The Talisman

“Would that I did not,” the Captain replied, looking at Jack with anger and contempt. “I honor him by bringing him to the great pavillion and then he slinks away like a dog. I caught him playing at d—”

“Yes, yes,” Osmond said, smiling remotely. He doesn’t believe a word, Jack thought wildly, and felt his mind take another clumsy step toward panic. Not a single word! “Boys are bad. All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.”

He tapped Jack lightly on the wrist with the haft of the bullwhip. Jack, his nerves screwed up to an unbearable pitch, screamed . . . and immediately flushed with hot shame.

Osmond giggled. “Bad, oh yes, it’s axiomatic, all boys are bad. I was bad; and I’ll wager you were bad, Captain Farren. Eh? Eh? Were you bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” the Captain said.

“Very bad?” Osmond asked. Incredibly, he had begun to prance in the mud. Yet there was nothing swishy about this: Osmond was willowy and almost delicate, but Jack got no feeling of true homosexuality from the man; if there was that innuendo in his words, then Jack sensed intuitively that it was hollow. No, what came through most clearly here was a sense of malignity . . . and madness. “Very bad? Most awfully bad?”

“Yes, Osmond,” Captain Farren said woodenly. His scar glowed in the afternoon light, more red than pink now.

Osmond ceased his impromptu little dance as abruptly as he had begun it. He looked coldly at the Captain.

“No one knew you had a son, Captain.”

“He’s a bastard,” the Captain said. “And simple. Lazy as well, it now turns out.” He pivoted suddenly and struck Jack on the side of the face. There was not much force behind the blow, but Captain Farren’s hand was as hard as a brick. Jack howled and fell into the mud, clutching his ear.

“Very bad, most awfully bad,” Osmond said, but now his face was a dreadful blank, thin and secretive. “Get up, you bad boy. Bad boys who disobey their fathers must be punished. And bad boys must be questioned.” He flicked the whip to one side. It made a dry pop. Jack’s tottery mind made another strange connection—reaching, he supposed later, for home in every way it knew how. The sound of Osmond’s whip was like the pop of the Daisy air rifle he’d had when he was eight. He and Richard Sloat had both had rifles like that.

Osmond reached out and grasped Jack’s muddy arm with one white, spiderlike hand. He drew Jack toward him, into those smells—old sweet powder and old rancid filth. His weird gray eyes peered solemnly into Jack’s blue ones. Jack felt his bladder grow heavy, and he struggled to keep from wetting his pants.

“Who are you?” Osmond asked.

4

The words hung in the air over the three of them.

Jack was aware of the Captain looking at him with a stern expression that could not quite hide his despair. He could hear hens clucking; a dog barking; somewhere the rumble of a large approaching cart.

Tell me the truth; I will know a lie, those eyes said. You look like a certain bad boy I first met in California—are you that boy?

And for a moment, everything trembled on his lips:

Jack, I’m Jack Sawyer, yeah, I’m the kid from California, the Queen of this world was my mother, only I died, and I know your boss, I know Morgan—Uncle Morgan—and I’ll tell you anything you want to know if only you’ll stop looking at me with those freaked-out eyes of yours, sure, because I’m only a kid, and that’s what kids do, they tell, they tell everything—

Then he heard his mother’s voice, tough, on the edge of a jeer:

You gonna spill your guts to this guy, Jack-O? THIS guy? He smells like a distress sale at the men’s cologne counter and he looks like a medieval version of Charles Manson . . . but you suit yourself. You can fool him if you want—no sweat—but you suit yourself.

“Who are you?” Osmond asked again, drawing even closer, and on his face Jack now saw total confidence—he was used to getting the answers he wanted from people . . . and not just from twelve-year-old kids, either.

Jack took a deep, trembling breath (When you want max volume—when you want to get it all the way up to the back row of the balcony—you gotta bring it from your diaphragm, Jacky. It just kind of gets passed through the old vox-box on the way up) and screamed:

“I WAS GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK! HONEST TO GOD!”

Osmond, who had been leaning even farther forward in anticipation of a broken and strengthless whisper, recoiled as if Jack had suddenly reached out and slapped him. He stepped on the trailing rawhide tails of his whip with one booted foot and came close to tripping over them.

“You damned God-pounding little—”

“I WAS GOING TO! PLEASE DON’T WHIP ME OSMOND I WAS GOING TO GO BACK! I NEVER WANTED TO COME HERE I NEVER I NEVER I NEVER—”

Captain Farren lunged forward and struck him in the back. Jack sprawled full-length in the mud, still screaming.

“He’s simple-minded, as I told you,” he heard the Captain saying. “I apologize, Osmond. You can be sure he’ll be beaten within an inch of his life. He—”

“What’s he doing here in the first place?” Osmond shrieked. His voice was now as high and shrewish as any fishwife’s. “What’s your snot-nosed puling brat-bastard doing here at all? Don’t offer to show me his pass! I know he has no pass! You sneaked him in to feed at the Queen’s table . . . to steal the Queen’s silver, for all I know . . . he’s bad . . . one look’s enough to tell anyone that he’s very, intolerably, most indubitably bad!”

The whip came down again, not the mild cough of a Daisy air rifle this time but the loud clean report of a .22, and Jack had time to think I know where that’s going, and then a large fiery hand clawed