The Talisman

said.
    ‘It’ll come with me? The bottle? You promise?’ The thought of getting stuck there, in that mystical other place, while his mother was sick and Sloat-beset back here, was awful.
    ‘I promise.’
    ‘Okay.’ Jack brought the bottle to his lips . . . and then let it fall away a little. The smell was awful – sharp and rancid. ‘I don’t want to, Speedy,’ he whispered.
    Lester Parker looked at him, and his lips were smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes – they were stern. Uncompromising. Frightening. Jack thought of black eyes: eye of gull, eye of vortex. Terror swept through him.
    He held the bottle out to Speedy. ‘Can’t you take it back?’ he asked, and his voice came out in a strengthless whisper. ‘Please?’
    Speedy made no reply. He did not remind Jack that his mother was dying, or that Morgan Sloat was coming. He didn’t call Jack a coward, although he had never in his life felt so much like a coward, not even the time he had backed away from the high board at Camp Accomac and some of the other kids had booed him. Speedy merely turned around and whistled at a cloud.
    Now loneliness joined the terror, sweeping helplessly through him. Speedy had turned away from him; Speedy had shown him his back.
    ‘Okay,’ Jack said suddenly. ‘Okay, if it’s what you need me to do.’
    He raised the bottle again, and before he could have any second or third thoughts, he drank.
    The taste was worse than anything he had anticipated. He had had wine before, had even developed some taste for it (he especially liked the dry white wines his mother served with sole or snapper or swordfish), and this was something like wine . . . but at the same time it was a dreadful mockery of all the wines he had drunk before. The taste was high and sweet and rotten, not the taste of lively grapes but of dead grapes that had not lived well.
    As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet-purple taste, he could actually see those grapes – dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies.
    He swallowed and thin fire printed a snail-trail down his throat.
    He closed his eyes, grimacing, his gorge threatening to rise. He did not vomit, although he believed that if he had eaten any breakfast he would have done.
    ‘Speedy—’
    He opened his eyes, and further words died in his throat. He forgot about the need to sick up that horrible parody of wine. He forgot about his mother, and Uncle Morgan, and his father, and almost everything else.
    Speedy was gone. The graceful arcs of the roller coaster against the sky were gone. Boardwalk Avenue was gone.
    He was someplace else now. He was –
    ‘In the Territories,’ Jack whispered, his entire body crawling with a mad mixture of terror and exhilaration. He could feel the hair stirring on the nape of his neck, could feel a goofed-up grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘Speedy, I’m here, my God, I’m here in the Territories! I—’
    But wonder overcame him. He clapped a hand over his mouth and slowly turned in a complete circle, looking at this place to which Speedy’s ‘magic juice’ had brought him.
    4
    The ocean was still there, but now it was a darker, richer blue – the truest indigo Jack had ever seen. For a moment he stood transfixed, the sea-breeze blowing in his hair, looking at the horizon-line where that indigo ocean met a sky the color of faded denim.
    That horizon-line showed a faint but unmistakable curve.
    He shook his head, frowning, and turned the other way. Sea-grass, high and wild and tangled, ran down from the headland where the round carousel building had been only a minute ago. The arcade pier was also gone; where it had been, a wild tumble of granite blocks ran down to the ocean. The waves struck the lowest of these and ran into ancient cracks and channels with great hollow boomings. Foam as thick as whipped cream jumped into the clear air and was blown away by the wind.
    Abruptly Jack seized his left cheek with his left thumb and forefinger. He pinched hard. His eyes watered, but nothing changed.
    ‘It’s real,’ he whispered, and another wave boomed onto the headland, raising white curds of foam.
    Jack suddenly realized that Boardwalk Avenue was still here . . . after a fashion. A rutted cart-track ran from the top of the headland – where Boardwalk Avenue had ended at the entrance to the arcade in what his mind persisted in