The Talisman (7 page)

The sound of the big front door opening and closing was clearly audible, and Jack was struck by a terrible sense of this place’s autumn desolation. Wide, deserted streets. The long beach with its empty dunes of sugar-sand. The empty amusement park, with the roller-coaster cars standing on a siding under canvas tarps and all the booths padlocked. It came to him that his mother had brought him to a place very like the end of the world.

Speedy had cocked his head back and sang in his true and mellow voice,
“Well I’ve laid around . . . and played around . . . this old town too long . . . summer’s almost gone, yes, and winter’s coming on . . . winter’s coming on, and I feel like . . . I got to travel on—”

He broke off and looked at Jack.

“You feel like you got to travel, ole Travellin Jack?”

Flagging terror stole through his bones.

“I guess so,” he said. “If it will help. Help her. Can I help her, Speedy?”

“You can,” Speedy said gravely.

“But—”

“Oh, there’s a whole string of buts,” Speedy said. “Whole
trainload
of buts, Travellin Jack. I don’t promise you no cake-walk. I don’t promise you success. Don’t promise that you’ll come back alive, or if you do, that you’ll come back with your mind still bolted together.

“You gonna have to do a lot of your ramblin in the Territories, because the Territories is a whole lot smaller. You notice that?”

“Yes.”

“Figured you would. Because you sure did get a whole mess down the road, didn’t you?”

Now an earlier question recurred to Jack, and although it was off the subject, he had to know. “Did I disappear, Speedy? Did you see me disappear?”

“You went,” Speedy said, and clapped his hands once, sharply, “just like
that
.”

Jack felt a slow, unwilling grin stretch his mouth . . . and Speedy grinned back.

“I’d like to do it sometime in Mr. Balgo’s computer class,” Jack said, and Speedy cackled like a child. Jack joined him—and the laughter felt good, almost as good as those blackberries had tasted.

After a few moments Speedy sobered and said, “There’s a reason you got to be in the Territories, Jack. There’s somethin you got to git. It’s a mighty powerful somethin.”

“And it’s over there?”

“Yeah-bob.”

“It can help my mother?”

“Her . . . and the other.”

“The Queen?”

Speedy nodded.

“What is it? Where is it? When do I—”

“Hold it! Stop!” Speedy held up a hand. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were grave, almost sorrowing. “One thing at a time. And, Jack, I can’t tell you what I don’t know . . . or what I’m not allowed to tell.”

“Not allowed?” Jack asked, bewildered. “Who—”

“There you go again,” Speedy said. “Now listen, Travellin Jack. You got to leave as soon as you can, before that man Bloat can show up an bottle you up—”

“Sloat.”

“Yeah, him. You got to get out before he comes.”

“But he’ll bug my mother,” Jack said, wondering why he was saying it—because it was true, or because it was an excuse to avoid the trip that Speedy was setting before him, like a meal that might be poisoned. “You don’t know him! He—”

“I know him,” Speedy said quietly. “I know him of old, Travellin Jack. And he knows me. He’s got my marks on him. They’re hidden—but they’re on him. Your momma can take care of herself. At least, she’s gonna have to, for a while. Because you got to go.”

“Where?”

“West,” Speedy said. “From this ocean to the other.”

“What?”
Jack cried, appalled by the thought of such distance. And then he thought of an ad he’d seen on TV not three nights ago—a man picking up goodies at a deli buffet some thirty-five thousand feet in the air, just as cool as a cucumber. Jack had flown from one coast to another with his mother a good two dozen times, and was always secretly delighted by the fact that when you flew from New York to L.A. you could have sixteen hours of daylight. It was like cheating time. And it was easy.

“Can I fly?” he asked Speedy.

“No!”
Speedy almost yelled, his eyes widening in consternation. He gripped Jack’s shoulder with one strong hand. “Don’t you let
nuthin
git you up in the sky! You dassn’t! If you happened to flip over into the Territories while you was up there—”

He said no more; he didn’t have to. Jack had a sudden, appalling picture of himself tumbling out of that clear, cloudless sky, a screaming boy-projectile in jeans with a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, a sky-diver with no parachute.

“You
walk
,” Speedy said. “And thumb what rides you think you can . . . but you got to be careful, because there’s strangers out there. Some are just crazy people, sissies that would like to touch you or thugs that would like to mug you. But some are real Strangers, Travellin Jack. They people with a foot in each world—they look that way and this like a goddam Janus-head. I’m afraid they gonna know you comin before too long has passed. And they’ll be on the watch.”

“Are they”—he groped—“Twinners?”

“Some are. Some aren’t. I can’t say no more right now. But you get across if you can. Get across to the other ocean. You travel in the Territories when you can and you’ll get across faster. You take the juice—”

“I hate it!”

