The Talisman

7

Farren

1

The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking. But—

Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.

Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud that was like being hit in the back of the neck.

“What does he look like?” he asked the Captain urgently.

“Morgan?” the Captain asked, as if startled out of some interior dream.

“Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?” And employing the innate gift for mimicry he’d always had—a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down—Jack “did” Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin. His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. “Does he go like that?”

“No,” the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him that Speedy Parker was old. “Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long”—the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long—“and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He wears a built-up boot, but—” He shrugged.

“You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—”

“Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!”

Jack lowered his voice. “I think I know the guy,” he said—and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . . something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world. Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!

“Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack winced but resisted.

Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.

“Not yet,” he said. Another question had occurred to him. “Did she have a son?”

“The Queen?”

“Yes.”

“She had a son,” the Captain replied reluctantly. “Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—”

“Tell me about him!”

“There is nothing to tell,” the Captain answered. “The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men—Osmond, perhaps—smothered the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying—God pounds His nails. Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter. He . . . Boy? are you all right?”

Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.

He had almost died as an infant.

His mother had told him the story—how she had found him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils savagely shut with his left hand (You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky, his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth, while Morgan cried: I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil. I don’t think that’s going to help him!

(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom? Jack had said. Yes, very funny, Jack-O, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)

“Boy!” the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. “Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . .”

“I’m okay,” Jack said—his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. “Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.”

The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.

“Okay,” Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could—Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.

He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.

He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.

If his mother hadn’t come in to check on him almost immediately . . .

Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.

Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told him it had been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer had almost died in his crib . . . and Morgan Sloat had been there.

His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.

Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.

2

“Now come on,” the Captain said.

“All right,” Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. “All right, let’s g—”

“Shhhh!” The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pair. Soldiers’ boots.

One voice cut through the babble: “. . . didn’t know he had a son.”

“Well,” a second answered, “bastards sire bastards—a fact you should well know, Simon.”

There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this—the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying names: queerboy and humpa-jumpa and morphadite. Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband of laughter exactly like this.

“Cork it! Cork it up!”—a third voice. “If he hears you, you’ll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!”

Mutters.

A muffled burst of laughter.

Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.

Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening . . . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might really be. Even a kid like him knew that.

“You heard enough?” the Captain said. “We’ve got to move.” He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.

Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, go west, is that correct?

He changed, Jack thought. He changed twice.

Once when Jack showed him the shark’s tooth that had been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west. He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?

I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do.

To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.

He wants to get out of here because he’s afraid we’ll be caught, Jack thought. But there’s more, isn’t there? He’s afraid of me. Afraid of—

“Come on,” the Captain said. “Come on, for Jason’s sake.”

“Whose sake?” Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and half-led, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.

“This isn’t the way we came,” Jack whispered.

“Don’t want to go past those fellows we saw coming in,” the Captain whispered back. “Morgan’s men. Did you see the tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?”

“Yes.” Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he had looked dimly familiar.

“Osmond,” the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.

The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes, perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.

“Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,” the Captain grunted. “He sees too much, and I’d just as soon he didn’t see you twice, boy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hsssst!” He clamped Jack’s aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway. To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain—except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost netlike, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome. “Now cry,” the Captain breathed warmly in Jack’s ear.

He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still predominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a confused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women’s faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded him of nuns’ wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.

“Never again!” the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. “Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I’ll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!”

And under his breath, the Captain hissed, “They’ll all remember and they’ll all talk, so cry, dammit!”

And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy—she was lying in her coffin and wearing the wedding dress she had worn in Drag Strip Rumble (RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack’s mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin—and the coffin itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log—a Viking’s coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother’s wedding dress from Drag Strip Rumble and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick out in Sharp’s of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood—not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break—at least, not until they were both dead.

Through the tears he saw a giant of a man in billowing whites rush across the room toward them. He wore a red bandanna instead of a puffy chef’s hat on his head, but Jack thought its purpose was the same—to identify the wearer as the boss of the kitchen. He was also brandishing a wicked-looking three-tined wooden fork.

“Ged-OUT!” the chef screeched at them, and the voice emerging from that huge barrel chest was absurdly flutelike—it was the voice of a willowy gay giving a shoe-clerk a piece of his mind. But there was nothing absurd about the fork; it looked deadly.

The women scattered before his charge like birds. The bottom-most pie dropped out of the pie-woman’s rack and she uttered a high, despairing cry as it broke apart on the boards. Strawberry juice splattered and ran, the red as fresh and bright as arterial blood.

“GED-DOUT MY KIDCHEN, YOU SLUGS! DIS IS NO SHORDCUD! DIS IS NO RAZE-TRAG! DIS IS MY KIDCHEN AND IF YOU CAD’T REMEMBER DAT, I’LL BY GOD THE CARBENDER CARVE YOUR AZZES FOR YOU!”

He jabbed the fork at them, simultaneously half-turning his head and squinching his eyes mostly shut, as if in spite of his tough talk the thought of hot flowing blood was just too gauche to be borne. The Captain removed the hand that had been on the scruff of Jack’s neck and reached out—almost casually, it seemed to Jack. A moment later the chef was on the floor, all six and a half feet of him. The meat-fork was lying in a puddle of strawberry sauce and chunks of white unbaked pastry. The chef rolled back and forth, clutching his broken right wrist and screaming in that high, flutelike voice. The news he screamed out to the room in general was certainly woeful enough: he was dead, the Captain had surely murdered him (pronounced mur-dirt in the chef’s odd, almost Teutonic accent); he was at the very least crippled, the cruel and heartless Captain of the Outer Guards having destroyed his good right hand and thus his livelihood, and so ensuring a miserable beggar’s life for him in the years to come; the Captain had inflicted terrible pain on him, a pain beyond belief, such as was not to be borne—

“Shut up!” the Captain roared, and the chef did. Immediately. He lay on the floor like a great baby, his right hand curled on his chest, his red bandanna drunkenly askew so that one ear (a small black pearl was set in the center of the lobe) showed, his fat cheeks quivering. The kitchen women gasped and twittered as the Captain bent over the dreaded chief ogre of the steaming cave where they spent their days and nights. Jack, still weeping, caught a glimpse of a black boy (brown boy, his mind amended) standing at one end of the largest brazier. The boy’s mouth was open, his face as comically surprised as a face in a minstrel show, but he kept turning the crank in his hands, and the haunch suspended over the glowing coals kept revolving.

“Now listen and I’ll give you some advice you won’t find in The Book of Good Farming,” the Captain said. He bent over the chef until their noses almost touched (his paralyzing grip on Jack’s arm—which was now going mercifully numb—never loosened the smallest bit). “Don’t you ever . . . don’t you ever . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding splinter in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it. One expects temperament from chefs, but temperament does not extend to assaults upon the person of the Captain of the Outer Guards. Do you understand me?”

The chef moaned out a teary, defiant something-or-other. Jack couldn’t make it all out—the man’s accent seemed to be growing steadily thicker—but it had something to do with the Captain’s mother and the dump-dogs beyond the pavillion.

“That may well be,” the Captain said. “I never knew the lady. But it certainly doesn’t answer my question.” He prodded the chef with one dusty, scuffed boot. It was a gentle enough prod, but the chef screeched as if the Captain had drawn his foot back and kicked him as hard as he could. The women twittered again.

