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    The Talisman: A Novel
    The Talisman: A Novel
    The Talisman: A Novel
    Ebook1,006 pages18 hours

    The Talisman: A Novel

    By Stephen King and Peter Straub

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Friendship

    • Adventure

    • Good Vs. Evil

    • Parallel Universes

    • Fear

    • Power of Friendship

    • Magical Artifact

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Wise Mentor

    • Chosen One

    • Power of Love

    • Mentor Figure

    • Call to Adventure

    • Road Trip

    • Supernatural Creatures

    • Coming of Age

    • Survival

    • Family

    • Self-Discovery

    • Mystery

    About this ebook

    Soon to be a Netflix series! The iconic, “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) collaboration between bestselling authors Stephen King and Peter Straub—an epic #1 New York Times bestselling fantasy thriller about a young boy’s quest to save his mother’s life.

    Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, is about to begin a most fantastic journey, an exalting, terrifying quest for the mystical Talisman—the only thing that can save Jack’s dying mother. But to reach his goal, Jack must make his way not only across the breadth of the United States but also through the wondrous and menacing parallel world of the Territories.

    In the Territories, Jack finds another realm, where the air is so sweet and clear a man can smell a radish being pulled from the ground a mile away—and a life can be snuffed out instantly in the continuing struggle between good and evil. Here Jack discovers “Twinners,” reflections of the people he knows on earth—most notably Queen Laura DeLoessian, the Twinner of Jack’s own imperiled mother. As Jack “flips” between worlds, making his way westward toward the redemptive Talisman, a sequence of heart-stopping encounters challenges him at every step.

    An unforgettable epic of adventure and resounding triumph, The Talisman is one of the most influential and highly praised works of fantasy ever written.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPocket Books
    Release dateSep 25, 2012
    ISBN9781451698367
    The Talisman: A Novel
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch (May 2025), the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for The Talisman

    4/5

    2,601 ratings75 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a fantastic fantasy, horror, and adventure book. It pulls you in and won't let go, with memorable characters and a gripping storyline. While some parts may drag a bit, overall it is a very good collaborative book. The Talisman is a perfect blend of fantasy, horror, and adventure that keeps readers hooked from start to finish. Highly recommended for fans of Stephen King and Peter Straub.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Always one of my favorite stephen king books....it was a long book but not long enough...now on to Black House
    • 4/5
      It's been many years since my last Stephen King read, but it was like riding a bike: a hero, a journey with scary thrills, and a happy ending. I hear they're making a series out of this—produced by the Duffer Brothers (that's right, Stranger Things)—and cannot wait to see it.
    • 5/5
      This should be in every classic horror collection.
    • 5/5
      This is an excellent book! It truly takes you along on a grand adventure.
      I love all of Stephen Kings books.
      Despite the fact that the majority are thought of as "horror" stories, I find that Kings sheer goodness, and his belief in goodness, always shines through!
      I highly recommend this story for anyone who was ever a young boy or whoever knew a young boy.
      You will be cheering Jack, his mother, and all of the friends he meets along his journey. Especially Wolf. (Right here and now! Wolf!)
      I am a huge Dark Tower junkie but Talisman and Black House are my next favorite stories from S.K. This is saying a lot.
      Now that I have read all of his books, some many times, I am going to have to check out Peter Straub. Then perhaps S.K.'s sons books. Owne King and Joe Hill.
      I am a huge fan and my only hope is that whomever reads this review enjoys this book as much as I did.
      10 stars!
      ~Kirsten (Standing with the White)
    • 5/5
      Read this book when I was eleven years old, which is also the year it came out. I was enthralled with it. I loved it then, the layers, the depth. It was a stretch for King. I think he was pulling on some personal demons while writing this. Now as an adult I am reading it again. It has not lost its sense of wonder. Of course it is easer to understand. There are a few chapters where you really feel for Jack. His first night alone in the territories is frightening. Kings makes it clear what it would be like for ourselves as a child to experience this lonlieness. I admit, I am not that familiar with Straub, but I will soon be putting a remedy to that. This is a direction however that I did not want to see King step into. Of course a good writer cannot pigieon hole themselves, but his later fantasy work just flew by me.
    • 3/5
      To cryptic for me not my style. It was descent but I can tell stephen king let Peter Straub lead the way in a some areas. It takes a while to pick up and the conclusion was so so to me. It had pieces that had potential but didn't execute in my humble opinion
    • 4/5
      Some string moments and memorable characters but also a few parts that drag a bit. Still, a very good collaborative book.
    • 4/5
      Excellent straight fantasy by King. This isn't horror or part horror and fantasy, more straight fantasy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of my favorite Stephen King books
    • 2/5
      I had a real problem with this book. The lead character's dialog wasn't working for me. I couldn't "hear" it. The part just before the end was pretty good. I suspect Stephen King wrote that part. The last few pages I only read the first sentence every every paragraph. I wanted to know how it ended, but it wasn't worth it. Oh well, hope my next book is better.
      9,326 members; 4,01 average rating; 3/20/2023
    • 5/5
      One of my favorites! King and Straube created a fantastic fantasy world fraught with danger and mystery.
    • 4/5
      For me, the best bits about this book were the excellent locations - a creepy, out of season hotel and its fantastical, horrific 'opposite', a deserted theme park (always a winner!) and a slow, open train ride across a dangerous wasteland. There were also some original and very memorable supporting characters and the flipping between parallel worlds was consistently well realised.

      It misses out on the final star only because, for me, it was a little too long and I didn't really warm to the main protagonist as much as I would have liked.
    • 5/5
      Love this book this is my 4th read
    • 5/5
      It's odd that I read Black House by these two first and connected an adult Jack Sawyer to a book I knew should be out there ha. After it drove me crazy for a few days, I realized it was The Talisman that told the story of Jacky-Boy's childhood.
      All in all, coming from a person who read Pet Semetary at age 6, Stephen King mixed with Peter Straub makes for gripping writing that will keep you up past your bedtime!
    • 5/5
      Read this book when I was eleven years old, which is also the year it came out. I was enthralled with it. I loved it then, the layers, the depth. It was a stretch for King. I think he was pulling on some personal demons while writing this. Now as an adult I am reading it again. It has not lost its sense of wonder. Of course it is easer to understand. There are a few chapters where you really feel for Jack. His first night alone in the territories is frightening. Kings makes it clear what it would be like for ourselves as a child to experience this lonlieness. I admit, I am not that familiar with Straub, but I will soon be putting a remedy to that. This is a direction however that I did not want to see King step into. Of course a good writer cannot pigieon hole themselves, but his later fantasy work just flew by me.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      OK read. First Stephen King book and it's nothing spectacular but sure worth it if your into borderline horror/adventure for young adult readers.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great job author, I really like your writing style. I suggest you join Novel Star’s writing competition on April.
    • 1/5
      Horridly adolescent story (tee hee, he said "penis"!). Too many characters are introduced, never to be heard from again. So what is the talisman? How does it work? What is the guitar pick? Even Jack/Jason doesn't fully understand what they are. They should have cut out half this book and then developed the remaining characters. I only read this as a prelude to "The Black House", which is much, much better.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Lots of people have lots of love for The Talisman and I guess I kind of get it. At it's heart it's a coming of age story combined with a Homeric caliber quest of a 12-year-old boy trying to save his mother's life. The young boy is Jack Sawyer and the word that King and Straub introduce is a complicated one where our reality overlaps with another (which they call "The Territories') and Jack is one of a few people who can bounce back and forth between them. Others apparently can cross over but only by taking control of their "twinner" who exists on the other side. I can't say that this was explained completely to my satisfaction, but there you go.