“Never mind what you hate,” Speedy said sternly. “You get across and you’re gonna find a place—another Alhambra. You got to go in that place. It’s a scary place, a bad place. But you got to go in.”

“How will I find it?”

“It will call you. You’ll hear it loud and clear, son.”

“Why?” Jack asked. He wet his lips. “Why do I have to go there, if it’s so bad?”

“Because,” Speedy said, “that’s where the Talisman is. Somewhere in that other Alhambra.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You will,” Speedy said. He stood up, then took Jack’s hand. Jack rose. The two of them stood face-to-face, old black man and young white boy.

“Listen,” Speedy said, and his voice took on a slow, chanting rhythm. “Talisman be given unto your hand, Travellin Jack. Not too big, not too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here’s your burden, here’s your cross: drop her, Jack, and all be lost.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack repeated with a scared kind of stubbornness. “You have to—”

“No,” Speedy said, not unkindly. “I got to finish with that carousel this morning, Jack, that’s what I got to do. Got no time for any more jaw-chin. I got to get back and you got to get on. Can’t tell you no more now. I guess I’ll be seein you around. Here . . . or over there.”

“But I don’t know what to
do!
” Jack said as Speedy swung up into the cab of the old truck.

“You know enough to get movin,” Speedy said. “You’ll go to the Talisman, Jack. She’ll draw you to her.”

“I don’t even know what a Talisman is!”

Speedy laughed and keyed the ignition. The truck started up with a big blue blast of exhaust. “Look it up in the dictionary!” he shouted, and threw the truck into reverse.

He backed up, turned around, and then the truck was rattling back toward Arcadia Funworld. Jack stood by the curb, watching it go. He had never felt so alone in his life.

5

Jack and Lily

1

When Speedy’s truck turned off the road and disappeared beneath the Funworld arch, Jack began to move toward the hotel. A Talisman. In another Alhambra. On the edge of another ocean. His heart seemed empty. Without Speedy beside him, the task was mountainous, so huge; vague, too—while Speedy had been talking, Jack had had the feeling of
almost
understanding that macaroni of hints and threats and instructions. Now it was close to just being macaroni. The Territories were real, though. He hugged that certainty as close as he could, and it both warmed and chilled him. They were a real place, and he was going there again. Even if he did not really understand everything yet—even if he was an ignorant pilgrim, he was going. Now all he had to do was to try to convince his mother. “Talisman,” he said to himself, using the word as the thing, and crossed empty Boardwalk Avenue and jumped up the steps onto the path between the hedges. The darkness of the Alhambra’s interior, once the great door had swung shut, startled him. The lobby was a long cave—you’d need a fire just to separate the shadows. The pale clerk flickered behind the long desk, stabbing at Jack with his white eyes. A message there: yes. Jack swallowed and turned away. The message made him stronger, it increased him, though its intention was only scornful.

He went toward the elevators with a straight back and an unhurried step.
Hang around with blackies, huh? Let them put their arms around you, huh?
The elevator whirred down like a great heavy bird, the doors parted, and Jack stepped inside. He turned to punch the button marked with a glowing 4. The clerk was still posed spectrally behind the desk, sending out his dumdum’s message.
Niggerlover Niggerlover Niggerlover (like it that way, hey brat? Hot and black, that’s for you, hey?)
. The doors mercifully shut. Jack’s stomach fell toward his shoes, the elevator lurched upward.

The hatred stayed down there in the lobby: the very air in the elevator felt better once it had risen above the first floor. Now all Jack had to do was to tell his mother that he had to go to California by himself.

Just don’t let Uncle Morgan sign any papers for you. . . .

As Jack stepped out of the elevator, he wondered for the first time in his life whether Richard Sloat understood what his father was really like.

2

Down past the empty sconces and paintings of little boats riding foamy, corrugated seas, the door marked 408 slanted inward, revealing a foot of the suite’s pale carpet. Sunlight from the living-room windows made a long rectangle on the inner wall. “Hey Mom,” Jack said, entering the suite. “You didn’t close the door, what’s the big—” He was alone in the room. “Idea?” he said to the furniture. “Mom?” Disorder seemed to ooze from the tidy room—an overflowing ashtray, a half-full tumbler of water left on the coffee table.

This time, Jack promised himself, he would not panic.

He turned in a slow circle. Her bedroom door was open, the room itself as dark as the lobby because Lily had never pulled open the curtains.

“Hey, I know you’re here,” he said, and then walked through her empty bedroom to knock at her bathroom door. No reply. Jack opened this door and saw a pink toothbrush beside the sink, a forlorn hairbrush on the dressing table. Bristles snarled with light hairs.
Laura DeLoessian
, announced a voice in Jack’s mind, and he stepped backward out of the little bathroom—that name stung him.

