The Talisman

46

Another Journey

1

He healed them, but he was never able to recall exactly how that had gone, or any of the specific details—for a while the Talisman had blazed and sung in his hands, and he had the vaguest possible memory of its fire’s actually seeming to flow out over them until they glowed in a bath of light. That was all he could bring back.

At the end of it, the glorious light in the Talisman faded . . . faded . . . went out.

Jack, thinking of his mother, uttered a hoarse, wailing cry.

Speedy staggered over to him through the melting snow and put an arm around Jack’s shoulders.

“It be back, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said. He smiled, but he looked twice as tired as Jack. Speedy had been healed . . . but he was still not well. This world is killing him, Jack thought dimly. At least, it’s killing the part of him that’s Speedy Parker. The Talisman healed him . . . but he is still dying.

“You did for it,” Speedy said, “and you wanna believe that it’s gonna do for you. Don’t worry. Come on over here, Jack. Come on over to where your frien’ be layin.”

Jack did. Richard was sleeping in the melting snow. That horrid loose flap of skin was gone, but there was a long white streak of scalp showing in his hair now—a streak of scalp from which no hair would ever grow.

“Take his han’.”

“Why? What for?”

“We’re gonna flip.”

Jack looked at Speedy questioningly, but Speedy offered no explanation. He only nodded, as if to say Yes; you heard me right.

Well, Jack thought, I trusted him this far—

He reached down and took Richard’s hand. Speedy held Jack’s other hand.

With hardly a tug at all, the three of them went over.

2

It was as Jack had intuited—the figure standing beside him over here, on this black sand that was stitched everywhere by Morgan of Orris’s dragging foot, looked hale and hearty and healthy.

Jack stared with awe—and some unease—at this stranger who looked a bit like Speedy Parker’s younger brother.

“Speedy—Mr. Parkus, I mean—what are you—”

“You boys need rest,” Parkus said. “You for sure, this other young squire even more. He came closer to dying than anyone will ever know but himself . . . and I don’t think he’s the type to do much admitting, even to himself.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “You got that right.”

“He’ll rest better over here,” Parkus told Jack, and struck off up the beach, away from the castle, carrying Richard. Jack stumbled along as best he could, but gradually found himself falling behind. He was quickly out of breath, his legs rubbery. His head ached with reaction from the final battle—shock hangover, he supposed.

“Why . . . where . . .” That was all he could pant. He held the Talisman against his chest. It was dull now, its exterior sooty and opaque and uninteresting.

“Just up a little way,” Parkus said. “You and your friend don’t want to rest where he was, do you?”

And, exhausted as he was, Jack shook his head.

Parkus glanced back over his shoulder, then looked sadly at Jack.

“It stinks of his evil back there,” he said, “and it stinks of your world, Jack.

“To me, they smell too much alike for comfort.”

He set off again, Richard in his arms.

3

Forty yards up the beach he stopped. Here the black sand had moderated to a lighter color—not white, but a medium gray. Parkus set Richard down gently. Jack sprawled beside him. The sand was warm—blessedly warm. No snow here.

Parkus sat beside him, cross-legged.

“You’re going to have a sleep now,” he said. “Might be tomorrow before you wake up. Won’t anybody bother you, if so. Take a look.”

Parkus waved his arm toward the place where Point Venuti had been in the American Territories. Jack first saw the black castle, one entire side of it crumbled and burst, as if there had been a tremendous explosion inside. Now the castle looked almost pedestrian. Its menace was burnt out, its illicit treasure borne away. It was only stones piled up in patterns.

Looking farther, Jack saw that the earthquake had not been so violent over here—and there had been less to destroy. He saw a few overturned huts that looked as if they had been built mostly of driftwood; he saw a number of burst coaches that might or might not have been Cadillacs back in the American Territories; here and there he could see a fallen, shaggy body.

“Those who were here and survived have now gone,” Parkus said. “They know what has happened, they know Orris is dead, and they’ll not trouble you more. The evil that was here has gone. Do you know that? Can you feel it?”

“Yes,” Jack whispered. “But . . . Mr. Parkus . . . you’re not . . . not . . .”

“Going? Yes. Very soon. You and your friend are going to have a good sleep, but you and I must have a bit of a talk first. It won’t take long, so I want you to try and get your head up off your chest, at least for the moment.”

With some effort, Jack got his head up and his eyes all—well, most—of the way open again. Parkus nodded.

