The Talisman

“I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy,” Jack panted, grinning.

“I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick.”

“Probably just how you look, chum.”

“Don’t . . . call me chum,” Richard whispered, and Jack’s grin widened. He thought, Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever.

4

“I knew that man,” Richard whispered from above Jack.

It startled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.

The tracks, Jack wondered. Do they go where I think they go?

“What man?”

“The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew him. I used to see him around.”

“When?” Jack panted.

“A long time ago. When I was a little kid.” Richard then added with great reluctance, “Around the time that I had that . . . that funny dream in the closet.” He paused. “Except I guess it wasn’t a dream, was it?”

“No. I guess it wasn’t.”

“Yes. Was the man with the whip Reuel’s dad?”

“What do you think?”

“It was,” Richard said glumly. “Sure it was.”

Jack stopped.

“Richard, where do these tracks go?”

“You know where they go,” Richard said with a strange, empty serenity.

“Yeah—I think I do. But I want to hear you say it.” Jack paused. “I guess I need to hear you say it. Where do they go?”

“They go to a town called Point Venuti,” Richard said, and he sounded near tears again. “There’s a big hotel there. I don’t know if it’s the place you’re looking for or not, but I think it probably is.”

“So do I,” Jack said. He set off once more, Richard’s legs in his arms, a growing ache in his back, following the tracks that would take him—both of them—to the place where his mother’s salvation might be found.

5

As they walked, Richard talked. He did not come on to the subject of his father’s involvement in this mad business all at once, but began to circle slowly in toward it.

“I knew that man from before,” Richard said. “I’m pretty sure I did. He came to the house. Always to the back of the house. He didn’t ring the bell, or knock. He kind of . . . scratched on the door. It gave me the creeps. Scared me so bad I felt like peeing my pants. He was a tall man—oh, all grown men seem tall to little kids, but this guy was very tall—and he had white hair. He wore dark glasses most of the time. Or sometimes the kind of sunglasses that have the mirror lenses. When I saw that story on him they had on Sunday Report, I knew I’d seen him somewhere before. My father was upstairs doing some paperwork the night that show was on. I was sitting in front of the tube, and when my father came in and saw what was on, he almost dropped the drink he was holding. Then he changed the station to a Star Trek rerun.

“Only the guy wasn’t calling himself Sunlight Gardener when he used to come and see my father. His name . . . I can’t quite remember. But it was something like Banlon . . . or Orlon . . .”

“Osmond?”

Richard brightened. “That was it. I never heard his first name. But he used to come once every month or two. Sometimes more often. Once he came almost every other night, for a week, and then he was gone for almost half a year. I used to lock myself in my room when he came. I didn’t like his smell. He wore some kind of scent . . . cologne, I suppose, but it really smelled stronger than that. Like perfume. Cheap dimestore perfume. But underneath it—”

“Underneath it he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath for about ten years.”

Richard looked at him, wide-eyed.

“I met him as Osmond, too,” Jack explained. He had explained before—at least some of this—but Richard had not been listening then. He was listening now. “In the Territories version of New Hampshire, before I met him as Sunlight Gardener in Indiana.”

“Then you must have seen that . . . that thing.”

“Reuel?” Jack shook his head. “Reuel must have been out in the Blasted Lands then, having a few more radical cobalt treatments.” Jack thought of the running sores on the creature’s face, thought of the worms. He looked at his red, puffy wrists where the worms had bitten, and shuddered. “I never saw Reuel until the end, and I never saw his American Twinner at all. How old were you when Osmond started showing up?”

“I must have been four. The thing about the . . . you know, the closet . . . that hadn’t happened yet. I remember I was more afraid of him after that.”

“After the thing touched you in the closet.”

“Yes.”

“And that happened when you were five.”