The Talisman

37

Richard Remembers

1

There was a sensation of rolling sideways and down, as if there were a short ramp between the two worlds. Dimly, fading, at last wavering into nothingness, Jack heard Osmond screaming, “Bad! All boys! Axiomatic! All boys! Filthy! Filthy!”

For a moment they were in thin air. Richard cried out. Then Jack thudded to the ground on one shoulder. Richard’s head bounced against his chest. Jack did not open his eyes but only lay there on the ground hugging Richard, listening, smelling.

Silence. Not utter and complete, but large—its size counterpointed by two or three singing birds.

The smell was cool and salty. A good smell . . . but not as good as the world could smell in the Territories. Even here—wherever here was—Jack could smell a faint underodor, like the smell of old oil ground into the concrete floors of gas-station garage bays. It was the smell of too many people running too many motors, and it had polluted the entire atmosphere. His nose had been sensitized to it and he could smell it even here, in a place where he could hear no cars.

“Jack? Are we okay?”

“Sure,” Jack said, and opened his eyes to see whether he was telling the truth.

His first glance brought a terrifying idea: somehow, in his frantic need to get out of there, to get away before Morgan could arrive, he had not flipped them into the American Territories but pushed them somehow forward in time. This seemed to be the same place, but older, now abandoned, as if a century or two had gone by. The train still sat on the tracks, and the train looked just as it had. Nothing else did. The tracks, which crossed the weedy exercise yard they were standing in and went on to God knew where, were old and thick with rust. The crossties looked spongy and rotted. High weeds grew up between them.

He tightened his hold on Richard, who squirmed weakly in his grasp and opened his eyes.

“Where are we?” he asked Jack, looking around. There was a long Quonset hut with a rust-splotched corrugated-tin roof where the bunkhouse-style barracks had been. The roof was all either of them could see clearly; the rest was buried in rambling woods ivy and wild weeds. There were a couple of poles in front of it which had perhaps once supported a sign. If so, it was long gone now.

“I don’t know,” Jack said, and then, looking at where the obstacle course had been—it was now a barely glimpsed dirt rut overgrown with the remains of wild phlox and goldenrod—he brought out his worst fear: “I may have pushed us forward in time.”

To his amazement, Richard laughed. “It’s good to know nothing much is going to change in the future, then,” he said, and pointed to a sheet of paper nailed to one of the posts standing in front of the Quonset/barracks. It was somewhat weather-faded but still perfectly readable:

NO TRESPASSING!

By Order of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department

By Order of the California State Police

VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED!

2

“Well, if you knew where we were,” Jack said, feeling simultaneously foolish and very relieved, “why did you ask?”

“I just saw it,” Richard replied, and any urge Jack might have had to chaff Richard anymore over it blew away. Richard looked awful; he looked as if he had developed some weird tuberculosis which was working on his mind instead of on his lungs. Nor was it just his sanity-shaking round trip to the Territories and back—he had actually seemed to be adapting to that. But now he knew something else as well. It wasn’t just a reality which was radically different from all of his carefully developed notions; that he might have been able to adapt to, if given world enough and time. But finding out that your dad is one of the guys in the black hats, Jack reflected, can hardly be one of life’s groovier moments.

“Okay,” he said, trying to sound cheerful—he actually did feel a little cheerful. Getting away from such a monstrosity as Reuel would have made even a kid dying of terminal cancer feel a little cheerful, he figured. “Up you go and up you get, Richie-boy. We’ve got promises we must keep, miles to go before we sleep, and you are still an utter creep.”

Richard winced. “Whoever gave you the idea you had a sense of humor should be shot, chum.”

“Bitez mon crank, mon ami.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, “but it’s somewhere around here. I can feel it. It’s like a fishhook in my mind.”

“Point Venuti?”

Jack turned his head and looked at Richard for a long time. Richard’s tired eyes were unreadable.

“Why did you ask that, chum?”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Jack shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not.

They began walking slowly across the weed-grown parade ground and Richard changed the subject. “Was all of that real?” They were approaching the rusty double gate. A lane of faded blue sky showed above the green. “Was any of it real?”

