Jack reached in, picked a handful of berries, and tossed them into his mouth. They were amazingly sweet, amazingly good. Smiling (his lips had taken on a definite bluish cast), thinking it quite possible that he had lost his mind, he picked another handful of berries . . . and then a third. He had never tasted anything so fine--although, he thought later, it was not just the berries themselves; part of it was the incredible clarity of the air.
He got a couple of scratches while picking a fourth helping--it was as if the bushes were telling him to lay off, enough was enough, already. He sucked at the deepest of the scratches, on the fleshy pad below the thumb, and then headed north along the twin ruts again, moving slowly, trying to look everywhere at once.
He paused a little way from the blackberry tangles to look up at the sun, which seemed somehow smaller and yet more fiery. Did it have a faint orange cast, like in those old medieval pictures? Jack thought perhaps it did. And--
A cry, as rusty and unpleasant as an old nail being pulled slowly out of a board, suddenly arose on his right, scattering his thoughts. Jack turned toward it, his shoulders going up, his eyes widening.
It was a gull--and its size was mind-boggling, almost unbelievable (but there it was, as solid as stone, as real as houses). It was, in fact, the size of an eagle. Its smooth white bullet-head cocked to one side. Its fishhook of a beak opened and closed. It fluttered great wings, rippling the sea-grass around it.
And then, seemingly without fear, it began to hop toward Jack.
Faintly, Jack heard the clear, brazen note of many horns blown together in a simple flourish, and for no reason at all he thought of his mother.
He glanced to the north momentarily, in the direction he had been travelling, drawn by that sound--it filled him with a sense of unfocussed urgency. It was, he thought (when there was time to think), like being hungry for a specific something that you haven't had in a long time--ice cream, potato chips, maybe a taco. You don't know until you see it--and until you do, there is only a need without a name, making you restless, making you nervous.
He saw pennons and the peak of what might have been a great tent--a pavillion--against the sky.
That's where the Alhambra is, he thought, and then the gull shrieked at him. He turned toward it and was alarmed to see it was now less than six feet away. Its beak opened again, showing that dirty pink lining, making him think of yesterday, the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then fixed him with a horrid stare exactly like this one. The gull was grinning at him--he was sure of it. As it hopped closer, Jack could smell a low and noisome stink hanging about it--dead fish and rotted seaweed.
The gull hissed at him and flurried its wings again.
"Get out of here," Jack said loudly. His heart was pumping quick blood and his mouth had gone dry, but he did not want to be scared off by a seagull, even a big one. "Get out!"
The gull opened its beak again . . . and then, in a terrible, open-throated series of pulses, it spoke--or seemed to.
"Other's iyyyin Ack . . . other's iyyyyyyyyyyin--"
Mother's dying, Jack. . . .
The gull took another clumsy hop toward him, scaly feet clutching at the grassy tangles, beak opening and closing, black eyes fixed on Jack's. Hardly aware of what he was doing, Jack raised the green bottle and drank.
Again that horrible taste made him wince his eyes shut--and when he opened them he was looking stupidly at a yellow sign which showed the black silhouettes of two running kids, a little boy and a little girl. SLOW CHILDREN, this sign read. A seagull--this one of perfectly normal size--flew up from it with a squawk, no doubt startled by Jack's sudden appearance.
He looked around, and was walloped by disorientation. His stomach, full of blackberries and Speedy's pustulant "magic juice," rolled over, groaning. The muscles in his legs began to flutter unpleasantly, and all at once he sat down on the curb at the base of the sign with a bang that travelled up his spine and made his teeth click together.
He suddenly leaned over between his splayed knees and opened his mouth wide, sure he was just going to yark up the whole works. Instead he hiccuped twice, half-gagged, and then felt his stomach slowly relax.
It was the berries, he thought. If it hadn't been for the berries, I would have puked for sure.
