The Talisman (78 page)

The Talisman did not just reflect the sunflash; it
boosted
it somehow. It sent back a thick ribbon of light like a deathray in a space movie. It was there only for a second, but it imprinted Richard’s retinas for almost an hour afterward, first white, then green, then blue, and finally, as it faded, the lemony yellow of sunshine.

11

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and then the scope was full of living fire. Its thick glass lenses shattered. Smoking fused glass was driven backward into Gardener’s right eye. The shells in the Weatherbee’s magazine exploded, tearing its mid-section apart. One of the whickers of flying metal amputated most of Gardener’s right cheek. Other hooks and twists of steel flew around Sloat in a storm, leaving him incredibly untouched. Three Wolfs had remained through everything. Now two of them took to their heels. The third lay dead on his back, glaring into the sky. The Weatherbee’s trigger was planted squarely between his eyes.

“What?” Morgan bellowed. His bloody mouth hung open. “What? What?”

Gardener looked weirdly like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons after one of his devices from the Acme Company has misfired.

He cast the gun aside, and Sloat saw that all the fingers had been torn from Gard’s left hand.

Gardener’s right hand pulled out his shirt with effeminate tweezing delicacy. There was a knife-case clipped to the inner waistband of his pants—a narrow sleeve of fine-grained kid leather. From it Gardener took a piece of chrome-banded ivory. He pushed a button, and a slim blade seven inches long shot out.

“Bad,” he whispered. “Bad!” His voice began to rise. “All boys!
Bad! It’s axiomatic! IT’S AXIOMATIC!
” He began to run up the beach toward the Agincourt’s walk, where Jack and Richard stood. His voice continued to rise until it was a thin febrile shriek.

“BAD! EVIL! BAD! EEVIL! BAAAD! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—”

Morgan stood a moment longer, then grasped the key around his neck. By grasping it, he seemed also to grasp his own panicked, flying thoughts.

He’ll go to the old nigger. And that’s where I’ll take him.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—”
Gardener shrieked, his killer knife held out before him as he ran.

Morgan turned and ran down the beach. He was vaguely aware that the Wolfs, all of them, had fled. That was all right.

He would take care of Jack Sawyer—and the Talisman—all by himself.

45

In Which Many Things are Resolved on the Beach

1

Sunlight Gardener ran dementedly toward Jack, blood streaming down his mutilated face. He was the center of a devastated madness. Under bright blistering sunshine for the first time in what must have been decades, Point Venuti was a ruin of collapsed buildings and broken pipes and sidewalks heaved up like books tilting and leaning on a shelf. Actual books lay here and there, their ripped jackets fluttering in raw seams of earth. Behind Jack the Agincourt Hotel uttered a sound uncannily like a groan; then Jack heard the sound of a thousand boards collapsing in on themselves, of walls tipping over in a shower of snapped lath and plaster-dust. The boy was faintly conscious of the beelike figure of Morgan Sloat slipping down the beach and realized with a stab of unease that his adversary was going toward Speedy Parker—or Speedy’s corpse.

“He’s got a knife, Jack,” Richard whispered.

Gardener’s ruined hand carelessly smeared blood on his once-spotless white silk shirt. “EEEEEEVIL!” he screeched, his voice still faint over the constant pounding of the water on the beach and the continuing, though intermittent, noises of destruction. “EEEEEEEEEEE . . .”

“What are you going to do?” Richard asked.

“How should I know?” Jack answered—it was the best, truest answer he could give. He had no idea of how he could defeat this madman. Yet he would defeat him. He was certain of that. “You shoulda killed
both
of the Ellis brothers,” Jack said to himself.

Gardener, still shrieking, came racing across the sand. He was even now a good distance away, about halfway between the end of the fence and the front of the hotel. A red mask covered half his face. His useless left hand leaked a steady spattering stream of blood onto the sandy ground. The distance between the madman and the boys seemed to halve in a second. Was Morgan Sloat on the beach by now? Jack felt an urgency like the Talisman’s, pushing him forward; pushing him on.

“Evil! Axiomatic! Evil!” Gardener screamed.

“Flip!” Richard loudly said—

and Jack

            sidestepped

as he had inside the black hotel.

And then found himself standing in front of Osmond in blistering Territories sunlight. Most of his certainty abruptly left him. Everything was the same but everything was different. Without looking, he knew that behind him was something much worse than the Agincourt—he had never seen the exterior of the castle the hotel became in the Territories, but he suddenly
knew
that through the great front doors a tongue was coiling out for him . . . and that Osmond was going to drive him and Richard back toward it.

Osmond wore a patch over his right eye and a stained glove on his left hand. The complicated tendrils of his whip came slithering off his shoulder. “Oh, yes,” he half-hissed, half-whispered. “
This
boy. Captain Farren’s boy.” Jack pulled the Talisman protectively into his belly. The intricacies of the whip slid over the ground, as responsive to Osmond’s minute movements of hand and wrist as is a racehorse to the hand of the jockey. “What does it profit a boy to gain a glass bauble if he loses the world?” The whip seemed almost to lift itself off the ground. “NOTHING! NAUGHT!” Osmond’s true smell, that of rot and filth and hidden corruption, boomed out, and his lean crazy face somehow rippled, as if a lightning-bolt had cracked beneath it. He smiled brightly, emptily, and raised the coiling whip above his shoulder.

