The Talisman

behind him, heard them clash and rattle—and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.

He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was even a moment to realize—Oh dear Jesus a tail it’s got something like a tail—that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.

Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back, trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion—

—Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God please—

—of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out what it was saying. “Now I’m not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I’m gonna kill you . . . after.”

Hearing it with his ears? Or in his head?

It didn’t matter. The space between this world and that had shrunk from a universe to a mere membrane.

The Elroy-thing snarled and came toward him, now unsteady and awkward on its rear feet, its clothes bulging in all the wrong places, its tongue swinging from its fanged mouth. Here was the vacant lot behind Smokey Updike’s Oatley Tap, yes, here it was at last, choked with weeds and blown trash—a rusty bedspring here, the grille of a 1957 Ford over there, and a ghastly sickle moon like a bent bone in the sky overhead, turning every shard of broken glass into a dead and staring eye, and this hadn’t begun in New Hampshire, had it? No. It hadn’t begun when his mother got sick, or with the appearance of Lester Parker. It had begun when—

Jacky was six. When we all lived in California and no one lived anywhere else and Jacky was—

He fumbled at the straps of his pack.

It came again, seeming almost to dance, for a moment reminding him of some animated Disney cartoon-figure in the chancy moonlight. Crazily, Jack began to laugh. The thing snarled and leaped at him. The swipe of those heavy hoofclaws again missed him by barest inches as he danced back through the weeds and litter. The Elroy- thing came down on the bedspring and somehow became entangled in it. Howling, snapping white gobbets of foam into the air, it pulled and twisted and lunged, one foot buried deep in the rusty coils.

Jack groped inside his pack for the bottle. He dug past socks and dirty undershorts and a wadded, fragrant pair of jeans. He seized the neck of the bottle and yanked it out.

The Elroy-thing split the air with a howl of rage, finally pulling free of the bedspring.

Jack hit the cindery, weedy, scruffy ground and rolled over, the last two fingers of his left hand hooked around one pack-strap, his right hand holding the bottle. He worked at the cap with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, the pack dangling and swinging. The cap spun off.

Can it follow me? he wondered incoherently, tipping the bottle to his lips. When I go, do I punch some kind of hole through the middle of things? Can it follow me through and finish me on the other side?

Jack’s mouth filled with that rotten dead-grape taste. He gagged, his throat closing, seeming to actually reverse direction. Now that awful taste filled his sinuses and nasal passages as well and he uttered a deep, shaking groan. He could hear the Elroy-thing screaming now, but the scream seemed far away, as if it were on one end of the Oatley tunnel and he, Jack, were falling rapidly toward the other end. And this time there was a sense of falling and he thought: Oh my God what if I just flipped my stupid self over a cliff or off a mountain over there?

He held on to the pack and the bottle, his eyes screwed desperately shut, waiting for whatever might happen next—Elroy-thing or no Elroy-thing. Territories or oblivion—and the thought which had haunted him all night came swinging back like a dancing carousel horse—Silver Lady, maybe Ella Speed. He caught it and rode it down in a cloud of the magic juice’s awful smell, holding it, waiting for whatever would happen next; feeling his clothes change on his body.

Six oh yes when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California who blows that sax daddy is it Dexter Gordon or is it is it what does Mom mean when she says we’re living on a fault-line and where where oh where do you go Daddy you and Uncle Morgan oh Daddy sometimes he looks at you like like oh like there is a fault-line in his head and an earthquake going on behind his eyes and you’re dying in it oh Daddy!

Falling, twisting, turning in the middle of limbo, in the middle of a smell like a purple cloud, Jack Sawyer, John Benjamin Sawyer, Jacky, Jacky

—was six when it started to happen, and who blew that sax Daddy? Who blew it when I was six, when Jacky was six, when Jacky—

11

The Death of Jerry Bledsoe

1

was six . . . when it really started, Daddy, when the engines that eventually pulled him to Oatley and beyond began to chug away. There had been loud saxophone music. Six. Jacky was six. At first his attention had been entirely on the toy his father had given him, a scale model of a London taxi—the toy car was heavy as a brick, and on the smooth wooden floors of the new office a good push sent it rumbling straight across the room. Late afternoon, first grade all the way on the other side of August, a neat new car that rolled like a tank on the strip of bare wood behind the couch, a contented, relaxed feeling in the air- conditioned office . . . no more work to do, no more phone calls that couldn’t wait until the next day. Jack pushed the heavy toy taxi down the strip of bare wood, barely able to hear the rumbling of the solid rubber tires under the soloing of a saxophone. The black car struck one of the legs of the couch, spun sideways, and stopped. Jack crawled down and Uncle Morgan had parked himself in one of the chairs on the other side of the couch. Each man nursed a drink; soon they would put down their glasses, switch off the turntable and the amplifier, and go downstairs to their cars.

when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California

“Who’s playing that sax?” he heard Uncle Morgan ask, and, half in a reverie, heard that familiar voice in a new way: something whispery and hidden in Morgan Sloat’s voice coiled into Jacky’s ear. He touched the top of the toy