He looked up and felt the unreality wash over him again. He had walked no more than sixty paces down the cart-track in the Territories world. He was sure of that. Say his stride was two feet--no, say two and a half feet, just to be on the safe side. That meant he had come a paltry hundred and fifty feet. But--
He looked behind him and saw the arch, with its big red letters: ARCADIA FUNWORLD. Although his vision was 20/20, the sign was now so far away he could barely read it. To his right was the rambling, many-winged Alhambra Inn, with the formal gardens before it and the ocean beyond it.
In the Territories world he had come a hundred and fifty feet.
Over here he had somehow come half a mile.
"Jesus Christ," Jack Sawyer whispered, and covered his eyes with his hands.
5
"Jack! Jack, boy! Travellin Jack!"
Speedy's voice rose over the washing-machine roar of an old flathead-six engine. Jack looked up--his head felt impossibly heavy, his limbs leaden with weariness--and saw a very old International Harvester truck rolling slowly toward him. Homemade stake sides had been added to the back of the truck, and they rocked back and forth like loose teeth as the truck moved up the street toward him. The body was painted a hideous turquoise. Speedy was behind the wheel.
He pulled up at the curb, gunned the engine (Whup! Whup! Whup-whup-whup!), and then killed it (Hahhhhhhhhhh . . .). He climbed down quickly.
"You all right, Jack?"
Jack held the bottle out for Speedy to take. "Your magic juice really sucks, Speedy," he said wanly.
Speedy looked hurt . . . then he smiled. "Whoever tole you medicine supposed to taste good, Travellin Jack?"
"Nobody, I guess," Jack said. He felt some of his strength coming back--slowly--as that thick feeling of disorientation ebbed.
"You believe now, Jack?"
Jack nodded.
"No," Speedy said. "That don't git it. Say it out loud."
"The Territories," Jack said. "They're there. Real. I saw a bird--" He stopped and shuddered.
"What kind of a bird?" Speedy asked sharply.
"Seagull. Biggest damn seagull--" Jack shook his head. "You wouldn't believe it." He thought and then said, "No, I guess you would. Nobody else, maybe, but you would."
"Did it talk? Lots of birds over there do. Talk foolishness, mostly. And there's some that talks a kind of sense . . . but it's a evil kind of sense, and mostly it's lies."
Jack was nodding. Just hearing Speedy talk of these things, as if it were utterly rational and utterly lucid to do so, made him feel better.
"I think it did talk. But it was like--" He thought hard. "There was a kid at the school Richard and I went to in L.A. Brandon Lewis. He had a speech impediment, and when he talked you could hardly understand him. The bird was like that. But I knew what it said. It said my mother was dying."
Speedy put an arm around Jack's shoulders and they sat quietly together on the curb for a time. The desk clerk from the Alhambra, looking pale and narrow and suspicious of every living thing in the universe, came out with a large stack of mail. Speedy and Jack watched him go down to the corner of Arcadia and Beach Drive and dump the inn's correspondence into the mailbox. He turned back, marked Jack and Speedy with his thin gaze, and then turned up the Alhambra's main walk. The top of his head could barely be descried over the tops of the thick box hedges.
The sound of the big front door opening and closing was clearly audible, and Jack was struck by a terrible sense of this place's autumn desolation. Wide, deserted streets. The long beach with its empty dunes of sugar-sand. The empty amusement park, with the roller-coaster cars standing on a siding under canvas tarps and all the booths padlocked. It came to him that his mother had
brought him to a place very like the end of the world.
Speedy had cocked his head back and sang in his true and mellow voice, "Well I've laid around . . . and played around . . . this old town too long . . . summer's almost gone, yes, and winter's coming on . . . winter's coming on, and I feel like . . . I got to travel on--"
He broke off and looked at Jack.
"You feel like you got to travel, ole Travellin Jack?"
Flagging terror stole through his bones.
"I guess so," he said. "If it will help. Help her. Can I help her, Speedy?"
"You can," Speedy said gravely.
"But--"
"Oh, there's a whole string of buts," Speedy said. "Whole trainload of buts, Travellin Jack. I don't promise you no cake-walk. I don't promise you success. Don't promise that you'll come back alive, or if you do, that you'll come back with your mind still bolted together.
