The Talisman (6 page)

“When you ain’t been there for a while, you kinda forget how to get there on your own hook,” Speedy said. He nodded at the bottle. “That’s why I got me some magic juice. This stuff is
special
.” Speedy spoke this last in tones that were almost reverential.

“Is it from there? The Territories?”

“Nope. They got
some
magic right here, Travellin Jack. Not much, but a little. This here magic juice come from California.”

Jack looked at him doubtfully.

“Go on. Have you a little sip and see if you don’t go travellin.” Speedy grinned. “Drink enough of that, you can go just about anyplace you want. You’re lookin at one who knows.”

“Jeez, Speedy, but—” He began to feel afraid. His mouth had gone dry, the sun seemed much too bright, and he could feel his pulsebeat speeding up in his temples. There was a coppery taste under his tongue and Jack thought:
That’s how his “magic juice” will taste—horrible
.

“If you get scared and want to come back, have another sip,” Speedy said.

“It’ll come with me? The bottle? You promise?” The thought of getting stuck there, in that mystical other place, while his mother was sick and Sloat-beset back here, was awful.

“I promise.”

“Okay.” Jack brought the bottle to his lips . . . and then let it fall away a little. The smell was awful—sharp and rancid. “I don’t want to, Speedy,” he whispered.

Lester Parker looked at him, and his lips were smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes—they were stern. Uncompromising. Frightening. Jack thought of black eyes: eye of gull, eye of vortex. Terror swept through him.

He held the bottle out to Speedy. “Can’t you take it back?” he asked, and his voice came out in a strengthless whisper. “Please?”

Speedy made no reply. He did not remind Jack that his mother was dying, or that Morgan Sloat was coming. He didn’t call Jack a coward, although he had never in his life felt so much like a coward, not even the time he had backed away from the high board at Camp Accomac and some of the other kids had booed him. Speedy merely turned around and whistled at a cloud.

Now loneliness joined the terror, sweeping helplessly through him. Speedy had turned away from him; Speedy had shown him his back.

“Okay,” Jack said suddenly. “Okay, if it’s what you need me to do.”

He raised the bottle again, and before he could have any second or third thoughts, he drank.

The taste was worse than anything he had anticipated. He had had wine before, had even developed some taste for it (he especially liked the dry white wines his mother served with sole or snapper or swordfish), and this was something like wine . . . but at the same time it was a dreadful mockery of all the wines he had drunk before. The taste was high and sweet and rotten, not the taste of lively grapes but of dead grapes that had not lived well.

As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet-purple taste, he could actually
see
those grapes—dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies.

He swallowed and thin fire printed a snail-trail down his throat.

He closed his eyes, grimacing, his gorge threatening to rise. He did not vomit, although he believed that if he had eaten any breakfast he would have done.

“Speedy—”

He opened his eyes, and further words died in his throat. He forgot about the need to sick up that horrible parody of wine. He forgot about his mother, and Uncle Morgan, and his father, and almost everything else.

Speedy was gone. The graceful arcs of the roller coaster against the sky were gone. Boardwalk Avenue was gone.

He was someplace else now. He was—

“In the Territories,” Jack whispered, his entire body crawling with a mad mixture of terror and exhilaration. He could feel the hair stirring on the nape of his neck, could feel a goofed-up grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Speedy, I’m here, my God, I’m here in the Territories! I—”

But wonder overcame him. He clapped a hand over his mouth and slowly turned in a complete circle, looking at this place to which Speedy’s “magic juice” had brought him.

4

The ocean was still there, but now it was a darker, richer blue—the truest indigo Jack had ever seen. For a moment he stood transfixed, the sea-breeze blowing in his hair, looking at the horizon-line where that indigo ocean met a sky the color of faded denim.

That horizon-line showed a faint but unmistakable curve.

He shook his head, frowning, and turned the other way. Sea-grass, high and wild and tangled, ran down from the headland where the round carousel building had been only a minute ago. The arcade pier was also gone; where it had been, a wild tumble of granite blocks ran down to the ocean. The waves struck the lowest of these and ran into ancient cracks and channels with great hollow boomings. Foam as thick as whipped cream jumped into the clear air and was blown away by the wind.

