The Talisman (59 page)

Then another fireball lurched over the wide horizon, spinning off a wide glowing track a distance from the train, and Jack momentarily glimpsed what looked like a ramshackle little shed set just below the curve of the desert wall. Before it stood a large humanoid figure, male, looking toward him. An impression of size, hairiness, force, malice . . .

Jack was indelibly conscious of the slowness of Anders’s little train, of his and Richard’s exposure to anything that might want to investigate them a little more closely. The first fireball had dispatched the horrible dog-things, but human residents of the Blasted Lands might prove more difficult to overcome. Before the light diminished into the glowing trail, Jack saw that the figure before the shed was following his progress, turning a great shaggy head as the train passed by. If what he had seen were dogs, then what would the people be like? In the last of the flaring light from the ball of fire, the manlike being scuttled around the side of its dwelling. A thick reptilian tail swung from its hindquarters, and then the thing had slipped around the side of the building, and then it was dark again and nothing—dogs, man-beast, shed—was visible. Jack could not even be sure that he had really seen it.

Richard jerked in his sleep, and Jack pushed his hand against the simple gearshift, vainly trying for more speed. The dog-noises gradually faded behind them. Sweating, Jack raised his left wrist again to the level of his eyes and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d checked his watch. He astonished himself by yawning again, and again regretted eating so much at The Depot.

“NO!” Richard screamed. “NO! I CAN’T GO THERE!”

There? Jack wondered. Where was “there”? California? Or was it anywhere threatening, anywhere Richard’s precarious control, as insecure as an unbroken horse, might slip away from him?

5

All night Jack stood at the gearshift while Richard slept, watching the trails of the departed fireballs flicker along the reddish surface of the earth. Their odor, of dead flowers and hidden corruption, filled the air. From time to time he heard the chatter of the mutant dogs, or of other poor creatures, rising from the roots of the stunted, ingrown trees which still dotted the landscape. The ranks of batteries occasionally sent up snapping arcs of blue. Richard was in a state beyond mere sleep, wrapped in an unconsciousness he both required and had willed. He made no more tortured outcries—in fact he did nothing but slump into his corner of the cab and breathe shallowly, as if even respiration took more energy than he had. Jack half-prayed for, half-feared the coming of the light. When morning came, he would be able to see the animals; but what else might he have to see?

From time to time he glanced over at Richard. His friend’s skin seemed oddly pale, an almost ghostly shade of gray.

6

Morning came with a relaxation of the darkness. A band of pink appeared along the bowllike edge of the eastern horizon, and soon a rosy stripe grew up beneath it, pushing the optimistic pinkness higher in the sky. Jack’s eyes felt almost as red as that stripe, and his legs ached. Richard lay across the whole of the cab’s little seat, still breathing in a restricted, almost reluctant way. It was true, Jack saw—Richard’s face did seem peculiarly gray. His eyelids fluttered in a dream, and Jack hoped that his friend was not about to erupt in another of his screams. Richard’s mouth dropped open, but what emerged was the tip of his tongue, not a loud outcry. Richard passed his tongue along his upper lip, snorted, then fell back into his stupefied coma.

Although Jack wished desperately to sit down and close his own eyes, he did not disturb Richard. For the more Jack saw as the new light filled in the details of the Blasted Lands, the more he hoped Richard’s unconsciousness would endure as long as he himself could endure the conditions of Anders’s cranky little train. He was anything but eager to witness the response of Richard Sloat to the idiosyncrasies of the Blasted Lands. A small amount of pain, a quantity of exhaustion—these were a minimal price to pay for what he knew must be a temporary peace.

What he saw through his squinting eyes was a landscape in which nothing seemed to have escaped withering, crippling damage. By moonlight, it had seemed a vast desert, though a desert furnished with trees. Now Jack took in that his “desert” was actually nothing of the sort. What he had taken for a reddish variety of sand was a loose, powdery soil—it looked as though a man would sink in it up to his ankles, if not his knees. From this starved dry soil grew the wretched trees. Looked at directly, these were much as they had appeared by night, so stunted they seemed to be straining over in an attempt to flee back under their own coiling roots. This was bad enough—bad enough for Rational Richard, anyhow. But when you saw one of these trees obliquely, out of the side of your eye, then you saw a living creature in torment—the straining branches were arms thrown up over an agonized face caught in a frozen scream. As long as Jack was not looking directly at the trees, he saw their tortured faces in perfect detail, the open O of the mouth, the staring eyes and the drooping nose, the long, agonized wrinkles running down the cheeks. They were cursing, pleading, howling at him—their unheard voices hung in the air like smoke. Jack groaned. Like all the Blasted Lands, these trees had been poisoned.