“When you wake up, strike east . . . but don’t flip! You stay right here for a while. Stay in the Territories. There’s going to be too much going on over there on your side—rescue units, news crews, Jason knows what else. At least the snow will melt before anybody knows it’s there, except for a few people who’ll be dismissed as crackpots—”

“Why do you have to go?”

“I just got to ramble some now, Jack. There’s a lot of work to be done over here. News of Morgan’s death will already be travelling east. Travelling fast. I’m behind that news right now, and I’ve got to get ahead of it if I can. I want to get back to the Outposts . . . and the east . . . before a lot of pretty bad folks start to head out for other places.” He looked out at the ocean, his eyes as cold and gray as flint. “When the bill comes due, people have to pay. Morgan’s gone, but there’s still a debt owing.”

“You’re something like a policeman over here, aren’t you?”

Parkus nodded. “I am what you’d call the Judge General and Lord High Executioner all rolled into one. Over here, that is.” He put a strong, warm hand on Jack’s head. “Over there, I’m just this fella who goes around from place to place, does a few odd jobs, strums a few tunes. And sometimes, believe me, I like that a lot better.”

He smiled again, and this time he was Speedy.

“And you be seein that guy from time to time, Jacky. Yeah, from time to time and place to place. In a shoppin center, maybe, or a park.”

He winked at Jack.

“But Speedy’s . . . not well,” Jack said. “Whatever was wrong with him, it was something the Talisman couldn’t touch.”

“Speedy’s old,” Parkus said. “He’s my age, but your world made him older than me. Just the same, he’s still got a few years left in him. Maybe quite a few. Feel no fret, Jack.”

“You promise?” Jack asked.

Parkus grinned. “Yeah-bob.”

Jack grinned tiredly back.

“You and your friend head out to the east. Go until you reckon you’ve done five miles. You get over those low hills and then you’ll be fine—easy walking. Look for a big tree—biggest damn tree you’ve ever seen. You get to that big old tree, Jack, and you take Richard’s hand, and you flip back. You’ll come out next to a giant redwood with a tunnel cut through the bottom of it to let the road through. The road’s Route Seventeen, and you’ll be on the outskirts of a little town in northern California called Storyville. Walk into town. There’s a Mobil station at the blinker-light.”

“And then?”

Parkus shrugged. “Don’t know, not for sure. Could be, Jack, you’ll meet someone you’ll recognize.”

“But how will we get h—”

“Shhh,” Parkus said, and put a hand on Jack’s forehead exactly as his mother had done when he was

(baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting, and all that good shit, la-la, go to sleep, Jacky, all’s well and all’s well and)

very small. “Enough questions. All will be well with you and Richard now, I think.”

Jack lay down. He cradled the dark ball in the crook of one arm. Each of his eyelids now seemed to have a cinderblock attached to it.

“You have been brave and true, Jack,” Parkus said with calm gravity. “I wish you were my own son . . . and I salute you for your courage. And your faith. There are people in many worlds who owe you a great debt of gratitude. And in some way or other, I think most of them sense that.”

Jack managed a smile.

“Stay a little while,” he managed to say.

“All right,” Parkus said. “Until you sleep. Feel no fret, Jack. Nothing will harm you here.”

“My mom always said—”

But before he finished the thought, sleep had claimed him.

4

And sleep continued to claim him, in some mysterious wise, the next day when he was technically awake—or if not sleep, then a protective numbing faculty of the mind which turned most of that day slow and dreamlike. He and Richard, who was similarly slow-moving and tentative, stood beneath the tallest tree in the world. All about them spangles of light lay across the floor of the forest. Ten grown men holding hands could not have reached around it. The tree soared up, massive and apart: in a forest of tall trees it was a leviathan, a pure example of Territories exuberance.

Feel no fret, Parkus had said, even while he threatened to fade hazily away like the Cheshire Cat. Jack tilted his head to stare up toward the top of the tree. He did not quite know this, but he was emotionally exhausted. The immensity of the tree aroused only a flicker of wonder in him. Jack rested a hand against the surprisingly smooth bark. I killed the man who killed my father, he said to himself. He clutched the dark, seemingly dead ball of the Talisman in his other hand. Richard was staring upward at the giant head of the tree, a skyscraper’s height above them. Morgan was dead, Gardener too, and the snow must have melted from the beach by now. Yet not all of it was gone. Jack felt as though a whole beachful of snow filled his head. He had thought once—a thousand years ago, it seemed now—that if he could ever actually get his hands around the Talisman, he would be so inundated with triumph and excitement and awe that he’d have to fizz over. Instead he now felt only the tiniest hint of all that. It was snowing in his head, and he could see no farther than Parkus’s instructions. He realized that the enormous tree was holding him up.

