The Talisman

popped over, although he had been wildly excited as well as terrified.
    The diligence took a mighty bounce – in the Outposts, you took the roads as you found them and thanked God they were there at all. Orris shifted in his seat and his clubfoot muttered dull pain.
    ‘Hold on steady, God pound you,’ the driver muttered up above. His whip whistled and popped. ‘Roll, you sons of dead whores! Roll on!’
    Sloat grinned with the pleasure of being here, even though it would only be for moments. He already knew what he needed to know; Orris’s voice had muttered it to him. The diligence would arrive at Outpost Depot – Thayer School in the other world – well before morning. It might be possible to take them there if they had lingered; if not, the Blasted Lands awaited them. It hurt and enraged him to think that Richard was now with the Sawyer brat, but if a sacrifice was demanded . . . well, Orris had lost his son and survived.
    The only thing that had kept Jack alive this long was the maddening fact of his single nature – when the whelp flipped to a place, he was always in the analogue of the place he had left. Sloat, however, always ended up where Orris was, which might be miles away from where he needed to be . . . as was the case now. He had been lucky at the rest area, but Sawyer had been luckier.
    ‘Your luck will run out soon enough, my little friend,’ Orris said. The diligence took another terrific bounce. He grimaced, then grinned. If nothing else, the situation was simplifying itself even as the final confrontation took on wider and deeper implications.
    Enough.
    He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. For just a moment he felt another dull thud of pain in the deformed foot . . . and when he opened his eyes, Sloat was looking up at the ceiling of his apartment. As always, there was a moment when the extra pounds fell into him with sickening weight, when his heart reacted with a surprised double-beat and then sped up.
    He had gotten to his feet then and had called West Coast Business Jet. Seventy minutes later he had been leaving LAX. The Lear’s steep and abrupt takeoff stance made him feel as it always did – it was as if a blowtorch had been strapped to his ass. They had touched down in Springfield at five-fifty central time, just as Orris would be approaching Outpost Depot in the Territories. Sloat had rented a Hertz sedan and here he was. American travel did have its advantages.
    He got out of the car and, just as the morning bells began to ring, he walked onto the Thayer campus his own son had so lately quitted.
    Everything was the essence of an early Thayer weekday morning. The chapel bells were playing a normal morning tune, something classical but not quite recognizable which sounded a bit like ‘Te Deum’ but wasn’t. Students passed Sloat on their way to the dining hall or to morning workouts. They were perhaps a little more silent than usual, and they shared a look – pale and slightly dazed, as if they had all shared a disquieting dream.
    Which, of course, they had, Sloat thought. He stopped for a moment in front of Nelson House, looking at it thoughtfully. They simply didn’t know how fundamentally unreal they all were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be. He walked around to the side and watched a maintenance man picking up broken glass that lay on the ground like trumpery diamonds. Beyond his bent back Sloat could see into the Nelson House lounge, where an unusually quiet Albert the Blob was sitting and looking blankly at a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
    Sloat started across toward The Depot, his thoughts turning to the first time that Orris had flipped over into this world. He found himself thinking of that time with a nostalgia that was, when one really stopped to think about it, damned near grotesque – after all, he had nearly died. Both of them had nearly died. But it had been in the middle fifties, and now he was in his middle fifties – it made all the difference in the world.
    He had been coming back from the office and the sun had been going down in a Los Angeles haze of smudged purples and smokey yellows – this had been in the days before the L.A. smog had really begun to thicken up. He had been on Sunset Boulevard and looking at a billboard advertising a new Peggy Lee record when he had felt a coldness in his mind. It had been as if a wellspring had suddenly opened somewhere in his subconscious, spilling out some alien weirdness that