The Talisman

down into the ditch and then up the other side, and so into the woods. He didn’t like being in these dark woods – not even a little way in, where he could still peer around the trunk of a tree and see the road; it was no rest-cure for the nerves, but he liked the idea of Uncle Morgan (for so he still believed Osmond’s superior to be, in spite of what Captain Farren had said) catching him out on the road even less.
    So each time he heard a wagon or carriage approaching he got out of sight, and each time the vehicle passed he went back to the road. Once, while he was crossing the damp and weedy right-hand ditch, something ran – or slithered – over his foot, and Jack cried out.
    The traffic was a pain in the tail, and it wasn’t exactly helping him to make better time, but there was also something comforting about the irregular passage of wagons – they served notice that he wasn’t alone, at least.
    He wanted to get the hell out of the Territories altogether.
    Speedy’s magic juice was the worst medicine he’d ever had in his life, but he would gladly have taken a belly-choking swig of it if someone – Speedy himself, for example – had just happened to appear in front of him and assure him that, when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he would see would be a set of McDonald’s golden arches – what his mother called The Great Tits of America. A sense of oppressive danger was growing in him – a feeling that the forest was indeed dangerous, that there were things in it aware of his passage, that perhaps the forest itself was aware of his passage. The trees had gotten closer to the road, hadn’t they? Yes. Before, they had stopped at the ditches. Now they infested those as well. Before, the forest had seemed composed solely of pines and spruces. Now other sorts of trees had crept in, some with black boles that twisted together like gnarls of rotted strings, some that looked like weird hybrids of firs and ferns – these latter had nasty-looking gray roots that gripped at the ground like pasty fingers. Our boy? these nasty things seemed to whisper inside of Jack’s head. O U R boy?
    All in your mind, Jack-O. You’re just freaking out a little.
    Thing was, he didn’t really believe that.
    The trees were changing. That sense of thick oppression in the air – that sense of being watched – was all too real. And he had begun to think that his mind’s obsessive return to monstrous thoughts was almost something he was picking up from the forest . . . as if the trees themselves were sending to him on some horrible shortwave.
    But Speedy’s bottle of magic juice was only half-full. Somehow that had to last him all the way across the United States. It wouldn’t last until he was out of New England if he sipped a little every time he got the willies.
    His mind also kept returning to the amazing distance he had travelled in his world when he had flipped back from the Territories. A hundred and fifty feet over here had equalled half a mile over there. At that rate – unless the ratio of distance travelled were somehow variable, and Jack recognized that it might be – he could walk ten miles over here and be damn near out of New Hampshire over there. It was like wearing seven-league boots.
    Still, the trees . . . those gray, pasty roots . . .
    When it starts to get really dark – when the sky goes from blue to purple – I’m flipping back. That’s it; that’s all she wrote. I’m not walking through these woods after dark. And if I run out of magic juice in Indiana or something, ole Speedy can just send me another bottle by UPS, or something.
    Still thinking these thoughts – and thinking how much better it made him feel to have a plan (even if the plan only encompassed the next two hours or so) – Jack suddenly realized he could hear another vehicle and a great many horses.
    Cocking his head, he stopped in the middle of the road. His eyes widened, and two pictures suddenly unspooled behind his eyes with shutterlike speed: the big car the two men had been in – the car that had not been a Mercedes – and then the WILD CHILD van, speeding down the street and away from Uncle Tommy’s corpse, blood dripping from the broken plastic fangs of its grille. He saw the hands on the van’s steering wheel . . . but they weren’t hands. They were weird, articulated hooves.
    At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth.
    Now, hearing it – the sound still