“We spent a couple of days on an electric train that ran at about twenty-five miles an hour, thirty tops,” Jack said, “and somehow we got from Springfield, Illinois, into northern California, near the coast. Now you tell me if it was real.”

“Yes . . . yes, but . . .”

Jack held out his arms. The wrists were covered with angry red weals that itched and smarted.

“Bites,” Jack said. “From the worms. The worms that fell out of Reuel Gardener’s head.”

Richard turned away and was noisily sick.

Jack held him. Otherwise, he thought, Richard simply would have fallen sprawling. He was appalled at how thin Richard had become, at how hot his flesh felt through his preppy shirt.

“I’m sorry I said that,” Jack said when Richard seemed a little better. “It was pretty crude.”

“Yeah, it was. But I guess maybe it’s the only thing that could have . . . you know . . .”

“Convinced you?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Richard looked at him with his naked, wounded eyes. There were now pimples all across his forehead. Sores surrounded his mouth. “Jack, I have to ask you something, and I want you to answer me . . . you know, straight. I want to ask you—”

Oh, I know what you want to ask me, Richie-boy.

“In a few minutes,” Jack said. “We’ll get to all the questions and as many of the answers as I know in a few minutes. But we’ve got a piece of business to take care of first.”

“What business?”

Instead of answering, Jack went over to the little train. He stood there for a moment, looking at it: stubby engine, empty boxcar, flatcar. Had he somehow managed to flip this whole thing into northern California? He didn’t think so. Flipping with Wolf had been a chore, dragging Richard into the Territories from the Thayer campus had nearly torn his arm out of its socket, and doing both had been a conscious effort on his part. So far as he could remember, he hadn’t been thinking of the train at all when he flipped—only getting Richard out of the Wolfs’ paramilitary training camp before he saw his old man. Everything else had taken a slightly different form when it went from one world into the other—the act of Migrating seemed to demand an act of translation, as well. Shirts might become jerkins; jeans might become woolen trousers; money might become jointed sticks. But this train looked exactly the same here as it had over there. Morgan had succeeded in creating something which lost nothing in the Migration.

Also, they were wearing blue jeans over there, Jack-O.

Yeah. And although Osmond had his trusty whip, he also had a machine-pistol.

Morgan’s machine-pistol. Morgan’s train.

Chilly gooseflesh rippled up his back. He heard Anders muttering, A bad business.

It was that, all right. A very bad business. Anders was right; it was devils all hurtled down together. Jack reached into the engine compartment, got one of the Uzis, slapped a fresh clip into it, and started back toward where Richard stood looking around with pallid, contemplative interest.

“This looks like an old survivalist camp,” he said.

“You mean the kind of place where soldier-of-fortune types get ready for World War Three?”

“Yes, sort of. There are quite a few places like that in northern California . . . they spring up and thrive for a while, and then the people lose interest when World War Three doesn’t start right away, or they get busted for illegal guns or dope, or something. My . . . my father told me that.”

Jack said nothing.

“What are you going to do with the gun, Jack?”

“I’m going to try and get rid of that train. Any objections?”

Richard shuddered; his mouth pulled down in a grimace of distaste. “None whatever.”

“Will the Uzi do it, do you think? If I shoot into that plastic junk?”

“One bullet wouldn’t. A whole clip might.”

“Let’s see.” Jack pushed off the safety.

Richard grabbed his arm. “It might be wise to remove ourselves to the fence before making the experiment,” he said.

“Okay.”

At the ivy-covered fence, Jack trained the Uzi on the flat and squashy packages of plastique. He pulled the trigger, and the Uzi bellowed the silence into rags. Fire hung mystically from the end of the barrel for a moment. The gunfire was shockingly loud in the chapellike silence of the deserted camp. Birds squawked in surprised fear and headed out for quieter parts of the forest. Richard winced and pressed his palms against his ears. The tarpaulin flirted and danced. Then, although he was still pulling the trigger, the gun stopped firing. The clip was exhausted, and the train just sat there on the track.