“Goat’s-penis,” Osmond said, almost lovingly. The thongs of the whip came singing down toward Jack, who stepped backward, though not far enough, in a sudden sparkling panic.

Richard’s hand gripped his shoulder as he flipped again, and the horrible, somehow laughing noise of the whip instantly erased itself from the air.

Knife!
he heard Speedy say.

Fighting his instincts, Jack stepped inside the space where the whip had been, not backward as almost all of him wished to do. Richard’s hand fell away from the ridge of his shoulder, and Speedy’s voice went wailing and lost. Jack clutched the glowing Talisman into his belly with his left hand and reached up with his right. His fingers closed magically around a bony wrist.

Sunlight Gardener giggled.

“JACK!” Richard bellowed behind him.

He was standing in this world again, under streaming cleansing light, and Sunlight Gardener’s knife hand was straining down toward him. Gardener’s ruined face hung only inches from his own. A smell as of garbage and long-dead animals left on the road blanketed them. “Naught,” Gardener said. “Can you give me hallelujah?” He pushed down with the elegant lethal knife, and Jack managed to hold it back.

“JACK!” Richard yelled again.

Sunlight Gardener stared at him with a bright birdlike air. He continued to push down with his knife.

Don’t you know what Sunlight done?
said Speedy’s voice.
Don’t you yet?

Jack looked straight into Gardener’s crazily dancing eye. Yes.

Richard rushed in and kicked Gardener in the ankle, then clouted a weak fist into his temple.

“You killed my father,” Jack said.

Gardener’s single eye sparkled back. “You killed my boy, baddest bastard!”

“Morgan Sloat told you to kill my father and you did.”

Gardener pushed the knife down a full two inches. A knot of yellow gristly stuff and a bubble of blood squeezed out of the hole that had been his right eye.

Jack screamed—with horror, rage, and all the long-hidden feelings of abandonment and helplessness which had followed his father’s death. He found that he had pushed Gardener’s knife hand all the way back up. He screamed again. Gardener’s fingerless left hand battered against Jack’s own left arm. Jack was just managing to twist Gardener’s wrist back when he felt that dripping pad of flesh insinuate itself between his chest and his arm. Richard continued to skirmish about Gardener, but Gardener was managing to get his fingerless hand very near the Talisman.

Gardener tilted his face right up to Jack’s.

“Hallelujah,”
he whispered.

Jack twisted his entire body around, using more strength than he’d known he had. He hauled down on Gardener’s knife hand. The other, fingerless hand flew to the side. Jack
squeezed
the wrist of the knife hand. Corded tendons wriggled in his grasp. Then the knife dropped, as harmless now as the fingerless cushion of skin which struck repeatedly at Jack’s ribs. Jack rolled his whole body into the off-center Gardener and sent him lurching away.

He shoved the Talisman toward Gardener. Richard squawked,
What are you doing?
This was right, right, right. Jack moved in toward Gardener, who was still gleaming at him, though with less assurance, and thrust the Talisman out toward him. Gardener grinned, another bubble of blood bulging fatly in the empty eye-socket, and swung wildly at the Talisman. Then he ducked for the knife. Jack rushed in and touched the Talisman’s grooved warm skin against Gardener’s own skin. Like Reuel, like Sunlight. He jumped back.

Gardener howled like a lost, wounded animal. Where the Talisman had brushed against him, the skin had blackened, then turned to a slowly sliding fluid, skimming away from the skull. Jack retreated another step. Gardener fell to his knees. All the skin on his head turned waxy. Within half a second, only a gleaming skull protruded through the collar of the ruined shirt.

That’s you taken care of,
Jack thought,
and good riddance!

2

“All right,” Jack said. He felt full of crazy confidence. “Let’s go get him, Richie. Let’s—”

He looked at Richard and saw that his friend was on the verge of collapsing again. He stood swaying on the sand, his eyes half-lidded and dopey.

“Maybe you better just sit this one out, on second thought,” Jack said.

Richard shook his head. “Coming, Jack. Seabrook Island. All the way . . . to the end of the line.”

“I’m going to have to kill him,” Jack said. “That is, if I can.”

Richard shook his head with dogged, stubborn persistence. “Not my father. Told you. Father’s dead. If you leave me I’ll crawl. Crawl right through the muck
that
guy left behind, if I have to.”

Jack looked toward the rocks. He couldn’t see Morgan, but he didn’t think there was much question that Morgan was there. And if Speedy was still alive, Morgan might at this moment be taking steps to remedy that situation.

Jack tried to smile but couldn’t make it. “Think of the germs you might pick up.” He hesitated a moment longer, then held the Talisman reluctantly out to Richard. “I’ll carry you, but you’ll have to carry this. Don’t drop the ball, Richard. If you drop it—”

What was it Speedy had said?