"You gonna have to do a lot of your ramblin in the Territories, because the Territories is a whole lot smaller. You notice that?"
"Yes."
"Figured you would. Because you sure did get a whole mess down the road, didn't you?"
Now an earlier question recurred to Jack, and although it was off the subject, he had to know. "Did I disappear, Speedy? Did you see me disappear?"
"You went," Speedy said, and clapped his hands once, sharply, "just like that."
Jack felt a slow, unwilling grin stretch his mouth . . . and Speedy grinned back.
"I'd like to do it sometime in Mr. Balgo's computer class," Jack said, and Speedy cackled like a child. Jack joined him--and the laughter felt good, almost as good as those blackberries had tasted.
After a few moments Speedy sobered and said, "There's a reason you got to be in the Territories, Jack. There's somethin you got to git. It's a mighty powerful somethin."
"And it's over there?"
"Yeah-bob."
"It can help my mother?"
"Her . . . and the other."
"The Queen?"
Speedy nodded.
"What is it? Where is it? When do I--"
"Hold it! Stop!" Speedy held up a hand. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were grave, almost sorrowing. "One thing at a time. And, Jack, I can't tell you what I don't know . . . or what I'm not allowed to tell."
"Not allowed?" Jack asked, bewildered. "Who--"
"There you go again," Speedy said. "Now listen, Travellin Jack. You got to leave as soon as you can, before that man Bloat can show up an bottle you up--"
"Sloat."
"Yeah, him. You got to get out before he comes."
"But he'll bug my mother," Jack said, wondering why he was saying it--because it was true, or because it was an excuse to avoid the trip that Speedy was setting before him, like a meal that might be poisoned. "You don't know him! He--"
"I know him," Speedy said quietly. "I know him of old, Travellin Jack. And he knows me. He's got my marks on him. They're hidden--but they're on him. Your momma can take care of herself. At least, she's gonna have to, for a while. Because you got to go."
"Where?"
"West," Speedy said. "From this ocean to the other."
"What?" Jack cried, appalled by the thought of such distance. And then he thought of an ad he'd seen on TV not three nights ago--a man picking up goodies at a deli buffet some thirty-five thousand feet in the air, just as cool as a cucumber. Jack had flown from one coast to another with his mother a good two dozen times, and was always secretly delighted by the fact that when you flew from New York to L.A. you could have sixteen hours of daylight. It was like cheating time. And it was easy.
"Can I fly?" he asked Speedy.
"No!" Speedy almost yelled, his eyes widening in consternation. He gripped Jack's shoulder with one strong hand. "Don't you let nuthin git you up in the sky! You dassn't! If you happened to flip over into the Territories while you was up there--"
He said no more; he didn't have to. Jack had a sudden, appalling picture of himself tumbling out of that clear, cloudless sky, a screaming boy-projectile in jeans with a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, a sky-diver with no parachute.
"You walk," Speedy said. "And thumb what rides you think you can . . . but you got to be careful, because there's strangers out there. Some are just crazy people, sissies that would like to touch you or thugs that would like to mug you. But some are real Strangers, Travellin Jack. They people with a foot in each world--they look that way and this like a goddam Janus-head. I'm afraid they gonna know you comin before too long has passed. And they'll be on the watch."
"Are they"--he groped--"Twinners?"
"Some are. Some aren't. I can't say no more right now. But you get across if you can. Get across to the other ocean. You travel in the Territories when you can and you'll get across faster. You take the juice--"
"I hate it!"
"Never mind what you hate," Speedy said sternly. "You get across and you're gonna find a place--another Alhambra. You got to go in that place. It's a scary place, a bad place. But you got to go in."
"How will I find it?"
"It will call you. You'll hear it loud and clear, son."
"Why?" Jack asked. He wet his lips. "Why do I have to go there, if it's so bad?"
"Because," Speedy said, "that's where the Talisman is. Somewhere in that other Alhambra."
"I don't know what you're talking about!"
"You will," Speedy said. He stood up, then took Jack's hand. Jack rose. The two of them stood face-to-face, old black man and young white boy.
