The Talisman

jump ship.”

He closed his eyes, concentrated . . . and there was that brief moment of spinning vertigo as the two of them flipped.

37

Richard Remembers

1

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

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

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

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

“Jack? Are we okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO TRESPASSING!

By Order of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department

By Order of the California State Police

VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED!

2

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

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

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

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

“Bitez mon crank, mon ami.”

“Where are we going?”

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

“Point Venuti?”

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

“Why did you ask that, chum?”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Jack shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not.

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

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