The Talisman

Lily Cavanaugh had little use for tears.
    ‘But that ain’t the only reason she come here, was it?’
    ‘No,’ Jack said in a low voice. ‘I think . . . she came here to die.’ His voice rose impossibly on the last word, making a squeak like an unoiled hinge.
    ‘Maybe,’ Speedy said, looking at Jack steadily. ‘And maybe you here to save her. Her . . . and a woman just like her.’
    ‘Who?’ Jack said through numb lips. He knew who. He didn’t know her name, but he knew who.
    ‘The Queen,’ Speedy said. ‘Her name is Laura DeLoessian, and she is the Queen of the Territories.’
    2
    ‘Help me,’ Speedy grunted. ‘Catch old Silver Lady right under the tail. You be takin liberties with the Lady, but I guess she ain’t gonna mind if you’re helpin me get her back where she belongs.’
    ‘Is that what you call her? Silver Lady?’
    ‘Yeah-bob,’ Speedy said, grinning, showing perhaps a dozen teeth, top and bottom. ‘All carousel horses is named, don’t you know that? Catch on, Travellin Jack!’
    Jack reached under the white horse’s wooden tail and locked his fingers together. Grunting, Speedy wrapped his big brown hands around the Lady’s forelegs. Together they carried the wooden horse over to the canted dish of the carousel, the pole pointing down, its far end sinister with layers of Quaker State oil.
    ‘Little to the left . . .’ Speedy gasped. ‘Yeah . . . now peg her, Travellin Jack! Peg her down good!’
    They seated the pole and then stood back, Jack panting, Speedy grinning and gasping wheezily. The black man armed sweat from his brow and then turned his grin on Jack.
    ‘My, ain’t we cool?’
    ‘If you say so,’ Jack answered, smiling.
    ‘I say so! Oh yes!’ Speedy reached into his back pocket and pulled out the dark green pint bottle. He unscrewed the cap, drank – and for a moment Jack felt a weird certainty: he could see through Speedy. Speedy had become transparent, as ghostly as one of the spirits on the Topper show, which they showed on one of the indy stations out in L.A. Speedy was disappearing. Disappearing , Jack thought, or going someplace else? But that was another nutty thought; it made no sense at all.
    Then Speedy was as solid as ever. It had just been a trick his eyes had played, a momentary –
    No. No it wasn’t. For just a second he almost wasn’t here! – hallucination.
    Speedy was looking shrewdly at him. He started to hold the bottle out to Jack, then shook his head a little. He recapped it instead, and then slid it into his back pocket again. He turned to study the Silver Lady, back in her place on the carousel, now needing only to have her post bolted securely into place. He was smiling. ‘We just as cool as we can be, Travellin Jack.’
    ‘Speedy—’
    ‘All of em is named,’ Speedy said, walking slowly around the canted dish of the carousel, his footfalls echoing in the high building. Overhead, in the shadowy crisscross of the beams, a few barnswallows cooed softly. Jack followed him. ‘Silver Lady . . . Midnight . . . this here roan is Scout . . . this mare’s Ella Speed.’
    The black man threw back his head and sang, startling the barnswallows into flight:
    ‘“ Ella Speed was havin her lovin fun . . . let me tell you what old Bill Martin done . . .” Hoo! Look at em fly!’ He laughed . . . but when he turned to Jack, he was serious again. ‘You like to take a shot at savin your mother’s life, Jack? Hers, and the life of that other woman I tole you about?’
    ‘I . . .’ . . . don’t know how , he meant to say, but a voice inside – a voice which came from that same previously locked room from which the memory of the two men and the attempted kidnapping had come that morning – rose up powerfully: You do know! You might need Speedy to get you started, but you do know, Jack. You do.
    He knew that voice so very well. It was his father’s voice.
    ‘I will if you tell me how,’ he said, his voice rising and falling unevenly.
    Speedy crossed to the room’s far wall – a great circular shape made of narrow slatted boards, painted with a primitive but wildly energetic mural of dashing horses. To Jack, the wall looked like the pull-down lid of his father’s rolltop desk (and that desk had been in Morgan Sloat’s office the last time Jack and his mother had been there, he suddenly remembered – the thought brought a thin, milky anger with it).
    Speedy pulled out a gigantic ring of keys, picked thoughtfully through them, found