The Talisman

door. There was an old, faded sign on that door. For a moment it seemed to Jack to be written in strange Cyrillic letters, as indecipherable as Russian. Then they came clear, and the word was no surprise. DEPOT .
    Jack raised his hand to knock, then shook his head a little. No. He would not knock. This was not a private dwelling; the sign said DEPOT , and that was a word he associated with public buildings – places to wait for Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains, loading zones for the Friendly Skies.
    He pushed the door open. Friendly lamplight and a decidedly unfriendly voice came out onto the porch together.
    ‘Get away, ye devil!’ the cracked voice screeched. ‘Get away, I’m going in the morning! I swear! The train’s in the shed! Go away! I swore I’d go and I will go, s’now Y E go . . . go and leave me some peace!’
    Jack frowned. Richard gaped. The room was clean but very old. The boards were so warped that the walls seemed almost to ripple. A picture of a stagecoach which looked almost as big as a whaling ship hung on one wall. An ancient counter, its flat surface almost as ripply as the walls, ran across the middle of the room, splitting it in two. Behind it, on the far wall, was a slate board with STAGE ARRIVES written above one column and STAGE LEAVES written above the other. Looking at the ancient board, Jack guessed it had been a good long time since any information had been written there; he thought that if someone tried to write on it with even a piece of soft chalk, the slate would crack in pieces and fall to the weathered floor.
    Standing on one side of the counter was the biggest hourglass Jack had ever seen – it was as big as a magnum of champagne and filled with green sand.
    ‘Leave me alone, can’t you? I’ve promised ye I’d go, and I will! Please, Morgan! For yer mercy! I’ve promised, and if ye don’t believe me, look in the shed! The train is ready, I swear the train is ready!’
    There was a good deal more gabble and gobble in this same vein. The large, elderly man spouting it was cringing in the far right-hand corner of the room. Jack guessed the oldster’s height at six-three at least – even in his present servile posture, The Depot’s low ceiling was only four inches or so above his head. He might have been seventy; he might have been a fairly well preserved eighty. A snowy white beard began under his eyes and cascaded down over his breast in a spray of baby-fine hair. His shoulders were broad, although now so slumped that they looked as if someone had broken them by forcing him to carry heavy weights over the course of many long years. Deep crow’s-feet radiated out from the corners of his eyes; deep fissures undulated on his forehead. His complexion was waxy-yellow. He was wearing a white kilt shot through with bright scarlet threads, and he was obviously scared almost to death. He was brandishing a stout staff, but with no authority at all.
    Jack glanced sharply around at Richard when the old man mentioned the name of Richard’s father, but Richard was currently beyond noticing such fine points.
    ‘I am not who you think I am,’ Jack said, advancing toward the old man.
    ‘Get away!’ he shrieked. ‘None of yer guff! I guess the devil can put on a pleasing face! Get away! I’ll do it! She’s ready to go, first thing in the morning! I said I’d do it and I mean to, now get away, can’t ye?’
    The knapsack was now a haversack hanging from Jack’s arm. As Jack reached the counter, he rummaged in it, pushing aside the mirror and a number of the jointed money-sticks. His fingers closed around what he wanted and brought it out. It was the coin Captain Farren had given him so long ago, the coin with the Queen on one side and the gryphon on the other. He slammed it down on the counter, and the room’s mellow light caught the lovely profile of Laura DeLoessian – again he was struck with wonder by the similarity of that profile to the profile of his mother. Did they look that much alike at the beginning? Is it just that I see the similarities more as I think about them more? Or am I actually bringing them together somehow, making them one?
    The old man cringed back even farther as Jack came forward to the counter; it began to seem as though he might push himself right through the back of the building. His words began to pour out in a hysterical flood. When Jack slammed the coin down on the counter like a badman in a Western movie demanding a drink, he