      So as the story goes, Jack meets a mysterious jazz musician named Speedy Parker who teaches Jack how to flip back and forth between our world and the Territories, and Speedy puts Jack on a quest to travel from New Hampshire all the way to California, to find a magical Talisman which can heal his mother's cancer. Along the way Jack has adventures, makes friends, and enemies, has experiences that I swear would send any 12-year-old today into a catatonic coma, gets one of his friends killed, and nearly gets killed himself by evil people who don't want him to succeed. Does he succeed? Well, I'm not sure I need a spoiler warning to say, yes he does, and he comes out the other end of this quest a different boy than he was when he started.

      Not my favorite King novel. I can kind of see why some people like it, but the whole thing felt disjointed to me. Like all the different episodes that Jack went through could easily have been written by 12 different people. There wasn't enough connective tissue between them to make me understand why they were all there. It almost read like a collection of short stories, and except for they "quest for the talisman" tying them together, they almost were.

      I read this along my own quest to read all of the Dark Tower books and any book related to that series. So why was this book important to the Dark Tower series? It wasn't. The sequel, Black House, written in 2001, is directly linked. This book was written in 1984, and I truly believe King had no intention at all of making this part of that saga. But when he started writing Black House, he had already decided to finish the Dark Tower saga, so he decided to retcon the world of The Talisman, and Jack Sawyer, to serve a larger purpose. So I kind of had to read this one so the sequel would make sense. And believe me, I tried to read Black House when it first came out and without this background I was thoroughly confused.

      I'm glad I read it, but it's not one of my faves.
    • 4/5
      Jack Sawyer is on a quest to save his mother's life. The journey will take him through two worlds,many dangers, and test his heart and grit to survive.
      Jack will meet friends and enemies, old and new.
      Is he destined to complete the task, or will his Uncle Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris along with Sunlight Gardner/Osmond end Jack's and his mother's lives.

      Sometimes hard to follow, but worth every second.
    • 4/5
      When two masters of horror team up you get a masterpiece such as The Talisman. I've actually never read any of Peter Straub's work however am a big Stephen King fan. The Talisman is the story of 12 year old Jakc Sawyer's quest to save his mother and his journey across America and it's twin dimension The Territories. I found this book to be more dark fantasy than horror, however it had its horrific elements as you would expect from the the authors. Truly, the most horrific parts for me were the more human aspects, but this is typical for King at least.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Officially the worst book I've read by King as I continue to reread his books in chronological order. First, while I do distinctly remember owning this book when it came out, I had absolutely no recollection of the story whatsoever and now I understand why as it is so forgettable. This book needs to loose 400 or so pages to make it a decent YA fantasy. The book is indeed very adolescent, coming mostly from a 12-year-old's perspective there is hardly anything in the majority of the book to offend anyone. I'm surprised at how cliched the story is. Jack finds out there is an alternate world. His mother is dying in this world and the Queen, who is his mother's twinner, is dying in the other. He has been chosen to be the one who must travel west across the country to find the talisman which will rescue the Queen and his mother. So off he goes on a journey with pages and pages of nothing happening. Even the big showdown at the end with good vs evil was more campy than anything else. I really had to force myself to finish this book, and then only for the sake of my chronological project.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Read it when I was a teen loved it.
      I have the sequel but have yet to indulge.
    • 2/5
      I started this book in July. I forced myself to read it. I love King, and the only book of his I *forced* myself to finish was Lisey's Story. I thought that that book was the only book of his I didn't like. I was wrong. The Talisman is a very long book that drags on needlessly. The only thing that struck me was how miserable King & Straub make life seem. Nothing but pain and murder. I didn't see a point at all. Why continue going on? There was just more horrific things to be seen. The ending was very abrupt and God help me, I have Black House. I hope this sequel will be good.

      I was told this book was like The Dark Towers series. No wonder I never wanted to read them!
    • 3/5
      God pound it, that was a tedious read! There is an awesome 300 page book in this behemoth! Jack Sawyer takes on a Herculean task and must cross the country/Territories to achieve it. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jack Kerouac, and even a bit of Jesus in this 12 year old! A good tale, but stretched out much too long. Makes me nervous about the sequel. Wolf!
    • 5/5
      As with all the best King works, it pulls you in and won't let go.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This has a companion book, The Regulators. Aside from being told they were companion books, I really wouldn't have guessed.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Jack Sawyer was my first character crush. Ok, maybe not my first. But what an awesome adventure. It has everything. Horror, mystery, thriller, fantasy, love - mostly familial love, but still. After all this, it is just an amazing story of friendships and the journey.
       

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Loved it! Couldn't put it down. Long yet a fast read.
    • 5/5
      Best book ever! I loved this book. of course I'm a huge SK fan so that helps. this book is fantasy,mystery and thriller all rolled into one. I've read it at least 5 times. its a good long read but never boring. You will fall in love with Jack, Wolf and you will want to visit The Territories. Do yourself a favor. Start this book today. Now.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Talisman - Stephen King

    ONE

    JACK LIGHTS OUT

    1

    The Alhambra Inn and Gardens

    1

    On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze swept back his brown hair, probably too long, from a fine, clear brow. He stood there, filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months—since the time when his mother had closed their house on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estate agents, rented an apartment on Central Park West. From that apartment they had fled to this quiet resort on New Hampshire’s tiny seacoast. Order and regularity had disappeared from Jack’s world. His life seemed as shifting, as uncontrolled, as the heaving water before him. His mother was moving him through the world, twitching him from place to place; but what moved his mother?

    His mother was running, running.

    Jack turned around, looking up the empty beach first to the left, then to the right. To the left was Arcadia Funworld, an amusement park that ran all racket and roar from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It stood empty and still now, a heart between beats. The roller coaster was a scaffold against that featureless, overcast sky, the uprights and angled supports like strokes done in charcoal. Down there was his new friend, Speedy Parker, but the boy could not think about Speedy Parker now. To the right was the Alhambra Inn and Gardens, and that was where the boy’s thoughts relentlessly took him. On the day of their arrival Jack had momentarily thought he’d seen a rainbow over its dormered and gambreled roof. A sign of sorts, a promise of better things. But there had been no rainbow. A weathervane spun right-left, left-right, caught in a crosswind. He had got out of their rented car, ignoring his mother’s unspoken desire for him to do something about the luggage, and looked up. Above the spinning brass cock of the weathervane hung only a blank sky.

