Just ahead of them, tall wooden gates loomed in a wall
made of wooden posts with the bark still on them—it was like a stockade wall in an old Western (his mother had made a few of those, too). Heavy brackets were screwed into the gates, but the bar the brackets were meant to hold was not in place.
It leaned against the woodpile to the left, thick as a railroad crosstie. The gates stood open almost six inches. Some mud-dled sense of direction in Jack’s head suggested that they had worked their way completely around the pavillion to its far side.
“Thank God,” the Captain said in a more normal voice.
“Now—”
“Captain,” a voice called from behind them. The voice was
low but carrying, deceptively casual. The Captain stopped in his tracks. It had called just as Jack’s scarred companion had been in the act of reaching for the left gate to push it open; it was as if the voice’s owner had watched and waited for just that second.
“Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to
your . . . ah . . . son.”
The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing,
halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettling out of
place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of—Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray
melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him. He’s crazy—this was the intuition which leaped spontaneously into his mind. Nuttier than a damned fruitcake.
Osmond took two neat steps toward them. In his left hand
he held the rawhide-wrapped haft of a bullwhip. The handle
narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder—the whip’s central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.
Osmond tugged the whip’s handle and the coils slithered
from his shoulder with a dry hiss. He wiggled the handle, and
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the metal-tipped strands of rawhide writhed slowly in the
straw-littered mud.
“Your son?” Osmond repeated, and took another step to-
ward them. And Jack suddenly understood why this man had
looked familiar before. The day he had almost been kid-
napped—hadn’t this man been White Suit?
Jack thought that perhaps he had been.
3
The Captain made a fist, brought it to his forehead, and bent forward. After only a moment’s hesitation, Jack did the same.
“My son, Lewis,” the Captain said stiffly. He was still bent over, Jack saw, cutting his eyes to the left. So he remained bent over himself, his heart racing.
“Thank you, Captain. Thank you, Lewis. Queen’s bless-
ings upon you.” When he touched him with the haft of the
bullwhip, Jack almost cried out. He stood straight again, biting the cry in.
Osmond was only two paces away now, regarding Jack
with that mad, melancholy gaze. He wore a leather jacket and what might have been diamond studs. His shirt was extravagantly ruffled. A bracelet of links clanked ostentatiously upon his right wrist (from the way he handled the bullwhip, Jack guessed that his left was his working hand). His hair was
drawn back and tied with a wide ribbon that might have been white satin. There were two odors about him. The top was
what his mother called “all those men’s perfumes,” meaning
after-shave, cologne, whatever. The smell about Osmond was
thick and powdery. It made Jack think of those old black-and-white British films where some poor guy was on trial in the Old Bailey. The judges and lawyers in those films always
wore wigs, and Jack thought the boxes those wigs came out of would smell like Osmond—dry and crumbly-sweet, like the
world’s oldest powdered doughnut. Beneath it, however, was a more vital, even less pleasant smell: it seemed to pulse out at him. It was the smell of sweat in layers and dirt in layers, the smell of a man who bathed seldom, if ever.
Yes. This was one of the creatures that had tried to steal
him that day.
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THE TALISMAN
His stomach knotted and roiled.
“I did not know you had a son, Captain Farren,” Osmond
said. Although he spoke to the Captain, his eyes remained on Jack. Lewis, he thought, I’m Lewis, don’t forget—
“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 an-
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other 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.
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