“Well,” Jack said, “that was great. Have you got any other i—”

The flatcar erupted in a sheet of blue fire and a bellowing roar. Jack saw the flatcar actually starting to rise from the track, as if it were taking off. He grabbed Richard around the neck, shoved him down.

The explosions went on for a long time. Metal whistled and flew overhead. It made a steady metallic rain-shower on the roof of the Quonset hut. Occasionally a larger piece made a sound like a Chinese gong, or a crunch as something really big just punched on through. Then something slammed through the fence just above Jack’s head, leaving a hole bigger than both of his fists laced together, and Jack decided it was time to cut out. He grabbed Richard and started pulling him toward the gates.

“No!” Richard shouted. “The tracks!”

“What?”

“The tr—”

Something whickered over them and both boys ducked. Their heads knocked together.

“The tracks!” Richard shouted, rubbing his skull with one pale hand. “Not the road! Go for the tracks!”

“Gotcha!” Jack was mystified but unquestioning. They had to go somewhere.

The two boys began to crawl along the rusting chain-link fence like soldiers crossing no-man’s-land. Richard was slightly ahead, leading them toward the hole in the fence where the tracks exited the far side of the compound.

Jack looked back over his shoulder as they went—he could see as much as he needed to, or wanted to, through the partially open gates. Most of the train seemed to have been simply vaporized. Twisted chunks of metal, some recognizable, most not, lay in a wide circle around the place where it had come back to America, where it had been built, bought, and paid for. That they had not been killed by flying shrapnel was amazing; that they had not been even so much as scratched seemed well-nigh impossible.

The worst was over now. They were outside the gate, standing up (but ready to duck and run if there were residual explosions).

“My father’s not going to like it that you blew up his train, Jack,” Richard said.

His voice was perfectly calm, but when Jack looked at him, he saw that Richard was weeping.

“Richard—”

“No, he won’t like it at all,” Richard said, as if answering himself.

3

A thick and luxuriant stripe of weeds, knee-high, grew up the center of the railroad tracks leading away from the camp, leading away in a direction Jack believed to be roughly south. The tracks themselves were rusty and long unused; in places they had twisted strangely—rippled.

Earthquakes did that, Jack thought with queasy awe.

Behind them, the plastic explosive continued to explode. Jack would think it was finally over, and then there would be another long, hoarse BREEE-APPP!—it was, he thought, the sound of a giant clearing its throat. Or breaking wind. He glanced back once and saw a black pall of smoke hanging in the sky. He listened for the thick, heavy crackle of fire—like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire—but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture. Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous ivy (poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.

He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off his track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard’s silence. He was toiling too hard to keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.

They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still congratulating himself on this conversion-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, “Hey Jack—”

Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his paper-white skin like birthmarks.

Jack caught him—barely. Richard seemed to weigh no more than a paper bag.

“Oh, Christ, Richard!”

“Felt okay until a second or two ago,” Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could only see whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. “Just got . . . faint. Sorry.”

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.”

“Camp Readiness?”

But Richard appeared not to have heard him. He was looking at the rusted tracks. They were whole here, but Jack thought Richard might be remembering the twisted ripples they had passed some way back. In a couple of places the ends of rail-sections actually curved up into the air, like broken guitar-strings. Jack guessed that in the Territories those tracks would be in fine shape, neatly and lovingly maintained.

“See, there used to be a trolley line here,” Richard said. “This was back in the thirties, my father said. The Mendocino County Red Line. Only it wasn’t owned by the county, it was owned by a private company, and they went broke, because in California . . . you know . . .”

Jack nodded. In California, everyone used cars. “Richard, why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”

“That was the one thing my dad said never to tell you. You and your parents knew we sometimes took vacations in northern California and he said that was all right, but I wasn’t to tell you about the train, or Camp Readiness. He said if I told, Phil would be mad because it was a secret.”

Richard paused.

“He said if I told, he’d never take me again. I thought it was because they were supposed to be partners. I guess it was more than that.

“The trolley line went broke because of the cars and the freeways.” He paused thoughtfully. “That was one thing about the place you took me to, Jack. Weird as it was, it didn’t stink of hydrocarbons. I could get into that.”