“Take my hand,” he said to Richard.

“But how are we going to get home?” Richard asked.

“Feel no fret,” he said, and closed his hand around Richard’s. Jack Sawyer didn’t need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was brave and true. Jack Sawyer was a played-out twelve-year-old boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him.

5

The forest had contracted; now it was an American forest. The roof of gently moving boughs was noticeably lower, the trees about them conspicuously smaller than in the part of the Territories forest to which Parkus had directed them. Jack was dimly conscious of this alteration in the scale of everything about him before he saw the two-lane blacktop road in front of him: but twentieth-century reality kicked him almost immediately in the shins, for as soon as he saw the road he heard the eggbeater sound of a small motor and instinctively drew himself and Richard back just before a white little Renault Le Car zipped by him. The car sped past and went through the tunnel cut into the trunk of the redwood (which was slightly more than half the size of its Territories counterpart). But at least one adult and two children in the Renault were not looking at the redwoods they had come to see all the way from New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die!”). The woman and the two small children in the back seat had swivelled around to gawp at Jack and Richard. Their mouths were small black caves, open wide. They had just seen two boys appear beside the road like ghosts, miraculously and instantaneously forming out of nothing, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock after beaming down from the Enterprise.

“You okay to walk for a little while?”

“Sure,” Richard said.

Jack stepped onto the surface of Route 17 and walked through the huge hole in the tree.

He might be dreaming all this, he thought. He might be still on the Territories beach, Richard knocked out beside him, both of them under Parkus’s kindly gaze. My mom always said . . . My mom always said . . .

6

Moving as if through thick fog (though that day in that part of northern California was in fact sunny and dry), Jack Sawyer led Richard Sloat out of the redwood forest and down a sloping road past dry December meadows.

. . . that the most important person in any movie is usually the cameraman . . .

His body needed more sleep. His mind needed a vacation.

. . . that vermouth is the ruination of a good martini . . .

Richard followed silently along, brooding. He was so much slower that Jack had to stop still on the side of the road and wait for Richard to catch up with him. A little town that must have been Storyville was visible a half-mile or so ahead. A few low white buildings sat on either side of the road. ANTIQUES, read the sign atop one of them. Past the buildings a blinking stoplight hung over an empty intersection. Jack could see the corner of the MOBIL sign outside the gas station. Richard trudged along, his head so far down his chin nearly rested on his chest. When Richard drew nearer, Jack finally saw that his friend was weeping.

Jack put his arm around Richard’s shoulders. “I want you to know something,” he said.

“What?” Richard’s small face was tear-streaked but defiant.

“I love you,” Jack said.

Richard’s eyes snapped back to the surface of the road. Jack kept his arm over his friend’s shoulders. In a moment Richard looked up—looked straight at Jack—and nodded. And that was like something Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer once or twice really had said to her son: Jack-O, there are times you don’t have to spill your guts out of your mouth.

“We’re on our way, Richie,” Jack said. He waited for Richard to wipe his eyes. “I guess somebody’s supposed to meet us up there at the Mobil station.”

“Hitler, maybe?” Richard pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. In a moment he was ready again, and the two boys walked into Storyville together.

7

It was a Cadillac, parked on the shady side of the Mobil station—an El Dorado with a boomerang TV antenna on the back. It looked as big as a house-trailer and as dark as death.

“Oh, Jack, baaaad shit,” Richard moaned, and grabbed at Jack’s shoulder. His eyes were wide, his mouth trembling.

Jack felt adrenaline whippet into his system again. It didn’t pump him up any longer. It only made him feel tired. There had been too much, too much, too much.

Clasping the dark junk-shop crystal ball that the Talisman had become, Jack started down the hill toward the Mobil station.

“Jack!” Richard screamed weakly from behind him. “What the hell are you doing? It’s one of THEM! Same cars as at Thayer! Same cars as in Point Venuti!”

“Parkus told us to come here,” Jack said.

“You’re crazy, chum,” Richard whispered.

“I know it. But this’ll be all right. You’ll see. And don’t call me chum.”

