The Talisman Read online

  "Oh, not again," he said to himself. "Where'd she go?"

  Already he was seeing it.

  He saw it as he went to his own bedroom, saw it as he opened his own door and surveyed his rumpled bed, his flattened knapsack and little stack of paperback books, his socks balled up on top of the dresser. He saw it when he looked into his own bathroom, where towels lay in oriental disarray over the floor, the sides of the tub, and the Formica counters.

  Morgan Sloat thrusting through the door, grabbing his mother's arms and hauling her downstairs . . .

  Jack hurried back into the living room and this time looked behind the couch.

  . . . yanking her out a side door and pushing her into a car, his eyes beginning to turn yellow. . . .

  He picked up the telephone and punched 0. "This is, ah, Jack Sawyer, and I'm in, ah, room four-oh-eight. Did my mother leave any message for me? She was supposed to be here and . . . and for some reason . . . ah . . ."

  "I'll check," said the girl, and Jack clutched the phone for a burning moment before she returned. "No message for four-oh-eight, sorry."

  "How about four-oh-seven?"

  "That's the same slot," the girl told him.

  "Ah, did she have any visitors in the last half hour or so? Anybody come this morning? To see her, I mean."

  "That would be Reception," the girl said. "I wouldn't know. Do you want me to check for you?"

  "Please," Jack said.

  "Oh, I'm happy to have something to do in this morgue," she told him. "Stay on the line."

  Another burning moment. When she came back to him, it was with "No visitors. Maybe she left a note somewhere in your rooms."

  "Yes, I'll look," Jack said miserably and hung up. Would the clerk tell the truth? Or would Morgan Sloat have held out a hand with a twenty-dollar bill folded like a stamp into his meaty palm? That, too, Jack could see.

  He dropped himself on the couch, stifling an irrational desire to look under the cushions. Of course Uncle Morgan could not have come to the rooms and abducted her--he was still in California. But he could have sent other people to do it for him. Those people Speedy had mentioned, the Strangers with a foot in each world.

  Then Jack could stay in the room no longer. He bounced off the couch and went back into the corridor, closing the door after him. When he had gone a few paces down the hall, he twirled around in mid-step, went back, and opened the door with his own key. He pushed the door an inch in, and then trotted back toward the elevators. It was always possible that she had gone out without her key--to the shop in the lobby, to the newsstand for a magazine or a paper.

  Sure. He had not seen her pick up a newspaper since the beginning of summer. All the news she cared about came over an internal radio.

  Out for a walk, then.

  Yeah, out exercising and breathing deeply. Or jogging, maybe: maybe Lily Cavanaugh had suddenly gone in for the hundred-yard dash. She'd set up hurdles down on the beach and was in training for the next Olympics. . . .

  When the elevator deposited him in the lobby he glanced into the shop, where an elderly blond woman behind a counter peered at him over the tops of her glasses. Stuffed animals, a tiny pile of thin newspapers, a display rack of flavored Chap Stick. Leaning out of pockets in a wallstand were People and Us and New Hampshire Magazine.

  "Sorry," Jack said, and turned away.

  He found himself staring at the bronze plaque beside a huge, dispirited fern . . . has begun to sicken and must soon die.

  The woman in the shop cleared her throat. Jack thought that he must have been staring at those words of Daniel Webster's for entire minutes. "Yes?" the woman said behind him.

  "Sorry," Jack repeated, and pulled himself into the center of the lobby. The hateful clerk lifted an eyebrow, then turned sideways to stare at a deserted staircase. Jack made himself approach the man.

  "Mister," he said when he stood before the desk. The clerk was pretending to try to remember the capital of North Carolina or the principal export of Peru. "Mister." The man scowled to himself: he was nearly there, he could not be disturbed.

  All of this was an act, Jack knew, and he said, "I wonder if you can help me."

  The man decided to look at him after all. "Depends on what the help is, sonny."

  Jack consciously decided to ignore the hidden sneer. "Did you see my mother go out a little while ago?"

  "What's a little while?" Now the sneer was almost visible.

  "Did you see her go out? That's all I'm asking."

