The Talisman (79 page)

But I’ve never really seen Morgan of Orris until now,
Jack thought. And he still
was
Jack—Jack in a pair of faded, dirty cotton pants of a sort you might expect to see an Asian coolie wearing, and sandals with rawhide thongs, but not Jason—Jack. His crotch was a great frozen scream of pain.

Ten yards away was the Talisman, throwing its effulgent glow along a beach of black sand. Richard was not there, but this fact did not impress itself on Jack’s conscious mind until a bit later.

Morgan was wearing a dark blue cape held at the neck with a catch of beaten silver. His pants were the same light wool as Sloat’s pants, only here they were bloused into black boots.

This Morgan walked with a slight limp, his deformed left foot leaving a line of short hyphens in the sand. The silver catch on his cloak swung loose and low as he moved, and Jack saw that the silver thing had nothing at all to do with the cape, which was held by a simple unadorned dark cord. This was some sort of pendant. He thought for a moment that it was a tiny golf-club, the sort of thing a woman might take off her charm-bracelet and wear around her neck, just for the fun of it. But as Sloat got closer, he saw it was too slim—it did not end in a club-head but came to a point.

It looked like a lightning-rod.

“No, you don’t look well at all, boy,” Morgan of Orris said. He stepped over to where Jack lay, moaning, holding his crotch, legs drawn up. He bent forward, hands planted just above his knees, and studied Jack as a man might study an animal his car has run over. A rather uninteresting animal like a woodchuck or a squirrel. “Not a
bit
well.”

Morgan leaned even closer.

“You’ve been quite a problem for me,” Morgan of Orris said, bending lower. “You’ve caused a great deal of damage. But in the end—”

“I think I’m dying,” Jack whispered.

“Not yet. Oh, I know it feels like that, but believe me, you’re not dying yet. In five minutes or so, you’ll know what dying
really
feels like.”

“No . . . really . . . I’m broken . . . inside,” Jack moaned. “Lean down . . . I want to tell . . . to ask . . . beg . . .”

Morgan’s dark eyes gleamed in his pallid face. It was the thought of Jack begging, perhaps. He leaned down until his face was almost touching Jack’s. Jack’s legs had drawn up in response to the pain. Now he pistoned them out and up. For a moment it felt as if a rusty blade were ripping up from his genitals and into his stomach, but the sound of his sandals striking Morgan’s face, splitting his lips and crunching his nose to one side, more than made up for the pain.

Morgan of Orris flailed backward, roaring in pain and surprise, his cape flapping like the wings of a great bat.

Jack got to his feet. For a moment he saw the black castle—it was much larger than the Agincourt had been; seemed, in fact, to cover acres—and then he was lunging spastically past the unconscious
(or dead!)
Parkus. He lunged for the Talisman, which lay peacefully glowing on the sand, and as he ran he

              flipped back

                  to the American Territories.

“Oh you bastard!”
Morgan Sloat bellowed.
“You rotten little bastard, my face, my face, you hurt my face!”

There was a crackling sizzle and a smell like ozone. A brilliant blue-white branch of lightning passed just to Jack’s right, fusing sand like glass.

Then he had the Talisman—
had it again!
The torn, throbbing ache in his crotch began to diminish at once. He turned to Morgan with the glass ball raised in his hands.

Morgan Sloat was bleeding from the lip and holding one hand up to his cheek—Jack hoped that he had cracked a few of Sloat’s teeth while he was at it. In Sloat’s other hand, outstretched in a curious echo of Jack’s own posture, was the keylike thing which had just sent a lightning-bolt snapping into the sand beside Jack.

Jack moved sideways, his arms straight out before him and the Talisman shifting internal colors like a rainbow machine. It seemed to understand that Sloat was near, for the great grooved glass ball had begun a kind of subtonal
humming
that Jack felt—more than heard—as a tingle in his hands. A band of clear bright white opened in the Talisman, like a shaft of light right through its center, and Sloat jerked himself sideways and pointed the key at Jack’s head.

He wiped a smear of blood away from his lower lip. “You hurt me, you stinking little bastard,” he said. “Don’t think that glass ball can help you now. Its future is a little shorter than your own.”

“Then why are you afraid of it?” the boy asked, thrusting it forward again.

Sloat dodged sideways, as if the Talisman, too, could shoot out bolts of lightning.
He doesn’t know
what
it can do,
Jack realized:
he doesn’t really know anything about it, he just knows he wants it.