The reddish land stretched out for miles on either side, dotted here and there with patches of acrid-looking yellow grass bright as urine or new paint. If it had not been for the hideous coloration of the long grass, these areas would have resembled oases, for each lay beside a small round body of water. The water was black, and oily patches floated on its skin. Thicker than water, somehow; itself oily, poisonous. The second of these false oases that Jack saw began to ripple sluggishly as the train went past, and at first Jack thought with horror that the black water itself was alive, a being as tormented as the trees he no longer wished to see. Then he momentarily saw something break the surface of the thick fluid, a broad black back or side which rolled over before a wide, ravenous mouth appeared, biting down on nothing. A suggestion of scales that would have been iridescent if the creature had not been discolored by the pool.
Holy cow,
Jack thought,
was that a fish?
It seemed to him to have been nearly twenty feet long, too big to inhabit the little pool. A long tail roiled the water before the entire enormous creature slipped back down into what must have been the pool’s considerable depth.

Jack looked up sharply at the horizon, imagining that he had momentarily seen the round shape of a head peering over it. And then he had another of those shocks of a sudden displacement, similar to that the Loch Ness monster, or whatever it was, had given him. How could a head peer over the
horizon
, for God’s sake?

Because the horizon wasn’t the real horizon, he finally understood—all night, and for as long as it took him to really see what lay at the end of his vision, he had drastically under-estimated the size of the Blasted Lands. Jack finally understood, as the sun began to force its way up into the world again, that he was in a broad valley, and the rim far off to either side was not the edge of the world but the craggy top of a range of hills. Anybody or anything could be tracking him, keeping just out of sight past the rim of the surrounding hills. He remembered the humanoid being with the crocodile’s tail that had slipped around the side of the little shed. Could he have been following Jack all night, waiting for him to fall asleep?

The train
poop-pooped
through the lurid valley, moving with a suddenly maddening lack of speed.

He scanned the entire rim of hills about him, seeing nothing but new morning sunlight gild the upright rocks far above him. Jack turned around completely in the cab, fear and tension for the moment completely negating his tiredness. Richard threw one arm over his eyes, and slept on. Anything, anybody might have been keeping pace with them, waiting them out.

A slow, almost hidden movement off to his left made him catch his breath. A movement huge, slithery . . . Jack had a vision of a half-dozen of the crocodile-men crawling over the rim of the hills toward him, and he shielded his eyes with his hands and stared at the place where he thought he had seen them. The rocks were stained the same red as the powdery soil, and between them a deep trail wound its way over the crest of the hills through a cleft in the high-standing rocks. What was moving between two of the standing rocks was a shape not even vaguely human. It was a snake—at least, Jack thought it was . . . It had slipped into a concealed section of the trail, and Jack saw only a huge sleek round reptilian body disappearing behind the rocks. The skin of the creature seemed oddly ridged; burned, too—a suggestion, just before it disappeared, of ragged black holes in its side . . . Jack craned to see the place where it would emerge, and in seconds witnessed the wholly unnerving spectacle of the head of a giant worm, one-quarter buried in the thick red dust, swivelling toward him. It had hooded, filmy eyes, but it was the head of a worm.

Some other animal bolted from under a rock, heavy head and dragging body, and as the worm’s big head darted toward it, Jack saw that the fleeing creature was one of the mutant dogs. The worm opened a mouth like the slot of a corner mailbox and neatly scooped up the frantic dog-thing. Jack clearly heard the snapping of bones. The dog’s wailing ceased. The huge worm swallowed the dog as neatly as if it were a pill. Now, immediately before the worm’s monstrous form, lay one of the black trails left by the fireballs, and as Jack watched, the long creature burrowed into the dust like a cruise ship sinking beneath the surface of the ocean. It apparently understood that the traces of the fireballs could do it damage and, wormlike, it would dig beneath them. Jack watched as the ugly thing completely disappeared into the red powder. And then cast his eyes uneasily over the whole of the long red slope dotted with pubic outpatches of the shiny yellow grass, wondering where it would surface again.