  "Afraid she saw you and your sweetheart holding hands out there?"

  "God, you're such a creep," Jack startled himself by saying. "No, I'm not afraid of that. I'm just wondering if she went out, and if you weren't such a creep, you'd tell me." His face had grown hot, and he realized that his hands were bunched into fists.

  "Well okay, she went out," the clerk said, drifting away toward the bank of pigeonholes behind him. "But you'd better watch your tongue, boy. You better apologize to me, fancy little Master Sawyer. I got eyes, too. I know things."

  "You run your mouth and I run my business," Jack said, dredging the phrase up from one of his father's old records--perhaps it did not quite fit the situation, but it felt right in his mouth, and the clerk blinked satisfactorily.

  "Maybe she's in the gardens, I don't know," the man said gloomily, but Jack was already on his way toward the door.

  The Darling of the Drive-ins and Queen of the Bs was nowhere in the wide gardens before the hotel, Jack saw immediately--and he had known that she would not be in the gardens, for he would have seen her on his way into the hotel. Besides, Lily Cavanaugh did not dawdle through gardens: that suited her as little as did setting up hurdles on the beach.

  A few cars rolled down Boardwalk Avenue. A gull screeched far overhead, and Jack's heart tightened.

  The boy pushed his fingers through his hair and looked up and down the bright street. Maybe she had been curious about Speedy--maybe she'd wanted to check out this unusual new pal of her son's and had wandered down to the amusement park. But Jack could not see her in Arcadia Funworld any more than he could see her lingering picturesquely in the gardens. He turned in the less familiar direction, toward the town line.

  Separated from the Alhambra's grounds by a high thick hedge, the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe stood first in a row of brightly colored shops. It and New England Drugs were the only shops in the terrace to remain open after Labor Day. Jack hesitated a moment on the cracked sidewalk. A tea shop, much less shoppe, was an unlikely situation for the Darling of the Drive-ins. But since it was the first place he might expect to find her, he moved across the sidewalk and peered in the window.

  A woman with piled-up hair sat smoking before a cash register. A waitress in a pink rayon dress leaned against the far wall. Jack saw no customers. Then at one of the tables near the Alhambra end of the shop he saw an old woman lifting a cup. Apart from the help, she was alone. Jack watched the old woman delicately replace the cup in the saucer, then fish a cigarette from her bag, and realized with a sickening jolt that she was his mother. An instant later, the impression of age had disappeared.

  But he could remember it--and it was as if he were seeing her through bifocals, seeing both Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer and that fragile old woman in the same body.

  Jack gently opened the door, but still he set off the tinkle of the bell that he had known was above it. The blond woman at the register nodded, smiling. The waitress straightened up and smoothed the lap of her dress. His mother stared at him with what looked like genuine surprise, and then gave him an open smile.

  "Well, Wandering Jack, you're so tall that you looked just like your father when you came through that door," she said. "Sometimes I forget you're only twelve."

  3

  "You called me 'Wandering Jack,' " he said, pulling a chair out and dropping himself into it.

  Her face was very pale, and the smudges beneath her eyes looked almost like bruises.

  "Didn't your father call you that? I just hap
pened to think of it--you've been on the move all morning."

  "He called me Wandering Jack?"

  "Something like that . . . sure he did. When you were tiny. Travelling Jack," she said firmly. "That was it. He used to call you Travelling Jack--you know, when we'd see you tearing down the lawn. It was funny, I guess. I left the door open, by the way. Didn't know if you remembered to take your key with you."

  "I saw," he said, still tingling with the new information she had so casually given him.

  "Want any breakfast? I just couldn't take the thought of eating another meal in that hotel."

  The waitress had appeared beside them. "Young man?" she asked, lifting her order pad.

  "How did you know I'd find you here?"

  "Where else is there to go?" his mother reasonably asked, and told the waitress, "Give him the three-star breakfast. He's growing about an inch a day."

  Jack leaned against the back of his chair. How could he begin this?

  His mother glanced at him curiously, and he began--he had to begin, now. "Mom, if I had to go away for a while, would you be all right?"

