shamed him . . . it was almost like peeing your pants. Was that because his mother had always been so tough? He supposed that was part of it, all right; Lily Cavanaugh had little use for tears.
“But that ain’t the only reason she come here, was it?”
“No,” Jack said in a low voice. “I think . . . she came here to die.” His voice rose impossibly on the last word, making a squeak like an unoiled hinge.
“Maybe,” Speedy said, looking at Jack steadily. “And maybe
you here to save her. Her . . . and a woman just like her.”
“Who?” Jack said through numb lips. He knew who. He
didn’t know her name, but he knew who.
“The Queen,” Speedy said. “Her name is Laura DeLoess-
ian, and she is the Queen of the Territories.”
2
“Help me,” Speedy grunted. “Catch ole Silver Lady right un-
der the tail. You be takin’ liberties with the Lady, but I guess she ain’t gonna mind if you’re helpin me get her back where she belong.”
“Is that what you call her? Silver Lady?”
“Yeah bob,” Speedy said, grinning, showing perhaps a
dozen teeth, top and bottom. “All carousel horses is named, don’t you know that? Catch on. Travellin Jack!”
Jack reached under the white horse’s wooden tail and
locked his fingers together. Grunting, Speedy wrapped his big brown hands around the Lady’s forelegs. Together they carried the wooden horse over to the canted dish of the carousel, the pole pointing down, its far end sinister with layers of Quaker State oil.
“Little to the left . . .” Speedy gasped. “Yeah . . . now peg her, Travellin Jack! Peg her down good!”
They seated the pole and then stood back, Jack panting,
Speedy grinning and gasping wheezily. The black man armed
sweat from his brow and then turned his grin on Jack.
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“My, ain’t we cool?”
“If you say so,” Jack answered, smiling.
“I say so! Oh yes!” Speedy reached into his back pocket and pulled out the dark green pint bottle. He unscrewed the cap, drank—and for a moment Jack felt a weird certainty: he could see through Speedy. Speedy had become transparent, as ghostly as one of the spirits on the Topper show, which they showed on one of the indy stations out in L.A. Speedy was disappearing.
Disappearing, Jack thought, or going someplace else? But that was another nutty thought; it made no sense at all.
Then Speedy was as solid as ever. It had just been a trick
his eyes had played, a momentary—
No. No it wasn’t. For just a second he almost wasn’t here!
—hallucination.
Speedy was looking shrewdly at him. He started to hold
the bottle out to Jack, then shook his head a little. He re-capped it instead, and then slid it into his back pocket again.
He turned to study the Silver Lady, back in her place on the carousel, now needing only to have her post bolted securely into place. He was smiling. “We just as cool as we can be,
Travellin Jack.”
“Speedy—”
“All of em is named,” Speedy said, walking slowly around
the canted dish of the carousel, his footfalls echoing in the high building. Overhead, in the shadowy crisscross of the
beams, a few barnswallows cooed softly. Jack followed him.
“Silver Lady . . . Midnight . . . this here roan is Scout . . . this mare’s Ella Speed.”
The black man threw back his head and sang, startling the
barnswallows into flight:
“ ‘ Ella Speed was havin her lovin fun . . . let me tell you what old Bill Martin done. . . .’ Hoo! Look at em fly!” He laughed . . . but when he turned to Jack, he was serious again.
“You like to take a shot at savin your mother’s life, Jack?
Hers, and the life of that other woman I tole you about?”
“I . . .” . . . don’t know how, he meant to say, but a voice inside—a voice which came from that same previously
locked room from which the memory of the two men and the
attempted kidnapping had come that morning—rose up pow-
erfully: You do know! You might need Speedy to get you started, but you do know, Jack. You do.
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THE TALISMAN
He knew that voice so very well. It was his father’s voice.
“I will if you tell me how,” he said, his voice rising and
falling unevenly.
Speedy crossed to the room’s far wall—a great circular
shape made of narrow slatted boards, painted with a primitive but wildly energetic mural of dashing horses. To Jack, the wall looked like the pull-down lid of his father’s rolltop desk (and that desk had been in Morgan Sloat’s office the last time Jack and his mother had been there, he suddenly remembered—the
thought brought a thin, milky anger with it).
Speedy pulled out a gigantic ring of keys, picked thought-
fully through them, found the one he wanted, and turned it in a padlock. He pulled the lock out of the hasp, clicked it shut, and dropped it into one of his breast pockets. Then he shoved the entire wall back on its track. Gorgeously bright sunlight poured in, making Jack narrow his eyes. Water ripples danced benignly across the ceiling. They were looking at the magnifi-cent sea-view the riders of the Arcadia Funworld Carousel got each time Silver Lady and Midnight and Scout carried them
past the east side of the round carousel building. A light sea-breeze pushed Jack’s hair back from his forehead.
“Best to have sunlight if we’re gonna talk about this,”
Speedy said. “Come on over here, Travellin Jack, and I’ll tell you what I can . . . which ain’t all I know. God forbid you should ever have to get all of that.”
3
Speedy talked in his soft voice—it was as mellow and sooth-
ing to Jack as leather that has been well broken in. Jack listened, sometimes frowning, sometimes gaping.
“You know those things you call the Daydreams?”
Jack nodded.
“Those things ain’t dreams, Travellin Jack. Not day-
dreams, not nightdreams, either. That place is a real place.
Real enough, anyway. It’s a lot different from here, but it’s real.”
“Speedy, my mom says—”
“Never mind that right now. She don’t know about the Ter-
ritories . . . but, in a way, she do know about them. Because your daddy, he knew. And this other man—”
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“Morgan Sloat?”
“Yeah, I reckon. He knows too.” Then, cryptically, Speedy
added, “I know who he is over there, too. Don’t I! Whooo!”
“The picture in your office . . . not Africa?”
“Not Africa.”
“Not a trick?”
“Not a trick.”
“And my father went to this place?” he asked, but his heart already knew the answer—it was an answer that clarified too many things not to be true. But, true or not, Jack wasn’t sure how much of it he wanted to believe. Magic lands? Sick queens? It made him uneasy. It made him uneasy about his
mind. Hadn’t his mother told him over and over again when
he was small that he shouldn’t confuse his Daydreaming with what was really real? She had been very stern about that, and she had frightened Jack a little. Perhaps, he thought now, she had been frightened herself. Could she have lived with Jack’s father for so long and not known something? Jack didn’t think so. Maybe, he thought, she didn’t know very much . . .
just enough to scare her.
Going nuts. That’s what she was talking about. People who couldn’t tell the difference between real things and make-believe were going nuts.
But his father had known a different truth, hadn’t he? Yes.
He and Morgan Sloat.
They have magic like we have physics, right?
“Your father went often, yes. And this other man, Groat—”
“Sloat.”
“Yeah-bob! Him. He went, too. Only your dad, Jacky, he
went to see and learn. The other fella, he just went to plunder him out a fortune.”
“Did Morgan Sloat kill my Uncle Tommy?” Jack asked.
“Don’t know nuthin bout that. You just listen to me, Travellin Jack. Because time is short. If you really think this fellow Sloat is gonna turn up here—”
“He sounded awful mad,” Jack said. Just thinking about
Uncle Morgan showing up in Arcadia Beach made him feel
nervous.
“—then time is shorter than ever. Because maybe he
wouldn’t mind so bad if your mother died. And his Twinner is sure hopin that Queen Laura dies.”
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THE TALISMAN
“Twinner?”
“There’s people in this world have got Twinners in the Ter-
ritories,” Speedy said. “Not many, because there’s a lot less people over there—maybe only one for every hundred thousand over here. But Twinners can go back and forth the easiest.”
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