The Talisman (65 page)

“Camp Readiness?”

But Richard appeared not to have heard him. He was looking at the rusted tracks. They were whole here, but Jack thought Richard might be remembering the twisted ripples they had passed some way back. In a couple of places the ends of rail-sections actually curved up into the air, like broken guitar-strings. Jack guessed that in the Territories those tracks would be in fine shape, neatly and lovingly maintained.

“See, there used to be a trolley line here,” Richard said. “This was back in the thirties, my father said. The Mendocino County Red Line. Only it wasn’t owned by the county, it was owned by a private company, and they went broke, because in California . . . you know . . .”

Jack nodded. In California, everyone used cars. “Richard, why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”

“That was the one thing my dad said never to tell you. You and your parents knew we sometimes took vacations in northern California and he said that was all right, but I wasn’t to tell you about the train, or Camp Readiness. He said if I told, Phil would be mad because it was a secret.”

Richard paused.

“He said if I told, he’d never take me again. I thought it was because they were supposed to be partners. I guess it was more than that.

“The trolley line went broke because of the cars and the freeways.” He paused thoughtfully. “That was one thing about the place you took me to, Jack. Weird as it was, it didn’t stink of hydrocarbons. I could get into that.”

Jack nodded again, saying nothing.

“The trolley company finally sold the whole line—grandfather clause and all—to a development company.
They
thought people would start to move inland, too. Except it didn’t happen.”

“Then your father bought it.”

“Yes, I guess so. I don’t really know. He never talked much about buying the line . . . or how he replaced the trolley tracks with these railroad tracks.”

That would have taken a lot of work, Jack thought, and then he thought of the ore-pits, and Morgan of Orris’s apparently unlimited supply of slave labor.

“I know he replaced them, but only because I got a book on railroads and found out there’s a difference in gauge. Trolleys run on ten-gauge track. This is sixteen-gauge.”

Jack knelt, and yes, he could see a very faint double indentation inside the existing tracks—that was where the trolley tracks had been.

“He had a little red train,” Richard said dreamily. “Just an engine and two cars. It ran on diesel fuel. He used to laugh about it and say that the only thing that separated the men from the boys was the price of their toys. There was an old trolley station on the hill above Point Venuti, and we’d go up there in the rental car and park and go on in. I remember how that station smelled—kind of old, but nice . . . full of old sunlight, sort of. And the train would be there. And my dad . . . he’d say, ’All aboard for Camp Readiness, Richard! You got your ticket?’ And there’d be lemonade . . . or iced tea . . . and we sat up in the cab . . . sometimes he’d have stuff . . . supplies . . . behind . . . but we’d sit up front . . . and . . . and . . .”

Richard swallowed hard and swiped a hand across his eyes.

“And it was a nice time,” he finished. “Just him and me. It was pretty cool.”

He looked around, his eyes shiny with unshed tears.

“There was a plate to turn the train around at Camp Readiness,” he said. “Back in those days. The old days.”

Richard uttered a terrible strangled sob.

“Richard—”

Jack tried to touch him.

Richard shook him off and stepped away, brushing tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands.

“Wasn’t so grown-up then,” he said, smiling. Trying to. “
Nothing
was so grown-up then, was it, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said, and now he found he was crying himself.

Oh Richard. Oh my dear one.

“No,” Richard said, smiling, looking around at the encroaching woods and brushing the tears away with the dirty backs of his hands, “nothing was so grown-up back then. In the old days, when we were just kids. Back when we all lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.”

He looked at Jack, trying to smile.

“Jack, help me,” he said. “I feel like my leg is caught in some stuh-stupid truh-truh-hap and I . . . I . . .”

Then Richard fell on his knees with his hair in his tired face, and Jack got down there with him, and I can bear to tell you no more—only that they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.

