The Talisman

with the delicate system on a weekday, he was sure to confuse or irritate the tenants with the klaxon alarm whenever he accidentally set it off. The security system was wired into the building’s main electrical board, set behind two large removable walnut panels on the ground floor. Jerry had set down his tools and lifted off the panels, having already seen that the lot was empty and nobody would jump out of his skin when the alarm went off. Then he went downstairs to the telephone in his basement cubicle and told the local precinct house to ignore any signals from the Sawyer & Sloat address until his next telephone call. When he went back upstairs to tackle the mare’s nest of wires coming into the board from all the contact points, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lorette Chang was just riding her bicycle into the building’s lot – she was distributing a leaflet advertising a restaurant which was due to open down the street in fifteen days.
    Miss Chang later told the police that she looked through the glass front door and saw a workman enter the hall from the basement. Just before the workman picked up his screwdriver and touched the wiring panel, she felt the parking lot wobble beneath her feet. It was, she assumed, a mini-earthquake: a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Lorette Chang was untroubled by any seismic event that did not actually knock anything down. She saw Jerry Bledsoe set his feet (so he felt it, too, though no one else did), shake his head, then gently insert the tip of the screwdriver into a hive of wires.
    And then the entry and downstairs corridor of the Sawyer & Sloat building turned into a holocaust.
    The entire wiring panel turned instantly to a solid rectangular body of flame; bluish-yellow arcs of what looked like lightning shot out and encased the workman. Electronic horns bawled and bawled: KA-WHAAAAM! KA-WHAAAM! A ball of fire six feet high fell right out of the wall, slammed the already dead Jerry Bledsoe aside, and rolled down the corridor toward the lobby. The transparent front door blew into flying glass and smoking, twisted pieces of frame. Lorette Chang dropped her bike and sprinted toward the pay telephone across the street. As she told the fire department the building’s address and noticed that her bicycle had been twisted nearly in half by whatever force had burst through the door, Jerry Bledsoe’s roasted corpse still swayed upright back and forth before the devastated panel. Thousands of volts poured through his body, twitching it with regular surges, snapping it back and forth in a steady pulse. All the handyman’s body hair and most of his clothes had fried off, and his skin had become a cooked blotchy gray. His eyeglasses, a solidifying lump of brown plastic, covered his nose like a poultice.
    Jerry Bledsoe. Who plays those changes, daddy? Jack made his feet move until he had gone half an hour without seeing another of the little thatched cottages. Unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar patterns lay all over the sky above him – messages in a language he could not read.

CHAPTER TWELVE
JACK GOES TO THE MARKET
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    1
    He slept that night in a sweetly fragrant Territories haystack, first burrowing his way in and then turning around so the fresh air could reach him along the tunnel he had made. He listened apprehensively for small scuttering sounds – he had heard or read somewhere that fieldmice were great haystack fans. If they were in this one, then a great big mouse named Jack Sawyer had scared them into silence. He relaxed little by little, his left hand tracing the shape of Speedy’s bottle – he had plugged the top with a piece of springy moss from a small stream where he had stopped to drink. He supposed it was entirely possible that some of the moss would fall into the bottle, or already had. What a pity, it would spoil the piquant flavor and the delicate bouquet.
    As he lay in here, warm at last, heavily sleepy, the feeling he was most aware of was relief . . . as if there had been a dozen ten-pound weights strapped to his back and some kind soul had undone the buckles and allowed them to fall to the ground. He was in the Territories again, the place which such charming folks as Morgan of Orris, Osmond the Bullwhipper, and Elroy the Amazing Goat-man all called home, the Territories, where anything could happen.
    But the Territories could be good, too. He remembered that from his earliest childhood, when everyone had lived in California and no one had lived