—something like Old Spice, something like cinnamon, something like books that no one has taken out of the library in a long time. Good smells, comforting smells. He groped his arms around Speedy; his palms felt the bones in Speedy’s back, close to the surface, hardly covered by scant meat.

“You weep if it put you easy again,” Speedy said, rocking him. “Sometimes it does. I know. Speedy knows how far you been, Travellin Jack, and how far you got to go, and how you tired. So you weep if it put you easy.”

Jack barely understood the words—only the sounds of them, soothing and calming.

“My mother’s really sick,” he said at last against Speedy’s chest. “I think she came here to get away from my father’s old partner. Mr. Morgan Sloat.” He sniffed mightily, let go of Speedy, stepped back, and rubbed at his swollen eyes with the heels of his hands. He was surprised at his lack of embarrassment—always before, his tears had disgusted and shamed him . . . it was almost like peeing your pants. Was that because his mother had always been so tough? He supposed that was part of it, all right; Lily Cavanaugh had little use for tears.

“But that ain’t the only reason she come here, was it?”

“No,” Jack said in a low voice. “I think . . . she came here to die.” His voice rose impossibly on the last word, making a squeak like an unoiled hinge.

“Maybe,” Speedy said, looking at Jack steadily. “And maybe you here to save her. Her . . . and a woman just like her.”

“Who?” Jack said through numb lips. He knew who. He didn’t know her name, but he knew who.

“The Queen,” Speedy said. “Her name is Laura DeLoessian, and she is the Queen of the Territories.”

2

“Help me,” Speedy grunted. “Catch ole Silver Lady right under the tail. You be takin’ liberties with the Lady, but I guess she ain’t gonna mind if you’re helpin me get her back where she belong.”

“Is that what you call her? Silver Lady?”

“Yeah bob,” Speedy said, grinning, showing perhaps a dozen teeth, top and bottom. “All carousel horses is named, don’t you know that? Catch on. Travellin Jack!”

Jack reached under the white horse’s wooden tail and locked his fingers together. Grunting, Speedy wrapped his big brown hands around the Lady’s forelegs. Together they carried the wooden horse over to the canted dish of the carousel, the pole pointing down, its far end sinister with layers of Quaker State oil.

“Little to the left . . .” Speedy gasped. “Yeah . . . now peg her, Travellin Jack! Peg her down good!”

They seated the pole and then stood back, Jack panting, Speedy grinning and gasping wheezily. The black man armed sweat from his brow and then turned his grin on Jack.

“My, ain’t we cool?”

“If you say so,” Jack answered, smiling.

“I say so! Oh yes!” Speedy reached into his back pocket and pulled out the dark green pint bottle. He unscrewed the cap, drank—and for a moment Jack felt a weird certainty: he could see through Speedy. Speedy had become transparent, as ghostly as one of the spirits on the
Topper
show, which they showed on one of the indy stations out in L.A. Speedy was disappearing.
Disappearing
, Jack thought,
or going someplace else?
But that was another nutty thought; it made no sense at all.

Then Speedy was as solid as ever. It had just been a trick his eyes had played, a momentary—

No. No it wasn’t. For just a second he almost wasn’t here!

—hallucination.

Speedy was looking shrewdly at him. He started to hold the bottle out to Jack, then shook his head a little. He recapped it instead, and then slid it into his back pocket again. He turned to study the Silver Lady, back in her place on the carousel, now needing only to have her post bolted securely into place. He was smiling. “We just as cool as we can be, Travellin Jack.”

“Speedy—”

“All of em is named,” Speedy said, walking slowly around the canted dish of the carousel, his footfalls echoing in the high building. Overhead, in the shadowy crisscross of the beams, a few barnswallows cooed softly. Jack followed him. “Silver Lady . . . Midnight . . . this here roan is Scout . . . this mare’s Ella Speed.”

The black man threw back his head and sang, startling the barnswallows into flight:

“ ’
Ella Speed was havin her lovin fun . . . let me tell you what old Bill Martin done
. . . .’ Hoo! Look at em fly!” He laughed . . . but when he turned to Jack, he was serious again. “You like to take a shot at savin your mother’s life, Jack? Hers, and the life of that other woman I tole you about?”