  "What do you mean, all right? And what do you mean, go away for a while?"

  "Would you be able--ah, would you have trouble from Uncle Morgan?"

  "I can handle old Sloat," she said, smiling tautly. "I can handle him for a while, anyhow. What's this all about, Jacky? You're not going anywhere."

  "I have to," he said. "Honest." Then he realized that he sounded like a child begging for a toy. Mercifully, the waitress arrived with toast in a rack and a stubby glass of tomato juice. He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back, his mother was spreading jam from one of the pots on the table over a triangular section of toast.

  "I have to go," he said. His mother handed him the toast; her face moved with a thought, but she said nothing.

  "You might not see me for a while, Mom," he said. "I'm going to try to help you. That's why I have to go."

  "Help me?" she asked, and her cool incredulity, Jack reckoned, was about seventy-five percent genuine.

  "I want to try to save your life," he said.

  "Is that all?"

  "I can do it."

  "You can save my life. That's very entertaining, Jacky-boy; it ought to make prime time someday. Ever think about going into network programming?" She had put down the red-smeared knife and was widening her eyes in mockery: but beneath the deliberate incomprehension he saw two things. A flare-up of her terror; a faint, almost unrecognized hope that he might after all be able to do something.

  "Even if you say I can't try, I'm going to do it anyhow. So you might as well give me your permission."

  "Oh, that's a wonderful deal. Especially since I don't have any idea of what you're talking about."

  "I think you do, though--I think you do have some idea, Mom. Because Dad would have known exactly what I'm talking about."

  Her cheeks reddened; her mouth thinned into a line. "That's so unfair it's despicable, Jacky. You can't use what Philip might have known as a weapon against me."

  "What he did know, not what he might have known."

  "You're talking total horseshit, sonny boy."

  The waitress, setting a plate of scrambled eggs, home fries, and sausages before Jack, audibly inhaled.

  After the waitress had paraded off, his mother shrugged. "I don't seem able to find the right tone with the help around here. But horseshit is still horseshit is still horseshit, to quote Gertrude Stein."

  "I'm going to save your life, Mom," he repeated. "And I have to go a long way away and bring something back to do it. And so that's what I'm going to do."

  "I wish I knew what you were talking about."

  Just an ordinary conversation, Jack told himself: as ordinary as asking permission to spend a couple of nights at a friend's house. He cut a sausage in half and popped one of the pieces in his mouth. She was watching him carefully. Sausage chewed and swallowed, Jack inserted a forkful of egg into his mouth. Speedy's bottle lumped like a rock against his backside.

  "I also wish you'd act as though you could hear the little remarks I send your way, as obtuse as they may be."

  Jack stolidly swallowed the eggs and inserted a salty wad of the crisp potatoes into his mouth.

  Lily put her hands in her lap. The longer he said nothing, the more she would listen when he did talk. He pretended to concentrate on his breakfast, eggs sausage potatoes, sausage potatoes eggs, potatoes eggs sausage, until he sensed that she was near to shouting at him.

  My father called me Travelling Jack, he thought to himself. This is right; this is as right as I'll ever get.

  "Jack--"

  "Mom," he said, "sometimes didn't Dad call you up from a long way away, and you knew he was supposed to be in town?"

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "And sometimes didn't you, ah, walk into a room because you thought he was there, maybe even knew he was there--but he wasn't?"

  Let her chew on that.

  "No," she said.

  Both of them let the denial fade away.

  "Almost never."

  "Mom, it even happened to me," Jack said.

  "There was always an explanation, you know there was."

  "My father--this is what you know--was never too bad at explaining things. Especially the stuff that really couldn't be explained. He was very good at that. That's part of the reason he was such a good agent."

  Now she was silent again.

  "Well, I know where he went," Jack said. "I've been there already. I was there this morning. And if I go there again, I can try to save your life."

  "My life doesn't need you to save it, it doesn't need anyone to save it," his mother hissed. Jack looked down at his devastated plate and muttered something. "What was that?" she drilled at him.

  "I think it does, I said." He met her eyes with his own.

  "Suppose I ask how you propose to go about saving my life, as you put it."

