The Talisman (77 page)

Things were still falling. Glass crashed and tinkled. Somewhere a toilet was flushing manically, again and again.

The redwood registration desk in the lobby had split down the middle. The double doors were ajar, however, and a bright wedge of sunlight came through them—the old dank carpet seemed to sizzle and steam in protest at that light.

The clouds have broken,
Jack thought.
Sun’s shining outside.
And then:
Going out those doors, Richie-boy. You and me. Big as life and twice as proud.

The corridor which led past the Heron Bar and down to the dining room reminded him of sets in some of the old
Twilight Zone
shows, where everything was askew and out of kilter. Here the floor tilted left; here to the right; here it was like the twin humps of a camel. He negotiated the dimness with the Talisman lighting his way like the world’s biggest flashlight.

He shoved into the dining room and saw Richard lying on the floor in a tangle of tablecloth. Blood was running from his nose. When he got closer he saw that some of those hard red bumps had split open and white bugs were working their way out of Richard’s flesh and crawling sluggishly over Richard’s cheeks. As he watched, one birthed itself from Richard’s nose.

Richard screamed, a weak, bubbling, wretched scream, and clawed at it. It was the scream of someone who is dying in agony.

His shirt humped and writhed with the things.

Jack stumbled across the distorted floor toward him . . . and the spider swung down from the dimness, squirting its poison blindly into the air.

“
Flushing feef!
” it gibbered in its whining, droning insect’s voice.
“Oh you fushing feef, put it back put it back!”

Without thinking, Jack raised the Talisman. It flashed clean white fire—rainbow fire—and the spider shrivelled and turned black. In only a second it was a tiny lump of smoking coal penduluming slowly to a dead stop in the air.

No time to gawp at this wonder. Richard was dying.

Jack reached him, fell on his knees beside him, and stripped back the tablecloth as if it were a sheet.

“Finally made it, chum,” he whispered, trying not to see the bugs crawling out of Richard’s flesh. He raised the Talisman, considered, and then placed it on Richard’s forehead. Richard shrieked miserably and tried to writhe away. Jack placed an arm on Richard’s scrawny chest and held him—it wasn’t hard to do. There was a stench as the bugs beneath the Talisman fried away.

Now what? There’s more, but what?

He looked across the room and his eye happened to fix upon the green croaker marble that he had left with Richard—the marble that was a magic mirror in that other world. As he looked, it rolled six feet of its own volition, and then stopped. It rolled, yes. It rolled because it was a marble, and it was a marble’s job to roll. Marbles were round. Marbles were round and so was the Talisman.

Light broke in his reeling mind.

Holding Richard, Jack slowly rolled the Talisman down the length of his body. After he reached Richard’s chest, Richard stopped struggling. Jack thought he had probably fainted, but a quick glance showed him this wasn’t so. Richard was staring at him with dawning wonder . . .

 . . . and the pimples on his face were gone! The hard red bumps were fading!

“Richard!” he yelled, laughing like a crazy loon. “Hey, Richard, look at this! Bwana make juju!”

He rolled the Talisman slowly down over Richard’s belly, using his palm. The Talisman glowed brightly, singing a clear, wordless harmonic of health and healing. Down over Richard’s crotch. Jack moved Richard’s thin legs together and rolled it down the groove between them to Richard’s ankles. The Talisman glowed bright blue . . . deep red . . . yellow . . . the green of June meadow-grass.

Then it was white again.

“Jack,” Richard whispered. “Is that what we came for?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful,” Richard said. He hesitated. “May I hold it?”

Jack felt a sudden twist of Scrooge-miserliness. He snatched the Talisman close to himself for a moment.
No! You might break it! Besides, it’s mine! I crossed the country for it! I fought the knights for it! You can’t have it! Mine! Mine! Mi—

In his hands the Talisman suddenly radiated a terrible chill, and for a moment—a moment more frightening to Jack than all the earthquakes in all the worlds that ever had been or ever would be—it turned a Gothic black. Its white light was extinguished. In its rich, thundery, thanatropic interior he saw the black hotel. On turrets and gambrels and gables, on the roofs of cupolas which bulged like warts stuffed with thick malignancies, the cabalistic symbols turned—wolf and crow and twisted genital star.

Would you be the new Agincourt, then?
the Talisman whispered.
Even a boy can be a hotel . . . if he would be
.