“Do we or do we not have an understanding on the subject of chefs and weapons and Captains? Because if we don’t, a little more instruction might be in order.”

“We do!” the chef gasped. “We do! We do! We—”

“Good. Because I’ve had to give far too much instruction already today.” He shook Jack by the scruff of the neck. “Haven’t I, boy?” He shook him again, and Jack uttered a wail that was completely unfeigned. “Well . . . I suppose that’s all he can say. The boy’s a simpleton. Like his mother.”

The Captain threw his dark, gleaming glance around the kitchen.

“Good day, ladies. Queen’s blessings upon you.”

“And you, good sir,” the eldest among them managed, and dropped an awkward, ungraceful curtsey. The others followed suit.

The Captain dragged Jack across the kitchen. Jack’s hip bumped the edge of the washing trough with excruciating force and he cried out again. Hot water flew. Smoking droplets hit the boards and ran, hissing, between them. Those women had their hands in that, Jack thought. How do they stand it? Then the Captain, who was almost carrying him by now, shoved Jack through another burlap curtain and into the hallway beyond.

“Phew!” the Captain said in a low voice. “I don’t like this, not any of it, it all smells bad.”

Left, right, then right again. Jack began to sense that they were approaching the outer walls of the pavillion, and he had time to wonder how the place could seem so much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. Then the Captain was pushing him through a flap and they were in daylight again—mid-afternoon daylight so bright after the shifting dimness of the pavillion that Jack had to wince his eyes shut against a burst of pain.

The Captain never hesitated. Mud squelched and smooched underfoot. There was the smell of hay and horses and shit. Jack opened his eyes again and saw they were crossing what might have been a paddock or a corral or maybe just a barnyard. He saw an open canvas-sided hallway and heard chickens clucking somewhere beyond it. A scrawny man, naked except for a dirty kilt and thong sandals, was tossing hay into an open stall, using a pitchfork with wooden tines to do the job. Inside the stall, a horse not much bigger than a Shetland pony looked moodily out at them. They had already passed the stall when Jack’s mind was finally able to accept what his eyes had seen: the horse had two heads.

“Hey!” he said. “Can I look back in that stall? That—”

“No time.”

“But that horse had—”

“No time, I said.” He raised his voice and shouted: “And if I ever catch you laying about again when there’s work to be done, you’ll get twice this!”

“You won’t!” Jack screamed (in truth he felt as if this scene were getting a bit old). “I swear you won’t! I told you I’d be good!”

Just ahead of them, tall wooden gates loomed in a wall made of wooden posts with the bark still on them—it was like a stockade wall in an old Western (his mother had made a few of those, too). Heavy brackets were screwed into the gates, but the bar the brackets were meant to hold was not in place. It leaned against the woodpile to the left, thick as a railroad crosstie. The gates stood open almost six inches. Some muddled sense of direction in Jack’s head suggested that they had worked their way completely around the pavillion to its far side.

“Thank God,” the Captain said in a more normal voice. “Now—”

“Captain,” a voice called from behind them. The voice was low but carrying, deceptively casual. The Captain stopped in his tracks. It had called just as Jack’s scarred companion had been in the act of reaching for the left gate to push it open; it was as if the voice’s owner had watched and waited for just that second.

“Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to your . . . ah . . . son.”

The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing, halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettling out of place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of—Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him. He’s crazy—this was the intuition which leaped spontaneously into his mind. Nuttier than a damned fruitcake.

Osmond took two neat steps toward them. In his left hand he held the rawhide-wrapped haft of a bullwhip. The handle narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder—the whip’s central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.

Osmond tugged the whip’s handle and the coils slithered from his shoulder with a dry hiss. He wiggled the handle, and the metal-tipped strands of rawhide writhed slowly in the straw-littered mud.

“Your son?” Osmond repeated, and took another step toward them. And Jack suddenly understood why this man had looked familiar before. The day he had almost been kidnapped—hadn’t this man been White Suit?

Jack thought that perhaps he had been.

3

The Captain made a fist, brought it to his forehead, and bent forward. After only a moment’s hesitation, Jack did the same.

“My son, Lewis,” the Captain said stiffly. He was still bent over, Jack saw, cutting his eyes to the left. So he remained bent over himself, his heart racing.

“Thank you, Captain. Thank you, Lewis. Queen’s blessings upon you.” When he touched him with the haft of the bullwhip, Jack almost cried out. He stood straight again, biting the cry in.

Osmond was only two paces away now, regarding Jack with that mad, melancholy gaze. He wore a leather jacket and what might have been diamond studs. His shirt was extravagantly ruffled. A bracelet of links clanked ostentatiously upon his right wrist (from the way he handled the bullwhip, Jack guessed that his left was his working hand). His hair was drawn back and tied with a wide ribbon that might have been white satin. There were two odors about him. The top was what his mother called “all those men’s perfumes,” meaning after-shave, cologne, whatever. The smell about Osmond was thick and powdery. It made Jack think of those old black-and-white British films where some poor guy was on trial in the Old Bailey. The judges and lawyers in those films always wore wigs, and Jack thought the boxes those wigs came out of would smell like Osmond—dry and crumbly-sweet, like the world’s oldest powdered doughnut. Beneath it, however, was a more vital, even less pleasant smell: it seemed to pulse out at him. It was the smell of sweat in layers and dirt in layers, the smell of a man who bathed seldom, if ever.

Yes. This was one of the creatures that had tried to steal him that day.

His stomach knotted and roiled.

“I did not know you had a son, Captain Farren,” Osmond said. Although he spoke to the Captain, his eyes remained on Jack. Lewis, he thought, I’m Lewis, don’t forget—

“Would that I did not,” the Captain replied, looking at Jack with anger and contempt. “I honor him by bringing him to the great pavillion and then he slinks away like a dog. I caught him playing at d—”

“Yes, yes,” Osmond said, smiling remotely. He doesn’t believe a word, Jack thought wildly, and felt his mind take another clumsy step toward panic. Not a single word! “Boys are bad. All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.”

He tapped Jack lightly on the wrist with the haft of the bullwhip. Jack, his nerves screwed up to an unbearable pitch, screamed . . . and immediately flushed with hot shame.

Osmond giggled. “Bad, oh yes, it’s axiomatic, all boys are bad. I was bad; and I’ll wager you were bad, Captain Farren. Eh? Eh? Were you bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” the Captain said.

“Very bad?” Osmond asked. Incredibly, he had begun to prance in the mud. Yet there was nothing swishy about this: Osmond was willowy and almost delicate, but Jack got no feeling of true homosexuality from the man; if there was that innuendo in his words, then Jack sensed intuitively that it was hollow. No, what came through most clearly here was a sense of malignity . . . and madness. “Very bad? Most awfully bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” Captain Farren said woodenly. His scar glowed in the afternoon light, more red than pink now.

Osmond ceased his impromptu little dance as abruptly as he had begun it. He looked coldly at the Captain.

“No one knew you had a son, Captain.”

“He’s a bastard,” the Captain said. “And simple. Lazy as well, it now turns out.” He pivoted suddenly and struck Jack on the side of the face. There was not much force behind the blow, but Captain Farren’s hand was as hard as a brick. Jack howled and fell into the mud, clutching his ear.

