The Talisman

. . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might really be. Even a kid like him knew that.
    ‘You heard enough?’ the Captain said. ‘We’ve got to move .’ He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.
    Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, go west, is that correct?
    He changed , Jack thought. He changed twice.
    Once when Jack showed him the shark’s tooth that had been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west. He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?
    I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do.
    To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.
    He wants to get out of here because he’s afraid we’ll be caught , Jack thought. But there’s more, isn’t there? He’s afraid of me. Afraid of –
    ‘Come on,’ the Captain said. ‘Come on , for Jason’s sake.’
    ‘ Whose sake?’ Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and half-led, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.
    ‘This isn’t the way we came,’ Jack whispered.
    ‘Don’t want to go past those fellows we saw coming in,’ the Captain whispered back. ‘Morgan’s men. Did you see the tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?’
    ‘Yes.’ Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he had looked dimly familiar.
    ‘Osmond,’ the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.
    The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes, perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.
    ‘Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,’ the Captain grunted. ‘He sees too much, and I’d just as soon he didn’t see you twice, boy.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘ Hsssst! ’ He clamped Jack’s aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway. To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain – except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost netlike, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome. ‘Now cry ,’ the Captain breathed warmly in Jack’s ear.
    He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still predominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a confused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women’s faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded him of nuns’ wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.
    ‘Never again!’ the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. ‘Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I’ll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!’
    And under his breath, the Captain hissed, ‘They’ll all remember and they’ll all talk, so cry , dammit!’
    And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy – she was lying in her coffin and wearing the wedding dress she had worn in Drag Strip Rumble (RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack’s mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a