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Lester Parker was a black man
with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting through his cheeks.
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.
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
the way you knew things in dreams—that it was radioactive, and that if it touched
him, he would d...
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how could one old black man he’d just met solve any of his problems?
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.
For a second he saw Thomas Woodbine, solid comfortable Uncle Tommy Woodbine,
His father, Philip Sawyer, at
Jacky playing with a black toy taxi behind the couch in his father’s office . . . and his father and Uncle Morgan unexpectedly, magically talking about the Daydreams. They
have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science. But can you begin to understand how much fucking clout we’d swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea? Hold on there, Morgan, I have a lot of ideas that apparently have yet to occur to you. .
Jack could almost hear his father’s voice, and the peculiar and unsettling realm of the Daydreams seemed to stir in the shadowy w...
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A long grassy plain of a particular, aching green unfurled toward a low, ground-down range of mountains. Above the plain and the mountains ranged a deeply transparent sky. Jack
could very nearly smell the freshness of this landscape. He knew that place. He had never been there, not really, but he knew it. That was one of the places of the Daydreams.
I just call it the Territories.”
“Her name is Laura DeLoessian, and she is the Queen of the Territories.”
“You know those things you call the Daydreams?” Jack nodded. “Those things ain’t dreams, Travellin Jack. Not daydreams, not nightdreams, either. That place is a real place. Real enough, anyway.
It’s a lot different from here, but it’s real.”
They have magic like we have physics, right?
“There’s people in this world have got Twinners in the Territories,”
Alhambra Inn,
In the Territories world he had come a hundred and fifty feet. Over here he had somehow come half a mile.
“You walk,” Speedy said. “And thumb what rides you think you can . . . but you got to be careful, because there’s strangers out there. Some are just crazy people, sissies that would like to touch you or thugs that would like to mug
you.
Get across to the other ocean. You travel in the Territories when you can and you’ll get across faster.
“Why do I have to go there, if it’s so bad?” “Because,” Speedy said, “that’s where the Talisman is. Somewhere in that other Alhambra.”
“Talisman be given unto your hand, Travellin Jack. Not too big, not
too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here’s your burden, here’s your cross: drop her, Jack, and all be lost.”
Laura DeLoessian, announced a voice in Jack’s mind, and he stepped backward out of the little bathroom—that name stung him.
You’re Phil Sawyer’s son, all right.
she look just like a crystal ball. Was that all the instruction Speedy intended to give him about the Talisman?
“Big scar on his face—you’ll see him pretty soon after you land in the Territories. He’s a guard. Fact is, he’s a Captain of the Outer Guards, and he’ll
take you to a place where you can see a lady you has to see. Well, a lady you ought to see. So you know the other reason you’re puttin your neck on the line. My friend over there, he’ll understand what you’re doin and he’ll figure out a way to get you to the lady.”
“Get it and bring it back safe. It gonna be your
burden but you got to be bigger than your burden.”
Scarred man, Captain of the Outer Guards. The Queen. Morgan Sloat, after him like a predator. In an evil place over on the other side of the country.
expression very like the last one Phil Sawyer had worn in the final seconds of his life, out in the middle of nowhere in Utah.
If Sawyer read those meticulous reports, they left him amazingly unaffected. He wanted to marry Lily Cavanaugh, and he did. As his damned Twinner had married Queen Laura.
Dondorf was an old character actor who had achieved a surprising level of prominence and visibility in the late seventies through a role on a television series; he’d played the landlord of the young couple—private detectives, and both cute as baby pandas—who were the series’ stars.
says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth,
Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.
He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what? I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do. To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.
“Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,”
“Don’t you ever . . . don’t you ever . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding splinter in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it. One
“He’s mad, you know. Mad as the man who chased the cake.”
Western Road. The way to the Talisman.
Farren’s coin, with the Queen’s head on one side and the winged lion on the other—had become a 1921 silver dollar. He
He had no idea what the thought meant; it just circled and circled, like a wooden horse bolted to a carousel. Six. I was six. Jacky Sawyer was six. Over and over, round and round she goes.
