The Talisman

sand, a kind of reverse dust-devil. The bright yellow of a gum wrapper was revealed, covered, revealed, covered, revealed again – each time it showed up again, Jack could read more of it as the funnel grew: JU , then JUI , then JUICY F. The funnel grew and the sand jerked away from the gum wrapper again. It was as quick and rude as an unfriendly hand jerking down the covers on a made bed. JUICY FRUIT , he read, and then the wrapper flapped upward.
    The sand turned faster and faster, in a hissing fury. Hhhhhhaaaaahhhhhhhh was the sound the sand made. Jack stared at it, fascinated at first, and then horrified. The sand was opening like a large dark eye: it was the eye of the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then pulled the living meat out of it like a rubber band.
    Hhhhhhaaaahhhhh , the sand-spout mocked in its dead, dry voice. That was not a mind-voice. No matter how much Jack wished it were only in his head, that voice was real. His false teeth flew, Jack, when the old WILD CHILD hit him, out they went, rattledybang! Yale or no Yale, when the old WILD CHILD van comes and knocks your false teeth out, Jacky, you got to go. And your mother –
    Then he was running again, blindly, not looking back, his hair blown off his forehead, his eyes wide and terrified.
    4
    Jack walked as quickly as he could through the dim lobby of the hotel. All the atmosphere of the place forbade running: it was as quiet as a library, and the gray light which fell through the tall mullioned windows softened and blurred the already faded carpets. Jack broke into a trot as he passed the desk, and the stooped ashen-skinned day-clerk chose that second to emerge through an arched wooden passage. The clerk said nothing, but his permanent scowl dragged the corners of his mouth another centimeter downward. It was like being caught running in church. Jack wiped his sleeve across his forehead, made himself walk the rest of the way to the elevators. He punched the button, feeling the desk clerk’s frown burning between his shoulder-blades. The only time this week that Jack had seen the desk clerk smile had been when the man had recognized his mother. The smile had met only the minimum standards for graciousness.
    ‘I suppose that’s how old you have to be to remember Lily Cavanaugh,’ she had said to Jack as soon as they were alone in their rooms. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when being identified, recognized from any one of the fifty movies she had made during the fifties and sixties (‘Queen of the Bs’, they called her; her own comment: ‘Darling of the Drive-ins’) – whether by a cabdriver, waiter, or the lady selling blouses at the Wilshire Boulevard Saks – perked her mood for hours. Now even that simple pleasure had gone dry for her.
    Jack jigged before the unmoving elevator doors, hearing an impossible and familiar voice lifting to him from a whirling funnel of sand. For a second he saw Thomas Woodbine, solid familiar Uncle Tommy Woodbine, who was supposed to have been one of his guardians – a strong wall against trouble and confusion – crumpled and dead on La Cienega Boulevard, his teeth like popcorn twenty feet away in the gutter. He stabbed the button again.
    Hurry up!
    Then he saw something worse – his mother hauled into a waiting car by two impassive men. Suddenly Jack had to urinate. He flattened his palm against the button, and the bent gray man behind the desk uttered a phlegmy sound of disapproval. Jack pressed the edge of his other hand into that magic place just beneath his stomach which lessened the pressure on his bladder. Now he could hear the slow whir of the descending elevator. He closed his eyes, squeezing his legs together. His mother looked uncertain, lost and confused, and the men forced her into the car as easily as they would a weary collie dog. But that was not really happening, he knew; it was a memory – part of it must have been one of the Daydreams – and it had happened not to his mother but to him.
    As the mahogany doors of the elevator slid away to reveal a shadowy interior from which his own face met him in a foxed and peeling mirror, that scene from his seventh year wrapped around him once again, and he saw one man’s eyes turn to yellow, felt the other’s hand alter into something clawlike, hard and inhuman . . . he jumped into the elevator as if he had been jabbed with a fork.
    Not possible: the Daydreams were not possible, he had not seen a man’s eyes turning