“If you drop it, all be lost.”

“I won’t drop it.”

Jack put the Talisman into Richard’s hands, and again Richard seemed to improve at its touch . . . but not so much. His face was terribly wan. Washed in the Talisman’s bright glow, it looked like the face of a dead child caught in the glare of a police photographer’s flash.

It’s the hotel. It’s poisoning him.

But it wasn’t the hotel; not entirely. It was Morgan.
Morgan
was poisoning him.

Jack turned around, discovering he was loath to look away from the Talisman even for a moment. He bent his back and curved his hands into stirrups.

Richard climbed on. He held to the Talisman with one hand and curled the other around Jack’s neck. Jack grabbed Richard’s thighs.

He is as light as a thistle. He has his own cancer. He’s had it all his life. Morgan Sloat is radioactive with evil and Richard is dying of the fallout.

He started to jog down toward the rocks behind which Speedy lay, conscious of the light and heat of the Talisman just above him.

3

He ran around the left side of the clump of rocks with Richard on his back, still full of that crazy assurance . . . and that it
was
crazy was brought home to him with rude suddenness. A plumpish leg clad in light brown wool (and just below the pulled-back cuff Jack caught a blurred glimpse of a perfectly proper brown nylon sock) suddenly stuck straight out from behind the last rock like a toll-gate.

Shit!
Jack’s mind screamed.
He was waiting for you! You total nerd!

Richard cried out. Jack tried to pull up and couldn’t.

Morgan tripped him up as easily as a schoolyard bully trips up a younger boy in the play-yard. After Smokey Updike, and Osmond, and Gardener, and Elroy, and something that looked like a cross between an alligator and a Sherman tank, all it really took to bring him down was overweight, hypertensive Morgan Sloat crouched behind a rock, watching and waiting for an overconfident boy named Jack Sawyer to come boogying right down on top of him.

“Yiyyy!”
Richard cried as Jack stumbled forward. He was dimly aware of their combined shadow tracking out to his left—it seemed to have as many arms as a Hindu idol. He felt the psychic weight of the Talisman shift . . . and then overshift.

“WATCH OUT FOR IT, RICHARD!”
Jack screamed.

Richard fell over the top of Jack’s head, his eyes huge and dismayed. The cords on his neck stood out like piano wire. He held the Talisman up as he went down. His mouth was pulled down at the corners in a desperate snarl. He hit the ground face-first like the nosecone of a defective rocket. The sand here around the place where Speedy had gone to earth was not precisely sand at all but a rough-textured scree stubbly with smaller rocks and shells. Richard came down on a rock that had been burped up by the earthquake. There was a compact thudding sound. For a moment Richard looked like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. His butt, clad in dirty polished-cotton slacks, wagged drunkenly back and forth in the air. In other circumstances—circumstances unattended by that dreadful compact thudding sound, for instance—it would have been a comic pose, worthy of a Kodachrome: “Rational Richard Acts Wild and Crazy at the Beach.” But it wasn’t funny at all. Richard’s hands opened slowly . . . and the Talisman rolled three feet down the gentle slope of the beach and stopped there, reflecting sky and clouds, not on its surface but in its gently lighted interior.

“Richard!”
Jack bellowed again.

Morgan was somewhere behind him, but Jack had momentarily forgotten him. All his reassurance was gone; it had left him at the moment when that leg, clad in light brown wool, had stuck out in front of him like a toll-gate. Fooled like a kid in a nursery-school play-yard, and Richard . . . Richard was . . .

“Rich—”

Richard rolled over and Jack saw that Richard’s poor, tired face was covered with running blood. A flap of his scalp hung down almost to one eye in a triangular shape like a ragged sail. Jack could see hair sticking out of the underside and brushing Richard’s cheek like sand-colored grass . . . and where that hair-covered skin had come from he could see the naked gleam of Richard Sloat’s skull.

“Did it break?” Richard asked. His voice cracked toward a scream.
“Jack, did it break when I fell?”

“It’s okay, Richie—it’s—”

Richard’s blood-rimmed eyes bulged widely at something behind him.
“Jack! Jack, look o—!”

Something that felt like a leather brick—one of Morgan Sloat’s Gucci loafers—crashed up between Jack’s legs and into his testicles. It was a dead-center hit, and Jack crumpled forward, suddenly living with the greatest pain of his life—a physical agony greater than any he had ever imagined. He couldn’t even scream.

“
It’s
okay,” Morgan Sloat said, “but
you
don’t look so good. Jacky-boy. Not

              at

                  all.”

And now the man slowly advancing on Jack—advancing slowly because he was savoring this—was a man to whom Jack had never been properly introduced. He had been a white face in the window of a great black coach for a space of moments, a face with dark eyes that somehow sensed his presence; he had been a rippling, changing shape bludgeoning itself into the reality of the field where he and Wolf had been talking of such wonders as litter-brothers and the big rut-moon; he had been a shadow in Anders’s eyes.