The Talisman

“If you say so,” Jack answered, smiling.

“I say so! Oh yes!” Speedy reached into his back pocket and pulled out the dark green pint bottle. He unscrewed the cap, drank—and for a moment Jack felt a weird certainty: he could see through Speedy. Speedy had become transparent, as ghostly as one of the spirits on the Topper show, which they showed on one of the indy stations out in L.A. Speedy was disappearing. Disappearing, Jack thought, or going someplace else? But that was another nutty thought; it made no sense at all.

Then Speedy was as solid as ever. It had just been a trick his eyes had played, a momentary—

No. No it wasn’t. For just a second he almost wasn’t here!

—hallucination.

Speedy was looking shrewdly at him. He started to hold the bottle out to Jack, then shook his head a little. He recapped it instead, and then slid it into his back pocket again. He turned to study the Silver Lady, back in her place on the carousel, now needing only to have her post bolted securely into place. He was smiling. “We just as cool as we can be, Travellin Jack.”

“Speedy—”

“All of em is named,” Speedy said, walking slowly around the canted dish of the carousel, his footfalls echoing in the high building. Overhead, in the shadowy crisscross of the beams, a few barnswallows cooed softly. Jack followed him. “Silver Lady . . . Midnight . . . this here roan is Scout . . . this mare’s Ella Speed.”

The black man threw back his head and sang, startling the barnswallows into flight:

“ ’Ella Speed was havin her lovin fun . . . let me tell you what old Bill Martin done. . . .’ Hoo! Look at em fly!” He laughed . . . but when he turned to Jack, he was serious again. “You like to take a shot at savin your mother’s life, Jack? Hers, and the life of that other woman I tole you about?”

“I . . .” . . . don’t know how, he meant to say, but a voice inside—a voice which came from that same previously locked room from which the memory of the two men and the attempted kidnapping had come that morning—rose up powerfully: You do know! You might need Speedy to get you started, but you do know, Jack. You do.

He knew that voice so very well. It was his father’s voice.

“I will if you tell me how,” he said, his voice rising and falling unevenly.

Speedy crossed to the room’s far wall—a great circular shape made of narrow slatted boards, painted with a primitive but wildly energetic mural of dashing horses. To Jack, the wall looked like the pull-down lid of his father’s rolltop desk (and that desk had been in Morgan Sloat’s office the last time Jack and his mother had been there, he suddenly remembered—the thought brought a thin, milky anger with it).

Speedy pulled out a gigantic ring of keys, picked thoughtfully through them, found the one he wanted, and turned it in a padlock. He pulled the lock out of the hasp, clicked it shut, and dropped it into one of his breast pockets. Then he shoved the entire wall back on its track. Gorgeously bright sunlight poured in, making Jack narrow his eyes. Water ripples danced benignly across the ceiling. They were looking at the magnificent sea-view the riders of the Arcadia Funworld Carousel got each time Silver Lady and Midnight and Scout carried them past the east side of the round carousel building. A light sea-breeze pushed Jack’s hair back from his forehead.

“Best to have sunlight if we’re gonna talk about this,” Speedy said. “Come on over here, Travellin Jack, and I’ll tell you what I can . . . which ain’t all I know. God forbid you should ever have to get all of that.”

3

Speedy talked in his soft voice—it was as mellow and soothing to Jack as leather that has been well broken in. Jack listened, sometimes frowning, sometimes gaping.

“You know those things you call the Daydreams?”

Jack nodded.

“Those things ain’t dreams, Travellin Jack. Not daydreams, not nightdreams, either. That place is a real place. Real enough, anyway. It’s a lot different from here, but it’s real.”

“Speedy, my mom says—”

“Never mind that right now. She don’t know about the Territories . . . but, in a way, she do know about them. Because your daddy, he knew. And this other man—”

“Morgan Sloat?”

“Yeah, I reckon. He knows too.” Then, cryptically, Speedy added, “I know who he is over there, too. Don’t I! Whooo!”

“The picture in your office . . . not Africa?”

“Not Africa.”

“Not a trick?”

“Not a trick.”

“And my father went to this place?” he asked, but his heart already knew the answer—it was an answer that clarified too many things not to be true. But, true or not, Jack wasn’t sure how much of it he wanted to believe. Magic lands? Sick queens? It made him uneasy. It made him uneasy about his mind. Hadn’t his mother told him over and over again when he was small that he shouldn’t confuse his Daydreaming with what was really real? She had been very stern about that, and she had frightened Jack a little. Perhaps, he thought now, she had been frightened herself. Could she have lived with Jack’s father for so long and not known something? Jack didn’t think so. Maybe, he thought, she didn’t know very much . . . just enough to scare her.

Going nuts. That’s what she was talking about. People who couldn’t tell the difference between real things and make-believe were going nuts.