The Talisman

38

The End of the Road

1

Jack inspected Richard’s drooping posture and glistening face carefully as they walked along. Richard now looked as though he were dragging himself along on will power alone. A few more wet-looking pimples had blossomed on his face.

“Are you okay, Richie?”

“No. I don’t feel too good. But I can still walk, Jack. You don’t have to carry me.” He bent his head and plodded glumly on. Jack saw that his friend, who had so many memories of that peculiar little railway and that peculiar little station, was suffering far more than he from the reality that now existed—rusty, broken ties, weeds, poison ivy . . . and at the end, a ram-shackle building from which all the bright, remembered paint had faded, a building where something slithered uneasily in the dark.

I feel like my leg is caught in some stupid trap, Richard had said, and Jack thought he could understand that well enough . . . but not with the depth of Richard’s understanding. That was more understanding than he was sure he could bear. A slice of Richard’s childhood had been burned out of him, turned inside-out. The railway and the dead station with its staring glassless windows must have seemed like dreadful parodies of themselves to Richard—yet more bits of the past destroyed in the wake of everything he was learning or admitting about his father. Richard’s entire life, as much as Jack’s, had begun to fold into the pattern of the Territories, and Richard had been given much less preparation for this transformation.

2

As for what he had told Richard about the Talisman, Jack would have sworn it was the truth—the Talisman knew they were coming. He had begun feeling it just about when he had seen the billboard shining out with his mother’s picture; now the feeling was urgent and powerful. It was as if a great animal had awakened some miles away, and its purring made the earth resonate . . . or as if every single bulb inside a hundred-story building just over the horizon had just gone on, making a blaze of light strong enough to conceal the stars . . . or as if someone had switched on the biggest magnet in the world, which was tugging at Jack’s belt buckle, at the change in his pockets and the fillings in his teeth, and would not be satisfied until it had pulled him into its heart. That great animal purring, that sudden and drastic illumination, that magnetic yearning—all these echoed in Jack’s chest. Something out there, something in the direction of Point Venuti, wanted Jack Sawyer, and what Jack Sawyer chiefly knew of the object calling him so viscerally was that it was big. Big. No small thing could own such power. It was elephant-sized, city-sized.

And Jack wondered about his capacity to handle something so monumental. The Talisman had been imprisoned in a magical and sinister old hotel; presumably it had been put there not only to keep it from evil hands but at least in part because it was hard for anybody to handle it, whatever his intentions. Maybe, Jack wondered, Jason had been the only being capable of handling it—capable of dealing with it without doing harm either to himself or to the Talisman itself. Feeling the strength and urgency of its call to him, Jack could only hope that he would not weaken before the Talisman.

“ ’You’ll understand, Rich,’ ” Richard surprised him by saying. His voice was dull and low. “My father said that. He said I’d understand. ’You’ll understand, Rich.’ ”

“Yeah,” Jack said, looking worriedly at his friend. “How are you feeling, Richard?”

In addition to the sores surrounding his mouth, Richard now had a collection of angry-looking raised red dots or bumps across his pimply forehead and his temples. It was as though a swarm of insects had managed to burrow just under the surface of his protesting skin. For a moment Jack had a flash of Richard Sloat on the morning he had climbed in his window at Nelson House, Thayer School; Richard Sloat with his glasses riding firmly on the bridge of his nose and his sweater tucked neatly into his pants. Would that maddeningly correct, unbudgeable boy ever return?

“I can still walk,” Richard said. “But is this what he meant? Is this the understanding I was supposed to get, or have, or whatever the hell . . . ?”

“You’ve got something new on your face,” Jack said. “You want to rest for a while?”

“Naw,” Richard said, still speaking from the bottom of a muddy barrel. “And I can feel that rash. It itches. I think I got it all over my back, too.”

“Let me see,” Jack said. Richard stopped in the middle of the road, obedient as a dog. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The red spots blazed on his forehead and temples. Jack stepped behind him, raised his jacket, and lifted the back of his stained and dirty blue button-down shirt. The spots were smaller here, not as raised or as angry-looking; they spread from Richard’s thin shoulder blades to the small of his back, no larger than ticks.

Richard let out a big dispirited unconscious sigh.

“You got em there, but it’s not so bad,” Jack said.

“Thanks,” Richard said. He inhaled, lifted his head. Overhead the gray sky seemed heavy enough to come crashing to earth. The ocean seethed against the rocks, far down the rough slope. “It’s only a couple of miles, really,” Richard said. “I’ll make it.”

“I’ll piggyback you when you need it,” Jack said, unwittingly exposing his conviction that before long Richard would need to be carried again.

Richard shook his head and made an inefficient stab at shoving his shirt back in his trousers. “Sometimes I think I . . . sometimes I think I can’t—”

“We’re going to go into that hotel, Richard,” Jack said, putting his arm through Richard’s and half-forcing him to step forward. “You and me. Together. I don’t have the faintest idea of what happens once we get in there, but you and I are going in. No matter who tries to stop us. Just remember that.”

Richard gave him a look half-fearful, half-grateful. Now Jack could see the irregular outlines of future bumps crowding beneath the surface of Richard’s cheeks. Again he was conscious of a powerful force pulling at him, forcing him along as he had forced Richard.