    Open the trunk and get the bags, sonny boy, his mother had called to him. This broken-down old actress wants to check in and hunt down a drink.

    An elementary martini, Jack had said.

    ‘You’re not so old,’ you were supposed to say. She was pushing herself effortfully off the carseat.

    You’re not so old.

    She gleamed at him—a glimpse of the old, go-to-hell Lily Cavanaugh (Sawyer), queen of two decades’ worth of B movies. She straightened her back. It’s going to be okay here, Jacky, she had said. Everything’s going to be okay here. This is a good place.

    A seagull drifted over the roof of the hotel, and for a second Jack had the disquieting sensation that the weathervane had taken flight.

    We’ll get away from the phone calls for a while, right?

    Sure, Jack had said. She wanted to hide from Uncle Morgan, she wanted no more wrangles with her dead husband’s business partner, she wanted to crawl into bed with an elementary martini and hoist the covers over her head. . . .

    Mom, what’s wrong with you?

    There was too much death, the world was half-made of death. The gull cried out overhead.

    Andelay, kid, andelay, his mother had said. Let’s get into the Great Good Place.

    Then, Jack had thought: At least there’s always Uncle Tommy to help out in case things get really hairy.

    But Uncle Tommy was already dead; it was just that the news was still on the other end of a lot of telephone wires.

    2

    The Alhambra hung out over the water, a great Victorian pile on gigantic granite blocks which seemed to merge almost seamlessly with the low headland—a jutting collarbone of granite here on the few scant miles of New Hampshire seacoast. The formal gardens on its landward side were barely visible from Jack’s beachfront angle—a dark green flip of hedge, that was all. The brass cock stood against the sky, quartering west by northwest. A plaque in the lobby announced that it was here, in 1838, that the Northern Methodist Conference had held the first of the great New England abolition rallies. Daniel Webster had spoken at fiery, inspired length. According to the plaque, Webster had said: From this day forward, know that slavery as an American institution has begun to sicken and must soon die in all our states and territorial lands.

    3

    So they had arrived, on that day last week which had ended the turmoil of their months in New York. In Arcadia Beach there were no lawyers employed by Morgan Sloat popping out of cars and waving papers which had to be signed, had to be filed, Mrs. Sawyer. In Arcadia Beach the telephones did not ring out from noon until three in the morning (Uncle Morgan appeared to forget that residents of Central Park West were not on California time). In fact the telephones in Arcadia Beach rang not at all.

    On the way into the little resort town, his mother driving with squinty-eyed concentration, Jack had seen only one person on the streets—a mad old man desultorily pushing an empty shopping cart along a sidewalk. Above them was that blank gray sky, an uncomfortable sky. In total contrast to New York, here there was only the steady sound of the wind, hooting up deserted streets that looked much too wide with no traffic to fill them. Here were empty shops with signs in the windows saying OPEN WEEKENDS ONLY or, even worse, SEE YOU IN JUNE! There were a hundred empty parking places on the street before the Alhambra, empty tables in the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe next door.

    And shabby-crazy old men pushed shopping carts along deserted streets.

    I spent the happiest three weeks of my life in this funny little place, Lily told him, driving past the old man (who turned, Jack saw, to look after them with frightened suspicion—he was mouthing something but Jack could not tell what it was) and then swinging the car up the curved drive through the front gardens of the hotel.

    For that was why they had bundled everything they could not live without into suitcases and satchels and plastic shopping bags, turned the key in the lock on the apartment door (ignoring the shrill ringing of the telephone, which seemed to penetrate that same keyhole and pursue them down the hall); that was why they had filled the trunk and back seat of the rented car with all their overflowing boxes and bags and spent hours crawling north along the Henry Hudson Parkway, then many more hours pounding up I-95—because Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had once been happy here. In 1968, the year before Jack’s birth, Lily had been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in a picture called Blaze. Blaze was a better movie than most of Lily’s, and in it she had been able to demonstrate a much richer talent than her usual bad-girl roles had revealed. Nobody expected Lily to win, least of all Lily; but for Lily the customary cliché about the real honor being in the nomination was honest truth—she did feel honored, deeply and genuinely, and to celebrate this one moment of real professional recognition, Phil Sawyer had wisely taken her for three weeks to the Alhambra Inn and Gardens, on the other side of the continent, where they had watched the Oscars while drinking champagne in bed. (If Jack had been older, and had he had an occasion to care, he might have done the necessary subtraction and discovered that the Alhambra had been the place of his essential beginning.)

    When the Supporting Actress nominations were read, according to family legend, Lily had growled to Phil, "If I win this thing and I’m not there, I’ll do the Monkey on your chest in my stiletto heels."

    But when Ruth Gordon had won, Lily had said, Sure, she deserves it, she’s a great kid. And had immediately poked her husband in the middle of the chest and said, You’d better get me another part like that, you big-shot agent you.

    There had been no more parts like that. Lily’s last role, two years after Phil’s death, had been that of a cynical ex-prostitute in a film called Motorcycle Maniacs.

    •   •   •

    It was that period Lily was commemorating now, Jack knew as he hauled the baggage out of the trunk and the back seat. A D’Agostino bag had torn right down through the big D’AG, and a jumble of rolled-up socks, loose photographs, chessmen and the board, and comic books had dribbled over all else in the trunk. Jack managed to get most of this stuff into other bags. Lily was moving slowly up the hotel steps, pulling herself along on the railing like an old lady. I’ll find the bellhop, she said without turning around.

    Jack straightened up from the bulging bags and looked again at the sky where he was sure he had seen a rainbow. There was no rainbow, only that uncomfortable, shifting sky.

    Then:

    Come to me, someone said behind him in a small and perfectly audible voice.

    What? he asked, turning around. The empty gardens and drive stretched out before him.

    Yes? his mother said. She looked crickle-backed, leaning over the knob of the great wooden door.

    Mistake, he said. There had been no voice, no rainbow. He forgot both and looked up at his mother, who was struggling with the vast door. Hold on, I’ll help, he called, and trotted up the steps, awkwardly carrying a big suitcase and a straining paper bag filled with sweaters.

    4

    Until he met Speedy Parker, Jack had moved through the days at the hotel as unconscious of the passage of time as a sleeping dog. His entire life seemed almost dreamlike to him during these days, full of shadows and inexplicable transitions. Even the terrible news about Uncle Tommy which had come down the telephone wires the night before had not entirely awakened him, as shocking as it had been. If Jack had been a mystic, he might have thought that other forces had taken him over and were manipulating his mother’s life and his own. Jack Sawyer at twelve was a being who required things to do, and the noiseless passivity of these days, after the hubbub of Manhattan, had confused and undone him in some basic way.