“Drop it right now,” Sloat said. “Let go of it, you little fraud. Or I’ll take the top of your head off right now. Drop it.”

“You’re afraid,” Jack said. “Now that the Talisman is right in front of you, you’re afraid to come and get it.”

“I don’t have to come and get it,” Sloat said. “You goddam Pretender. Drop it. Let’s see you break it by yourself, Jacky.”

“Come for it, Bloat,” Jack said, feeling a blast of wholly bracing anger shoot through him.
Jacky
. He
hated
hearing his mother’s nickname for him in Sloat’s wet mouth. “I’m not the black hotel, Bloat. I’m just a kid. Can’t you take a glass ball away from a kid?” Because it was clear to him that they were in stalemate as long as Jack held the Talisman in his hands. A deep blue spark, as vibrant as one of the sparks from Anders’s “demons,” flared up and died in the Talisman’s center. Another immediately followed. Jack could still feel that powerful
humming
emanating from the heart of the grooved glass ball. He had been destined to get the Talisman—he was
supposed to get it
. The Talisman had known of his existence since his birth, Jack now thought, and ever since had awaited him to set it free. It needed Jack Sawyer and no one else. “Come on and try for it,” Jack taunted.

Sloat pushed the key toward him, snarling. Blood drooled down his chin. For a moment Sloat appeared baffled, as frustrated and enraged as a bull in a pen, and Jack actually smiled at him. Then Jack glanced sideways to where Richard lay on the sand, and the smile disappeared from his face. Richard’s face was literally covered with blood, his dark hair was matted with it.

“You bast—” he began, but it had been a mistake to look away. A searing blast of blue and yellow light smacked into the beach directly beside him.

He turned to Sloat, who was just firing off another lightning-bolt at his feet. Jack danced back, and the shaft of destructive light melted the sand at his feet into molten yellow liquid, which almost instantly cooled into a long straight slick of glass.

“Your son is going to die,” Jack said.

“Your mother is going to die,” Sloat snarled back at him. “Drop that damned thing before I cut your head off. Now. Let go of it.”

Jack said, “Why don’t you go hump a weasel?”

Morgan Sloat opened his mouth and screeched, revealing a row of square bloodstained teeth. “I’ll hump your
corpse!
” The pointing key wavered toward Jack’s head, wavered away. Sloat’s eyes glittered, and he jerked his hand up so that the key pointed at the sky. A long skein of lightning seemed to erupt upward from Sloat’s fist, widening out as it ascended. The sky blackened. Both the Talisman and Morgan Sloat’s face shone in the sudden dark, Sloat’s face because the Talisman shed its light upon it. Jack realized that his face, too, must be picked out by the Talisman’s fierce illumination. And as soon as he brandished the glowing Talisman toward Sloat, trying God knew what—to get him to drop the key, to anger him, to rub his nose in the fact that he was powerless—Jack was made to understand that he had not yet reached the end of Morgan Sloat’s capabilities. Fat snowflakes spun down out of the dark sky. Sloat disappeared behind the thickening curtain of snow; Jack heard his wet laughter.

4

She struggled out of her invalid’s bed and crossed to the window. She looked out at the dead December beach, which was lit by a single streetlight on the boardwalk. Suddenly a gull alighted on the sill outside the window. A string of gristle hung from one side of its beak, and in that moment she thought of Sloat. The gull looked like Sloat.

Lily first recoiled, and then came back. She felt a wholly ridiculous anger. A gull couldn’t look like Sloat, and a gull couldn’t invade her territory . . . it wasn’t
right
. She tapped the cold glass. The bird fluffed its wings briefly but did not fly. And she heard a thought come from its cold mind, heard it as clearly as a radio wave:

Jack’s dying, Lily . . . Jack’s dyyyyyinn . . .

It bent its head forward. Tapped on the glass as deliberately as Poe’s raven.

Dyyyyyyinnnn . . .

“NO!”
she shrieked at it.
“FUCK OFF, SLOAT!”
She did not simply tap this time but slammed her fist forward, driving it through the glass. The gull fluttered backward, squawking, almost falling. Frigid air funnelled in through the hole in the window.

Blood was dripping from Lily’s hand—no; no, not just dripping. It was
running
. She had cut herself quite badly in two places. She picked shards of glass out of the pad on the side of her palm and then wiped her hand against the bodice of her nightdress.

