The Talisman

Jack’s eyes widened. Nine years old? That long? Three years?

It was frightening to think how quietly, how unobtrusively, those dreams, sometimes sweet, sometimes darkly unsettling, had slipped away—as if a large part of his imagination had died painlessly and unannounced.

He took the bottle from Speedy quickly, almost dropping it. He felt a little panicky. Some of the Daydreams had been disturbing, yes, and his mother’s carefully worded admonitions not to mix up reality and make-believe (in other words don’t go crazy, Jacky, ole kid ole sock, okay?) had been a little scary, yes, but he discovered now that he didn’t want to lose that world after all.

He looked in Speedy’s eyes and thought: He knows it, too. Everything I just thought, he knows. Who are you, Speedy?

“When you ain’t been there for a while, you kinda forget how to get there on your own hook,” Speedy said. He nodded at the bottle. “That’s why I got me some magic juice. This stuff is special.” Speedy spoke this last in tones that were almost reverential.

“Is it from there? The Territories?”

“Nope. They got some magic right here, Travellin Jack. Not much, but a little. This here magic juice come from California.”

Jack looked at him doubtfully.

“Go on. Have you a little sip and see if you don’t go travellin.” Speedy grinned. “Drink enough of that, you can go just about anyplace you want. You’re lookin at one who knows.”

“Jeez, Speedy, but—” He began to feel afraid. His mouth had gone dry, the sun seemed much too bright, and he could feel his pulsebeat speeding up in his temples. There was a coppery taste under his tongue and Jack thought: That’s how his “magic juice” will taste—horrible.

“If you get scared and want to come back, have another sip,” Speedy said.

“It’ll come with me? The bottle? You promise?” The thought of getting stuck there, in that mystical other place, while his mother was sick and Sloat-beset back here, was awful.

“I promise.”

“Okay.” Jack brought the bottle to his lips . . . and then let it fall away a little. The smell was awful—sharp and rancid. “I don’t want to, Speedy,” he whispered.

Lester Parker looked at him, and his lips were smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes—they were stern. Uncompromising. Frightening. Jack thought of black eyes: eye of gull, eye of vortex. Terror swept through him.

He held the bottle out to Speedy. “Can’t you take it back?” he asked, and his voice came out in a strengthless whisper. “Please?”

Speedy made no reply. He did not remind Jack that his mother was dying, or that Morgan Sloat was coming. He didn’t call Jack a coward, although he had never in his life felt so much like a coward, not even the time he had backed away from the high board at Camp Accomac and some of the other kids had booed him. Speedy merely turned around and whistled at a cloud.

Now loneliness joined the terror, sweeping helplessly through him. Speedy had turned away from him; Speedy had shown him his back.

“Okay,” Jack said suddenly. “Okay, if it’s what you need me to do.”

He raised the bottle again, and before he could have any second or third thoughts, he drank.

The taste was worse than anything he had anticipated. He had had wine before, had even developed some taste for it (he especially liked the dry white wines his mother served with sole or snapper or swordfish), and this was something like wine . . . but at the same time it was a dreadful mockery of all the wines he had drunk before. The taste was high and sweet and rotten, not the taste of lively grapes but of dead grapes that had not lived well.

As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet-purple taste, he could actually see those grapes—dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies.

He swallowed and thin fire printed a snail-trail down his throat.

He closed his eyes, grimacing, his gorge threatening to rise. He did not vomit, although he believed that if he had eaten any breakfast he would have done.

“Speedy—”

He opened his eyes, and further words died in his throat. He forgot about the need to sick up that horrible parody of wine. He forgot about his mother, and Uncle Morgan, and his father, and almost everything else.

Speedy was gone. The graceful arcs of the roller coaster against the sky were gone. Boardwalk Avenue was gone.

He was someplace else now. He was—

“In the Territories,” Jack whispered, his entire body crawling with a mad mixture of terror and exhilaration. He could feel the hair stirring on the nape of his neck, could feel a goofed-up grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Speedy, I’m here, my God, I’m here in the Territories! I—”

But wonder overcame him. He clapped a hand over his mouth and slowly turned in a complete circle, looking at this place to which Speedy’s “magic juice” had brought him.

4

The ocean was still there, but now it was a darker, richer blue—the truest indigo Jack had ever seen. For a moment he stood transfixed, the sea-breeze blowing in his hair, looking at the horizon-line where that indigo ocean met a sky the color of faded denim.

That horizon-line showed a faint but unmistakable curve.

He shook his head, frowning, and turned the other way. Sea-grass, high and wild and tangled, ran down from