    Jack had found himself standing on the beach with no recollection of having gone there, no idea of what he was doing there at all. He supposed he was mourning Uncle Tommy, but it was as though his mind had gone to sleep, leaving his body to fend for itself. He could not concentrate long enough to grasp the plots of the sitcoms he and Lily watched at night, much less keep the nuances of fiction in his head.

    You’re tired from all this moving around, his mother said, dragging deeply on a cigarette and squinting at him through the smoke. All you have to do, Jack-O, is relax for a little while. This is a good place. Let’s enjoy it as long as we can.

    Bob Newhart, before them in a slightly too-reddish color on the set, bemusedly regarded a shoe he held in his right hand.

    That’s what I’m doing, Jacky. She smiled at him. Relaxing and enjoying it.

    He peeked at his watch. Two hours had passed while they sat in front of the television, and he could not remember anything that had preceded this program.

    Jack was getting up to go to bed when the phone rang. Good old Uncle Morgan Sloat had found them. Uncle Morgan’s news was never very great, but this was apparently a blockbuster even by Uncle Morgan’s standards. Jack stood in the middle of the room, watching as his mother’s face grew paler, palest. Her hand crept to her throat, where new lines had appeared over the last few months, and pressed lightly. She said barely a word until the end, when she whispered, Thank you, Morgan, and hung up. She had turned to Jack then, looking older and sicker than ever.

    Got to be tough now, Jacky, all right?

    He hadn’t felt tough.

    She took his hand then and told him.

    Uncle Tommy was killed in a hit-and-run accident this afternoon, Jack.

    He gasped, feeling as if the wind had been torn out of him.

    He was crossing La Cienega Boulevard and a van hit him. There was a witness who said it was black, and that the words WILD CHILD were written on the side, but that was . . . was all.

    Lily began to cry. A moment later, almost surprised, Jack began to cry as well. All of that had happened three days ago, and to Jack it seemed forever.

    5

    On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood looking out at the steady water as he stood on an unmarked beach before a hotel that looked like a castle in a Sir Walter Scott novel. He wanted to cry but was unable to release his tears. He was surrounded by death, death made up half the world, there were no rainbows. The WILD CHILD van had subtracted Uncle Tommy from the world. Uncle Tommy, dead in L.A., too far from the east coast, where even a kid like Jack knew he really belonged. A man who felt he had to put on a tie before going out to get a roast beef sandwich at Arby’s had no business on the west coast at all.

    His father was dead, Uncle Tommy was dead, his mother might be dying. He felt death here, too, at Arcadia Beach, where it spoke through telephones in Uncle Morgan’s voice. It was nothing as cheap or obvious as the melancholy feel of a resort in the offseason, where one kept stumbling over the Ghosts of Summers Past; it seemed to be in the texture of things, a smell on the ocean breeze. He was scared . . . and he had been scared for a long time. Being here, where it was so quiet, had only helped him to realize it—had helped him to realize that maybe Death had driven all the way up I-95 from New York, squinting out through cigarette smoke and asking him to find some bop on the car radio.

    He could remember—vaguely—his father telling him that he was born with an old head, but his head didn’t feel old now. Right now, his head felt very young. Scared, he thought. I’m pretty damn scared. This is where the world ends, right?

    Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The silence was as gray as the air—as deadly as the growing circles under her eyes.

    6

    When he had wandered into Funworld and met Lester Speedy Parker after he did not quite know how many days of numbly drifting through time, that passive feeling of being on hold had somehow left him. Lester Parker was a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting through his cheeks. He was utterly unremarkable now despite whatever he had accomplished in his earlier life as a travelling blues musician. Nor had he said anything particularly remarkable. Yet as soon as Jack had walked aimlessly into Funworld’s game arcade and met Speedy’s pale eyes he felt all the fuzziness leave him. He had become himself again. It was as if a magical current had passed directly from the old man into Jack. Speedy had smiled at him and said, Well, it looks like I got me some company. Little travellin man just walked in.

    It was true, he was not on hold anymore: just an instant before, he had seemed to be wrapped in wet wool and cotton candy, and now he was set free. A silvery nimbus seemed to play about the old man for an instant, a little aureole of light which disappeared as soon as Jack blinked. For the first time Jack saw that the man was holding the handle of a wide heavy push-broom.

    You okay, son? The handyman put one hand in the small of his back, and stretched backward. The world just get worse, or did she get better?

    Uh, better, Jack said.

    Then you come to the right place, I’d say. What do they call you?

    Little travellin man, Speedy had said that first day, ole Travellin Jack. He had leaned his tall angular body against the Skee-Ball machine and wrapped his arms around the broom-handle as though it were a girl at a dance. The man you see here is Lester Speedy Parker, formerly a travellin man hisself, son, hee hee—oh yeah, Speedy knew the road, he knew all the roads, way back in the old days. Had me a band, Travellin Jack, played the blues. Gittar blues. Made me a few records, too, but I won’t shame you by asking if you ever heard em. Every syllable had its own rhythmic lilt, every phrase its rimshot and backbeat; Speedy Parker carried a broom instead of a guitar, but he was still a musician. Within the first five seconds of talking to Speedy, Jack had known that his jazz-loving father would have relished this man’s company.

    He had tagged along behind Speedy for the better part of three or four days, watching him work and helping out when he could. Speedy let him bang in nails, sand down a picket or two that needed paint; these simple tasks done under Speedy’s instructions were the only schooling he was getting, but they made him feel better. Jack now saw his first days in Arcadia Beach as a period of unrelieved wretchedness from which his new friend had rescued him. For Speedy Parker was a friend, that was certain—so certain, in fact, that in it was a quantity of mystery. In the few days since Jack had shaken off his daze (or since Speedy had shaken it off for him by dispelling it with one glance of his light-colored eyes), Speedy Parker had become closer to him than any other friend, with the possible exception of Richard Sloat, whom Jack had known approximately since the cradle. And now, counteracting his terror at losing Uncle Tommy and his fear that his mother was actually dying, he felt the tug of Speedy’s warm wise presence from just down the street.

    Again, and uncomfortably, Jack had his old sense of being directed, of being manipulated: as if a long invisible wire had pulled himself and his mother up to this abandoned place by the sea.

    They wanted him here, whoever they were.

    Or was that just crazy? In his inner vision he saw a bent old man, clearly out of his mind, muttering to himself as he pushed an empty shopping cart down the sidewalk.

    A gull screamed in the air, and Jack promised himself that he would make himself talk about some of his feelings with Speedy Parker. Even if Speedy thought he was nuts; even if he laughed at Jack. He would not laugh, Jack secretly knew. They were old friends because one of the things Jack understood about the old custodian was that he could say almost anything to him.

    But he was not ready for all that yet. It was all too crazy, and he did not understand it yet himself. Almost reluctantly Jack turned his back on Funworld and trudged across the sand toward the hotel.