“DIDN’T EXPECT THAT, DID YOU, FUCKHEAD?”
she screamed at the bird, which was circling restlessly over the gardens. She burst into tears.
“Now leave him alone! Leave him alone! LEAVE MY SON ALONE!”

She was covered all over in blood. Cold air blew in the pane she had shattered. And outside she saw the first flakes of snow come swirling down from the sky and into the white glow of that streetlight.

5

“Look out, Jacky.”

Soft. On the left.

Jack pivoted that way, holding the Talisman up like a searchlight. It sent out a beam of light filled with falling snow.

Nothing else. Darkness . . . snow . . . the sound of the ocean.

“Wrong side, Jacky.”

He spun to the right, feet slipping in the icing of snow. Closer. He had been closer.

Jack held up the Talisman. “Come and get it, Bloat!”

“You haven’t got a chance, Jack. I can take you anytime I want to.”

Behind him . . . and closer still. But when he raised the blazing Talisman, there was no Sloat to be seen. Snow roared into his face. He inhaled it and began to cough on the cold.

Sloat tittered from directly in front of him.

Jack recoiled and almost tripped over Speedy.

“Hoo-hoo, Jacky!”

A hand came out of the darkness on his left and tore at Jack’s ear. He turned in that direction, heart pumping wildly, eyes bulging. He slipped and went to one knee.

Richard uttered a thick, snoring moan somewhere close by.

Overhead, a cannonade of thunder went off in the darkness Sloat had somehow brought down.

“Throw it at me!” Sloat taunted. He danced forward out of that stormy, exposures-all-jammed-up-together dark. He was snapping the fingers of his right hand and wagging the tin key at Jack with the left. The gestures had a jerky, eccentric syncopation. To Jack, Sloat looked crazily like some old-time Latin bandleader—Xavier Cugat, perhaps. “Throw it at me, why don’t you? Shooting gallery, Jack! Clay pigeon! Big old Uncle Morgan! What do you say, Jack? Have a go? Throw the ball and win a Kewpie doll!”

And Jack discovered he had pulled the Talisman back to his right shoulder, apparently intending to do just that.
He’s spooking you, trying to panic you, trying to get you to cough it up, to—

Sloat faded back into the murk. Snow flew in dust-devils.

Jack wheeled nervously around but could see Sloat nowhere.
Maybe he’s taken off. Maybe
—

“Wassa matta, Jacky?”

No, he was still here. Somewhere. On the left.

“I laughed when your dear old daddy died, Jacky. I laughed in his face. When his motor finally quit I felt—”

The voice warbled. Faded for a moment. Came back. On the right. Jack whirled that way, not understanding what was going on, his nerves increasingly frayed.

“—my heart flew like a bird on the wing. It flew like
this
, Jacky-boy.”

A rock came out of the dark—aimed not at Jack but at the glass ball. He dodged. Got a murky glimpse of Sloat. Gone again.

A pause . . . then Sloat was back, and playing a new record.

“Fucked your mother, Jacky,” the voice teased from behind him. A fat hot hand snatched at the seat of his pants.

Jack whirled around, this time almost stumbling over Richard. Tears—hot, painful, outraged—began to squeeze out of his eyes. He hated them, but here they were, and nothing in the world would deny them. The wind screamed like a dragon in a wind-tunnel.
The magic’s in you,
Speedy had said, but where was the magic now? Where oh where oh where?

“You shut up about my mom!”

“Fucked her a lot,” Sloat added with smug cheeriness.

On the right again. A fat, dancing shape in the dark.

“Fucked her by
invitation
, Jacky!”

Behind him!
Close!

Jack spun. Held up the Talisman. It flashed a white slice of light. Sloat danced back out of it, but not before Jack had seen a grimace of pain and anger. That light had touched Sloat, had hurt him.

Never mind what he’s saying—it’s all lies and you know it is. But how can he do that? He’s like Edgar Bergen. No . . . he’s like Indians in the dark, closing in on the wagon train. How can he do it?

“Singed my whiskers a little that time, Jacky,” Sloat said, and chuckled fruitily. He sounded a bit out of breath, but not enough. Not nearly enough. Jack was panting like a dog on a hot summer day, his eyes frantic as he searched the stormy blackness for Sloat. “But I’ll not hold it against you, Jacky Now, let’s see. What were we talking about? Oh yes. Your mother . . .”