The Talisman

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?

“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 goinging 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.

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.