“Very bad, most awfully bad,” Osmond said, but now his face was a dreadful blank, thin and secretive. “Get up, you bad boy. Bad boys who disobey their fathers must be punished. And bad boys must be questioned.” He flicked the whip to one side. It made a dry pop. Jack’s tottery mind made another strange connection—reaching, he supposed later, for home in every way it knew how. The sound of Osmond’s whip was like the pop of the Daisy air rifle he’d had when he was eight. He and Richard Sloat had both had rifles like that.

Osmond reached out and grasped Jack’s muddy arm with one white, spiderlike hand. He drew Jack toward him, into those smells—old sweet powder and old rancid filth. His weird gray eyes peered solemnly into Jack’s blue ones. Jack felt his bladder grow heavy, and he struggled to keep from wetting his pants.

“Who are you?” Osmond asked.

4

The words hung in the air over the three of them.

Jack was aware of the Captain looking at him with a stern expression that could not quite hide his despair. He could hear hens clucking; a dog barking; somewhere the rumble of a large approaching cart.

Tell me the truth; I will know a lie, those eyes said. You look like a certain bad boy I first met in California—are you that boy?

And for a moment, everything trembled on his lips:

Jack, I’m Jack Sawyer, yeah, I’m the kid from California, the Queen of this world was my mother, only I died, and I know your boss, I know Morgan—Uncle Morgan—and I’ll tell you anything you want to know if only you’ll stop looking at me with those freaked-out eyes of yours, sure, because I’m only a kid, and that’s what kids do, they tell, they tell everything—

Then he heard his mother’s voice, tough, on the edge of a jeer:

You gonna spill your guts to this guy, Jack-O? THIS guy? He smells like a distress sale at the men’s cologne counter and he looks like a medieval version of Charles Manson . . . but you suit yourself. You can fool him if you want—no sweat—but you suit yourself.

“Who are you?” Osmond asked again, drawing even closer, and on his face Jack now saw total confidence—he was used to getting the answers he wanted from people . . . and not just from twelve-year-old kids, either.

Jack took a deep, trembling breath (When you want max volume—when you want to get it all the way up to the back row of the balcony—you gotta bring it from your diaphragm, Jacky. It just kind of gets passed through the old vox-box on the way up) and screamed:

“I WAS GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK! HONEST TO GOD!”

Osmond, who had been leaning even farther forward in anticipation of a broken and strengthless whisper, recoiled as if Jack had suddenly reached out and slapped him. He stepped on the trailing rawhide tails of his whip with one booted foot and came close to tripping over them.

“You damned God-pounding little—”

“I WAS GOING TO! PLEASE DON’T WHIP ME OSMOND I WAS GOING TO GO BACK! I NEVER WANTED TO COME HERE I NEVER I NEVER I NEVER—”

Captain Farren lunged forward and struck him in the back. Jack sprawled full-length in the mud, still screaming.

“He’s simple-minded, as I told you,” he heard the Captain saying. “I apologize, Osmond. You can be sure he’ll be beaten within an inch of his life. He—”

“What’s he doing here in the first place?” Osmond shrieked. His voice was now as high and shrewish as any fishwife’s. “What’s your snot-nosed puling brat-bastard doing here at all? Don’t offer to show me his pass! I know he has no pass! You sneaked him in to feed at the Queen’s table . . . to steal the Queen’s silver, for all I know . . . he’s bad . . . one look’s enough to tell anyone that he’s very, intolerably, most indubitably bad!”

The whip came down again, not the mild cough of a Daisy air rifle this time but the loud clean report of a .22, and Jack had time to think I know where that’s going, and then a large fiery hand clawed into his back. The pain seemed to sink into his flesh, not diminishing but actually intensifying. It was hot and maddening. He screamed and writhed in the mud.

“Bad! Most awfully bad! Indubitably bad!”

Each “bad” was punctuated by another crack of Osmond’s whip, another fiery handprint, another scream from Jack. His back was burning. He had no idea how long it might have gone on—Osmond seemed to be working himself into a hotter frenzy with each blow—but then a new voice shouted: “Osmond! Osmond! There you are! Thank God!”

A commotion of running footsteps.

Osmond’s voice, furious and slightly out of breath: “Well? Well? What is it?”

A hand grasped Jack’s elbow and helped him to his feet. When he staggered, the arm attached to the hand slipped around his waist and supported him. It was difficult to believe that the Captain who had been so hard and sure during their bewildering tour of the pavillion could now be so gentle.

Jack staggered again. The world kept wanting to swim out of focus. Trickles of warm blood ran down his back. He looked at Osmond with swift-awakening hatred, and it was good to feel that hatred. It was a welcome antidote to the fear and the confusion.

You did that—you hurt me, you cut me. And listen to me, Jiggs, if I get a chance to pay you back—

“Are you all right?” the Captain whispered.

“Yes.”

“What?” Osmond screamed at the two men who had interrupted Jack’s whipping.

The first was one of the dandies Jack and the Captain had passed going to the secret room. The other looked a bit like the carter Jack had seen almost immediately upon his return to the Territories. This fellow looked badly frightened, and hurt as well—blood was welling from a gash on the left side of his head and had covered most of the left side of his face. His left arm was scraped and his jerkin was torn. “What are you saying, you jackass?”

“My wagon overturned coming around the bend on the far side of All-Hands’ Village,” the carter said. He spoke with the slow, dazed patience of one in deep shock. “My son’s kilt, my Lord. Crushed to death under the barrels. He was just sixteen last May-Farm Day. His mother—”

“What?” Osmond screamed again. “Barrels? Ale? Not the Kingsland? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goat’s penis? You don’t mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu?”

Osmond’s voice rose on the last word like the voice of a man making savage mockery of an operatic diva. It wavered and warbled. At the same time he began to dance again . . . but in rage this time. The combination was so weird that Jack had to raise both hands to stifle an involuntary giggle. The movement caused his shirt to scrape across his welted back, and that sobered him even before the Captain muttered a warning word.

Patiently, as if Osmond had missed the only important fact (and so it must have seemed to him), the carter began again: “He was just sixteen last May-Farm Day. His mother didn’t want him to come with me. I can’t think what—”

Osmond raised his whip and brought it whickering down with blinding and unexpected speed. At one moment the handle was grasped loosely in his left hand, the whip itself with its rawhide tails trailing in the mud; at the next there was a whipcrack not like the sound of a .22 but more like that of a toy rifle. The carter staggered back, shrieking, his hands clapped to his face. Fresh blood ran loosely through his dirty fingers. He fell over, screaming, “My Lord! My Lord! My Lord!” in a muffled, gargling voice.

Jack moaned: “Let’s get out of here. Quick!”

“Wait,” the Captain said. The grim set of his face seemed to have loosened the smallest bit. There might have been hope in his eyes.

Osmond whirled to the dandy, who took a step back, his thick red mouth working.

“Was it the Kingsland?” Osmond panted.

“Osmond, you shouldn’t tax yourself so—”

Osmond flicked his left wrist upward; the whip’s steel-tipped rawhide tails clattered against the dandy’s boots. The dandy took another step backward.

“Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do,” he said. “Only answer my questions. I’m vexed, Stephen, I’m most intolerably, indubitably vexed. Was it the Kingsland?”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “I regret to say it, but—”

“On the Outpost Road?”

“Osmond—”

“On the Outpost Road, you dripping penis?”

“Yes,” Stephen gulped.

“Of course,” Osmond said, and his thin face was split by a hideous white grin. “Where is All-Hands’ Village, if not on the Outpost Road? Can a village fly? Huh? Can a village somehow fly from one road to another, Stephen? Can it? Can it?”

“No, Osmond, of course not.”

“No. And so there are barrels all over the Outpost Road, is that correct? Is it correct for me to assume that there are barrels and an overturned ale-wagon blocking the Outpost Road while the best ale in the Territories soaks into the ground for the earthworms to carouse on? Is that correct?”

“Yes . . . yes. But—”

“Morgan is coming by the Outpost Road!” Osmond screamed. “Morgan is coming and you know how he drives his horses! If his diligence comes around a bend and upon that mess, his driver may not have time to stop! He could be overturned! He could be killed!”

“Dear-God,” Stephen said, all as one word. His pallid face went two shades whiter.

Osmond nodded slowly. “I think, if Morgan’s diligence were to overturn, we would all do better to pray for his death than for his recovery.”

“But—but—”

Osmond turned from him and almost ran back to where the Captain of the Outer Guards stood with his “son.” Behind Osmond, the hapless carter still writhed in the mud, bubbling My Lords.

Osmond’s eyes touched Jack and then swept over him as if he weren’t there. “Captain Farren,” he said. “Have you followed the events of the last five minutes?”

“Yes, Osmond.”

“Have you followed them closely? Have you gleaned them? Have you gleaned them most closely?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Do you think so? What an excellent Captain you are, Captain! We will talk more, I think, about how such an excellent Captain could produce such a frog’s testicle of a son.”

His eyes touched Jack’s face briefly, coldly.

“But there’s no time for that now, is there? No. I suggest that you summon a dozen of your brawniest men and that you double-time them—no, triple-time them—out to the Outpost Road. You’ll be able to follow your nose, to the site of the accident, won’t you?”

“Yes, Osmond.”

Osmond glanced quickly at the sky. “Morgan is expected at six of the clock—perhaps a little sooner. It is now—two. I would say two. Would you say two, Captain?”

“Yes, Osmond.”

“And what would you say, you little turd? Thirteen? Twenty-three? Eighty-one of the clock?”

Jack gaped. Osmond grimaced contemptuously, and Jack felt the clear tide of his hate rise again.

You hurt me, and if I get the chance—!

Osmond looked back at the Captain. “Until five of the clock, I suggest that you be at pains to save whatever barrels may still be whole. After five, I suggest you simply clear the road as rapidly as you can. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Osmond.”

“Then get out of here.”

Captain Farren brought a fist to his forehead and bowed. Gaping stupidly, still hating Osmond so fiercely that his brains seemed to pulse, Jack did the same. Osmond had whirled away from them before the salute was even fairly begun. He was striding back toward the carter, popping his whip, making it cough out those Daisy air rifle sounds.

The carter heard Osmond’s approach and began to scream.

“Come on,” the Captain said, pulling Jack’s arm for the last time. “You don’t want to see this.”

“No,” Jack managed. “God, no.”

But as Captain Farren pushed the right-hand gate open and they finally left the pavillion, Jack heard it—and he heard it in his dreams that night: one whistling carbine-crack after another, each followed by a scream from the doomed carter. And Osmond was making a sound. The man was panting, out of breath, and so it was hard to tell exactly what that sound was, without turning around to look at his face—something Jack did not want to do.

He was pretty sure he knew, though.

He thought Osmond was laughing.

5

They were in the public area of the pavillion grounds now. The strollers glanced at Captain Farren from the corners of their eyes . . . and gave him a wide berth. The Captain strode swiftly, his face tight and dark with thought. Jack had to trot in order to catch up.

“We were lucky,” the Captain said suddenly. “Damned lucky. I think he meant to kill you.”

Jack gaped at him, his mouth dry and hot.

“He’s mad, you know. Mad as the man who chased the cake.”

Jack had no idea what that might mean, but he agreed that Osmond was mad.

“What—”

“Wait,” the Captain said. They had come back around to the small tent where the Captain had taken Jack after seeing the shark’s tooth. “Stand right here and wait for me. Speak to no one.”

The Captain entered the tent. Jack stood watching and waiting. A juggler passed him, glancing at Jack but never losing his rhythm as he tossed half a dozen balls in a complex and airy pattern. A straggle of dirty children followed him as the children followed the Piper out of Hamelin. A young woman with a dirty baby at one huge breast told him she could teach him something to do with his little man besides let piss out of it, if he had a coin or two. Jack looked uncomfortably away, his face hot.

The girl cawed laughter. “Oooooo, this pretty young man’s SHY! Come over here, pretty! Come—”

“Get out, slut, or you’ll finish the day in the underkitchens.”

It was the Captain. He had come out of the tent with another man. This second fellow was old and fat, but he shared one characteristic with Farren—he looked like a real soldier rather than one from Gilbert and Sullivan. He was trying to fasten the front of his uniform over his bulging gut while holding a curly, French horn–like instrument at the same time.

The girl with the dirty baby scurried away with never another look at Jack. The Captain took the fat man’s horn so he could finish buttoning, and passed another word with him. The fat man nodded, finished with his shirt, took his horn back, and then strode off, blowing it. It was not like the sound Jack had heard on his first flip into the Territories; that had been many horns, and their sound had been somehow showy: the sound of heralds. This was like a factory whistle, announcing work to be done.

The Captain returned to Jack.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“Outpost Road,” Captain Farren said, and then he cast a wondering, half-fearful eye down on Jack Sawyer. “What my father’s father called Western Road. It goes west through smaller and smaller villages until it reaches the Outposts. Beyond the Outposts it goes into nowhere . . . or hell. If you’re going west, you’ll need God with you, boy. But I’ve heard it said He Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. Come on.”

Questions crowded Jack’s mind—a million of them—but the Captain set a killer pace and he didn’t have the spare breath to ask them. They breasted the rise south of the great pavillion and passed the spot where he had first flipped back out of the Territories. The rustic fun-fair was now close—Jack could hear a barker cajoling patrons to try their luck on Wonder the Devil-Donkey; to stay on two minutes was to win a prize, the barker cried. His voice came on the sea-breeze with perfect clarity, as did the mouthwatering smell of hot food—roast corn as well as meat this time. Jack’s stomach rumbled. Now safely away from Osmond the Great and Terrible, he was ravenous.

Before they quite reached the fair, they turned right on a road much wider than the one which led toward the great pavillion. Outpost Road, Jack thought, and then, with a little chill of fear and anticipation in his belly, he corrected himself: No . . . Western Road. The way to the Talisman.

Then he was hurrying after Captain Farren again.

6

Osmond had been right; they could have followed their noses, if necessary. They were still a mile outside the village with that odd name when the first sour tang of spilled ale came to them on the breeze.

