The Talisman

and Anders looked at him without pity.
    Jack pushed the ignition button, and two enormous blue sparks shot out from the ‘devil-box’ just as the engine whirred into life. ‘Here goes,’ Jack said, and eased the lever forward. The train began to glide out of the shed. Richard whimpered and drew up his knees. Saying something like ‘Nonsense’ or ‘Impossible’ – Jack chiefly heard the hiss of the sibilants – he buried his face between his knees. He looked as though he were trying to become a circle. Jack waved to Anders, who waved back, and then they were out of the lighted shed and were covered only by the vast dark sky. Anders’s silhouette appeared in the opening through which they had gone, as if he had decided to run after them. The train was not capable of going more than thirty miles an hour, Jack thought, and at present was doing no better than eight or nine. This seemed excruciatingly slow. West, Jack said to himself, west, west, west. Anders stepped back inside the shed, and his beard lay against his massive chest like a covering of frost. The train lurched forward – another sizzling blue spark snapped upward – and Jack turned around on the padded seat to see what was coming.
    ‘NO!’ Richard screamed, almost making Jack fall out of the cab. ‘I CAN’T! CAN’T GO THERE!’ He had drawn his head up from his knees, but he wasn’t seeing anything – his eyes were still clamped shut, and his whole face looked like a knuckle.
    ‘Be quiet,’ Jack said. Ahead the tracks arrowed through the endless fields of waving grain; dim mountains, old teeth, floated in the western clouds. Jack glanced one last time over his shoulder and saw the little oasis of warmth and light which was The Depot and the octagonal shed, slipping slowly backward behind him. Anders was a tall shadow in a lighted doorway. Jack gave a final wave, and the tall shadow waved, too. Jack turned around again and looked over the immensity of grain, all that lyric distance. If this was what the Blasted Lands were like, the next two days were going to be positively restful.
    Of course they were not, not like that at all. Even in the moonlit dark he could tell that the grain was thinning out, becoming scrubby – about half an hour out of The Depot the change had begun. Even the color seemed wrong now, almost artificial, no longer the beautiful organic yellow he had seen before, but the yellow of something left too near a powerful heat source – the yellow of something with most of the life bleached out of it. Richard now had a similar quality. For a time he had hyperventilated, then he had wept as silently and shamelessly as a jilted girl, then he had fallen into a twitchy sleep. ‘Can’t go back,’ he had muttered in his sleep, or such were the words Jack thought he had heard. In sleep he seemed to dwindle.
    The whole character of the landscape had begun to alter. From the broad sweep of the plains in Ellis-Breaks, the land had mutated to secretive little hollows and dark little valleys crowded with black trees. Huge boulders lay everywhere, skulls, eggs, giant teeth. ‘The ground itself had changed, become much sandier. Twice the walls of the valleys grew up right alongside the tracks, and all Jack could see on either side were scrubby reddish cliffs covered with low creeping plants. Now and then he thought he saw an animal scurrying for cover, but the light was too weak, and the animal too quick, for him to identify it. But Jack had the eerie feeling that if the animal had frozen absolutely still in the middle of Rodeo Drive at high noon, he would still have been unable to identify it – a suggestion that the head was twice the size it should be, that this animal was better off hiding from human sight.
    By the time ninety minutes had elapsed, Richard was moaning in his sleep and the landscape had passed into utter strangeness. The second time they had emerged from one of the claustrophobic valleys, Jack had been surprised by a sense of sudden openness – at first it was like being back in the Territories again, the Daydreams-land. Then he had noticed, even in the dark, how the trees were stunted and bent; then he had noticed the smell. Probably this had been slowly growing in his consciousness, but it was only after he had seen how the few trees scattered on the black plain had coiled themselves up like tortured beasts that he finally noticed the faint but unmistakable odor of corruption in the air. Corruption,