"Listen," Speedy said, and his voice took on a slow, chanting rhythm. "Talisman be given unto your hand, Travellin Jack. Not too big, not too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here's your burden, here's your cross: drop her, Jack, and all be lost."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jack repeated with a scared kind of stubbornness. "You have to--"
"No," Speedy said, not unkindly. "I got to finish with that carousel this morning, Jack, that's what I got to do. Got no time for any more jaw-chin. I got to get back and you got to get on. Can't tell you no more now. I guess I'll be seein you around. Here . . . or over there."
"But I don't know what to do!" Jack said as Speedy swung up into the cab of the old truck.
"You know enough to get movin," Speedy said. "You'll go to the Talisman, Jack. She'll draw you to her."
"I don't even know what a Talisman is!"
Speedy laughed and keyed the ignition. The truck started up with a big blue blast of exhaust. "Look it up in the dictionary!" he shouted, and threw the truck into reverse.
He backed up, turned around, and then the truck was rattling back toward Arcadia Funworld. Jack stood by the curb, watching it go. He had never felt so alone in his life.
5
Jack and Lily
1
When Speedy's truck turned off the road and disappeared beneath the Funworld arch, Jack began to move toward the hotel. A Talisman. In another Alhambra. On the edge of another ocean. His heart seemed empty. Without Speedy beside him, the task was mountainous, so huge; vague, too--while Speedy had been talking, Jack had had the feeling of almost understanding that macaroni of hints and threats and instructions. Now it was close to just being macaroni. The Territories were real, though. He hugged that certainty as close as he could, and it both warmed and chilled him. They were a real place, and he was going there again. Even if he did not really understand everything yet--even if he was an ignorant pilgrim, he was going. Now all he had to do was to try to convince his mother. "Talisman," he said to himself, using the word as the thing, and crossed empty Boardwalk Avenue and jumped up the steps onto the path between the hedges. The darkness of the Alhambra's interior, once the great door had swung shut, startled him. The lobby was a long cave--you'd need a fire just to separate the shadows. The pale clerk flickered behind the long desk, stabbing at Jack with his white eyes. A message there: yes. Jack swallowed and turned away. The mess
age made him stronger, it increased him, though its intention was only scornful.
He went toward the elevators with a straight back and an unhurried step. Hang around with blackies, huh? Let them put their arms around you, huh? The elevator whirred down like a great heavy bird, the doors parted, and Jack stepped inside. He turned to punch the button marked with a glowing 4. The clerk was still posed spectrally behind the desk, sending out his dumdum's message. Niggerlover Niggerlover Niggerlover (like it that way, hey brat? Hot and black, that's for you, hey?). The doors mercifully shut. Jack's stomach fell toward his shoes, the elevator lurched upward.
The hatred stayed down there in the lobby: the very air in the elevator felt better once it had risen above the first floor. Now all Jack had to do was to tell his mother that he had to go to California by himself.
Just don't let Uncle Morgan sign any papers for you. . . .
As Jack stepped out of the elevator, he wondered for the first time in his life whether Richard Sloat understood what his father was really like.
2
Down past the empty sconces and paintings of little boats riding foamy, corrugated seas, the door marked 408 slanted inward, revealing a foot of the suite's pale carpet. Sunlight from the living-room windows made a long rectangle on the inner wall. "Hey Mom," Jack said, entering the suite. "You didn't close the door, what's the big--" He was alone in the room. "Idea?" he said to the furniture. "Mom?" Disorder seemed to ooze from the tidy room--an overflowing ashtray, a half-full tumbler of water left on the coffee table.
This time, Jack promised himself, he would not panic.
He turned in a slow circle. Her bedroom door was open, the room itself as dark as the lobby because Lily had never pulled open the curtains.
"Hey, I know you're here," he said, and then walked through her empty bedroom to knock at her bathroom door. No reply. Jack opened this door and saw a pink toothbrush beside the sink, a forlorn hairbrush on the dressing table. Bristles snarled with light hairs. Laura DeLoessian, announced a voice in Jack's mind, and he stepped backward out of the little bathroom--that name stung him.