The Talisman

Blasted Lands, but each is apt to be different from each, and they always begin something like “I know a man who met a man who was lost on the edge of the Blasted Lands for three days and he said . . .” But I never heard a story that begun “ I was lost on the edge of the Blasted Lands for three days and I say . . .” Ye ken the difference, Jason my Lord?’
    ‘I ken it,’ Jack said slowly. The Blasted Lands . Just the sound of that had raised the hairs on his arms and the nape of his neck. ‘No one knows what they are, then?’
    ‘Not for sure,’ Anders said. ‘But if even a quarter of what I’ve heard is true—’
    ‘What have you heard?’
    ‘That there are monstrosities out there that makes the things in Orris’s ore-pits look almost normal. That there are balls of fire that go rolling across the hills and empty places, leaving long black trails behind them – the trails are black in the daytime, anyway, but I’ve heard they glow at night. And if a man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick. He loses his hair, and sores’re apt to raise all over his body, and then he begins to vomit; and mayhap he gets better, but more often he only vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts and then . . .’
    Anders rose.
    ‘My Lord! Why d’ye look so? Have y’seen something out the window? Have y’seen a spook along those double-damned tracks?’
    Anders looked wildly toward the window.
    Radiation poisoning , Jack thought. He doesn’t know it, but he’s described the symptoms of radiation poisoning almost to a T.
    They had studied both nuclear weapons and the consequences of exposure to radiation in a physical science mod the year before – because his mother was at least casually involved in both the nuclear-freeze movement and the movement to prevent the proliferation of nuclear power plants, Jack had paid very close attention.
    How well, he thought, how well radiation poisoning fitted with the whole idea of the Blasted Lands! And then he realized something else, as well: the west was where the first tests had been carried out – where the prototype of the Hiroshima bomb had been hung from a tower and then exploded, where any number of suburbs inhabited only by department-store mannequins had been destroyed so the Army could get a more or less accurate idea of what a nuclear explosion and the resulting firestorm would really do. And in the end they had returned to Utah and Nevada, among the last of the real American Territories, and had simply resumed testing underground. There was, he knew, a lot of government land out there in those great wastes, those tangles of buttes and mesas and crenellated badlands, and bombs were not all they were testing out there.
    How much of that shit would Sloat bring over here if the Queen died? How much of that shit had he already brought? Was this stageline- cum -railhead part of the shipping system for it?
    ‘Ye don’t look good, my Lord, not at all. Ye look as white as a sheet; I’ll take an oath that ye do!’
    ‘I’m fine,’ Jack said slowly. ‘Sit down. Go on with your story. And light your pipe, it’s gone out.’
    Anders took his pipe from his mouth, relit it, and looked from Jack to the window again . . . and now his face was not just bleak; it was haggard with fright. ‘But I’ll know soon enough if the stories are true, I suppose.’
    ‘Why is that?’
    ‘Because I start through the Blasted Lands tomorrow morning, at first light,’ Anders said. ‘I start through the Blasted Lands, driving Morgan of Orris’s devil-machine in yon shed, and carrying God alone knows what sort of hideous devil’s work.’
    Jack stared at him, his heart pumping hard, the blood humming in his head.
    ‘Where? How far? To the ocean? The big water?’
    Anders nodded slowly. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘To the water. And—’ His voice dropped, became a strengthless whisper. His eyes rolled toward the dark windows, as if he feared some nameless thing might be peering in, watching, eavesdropping
    ‘And there Morgan will meet me, and we’re to take his goods on.’
    ‘On to where?’ Jack asked.
    ‘To the black hotel,’ Anders finished in a low, trembling voice.
    6
    Jack felt that urge to break into wild cackles of laughter again. The Black Hotel – it sounded like the title of a lurid mystery novel. And yet . . . and yet . . . all of this had begun at a hotel, hadn’t it? The Alhambra in New Hampshire, on the