When he could be at least reasonably certain that the worm was not going to try to ingest the train, Jack went back to inspecting the ridge of rocky hills about him.

7

Before Richard woke up late that afternoon, Jack saw:

at least one unmistakable head peering over the rim of the hills;

two more jouncing and deadly fireballs careering down at him;

the headless skeleton of what he at first took to be a large rabbit, then sickeningly knew was a human baby, picked shining clean, lying beside the tracks and closely followed by:

the round babyish gleaming skull of the same baby, half-sunk in the loose soil. And he saw:

a pack of the big-headed dogs, more damaged than the others he had seen, pathetically come crawling after the train, drooling with hunger;

three board shacks, human habitations, propped up over the thick dust on stilts, promising that somewhere out in that stinking poisoned wilderness which was the Blasted Lands other people schemed and hunted for food;

a small leathery bird, featherless, with—this a real Territories touch—a bearded monkeylike face, and clearly delineated fingers protruding from the tips of its wings;

and worst of all (apart from what he
thought
he saw), two completely unrecognizable animals drinking from one of the black pools—animals with long teeth and human eyes and forequarters like those of pigs, hindquarters like those of big cats. Their faces were matted with hair. As the train pulled past the animals, Jack saw that the testicles of the male had swollen to the size of pillows and sagged onto the ground. What had made such monstrosities? Nuclear damage, Jack supposed, since scarcely anything else had such power to deform nature. The creatures, themselves poisoned from birth, snuffled up the equally poisoned water and snarled at the little train as it passed.

Our world could look like this someday, Jack thought. What a treat.

8

Then there were the things he
thought
he saw. His skin began to feel hot and itchy—he had already dumped the serapelike overgarment which had replaced Myles P. Kiger’s coat onto the floor of the cab. Before noon he stripped off his homespun shirt, too. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, an acidic combination of rusty metal and rotten fruit. Sweat ran from his hairline into his eyes. He was so tired he began to dream standing up, eyes open and stinging with sweat. He saw great packs of the obscene dogs scuttling over the hills; he saw the reddish clouds overhead open up and reach down for Richard and himself with long flaming arms, devil’s arms. When at last his eyes finally did close, he saw Morgan of Orris, twelve feet tall and dressed in black, shooting thunderbolts all around him, tearing the earth into great dusty spouts and craters.

Richard groaned and muttered, “No, no, no.”

Morgan of Orris blew apart like a wisp of fog, and Jack’s painful eyes flew open.

“Jack?” Richard said.

The red land ahead of the train was empty but for the blackened trails of the fireballs. Jack wiped his eyes and looked at Richard, feebly stretching. “Yeah,” he said. “How are you?”

Richard lay back against the stiff seat, blinking out of his drawn gray face.

“Sorry I asked,” Jack said.

“No,” Richard said, “I’m better, really,” and Jack felt at least a portion of his tension leave him. “I still have a headache, but I’m better.”

“You were making a lot of noise in your . . . um . . .” Jack said, unsure of how much reality his friend could stand.

“In my sleep. Yeah, I guess I probably did.” Richard’s face worked, but for once Jack did not brace himself against a scream. “I know I’m not dreaming now, Jack. And I know I don’t have a brain tumor.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“On that train. That old man’s train. In what he called the Blasted Lands.”

“Well, I’ll be double-damned,” Jack said, smiling.

Richard blushed beneath his gray pallor.

“What brought this on?” Jack asked, still not quite sure that he could trust Richard’s transformation.

“Well, I knew I wasn’t dreaming,” Richard said, and his cheeks grew even redder. “I guess I . . . I guess it was just time to stop fighting it. If we’re in the Territories, then we’re in the Territories, no matter how impossible it is.” His eyes found Jack’s, and the trace of humor in them startled his friend. “You remember that gigantic hourglass back in The Depot?” When Jack nodded, Richard said, “Well, that was it, really . . . when I saw that thing, I knew I wasn’t just making everything up. Because I knew I
couldn’t
have made up that thing. Couldn’t. Just . . . couldn’t. If I were going to invent a primitive clock, it’d have all sorts of wheels, and big pulleys . . . it wouldn’t be so simple. So I didn’t make it up. Therefore it was real. Therefore everything else was real, too.”