Jack nodded again, saying nothing.

“The trolley company finally sold the whole line—grandfather clause and all—to a development company. They thought people would start to move inland, too. Except it didn’t happen.”

“Then your father bought it.”

“Yes, I guess so. I don’t really know. He never talked much about buying the line . . . or how he replaced the trolley tracks with these railroad tracks.”

That would have taken a lot of work, Jack thought, and then he thought of the ore-pits, and Morgan of Orris’s apparently unlimited supply of slave labor.

“I know he replaced them, but only because I got a book on railroads and found out there’s a difference in gauge. Trolleys run on ten-gauge track. This is sixteen-gauge.”

Jack knelt, and yes, he could see a very faint double indentation inside the existing tracks—that was where the trolley tracks had been.

“He had a little red train,” Richard said dreamily. “Just an engine and two cars. It ran on diesel fuel. He used to laugh about it and say that the only thing that separated the men from the boys was the price of their toys. There was an old trolley station on the hill above Point Venuti, and we’d go up there in the rental car and park and go on in. I remember how that station smelled—kind of old, but nice . . . full of old sunlight, sort of. And the train would be there. And my dad . . . he’d say, ’All aboard for Camp Readiness, Richard! You got your ticket?’ And there’d be lemonade . . . or iced tea . . . and we sat up in the cab . . . sometimes he’d have stuff . . . supplies . . . behind . . . but we’d sit up front . . . and . . . and . . .”

Richard swallowed hard and swiped a hand across his eyes.

“And it was a nice time,” he finished. “Just him and me. It was pretty cool.”

He looked around, his eyes shiny with unshed tears.

“There was a plate to turn the train around at Camp Readiness,” he said. “Back in those days. The old days.”

Richard uttered a terrible strangled sob.

“Richard—”

Jack tried to touch him.

Richard shook him off and stepped away, brushing tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands.

“Wasn’t so grown-up then,” he said, smiling. Trying to. “Nothing was so grown-up then, was it, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said, and now he found he was crying himself.

Oh Richard. Oh my dear one.

“No,” Richard said, smiling, looking around at the encroaching woods and brushing the tears away with the dirty backs of his hands, “nothing was so grown-up back then. In the old days, when we were just kids. Back when we all lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.”

He looked at Jack, trying to smile.

“Jack, help me,” he said. “I feel like my leg is caught in some stuh-stupid truh-truh-hap and I . . . I . . .”

Then Richard fell on his knees with his hair in his tired face, and Jack got down there with him, and I can bear to tell you no more—only that they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.

8

“The fence was new back then,” Richard said when he could continue speaking. They had walked on a ways. A whippoor-will sang from a tall sturdy oak. The smell of salt in the air was stronger. “I remember that. And the sign—CAMP READINESS, that’s what it said. There was an obstacle course, and ropes to climb, and other ropes that you hung on to and then swung over big puddles of water. It looked sort of like bootcamp in a World War Two movie about the Marines. But the guys using the equipment didn’t look much like Marines. They were fat, and they were all dressed the same—gray sweat-suits with CAMP READINESS written on the chest in small letters, and red piping on the sides of the sweat-pants. They all looked like they were going to have heart-attacks or strokes any minute. Maybe both at the same time. Sometimes we stayed overnight. A couple of times we stayed the whole weekend. Not in the Quonset hut; that was like a barracks for the guys who were paying to get in shape.”

“If that’s what they were doing.”

“Yeah, right. If that’s what they were doing. Anyway, we stayed in a big tent and slept on cots. It was a blast.” Again, Richard smiled wistfully. “But you’re right, Jack—not all the guys shagging around the place looked like businessmen trying to get in shape. The others—”

“What about the others?” Jack asked quietly.

“Some of them—a lot of them—looked like those big hairy creatures in the other world,” Richard said in a low voice Jack had to strain to hear. “The Wolfs. I mean, they looked sort of like regular people, but not too much. They looked . . . rough. You know?”

Jack nodded. He knew.