Eastward-bearing traffic on the road was heavy. Most of it was wagons drawn by lathered teams of horses (none with two heads, however). The wagons were, Jack supposed, the Diamond Reos and Peterbilts of this world. Some were piled high with bags and bales and sacks, some with raw meat, some with clacking cages of chickens. On the outskirts of All-Hands’ Village, an open wagon filled with women swept by them at an alarming pace. The women were laughing and shrieking. One got to her feet, raised her skirt all the way to her hairy crotch, and did a tipsy bump and grind. She would have tumbled over the side of the wagon and into the ditch—probably breaking her neck—if one of her colleagues hadn’t grabbed her by the back of the skirt and pulled her rudely back down.

Jack blushed again: he saw the girl’s white breast, its nipple in the dirty baby’s working mouth. Oooooo, this pretty young man’s SHY!

“God!” Farren muttered, walking faster than ever. “They were all drunk! Drunk on spilled Kingsland! Whores and driver both! He’s apt to wreck them on the road or drive them right off the sea-cliffs—no great loss. Diseased sluts!”

“At least,” Jack panted, “the road must be fairly clear, if all this traffic can get through. Mustn’t it?”

They were in All-Hands’ Village now. The wide Western Road had been oiled here to lay the dust. Wagons came and went, groups of people crossed the street, and everyone seemed to be talking too loudly. Jack saw two men arguing outside what might have been a restaurant. Abruptly, one of them threw a punch. A moment later, both men were rolling on the ground. Those whores aren’t the only ones drunk on Kingsland, Jack thought. I think everyone in this town’s had a share.

“All of the big wagons that passed us came from here,” Captain Farren said. “Some of the smaller ones may be getting through, but Morgan’s diligence isn’t small, boy.”

“Morgan—”

“Never mind Morgan now.”

The smell of the ale grew steadily sharper as they passed through the center of the village and out the other side. Jack’s legs ached as he struggled to keep up with the Captain. He guessed they had now come perhaps three miles. How far is that in my world? he thought, and that thought made him think of Speedy’s magic juice. He groped frantically in his jerkin, convinced it was no longer there—but it was, held securely within whatever Territories undergarment had replaced his Jockey shorts.

Once they were on the western side of the village, the wagon-traffic decreased, but the pedestrian traffic headed east increased dramatically. Most of the pedestrians were weaving, staggering, laughing. They all reeked of ale. In some cases, their clothes were dripping, as if they had lain full-length in it and drunk of it like dogs. Jack supposed they had. He saw a laughing man leading a laughing boy of perhaps eight by the hand. The man bore a nightmarish resemblance to the hateful desk clerk at the Alhambra, and Jack understood with perfect clarity that this man was that man’s Twinner. Both he and the boy he led by the hand were drunk, and as Jack turned to look after them, the little boy began to vomit. His father—or so Jack supposed him to be—jerked him hard by the arm as the boy attempted to flounder his way into the brushy ditch, where he could be sick in relative privacy. The kid reeled back to his father like a cur-dog on a short leash, spraying puke on an elderly man who had collapsed by the side of the road and was snoring there.

Captain Farren’s face grew blacker and blacker. “God pound them all,” he said.

Even those furthest into their cups gave the scarred Captain a wide and prudent berth. While in the guard-post outside the pavillion, he had belted a short, businesslike leather scabbard around his waist. Jack assumed (not unreasonably) that it contained a short, businesslike sword. When any of the sots came too close, the Captain touched the sword and the sot detoured quickly away.

Ten minutes later—as Jack was becoming sure he could no longer keep up—they arrived at the site of the accident. The driver had been coming out of the turn on the inside when the wagon had tilted and gone over. As a result, the kegs had sprayed all the way across the road. Many of them were smashed, and the road was a quagmire for twenty feet. One horse lay dead beneath the wagon, only its hindquarters visible. Another lay in the ditch, a shattered chunk of barrel-stave protruding from its ear. Jack didn’t think that could have happened by accident. He supposed the horse had been badly hurt and someone had put it out of its misery by the closest means at hand. The other horses were nowhere to be seen.

Between the horse under the wagon and the one in the ditch lay the carter’s son, spreadeagled on the road. Half of his face stared up at the bright blue Territories sky with an expression of stupid amazement. Where the other half had been was now only red pulp and splinters of white bone like flecks of plaster.

Jack saw that his pockets had been turned out.

Wandering around the scene of the accident were perhaps a dozen people. They walked slowly, often bending over to scoop ale two-handed from a hoofprint or to dip a handkerchief or a torn-off piece of singlet into another puddle. Most of them were staggering. Voices were raised in laughter and in quarrelsome shouts. After a good deal of pestering, Jack’s mother had allowed him to go with Richard to see a midnight double feature of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead at one of Westwood’s dozen or so movie theaters. The shuffling, drunken people here reminded him of the zombies in those two films.

Captain Farren drew his sword. It was as short and businesslike as Jack had imagined, the very antithesis of a sword in a romance. It was little more than a long butcher’s knife, pitted and nicked and scarred, the handle wrapped in old leather that had been sweated dark. The blade itself was dark . . . except for the cutting edge. That looked bright and keen and very sharp.

“Make away, then!” Farren bawled. “Make away from the Queen’s ale, God-pounders! Make away and keep your guts where they belong!”

Growls of displeasure met this, but they moved away from Captain Farren—all except one hulk of a man with tufts of hair growing at wildly random points from his otherwise bald skull. Jack guessed his weight at close to three hundred pounds, his height at just shy of seven feet.

“D’you like the idea of taking on all of us, sojer?” this hulk asked, and waved one grimy hand at the knot of villagers who had stepped away from the swamp of ale and the litter of barrels at Farren’s order.

“Sure,” Captain Farren said, and grinned at the big man. “I like it fine, just as long as you’re first, you great drunken clot of shit.” Farren’s grin widened, and the big man faltered away from its dangerous power. “Come for me, if you like. Carving you will be the first good thing that’s happened to me all day.”

Muttering, the drunken giant slouched away.

“Now, all of you!” Farren shouted. “Make away! There’s a dozen of my men just setting out from the Queen’s pavillion! They’ll not be happy with this duty and I don’t blame them and I can’t be responsible for them! I think you’ve just got time to get back to the village and hide in your cellars before they arrive there! It would be prudent to do so! Make away!”

They were already streaming back toward the village of All-Hands’, the big man who had challenged the Captain in their van. Farren grunted and then turned back to the scene of the accident. He removed his jacket and covered the face of the carter’s son with it.

“I wonder which of them robbed the lad’s pockets as he lay dead or dying in the roadstead,” Farren said meditatively. “If I knew, I’d have them hung on a cross by nightfall.”

Jack made no answer.

The Captain stood looking down at the dead boy for a long time, one hand rubbing at the smooth, ridged flesh of the scar on his face. When he looked up at Jack, it was as if he had just come to.

“You’ve got to leave now, boy. Right away. Before Osmond decides he’d like to investigate my idiot son further.”

“How bad is it going to be with you?” Jack asked.

The Captain smiled a little. “If you’re gone, I’ll have no trouble. I can say that I sent you back to your mother, or that I was overcome with rage and hit you with a chunk of wood and killed you. Osmond would believe either. He’s distracted. They all are. They’re waiting for her to die. It will be soon. Unless . . .”

He didn’t finish.

