The Talisman

A white sign hung in the thickness of ivy, seemingly supported by it. The words were too small to be read. Jack put his right hand in his pocket and clutched the coin Captain Farren had given him.
    His stomach talked to him. He was going to need dinner soon, so he had to move off this spot and find a town where he could earn his meals. Mill Road it was – at least he could go far enough to see what was on the other side of the tunnel. Jack pushed himself toward it, and the dark opening in the bank of trees enlarged with every step.
    Cool and damp and smelling of brick dust and overturned earth, the tunnel seemed to take the boy in and then tighten down around him. For a moment Jack feared that he was being led underground – no circle of light ahead showed the tunnel’s end – but then realized that the asphalt floor was level. TURN ON LIGHTS , the sign outside the tunnel had read. Jack bumped into a brick wall and felt grainy powder crumble onto his hands. ‘Lights,’ he said to himself, wishing he had one to turn on. The tunnel must, he realized, bend somewhere along its length. He had cautiously, slowly, carefully, walked straight into the wall, like a blind man with his hands extended. Jack groped his way along the wall. When the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons did something like this, he usually wound up splashed across the front of a truck.
    Something rattled busily along the floor of the tunnel, and Jack froze.
    A rat, he thought. Maybe a rabbit out taking a shortcut between fields. But it had sounded bigger than that.
    He heard it again, farther away in the dark, and took another blind step forward. Ahead of him, just once, he heard an intake of breath. And stopped, wondering: Was that an animal? Jack held his fingertips against the damp brick wall, waiting for the exhalation. It had not sounded like an animal – certainly no rat or rabbit inhaled so deeply. He crept a few inches forward, almost unwilling to admit to himself that whatever was up there had frightened him.
    Jack froze again, hearing a quiet little sound like a raspy chuckle come out of the blackness before him. In the next second a familiar but unidentifiable smell, coarse, strong, and musky, drifted toward him out of the tunnel.
    Jack looked back over his shoulder. The entrance was now only half-visible, half-obscured by the curve of the wall, a long way off and looking about the size of a rabbit-hole.
    ‘What’s in here?’ he called out. ‘Hey! Anything in here with me? Anybody?’
    He thought he heard something whisper deeper into the tunnel.
    He was not in the Territories, he reminded himself – at the worst he might have startled some imbecilic dog who had come into the cool dark for a nap. In that case, he’d be saving its life by waking it up before a car came along. ‘Hey, dog!’ he yelled. ‘ Dog! ’
    And was rewarded instantly by the sound of paws trotting through the tunnel. But were they . . . going out or coming in? He could not tell, listening to the soft pad pad pad , whether the animal was leaving or approaching. Then it occurred to him that maybe the noise was coming toward him from behind, and he twisted his neck and looked back and saw that he had moved far enough along so that he could not see that entrance, either.
    ‘Where are you, dog?’ he said.
    Something scratched the ground only a foot or two behind him, and Jack jumped forward and struck his shoulder, hard, against the curve of the wall.
    He sensed a shape – doglike, perhaps – in the darkness. Jack stepped forward – and was stopped short by a sense of dislocation so great that he imagined himself back in the Territories. The tunnel was filled with that musky, acrid zoo-odor, and whatever was coming toward him was not a dog.
    A gust of cold air smelling of grease and alcohol pushed toward him. He sensed that shape getting nearer.
    Only for an instant he had a glimpse of a face hanging in the dark, glowing as if with its own sick and fading interior light, a long, bitter face that should have been almost youthful but was not. Sweat, grease, a stink of alcohol on the breath that came from it. Jack flattened himself against the wall, raising his fists, even as the face faded back into the dark.
    In the midst of his terror he thought he heard footfalls softly, quickly covering the ground toward the tunnel’s entrance, and turned his face from the square foot of darkness which had spoken to him to look back. Darkness, silence. The tunnel was