“I . . .” . . . 
don’t know how
, he meant to say, but a voice inside—a voice which came from that same previously locked room from which the memory of the two men and the attempted kidnapping had come that morning—rose up powerfully:
You do know! You might need Speedy to get you started, but you do know, Jack. You do.

He knew that voice so very well. It was his father’s voice.

“I will if you tell me how,” he said, his voice rising and falling unevenly.

Speedy crossed to the room’s far wall—a great circular shape made of narrow slatted boards, painted with a primitive but wildly energetic mural of dashing horses. To Jack, the wall looked like the pull-down lid of his father’s rolltop desk (and that desk had been in Morgan Sloat’s office the last time Jack and his mother had been there, he suddenly remembered—the thought brought a thin, milky anger with it).

Speedy pulled out a gigantic ring of keys, picked thoughtfully through them, found the one he wanted, and turned it in a padlock. He pulled the lock out of the hasp, clicked it shut, and dropped it into one of his breast pockets. Then he shoved the entire wall back on its track. Gorgeously bright sunlight poured in, making Jack narrow his eyes. Water ripples danced benignly across the ceiling. They were looking at the magnificent sea-view the riders of the Arcadia Funworld Carousel got each time Silver Lady and Midnight and Scout carried them past the east side of the round carousel building. A light sea-breeze pushed Jack’s hair back from his forehead.

“Best to have sunlight if we’re gonna talk about this,” Speedy said. “Come on over here, Travellin Jack, and I’ll tell you what I can . . . which ain’t all I know. God forbid you should ever have to get all of that.”

3

Speedy talked in his soft voice—it was as mellow and soothing to Jack as leather that has been well broken in. Jack listened, sometimes frowning, sometimes gaping.

“You know those things you call the Daydreams?”

Jack nodded.

“Those things ain’t dreams, Travellin Jack. Not daydreams, not nightdreams, either. That place is a real place. Real enough, anyway. It’s a lot different from here, but it’s real.”

“Speedy, my mom says—”

“Never mind that right now. She don’t know about the Territories . . . but, in a way, she
do
know about them. Because your daddy,
he
knew. And this other man—”

“Morgan Sloat?”

“Yeah, I reckon. He knows too.” Then, cryptically, Speedy added, “I know who he is over there, too. Don’t I! Whooo!”

“The picture in your office . . . not Africa?”

“Not Africa.”

“Not a trick?”

“Not a trick.”

“And my father went to this place?” he asked, but his heart already knew the answer—it was an answer that clarified too many things not to be true. But, true or not, Jack wasn’t sure how much of it he wanted to
believe
. Magic lands? Sick queens? It made him uneasy. It made him uneasy about his mind. Hadn’t his mother told him over and over again when he was small that he shouldn’t confuse his Daydreaming with what was really real? She had been very stern about that, and she had frightened Jack a little. Perhaps, he thought now, she had been frightened herself. Could she have lived with Jack’s father for so long and not known
something?
Jack didn’t think so.
Maybe
, he thought,
she didn’t know very much . . . just enough to scare her
.

Going nuts
. That’s what she was talking about. People who couldn’t tell the difference between real things and make-believe were going nuts.

But his father had known a different truth, hadn’t he? Yes. He and Morgan Sloat.

They have magic like we have physics, right?

“Your father went often, yes. And this other man, Groat—”

“Sloat.”

“Yeah-bob! Him. He went, too. Only your dad, Jacky, he went to see and learn. The other fella, he just went to plunder him out a fortune.”

“Did Morgan Sloat kill my Uncle Tommy?” Jack asked.

“Don’t know nuthin bout that. You just listen to me, Travellin Jack. Because time is short. If you really think this fellow Sloat is gonna turn up here—”

“He sounded awful mad,” Jack said. Just thinking about Uncle Morgan showing up in Arcadia Beach made him feel nervous.

