The Talisman

clean here. Hell, Richard, can’t you smell it?’
    ‘There are no such things as Territories ,’ Richard said thinly.
    ‘Look around you.’
    ‘No,’ Richard said. His voice was thinner than ever, the voice of an infuriatingly stubborn child.
    Jack snatched up a handful of the heavily bearded grass. ‘Look at this!’
    Richard turned his head.
    Jack had to actively restrain an urge to shake him.
    Instead of doing that, he tossed the grass away, counted mentally to ten, and then started up the hill. He looked down and saw that he was now wearing something like leather chaps. Richard was dressed in much the same way, and he had a red bandanna around his neck that looked like something out of a Frederic Remington painting. Jack reached up to his own neck and felt a similar bandanna. He ran his hands down along his body and discovered that Myles P. Kiger’s wonderfully warm coat was now something very like a Mexican serape. I bet I look like an advertisement for Taco Bell , he thought, and grinned.
    An expression of utter panic came over Richard’s face when Jack started up the hill, leaving him alone at the bottom.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    Jack looked at Richard and came back. He put his hands on Richard’s shoulders and looked soberly into Richard’s eyes.
    ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘Some of them must have seen us flip. It may be that they can’t come right after us, or it may be that they can. I don’t know. I know as much about the laws governing all of this as a kid of five knows about magnetism – and all a kid of five knows on the subject is that sometimes magnets attract and sometimes they repel.
    But for the time being, that’s all I have to know. We have to get out of here. End of story.’
    ‘I’m dreaming all this, I know I am.’
    Jack nodded toward the ramshackle wooden building. ‘You can come or you can stay here. If you want to stay here, I’ll come back for you after I check the place out.’
    ‘None of this is happening,’ Richard said. His naked, glasses-less eyes were wide and flat and somehow dusty. He looked for a moment up at the black Territories sky with its strange and unfamiliar sprawl of stars, shuddered, and looked away. ‘I have a fever. It’s the flu. There’s been a lot of flu around. This is a delirium. You’re guest-starring in my delirium, Jack.’
    ‘Well, I’ll send somebody around to the Delirium Actors’ Guild with my AFTRA card when I get a chance,’ Jack said. ‘In the meantime, why don’t you just stay here, Richard? If none of this is happening, then you have nothing to worry about.’
    He started away again, thinking that it would take only a few more of these Alice-at-the-teaparty conversations with Richard to convince him that he was crazy, as well.
    He was halfway up the hill when Richard joined him.
    ‘I would have come back for you,’ Jack said.
    ‘I know,’ Richard said. ‘I just thought that I might as well come along. As long as all of this is a dream, anyway.’
    ‘Well, keep your mouth shut if there’s anyone up there,’ Jack said. ‘I think there is – I think I saw someone looking out that front window at me.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’ Richard asked.
    Jack smiled. ‘Play it by ear, Richie-boy,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing ever since I left New Hampshire. Playing it by ear.’
    3
    They reached the porch. Richard clutched Jack’s shoulder with panicky strength. Jack turned toward him wearily; Richard’s patented Kansas City Clutch was something else that was getting old in a big hurry.
    ‘What?’ Jack asked.
    ‘This is a dream, all right,’ Richard said, ‘and I can prove it.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘We’re not talking English anymore, Jack! We’re talking some language, and we’re speaking it perfectly, but it’s not English!’
    ‘Yeah,’ Jack said. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’
    He started up the steps again, leaving Richard standing below him, gape-mouthed.
    4
    After a moment or two, Richard recovered himself and scrambled up the steps after Jack. The boards were warped and loose and splintery. Stalks of that richly bearded grain-grass grew up through some of them. Off in the deep darkness, both boys could hear the sleepy hum of insects – it was not the reedy scratch of crickets but a sweeter sound – so much was sweeter over here, Jack thought.
    The outside lamp was now behind them; their shadows ran ahead of them across the porch and then made rightangles to climb the