“Go,” Farren said. “Don’t tarry. And when you hear Morgan’s diligence coming, get off the road and get deep into the woods. Deep. Or he’ll smell you like a cat smells a rat. He knows instantly if something is out of order. His order. He’s a devil.”

“Will I hear it coming? His diligence?” Jack asked timidly. He looked at the road beyond the litter of barrels. It rose steadily upward, toward the edge of a piney forest. It would be dark in there, he thought . . . and Morgan would be coming the other way. Fear and loneliness combined in the sharpest, most disheartening wave of unhappiness he had ever known. Speedy, I can’t do this! Don’t you know that? I’m just a kid!

“Morgan’s diligence is drawn by six pairs of horses and a thirteenth to lead,” Farren said. “At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth. You’ll hear it, all right. Plenty of time to burrow down. Just make sure you do.”

Jack whispered something.

“What?” Farren asked sharply.

“I said I don’t want to go,” Jack said, only a little louder. Tears were close and he knew that once they began to fall he was going to lose it, just blow his cool entirely and ask Captain Farren to get him out of it, protect him, something—

“I think it’s too late for your wants to enter into the question,” Captain Farren said. “I don’t know your tale, boy, and I don’t want to. I don’t even want to know your name.”

Jack stood looking at him, shoulders slumped, eyes burning, his lips trembling.

“Get your shoulders up!” Farren shouted at him with sudden fury. “Who are you going to save? Where are you going? Not ten feet, looking like that! You’re too young to be a man, but you can at least pretend, can’t you? You look like a kicked dog!”

Stung, Jack straightened his shoulders and blinked his tears back. His eyes fell on the remains of the carter’s son and he thought: At least I’m not like that, not yet. He’s right. Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can’t afford. It was true. All the same, he could not help hating the scarred Captain a little for reaching inside him and pushing the right buttons so easily.

“Better,” Farren said dryly. “Not much, but a little.”

“Thanks,” Jack said sarcastically.

“You can’t cry off, boy. Osmond’s behind you. Morgan will soon be behind you as well. And perhaps . . . perhaps there are problems wherever you came from, too. But take this. If Parkus sent you to me, he’d want me to give you this. So take it, and then go.”

He was holding out a coin. Jack hesitated, then took it. It was the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, but much heavier—as heavy as gold, he guessed, although its color was dull silver. What he was looking at was the face of Laura DeLoessian in profile—he was struck again, briefly but forcibly, by her resemblance to his mother. No, not just resemblance—in spite of such physical dissimilarities as the thinner nose and rounder chin, she was his mother. Jack knew it. He turned the coin over and saw an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It seemed to be looking at Jack. It made him a little nervous, and he put the coin inside his jerkin, where it joined the bottle of Speedy’s magic juice.

“What’s it for?” he asked Farren.

“You’ll know when the time comes,” the Captain replied. “Or perhaps you won’t. Either way, I’ve done my duty by you. Tell Parkus so, when you see him.”

Jack felt wild unreality wash over him again.

“Go, son,” Farren said. His voice was lower, but not necessarily more gentle. “Do your job . . . or as much of it as you can.”

In the end, it was that feeling of unreality—the pervasive sense that he was no more than a figment of someone else’s hallucination—that got him moving. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. He kicked aside a splinter of ale-soaked wood. Stepped over the shattered remnants of a wheel. Detoured around the end of the wagon, not impressed by the blood drying there or the buzzing flies. What was blood or buzzing flies in a dream?

He reached the end of the muddy, wood- and barrel-littered stretch of road, and looked back . . . but Captain Farren had turned the other way, perhaps to look for his men, perhaps so he would not have to look at Jack. Either way, Jack reckoned, it came to the same thing. A back was a back. Nothing to look at.

He reached inside his jerkin, tentatively touched the coin Farren had given him, and then gripped it firmly. It seemed to make him feel a little better. Holding it as a child might hold a quarter given him to buy a treat at the candy store, Jack went on.

7

It might have been as little as two hours later when Jack heard the sound Captain Farren had described as “thunder rolling along the earth”—or it might have been as long as four. Once the sun passed below the western rim of the forest (and it did that not long after Jack had entered it), it became difficult to judge the time.

On a number of occasions vehicles came out of the west, presumably bound for the Queen’s pavillion. Hearing each one come (and vehicles could be heard a long way away here; the clarity with which sound carried made Jack think of what Speedy had said about one man pulling a radish out of the ground and another smelling it half a mile away) made him think of Morgan, and each time he hurried first down into the ditch and then up the other side, and so into the woods. He didn’t like being in these dark woods—not even a little way in, where he could still peer around the trunk of a tree and see the road; it was no rest-cure for the nerves, but he liked the idea of Uncle Morgan (for so he still believed Osmond’s superior to be, in spite of what Captain Farren had said) catching him out on the road even less.

So each time he heard a wagon or carriage approaching he got out of sight, and each time the vehicle passed he went back to the road. Once, while he was crossing the damp and weedy right-hand ditch, something ran—or slithered—over his foot, and Jack cried out.

The traffic was a pain in the tail, and it wasn’t exactly helping him to make better time, but there was also something comforting about the irregular passage of wagons—they served notice that he wasn’t alone, at least.

He wanted to get the hell out of the Territories altogether.

Speedy’s magic juice was the worst medicine he’d ever had in his life, but he would gladly have taken a belly-choking swig of it if someone—Speedy himself, for example—had just happened to appear in front of him and assure him that, when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he would see would be a set of McDonald’s golden arches—what his mother called The Great Tits of America. A sense of oppressive danger was growing in him—a feeling that the forest was indeed dangerous, that there were things in it aware of his passage, that perhaps the forest itself was aware of his passage. The trees had gotten closer to the road, hadn’t they? Yes. Before, they had stopped at the ditches. Now they infested those as well. Before, the forest had seemed composed solely of pines and spruces. Now other sorts of trees had crept in, some with black boles that twisted together like gnarls of rotted strings, some that looked like weird hybrids of firs and ferns—these latter had nasty-looking gray roots that gripped at the ground like pasty fingers. Our boy? these nasty things seemed to whisper inside of Jack’s head. OUR boy?

All in your mind, Jack-O. You’re just freaking out a little.

Thing was, he didn’t really believe that.

The trees were changing. That sense of thick oppression in the air—that sense of being watched—was all too real. And he had begun to think that his mind’s obsessive return to monstrous thoughts was almost something he was picking up from the forest . . . as if the trees themselves were sending to him on some horrible shortwave.

But Speedy’s bottle of magic juice was only half-full. Somehow that had to last him all the way across the United States. It wouldn’t last until he was out of New England if he sipped a little every time he got the willies.

His mind also kept returning to the amazing distance he had travelled in his world when he had flipped back from the Territories. A hundred and fifty feet over here had equalled half a mile over there. At that rate—unless the ratio of distance travelled were somehow variable, and Jack recognized that it might be—he could walk ten miles over here and be damn near out of New Hampshire over there. It was like wearing seven-league boots.

Still, the trees . . . those gray, pasty roots . . .

When it starts to get really dark—when the sky goes from blue to purple—I’m flipping back. That’s it; that’s all she wrote. I’m not walking through these woods after dark. And if I run out of magic juice in Indiana or something, ole Speedy can just send me another bottle by UPS, or something.

