meant to be a father.”
Jack shuddered, remembering how his enemy had torn his
way through the air and nearly killed Wolf ’s entire herd.
“We’re going,” he said. “Will you please help me get
Richard into the cab, Anders?”
“My Lord . . .” Anders hung his head, then lifted it and
gave Jack a look of almost parental concern. “The journey
will require at least two days, perhaps three, before ye reach the western shore. Have ye any food? Would ye share my
evening meal?”
Jack shook his head, impatient to begin this last leg of his journey to the Talisman, but then his stomach abruptly
growled, reminding him of how long it had been since he had eaten anything but the Ring-Dings and stale Famous Amos
cookies in Albert the Blob’s room. “Well,” he said, “I suppose another half hour won’t make any difference. Thank you, Anders. Help me get Richard up on his feet, will you?” And
maybe, he thought, he wasn’t so eager to cross the Blasted
Lands after all.
The two of them jerked Richard to his feet. Like the Dor-
mouse, he opened his eyes, smiled, and sagged back to sleep again. “Food,” Jack said. “Real food. You up for that, chum?”
“I never eat in dreams,” Richard answered with surreal ra-
tionality. He yawned, then wiped his eyes. He gradually had found his feet, and no longer leaned against Anders and Jack.
“I am pretty hungry, though, to tell you the truth. I’m having a long dream, aren’t I, Jack?” He seemed almost proud of it.
“Yep,” said Jack.
“Say, is that the train we’re going to take? It looks like a cartoon.”
“Yep.”
“Can you drive that thing, Jack? It’s my dream, I know,
but—”
“It’s about as hard to operate as my old electric train set,”
Jack said. “I can drive it, and so can you.”
“I don’t want to,” Richard said, and that cringing, whining tone came back into his voice again. “I don’t want to get on that train at all. I want to go back to my room.”
“Come and have some food instead,” Jack said, and found
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himself leading Richard out of the shed. “Then we’re on our way to California.”
And so the Territories showed one of its best faces to the boys immediately before they entered the Blasted Lands. Anders
gave them thick sweet slices of bread clearly made from the grain growing around The Depot, kebabs of tender sections of meat and plump juicy unfamiliar vegetables, a spicy pink
juice that Jack for some reason thought of as papaya though he knew it was not. Richard chewed in a happy trance, the
juice running down his chin until Jack wiped it off for him.
“California,” he said once. “I should have known.” Assuming that he was alluding to that state’s reputation for craziness, Jack did not question him. He was more concerned about
what the two of them were doing to Anders’s presumably lim-
ited stock of food, but the old man kept nipping behind the counter, where he or his father before him had installed a
small wood-burning stove, and returning with yet more food.
Corn muffins, calf ’s-foot jelly, things that looked like chicken legs but tasted of . . . what? Frankincense and myrrh? Flowers? The taste fairly exploded over his tongue, and he thought that he, too, might begin to drool.
The three of them sat around a little table in the warm and mellow room. At the end of the meal Anders almost shyly
brought forth a heavy beaker half-filled with red wine. Feeling as if he were following someone else’s script, Jack drank a small glassful.
3
Two hours later, beginning to feel drowsy, Jack wondered if that enormous meal had been an equally enormous error. First of all, there had been the departure from Ellis-Breaks and
The Depot, which had not gone easily; secondly, there was
Richard, who threatened to go seriously crazy; and thirdly, and above all else, there were the Blasted Lands. Which were far crazier than Richard would ever be, and which absolutely demanded concentrated attention.
After the meal the three of them had returned to the shed,
and the trouble had started. Jack knew that he was fearful of
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whatever might be ahead—and, he now knew, that fear was
perfectly justified—and perhaps his trepidation had made him behave less well than he should have. The first difficulty had come when he tried to pay old Anders with the coin Captain
Farren had given him. Anders responded as if his beloved Jason had just stabbed him in the back. Sacrilege! Outrage! By offering the coin, Jack had done more than merely insult the old liveryman; he had metaphorically smeared mud on his religion. Supernaturally restored divine beings apparently were not supposed to offer coins to their followers. Anders had
been upset enough to smash his hand into the “devil-box,” as he called the metal container for the rank of batteries, and Jack knew that Anders had been mightily tempted to strike
another target besides the train. Jack had managed only a
semi-truce: Anders did not want his apologies any more than he wanted his money. The old man had finally calmed down
once he realized the extent of the boy’s dismay, but he did not really return to his normal behavior until Jack speculated out loud that the Captain Farren coin might have other functions, other roles for him. “Ye’re not Jason entire,” the old man
gloomed, “yet the Queen’s coin may aid ye toward yer des-
tiny.” He shook his head heavily. His farewell wave had been distinctly half-hearted.
But a good portion of that had been due to Richard. What
had begun as a sort of childish panic had quickly blossomed into full-blown terror. Richard had refused to get in the cab.
Up until that moment he had mooned around the shed, not
looking at the train, seemingly in an uncaring daze. Then he had realized that Jack was serious about getting him on that thing, and he had freaked—and, strangely, it had been the idea of ending up in California which had disturbed him most.
“NO! NO! CAN’T!” Richard had yelled when Jack urged
him toward the train. “I WANT TO GO BACK TO MY
ROOM!”
“They might be following us, Richard,” Jack said wearily.
“We have to get going.” He reached out and took Richard’s
arm. “This is all a dream, remember?”
“Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” Anders had said, moving aim-
lessly around in the big shed, and Jack understood that for once the liveryman was not addressing him.
“I HAVE TO GO BACK TO MY ROOM!” Richard
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squalled. His eyes were clamped shut so tightly that a single painful crease ran from temple to temple.
Echoes of Wolf again. Jack had tried to pull Richard to-
ward the train, but Richard had stuck fast, like a mule. “I CAN’T GO THERE!” he yelled.
“Well, you can’t stay here, either,” Jack said. He made an-
other futile effort at yanking Richard toward the train, and this time actually budged him a foot or two. “Richard,” he
said, “this is ridiculous. Do you want to be here alone? Do you want to be left alone in the Territories?” Richard shook his head. “Then come with me. It’s time. In two days we’ll be in California.”
“Bad business,” Anders muttered to himself, watching the
boys. Richard simply continued to shake his head, offering a single comprehensive negative. “I can’t go there,” he repeated. “I can’t get on that train and I can’t go there.”
“California?”
Richard bit his mouth into a lipless seam and closed his
eyes again. “Oh hell,” Jack said. “Can you help me, Anders?”
The huge old man gave him a dismayed, almost disgusted
look, then marched across the room and scooped up Richard
in his arms—as if Richard were the size of a puppy. The boy let out a distinctly puppyish squeal. Anders dropped him onto the padded bench in the cab. “Jack!” Richard called, afraid that he somehow was going to wind up in the Blasted Lands
all by himself. “I’m here,” Jack said, and was in fact already climbing into the other side of the cab. “Thank you, Anders,”
he said to the old liveryman, who nodded gloomily and re-
treated back into a corner of the shed. “Take care.” Richard had begun to weep, and Anders looked at him without pity.
Jack pushed the ignition button, and two enormous blue
sparks shot out from the “devil-box” just as the engine
whirred into life. “Here goes,” Jack said, and eased the lever forward. The train began to glide out of the shed. Richard
whimpered and drew up his knees. Saying something like
“Nonsense” or “Impossible”—Jack chiefly heard the hiss of
the sibilants—he buried his face between his knees. He