“This Queen . . . she’s my mother’s . . . her Twinner?”
“Yeah, seems like she is.”
“But my mother never—?”
“No. She never has. No reason.”
“My father had a . . . a Twinner?”
“Yes indeed he did. A fine man.”
Jack wet his lips—what a crazy conversation this was!
Twinners and Territories! “When my father died over here,
did his Twinner die over there?”
“Yeah. Not zackly the same time, but almost.”
“Speedy?”
“What?”
“Have I got a Twinner? In the Territories?”
And Speedy looked at him so seriously that Jack felt a
deep chill go up his back. “Not you, son. There’s only one of you. You special. And this fella Smoot—”
“Sloat,” Jack said, smiling a little.
“—yeah, whatever, he knows it. That be one of the reasons
he be coming up here soon. And one of the reasons you got to get movin.”
“Why?” Jack burst out. “What good can I do if it’s cancer?
If it’s cancer and she’s here instead of in some clinic, it’s because there’s no way, if she’s here, see, it means—” The tears threatened again and he swallowed them back frantically. “It means it must be all through her.”
All through her. Yes. That was another truth his heart knew: the truth of her accelerating weight-loss, the truth of the brown shadows under her eyes. All through her, but please God, hey, God, please, man, she’s my mother—
“I mean,” he finished in a thick voice, “what good is that
Daydream place going to do?”
“I think we had enough jaw-chin for now,” Speedy said.
“Just believe this here, Travellin Jack: I’d never tell you you ought to go if you couldn’t do her some good.”
“But—”
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“Get quiet, Travellin Jack. Can’t talk no more till I show
you some of what I mean. Wouldn’t do no good. Come on.”
Speedy put an arm around Jack’s shoulders and led him
around the carousel dish. They went out the door together and walked down one of the amusement park’s deserted byways.
On their left was the Demon Dodgem Cars building, now
boarded and shuttered. On their right was a series of booths: Pitch Til U Win, Famous Pier Pizza & Dough-Boys, the Rim-fire Shooting Gallery, also boarded up (faded wild animals
pranced across the boards—lions and tigers and bears, o my).
They reached the wide main street, which was called
Boardwalk Avenue in vague imitation of Atlantic City—
Arcadia Funworld had a pier, but no real boardwalk. The ar-
cade building was now a hundred yards down to their left and the arch marking the entrance to Arcadia Funworld about two hundred yards down to their right. Jack could hear the steady, grinding thunder of the breaking waves, the lonely cries of the gulls.
He looked at Speedy, meaning to ask him what now, what
next, could he mean any of it or was it a cruel joke . . . but he said none of those things. Speedy was holding out the green glass bottle.
“That—” Jack began.
“Takes you there,” Speedy said. “Lot of people who visit
over there don’t need nothin like this, but you ain’t been there in a while, have you, Jacky?”
“No.” When had he last closed his eyes in this world and
opened them in the magic world of the Daydreams, that world with its rich, vital smells and its deep, transparent sky? Last year? No. Further back than that . . . California . . . after his father had died. He would have been about . . .
Jack’s eyes widened. Nine years old? That long? Three
years?
It was frightening to think how quietly, how unobtrusively, those dreams, sometimes sweet, sometimes darkly unsettling, had slipped away—as if a large part of his imagination had
died painlessly and unannounced.
He took the bottle from Speedy quickly, almost dropping
it. He felt a little panicky. Some of the Daydreams had been disturbing, yes, and his mother’s carefully worded admoni-tions not to mix up reality and make-believe (in other words
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don’t go crazy, Jacky, ole kid ole sock, okay?) had been a little scary, yes, but he discovered now that he didn’t want to lose that world after all.
He looked in Speedy’s eyes and thought: He knows it, too.
Everything I just thought, he knows. Who are you, Speedy?
“When you ain’t been there for a while, you kinda forget
how to get there on your own hook,” Speedy said. He nodded
at the bottle. “That’s why I got me some magic juice. This
stuff is special.” Speedy spoke this last in tones that were almost reverential.
“Is it from there? The Territories?”
“Nope. They got some magic right here, Travellin Jack.
Not much, but a little. This here magic juice come from California.”
Jack looked at him doubtfully.
“Go on. Have you a little sip and see if you don’t go travellin.” Speedy grinned. “Drink enough of that, you can go just about anyplace you want. You’re lookin at one who knows.”
“Jeez, Speedy, but—” He began to feel afraid. His mouth
had gone dry, the sun seemed much too bright, and he could
feel his pulsebeat speeding up in his temples. There was a
coppery taste under his tongue and Jack thought: That’s how his “magic juice” will taste—horrible.
“If you get scared and want to come back, have another
sip,” Speedy said.
“It’ll come with me? The bottle? You promise?” The
thought of getting stuck there, in that mystical other place, while his mother was sick and Sloat-beset back here, was awful.
“I promise.”
“Okay.” Jack brought the bottle to his lips . . . and then let it fall away a little. The smell was awful—sharp and rancid. “I don’t want to, Speedy,” he whispered.
Lester Parker looked at him, and his lips were smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes—they were stern. Uncompromising. Frightening. Jack thought of black eyes: eye of gull, eye of vortex. Terror swept through him.
He held the bottle out to Speedy. “Can’t you take it back?”
he asked, and his voice came out in a strengthless whisper.
“Please?”
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Speedy made no reply. He did not remind Jack that his
mother was dying, or that Morgan Sloat was coming. He
didn’t call Jack a coward, although he had never in his life felt so much like a coward, not even the time he had backed away from the high board at Camp Accomac and some of the other
kids had booed him. Speedy merely turned around and whis-
tled at a cloud.
Now loneliness joined the terror, sweeping helplessly
through him. Speedy had turned away from him; Speedy had
shown him his back.
“Okay,” Jack said suddenly. “Okay, if it’s what you need
me to do.”
He raised the bottle again, and before he could have any
second or third thoughts, he drank.
The taste was worse than anything he had anticipated. He
had had wine before, had even developed some taste for it (he especially liked the dry white wines his mother served with sole or snapper or swordfish), and this was something like
wine . . . but at the same time it was a dreadful mockery of all the wines he had drunk before. The taste was high and sweet and rotten, not the taste of lively grapes but of dead grapes that had not lived well.
As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet-purple taste, he could actually see those grapes—dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies.
He swallowed and thin fire printed a snail-trail down his
throat.
He closed his eyes, grimacing, his gorge threatening to
rise. He did not vomit, although he believed that if he had eaten any breakfast he would have done.
“Speedy—”
He opened his eyes, and further words died in his throat.
He forgot about the need to sick up that horrible parody of wine. He forgot about his mother, and Uncle Morgan, and his father, and almost everything else.
Speedy was gone. The graceful arcs of the roller coaster
against the sky were gone. Boardwalk Avenue was gone.
He was someplace else now. He was—
“In the Territories,” Jack whispered, his entire body crawl-
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ing with a mad mixture of terror and exhilaration. He could feel the hair stirring on the nape of his neck, could feel a goofed-up grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Speedy, I’m here, my God, I’m here in the Territories! I—”
But wonder overcame him. He clapped a hand over his
mouth and slowly turned in a complete circle, looking at this place to which Speedy’s “magic juice” had brought him.