The Talisman

tangles, beak opening and closing, black eyes fixed on Jack’s. Hardly aware of what he was doing. Jack raised the green bottle and drank.
    Again that horrible taste made him wince his eyes shut – and when he opened them he was looking stupidly at a yellow sign which showed the black silhouettes of two running kids, a little boy and a little girl. SLOW CHILDREN , this sign read. A seagull – this one of perfectly normal size – flew up from it with a squawk, no doubt startled by Jack’s sudden appearance.
    He looked around, and was walloped by disorientation. His stomach, full of blackberries and Speedy’s pustulant ‘magic juice’, rolled over, groaning. The muscles in his legs began to flutter unpleasantly, and all at once he sat down on the curb at the base of the sign with a bang that travelled up his spine and made his teeth click together.
    He suddenly leaned over between his splayed knees and opened his mouth wide, sure he was just going to yark up the whole works. Instead he hiccuped twice, half-gagged, and then felt his stomach slowly relax.
    It was the berries , he thought. If it hadn’t been for the berries, I would have puked for sure .
    He looked up and felt the unreality wash over him again. He had walked no more than sixty paces down the cart-track in the Territories world. He was sure of that. Say his stride was two feet – no, say two and a half feet, just to be on the safe side. That meant he had come a paltry hundred and fifty feet. But –
    He looked behind him and saw the arch, with its big red letters: ARCADIA FUNWORLD . Although his vision was 20/20, the sign was now so far away he could barely read it. To his right was the rambling, many-winged Alhambra Inn, with the formal gardens before it and the ocean beyond it.
    In the Territories world he had come a hundred and fifty feet.
    Over here he had somehow come half a mile.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jack Sawyer whispered, and covered his eyes with his hands.
    5
    ‘Jack! Jack, boy! Travellin Jack!’
    Speedy’s voice rose over the washing-machine roar of an old flathead-six engine. Jack looked up – his head felt impossibly heavy, his limbs leaden with weariness – and saw a very old International Harvester truck rolling slowly toward him. Homemade stake sides had been added to the back of the truck, and they rocked back and forth like loose teeth as the truck moved up the street toward him. The body was painted a hideous turquoise. Speedy was behind the wheel.
    He pulled up at the curb, gunned the engine ( Whup! Whup! Whup-whup-whup! ), and then killed it ( Hahhhhhhhhhh . . .). He climbed down quickly.
    ‘You all right, Jack?’
    Jack held the bottle out for Speedy to take. ‘Your magic juice really sucks, Speedy,’ he said wanly.
    Speedy looked hurt . . . then he smiled. ‘Whoever tole you medicine supposed to taste good, Travellin Jack?’
    ‘Nobody, I guess,’ Jack said. He felt some of his strength coming back – slowly – as that thick feeling of disorientation ebbed.
    ‘You believe now, Jack?’
    Jack nodded.
    ‘No,’ Speedy said. ‘That don’t git it. Say it out loud.’
    ‘The Territories,’ Jack said. ‘They’re there. Real. I saw a bird—’ He stopped and shuddered.
    ‘What kind of a bird?’ Speedy asked sharply.
    ‘Seagull. Biggest damn seagull—’ Jack shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ He thought and then said, ‘No, I guess you would. Nobody else, maybe, but you would.’
    ‘Did it talk? Lots of birds over there do. Talk foolishness, mostly. And there’s some that talks a kind of sense . . . but it’s a evil kind of sense, and mostly it’s lies.’
    Jack was nodding. Just hearing Speedy talk of these things, as if it were utterly rational and utterly lucid to do so, made him feel better.
    ‘I think it did talk. But it was like—’ He thought hard. ‘There was a kid at the school Richard and I went to in L.A. Brandon Lewis. He had a speech impediment, and when he talked you could hardly understand him. The bird was like that. But I knew what it said. It said my mother was dying.’
    Speedy put an arm around Jack’s shoulders and they sat quietly together on the curb for a time. The desk clerk from the Alhambra, looking pale and narrow and suspicious of every living thing in the universe, came out with a large stack of mail. Speedy and Jack watched him go down to the corner of Arcadia and Beach Drive and dump the inn’s correspondence into the mailbox. He turned back, marked