The Talisman (64 page)

From behind them came another heavy, belching explosion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof of the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.

“Can you hang on to me? I’ll piggyback you a ways.”
Shades of Wolf,
he thought.

“I can hang on.”

“If you can’t, say so.”

“Jack,” Richard said with a heartening trace of that old fussy Richard-irritation, “if I couldn’t hang on, I wouldn’t say I could.”

Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack’s neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener’s Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world—gorgeous as it could be—rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.

He
did
begin to jog.

“If you make me seasick,” Richard said, his voice jiggling in time with Jack’s footfalls, “I’ll just vomit on your head.”

“I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy,” Jack panted, grinning.

“I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick.”

“Probably just how you look, chum.”

“Don’t . . . call me chum,” Richard whispered, and Jack’s grin widened. He thought,
Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever
.

4

“I knew that man,” Richard whispered from above Jack.

It startled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.

The tracks,
Jack wondered.
Do they go where I think they go?

“What man?”

“The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew him. I used to see him around.”

“When?” Jack panted.

“A long time ago. When I was a little kid.” Richard then added with great reluctance, “Around the time that I had that . . . that funny dream in the closet.” He paused. “Except I guess it wasn’t a dream, was it?”

“No. I guess it wasn’t.”

“Yes. Was the man with the whip Reuel’s dad?”

“What do you think?”

“It was,” Richard said glumly. “Sure it was.”

Jack stopped.

“Richard, where do these tracks go?”

“You know where they go,” Richard said with a strange, empty serenity.

“Yeah—I think I do. But I want to hear you say it.” Jack paused. “I guess I
need
to hear you say it. Where do they go?”

“They go to a town called Point Venuti,” Richard said, and he sounded near tears again. “There’s a big hotel there. I don’t know if it’s the place you’re looking for or not, but I think it probably is.”

“So do I,” Jack said. He set off once more, Richard’s legs in his arms, a growing ache in his back, following the tracks that would take him—both of them—to the place where his mother’s salvation might be found.

5

As they walked, Richard talked. He did not come on to the subject of his father’s involvement in this mad business all at once, but began to circle slowly in toward it.

“I knew that man from before,” Richard said. “I’m pretty sure I did. He came to the house. Always to the back of the house. He didn’t ring the bell, or knock. He kind of . . . scratched on the door. It gave me the creeps. Scared me so bad I felt like peeing my pants. He was a tall man—oh, all grown men seem tall to little kids, but this guy was
very
tall—and he had white hair. He wore dark glasses most of the time. Or sometimes the kind of sunglasses that have the mirror lenses. When I saw that story on him they had on
Sunday Report
, I knew I’d seen him
somewhere
before. My father was upstairs doing some paperwork the night that show was on. I was sitting in front of the tube, and when my father came in and saw what was on, he almost dropped the drink he was holding. Then he changed the station to a
Star Trek
rerun.

“Only the guy wasn’t calling himself Sunlight Gardener when he used to come and see my father. His name . . . I can’t quite remember. But it was something like Banlon . . . or Orlon . . .”

“Osmond?”

Richard brightened. “
That
was it. I never heard his first name. But he used to come once every month or two. Sometimes more often. Once he came almost every other night, for a week, and then he was gone for almost half a year. I used to lock myself in my room when he came. I didn’t like his smell. He wore some kind of scent . . . cologne, I suppose, but it really smelled stronger than that. Like perfume. Cheap dimestore perfume. But underneath it—”

“Underneath it he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath for about ten years.”

Richard looked at him, wide-eyed.

“I met him as Osmond, too,” Jack explained. He had explained before—at least some of this—but Richard had not been listening then. He was listening now. “In the Territories version of New Hampshire, before I met him as Sunlight Gardener in Indiana.”

“Then you must have seen that . . . that
thing
.”

“Reuel?” Jack shook his head. “Reuel must have been out in the Blasted Lands then, having a few more radical cobalt treatments.” Jack thought of the running sores on the creature’s face, thought of the worms. He looked at his red, puffy wrists where the worms had bitten, and shuddered. “I never saw Reuel until the end, and I never saw his American Twinner at all. How old were you when Osmond started showing up?”

“I must have been four. The thing about the . . . you know, the closet . . . that hadn’t happened yet. I remember I was more afraid of him after that.”

“After the thing touched you in the closet.”

“Yes.”

“And that happened when you were five.”

“Yes.”

“When we were
both
five.”

“Yes. You can put me down. I can walk for a while.”

Jack did. They walked in silence, heads down, not looking at each other. At five, something had reached out of the dark and touched Richard. When they were both six

(six, Jacky was six)

Jack had overheard his father and Morgan Sloat talking about a place they went to, a place that Jacky called the Day-dream-country. And later that year, something had reached out of the dark and had touched him and his mother. It had been nothing more or less than Morgan Sloat’s voice. Morgan Sloat calling from Green River, Utah. Sobbing. He, Phil Sawyer, and Tommy Woodbine had left three days before on their yearly November hunting trip—another college chum, Randy Glover, owned a luxurious hunting lodge in Blessington, Utah. Glover usually hunted with them, but that year he had been cruising in the Caribbean. Morgan called to say that Phil had been shot, apparently by another hunter. He and Tommy Woodbine had packed him out of the wilderness on a lashed-together stretcher. Phil had regained consciousness in the back of Glover’s Jeep Cherokee, Morgan said, and had asked that Morgan send his love to Lily and Jack. He died fifteen minutes later, as Morgan drove wildly toward Green River and the nearest hospital.