“I remember I was a little afraid to look into their eyes very closely. Every now and then there’d be these funny flashes of light in them . . . like their brains were on fire. Some of the others . . .” A light of realization dawned in Richard’s eyes. “Some of the others looked like that substitute basketball coach I told you about. The one who wore the leather jacket and smoked.”

“How far is this Point Venuti, Richard?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But we used to do it in a couple of hours, and the train never went very fast. Running speed, maybe, but not much more. It can’t be much more than twenty miles from Camp Readiness, all told. Probably a little less.”

“Then we’re maybe fifteen miles or less from it. From—”

(from the Talisman)

“Yeah. Right.”

Jack looked up as the day darkened. As if to show that the pathetic fallacy wasn’t so pathetic after all, the sun now sailed behind a deck of clouds. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees and the day seemed to grow dull—the whippoorwill fell silent.

9

Richard saw the sign first—a simple whitewashed square of wood painted with black letters. It stood on the left side of the tracks, and ivy had grown up its post, as if it had been here for a very long time. The sentiment, however, was quite current. It read: GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY; BAD BOYS MUST DIE. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE: GO HOME.

“You can go, Richie,” Jack said quietly. “It’s okay by me. They’ll let you go, no sweat. None of this is your business.”

“I think maybe it is,” Richard said.

“I dragged you into it.”

“No,” Richard said. “My father dragged me into it. Or fate dragged me into it. Or God. Or Jason. Whoever it was, I’m sticking.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

As they passed the sign, Jack lashed out with one foot in a passably good kung-fu kick and knocked it over.

“Way to go, chum,” Richard said, smiling a little.

“Thanks. But don’t call me chum.”

10

Although he had begun to look wan and tired again, Richard talked for the next hour as they walked down the tracks and into the steadily strengthening smell of the Pacific Ocean. He spilled out a flood of reminiscences that had been bottled up inside of him for years. Although his face didn’t reveal it, Jack was stunned with amazement . . . and a deep, welling pity for the lonely child, eager for the last scrap of his father’s affection, that Richard was revealing to him, inadvertently or otherwise.

He looked at Richard’s pallor, the sores on his cheeks and forehead and around his mouth; listened to that tentative, almost whispering voice that nevertheless did not hesitate or falter now that the chance to tell all these things had finally come; and was glad once more that Morgan Sloat had never been his father.

He told Jack that he remembered landmarks all along this part of the railroad. They could see the roof of a barn over the trees at one point, with a faded ad for Chesterfield Kings on it.

“ ’Twenty great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes,’ ” Richard said, smiling. “Only, in those days you could see the whole barn.”

He pointed out a big pine with a double top, and fifteen minutes later told Jack, “There used to be a rock on the other side of this hill that looked just like a frog. Let’s see if it’s still there.”

It was, and Jack supposed it did look like a frog. A little. If you stretched your imagination. And maybe it helps to be three. Or four. Or seven. Or however old he was.

Richard had loved the railroad, and had thought Camp Readiness was really neat, with its track to run on and its hurdles to jump over and its ropes to climb. But he hadn’t liked Point Venuti itself. After some self-prodding, Richard even remembered the name of the motel at which he and his father had stayed during their time in the little coastal town. The Kingsland Motel, he said . . . and Jack found that name did not surprise him much at all.

The Kingsland Motel, Richard said, was just down the road from the old hotel his father always seemed interested in. Richard could see the hotel from his window, and he didn’t like it. It was a huge, rambling place with turrets and gables and gambrels and cupolas and towers; brass weathervanes in strange shapes twirled from all of the latter. They twirled even when there was no wind, Richard said—he could clearly remember standing at the window of his room and watching them go around and around and around, strange brass creations shaped like crescent moons and scarab beetles and Chinese ideograms, winking in the sun while the ocean foamed and roared below.

Ah yes, doc, it all comes back to me now, Jack thought.

“It was deserted?” Jack asked.

“Yes. For sale.”

“What was its name?”