Still thinking these thoughts—and thinking how much better it made him feel to have a plan (even if the plan only encompassed the next two hours or so)—Jack suddenly realized he could hear another vehicle and a great many horses.

Cocking his head, he stopped in the middle of the road. His eyes widened, and two pictures suddenly unspooled behind his eyes with shutterlike speed: the big car the two men had been in—the car that had not been a Mercedes—and then the WILD CHILD van, speeding down the street and away from Uncle Tommy’s corpse, blood dripping from the broken plastic fangs of its grille. He saw the hands on the van’s steering wheel . . . but they weren’t hands. They were weird, articulated hooves.

At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth.

Now, hearing it—the sound still distant but perfectly clear in the pure air—Jack wondered how he could have even thought those other approaching wagons might be Morgan’s diligence. He would certainly never make such a mistake again. The sound he heard now was perfectly ominious, thick with a potential for evil—the sound of a hearse, yes, a hearse driven by a devil.

He stood frozen in the road, almost hypnotized, as a rabbit is hypnotized by headlights. The sound grew steadily louder—the thunder of the wheels and hooves, the creak of leather rigging. Now he could hear the driver’s voice: “Hee-yah! Heee-yahhh! HEEEEE-YAHHHH!”

He stood in the road, stood there, his head drumming with horror. Can’t move, oh dear God oh dear Christ I can’t move Mom Mom Muhhhhhmeeeee—!

He stood in the road and the eye of his imagination saw a huge black thing like a stagecoach tearing up the road, pulled by black animals that looked more like pumas than horses; he saw black curtains flapping in and out of the coach’s windows; he saw the driver standing on the teeterboard, his hair blown back, his eyes as wild and crazed as those of a psycho with a switchblade.

He saw it coming toward him, never slowing.

He saw it run him down.

That broke the paralysis. He ran to the right, skidding down the side of the road, catching his foot under one of those gnarled roots, falling, rolling. His back, relatively quiet for the last couple of hours, flared with fresh pain, and Jack drew his lips back with a grimace.

He got to his feet and scurried into the woods, hunched over.

He slipped first behind one of the black trees, but the touch of the gnarly trunk—it was a bit like the banyans he had seen while on vacation on Hawaii year before last—was oily and unpleasant. Jack moved to the left and behind the trunk of a pine.

The thunder of the coach and its outriders grew steadily louder. At every second Jack expected the company to flash by toward All-Hands’ Village. Jack’s fingers squeezed and relaxed on the pine’s gummy back. He bit at his lips.

Directly ahead was a narrow but perfectly clear sightline back to the road, a tunnel with sides of leaf and fern and pine needles. And just when Jack had begun to think that Morgan’s party would never arrive, a dozen or more mounted soldiers passed heading east, riding at a gallop. The one in the lead carried a banner, but Jack could not make out its device . . . nor was he sure he wanted to. Then the diligence flashed across Jack’s narrow sightline.

The moment of its passage was brief—no more than a second, perhaps less than that—but Jack’s recall of it was total. The diligence was a gigantic vehicle, surely a dozen feet high. The trunks and bundles lashed with stout cord to the top added another three feet. Each horse in the team which pulled it wore a black plume on its head—these plumes were blown back almost flat in a speed-generated wind. Jack thought later that Morgan must need a new team for every run, because these looked close to the end of their endurance. Foam and blood sprayed back from their working mouths in curds; their eyes rolled crazily, showing arcs of white.

As in his imagining—or his vision—black crepe curtains flew and fluttered through glassless windows. Suddenly a white face appeared in one of those black oblongs, a white face framed in strange, twisted carving-work. The sudden appearance of that face was as shocking as the face of a ghost in the ruined window of a haunted house. It was not the face of Morgan Sloat . . . but it was.

And the owner of that face knew that Jack—or some other danger, just as hated and just as personal—was out there. Jack saw this in the widening of the eyes and the sudden vicious downtwist of the mouth.

Captain Farren had said He’ll smell you like a rat, and now Jack thought dismally: I’ve been smelled, all right. He knows I’m here, and what happens now? He’ll stop the whole bunch of them, I bet, and send the soldiers into the woods after me.

Another band of soldiers—these protecting Morgan’s diligence from the rear—swept by. Jack waited, his hands frozen to the bark of the pine, sure that Morgan would call a halt. But no halt came; soon the heavy thunder of the diligence and its outriders began to fade.

His eyes. That’s what’s the same. Those dark eyes in that white face. And—

Our boy? YESSSS!

Something slithered over his foot . . . and up his ankle. Jack screamed and floundered backward, thinking it must be a snake. But when he looked down he saw that one of those gray roots had slipped up his foot . . . and now it ringed his calf.

That’s impossible, he thought stupidly. Roots don’t move—

He pulled back sharply, yanking his leg out of the rough gray manacle the root had formed. There was thin pain in his calf, like the pain of a rope-burn. He raised his eyes and felt sick fear slip into his heart. He thought he knew now why Morgan had sensed him and gone on anyway; Morgan knew that walking in this forest was like walking into a jungle stream infested with piranhas. Why hadn’t Captain Farren warned him? All Jack could think was that the scarred Captain must not have known; must never have been this far west.

The grayish roots of those fir-fern hybrids were all moving now—rising, falling, scuttling along the mulchy ground toward him. Ents and Entwives, Jack thought crazily. BAD Ents and Entwives. One particularly thick root, its last six inches dark with earth and damp, rose and wavered in front of him like a cobra piped up from a fakir’s basket. OUR boy! YESS!

It darted toward him and Jack backed away from it, aware that the roots had now formed a living screen between him and the safety of the road. He backed into a tree . . . and then lurched away from it, screaming, as its bark began to ripple and twitch against his back—it was like feeling a muscle which has begun to spasm wildly. Jack looked around and saw one of those black trees with the gnarly trunks. Now the trunk was moving, writhing. Those twisted knots of bark formed something like a dreadful runnelled face, one eye widely, blackly open, the other drawn down in a hideous wink. The tree split open lower down with a grinding, rending sound, and whitish-yellow sap began to drool out. OURS! Oh, yesssss!

Roots like fingers slipped between Jack’s upper arm and ribcage, as if to tickle.

He tore away, holding on to the last of his rationality with a huge act of will, groping in his jerkin for Speedy’s bottle. He was aware—faintly—of a series of gigantic ripping sounds. He supposed the trees were tearing themselves right out of the ground. Tolkien had never been like this.

He got the bottle by the neck and pulled it out. He scrabbled at the cap, and then one of those gray roots slid easily around his neck. A moment later it pulled as bitterly tight as a hangman’s noose.

Jack’s breath stopped. The bottle tumbled from his fingers as he grappled with the thing that was choking him. He managed to work his fingers under the root. It was not cold and stiff but warm and limber and fleshlike. He struggled with it, aware of the choked gargling sound coming from him and the slick of spittle on his chin.

With a final convulsive effort he tore the root free. It tried to circle his wrist then, and Jack whipped his arm away from it with a cry. He looked down and saw the bottle twisting and bumping away, one of those gray roots coiled about its neck.