“Oh, not again,” he said to himself. “Where’d she
go?
”

Already he was seeing it.

He saw it as he went to his own bedroom, saw it as he opened his own door and surveyed his rumpled bed, his flattened knapsack and little stack of paperback books, his socks balled up on top of the dresser. He saw it when he looked into his own bathroom, where towels lay in oriental disarray over the floor, the sides of the tub, and the Formica counters.

Morgan Sloat thrusting through the door, grabbing his mother’s arms and hauling her downstairs . . .

Jack hurried back into the living room and this time looked behind the couch.

 . . . yanking her out a side door and pushing her into a car, his eyes beginning to turn yellow. . . .

He picked up the telephone and punched 0. “This is, ah, Jack Sawyer, and I’m in, ah, room four-oh-eight. Did my mother leave any message for me? She was supposed to be here and . . . and for some reason . . . ah . . .”

“I’ll check,” said the girl, and Jack clutched the phone for a burning moment before she returned. “No message for four-oh-eight, sorry.”

“How about four-oh-seven?”

“That’s the same slot,” the girl told him.

“Ah, did she have any visitors in the last half hour or so? Anybody come this morning? To see her, I mean.”

“That would be Reception,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t know. Do you want me to check for you?”

“Please,” Jack said.

“Oh, I’m happy to have something to do in this morgue,” she told him. “Stay on the line.”

Another burning moment. When she came back to him, it was with “No visitors. Maybe she left a note somewhere in your rooms.”

“Yes, I’ll look,” Jack said miserably and hung up. Would the clerk tell the truth? Or would Morgan Sloat have held out a hand with a twenty-dollar bill folded like a stamp into his meaty palm? That, too, Jack could see.

He dropped himself on the couch, stifling an irrational desire to look under the cushions. Of course Uncle Morgan could not have come to the rooms and abducted her—he was still in California. But he could have sent other people to do it for him. Those people Speedy had mentioned, the Strangers with a foot in each world.

Then Jack could stay in the room no longer. He bounced off the couch and went back into the corridor, closing the door after him. When he had gone a few paces down the hall, he twirled around in mid-step, went back, and opened the door with his own key. He pushed the door an inch in, and then trotted back toward the elevators. It was always possible that she had gone out without her key—to the shop in the lobby, to the newsstand for a magazine or a paper.

Sure. He had not seen her pick up a newspaper since the beginning of summer. All the news she cared about came over an internal radio.

Out for a walk, then.

Yeah, out exercising and breathing deeply. Or jogging, maybe: maybe Lily Cavanaugh had suddenly gone in for the hundred-yard dash. She’d set up hurdles down on the beach and was in training for the next Olympics. . . .

When the elevator deposited him in the lobby he glanced into the shop, where an elderly blond woman behind a counter peered at him over the tops of her glasses. Stuffed animals, a tiny pile of thin newspapers, a display rack of flavored Chap Stick. Leaning out of pockets in a wallstand were
People
and
Us
and
New Hampshire Magazine
.

“Sorry,” Jack said, and turned away.

He found himself staring at the bronze plaque beside a huge, dispirited fern . . . 
has begun to sicken and must soon die
.

The woman in the shop cleared her throat. Jack thought that he must have been staring at those words of Daniel Webster’s for entire minutes. “Yes?” the woman said behind him.

“Sorry,” Jack repeated, and pulled himself into the center of the lobby. The hateful clerk lifted an eyebrow, then turned sideways to stare at a deserted staircase. Jack made himself approach the man.

“Mister,” he said when he stood before the desk. The clerk was pretending to try to remember the capital of North Carolina or the principal export of Peru. “Mister.” The man scowled to himself: he was nearly there, he could not be disturbed.

All of this was an act, Jack knew, and he said, “I wonder if you can help me.”

The man decided to look at him after all. “Depends on what the help is, sonny.”

Jack consciously decided to ignore the hidden sneer. “Did you see my mother go out a little while ago?”

“What’s a little while?” Now the sneer was almost visible.

“Did you see her go out? That’s all I’m asking.”

“Afraid she saw you and your sweetheart holding hands out there?”

“God, you’re such a creep,” Jack startled himself by saying. “No, I’m not afraid of that. I’m just wondering if she went out, and if you weren’t such a creep, you’d tell me.” His face had grown hot, and he realized that his hands were bunched into fists.

“Well okay, she went out,” the clerk said, drifting away toward the bank of pigeonholes behind him. “But you’d better watch your tongue, boy. You better apologize to me, fancy little Master Sawyer. I got eyes, too. I know things.”