  "I can't answer. Because I don't really understand it yet. Mom, I'm not in school, anyhow . . . give me a chance. I might only be gone a week or so."

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "It could be longer," he admitted.

  "I think you're nuts," she said. But he saw that part of her wanted to believe him, and her next words proved it. "If--if--I were mad enough to allow you to go off on this mysterious errand, I'd have to be sure that you wouldn't be in any danger."

  "Dad always came back," Jack pointed out.

  "I'd rather risk my life than yours," she said, and this truth, too, lay hugely between them for a long moment.

  "I'll call when I can. But don't get too worried if a couple of weeks go by without my calling. I'll come back, too, just like Dad always did."

  "This whole thing is nuts," she said. "Me included. How are you going to get to this place you have to go to? And where is it? Do you have enough money?"

  "I have everything I need," he said, hoping that she would not press him on the first two questions. The silence stretched out and out, and finally he said, "I guess I'll mainly walk. I can't talk about it much, Mom."

  "Travelling Jack," she said. "I can almost believe . . ."

  "Yes," Jack said. "Yes." He was nodding. And maybe, he thought, you know some of what she knows, the real Queen, and that's why you are letting go this easily. "That's right. I can believe, too. That's what makes it right."

  "Well . . . since you say you'll go no matter what I say . . ."

  "I will, too."

  ". . . then I guess it doesn't matter what I say." She looked at him bravely. "It does matter, though. I know. I want you to get back here as quick as you can, sonny boy. You're not going right away, are you?"

  "I have to." He inhaled deeply. "Yes. I am going right away. As soon as I leave you."

  "I could almost believe in this rigamarole. You're Phil Sawyer's son, all right. You haven't found a girl somewhere in this place, have you . . . ?" She looked at him very sharply. "No. No girl. Okay. Save my life. Off with you.
" She shook her head, and he thought he saw an extra brightness in her eyes. "If you're going to leave, get out of here, Jacky. Call me tomorrow."

  "If I can." He stood up.

  "If you can. Of course. Forgive me." She looked down at nothing, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused. Red dots burned in the middle of her cheeks.

  Jack leaned over and kissed her, but she just waved him away. The waitress stared at the two of them as if they were performing a play. Despite what his mother had just said, Jack thought that he had brought the level of her disbelief down to something like fifty percent; which meant that she no longer knew what to believe.

  She focused on him for a moment, and he saw that hectic brightness blazing in her eyes again. Anger; tears? "Take care," she said, and signalled the waitress.

  "I love you," Jack said.

  "Never get off on a line like that." Now she was almost smiling. "Get travelling, Jack. Get going before I realize how crazy this is."

  "I'm gone," he said, and turned away and marched out of the restaurant. His head felt tight, as if the bones in his skull had just grown too large for their covering of flesh. The empty yellow sunlight attacked his eyes. Jack heard the door of the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe banging shut an instant after the little bell had sounded. He blinked; ran across Boardwalk Avenue without looking for cars. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he realized that he would have to go back to their suite for some clothes. His mother had still not emerged from the tea shop by the time Jack was pulling open the hotel's great front door.

  The desk clerk stepped backward and sullenly stared. Jack felt some sort of emotion steaming off the man, but for a second could not remember why the clerk should react so strongly to the sight of him. The conversation with his mother--actually much shorter than he had imagined it would be--seemed to have lasted for days. On the other side of the vast gulf of time he'd spent in the Tea and Jam Shoppe, he had called the clerk a creep. Should he apologize? He no longer actually remembered what had caused him to flare up at the clerk. . . .

  His mother had agreed to his going--she had given him permission to take his journey, and as he walked through the crossfire of the deskman's glare he finally understood why. He had not mentioned the Talisman, not explicitly, but even if he had--if he had spoken of the most lunatic aspect of his mission--she would have accepted that too. And if he'd said that he was going to bring back a foot-long butterfly and roast it in the oven, she'd have agreed to eat roast butterfly. It would have been an ironic, but a real, agreement. In part this showed the depth of her fear, that she would grasp at such straws.