His mother’s voice, clear in his head:
If you don’t want to share it, Jack-O, if you can’t bring yourself to risk it for your friend, then you might as well stay where you are. If you can’t bring yourself to share the prize—risk the prize—don’t even bother to come home. Kids hear that shit all their lives, but when it comes time to put up or shut up, it’s never quite the same, is it? If you can’t share it, let me die, chum, because I don’t want to live at that price.

The weight of the Talisman suddenly seemed immense, the weight of dead bodies. Yet somehow Jack lifted it, and put it in Richard’s hands. His hands were white and skeletal . . . but Richard held it easily, and Jack realized that sensation of weight had been only his own imagination, his own twisted and sickly wanting. As the Talisman flashed into glorious white light again, Jack felt his own interior darkness pass from him. It occurred to him dimly that you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up . . . and then that thought passed.

Richard smiled, and the smile made his face beautiful. Jack had seen Richard smile many times, but there was a peace in this smile he had never seen before; it was a peace which passed his understanding. In the Talisman’s white, healing light, he saw that Richard’s face, although still ravaged and haggard and sickly, was healing. He hugged the Talisman against his chest as if it were a baby, and smiled at Jack with shining eyes.

“If
this
is the Seabrook Island Express,” he said, “I may just buy a season ticket.
If
we ever get out of this.”

“You feel better?”

Richard’s smile shone like the Talisman’s light. “
Worlds
better,” he said. “Now help me up, Jack.”

Jack moved to take his shoulder. Richard held out the Talisman.

“Better take this first,” he said. “I’m still weak, and it wants to go back with you. I feel that.”

Jack took it and helped Richard up. Richard put an arm around Jack’s neck.

“You ready . . . 
chum?
”

“Yeah,” Richard said. “Ready. But I somehow think the seagoing route’s out, Jack. I think I heard the deck out there collapse during the Big Rumble.”

“We’re going out the front door,” Jack said. “Even if God put down a gangway over the ocean from the windows back there to the beach, I’d still go out the front door. We ain’t ditching this place, Richie. We’re going out like paying guests. I feel like I’ve paid plenty. What do you think?”

Richard held out one thin hand, palm-up. Healing red blemishes still glared on it.

“I think we ought to go for it,” he said. “Gimme some skin, Jacky.”

Jack slapped his palm down on Richard’s, and then the two of them started back toward the hallway, Richard with one arm around Jack’s neck.

Halfway down the hall, Richard stared at the litter of dead metal. “What in heck?”

“Coffee cans,” Jack said, and smiled. “Maxwell House.”

“Jack, what in the world are you t—”

“Never mind, Richard,” Jack said. He was grinning, and he still felt good, but wires of tension were working into his body again just the same. The earthquake was over . . . but it wasn’t over. Morgan would be waiting for them now. And Gardener.

Never mind. Let it come down the way it will.

They reached the lobby and Richard looked around wonderingly at the stairs, the broken registration desk, the tumbled trophies and flagstands. The stuffed head of a black bear had its nose in one of the pigeonholes of the mail depository, as if smelling something good—honey, perhaps.

“Wow,” Richard said. “Whole place just about fell down.”

Jack got Richard over to the double doors, and observed Richard’s almost greedy appreciation of that little spray of sunlight.

“Are you really ready for this, Richard?”

“Yes.”

“Your father’s out there.”

“No, he’s not. He’s dead. All that’s out there is his . . . what do you call it? His Twinner.”

“Oh.”

Richard nodded. In spite of the Talisman’s proximity, he was beginning to look exhausted again. “Yes.”

“There’s apt to be a hell of a fight.”

“Well, I’ll do what I can.”

“I love you, Richard.”

Richard smiled wanly. “I love you, too, Jack. Now let’s go for it before I lose my nerve.”

9

Sloat really believed he had everything under control—the situation, of course, but more important, himself. He went right on believing this until he saw his son, obviously weak, obviously sick, but still very much alive, come out of the black hotel with his arm around Jack Sawyer’s neck and his head leaning against Jack’s shoulder.

Sloat had also believed he finally had his feelings about Phil Sawyer’s brat under control—it was his previous rage that had caused him to miss Jack, first at the Queen’s pavillion, then in the midwest. Christ, he had crossed Ohio unscathed—and Ohio was only an eyeblink from Orris, that other Morgan’s stronghold. But his fury had led to uncontrolled behavior, and so the boy had slipped through. He had suppressed his rage—but now it flared up with wicked and unbridled freedom. It was as if someone had hosed kerosene on a well-banked fire.