“The Agincourt.” Richard paused, then added another child’s color—the one most small children are apt to leave in the box. “It was black. It was made of wood, but the wood looked like stone. Old black stone. And that’s what my father and his friends called it. The Black Hotel.”

11

It was partly—but not entirely—to divert Richard that Jack asked, “Did your father buy that hotel? Like he did Camp Readiness?”

Richard thought about it awhile and then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I think he did. After a while. There was a For Sale sign on the gates in front of the place when he first started taking me there, but one time when we went there it was just gone.”

“But you never stayed there?”

“God, no!” Richard shuddered. “The only way he could have gotten me in there would have been with a towing chain . . . even then I might not have gone.”

“Never even went in?”

“No. Never did, never will.”

Ah, Richie-boy, didn’t anyone ever teach you to never say never?

“That goes for your father as well? He never even went in?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Richard said in his best professorial voice. His forefinger went to the bridge of his nose, as if to push up the glasses that weren’t there. “I’d be willing to bet he never went in. He was as scared of it as I was. But with me, that’s all I felt . . . just scared. For my father, there was something more. He was . . .”

“Was what?”

Reluctantly, Richard said, “He was obsessed with the place, I think.”

Richard paused, eyes vague, thinking back. “He’d go and stand in front of it every day we were in Point Venuti. And I don’t mean just for a couple of minutes, or something like that—he’d stand in front of it for, like, three hours. Sometimes more. He was alone most of those times. But not always. He had . . . strange friends.”

“Wolfs?”

“I guess so,” Richard said, almost angrily. “Yeah, I guess some of them could have been Wolfs, or whatever you call them. They looked uncomfortable in their clothes—they were always scratching themselves, usually in those places where nice people aren’t supposed to scratch. Others looked like the substitute coach. Kind of hard and mean. Some of those guys I used to see out at Camp Readiness, too. I’ll tell you one thing, Jack—those guys were even more scared of that place than my father was. They just about cringed when they got near it.”

“Sunlight Gardener? Was he ever there?”

“Uh-huh,” Richard said. “But in Point Venuti he looked more like the man we saw over there. . . .”

“Like Osmond.”

“Yes. But those people didn’t come very often. Mostly it was just my father, by himself. Sometimes he’d get the restaurant at our motel to pack him some sandwiches, and he’d sit on a sidewalk bench and eat his lunch looking at the hotel. I stood at the window in the lobby of the Kingsland and looked at my father looking at the hotel. I never liked his face at those times. He looked afraid, but he also looked like . . . like he was gloating.”

“Gloating,” Jack mused.

“Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and I always said no. He’d nod and I remember once he said, ’There’ll be time. You’ll understand everything, Rich . . . in time.’ I remember thinking that if it was about that black hotel, I didn’t want to understand.

“Once,” Richard said, “when he was drunk, he said there was something inside that place. He said it had been there for a long time. We were lying in our beds, I remember. The wind was high that night. I could hear the waves hitting the beach, and the squeaky sound of those weathervanes turning on top of the Agincourt’s towers. It was a scary sound. I thought about that place, all those rooms, all of them empty—”

“Except for the ghosts,” Jack muttered. He thought he heard footsteps and looked quickly behind them. Nothing; no one. The roadbed was deserted for as far as he could see.

“That’s right; except for the ghosts,” Richard agreed. “So I said, ’Is it valuable, Daddy?’

“ ’It’s the most valuable thing there is,’ he said.

“ ’Then some junkie will probably break in and steal it,’ I said. It wasn’t—how can I say this?—it wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue, but I didn’t want him to go to sleep, either. Not with that wind blowing outside, and the sound of those vanes squeaking in the night.

“He laughed, and I heard a clink as he poured himself a little more bourbon from the bottle on the floor.

“ ’Nobody is going to steal it, Rich,’ he said. ’And any junkie who went into the Agincourt would see things he never saw before.’ He drank his drink, and I could tell he was getting sleepy. ’Only one person in the whole world could ever touch that thing, and he’ll never even get close to it, Rich. I can guarantee that. One thing that interests me is that it’s the same over there as over here. It doesn’t change—at least, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t change. I’d like to have it, but I’m not even going to try, at least not now, and maybe not ever. I could do things with it—you bet!—but on the whole, I think I like the thing best right where it is.’