“You run your mouth and I run my business,” Jack said, dredging the phrase up from one of his father’s old records—perhaps it did not quite fit the situation, but it felt right in his mouth, and the clerk blinked satisfactorily.

“Maybe she’s in the gardens, I don’t know,” the man said gloomily, but Jack was already on his way toward the door.

The Darling of the Drive-ins and Queen of the Bs was nowhere in the wide gardens before the hotel, Jack saw immediately—and he had known that she would not be in the gardens, for he would have seen her on his way into the hotel. Besides, Lily Cavanaugh did not dawdle through gardens: that suited her as little as did setting up hurdles on the beach.

A few cars rolled down Boardwalk Avenue. A gull screeched far overhead, and Jack’s heart tightened.

The boy pushed his fingers through his hair and looked up and down the bright street. Maybe she had been curious about Speedy—maybe she’d wanted to check out this unusual new pal of her son’s and had wandered down to the amusement park. But Jack could not see her in Arcadia Funworld any more than he could see her lingering picturesquely in the gardens. He turned in the less familiar direction, toward the town line.

Separated from the Alhambra’s grounds by a high thick hedge, the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe stood first in a row of brightly colored shops. It and New England Drugs were the only shops in the terrace to remain open after Labor Day. Jack hesitated a moment on the cracked sidewalk. A tea shop, much less shoppe, was an unlikely situation for the Darling of the Drive-ins. But since it was the first place he might expect to find her, he moved across the sidewalk and peered in the window.

A woman with piled-up hair sat smoking before a cash register. A waitress in a pink rayon dress leaned against the far wall. Jack saw no customers. Then at one of the tables near the Alhambra end of the shop he saw an old woman lifting a cup. Apart from the help, she was alone. Jack watched the old woman delicately replace the cup in the saucer, then fish a cigarette from her bag, and realized with a sickening jolt that she was his mother. An instant later, the impression of age had disappeared.

But he could remember it—and it was as if he were seeing her through bifocals, seeing both Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer and that fragile old woman in the same body.

Jack gently opened the door, but still he set off the tinkle of the bell that he had
known
was above it. The blond woman at the register nodded, smiling. The waitress straightened up and smoothed the lap of her dress. His mother stared at him with what looked like genuine surprise, and then gave him an open smile.

“Well, Wandering Jack, you’re so tall that you looked just like your father when you came through that door,” she said. “Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.”

3

“You called me ’Wandering Jack,’ ” he said, pulling a chair out and dropping himself into it.

Her face was very pale, and the smudges beneath her eyes looked almost like bruises.

“Didn’t your father call you that? I just happened to think of it—you’ve been on the move all morning.”

“He called me Wandering Jack?”

“Something like that . . . sure he did. When you were tiny.
Travelling
Jack,” she said firmly. “That was it. He used to call you Travelling Jack—you know, when we’d see you tearing down the lawn. It was funny, I guess. I left the door open, by the way. Didn’t know if you remembered to take your key with you.”

“I saw,” he said, still tingling with the new information she had so casually given him.

“Want any breakfast? I just couldn’t take the thought of eating another meal in that hotel.”

The waitress had appeared beside them. “Young man?” she asked, lifting her order pad.

“How did you know I’d find you here?”

“Where else is there to go?” his mother reasonably asked, and told the waitress, “Give him the three-star breakfast. He’s growing about an inch a day.”

Jack leaned against the back of his chair. How could he begin this?

His mother glanced at him curiously, and he began—he had to begin, now. “Mom, if I had to go away for a while, would you be all right?”

“What do you mean, all right? And what do you mean, go away for a while?”

“Would you be able—ah, would you have trouble from Uncle Morgan?”

“I can handle old Sloat,” she said, smiling tautly. “I can handle him for a while, anyhow. What’s this all about, Jacky? You’re not going anywhere.”

“I have to,” he said. “Honest.” Then he realized that he sounded like a child begging for a toy. Mercifully, the waitress arrived with toast in a rack and a stubby glass of tomato juice. He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back, his mother was spreading jam from one of the pots on the table over a triangular section of toast.

“I have to go,” he said. His mother handed him the toast; her face moved with a thought, but she said nothing.

“You might not see me for a while, Mom,” he said. “I’m going to try to help you. That’s why I have to go.”

“Help me?” she asked, and her cool incredulity, Jack reckoned, was about seventy-five percent genuine.

“I want to try to save your life,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“I can do it.”

“You can save my life. That’s very entertaining, Jacky-boy; it ought to make prime time someday. Ever think about going into network programming?” She had put down the red-smeared knife and was widening her eyes in mockery: but beneath the deliberate incomprehension he saw two things. A flare-up of her terror; a faint, almost unrecognized hope that he might after all be able to do something.