Abruptly Jack seized his left cheek with his left thumb and forefinger. He pinched hard. His eyes watered, but nothing changed.

“It’s real,” he whispered, and another wave boomed onto the headland, raising white curds of foam.

Jack suddenly realized that Boardwalk Avenue
was
still here . . . after a fashion. A rutted cart-track ran from the top of the headland—where Boardwalk Avenue had ended at the entrance to the arcade in what his mind persisted in thinking of as “the real world”—down to where he was standing and then on to the north, just as Boardwalk Avenue ran north, becoming Arcadia Avenue after it passed under the arch at the border of Funworld. Sea-grass grew up along the center of this track, but it had a bent and matted look that made Jack think that the track was still used, at least once in a while.

He started north, still holding the green bottle in his right hand. It occurred to him that somewhere, in another world, Speedy was holding the cap that went on this bottle.

Did I disappear right in front of him? I suppose I must have
. Jeez!

About forty paces along the track, he came upon a tangle of blackberry bushes. Clustered amid the thorns were the fattest, darkest, most lush-looking blackberries he had ever seen. Jack’s stomach, apparently over the indignity of the “magic juice,” made a loud
going
ing sound.

Blackberries? In September?

Never mind. After all that had happened today (and it was not yet ten o’clock), sticking at blackberries in September seemed a little bit like refusing to take an aspirin after one has swallowed a doorknob.

Jack reached in, picked a handful of berries, and tossed them into his mouth. They were amazingly sweet, amazingly good. Smiling (his lips had taken on a definite bluish cast), thinking it quite possible that he had lost his mind, he picked another handful of berries . . . and then a third. He had never tasted anything so fine—although, he thought later, it was not just the berries themselves; part of it was the incredible clarity of the air.

He got a couple of scratches while picking a fourth helping—it was as if the bushes were telling him to lay off, enough was enough, already. He sucked at the deepest of the scratches, on the fleshy pad below the thumb, and then headed north along the twin ruts again, moving slowly, trying to look everywhere at once.

He paused a little way from the blackberry tangles to look up at the sun, which seemed somehow smaller and yet more fiery. Did it have a faint orange cast, like in those old medieval pictures? Jack thought perhaps it did. And—

A cry, as rusty and unpleasant as an old nail being pulled slowly out of a board, suddenly arose on his right, scattering his thoughts. Jack turned toward it, his shoulders going up, his eyes widening.

It was a gull—and its size was mind-boggling, almost unbelievable (but there it was, as solid as stone, as real as houses). It was, in fact, the size of an eagle. Its smooth white bullet-head cocked to one side. Its fishhook of a beak opened and closed. It fluttered great wings, rippling the sea-grass around it.

And then, seemingly without fear, it began to hop toward Jack.

Faintly, Jack heard the clear, brazen note of many horns blown together in a simple flourish, and for no reason at all he thought of his mother.

He glanced to the north momentarily, in the direction he had been travelling, drawn by that sound—it filled him with a sense of unfocussed urgency. It was, he thought (when there was
time
to think), like being hungry for a specific
something
that you haven’t had in a long time—ice cream, potato chips, maybe a taco. You don’t know until you see it—and until you do, there is only a need without a name, making you restless, making you nervous.

He saw pennons and the peak of what might have been a great tent—a pavillion—against the sky.

That’s where the Alhambra is
, he thought, and then the gull shrieked at him. He turned toward it and was alarmed to see it was now less than six feet away. Its beak opened again, showing that dirty pink lining, making him think of yesterday, the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then fixed him with a horrid stare exactly like this one. The gull was grinning at him—he was sure of it. As it hopped closer, Jack could smell a low and noisome stink hanging about it—dead fish and rotted seaweed.

The gull hissed at him and flurried its wings again.

“Get out of here,” Jack said loudly. His heart was pumping quick blood and his mouth had gone dry, but he did not want to be scared off by a seagull, even a big one. “Get out!”

The gull opened its beak again . . . and then, in a terrible, open-throated series of pulses, it spoke—or seemed to.

“Other’s iyyyin Ack . . . other’s iyyyyyyyyyyin—”

Mother’s dying, Jack. . . .