“You mean my father,” Richard said. He blinked, and Jack thought he was trying not to cry—exhaustion had magnified Richard’s emotions.

“I mean everything,” Jack said, not quite truthfully. “Let’s get going, old pal.”

“But what am I supposed to understand? I don’t get—” Richard looked around, blinking his unprotected eyes. Most of the world, Jack remembered, was a blur to Richard.

“You understand a lot more already, Richie,” Jack pointed out.

And then for a moment a disconcertingly bitter smile twisted Richard’s mouth. He had been made to understand a great deal more than he had ever wished to know, and his friend found himself momentarily wishing that he had run away from Thayer School in the middle of the night by himself. But the moment in which he might have preserved Richard’s innocence was far behind him, if it had ever really existed—Richard was a necessary part of Jack’s mission. He felt strong hands fold around his heart: Jason’s hands, the Talisman’s hands.

“We’re on our way,” he said, and Richard settled back into the rhythm of his strides.

“We’re going to see my dad down there in Point Venuti, aren’t we?” he asked.

Jack said, “I’m going to take care of you, Richard. You’re the herd now.”

“What?”

“Nobody’s going to hurt you, not unless you scratch yourself to death.”

Richard muttered to himself as they plodded along. His hands slid over his inflamed temples, rubbing and rubbing. Now and then he dug his fingers in his hair, scratched himself like a dog, and grunted in an only partially fulfilled satisfaction.

3

Shortly after Richard lifted his shirt, revealing the red blotches on his back, they saw the first of the Territories trees. It grew on the inland side of the highway, its tangle of dark branches and column of thick, irregular bark emerging from a reddish, waxy tangle of poison ivy. Knotholes in the bark gaped, mouths or eyes, at the boys. Down in the thick mat of poison ivy a rustling, rustling of unsatisfied roots agitated the waxy leaves above them, as if a breeze blew through them. Jack said, “Let’s cross the road,” and hoped that Richard had not seen the tree. Behind him he could still hear the thick, rubbery roots prowling through the stems of the ivy.

Is that a BOY? Could that be a BOY up there? A SPECIAL boy perhaps?

Richard’s hands flew from his sides to his shoulders to his temples to his scalp. On his cheeks, the second wave of raised bumps resembled horror-movie makeup—he could have been a juvenile monster from one of Lily Cavanaugh’s old films. Jack saw that on the backs of Richard’s hands the red bumps of the rash had begun to grow together into great red welts.

“Can you really keep going, Richard?” he asked.

Richard nodded. “Sure. For a while.” He squinted back across the road. “That wasn’t a regular tree, was it? I never saw a tree like that before, not even in a book. It was a Territories tree, wasn’t it?”

“ ’Fraid so,” Jack said.

“That means the Territories are really close, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does.”

“So there’ll be more of those trees up ahead, won’t there?”

“If you know the answers, why ask the questions?” Jack asked. “Oh Jason, what a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry, Richie—I guess I was hoping that you didn’t see it. Yeah, I suppose there’ll be more of them up there. Let’s just not get too close to them.”

In any case, Jack thought, “up there” was hardly an accurate way to describe where they were going: the highway slid resolutely down a steady grade, and every hundred feet seemed to take it farther from the light. Everything seemed invaded by the Territories.

“Could you take a look at my back?” Richard asked.

“Sure.” Jack again lifted Richard’s shirt. He kept himself from saying anything, though his instinct was to groan. Richard’s back was now covered with raised red blotches which seemed almost to radiate heat. “It’s a little worse,” he said.

“I thought it had to be. Only a little, huh?”

“Only a little.”

Before long, Jack thought, Richard was going to look one hell of a lot like an alligator suitcase—Alligator Boy, son of Elephant Man.

Two of the trees grew together a short way ahead, their warty trunks twisted around each other in a way that suggested violence more than love. As Jack stared at them while they hurried past, he thought he saw the black holes in the bark mouthing at them, blowing curses or kisses: and he knew that he heard the roots gnashing together at the base of the joined trees. (BOY! A BOY’s out there! OUR boy’s out there!)

Though it was only mid-afternoon, the air was dark, oddly grainy, like an old newspaper photograph. Where grass had grown on the inland side of the highway, where Queen Anne’s lace had bloomed delicately and whitely, low unrecognizable weeds blanketed the earth. With no blossoms and few leaves, they resembled snakes coiled together and smelled faintly of diesel oil. Occasionally the sun flared through the granular murk like a dim orange fire. Jack was reminded of a photograph he had once seen of Gary, Indiana, at night—hellish flames feeding on poison in a black, poisoned sky. From down there the Talisman pulled at him as surely as if it were a giant with its hands on his clothes. The nexus of all possible worlds. He would take Richard into that hell—and fight for his life with all his strength—if he had to haul him along by the ankles. And Richard must have seen this determination in Jack, for, scratching at his sides and shoulders, he toiled along beside him.

I’m going to do this, Jack said to himself, and tried to ignore how greatly he was merely trying to bolster his courage. If I have to go through a dozen different worlds, I’m going to do it.

4

Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like muggers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton, once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a leash.

5

A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.