The Caddy’s door swung open and a heavily muscled leg clad in faded blue denim swung out. Unease became active terror when he saw that the toe of the driver’s black engineer boot had been cut off so long, hairy toes could stick out.

Richard squeaked beside him like a fieldmouse.

It was a Wolf, all right—Jack knew that even before the guy turned around. He stood almost seven feet tall. His hair was long, shaggy, and not very clean. It hung in tangles to his collar. There were a couple of burdocks in it. Then the big figure turned, Jack saw a flash of orange eyes—and suddenly terror became joy.

Jack sprinted toward the big figure down there, heedless of the gas station attendant who had come out to stare at him, and the idlers in front of the general store. His hair flew back from his forehead; his battered sneakers thumped and flapped; his face was split by a dizzy grin; his eyes shone like the Talisman itself.

Bib overalls: Oshkosh, by gosh. Round rimless spectacles: John Lennon glasses. And a wide, welcoming grin.

“Wolf!” Jack Sawyer screamed. “Wolf, you’re alive! Wolf, you’re alive!”

He was still five feet from Wolf when he leaped. And Wolf caught him with neat, casual ease, grinning delightedly.

“Jack Sawyer! Wolf! Look at this! Just like Parkus said! I’m here at this God-pounding place that smells like shit in a swamp, and you’re here, too! Jack and his friend! Wolf! Good! Great! Wolf!”

It was the Wolf’s smell that told Jack this wasn’t his Wolf, just as it was the smell that told him this Wolf was some sort of relation . . . surely a very close one.

“I knew your litter-brother,” Jack said, still in the Wolf’s shaggy, strong arms. Now, looking at this face, he could see it was older and wiser. But still kind.

“My brother Wolf,” Wolf said, and put Jack down. He reached out one hand and touched the Talisman with the tip of one finger. His face was full of awed reverence. When he touched it, one bright spark appeared and shot deep into the globe’s dull depths like a tumbling comet.

He drew in a breath, looked at Jack, and grinned. Jack grinned back.

Richard now arrived, staring at both of them with wonder and caution.

“There are good Wolfs as well as bad in the Territories—” Jack began.

“Lots of good Wolfs,” Wolf interjected.

He stuck out his hand to Richard. Richard pulled back for a second and then shook it. The set of his mouth as his hand was swallowed made Jack believe Richard expected the sort of treatment Wolf had accorded Heck Bast a long time ago.

“This is my Wolf’s litter-brother,” Jack said proudly. He cleared his throat, not knowing exactly how to express his feelings for this being’s brother. Did Wolfs understand condolence? Was it part of their ritual?

“I loved your brother,” he said. “He saved my life. Except for Richard here, he was just about the best friend I ever had, I guess. I’m sorry he died.”

“He’s in the moon now,” Wolf’s brother said. “He’ll be back. Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon. Come on. Want to get away from this stinking place.”

Richard looked puzzled, but Jack understood and more than sympathized—the Mobil station seemed surrounded with a hot, oily aroma of fried hydrocarbons. It was like a brown shroud you could see through.

The Wolf went to the Cadillac and opened the rear door like a chauffeur—which was, Jack supposed, exactly what he was.

“Jack?” Richard looked frightened.

“It’s okay,” Jack said.

“But where—”

“To my mother, I think,” Jack said. “All the way across the country to Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. Going first class. Come on, Richie.”

They walked to the car. Shoved over to one side of the wide back seat was a scruffy old guitar case. Jack felt his heart leap up again.

“Speedy!” He turned to Wolf’s litter-brother. “Is Speedy coming with us?”

“Don’t know anyone speedy,” the Wolf said. “Had an uncle who was sort of speedy, then he pulled up lame—Wolf!—and couldn’t even keep up with the herd anymore.”

Jack pointed at the guitar case.

“Where did that come from?”

Wolf grinned, showing many big teeth. “Parkus,” he said. “Left this for you, too. Almost forgot.”

From his back pocket he took a very old postcard. On the front was a carousel filled with a great many familiar horses—Ella Speed and Silver Lady among them—but the ladies in the foreground were wearing bustles, the boys knickers, many of the men derby hats and Rollie Fingers moustaches. The card felt silky with age.

He turned it over, first reading the print up the middle: ARCADIA BEACH CAROUSEL, JULY 4TH, 1894.