The gull took another clumsy hop toward him, scaly feet clutching at the grassy tangles, beak opening and closing, black eyes fixed on Jack’s. Hardly aware of what he was doing, Jack raised the green bottle and drank.

Again that horrible taste made him wince his eyes shut—and when he opened them he was looking stupidly at a yellow sign which showed the black silhouettes of two running kids, a little boy and a little girl.
SLOW CHILDREN
, this sign read. A seagull—this one of perfectly normal size—flew up from it with a squawk, no doubt startled by Jack’s sudden appearance.

He looked around, and was walloped by disorientation. His stomach, full of blackberries and Speedy’s pustulant “magic juice,” rolled over, groaning. The muscles in his legs began to flutter unpleasantly, and all at once he sat down on the curb at the base of the sign with a bang that travelled up his spine and made his teeth click together.

He suddenly leaned over between his splayed knees and opened his mouth wide, sure he was just going to yark up the whole works. Instead he hiccuped twice, half-gagged, and then felt his stomach slowly relax.

It was the berries
, he thought.
If it hadn’t been for the berries, I would have puked for sure
.

He looked up and felt the unreality wash over him again. He had walked no more than sixty paces down the cart-track in the Territories world. He was sure of that. Say his stride was two feet—no, say two and a half feet, just to be on the safe side. That meant he had come a paltry hundred and fifty feet. But—

He looked behind him and saw the arch, with its big red letters:
ARCADIA FUNWORLD
. Although his vision was 20/20, the sign was now so far away he could barely read it. To his right was the rambling, many-winged Alhambra Inn, with the formal gardens before it and the ocean beyond it.

In the Territories world he had come a hundred and fifty feet.

Over here he had somehow come half a mile.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack Sawyer whispered, and covered his eyes with his hands.

5

“Jack! Jack, boy! Travellin Jack!”

Speedy’s voice rose over the washing-machine roar of an old flathead-six engine. Jack looked up—his head felt impossibly heavy, his limbs leaden with weariness—and saw a very old International Harvester truck rolling slowly toward him. Homemade stake sides had been added to the back of the truck, and they rocked back and forth like loose teeth as the truck moved up the street toward him. The body was painted a hideous turquoise. Speedy was behind the wheel.

He pulled up at the curb, gunned the engine (
Whup! Whup! Whup-whup-whup!)
, and then killed it (
Hahhhhhhhhhh . . .
). He climbed down quickly.

“You all right, Jack?”

Jack held the bottle out for Speedy to take. “Your magic juice really sucks, Speedy,” he said wanly.

Speedy looked hurt . . . then he smiled. “Whoever tole you medicine supposed to taste good, Travellin Jack?”

“Nobody, I guess,” Jack said. He felt some of his strength coming back—slowly—as that thick feeling of disorientation ebbed.

“You believe now, Jack?”

Jack nodded.

“No,” Speedy said. “That don’t git it. Say it out loud.”

“The Territories,” Jack said. “They’re there. Real. I saw a bird—” He stopped and shuddered.

“What kind of a bird?” Speedy asked sharply.

“Seagull. Biggest damn seagull—” Jack shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.” He thought and then said, “No, I guess
you
would. Nobody else, maybe, but
you
would.”

“Did it talk? Lots of birds over there do. Talk foolishness, mostly. And there’s some that talks a kind of sense . . . but it’s a evil kind of sense, and mostly it’s lies.”

Jack was nodding. Just hearing Speedy talk of these things, as if it were utterly rational and utterly lucid to do so, made him feel better.

“I think it did talk. But it was like—” He thought hard. “There was a kid at the school Richard and I went to in L.A. Brandon Lewis. He had a speech impediment, and when he talked you could hardly understand him. The bird was like that. But I knew what it said. It said my mother was dying.”

Speedy put an arm around Jack’s shoulders and they sat quietly together on the curb for a time. The desk clerk from the Alhambra, looking pale and narrow and suspicious of every living thing in the universe, came out with a large stack of mail. Speedy and Jack watched him go down to the corner of Arcadia and Beach Drive and dump the inn’s correspondence into the mailbox. He turned back, marked Jack and Speedy with his thin gaze, and then turned up the Alhambra’s main walk. The top of his head could barely be descried over the tops of the thick box hedges.