The Talisman

“Here and now.”

“Right here and now!”

Jack squeezed Wolf’s paw-hands tighter. He could smell Lysol. Somewhere he could hear a car passing. A phone rang. He thought, I am drinking the magic juice. In my mind I’m drinking it, right here and now I’m drinking it, I can smell it, so purple and so thick and new, I can taste it, I can feel my throat closing on it—

As the taste filled his throat, the world swayed under them, around them. Wolf cried out, “Jacky, it’s working!”

It startled him out of his fierce concentration and for a moment he became aware that it was only a trick, like trying to get to sleep by counting sheep, and the world steadied again. The smell of the Lysol flooded back. Faintly he heard someone answer the phone querulously: “Yes, hello, who is it?”

Never mind, it’s not a trick, not a trick at all—it’s magic. It’s magic and I did it before when I was little and I can do it again, Speedy said so that blind singer Snowball said so, too, THE MAGIC JUICE IS IN MY MIND—

He bore down with all his force, all his effort of will . . . and the ease with which they flipped was stupefying, as if a punch aimed at something which looked like granite hit a cleverly painted papier-mache shell instead, so that the blow you thought would break all your knuckles instead encountered no resistance at all.

4

To Jack, with his eyes screwed tightly shut, it felt as if the floor had first crumbled under his feet . . . and then disappeared completely.

Oh shit we’re going to fall anyway, he thought dismally.

But it wasn’t really a fall, only a minor sideslip. A moment later he and Wolf were standing firmly, not on hard bathroom tile but on dirt.

A reek of sulphur mingled with what smelled like raw sewage flooded in. It was a deathly smell, and Jack thought it meant the end of all hope.

“Jason! What’s that smell?” Wolf groaned. “Oh Jason that smell, can’t stay here, Jacky, can’t stay—”

Jack’s eyes snapped open. At the same moment Wolf let go of Jack’s hands and blundered forward, his own eyes still tightly shut. Jack saw that Wolf’s ill-fitting chinos and checked shirt had been replaced by the Oshkosh biballs in which Jack had originally seen the big herdsman. The John Lennon glasses were gone. And—

—and Wolf was blundering toward the edge of a precipice less than four feet away.

“Wolf!” He lunged at Wolf and wrapped his arms around Wolf’s waist. “Wolf, no!”

“Jacky, can’t stay,” Wolf moaned. “It’s a Pit, one of the Pits, Morgan made these places, oh I heard that Morgan made them, I can smell it—”

“Wolf, there’s a cliff, you’ll fall!”

Wolf’s eyes opened. His jaw dropped as he saw the smokey chasm which spread at their feet. In its deepest, cloudy depths, red fire winked like infected eyes.

“A Pit,” Wolf moaned. “Oh Jacky, it’s a Pit. Furnaces of the Black Heart down there. Black Heart at the middle of the world. Can’t stay, Jacky, it’s the worst bad there is.”

Jack’s first cold thought as he and Wolf stood at the edge of the Pit, looking down into hell, or the Black Heart at the middle of the world, was that Territories geography and Indiana geography weren’t the same. There was no corresponding place in the Sunlight Home to this cliff, this hideous Pit.

Four feet to the right, Jack thought with sudden, sickening horror. That’s all it would have taken—just four feet to the right. And if Wolf had done what I told him—

If Wolf had done just what Jack had told him, they would have flipped from that first stall. And if they had done that, they would have come into the Territories just over this cliff’s edge.

The strength ran out of his legs. He groped at Wolf again, this time for support.

Wolf held him absently, his eyes wide and glowing a steady orange. His face was a grue of dismay and fear. “It’s a Pit, Jacky.”

It looked like the huge open-pit molybdenum mine he had visited with his mother when they had vacationed in Colorado three winters ago—they had gone to Vail to ski but one day it had been too bitterly cold for that and so they had taken a bus tour to the Continental Minerals molybdenum mine outside the little town of Sidewinder. “It looks like Gehenna to me, Jack-O,” she had said, and her face as she looked out the frost-bordered bus window had been dreamy and sad. “I wish they’d shut those places down, every one of them. They’re pulling fire and destruction out of the earth. It’s Gehenna, all right.”

Thick, choking vines of smoke rose from the depths of the Pit. Its sides were veined with thick lodes of some poisonous green metal. It was perhaps half a mile across. A road leading downward spiraled its inner circumference. Jack could see figures toiling both upward and downward upon this road.

It was a prison of some kind, just as the Sunlight Home was a prison, and these were the prisoners and their keepers. The prisoners were naked, harnessed in pairs to carts like rickshaws—carts filled with huge chunks of that green, greasy-looking ore. Their faces were drawn in rough woodcuts of pain. Their faces were blackened with soot. Their faces ran with thick red sores.

The guards toiled beside them, and Jack saw with numb dismay that they were not human; in no sense at all could they be called human. They were twisted and humped, their hands were claws, their ears pointed like Mr. Spock’s. Why, they’re gargoyles! he thought. All those nightmare monsters on those cathedrals in France—Mom had a book and I thought we were going to have to see every one in the whole country but she stopped when I had a bad dream and wet the bed—did they come from here? Did somebody see them here? Somebody from the Middle Ages who flipped over, saw this place, and thought he’d had a vision of hell?