8

“The fence was new back then,” Richard said when he could continue speaking. They had walked on a ways. A whippoor-will sang from a tall sturdy oak. The smell of salt in the air was stronger. “I remember that. And the sign—
CAMP READINESS
, that’s what it said. There was an obstacle course, and ropes to climb, and other ropes that you hung on to and then swung over big puddles of water. It looked sort of like bootcamp in a World War Two movie about the Marines. But the guys using the equipment didn’t look much like Marines. They were fat, and they were all dressed the same—gray sweat-suits with
CAMP READINESS
written on the chest in small letters, and red piping on the sides of the sweat-pants. They all looked like they were going to have heart-attacks or strokes any minute. Maybe both at the same time. Sometimes we stayed overnight. A couple of times we stayed the whole weekend. Not in the Quonset hut; that was like a barracks for the guys who were paying to get in shape.”

“If that’s what they were doing.”

“Yeah, right. If that’s what they were doing. Anyway, we stayed in a big tent and slept on cots. It was a blast.” Again, Richard smiled wistfully. “But you’re right, Jack—not all the guys shagging around the place looked like businessmen trying to get in shape. The others—”

“What about the others?” Jack asked quietly.

“Some of them—a lot of them—looked like those big hairy creatures in the other world,” Richard said in a low voice Jack had to strain to hear. “The Wolfs. I mean, they looked
sort
of like regular people, but not too much. They looked . . . rough. You know?”

Jack nodded. He knew.

“I remember I was a little afraid to look into their eyes very closely. Every now and then there’d be these funny flashes of light in them . . . like their brains were on fire. Some of the others . . .” A light of realization dawned in Richard’s eyes. “Some of the others looked like that substitute basketball coach I told you about. The one who wore the leather jacket and smoked.”

“How far is this Point Venuti, Richard?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But we used to do it in a couple of hours, and the train never went very fast. Running speed, maybe, but not much more. It can’t be much more than twenty miles from Camp Readiness, all told. Probably a little less.”

“Then we’re maybe fifteen miles or less from it. From—”

(from the Talisman)

“Yeah. Right.”

Jack looked up as the day darkened. As if to show that the pathetic fallacy wasn’t so pathetic after all, the sun now sailed behind a deck of clouds. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees and the day seemed to grow dull—the whippoorwill fell silent.

9

Richard saw the sign first—a simple whitewashed square of wood painted with black letters. It stood on the left side of the tracks, and ivy had grown up its post, as if it had been here for a very long time. The sentiment, however, was quite current. It read:
GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY; BAD BOYS MUST DIE
.
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE:
GO HOME.

“You can go, Richie,” Jack said quietly. “It’s okay by me. They’ll let you go, no sweat. None of this is your business.”

“I think maybe it is,” Richard said.

“I dragged you into it.”

“No,” Richard said. “My father dragged me into it. Or fate dragged me into it. Or God. Or Jason. Whoever it was, I’m sticking.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

As they passed the sign, Jack lashed out with one foot in a passably good kung-fu kick and knocked it over.

“Way to go, chum,” Richard said, smiling a little.

“Thanks. But don’t call me chum.”

10

Although he had begun to look wan and tired again, Richard talked for the next hour as they walked down the tracks and into the steadily strengthening smell of the Pacific Ocean. He spilled out a flood of reminiscences that had been bottled up inside of him for years. Although his face didn’t reveal it, Jack was stunned with amazement . . . and a deep, welling pity for the lonely child, eager for the last scrap of his father’s affection, that Richard was revealing to him, inadvertently or otherwise.

He looked at Richard’s pallor, the sores on his cheeks and forehead and around his mouth; listened to that tentative, almost whispering voice that nevertheless did not hesitate or falter now that the chance to tell all these things had finally come; and was glad once more that Morgan Sloat had never been
his
father.

He told Jack that he remembered landmarks all along this part of the railroad. They could see the roof of a barn over the trees at one point, with a faded ad for Chesterfield Kings on it.

“ ’Twenty great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes,’ ” Richard said, smiling. “Only, in those days you could see the whole barn.”

He pointed out a big pine with a double top, and fifteen minutes later told Jack, “There used to be a rock on the other side of this hill that looked just like a frog. Let’s see if it’s still there.”

