The Talisman

front of the depot-keeper himself. No nonsense about Migrating to a spot which might be a hundred miles away from the point of interest in Territories geography and no way to cover the intervening distance but by wagon or, worse, what his father had called shanks’ mare.
    The boys would already have gone on, in all likelihood. Into the Blasted Lands. If so, the Blasted Lands would finish them. And Sunlight Gardener’s Twinner, Osmond, would be more than capable of squeezing out all the information that Anders knew. Osmond and his horrid son. No need to Migrate at all.
    Except maybe for a look-see. For the pleasure and refreshment of becoming Orris again, if only for a few seconds.
    And to Make Sure, of course. His entire life, from childhood onward, had been an exercise in Making Sure.
    He looked around once to assure himself that Etheridge had not lingered; then he opened the door of The Depot and went inside.
    The smell was stale, dark, and incredibly nostalgic – the smell of old makeup and canvas flats. For a moment he had the crazy idea that he had done something even more incredible than Migrating; he felt that he might have travelled back through time to those undergraduate days when he and Phil Sawyer had been theater-mad college students.
    Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw the unfamiliar, almost mawkish props – a plaster bust of Pallas for a production of The Raven , an extravagantly gilt birdcage, a bookcase full of false bindings – and remembered that he was in the Thayer School excuse for a ‘little theater’.
    He paused for a moment, breathing deeply of the dust; he turned his eyes up to one dusty sunray falling through a small window. The light wavered and was suddenly a deeper gold, the color of lamplight. He was in the Territories. Just like that, he was in the Territories. There was a moment of almost staggering exhilaration at the speed of the change. Usually there was a pause, a sense of sideslipping from one place to another. This caesura seemed to be in direct proportion to the distance between the physical bodies of his two selves, Sloat and Orris. Once, when he had Migrated from Japan, where he was negotiating a deal with the Shaw brothers for a terrible novel about Hollywood stars menaced by a crazed ninja , the pause had gone on so long that he had feared he might be lost forever somewhere in the empty, senseless purgatory that exists between the worlds. But this time they had been close . . . so close! It was like those few times, he thought
    (Orris thought)
    when a man and woman achieve orgasm at the exact same instant and die in sex together.
    The smell of dried paint and canvas was replaced with the light, pleasant smell of Territories burning-oil. The lamp on the table was guttering low, sending out dark membranes of smoke. To his left a table was set, the remains of a meal congealing on the rough plates. Three plates.
    Orris stepped forward, dragging his clubfoot a little as always. He tipped one of the plates up, let the guttering lamplight skate queasily across the grease. Who ate from this one? Was it Anders, or Jason, or Richard . . . the boy would also have been Rushton if my son had lived?
    Rushton had drowned while swimming in a pond not far from the Great House. There had been a picnic. Orris and his wife had drunk a quantity of wine. The sun had been hot. The boy, little more than an infant, had been napping. Orris and his wife had made love and then they had also fallen asleep in the sweet afternoon sunshine. He had been awakened by the child’s cries. Rushton had awakened and gone down to the water. He had been able to dog-paddle a little, just enough to get well out beyond his depth before panicking. Orris had limped to the water, dived in, and swum as fast as he could out to where the boy floundered. It was his foot, his damned foot, that had hampered him and perhaps cost his son his life. When he reached the boy, he had been sinking. Orris had managed to catch him by the hair and pull him to shore . . . but by then Rushton had been blue and dead.
    Margaret had died by her own hand less than six weeks later.
    Seven months after that, Morgan Sloat’s own young son had nearly drowned in a Westwood YMCA pool during a Young Paddlers class. He had been pulled from the pool as blue and dead as Rushton . . . but the lifeguard had applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Richard Sloat had responded.
    God pounds His nails , Orris thought, and then a deep,