The Talisman

here.’
    ‘Morgan?’ Jack said, almost thinking that he had not heard the name correctly. ‘Morgan Sloat? Is he coming here?’

CHAPTER SEVEN
FARREN
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1
    The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking. But –
    Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail – his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.
    Speedy had said that, and Jack had been concentrating so hard on the Talisman that he had almost missed it. Now the words came back and came home with a nasty double-thud that was like being hit in the back of the neck.
    ‘What does he look like?’ he asked the Captain urgently.
    ‘Morgan?’ the Captain asked, as if startled out of some interior dream.
    ‘Is he fat? Is he fat and sorta going bald? Does he go like this when he’s mad?’ And employing the innate gift for mimicry he’d always had – a gift which had made his father roar with laughter even when he was tired and feeling down – Jack ‘did’ Morgan Sloat. Age fell into his face as he laddered his brow the way Uncle Morgan’s brow laddered into lines when he was pissed off about something. At the same time, Jack sucked his cheeks in and pulled his head down to create a double chin. His lips flared out in a fishy pout and he began to waggle his eyebrows rapidly up and down. ‘Does he go like that?’
    ‘No,’ the Captain said, but something flickered in his eyes, the way something had flickered there when Jack told him that Speedy Parker was old. ‘Morgan’s tall. He wears his hair long’ – the Captain held a hand by his right shoulder to show Jack how long – ‘and he has a limp. One foot’s deformed. He wears a built-up boot, but—’ He shrugged.
    ‘You looked like you knew him when I did him! You—’
    ‘Shhh! Not so God-pounding loud, boy!’
    Jack lowered his voice. ‘I think I know the guy,’ he said – and for the first time he felt fear as an informed emotion . . . something he could grasp in a way he could not as yet grasp this world. Uncle Morgan here? Jesus!
    ‘Morgan is just Morgan. No one to fool around with, boy. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
    His hand closed around Jack’s upper arm again. Jack winced but resisted.
    Parker becomes Parkus. And Morgan . . . it’s just too big a coincidence.
    ‘Not yet,’ he said. Another question had occurred to him. ‘Did she have a son?’
    ‘The Queen?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘She had a son,’ the Captain replied reluctantly. ‘Yes. Boy, we can’t stay here. We—’
    ‘Tell me about him!’
    ‘There is nothing to tell,’ the Captain answered. ‘The babe died an infant, not six weeks out of her womb. There was talk that one of Morgan’s men – Osmond, perhaps – smothered the lad. But talk of that sort is always cheap. I have no love for Morgan of Orris but everyone knows that one child in every dozen dies a-crib. No one knows why; they die mysteriously, of no cause. There’s a saying – God pounds His nails . Not even a royal child is excepted in the eyes of the Carpenter. He . . . Boy? are you all right?’
    Jack felt the world go gray around him. He reeled, and when the Captain caught him, his hard hands felt as soft as feather pillows.
    He had almost died as an infant.
    His mother had told him the story – how she had found him still and apparently lifeless in his crib, his lips blue, his cheeks the color of funeral candles after they have been capped and thus put out. She had told him how she had run screaming into the living room with him in her arms. His father and Sloat were sitting on the floor, stoned on wine and grass, watching a wrestling match on TV. His father had snatched him from his mother’s arms, pinching his nostrils savagely shut with his left hand ( You had bruises there for almost a month, Jacky , his mother had told him with a jittery laugh) and then plunging his mouth over Jack’s tiny mouth, while Morgan cried: I don’t think that’s going to help him, Phil, I don’t think that’s going to help him!
    ( Uncle Morgan was funny, wasn’t he, Mom? Jack had said. Yes, very funny, Jack-O , his mother had replied, and she had smiled an oddly humorless smile, and lit