“—then time is shorter than ever. Because maybe he wouldn’t mind so bad if your mother died. And his Twinner is sure hopin that Queen Laura dies.”

“Twinner?”

“There’s people in this world have got Twinners in the Territories,” Speedy said. “Not many, because there’s a lot less people over there—maybe only one for every hundred thousand over here. But Twinners can go back and forth the easiest.”

“This Queen . . . she’s my mother’s . . . her Twinner?”

“Yeah, seems like she is.”

“But my mother never—?”

“No. She never has. No reason.”

“My father had a . . . a Twinner?”

“Yes indeed he did. A fine man.”

Jack wet his lips—what a crazy conversation this was! Twinners and Territories! “When my father died over here, did his Twinner die over there?”

“Yeah. Not zackly the same time, but almost.”

“Speedy?”

“What?”

“Have I got a Twinner? In the Territories?”

And Speedy looked at him so seriously that Jack felt a deep chill go up his back. “Not you, son. There’s only one of you. You special. And this fella Smoot—”

“Sloat,” Jack said, smiling a little.

“—yeah, whatever, he knows it. That be one of the reasons he be coming up here soon. And one of the reasons you got to get movin.”

“Why?”
Jack burst out. “What good can I do if it’s cancer? If it’s cancer and she’s here instead of in some clinic, it’s because there’s no
way
, if she’s here, see, it means—” The tears threatened again and he swallowed them back frantically. “It means it must be all through her.”

All through her
. Yes. That was another truth his heart knew: the truth of her accelerating weight-loss, the truth of the brown shadows under her eyes.
All through her
, but please God, hey, God, please, man, she’s my
mother
—

“I mean,” he finished in a thick voice, “what good is that Daydream place going to do?”

“I think we had enough jaw-chin for now,” Speedy said. “Just believe this here, Travellin Jack: I’d never tell you you ought to go if you couldn’t do her some good.”

“But—”

“Get quiet, Travellin Jack. Can’t talk no more till I show you some of what I mean. Wouldn’t do no good. Come on.”

Speedy put an arm around Jack’s shoulders and led him around the carousel dish. They went out the door together and walked down one of the amusement park’s deserted byways. On their left was the Demon Dodgem Cars building, now boarded and shuttered. On their right was a series of booths: Pitch Til U Win, Famous Pier Pizza & Dough-Boys, the Rimfire Shooting Gallery, also boarded up (faded wild animals pranced across the boards—lions and tigers and bears, o my).

They reached the wide main street, which was called Boardwalk Avenue in vague imitation of Atlantic City—Arcadia Funworld had a pier, but no real boardwalk. The arcade building was now a hundred yards down to their left and the arch marking the entrance to Arcadia Funworld about two hundred yards down to their right. Jack could hear the steady, grinding thunder of the breaking waves, the lonely cries of the gulls.

He looked at Speedy, meaning to ask him what now, what next, could he mean any of it or was it a cruel joke . . . but he said none of those things. Speedy was holding out the green glass bottle.

“That—” Jack began.

“Takes you there,” Speedy said. “Lot of people who visit over there don’t need nothin like this, but you ain’t been there in a while, have you, Jacky?”

“No.” When had he last closed his eyes in this world and opened them in the magic world of the Daydreams, that world with its rich, vital smells and its deep, transparent sky? Last year? No. Further back than that . . . California . . . after his father had died. He would have been about . . .

Jack’s eyes widened. Nine years old? That long? Three
years?

It was frightening to think how quietly, how unobtrusively, those dreams, sometimes sweet, sometimes darkly unsettling, had slipped away—as if a large part of his imagination had died painlessly and unannounced.

He took the bottle from Speedy quickly, almost dropping it. He felt a little panicky. Some of the Daydreams had been disturbing, yes, and his mother’s carefully worded admonitions not to mix up reality and make-believe
(in other words don’t go crazy, Jacky, ole kid ole sock, okay?)
had been a little scary, yes, but he discovered now that he didn’t want to lose that world after all.

He looked in Speedy’s eyes and thought:
He knows it, too. Everything I just thought, he knows. Who are you, Speedy?