“I was getting sleepy myself by then, but I asked him what it was that he kept talking about.”

“What did he say?” Jack asked, dry-mouthed.

“He called it—” Richard hesitated, frowning in thought. “He called it ’the axle of all possible worlds.’ Then he laughed. Then he called it something else. Something you wouldn’t like.”

“What was that?”

“It’ll make you mad.”

“Come on, Richard, spill it.”

“He called it . . . well . . . he called it ’Phil Sawyer’s folly.’ ”

It was not anger he felt but a burst of hot, dizzying excitement. That was it, all right; that was the Talisman. The axle of all possible worlds. How many worlds? God alone knew. The American Territories; the Territories themselves; the hypothetical Territories’ Territories; and on and on, like the stripes coming ceaselessly up and out of a turning barber pole. A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds—and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds. And was it also Phil Sawyer’s folly? Probably so. Phil’s folly . . . Jack’s folly . . . Morgan Sloat’s . . . Gardener’s . . . and the hope, of course, of two Queens.

“It’s more than Twinners,” he said in a low voice.

Richard had been plodding along, watching the rotted ties disappear beneath his feet. Now he looked nervously up at Jack.

“It’s more than Twinners, because there are more than two worlds. There are triplets . . . quadruplets . . . who knows? Morgan Sloat here; Morgan of Orris over there; maybe Morgan, Duke of Azreel, somewhere else. But he never went inside the hotel!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard said in a resigned voice. But I’m sure you’ll go right on, anyway, that resigned tone said, progressing from nonsense to outright insanity. All aboard for Seabrook Island!

“He can’t go inside. That is, Morgan of California can’t—and do you know why? Because Morgan of Orris can’t. And Morgan of Orris can’t because Morgan of California can’t. If one of them can’t go into his version of the black hotel, then none of them can. Do you see?”

“No.”

Jack, feverish with discovery, didn’t hear what Richard said at all.

“Two Morgans, or dozens. It doesn’t matter. Two Lilys, or dozens—dozens of Queens in dozens of worlds, Richard, think of that! How does that mess your mind? Dozens of black hotels—only in some worlds it might be a black amusement park . . . or a black trailer court . . . or I don’t know what. But Richard—”

He stopped, turned Richard by the shoulders, and stared at him, his eyes blazing. Richard tried to draw away from him for a moment, and then stopped, entranced by the fiery beauty on Jack’s face. Suddenly, briefly, Richard believed that all things might be possible. Suddenly, briefly, he felt healed.

“What?” he whispered.

“Some things are not excluded. Some people are not excluded. They are . . . well . . . single-natured. That’s the only way I can think of to say it. They are like it—the Talisman. Single-natured. Me. I’m single-natured. I had a Twinner, but he died. Not just in the Territories world, but in all worlds but this one. I know that—I feel that. My dad knew it, too. I think that’s why he called me Travelling Jack. When I’m here, I’m not there. When I’m there, I’m not here. And Richard, neither are you!”

Richard stared at him, speechless.

“You don’t remember; you were mostly in Freakout City while I was talking to Anders. But he said Morgan of Orris had a boy-child. Rushton. Do you know what he was?”

“Yes,” Richard whispered. He was still unable to pull his eyes away from Jack’s. “He was my Twinner.”

“That’s right. The little boy died, Anders said. The Talisman is single-natured. We’re single-natured. Your father isn’t. I’ve seen Morgan of Orris in that other world, and he’s like your father, but he’s not your father. He couldn’t go into the black hotel, Richard. He can’t now. But he knew you were single-natured, just as he knows I am. He’d like me dead. He needs you on his side.

“Because then, if he decided he did want the Talisman, he could always send you in to get it, couldn’t he?”

Richard began to tremble.

“Never mind,” Jack said grimly. “He won’t have to worry about it. We’re going to bring it out, but he’s not going to have it.”

