The Talisman

distant but perfectly clear in the pure air – Jack wondered how he could have even thought those other approaching wagons might be Morgan’s diligence. He would certainly never make such a mistake again. The sound he heard now was perfectly ominous, thick with a potential for evil – the sound of a hearse, yes, a hearse driven by a devil.
    He stood frozen in the road, almost hypnotized, as a rabbit is hypnotized by headlights. The sound grew steadily louder – the thunder of the wheels and hooves, the creak of leather rigging. Now he could hear the driver’s voice: ‘ Hee-yah! Heee-yahhh! HEEEEE-YAHHHH! ’
    He stood in the road, stood there, his head drumming with horror. Can’t move, oh dear God oh dear Christ I can’t move Mom Mom Muhhhhhmeeeee—!
    He stood in the road and the eye of his imagination saw a huge black thing like a stagecoach tearing up the road, pulled by black animals that looked more like pumas than horses; he saw black curtains flapping in and out of the coach’s windows; he saw the driver standing on the teeterboard, his hair blown back, his eyes as wild and crazed as those of a psycho with a switchblade.
    He saw it coming toward him, never slowing.
    He saw it run him down.
    That broke the paralysis. He ran to the right, skidding down the side of the road, catching his foot under one of those gnarled roots, falling, rolling. His back, relatively quiet for the last couple of hours, flared with fresh pain, and Jack drew his lips back with a grimace.
    He got to his feet and scurried into the woods, hunched over.
    He slipped first behind one of the black trees, but the touch of the gnarly trunk – it was a bit like the banyans he had seen while on vacation in Hawaii year before last – was oily and unpleasant. Jack moved to the left and behind the trunk of a pine.
    The thunder of the coach and its outriders grew steadily louder. At every second Jack expected the company to flash by toward All-Hands’ Village. Jack’s fingers squeezed and relaxed on the pine’s gummy bark. He bit at his lips.
    Directly ahead was a narrow but perfectly clear sightline back to the road, a tunnel with sides of leaf and fern and pine needles. And just when Jack had begun to think that Morgan’s party would never arrive, a dozen or more mounted soldiers passed heading east, riding at a gallop. The one in the lead carried a banner, but Jack could not make out its device . . . nor was he sure he wanted to. Then the diligence flashed across Jack’s narrow sightline.
    The moment of its passage was brief – no more than a second, perhaps less than that – but Jack’s recall of it was total. The diligence was a gigantic vehicle, surely a dozen feet high. The trunks and bundles lashed with stout cord to the top added another three feet. Each horse in the team which pulled it wore a black plume on its head – these plumes were blown back almost flat in a speed-generated wind. Jack thought later that Morgan must need a new team for every run, because these looked close to the end of their endurance. Foam and blood sprayed back from their working mouths in curds; their eyes rolled crazily, showing arcs of white.
    As in his imagining – or his vision – black crepe curtains flew and fluttered through glassless windows. Suddenly a white face appeared in one of those black oblongs, a white face framed in strange, twisted carving-work. The sudden appearance of that face was as shocking as the face of a ghost in the ruined window of a haunted house. It was not the face of Morgan Sloat . . . but it was .
    And the owner of that face knew that Jack – or some other danger, just as hated and just as personal – was out there. Jack saw this in the widening of the eyes and the sudden vicious downtwist of the mouth.
    Captain Farren had said He’ll smell you like a rat , and now Jack thought dismally: I’ve been smelled, all right. He knows I’m here, and what happens now? He’ll stop the whole bunch of them, I bet, and send the soldiers into the woods after me .
    Another band of soldiers – these protecting Morgan’s diligence from the rear – swept by. Jack waited, his hands frozen to the bark of the pine, sure that Morgan would call a halt. But no halt came; soon the heavy thunder of the diligence and its outriders began to fade.
    His eyes. That’s what’s the same. Those dark eyes in that white face. And –
    Our boy? Y E S S S S!
    Something slithered over his foot . . . and up his ankle. Jack screamed and