    2

    The Funnel Opens

    1

    It was a day later, but Jack Sawyer was no wiser. He had, however, had one of the greatest nightmares of all time last night. In it, some terrible creature had been coming for his mother—a dwarfish monstrosity with misplaced eyes and rotting, cheesy skin. Your mother’s almost dead, Jack, can you say hallelujah? this monstrosity had croaked, and Jack knew—the way you knew things in dreams—that it was radioactive, and that if it touched him, he would die, too. He had awakened with his body drenched in sweat, on the edge of a bitter scream. It took the steady pounding of the surf to reacquaint him with where he was, and it was hours before he could go back to sleep.

    He had meant to tell his mother about the dream this morning, but Lily had been sour and uncommunicative, hiding in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was only as he started out of the hotel coffee shop on some trumped-up errand that she smiled at him a little.

    Think about what you want to eat tonight.

    Yeah?

    Yeah. Anything but fast food. I did not come all the way from L.A. to New Hampshire in order to poison myself with hotdogs.

    Let’s try one of those seafood places in Hampton Beach, Jack said.

    Fine. Go on and play.

    Go on and play, Jack thought with a bitterness utterly unlike him. Oh yeah, Mom, way to go. Too cool. Go on and play. With who? Mom, why are you here? Why are we here? How sick are you? How come you won’t talk to me about Uncle Tommy? What’s Uncle Morgan up to? What—

    Questions, questions. And not one of them worth a darned thing, because there was no one to answer them.

    Unless Speedy—

    But that was ridiculous; how could one old black man he’d just met solve any of his problems?

    Still, the thought of Speedy Parker danced at the edge of his mind as Jack ambled across the boardwalk and down to the depressingly empty beach.

    2

    This is where the world ends, right? Jack thought again.

    Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The calendar said it was still summer, but summer ended here at Arcadia Beach on Labor Day. The silence was gray as the air.

    He looked down at his sneakers and saw that there was some sort of tarry goo on them. Beach crud, he thought. Some kind of pollution. He had no idea where he had picked it up and he stepped back from the edge of the water, uneasy.

    The gulls in the air, swooping and crying. One of them screamed overhead and he heard a flat cracking that was almost metallic. He turned in time to see it come in for a fluttering, awkward landing on a hump of rock. The gull turned its head in rapid, almost robotic movements, as if to verify it was alone, and then it hopped down to where the clam it had dropped lay on the smooth, hard-packed sand. The clam had cracked open like an egg and Jack saw raw meat inside, still twitching . . . or perhaps that was his imagination.

    Don’t want to see this.

    But before he could turn away, the gull’s yellow, hooked beak was pulling at the meat, stretching it like a rubber band, and he felt his stomach knot into a slick fist. In his mind he could hear that stretched tissue screaming—nothing coherent, only stupid flesh crying out in pain.

    He tried to look away from the seagull again and he couldn’t. The gull’s beak opened, giving him a brief glimpse of dirty pink gullet. The clam snapped back into its cracked shell and for a moment the gull was looking at him, its eyes a deadly black, confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe . . . and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.

    Hey, Jack said aloud, not aware he was doing anything but thinking inside his own head. Hey, give me a break.

    The gull sat over its catch, regarding him with its beady black eyes. Then it began to dig at the meat again. Want some, Jack? It’s still twitching! By God, it’s so fresh it hardly knows it’s dead!

    The strong yellow beak hooked into the meat again and pulled. Strettttchhhhhh—

    It snapped. The gull’s head went up toward the gray September sky and its throat worked. And again it seemed to be looking at him, the way the eyes in some pictures seemed always to look at you no matter where you went in the room. And the eyes . . . he knew those eyes.

    Suddenly he wanted his mother—her dark blue eyes. He could not remember wanting her with such desperation since he had been very, very small. La-la, he heard her sing inside his head, and her voice was the wind’s voice, here for now, somewhere else all too soon. La-la, sleep now, Jacky, baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting. And all that jazz. Memories of being rocked, his mother smoking one Herbert Tareyton after another, maybe looking at a script—blue pages, she called them, he remembered that: blue pages. La-la, Jacky, all is cool. I love you, Jacky. Shhh . . . sleep. La-la.

    The gull was looking at him.

    With sudden horror that engorged his throat like hot salt water he saw it really was looking at him. Those black eyes (whose?) were seeing him. And he knew that look.

    A raw strand of flesh still dangled from the gull’s beak. As he looked, the gull sucked it in. Its beak opened in a weird but unmistakable grin.

    He turned then and ran, head down, eyes shut against the hot salt tears, sneakers digging against the sand, and if there was a way to go up, go up and up, up to some gull’s-eye view, one would have seen only him, only his tracks, in all that gray day; Jack Sawyer, twelve and alone, running back toward the inn, Speedy Parker forgotten, his voice nearly lost in tears and wind, crying the negative over and over again: no and no and no.

    3

    He paused at the top of the beach, out of breath. A hot stitch ran up his left side from the middle of his ribs to the deepest part of his armpit. He sat down on one of the benches the town put out for old people and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

    Got to get control of yourself. If Sergeant Fury goes Section Eight, who’s gonna lead the Howling Commandos?

    He smiled and actually did feel a little better. From up here, fifty feet from the water, things looked a little better. Maybe it was the change in barometric pressure, or something. What had happened to Uncle Tommy was horrible, but he supposed he would get over it, learn to accept. That was what his mother said, anyway. Uncle Morgan had been unusually pesty just lately, but then, Uncle Morgan had always been sort of a pest.

    As for his mother . . . well, that was the big one, wasn’t it?

    Actually, he thought, sitting on the bench and digging at the verge of the sand beyond the boardwalk with one toe, actually his mother might still be all right. She could be all right; it was certainly possible. After all, no one had come right out and said it was the big C, had they? No. If she had cancer, she wouldn’t have brought him here, would she? More likely they’d be in Switzerland, with his mother taking cold mineral baths and scoffing goat-glands, or something. And she would do it, too.

    So maybe—

    A low, dry whispering sound intruded on his consciousness. He looked down and his eyes widened. The sand had begun to move by the instep of his left sneaker. The fine white grains were sliding around in a small circle perhaps a finger’s length in diameter. The sand in the middle of this circle suddenly collapsed, so that now there was a dimple in the sand. It was maybe two inches deep. The sides of this dimple were also in motion: around and around, moving in rapid counterclockwise circuits.

    Not real, he told himself immediately, but his heart began to speed up again. His breathing also began to come faster. Not real, it’s one of the Daydreams, that’s all, or maybe it’s a crab or something . . .

    But it wasn’t a crab and it wasn’t one of the Daydreams—this was not the other place, the one he dreamed about when things were boring or maybe a little scary, and it sure as hell wasn’t any crab.

    The sand spun faster, the sound arid and dry, making him think of static electricity, of an experiment they had done in science last year with a Leyden jar. But more than either of these, the minute sound was like a long lunatic gasp, the final breath of a dying man.