His son, still alive. And his beloved son, to whom he had meant to turn over the kingship of worlds and universes, was leaning on Sawyer for support.

Nor was that all. Glimmering and flashing in Sawyer’s hands like a star which had fallen to earth was the Talisman. Even from here Sloat could feel it—it was as if the planet’s gravitational field had suddenly gotten stronger, pulling him down, making his heart labor; as if time were speeding up, drying out his flesh, dimming his eyes.

“It hurts!”
Gardener wailed beside him.

Most of the Wolfs who had stood up to the quake and rallied to Morgan were now reeling away, hands before their faces. A couple of them were vomiting helplessly.

Morgan felt a moment of swooning fear . . . and then his rage, his excitement, and the lunacy that had been feeding on his increasingly grandiose dreams of overlordship—these things burst apart the webbing of his self-control.

He raised his thumbs to his ears and slammed them deep inside, so deep it hurt. Then he stuck out his tongue and waggled his fingers at Mr. Jack Dirty Motherfuck and Soon-to-be-Dead Sawyer. A moment later his upper teeth descended like a drop-gate and seered the tip of his wagging tongue. Sloat didn’t even notice it. He seized Gardener by the flak-vest.

Gardener’s face was moony with fear. “They’re out, he’s got IT, Morgan . . . my Lord . . . we ought to run, we
must
run—”

“SHOOT HIM!”
Morgan screamed into Gardener’s face. Blood from his severed tongue flew in a fine spray.
“SHOOT HIM, YOU ETHIOPIAN JUG-FUCKER, HE KILLED YOUR BOY! SHOOT HIM AND SHOOT THE FUCKING TALISMAN! SHOOT RIGHT THROUGH HIS ARMS AND BREAK IT!”

Sloat now began to dance slowly up and down before Gardener, his face working horribly, his thumbs back in his ears, his fingers waggling beside his head, his amputated tongue popping in and out of his mouth like one of those New Year’s Eve party favors that unroll with a tooting sound. He looked like a murderous child—hilarious, and at the same time awful.

“HE KILLED YOUR SON! AVENGE YOUR SON! SHOOT HIM! SHOOT IT! YOU SHOT HIS FATHER, NOW SHOOT HIM!”

“Reuel,” Gardener said thoughtfully. “Yes. He killed Reuel. He’s the baddest bitch’s bastard to ever draw a breath.
All
boys. Axiomatic. But he . . . 
he
 . . .”

He turned toward the black hotel and raised the Weatherbee to his shoulder. Jack and Richard had reached the bottom of the twisted front steps and were beginning to move down the broad walkway, which had been flat a few minutes ago and which was now crazy-paved. In the Judkins scope, the two boys were as big as house-trailers.

“SHOOT HIM!”
Morgan bellowed. He ran out his bleeding tongue again and made a hideously triumphant nursery-school sound:
Yadda-yadda-yadda-yah!
His feet, clad in dirty Gucci loafers, bumped up and down. One of them landed squarely on the severed tip of his tongue and tromped it deeper into the sand.

“SHOOT HIM! SHOOT IT!”
Morgan howled.

The muzzle of the Weatherbee circled minutely as it had when Gardener was preparing to shoot the rubber horse. Then it settled. Jack was carrying the Talisman against his chest. The crosshairs were over its flashing, circular light. The .360 slug would pass right through it, shattering it, and the sun would turn black . . . 
but before it does,
Gardener thought,
I will see that baddest bad boy’s chest explode.

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and began to settle pressure against the Weatherbee’s trigger.

10

Richard raised his head with great effort and his eyes were sizzled by reflected sunlight.

Two men. One with his head slightly cocked, the other seeming to dance. That flash of sunlight again, and Richard understood. He understood . . . and Jack was looking in the wrong place. Jack was looking down toward the rocks where Speedy lay.

“Jack look out!”
he screamed.

Jack looked around, surprised. “What—”

It happened fast. Jack missed it almost entirely. Richard saw it and understood it, but could never quite explain what had happened to Jack. The sunlight flashed off the shooter’s riflescope again. The ray of reflected light this time struck the Talisman. And the Talisman reflected it back directly at the shooter. This was what Richard later told Jack, but that was like saying the Empire State Building is a few stories high.