Morgan had not killed Phil; there was Tommy to testify that the three of them had been together when the shot rang out, if any testimony had ever been required (and, of course, none ever was).

But that was not to say he couldn’t have hired it done, Jack thought now. And it was not to say that Uncle Tommy might not have harbored his own long doubts about what had happened. If so, maybe Uncle Tommy hadn’t been killed just so that Jack and his dying mother would be totally unprotected from Morgan’s depredations. Maybe he had died because Morgan was tired of wondering if the old faggot might finally hint to the surviving son that there might have been more to Phil Sawyer’s death than an accident. Jack felt his skin crawl with dismay and revulsion.

“Was that man around before your father and my father went hunting together that last time?” Jack asked fiercely.

“Jack, I was four years old—”

“No, you weren’t, you were
six
. You were four when he started coming, you were six when my father got killed in Utah. And you don’t forget much, Richard. Did he come around before my father died?”

“That was the time he came almost every night for a week,” Richard said, his voice barely audible. “Just before that last hunting trip.”

Although none of this was precisely Richard’s fault, Jack was unable to contain his bitterness. “My dad dead in a hunting accident in Utah, Uncle Tommy run down in L.A. The death-rate among your father’s friends is very fucking high, Richard.”

“Jack—” Richard began in a small, trembling voice.

“I mean it’s all water over the dam, or spilled milk, or pick your cliché,” Jack said. “But when I showed up at your school, Richard, you called me crazy.”

“Jack, you don’t under—”

“No, I guess I don’t. I was tired and you gave me a place to sleep. Fine. I was hungry and you got me some food. Great. But what I needed most was for you to
believe
me. I knew it was too much to expect, but jeepers! You
knew
the guy I was talking about! You
knew
he’d been in your father’s life before! And you just said something like ’Good old Jack’s been spending too much time in the hot sun out there on Seabrook Island and blah-blah-blah!’ Jesus, Richard, I thought we were better friends than that.”

“You still don’t understand.”

“What? That you were too afraid of Seabrook Island stuff to believe in me a little?” Jack’s voice wavered with tired indignation.

“No. I was afraid of more than that.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack stopped and looked at Richard’s pale, miserable face truculently. “What could be more than that for Rational Richard?”

“I was afraid,” Richard said in a perfectly calm voice. “I was afraid that if I knew any more about those secret pockets . . . that man Osmond, or what was in the closet that time, I wouldn’t be able to love my father anymore. And I was right.”

Richard covered his face with his thin, dirty fingers and began to cry.

6

Jack stood watching Richard cry and damned himself for twenty kinds of fool. No matter what else Morgan was, he was still Richard Sloat’s father; Morgan’s ghost lurked in the shape of Richard’s hands and in the bones of Richard’s face. Had he forgotten those things? No—but for a moment his bitter disappointment in Richard had covered them up. And his increasing nervousness had played a part. The Talisman was very, very close now, and he felt it in his nerve-endings the way a horse smells water in the desert or a distant grass-fire in the plains. That nerviness was coming out in a kind of prancy skittishness.

Yeah, well, this guy’s supposed to be your best buddy, Jack-O—get a little funky if you have to, but don’t trample Richard. The kid’s sick, just in case you hadn’t noticed.

He reached for Richard. Richard tried to push him away. Jack was having none of that. He held Richard. The two of them stood that way in the middle of the deserted railroad bed for a while, Richard’s head on Jack’s shoulder.

“Listen,” Jack said awkwardly, “try not to worry too much about . . . you know . . . everything . . . just yet, Richard. Just kind of try to roll with the changes, you know?” Boy, that sounded really stupid. Like telling somebody they had cancer but don’t worry because pretty soon we’re going to put
Star Wars
on the VCR and it’ll cheer you right up.

“Sure,” Richard said. He pushed away from Jack. The tears had cut clean tracks on his dirty face. He wiped an arm across his eyes and tried to smile. “A’ wi’ be well an’ a’ wi’ be well—”

“An’ a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well,” Jack chimed in—they finished together, then laughed together, and that was all right.

“Come on,” Richard said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To get your Talisman,” Richard said. “The way you’re talking, it must be in Point Venuti. It’s the next town up the line. Come on, Jack. Let’s get going. But walk slow—I’m not done talking yet.”

Jack looked at him curiously, and then they started walking again—but slowly.

7

Now that the dam had broken and Richard had allowed himself to begin remembering things, he was an unexpected fountain of information. Jack began to feel as if he had been working a jigsaw puzzle without knowing that several of the most important pieces were missing. It was Richard who had had most of those pieces all along. Richard had been in the survivalist camp before; that was the first piece. His father had owned it.

“Are you sure it was the same place, Richard?” Jack asked doubtfully.

“I’m sure,” Richard said. “It even looked a little familiar to me on the other side, there. When we got back over . . . over here . . . I was sure.”

Jack nodded, unsure what else to do.

“We used to stay in Point Venuti. That’s where we always stayed before we came here. The train was a big treat. I mean, how many dads have their own private train?”

“Not many,” Jack said. “I guess Diamond Jim Brady and some of those guys had private trains, but I don’t know if they were dads or not.”

“Oh, my dad wasn’t in their league,” Richard said, laughing a little, and Jack thought:
Richard, you might be surprised
.

“We’d drive up to Point Venuti from L.A. in a rental car. There was a motel we stayed at. Just the two of us.” Richard stopped. His eyes had gone misty with love and remembering. “Then—after we hung out there for a while—we’d take my dad’s train up to Camp Readiness. It was just a little train.” He looked at Jack, startled. “Like the one we came on, I guess.”