    More sand collapsed inward and began to spin. Now it was not a dimple; it was a funnel in the sand, a kind of reverse dustdevil. 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 was 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, rattledy-bang! 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 comfortable 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, squeezed 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 from blue to yellow, and his mother was fine and dandy, there was nothing to be scared of, nobody was dying, and danger was what a seagull meant to a clam. He closed his eyes and the elevator toiled upward.

    That thing in the sand had laughed at him.

    Jack squeezed through the opening as soon as the doors began to part. He trotted past the closed mouths of the other elevators, turned right into the panelled corridor and ran past the sconces and paintings toward their rooms. Here running seemed less a sacrilege. They had 407 and 408, consisting of two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room with a view of the long smooth beach and the vastness of the ocean. His mother had appropriated flowers from somewhere, arranged them in vases, and set her little array of framed photographs beside them. Jack at five, Jack at eleven, Jack as an infant in the arms of his father. His father, Philip Sawyer, at the wheel of the old DeSoto he and Morgan Sloat had driven to California in the unimaginable days when they had been so poor they had often slept in the car.

    When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he called out, Mom? Mom?

    The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no answer. Mom! The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. Mom! Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother’s window showed black waves rolling and rolling toward him.

    Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves nondescript, reaching for her . . .

    Mom! he shouted.

    I hear you, Jack, came his mother’s voice through the bathroom door. What on earth . . . ?

    Oh, he said, and felt all his muscles relax. Oh, sorry. I just didn’t know where you were.

    Taking a bath, she said. Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?

    Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom. He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay—

    Still okay for now, a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.

    5

    Seven or eight miles up the coast road, just outside Hampton Township, they found a restaurant called The Lobster Chateau. Jack had given a very sketchy account of his day—already he was backing away from the terror he had experienced on the beach, letting it diminish in his memory. A waiter in a red jacket printed with the yellow image of a lobster across the back showed them to a table beside a long streaky window.

    Would Madam care for a drink? The waiter had a stony-cold off-season New England face, and looking at it, suspecting the resentment of his Ralph Lauren sport coat and his mother’s carelessly worn Halston afternoon dress behind those watery blue eyes, Jack felt a more familiar terror needle him—simple homesickness. Mom, if you’re not really sick, what the hell are we doing here? The place is empty! It’s creepy! Jesus!

    Bring me an elementary martini, she said.

    The waiter raised his eyebrows. Madam?

    Ice in a glass, she said. Olive on ice. Tanqueray gin over olive. Then—are you getting this?

    Mom, for God’s sake, can’t you see his eyes? You think you’re being charming—he thinks you’re making fun of him! Can’t you see his eyes?

    No. She couldn’t. And that failure of empathy, when she had always been so sharp about how other people were feeling, was another stone against his heart. She was withdrawing . . . in all ways.

    Yes, madam.

    Then, she said, you take a bottle of vermouth—any brand—and hold it against the glass. Then you put the vermouth back on the shelf and bring the glass to me. ’Kay?

    Yes, madam. Watery-cold New England eyes, staring at his mother with no love at all. We’re alone here, Jack thought, really realizing it for the first time. Jeez, are we. Young sir?

    I’d like a Coke, Jack said miserably.

    The waiter left. Lily rummaged in her purse, came up with a package of Herbert Tarrytoons (so she had called them since he had been a baby, as in Bring me my Tarrytoons from over there on the shelf, Jacky, and so he still thought of them) and lit one. She coughed out smoke in three harsh bursts.

    It was another stone against his heart. Two years ago, his mother had given up smoking entirely. Jack had waited for her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence. His mother had always smoked; she would soon smoke again. But she had not . . . not until three months ago, in New York. Carltons. Walking around the living room in the apartment on Central Park West, puffing like a choo-choo, or squatting in front of the record cabinet, pawing through her old rock records or her dead husband’s old jazz records.

    You smoking again, Mom? he’d asked her.

    Yeah, I’m smoking cabbage leaves, she’d said.

    I wish you wouldn’t.

    Why don’t you turn on the TV? she’d responded with uncharacteristic sharpness, turning toward him, her lips pressed tightly together. Maybe you can find Jimmy Swaggart or Reverend Ike. Get down there in the hallelujah corner with the amen sisters.

    Sorry, he’d muttered.

    Well—it was only Carltons. Cabbage leaves. But here were the Herbert Tarrytoons—the blue-and-white old-fashioned pack, the mouthpieces that looked like filters but which weren’t. He could remember, vaguely, his father telling somebody that he smoked Winstons and his wife smoked Black Lungers.

    See anything weird, Jack? she asked him now, her overbright eyes fixed on him, the cigarette held in its old, slightly eccentric position between the second and third fingers of the right hand. Daring him to say something. Daring him to say, Mom, I notice you’re smoking Herbert Tarrytoons again—does this mean you figure you don’t have anything left to lose?

    No, he said. That miserable, bewildered homesickness swept him again, and he felt like weeping. "Except this place. It’s a little weird."

    She looked around and grinned. Two other waiters, one fat, one thin, both in red jackets with golden lobsters on the back, stood by the swing doors to the kitchen, talking quietly. A velvet rope hung across the entrance to a huge dining room beyond the alcove where Jack and his mother sat. Chairs were overturned in ziggurat shapes on the tables in this dark cave. At the far end, a huge window-wall looked out on a gothic shorescape that made Jack think of Death’s Darling, a movie his mother had been in. She had played a young woman with a lot of money who married a dark and handsome stranger against her parents’ wishes. The dark and handsome stranger took her to a big house by the ocean and tried to drive her crazy. Death’s Darling had been more or less typical of Lily Cavanaugh’s career—she had starred in a lot of black-and-white films in which handsome but forgettable actors drove around in Ford convertibles with their hats on.

    The sign hanging from the velvet rope barring the entrance to this dark cavern was ludicrously understated: THIS SECTION CLOSED.

    "It is a little grim, isn’t it?" she said.

    It’s like the Twilight Zone, he replied, and she barked her harsh, infectious, somehow lovely laugh.

    Yeah, Jacky, Jacky, Jacky, she said, and leaned over to ruffle his too-long hair, smiling.

    He pushed her hand away, also smiling (but oh, her fingers felt like bones, didn’t they? She’s almost dead, Jack . . .). Don’t touch-a da moichendise.

    Off my case.

    Pretty hip for an old bag.

    Oh boy, try to get movie money out of me this week.

    Yeah.

    They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remember a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much. There was a kind of desperate toughness about her now . . . going back to the Black Lungers was part of that.

    Their drinks came. She tipped her glass toward his. Us.

    Okay.

    They drank. The waiter came with menus.

    Did I pull his string a little hard before, Jacky?

    Maybe a little, he said.

    She thought about it, then shrugged it away. What are you having?

    Sole, I guess.

    Make it two.

