“Better,” Farren said dryly. “Not much, but a little.”
“Thanks,” Jack said sarcastically.
“You can’t cry off, boy. Osmond’s behind you. Morgan
will soon be behind you as well. And perhaps . . . perhaps
there are problems wherever you came from, too. But take
this. If Parkus sent you to me, he’d want me to give you this.
So take it, and then go.”
He was holding out a coin. Jack hesitated, then took it. It was the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, but much heavier—as
heavy as gold, he guessed, although its color was dull silver.
What he was looking at was the face of Laura DeLoessian in
profile—he was struck again, briefly but forcibly, by her resemblance to his mother. No, not just resemblance—in spite
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 128
128
THE TALISMAN
of such physical dissimilarities as the thinner nose and
rounder chin, she was his mother. Jack knew it. He turned the coin over and saw an animal with the head and wings of an
eagle and the body of a lion. It seemed to be looking at Jack.
It made him a little nervous, and he put the coin inside his jerkin, where it joined the bottle of Speedy’s magic juice.
“What’s it for?” he asked Farren.
“You’ll know when the time comes,” the Captain replied.
“Or perhaps you won’t. Either way, I’ve done my duty by you.
Tell Parkus so, when you see him.”
Jack felt wild unreality wash over him again.
“Go, son,” Farren said. His voice was lower, but not neces-
sarily more gentle. “Do your job . . . or as much of it as you can.”
In the end, it was that feeling of unreality—the pervasive
sense that he was no more than a figment of someone else’s
hallucination—that got him moving. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. He kicked aside a splinter of ale-soaked
wood. Stepped over the shattered remnants of a wheel. De-
toured around the end of the wagon, not impressed by the
blood drying there or the buzzing flies. What was blood or
buzzing flies in a dream?
He reached the end of the muddy, wood- and barrel-
littered stretch of road, and looked back . . . but Captain Farren had turned the other way, perhaps to look for his men,
perhaps so he would not have to look at Jack. Either way, Jack reckoned, it came to the same thing. A back was a back. Nothing to look at.
He reached inside his jerkin, tentatively touched the coin
Farren had given him, and then gripped it firmly. It seemed to make him feel a little better. Holding it as a child might hold a quarter given him to buy a treat at the candy store, Jack went on.
7
It might have been as little as two hours later when Jack heard the sound Captain Farren had described as “thunder rolling
along the earth”—or it might have been as long as four. Once the sun passed below the western rim of the forest (and it did that not long after Jack had entered it), it became difficult to judge the time.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 129
The Road of Trials
129
On a number of occasions vehicles came out of the west,
presumably bound for the Queen’s pavillion. Hearing each
one come (and vehicles could be heard a long way away here; the clarity with which sound carried made Jack think of what Speedy had said about one man pulling a radish out of the
ground and another smelling it half a mile away) made him
think of Morgan, and each time he hurried first down into the ditch and then up the other side, and so into the woods. He didn’t like being in these dark woods—not even a little way in, where he could still peer around the trunk of a tree and see the road; it was no rest-cure for the nerves, but he liked the idea of Uncle Morgan (for so he still believed Osmond’s superior to be, in spite of what Captain Farren had said) catching him out on the road even less.
So each time he heard a wagon or carriage approaching he
got out of sight, and each time the vehicle passed he went
back to the road. Once, while he was crossing the damp and
weedy right-hand ditch, something ran—or slithered—over
his foot, and Jack cried out.
The traffic was a pain in the tail, and it wasn’t exactly helping him to make better time, but there was also something
comforting about the irregular passage of wagons—they
served notice that he wasn’t alone, at least.
He wanted to get the hell out of the Territories altogether.
Speedy’s magic juice was the worst medicine he’d ever had
in his life, but he would gladly have taken a belly-choking swig of it if someone—Speedy himself, for example—had
just happened to appear in front of him and assure him that, when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he would see would be a set of McDonald’s golden arches—what his
mother called The Great Tits of America. A sense of oppres-
sive danger was growing in him—a feeling that the forest was indeed dangerous, that there were things in it aware of his passage, that perhaps the forest itself was aware of his passage. The trees had gotten closer to the road, hadn’t they? Yes.
Before, they had stopped at the ditches. Now they infested
those as well. Before, the forest had seemed composed solely of pines and spruces. Now other sorts of trees had crept in, some with black boles that twisted together like gnarls of rotted strings, some that looked like weird hybrids of firs and ferns—these latter had nasty-looking gray roots that gripped
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 130
130
THE TALISMAN
at the ground like pasty fingers. Our boy? these nasty things seemed to whisper inside of Jack’s head. OUR boy?
All in your mind, Jack-O. You’re just freaking out a little.
Thing was, he didn’t really believe that.
The trees were changing. That sense of thick oppression in the air—that sense of being watched—was all too real. And he had begun to think that his mind’s obsessive return to monstrous thoughts was almost something he was picking up
from the forest . . . as if the trees themselves were sending to him on some horrible shortwave.
But Speedy’s bottle of magic juice was only half-full.
Somehow that had to last him all the way across the United
States. It wouldn’t last until he was out of New England if he sipped a little every time he got the willies.
His mind also kept returning to the amazing distance he
had travelled in his world when he had flipped back from the Territories. A hundred and fifty feet over here had equalled half a mile over there. At that rate—unless the ratio of distance travelled were somehow variable, and Jack recognized
that it might be—he could walk ten miles over here and be
damn near out of New Hampshire over there. It was like
wearing seven-league boots.
Still, the trees . . . those gray, pasty roots . . .
When it starts to get really dark—when the sky goes from blue to purple—I’m flipping back. That’s it; that’s all she wrote. I’m not walking through these woods after dark. And if I run out of magic juice in Indiana or something, ole Speedy can just send me another bottle by UPS, or something.
Still thinking these thoughts—and thinking how much bet-
ter it made him feel to have a plan (even if the plan only en-compassed the next two hours or so)—Jack suddenly realized
he could hear another vehicle and a great many horses.
Cocking his head, he stopped in the middle of the road.
His eyes widened, and two pictures suddenly unspooled be-
hind his eyes with shutterlike speed: the big car the two men had been in—the car that had not been a Mercedes—and then
the WILD CHILD van, speeding down the street and away from
Uncle Tommy’s corpse, blood dripping from the broken plas-
tic fangs of its grille. He saw the hands on the van’s steering wheel . . . but they weren’t hands. They were weird, articulated hooves.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 131
The Road of Trials
131
At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth.
Now, hearing it—the sound still distant but perfectly clear in the pure air—Jack wondered how he could have even
thought those other approaching wagons might be Morgan’s
diligence. He would certainly never make such a mistake
again. The sound he heard now was perfectly ominious, thick with a potential for evil—the sound of a hearse, yes, a hearse driven by a devil.
He stood frozen in the road, almost hypnotized, as a rab-
bit is hypnotized by headlights. The sound grew steadily