It was Speedy—not Parkus—who had scratched two sentences in the message space. His hand was sprawling, not very literate; he had written with a soft, blunt pencil.

You done great wonders, Jack. Use what you need of what’s in the case—keep the rest or throw it away.

Jack put the postcard in his hip pocket and got into the back of the Cadillac, sliding across the plush seat. One of the catches on the old guitar case was broken. He unsnapped the other three.

Richard had gotten in after Jack. “Holy crow!” he whispered.

The guitar case was stuffed with twenty-dollar bills.

8

Wolf took them home, and although Jack grew hazy about many of that autumn’s events in a very short time, each moment of that trip was emblazoned on his mind for the rest of his life. He and Richard sat in the back of the El Dorado and Wolf drove them east and east and east. Wolf knew the roads and Wolf drove them. He sometimes played Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes—“Run Through the Jungle” seemed to be his favorite—at a volume just short of ear-shattering. Then he would spend long periods of time listening to the tonal variations in the wind as he worked the button that controlled his wing window. This seemed to fascinate him completely.

East, east, east—into the sunrise each morning, into the mysterious deepening blue dusk of each coming night, listening first to John Fogerty and then to the wind, John Fogerty again and then the wind again.

They ate at Stuckeys’. They ate at Burger Kings. They stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the latter, Jack and Richard got dinners; Wolf got a Family-Style Bucket and ate all twenty-one pieces. From the sounds, he ate most of the bones as well. This made Jack think of Wolf and the popcorn. Where had that been? Muncie. The outskirts of Muncie—the Town Line Sixplex. Just before they had gotten their asses slammed into the Sunlight Home. He grinned . . . and then felt something like an arrow slip into his heart. He looked out the window so Richard wouldn’t see the gleam of his tears.

They stopped on the second night in Julesburg, Colorado, and Wolf cooked them a huge picnic supper on a portable barbecue he produced from the trunk. They ate in a snowy field by starlight, bundled up in heavy parkas bought out of the guitar-case stash. A meteor-shower flashed overhead, and Wolf danced in the snow like a child.

“I love that guy,” Richard said thoughtfully.

“Yeah, me too. You should have met his brother.”

“I wish I had.” Richard began to gather up the trash. What he said next flummoxed Jack almost completely. “I’m forgetting a lot of stuff, Jack.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Every mile I remember a little less about what happened. It’s all getting misty. And I think . . . I think that’s the way I want it. Look, are you really sure your mother’s okay?”

Three times Jack had tried to call his mother. There was no answer. He was not too worried about this. Things were okay. He hoped. When he got there, she would be there. Sick . . . but still alive. He hoped.

“Yes.”

“Then how come she doesn’t answer the phone?”

“Sloat played some tricks with the phones,” Jack said. “He played some tricks with the help at the Alhambra, too, I bet. She’s still okay. Sick . . . but okay. Still there. I can feel her.”

“And if this healing thing works—” Richard grimaced a little, then plunged. “You still . . . I mean, you still think she’d let me . . . you know, stay with you guys?”

“No,” Jack said, helping Richard pick up the remains of supper. “She’ll want to see you in an orphanage, probably. Or maybe in jail. Don’t be a dork, Richard, of course you can stay with us.”

“Well . . . after all my father did . . .”

“That was your dad, Richie,” Jack said simply. “Not you.”

“And you won’t always be reminding me? You know . . . jogging my memory?”

“Not if you want to forget.”

“I do, Jack. I really do.”

Wolf was coming back.

“You guys ready? Wolf!”

“All ready,” Jack said. “Listen, Wolf, how about that Scott Hamilton tape I got in Cheyenne?”

“Sure, Jack. Then how about some Creedence?”

“ ’Run Through the Jungle,’ right?”

“Good tune, Jack! Heavy! Wolf! God-pounding heavy tune!”

“You bet, Wolf.” He rolled his eyes at Richard. Richard rolled his back, and grinned.

The next day they rolled across Nebraska and Iowa; a day later they tooled past the gutted ruin of the Sunlight Home. Jack thought Wolf had taken them past it on purpose, that he perhaps wanted to see the place where his brother had died. He turned up the Creedence tape in the cassette player as loud as it would go, but Jack still thought he heard the sound of Wolf sobbing.

Time—suspended swatches of time. Jack seemed almost to be floating, and there was a feeling of suspension, triumph, valediction. Work honorably discharged.

Around sunset of the fifth day, they crossed into New England.