“Jack, I don’t think I can go into that place,” Richard said, but he spoke in a low, strengthless whisper, and Jack, who was already walking on, didn’t hear him.

Richard trotted to catch up.

12

Conversation lapsed. Noon came and went. The woods had become very silent, and twice Jack had seen trees with strange, gnarly trunks and tangled roots growing quite close to the tracks. He did not much like the looks of these trees. They looked familiar.

Richard, staring at the ties as they disappeared beneath his feet, at last stumbled and fell over, hitting his head. After that, Jack piggybacked him again.

“There, Jack!” Richard called, after what seemed an eternity.

Up ahead, the tracks disappeared into an old car-barn. The doors hung open on a shadowy darkness that looked dull and moth-eaten. Beyond the car-barn (which might once have been as pleasant as Richard had said, but which only looked spooky to Jack now) was a highway—101, Jack guessed.

Beyond that, the ocean—he could hear the pounding waves.

“I guess we’re here,” he said in a dry voice.

“Almost,” Richard said. “Point Venuti’s a mile or so down the road. God, I wish we didn’t have to go there, Jack . . . Jack? Where are you going?”

But Jack didn’t look around. He stepped off the tracks, detoured around one of those strange-looking trees (this one not even shrub-high), and headed for the road. High grasses and weeds brushed his road-battered jeans. Something inside the trolley-barn—Morgan Sloat’s private train-station of yore—moved with a nasty slithering bump, but Jack didn’t even look toward it.

He reached the road, crossed it, and walked to the edge.

13

Near the middle of December in the year 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and the land came together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Pacific. He was twelve years old and extraordinarily beautiful for his age. His brown hair was long—probably too long—but the sea-breeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow. He stood thinking of his mother, who was dying, and of friends, both absent and present, and worlds within worlds, turning in their courses.

I’ve come the distance, he thought, and shivered. Coast to coast with Travelling Jack Sawyer. His eyes abruptly filled with tears. He breathed deeply of the salt. Here he was—and the Talisman was close by.

“Jack!”

Jack didn’t look at him at first; his gaze was held by the Pacific, by the sunlight gleaming gold on top of the waves. He was here; he had made it. He—

“Jack!” Richard struck his shoulder, bringing him out of his daze.

“Huh?”

“Look!” Richard was gaping, pointing at something down the road, in the direction in which Point Venuti presumably lay. “Look there!”

Jack looked. He understood Richard’s surprise, but he felt none himself—or no more than he had felt when Richard had told him the name of the motel where he and his father had stayed in Point Venuti. No, not much surprise, but—

But it was damned good to see his mother again.

Her face was twenty feet high, and it was a younger face than Jack could remember. It was Lily as she had looked at the height of her career. Her hair, a glorious be-bop shade of brassy blond, was pulled back in a Tuesday Weld ponytail. Her insouciant go-to-hell grin was, however, all her own. No one else in films had ever smiled that way—she had invented it, and she still held the patent. She was looking back over one bare shoulder. At Jack . . . at Richard . . . at the blue Pacific.

It was his mother . . . but when he blinked, the face changed the slightest bit. The line of chin and jaw grew rounder, the cheekbones less pronounced, the hair darker, the eyes an even deeper blue. Now it was the face of Laura DeLoessian, mother of Jason. Jack blinked again, and it was his mother again—his mother at twenty-eight, grinning her cheerful fuckya-if-you-can’t-take-a-joke defiance at the world.

It was a billboard. Across the top of it ran this legend:

THIRD ANNUAL KILLER B FILM FESTIVAL

POINT VENUTI, CALIFORNIA

BITKER THEATER

DECEMBER 10TH-DECEMBER 20TH

THIS YEAR FEATURING LILY CAVANAUGH

“QUEEN OF THE B’S”

“Jack, it’s your mother,” Richard said. His voice was hoarse with awe. “Is it just a coincidence? It can’t be, can it?”

Jack shook his head. No, not a coincidence.

The word his eyes kept fixing on, of course, was QUEEN.

“Come on,” he said to Richard. “I think we’re almost there.”

The two of them walked side by side down the road toward Point Venuti.