Jack leaped for it. Roots grabbed his legs, circled them. He fell heavily to the earth, stretching, reaching, the tips of his fingers digging at the thick black forest soil for an extra inch—

He touched the bottle’s slick green side . . . and seized it. He pulled as hard as he could, dimly aware that the roots were all over his legs now, crisscrossing like bonds, holding him firmly. He spun the cap off the bottle. Another root floated down, cobweb-light, and tried to snatch the bottle away from him. Jack pushed it away and raised the bottle to his lips. That smell of sickish fruit suddenly seemed everywhere, a living membrane.

Speedy, please let it work!

As more roots slid over his back and around his waist, turning him helplessly this way and that, Jack drank, cheap wine splattering both of his cheeks. He swallowed, groaning, praying, and it was no good, it wasn’t working, his eyes were still closed but he could feel the roots entangling his arms and legs, could feel

8

the water soaking into his jeans and his shirt, could smell

Water? mud and damp, could hear

Jeans? Shirt? the steady croak of frogs and

Jack opened his eyes and saw the orange light of the setting sun reflected from a wide river. Unbroken forest grew on the east side of this river; on the western side, the side that he was on, a long field, now partially obscured with evening ground-mist, rolled down to the water’s edge. The ground here was wet and squelchy. Jack was lying at the edge of the water, in the boggiest area of all. Thick weeds still grew here—the hard frosts that would kill them were still a month or more away—and Jack had gotten entangled in them, the way a man awakening from a nightmare may entangle himself in the bedclothes.

He scrambled and stumbled to his feet, wet and slimed with the fragrant mud, the straps of his pack pulling under his arms. He pushed the weedy fragments from his arms and face with horror. He started away from the water, then looked back and saw Speedy’s bottle lying in the mud, the cap beside it. Some of the “magic juice” had either run out or been spilled in his struggle with the malignant Territories trees. Now the bottle was no more than a third full.

He stood there a moment, his caked sneakers planted in the oozy muck, looking out at the river. This was his world; this was the good old United States of America. He didn’t see the golden arches he had hoped for, or a skyscraper, or an earth satellite blinking overhead in the darkening sky, but he knew where he was as well as he knew his own name. The question was, had he ever been in that other world at all?

He looked around at the unfamiliar river, the likewise unfamiliar countryside, and listened to the distant mellow mooing of cows. He thought: You’re somewhere different. This sure isn’t Arcadia Beach anymore, Jack-O.

No, it wasn’t Arcadia Beach, but he didn’t know the area surrounding Arcadia Beach well enough to say for sure that he was more than four or five miles away—just enough inland, say, to no longer be able to smell the Atlantic. He had come back as if waking from a nightmare—was it not possible that was all it had been, the whole thing, from the carter with his load of fly-crawling meat to the living trees? A sort of waking nightmare in which sleepwalking had played a part? It made sense. His mother was dying, and he now thought he had known that for quite a while—the signs had been there, and his subconscious had drawn the correct conclusion even while his conscious mind denied it. That would have contributed the correct atmosphere for an act of self-hypnosis, and that crazy wino Speedy Parker had gotten him in gear. Sure. It all hung together.

Uncle Morgan would have loved it.

Jack shivered and swallowed hard. The swallow hurt. Not the way a sore throat hurts, but the way an abused muscle hurts.

He raised his left hand, the one not holding the bottle, and rubbed his palm gently against his throat. For a moment he looked absurdly like a woman checking for dewlaps or wrinkles. He found a welted abrasion just above his adam’s apple. It hadn’t bled much, but it was almost too painful to touch. The root that had closed about his throat had done that.

“True,” Jack whispered, looking out at the orange water, listening to the twank of the bullfrogs and the mooing, distant cows. “All true.”

9

Jack began walking up the slope of the field, setting the river—and the east—at his back. After he had gone half a mile, the steady rub and shift of the pack against his throbbing back (the strokes Osmond had laid on were still there, too, the shifting pack reminded him) triggered a memory. He had refused Speedy’s enormous sandwich, but hadn’t Speedy slipped the remains into his pack anyway, while Jack was examining the guitar-pick?

His stomach pounced on the idea.

Jack unshipped the pack then and there, standing in a curdle of ground-mist beneath the evening star. He unbuckled one of the flaps, and there was the sandwich, not just a piece or a half, but the whole thing, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Jack’s eyes filled with a warmth of tears and he wished that Speedy were here so he could hug him.

Ten minutes ago you were calling him a crazy old wino.

His face flamed at that, but his shame didn’t stop him from gobbling the sandwich in half a dozen big bites. He rebuckled his pack and reshouldered it. He went on, feeling better—with that whistling hole in his gut stopped up for the time being, Jack felt himself again.

Not long after, lights twinkled up out of the growing darkness. A farmhouse. A dog began to bark—the heavy bark of a really big fellow—and Jack froze for a moment.

Inside, he thought. Or chained up. I hope.

He bore to the right, and after a while the dog stopped barking. Keeping the lights of the farmhouse as a guide, Jack soon came out on a narrow blacktop road. He stood looking from right to left, having no idea which way to go.

Well, folks, here’s Jack Sawyer, halfway between hoot and holler, wet through to the skin and sneakers packed with mud. Way to go, Jack!

The loneliness and homesickness rose in him again. Jack fought them off. He put a drop of spit on his left index finger, then spanked the drop sharply. The larger of the two halves flew off to the right—or so it seemed to Jack—and so he turned that way and began to walk. Forty minutes later, drooping with weariness (and hungry again, which was somehow worse), he saw a gravel-pit with a shed of some sort standing beyond a chained-off access road.

Jack ducked under the chain and went to the shed. The door was padlocked shut, but he saw that the earth had eroded under one side of the small outbuilding. It was the work of a minute to remove his pack, wriggle under the shed’s side, and then pull the pack in after him. The lock on the door actually made him feel safer.

He looked around and saw that he was in with some very old tools—this place hadn’t been used in a long time, apparently, and that suited Jack just fine. He stripped to the skin, not liking the feel of his clammy, muddy clothes. He felt the coin Captain Farren had given him in one of his pants pockets, resting there like a giant amid his little bit of more ordinary change. Jack took it out and saw that Farren’s coin, with the Queen’s head on one side and the winged lion on the other—had become a 1921 silver dollar. He looked fixedly at the profile of Lady Liberty on the cartwheel for some time, and then slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans.

He rooted out fresh clothes, thinking he would put the dirty ones in his pack in the morning—they would be dry then—and perhaps clean them along the way, maybe in a Laundromat, maybe just in a handy stream.

While searching for socks, his hand encountered something slim and hard. Jack pulled it out and saw it was his toothbrush. At once, images of home and safety and rationality—all the things a toothbrush could represent—rose up and overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could beat these emotions down or turn them aside this time. A toothbrush was a thing meant to be seen in a well-lighted bathroom, a thing to be used with cotton pajamas on the body and warm slippers on the feet. It was nothing to come upon in the bottom of your knapsack in a cold, dark toolshed on the edge of a gravel-pit in a deserted rural town whose name you did not even know.

Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his outcast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.

Jack fell asleep before the sobs had entirely run their course. He slept curled around his pack, naked except for clean underpants and socks. The tears had cut clean courses down his dirty cheeks, and he held his toothbrush loosely in one hand.