The Talisman

squelchy. Jack was lying at the edge of the water, in the boggiest area of all. Thick weeds still grew here – the hard frosts that would kill them were still a month or more away – and Jack had gotten entangled in them, the way a man awakening from a nightmare may entangle himself in the bedclothes.
    He scrambled and stumbled to his feet, wet and slimed with the fragrant mud, the straps of his pack pulling under his arms. He pushed the weedy fragments from his arms and face with horror. He started away from the water, then looked back and saw Speedy’s bottle lying in the mud, the cap beside it. Some of the ‘magic juice’ had either run out or been spilled in his struggle with the malignant Territories trees. Now the bottle was no more than a third full.
    He stood there a moment, his caked sneakers planted in the oozy muck, looking out at the river. This was his world; this was the good old United States of America. He didn’t see the golden arches he had hoped for, or a skyscraper, or an earth satellite blinking overhead in the darkening sky, but he knew where he was as well as he knew his own name. The question was, had he ever been in that other world at all?
    He looked around at the unfamiliar river, the likewise unfamiliar countryside, and listened to the distant mellow mooing of cows. He thought: You’re somewhere different. This sure isn’t Arcadia Beach anymore, Jack-O .
    No, it wasn’t Arcadia Beach, but he didn’t know the area surrounding Arcadia Beach well enough to say for sure that he was more than four or five miles away – just enough inland, say, to no longer be able to smell the Atlantic. He had come back as if waking from a nightmare – was it not possible that was all it had been, the whole thing, from the carter with his load of fly-crawling meat to the living trees? A sort of waking nightmare in which sleepwalking had played a part? It made sense. His mother was dying, and he now thought he had known that for quite a while – the signs had been there, and his subconscious had drawn the correct conclusion even while his conscious mind denied it. That would have contributed the correct atmosphere for an act of self-hypnosis, and that crazy wino Speedy Parker had gotten him in gear. Sure. It all hung together.
    Uncle Morgan would have loved it.
    Jack shivered and swallowed hard. The swallow hurt. Not the way a sore throat hurts, but the way an abused muscle hurts.
    He raised his left hand, the one not holding the bottle, and rubbed his palm gently against his throat. For a moment he looked absurdly like a woman checking for dewlaps or wrinkles. He found a welted abrasion just above his adam’s apple. It hadn’t bled much, but it was almost too painful to touch. The root that had closed about his throat had done that.
    ‘True,’ Jack whispered, looking out at the orange water, listening to the twank of the bullfrogs and the mooing, distant cows. ‘All true.’

9
    Jack began walking up the slope of the field, setting the river – and the east – at his back. After he had gone half a mile, the steady rub and shift of the pack against his throbbing back (the strokes Osmond had laid on were still there too, the shifting pack reminded him) triggered a memory. He had refused Speedy’s enormous sandwich, but hadn’t Speedy slipped the remains into his pack anyway, while Jack was examining the guitar-pick?
    His stomach pounced on the idea.
    Jack unshipped the pack then and there, standing in a curdle of ground-mist beneath the evening star. He unbuckled one of the flaps, and there was the sandwich, not just a piece or a half, but the whole thing, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Jack’s eyes filled with a warmth of tears and he wished that Speedy were here so he could hug him.
    Ten minutes ago you were calling him a crazy old wino.
    His face flamed at that, but his shame didn’t stop him from gobbling the sandwich in half a dozen big bites. He rebuckled his pack and reshouldered it. He went on, feeling better – with that whistling hole in his gut stopped up for the time being, Jack felt himself again.
    Not long after, lights twinkled up out of the growing darkness. A farmhouse. A dog began to bark – the heavy bark of a really big fellow – and Jack froze for a moment.
    Inside , he thought. Or chained up. I hope.
    He bore to the right, and after a while the dog stopped barking. Keeping the lights of the farmhouse as a guide, Jack soon came out on a narrow blacktop road. He