shoulders visible above the sheet.
And then Jack nearly shouted with shock and terror, be-
cause the woman on the bed was his mother. That was his
mother, and she was dying.
“You saw her,” the Captain whispered, and braced his arms
more firmly.
Open-mouthed, Jack stared in at his mother. She was dy-
ing, he could not doubt that any longer: even her skin seemed bleached and unhealthy, and her hair, too, had lost several shades of color. The nurses around her bustled about, straightening the sheets or rearranging books on a table, but they assumed this busy and purposeful manner because they had no
real idea of how to help their patient. The nurses knew that for such a patient there was no real help. If they could stave off
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death for another month, or even a week, they were at the
fullest extent of their powers.
He looked back at the face turned upward like a waxen
mask and finally saw that the woman on the bed was not his
mother. Her chin was rounder, the shape of her nose slightly more classical. The dying woman was his mother’s Twinner; it was Laura DeLoessian. If Speedy had wanted him to see
more, he was not capable of it: that white moveless face told him nothing of the woman behind it.
“Okay,” he whispered, pushing the panel back into place,
and the Captain lowered him to the floor.
In the darkness he asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nobody can find that out,” came from above him. “The
Queen cannot see, she cannot speak, she cannot move. . . .”
There was silence for a moment, and then the Captain
touched his hand and said, “We must return.”
They quietly emerged from blackness into the dusty empty
room. The Captain brushed ropy cobwebs from the front of
his uniform. His head cocked to one side, he considered Jack for a long moment, worry very plain upon his face. “Now you must answer a question of mine,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Were you sent here to save her? To save the Queen?”
Jack nodded. “I think so—I think that’s part of it. Tell me just one thing.” He hesitated. “Why don’t those creeps out
there just take over? She sure couldn’t stop them.”
The Captain smiled. There was no humor in that smile.
“Me,” he said. “My men. We’d stop them. I know not what they may have gotten up to in the Outposts, where order is
thin—but here we hold to the Queen.”
A muscle just below the eye on the unscarred cheekbone
jumped like a fish. He was pressing his hands together, palm to palm. “And your directions, your orders, whatever, are
to . . . ah, to go west, is that correct?”
Jack could practically feel the man vibrating, controlling
his growing agitation only from a lifetime’s habit of self-
discipline. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m supposed to go west.
Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t I go west? To the other Alhambra?”
“I can’t say, I can’t say,” the Captain blurted, taking a step backward. “We have to get you out of here right now. I can’t tell
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you what to do.” He could not even look at Jack now, the boy saw. “But you can’t stay here a minute longer—let’s, ah, let’s see if we can get you out and away before Morgan gets here.”
“Morgan?” Jack said, almost thinking that he had not
heard the name correctly. “Morgan Sloat? Is he coming
here?”
7
Farren
1
The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He
was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room
as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy
had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking
hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was
speaking. But—
Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.
Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so
hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the
words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud
that was like being hit in the back of the neck.
“What does he look like?” he asked the Captain urgently.
“Morgan?” the Captain asked, as if startled out of some in-
terior dream.
“Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?” And employing the innate gift for mim-icry he’d always had—a gift which had made his father roar
with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down—Jack
“did” Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked
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his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin.
His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. “Does he go like that?”
“No,” the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him
that Speedy Parker was old. “Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long”—the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long—“and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He
wears a built-up boot, but—” He shrugged.
“You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—”
“Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!”
Jack lowered his voice. “I think I know the guy,” he said—
and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . .
something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world. Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!
“Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy.
Come on, let’s get out of here.”
His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack
winced but resisted.
Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.
“Not yet,” he said. Another question had occurred to him.
“Did she have a son?”
“The Queen?”
“Yes.”
“She had a son,” the Captain replied reluctantly. “Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—”
“Tell me about him!”
“There is nothing to tell,” the Captain answered. “The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men—Osmond, perhaps—smothered
the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every
dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying— God pounds His nails. Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter.
He . . . Boy? are you all right?”
Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and
when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.
He had almost died as an infant.
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His mother had told him the story—how she had found
him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been
capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run
screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had
snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils
savagely shut with his left hand ( You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky, his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth,
while Morgan cried: I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil. I don’t think that’s going to help him!
(Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom? Jack had said.
Yes, very funny, Jack-O, his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)
“Boy!” the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that
Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. “Boy! Dammit! If
you faint on me . . .”
“I’m okay,” Jack said—his voice seemed to come from far
away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer
when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the
top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. “Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.”