Talisman Chapter 3

Chapter 3 That first room I had gone into! I could climb out of the window! I whirled round and rushed towards it – but that door had vanished too. And the one opposite it. The noises from the house were changing now, and beginning to sound like words. “Tal-is-man Mall-er-by. Tal-is-man Mall-er-by.” There must be a back door. I ran for the kitchen. The back door was still there, the big key in the lock. I turned the key, my desperation giving me the strength to do it, pulled back the bolts and dashed outside. Outside was a narrow passage with a high brick wall around it. And a gate in the wall! The voices went on. “Talisman Mallerbeeee. Talisman Mallerbeeee.” Then the gate vanished as well. I ran along the narrow path and found myself at a dead end – but there was a door in the wall next to me. I was past thinking now. I wrenched it open and ran down the stairs I found behind it. A huge cellar door was there, and I just ran through it, doing anything to try and get away from the eerie voices calling my name. I ran through that empty cellar room, through another and into a third – and then suddenly the voices stopped and the silence returned. But my heart hadn’t even begun to slow down when I felt myself falling through the floor and tumbling head over heels. I picked myself up from the bottom of a spiral staircase, a bit more bruised than I really wanted to be, and found myself in the weirdest room I’d ever seen. It was like something from Doctor Who or Star Trek, when they end up inside a long-deserted space ship. Had some previous Mallerby been into film-making? And maybe that explained the sound effects too – perhaps I’d triggered some sound system or another? Then I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice said,
“Talisman Mallerby?” Someone walked over to me from the other side of the room. She was odd. She looked human – humanoid, you always call it – but I could tell that there was something not right. It wasn’t just the way she was dressed either – it looked like her body had been encased in bands of beaten metal – it was everything about her. “Talisman, I’m sorry about this. And I don’t have much time to explain, so listen carefully. Ship has pulled you down here. And she’s going to pull you into her program very soon. I thought I’d persuaded your parents to go away and never come back. I don’t know what’s brought you here.”
“My parents are dead. I got a letter saying I’d inherited this house. I thought I’d come and look at it.”
She began explaining things to me. Maybe if I hadn’t watched so many sci-fi programmes in my time, I wouldn’t have believed her so easily, but as it was, it wasn’t hard to accept her story. And she was standing there in front of me. “Ship crashed here – many, many years ago. Nearly a thousand of them. She repaired the crew, and then tried to repair herself, but it was slow: she had used up a lot of her power repairing us, and there wasn’t much sunlight reaching her to let her recharge herself.
Then Sir Guy de Malherbe came here and began to dig the foundations for his castle. He dug down to ship and discovered us. Ship made a bargain with him. She gave him something from herself – a guerdon, that would bring him good luck always. A talisman. And in return, two things.” “A talisman? But that’s my name!”
“Yes. One of the two things was that there would always be a daughter called Talisman. That would keep the luck alive. And the other thing was that he let Ship extend herself into the walls of his castle. More sunshine, more power, and she could repair herself faster. It’s not a hard thing for a silicon-based life-form to do: join herself to a stone building, but it has to be built right.” “So what went wrong?”
Something must have done – the whole room said that to me, not to mention her appearance.
“Sir Guy’s brother, Philippe. That’s what went wrong. Ship gave Sir Guy a gift – later his brother came and stole six more guerdons. And he took them away from this place” She pointed out the eight niches round the room. Seven of them were empty: only one had anything in it.
“We could get home on seven guerdons easily enough. Six are fine. But just one? Ship’s been crippled ever since. And as the original castle has slowly been knocked down, ship has had access to less and less power.” “But what has this got to do with me? You said Ship has pulled me into her program. What does that mean? And why me?”
“Because you are Talisman Mallerby. Ship will send you back to a point in time when one of the guerdon was here in this building, and you will overlap with another Talisman Mallerby. You have to find the guerdon. Once you lay your hands on it – literally – Ship will bring you and it back to the here and now. I’m sorry – I’m the last crew member, and Ship is desperate, because I’m dying. She doesn’t have enough power to rejuvenate me any more. And once I die, Ship can never leave. She’s past caring what she does now.” “But how will I know this guerdon when I find it? What will it look like?”
“It could look like anything, but you will recognise it, Ship will make sure of that. And you will find that whoever owns it – well, they won’t be very happy. The guerdon Ship gave – well, that brings only good. But a stolen guerdon – that works against the owner, not for them.”
The noises were beginning again – right at the edge of my hearing.
“Talisman Mallerby. Talisman Mallerby.” I flinched.
“Ship!” she said, loudly. “Ship! You have to send her some time easy to start with. She’s got to learn all this from scratch. Some time she won’t find it too hard to adjust to.”
And then it was as though everything just dissolved into a strange folded nothingness. And all the time, the voices saying “Talisman Mallerby. Talisman Mallerby.” over and over again. “Talisman Mallerby!” the voice said. “Welcome home, my dear.” And I was drawn into a soft scented hug.
Welcome home? Where was I? But as I emerged from Aunt Violet’s welcoming embrace, part of me knew the answer to that question. I was Talisman Mallerby, home from India for the first time, to recover my health and then complete my education, here to stay with my father’s sister for the next few years while my parents stayed in India, running the business out there. Here? I turned, looked and gasped. Was this really the derelict house I had been exploring only a little while ago? It didn’t seem possible.