    So he ordered for both of them, feeling clumsy and embarrassed but knowing it was what she wanted—and he could see in her eyes when the waiter left that he hadn’t done too bad a job. A lot of that was Uncle Tommy’s doing. After a trip to Hardee’s Uncle Tommy had said: I think there’s hope for you, Jack, if we can just cure this revolting obsession with processed yellow cheese.

    •   •   •

    The food came. He wolfed his sole, which was hot and lemony and good. Lily only toyed with hers, ate a few green beans, and then pushed things around on her plate.

    School started up here two weeks ago, Jack announced halfway through the meal. Seeing the big yellow buses with ARCADIA DISTRICT SCHOOLS written on the sides had made him feel guilty—under the circumstances he thought that was probably absurd, but there it was. He was playing hooky.

    She looked at him, enquiring. She had ordered and finished a second drink; now the waiter brought a third.

    Jack shrugged. Just thought I’d mention it.

    Do you want to go?

    Huh? No! Not here!

    Good, she said. Because I don’t have your goddam vaccination papers. They won’t let you in school without a pedigree, chum.

    Don’t call me chum, Jack said, but Lily didn’t crack a smile at the old joke.

    Boy, why ain’t you in school?

    He blinked as if the voice had spoken aloud instead of only in his mind.

    Something? she asked.

    No. Well . . . there’s a guy at the amusement park. Funworld. Janitor, caretaker, something like that. An old black guy. He asked me why I wasn’t in school.

    She leaned forward, no humor in her now, almost frighteningly grim. What did you tell him?

    Jack shrugged. I said I was getting over mono. You remember that time Richard had it? The doctor told Uncle Morgan Richard had to stay out of school for six weeks, but he could walk around outside and everything. Jack smiled a little. I thought he was lucky.

    Lily relaxed a little. I don’t like you talking to strangers, Jack.

    Mom, he’s just a—

    "I don’t care who he is. I don’t want you talking to strangers."

    Jack thought of the black man, his hair gray steel wool, his dark face deeply lined, his odd, light-colored eyes. He had been pushing a broom in the big arcade on the pier—the arcade was the only part of Arcadia Funworld that stayed open the year around, but it had been deserted then except for Jack and the black man and two old men far in the back. The two were playing Skee-Ball in apathetic silence.

    But now, sitting here in this slightly creepy restaurant with his mother, it wasn’t the black man who asked the question; it was himself.

    Why aren’t I in school?

    It be just like she say, son. Got no vaccination, got no pedigree. You think she come down here with your birth certificate? That what you think? She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. You—

    Have you heard from Richard? she broke in, and when she said it, it came to him—no, that was too gentle. It crashed into him. His hands twitched and his glass fell off the table. It shattered on the floor.

    She’s almost dead, Jack.

    The voice from the swirling sand-funnel. The one he had heard in his mind.

    It had been Uncle Morgan’s voice. Not maybe, not almost, not sorta like. It had been a real voice. The voice of Richard’s father.

    6

    Going home in the car, she asked him, What happened to you in there, Jack?

    Nothing. My heart did this funny little Gene Krupa riff. He ran off a quick one on the dashboard to demonstrate. "Threw a PCV, just like on General Hospital."

    Don’t wise off to me, Jacky. In the glow of the dashboard instruments she looked pale and haggard. A cigarette smouldered between the second and third fingers of her right hand. She was driving very slowly—never over forty—as she always drove when she’d had too much to drink. Her seat was pulled all the way forward, her skirt was hiked up so her knees floated, storklike, on either side of the steering column, and her chin seemed to hang over the wheel. For a moment she looked haglike, and Jack quickly looked away.

    I’m not, he mumbled.

    What?

    I’m not wising off, he said. It was like a twitch, that’s all. I’m sorry.

    It’s okay, she said. I thought it was something about Richard Sloat.

    No. His father talked to me out of a hole in the sand down on the beach, that’s all. In my head he talked to me, like in a movie where you hear a voice-over. He told me you were almost dead.

    Do you miss him, Jack?

    Who, Richard?

    No—Spiro Agnew. Of course Richard.

    Sometimes. Richard Sloat was now going to school in Illinois—one of those private schools where chapel was compulsory and no one had acne.

    You’ll see him. She ruffled his hair.

    Mom, are you all right? The words burst out of him. He could feel his fingers biting into his thighs.

    Yes, she said, lighting another cigarette (she slowed down to twenty to do it; an old pick-up swept by them, its horn blatting). Never better.

    How much weight have you lost?

    Jacky, you can never be too thin or too rich. She paused and then smiled at him. It was a tired, hurt smile that told him all the truth he needed to know.

    Mom—

    No more, she said. All’s well. Take my word for it. See if you can find us some be-bop on the FM.

    But—

    Find us some bop, Jacky, and shut up.

    He found some jazz on a Boston station—an alto saxophone elucidating All the Things You Are. But under it, a steady, senseless counterpoint, was the ocean. And later, he could see the great skeleton of the roller coaster against the sky. And the rambling wings of the Alhambra Inn. If this was home, they were home.

    3

    Speedy Parker

    1

    The next day the sun was back—a hard bright sun that layered itself like paint over the flat beach and the slanting, red-tiled strip of roof Jack could see from his bedroom window. A long low wave far out in the water seemed to harden in the light and sent a spear of brightness straight toward his eyes. To Jack this sunlight felt different from the light in California. It seemed somehow thinner, colder, less nourishing. The wave out in the dark ocean melted away, then hoisted itself up again, and a hard dazzling streak of gold leaped across it. Jack turned away from his window. He had already showered and dressed, and his body’s clock told him that it was time to start moving toward the schoolbus stop. Seven-fifteen. But of course he would not go to school today, nothing was normal anymore, and he and his mother would just drift like ghosts through another twelve hours of daytime. No schedule, no responsibilities, no homework . . . no order at all except for that given them by mealtimes.

    Was today even a schoolday? Jack stopped short beside his bed, feeling a little flicker of panic that his world had become so formless . . . he didn’t think this was a Saturday. Jack counted back to the first absolutely identifiable day his memory could find, which was the previous Sunday. Counting forward made it Thursday. On Thursdays he had computer class with Mr. Balgo and an early sports period. At least that was what he’d had when his life had been normal, a time that now seemed—though it had come to an end only months ago—irretrievably lost.

    He wandered out of his bedroom into the living room. When he tugged at the drawstring for the curtains the hard bright light flooded into the room, bleaching the furniture. Then he punched the button on the television set and dropped himself onto the stiff couch. His mother would not be up for at least another fifteen minutes. Maybe longer, considering that she’d had three drinks with dinner the night before.

    Jack glanced toward the door to his mother’s room.

    Twenty minutes later he rapped softly at her door. Mom? A thick mumble answered him. Jack pushed the door open a crack and looked in. She was lifting her head off the pillow and peering back through half-closed eyes.

    Jacky. Morning. What time?

    Around eight.