It was, and Jack supposed it did look like a frog. A little. If you stretched your imagination.
And maybe it helps to be three. Or four. Or seven. Or however old he was
.

Richard had loved the railroad, and had thought Camp Readiness was really neat, with its track to run on and its hurdles to jump over and its ropes to climb. But he hadn’t liked Point Venuti itself. After some self-prodding, Richard even remembered the name of the motel at which he and his father had stayed during their time in the little coastal town. The Kingsland Motel, he said . . . and Jack found that name did not surprise him much at all.

The Kingsland Motel, Richard said, was just down the road from the old hotel his father always seemed interested in. Richard could see the hotel from his window, and he didn’t like it. It was a huge, rambling place with turrets and gables and gambrels and cupolas and towers; brass weathervanes in strange shapes twirled from all of the latter. They twirled even when there was no wind, Richard said—he could clearly remember standing at the window of his room and watching them go around and around and around, strange brass creations shaped like crescent moons and scarab beetles and Chinese ideograms, winking in the sun while the ocean foamed and roared below.

Ah yes, doc, it all comes back to me now,
Jack thought.

“It was deserted?” Jack asked.

“Yes. For sale.”

“What was its name?”

“The Agincourt.” Richard paused, then added another child’s color—the one most small children are apt to leave in the box. “It was black. It was made of wood, but the wood looked like stone. Old black stone. And that’s what my father and his friends called it. The Black Hotel.”

11

It was partly—but not entirely—to divert Richard that Jack asked, “Did your father buy that hotel? Like he did Camp Readiness?”

Richard thought about it awhile and then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I think he did. After a while. There was a For Sale sign on the gates in front of the place when he first started taking me there, but one time when we went there it was just gone.”

“But you never stayed there?”

“God, no!” Richard shuddered. “The only way he could have gotten me in there would have been with a towing chain . . . even then I might not have gone.”

“Never even went in?”

“No. Never did, never will.”

Ah, Richie-boy, didn’t anyone ever teach you to never say never?

“That goes for your father as well? He never even went in?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Richard said in his best professorial voice. His forefinger went to the bridge of his nose, as if to push up the glasses that weren’t there. “I’d be willing to bet he never went in. He was as scared of it as I was. But with me, that’s all I felt . . . just scared. For my father, there was something more. He was . . .”

“Was what?”

Reluctantly, Richard said, “He was obsessed with the place, I think.”

Richard paused, eyes vague, thinking back. “He’d go and stand in front of it every day we were in Point Venuti. And I don’t mean just for a couple of minutes, or something like that—he’d stand in front of it for, like, three hours. Sometimes more. He was alone most of those times. But not always. He had . . . strange friends.”

“Wolfs?”

“I guess so,” Richard said, almost angrily. “Yeah, I guess some of them could have been Wolfs, or whatever you call them. They looked uncomfortable in their clothes—they were always scratching themselves, usually in those places where nice people aren’t supposed to scratch. Others looked like the substitute coach. Kind of hard and mean. Some of those guys I used to see out at Camp Readiness, too. I’ll tell you one thing, Jack—those guys were even more scared of that place than my father was. They just about cringed when they got near it.”

“Sunlight Gardener? Was he ever there?”

“Uh-huh,” Richard said. “But in Point Venuti he looked more like the man we saw over there. . . .”

“Like Osmond.”

“Yes. But those people didn’t come very often. Mostly it was just my father, by himself. Sometimes he’d get the restaurant at our motel to pack him some sandwiches, and he’d sit on a sidewalk bench and eat his lunch looking at the hotel. I stood at the window in the lobby of the Kingsland and looked at my father looking at the hotel. I never liked his face at those times. He looked afraid, but he also looked like . . . like he was gloating.”

“Gloating,” Jack mused.

“Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and I always said no. He’d nod and I remember once he said, ’There’ll be time. You’ll understand everything, Rich . . . in time.’ I remember thinking that if it was about that black hotel, I didn’t want to understand.