Whup-whup-whup!), and then killed it ( Hahhhhhhhhhh . . . ).
He climbed down quickly.
“You all right, Jack?”
Jack held the bottle out for Speedy to take. “Your magic
juice really sucks, Speedy,” he said wanly.
Speedy looked hurt . . . then he smiled. “Whoever tole you
medicine supposed to taste good, Travellin Jack?”
“Nobody, I guess,” Jack said. He felt some of his strength
coming back—slowly—as that thick feeling of disorientation
ebbed.
“You believe now, Jack?”
Jack nodded.
“No,” Speedy said. “That don’t git it. Say it out loud.”
“The Territories,” Jack said. “They’re there. Real. I saw a bird—” He stopped and shuddered.
“What kind of a bird?” Speedy asked sharply.
“Seagull. Biggest damn seagull—” Jack shook his head.
“You wouldn’t believe it.” He thought and then said, “No, I guess you would. Nobody else, maybe, but you would.”
“Did it talk? Lots of birds over there do. Talk foolishness, mostly. And there’s some that talks a kind of sense . . . but it’s a evil kind of sense, and mostly it’s lies.”
Jack was nodding. Just hearing Speedy talk of these
things, as if it were utterly rational and utterly lucid to do so, made him feel better.
“I think it did talk. But it was like—” He thought hard.
“There was a kid at the school Richard and I went to in L.A.
Brandon Lewis. He had a speech impediment, and when he
talked you could hardly understand him. The bird was like
that. But I knew what it said. It said my mother was dying.”
Speedy put an arm around Jack’s shoulders and they sat
quietly together on the curb for a time. The desk clerk from the Alhambra, looking pale and narrow and suspicious of
every living thing in the universe, came out with a large stack of mail. Speedy and Jack watched him go down to the corner
of Arcadia and Beach Drive and dump the inn’s correspon-
dence into the mailbox. He turned back, marked Jack and
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Speedy with his thin gaze, and then turned up the Alhambra’s main walk. The top of his head could barely be descried over the tops of the thick box hedges.
The sound of the big front door opening and closing was
clearly audible, and Jack was struck by a terrible sense of this place’s autumn desolation. Wide, deserted streets. The long beach with its empty dunes of sugar-sand. The empty amusement park, with the roller-coaster cars standing on a siding under canvas tarps and all the booths padlocked. It came to him that his mother had brought him to a place very like the end of the world.
Speedy had cocked his head back and sang in his true
and mellow voice, “Well I’ve laid around . . . and played around . . . this old town too long . . . summer’s almost gone, yes, and winter’s coming on . . . winter’s coming on, and I feel like . . . I got to travel on—”
He broke off and looked at Jack.
“You feel like you got to travel, ole Travellin Jack?”
Flagging terror stole through his bones.
“I guess so,” he said. “If it will help. Help her. Can I help her, Speedy?”
“You can,” Speedy said gravely.
“But—”
“Oh, there’s a whole string of buts,” Speedy said. “Whole
trainload of buts, Travellin Jack. I don’t promise you no cakewalk. I don’t promise you success. Don’t promise that you’ll come back alive, or if you do, that you’ll come back with your mind still bolted together.
“You gonna have to do a lot of your ramblin in the Territo-
ries, because the Territories is a whole lot smaller. You notice that?”
“Yes.”
“Figured you would. Because you sure did get a whole
mess down the road, didn’t you?”
Now an earlier question recurred to Jack, and although it
was off the subject, he had to know. “Did I disappear,
Speedy? Did you see me disappear?”
“You went,” Speedy said, and clapped his hands once,
sharply, “just like that.”
Jack felt a slow, unwilling grin stretch his mouth . . . and Speedy grinned back.
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THE TALISMAN
“I’d like to do it sometime in Mr. Balgo’s computer class,”
Jack said, and Speedy cackled like a child. Jack joined him—
and the laughter felt good, almost as good as those blackberries had tasted.
After a few moments Speedy sobered and said, “There’s a
reason you got to be in the Territories, Jack. There’s somethin you got to git. It’s a mighty powerful somethin.”
“And it’s over there?”
“Yeah-bob.”
“It can help my mother?”
“Her . . . and the other.”
“The Queen?”
Speedy nodded.
“What is it? Where is it? When do I—”
“Hold it! Stop!” Speedy held up a hand. His lips were
smiling, but his eyes were grave, almost sorrowing. “One
thing at a time. And, Jack, I can’t tell you what I don’t
know . . . or what I’m not allowed to tell.”
“Not allowed?” Jack asked, bewildered. “Who—”
“There you go again,” Speedy said. “Now listen, Travellin
Jack. You got to leave as soon as you can, before that man
Bloat can show up an bottle you up—”
“Sloat.”
“Yeah, him. You got to get out before he comes.”
“But he’ll bug my mother,” Jack said, wondering why he
was saying it—because it was true, or because it was an ex-
cuse to avoid the trip that Speedy was setting before him, like a meal that might be poisoned. “You don’t know him! He—”
“I know him,” Speedy said quietly. “I know him of old,
Travellin Jack. And he knows me. He’s got my marks on him.
They’re hidden—but they’re on him. Your momma can take
care of herself. At least, she’s gonna have to, for a while. Because you got to go.”
“Where?”
“West,” Speedy said. “From this ocean to the other.”
“What?” Jack cried, appalled by the thought of such distance. And then he thought of an ad he’d seen on TV not three nights ago—a man picking up goodies at a deli buffet some
thirty-five thousand feet in the air, just as cool as a cucumber.
Jack had flown from one coast to another with his mother a
good two dozen times, and was always secretly delighted by
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the fact that when you flew from New York to L.A. you could have sixteen hours of daylight. It was like cheating time. And it was easy.
“Can I fly?” he asked Speedy.
“No!” Speedy almost yelled, his eyes widening in conster-nation. He gripped Jack’s shoulder with one strong hand.
“Don’t you let nuthin git you up in the sky! You dassn’t! If you happened to flip over into the Territories while you was up there—”
He said no more; he didn’t have to. Jack had a sudden, ap-
palling picture of himself tumbling out of that clear, cloudless sky, a screaming boy-projectile in jeans with a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, a sky-diver with no parachute.
“You walk,” Speedy said. “And thumb what rides you think you can . . . but you got to be careful, because there’s strangers out there. Some are just crazy people, sissies that would like to touch you or thugs that would like to mug you. But
some are real Strangers, Travellin Jack. They people with a foot in each world—they look that way and this like a goddam Janus-head. I’m afraid they gonna know you comin be-
fore too long has passed. And they’ll be on the watch.”
“Are they”—he groped—“Twinners?”
“Some are. Some aren’t. I can’t say no more right now. But
you get across if you can. Get across to the other ocean. You travel in the Territories when you can and you’ll get across faster. You take the juice—”
“I hate it!”
“Never mind what you hate,” Speedy said sternly. “You get
across and you’re gonna find a place—another Alhambra. You
got to go in that place. It’s a scary place, a bad place. But you got to go in.”
“How will I find it?”
“It will call you. You’ll hear it loud and clear, son.”
“Why?” Jack asked. He wet his lips. “Why do I have to go
there, if it’s so bad?”
“Because,” Speedy said, “that’s where the Talisman is.
Somewhere in that other Alhambra.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You will,” Speedy said. He stood up, then took Jack’s
hand. Jack rose. The two of them stood face-to-face, old black man and young white boy.
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THE TALISMAN
“Listen,” Speedy said, and his voice took on a slow, chant-
ing rhythm. “Talisman be given unto your hand, Travellin
Jack. Not too big, not too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here’s your burden, here’s your