    God. You starving? She sat up and pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes.

    Kind of. I’m sort of sick of sitting in here. I just wondered if you were getting up soon.

    Not if I can help it. You mind? Go down to the dining room, get some breakfast. Mess around on the beach, okay? You’ll have a much better mother today if you give her another hour in bed.

    Sure, he said. Okay. See you later.

    Her head had already dropped back down on the pillow.

    Jack switched off the television and let himself out of the room after making sure his key was in the pocket of his jeans.

    The elevator smelled of camphor and ammonia—a maid had tipped a bottle off a cart. The doors opened, and the gray desk clerk frowned at him and ostentatiously turned away. Being a movie star’s brat doesn’t make you anything special around here, sonny . . . and why aren’t you in school? Jack turned into the panelled entrance to the dining room—The Saddle of Lamb—and saw rows of empty tables in a shadowy vastness. Perhaps six had been set up. A waitress in a white blouse and red ruffled skirt looked at him, then looked away. Two exhausted-looking old people sat across a table from each other at the other end of the room. There were no other breakfasters. As Jack looked on, the old man leaned over the table and unselfconsciously cut his wife’s fried egg into four-inch square sections.

    Table for one? The woman in charge of The Saddle of Lamb during the day had materialized beside him, and was already plucking a menu off a stack beside the reservation book.

    Changed my mind, sorry. Jack escaped.

    The Alhambra’s coffee shop, The Beachcomber Lounge, lay all the way across the lobby and down a long bleak corridor lined with empty display cases. His hunger died at the thought of sitting by himself at the counter and watching the bored cook slap down strips of bacon on the crusty grill. He would wait until his mother got up: or, better yet, he would go out and see if he could get a doughnut and a little carton of milk at one of the shops up the street on the way into town.

    He pushed open the tall heavy front door of the hotel and went out into the sunlight. For a moment the sudden brightness stung his eyes—the world was a flat glaring dazzle. Jack squinted, wishing he had remembered to bring his sunglasses downstairs. He went across the apron of red brick and down the four curving steps to the main pathway through the gardens at the front of the hotel.

    What happened if she died?

    What happened to him—where would he go, who would take care of him, if the worst thing in the world actually took place and she died, for good and all died, up in that hotel room?

    He shook his head, trying to send the terrible thought away before a lurking panic could rush up out of the Alhambra’s well-ordered gardens and blast him apart. He would not cry, he would not let that happen to him—and he would not let himself think about the Tarrytoons and the weight she had lost, the feeling that he sometimes had that she was too helpless and without direction. He was walking very quickly now, and he shoved his hands into his pockets as he jumped down off the curving path through the gardens onto the hotel’s drive. She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. On the run, but from whom? And to where? Here—just to here, this deserted resort?

    He reached the wide street that travelled up the shoreline toward the town, and now all of the empty landscape before him was a whirlpool that could suck him down into itself and spit him out into a black place where peace and safety had never existed. A gull sailed out over the empty road, wheeled around in a wide curve, and dipped back toward the beach. Jack watched it go, shrinking in the air to a smudge of white above the erratic line of the roller-coaster track.

    Lester Speedy Parker, a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting down through his cheeks, was down there somewhere inside Funworld and it was Speedy he had to see. That was as clear to Jack as his sudden insight about his friend Richard’s father.

    A gull screeched, a wave bounced hard gold light toward him, and Jack saw Uncle Morgan and his new friend Speedy as figures almost allegorically opposed, as if they were statues of NIGHT and DAY, stuck up on plinths, MOON and SUN—the dark and the light. What Jack had understood as soon as he had known that his father would have liked Speedy Parker was that the ex-bluesman had no harm in him. Uncle Morgan, now . . . he was another kind of being altogether. Uncle Morgan lived for business, for deal-making and hustling; and he was so ambitious that he challenged every even faintly dubious call in a tennis match, so ambitious in fact that he cheated in the penny-ante card games his son had now and then coaxed him into joining. At least, Jack thought that Uncle Morgan had been cheating in a couple of their games . . . not a man who thought that defeat demanded graciousness.

    NIGHT and DAY, MOON and SUN; DARK and LIGHT, and the black man was the light in these polarities. And when Jack’s mind had pushed him this far, all that panic he had fought off in the hotel’s tidy gardens swarmed toward him again. He lifted his feet and ran.

    2

    When the boy saw Speedy kneeling down outside the gray and peeling arcade building—wrapping electrician’s tape around a thick cord, his steel-wool head bent almost to the pier and his skinny buttocks poking out the worn green seat of his workpants, the dusty soles of his boots toed down like a pair of upended surfboards—he realized that he had no idea of what he had been planning to say to the custodian, or even if he intended to say anything at all. Speedy gave the roll of black tape another twist around the cord, nodded, took a battered Palmer knife from the flap pocket of his workshirt and sliced the tape off the roll with a flat surgical neatness. Jack would have escaped from here, too, if he could—he was intruding on the man’s work, and anyhow, it was crazy to think that Speedy could really help him in any way. What kind of help could he give, an old janitor in an empty amusement park?

    Then Speedy turned his head and registered the boy’s presence with an expression of total and warming welcome—not so much a smile as a deepening of all those heavy lines in his face—and Jack knew that he was at least no intrusion.

    Travellin Jack, Speedy said. I was beginnin to get afraid you decided to stay away from me. Just when we got to be friends, too. Good to see you again, son.

    Yeah, Jack said. Good to see you, too.

    Speedy popped the metal knife back into his shirt pocket and lifted his long bony body upright so easily, so athletically, that he seemed weightless. This whole place comin down around my ears, he said. I just fix it a little bit at a time, enough so everything works more or less the way it should. He stopped in mid-sentence, having had a good look at Jack’s face. Old world’s not so fine right now, seems like. Travellin Jack got buckled up to a load of worries. That the way it is?

    Yeah, sort of, Jack began—he still had no idea of how to begin expressing the things that troubled him. They could not be put into ordinary sentences, for ordinary sentences made everything seem rational. One . . . two . . . three: Jack’s world no longer marched in those straight lines. All he could not say weighed in his chest.

    He looked miserably at the tall thin man before him. Speedy’s hands were thrust deep into his pockets; his thick gray eyebrows pushed toward the deep vertical furrow between them. Speedy’s eyes, so light they were almost no color at all, swung up from the blistered paint of the pier and met Jack’s own—and suddenly Jack felt better again. He did not understand why, but Speedy seemed to be able to communicate emotion directly to him: as if they had not met just a week before, but years ago, and had shared far more than a few words in a deserted arcade.

    Well, that’s enough work for now, Speedy said, glancing up in the direction of the Alhambra. Do any more and I just spoil em. Don’t suppose you ever saw my office, did you?

    Jack shook his head.

    "Time for a little refreshment, boy. The time is right."

    He set off down the pier in his long-legged gait, and Jack trotted after him. As they jumped down the

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