The Talisman

like a fox after a goose.

Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud that was like being hit in the back of the neck.

“What does he look like?” he asked the Captain urgently.

“Morgan?” the Captain asked, as if startled out of some interior dream.

“Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?” And employing the innate gift for mimicry he’d always had—a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down—Jack “did” Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin. His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. “Does he go like that?”

“No,” the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him that Speedy Parker was old. “Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long”—the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long—“and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He wears a built-up boot, but—” He shrugged.

“You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—”

“Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!”

Jack lowered his voice. “I think I know the guy,” he said—and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . . something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world. Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!

“Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack winced but resisted.

Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.

“Not yet,” he said. Another question had occurred to him. “Did she have a son?”

“The Queen?”

“Yes.”

“She had a son,” the Captain replied reluctantly. “Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—”

“Tell me about him!”

“There is nothing to tell,” the Captain answered. “The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men—Osmond, perhaps—smothered the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying—God pounds His nails. Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter. He . . . Boy? are you all right?”

Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.

He had almost died as an infant.

His mother had told him the story—how she had found him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils savagely shut with his left hand (You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky, his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth, while Morgan cried: I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil. I don’t think that’s going to help him!

(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom? Jack had said. Yes, very funny, Jack-O, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)

“Boy!” the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. “Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . .”

“I’m okay,” Jack said—his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by- play of baseball in a sweet dream. “Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.”

The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.

“Okay,” Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could—Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.

He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.

He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.