The Talisman

Interlude

Sloat in This World (V)

The Kingsland Motel had been empty for nearly six years, and it had the mouldy yellow-newspaper smell of buildings that have been deserted for a long time. This smell had disturbed Sloat at first. His maternal grandmother had died at home when Sloat was a boy—it had taken her four years, but she had finally made the grade—and the smell of her dying had been like this. He did not want such a smell, or such memories, at a moment which was supposed to be his greatest triumph.

Now, however, it didn’t matter. Not even the infuriating losses inflicted on him by Jack’s early arrival at Camp Readiness mattered. His earlier feelings of dismay and fury had turned into a frenzy of nervous excitement. Head down, lips twitching, eyes bright, he strode back and forth through the room where he and Richard had stayed in the old days. Sometimes he locked his hands behind his back, sometimes he slammed one fist into the other palm, sometimes he stroked his bald pate. Mostly, however, he paced as he had in college, with his hands clenched into tight and somehow anal little fists, the hidden nails digging viciously into his palms. His stomach was by turns sour and giddily light.

Things were coming to a head.

No; no. Right idea, wrong phrase.

Things were coming together.

Richard is dead by now. My son is dead. Got to be. He survived the Blasted Lands—barely—but he’ll never survive the Agincourt. He’s dead. Hold out no false hope for yourself on that score. Jack Sawyer killed him, and I’ll gouge the eyes out of his living head for it.

“But I killed him, too,” Morgan whispered, stopping for a moment.

Suddenly he thought of his father.

Gordon Sloat had been a dour Lutheran minister in Ohio—Morgan had spent his whole boyhood trying to flee that harsh and frightening man. Finally he had escaped to Yale. He had set his entire mind and spirit on Yale in his sophomore year of high school for one reason above all others, unadmitted by his conscious mind but as deep as bedrock: it was a place where his rude, rural father would never dare to come. If his father ever tried to set foot on the Yale campus, something would happen to him. Just what that something might be, the high-school-age Sloat was not sure . . . but it would be roughly akin, he felt, to what had happened to the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw the bucket of water over her. And this insight seemed to have been true: his father never had set foot on the Yale campus. From Morgan’s first day there, Gordon Sloat’s power over his son had begun to wane—that alone made all the striving and effort seem worthwhile.

But now, as he stood with his fists clenched and his nails digging into his soft palms, his father spoke up: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

For a moment that wet yellow smell—the empty-motel-smell, the grandmother-smell, the death-smell—filled his nostrils, seeming to choke him, and Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris was afraid.

What does it profit a man—

For it says in The Book of Good Farming that a man shall not bring the get of his seed to any place of sacrifice, for what—

What does it profit—

That man shall be damned, and damned, and damned

—a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

Stinking plaster. The dry smell of vintage mouseturds turning to powder in the dark spaces behind the walls. Crazies. There were crazies in the streets.

What does it profit a man?

Dead. One son dead in that world, one son dead in this.

What does it profit a man?

Your son is dead, Morgan. Must be. Dead in the water, or dead under the pilings and floating around under there, or dead—for sure!—topside. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t—

What does it profit—

And suddenly the answer came to him.

“It profits a man the world!” Morgan shouted in the decaying room. He began to laugh and pace again. “It profits a man the world, and by Jason, the world is enough!”

Laughing, he began to pace faster and faster, and before long, blood had begun to drip out of his clenched fists.

A car pulled up out front about ten minutes later. Morgan went to the window and saw Sunlight Gardener come bursting out of the Cadillac.

Seconds later he was hammering on the door with both fists, like a tantrumy three-year-old hammering on the floor. Morgan saw that the man had gone utterly crazy, and wondered if this was good or bad.

“Morgan!” Gardener bellowed. “Open for me, my Lord! News! I have news!”

I saw all your news through my binoculars, I think. Hammer on that door awhile longer, Gardener, while I make up my mind on this. Is it good that you should be crazy, or is it bad?

Good, Morgan decided. In Indiana, Gardener had turned Sunlight Yellow at the crucial moment and had fled without taking care of Jack once and for all. But now his wild grief had made him trustworthy again. If Morgan needed a kamikaze pilot, Sunlight Gardener would be the first one to the planes.

“Open for me, my Lord! News! News! N—”

Morgan opened the door. Although he himself was wildly excited, the face he presented to Gardener was almost eerily serene.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy, Gard. You’ll pop a blood vessel.”

“They’ve gone to the hotel . . . the beach . . . shot at them while they were on the beach . . . stupid assholes missed . . . in the water, I thought . . . we’ll get them in the water . . . then the deep-creatures rose up . . . I had him in my sights . . . I had that bad bad boy RIGHT IN MY SIGHTS . . . and then . . . the creatures . . . they . . . they . . .”

“Slow down,” Morgan said soothingly. He closed the door and took a flask out of his inside pocket. He handed it to Gardener, who spun the cap off and took two huge gulps. Morgan waited. His face was benign, serene, but a vein pulsed in the center of his forehead and his hands opened and closed, opened and closed.

Gone to the hotel, yes. Morgan had seen the ridiculous raft with its painted horse’s head and its rubber tail bobbing its way out there.

“My son,” he said to Gardener. “Do your men say he was alive or dead when Jack put him in the raft?”

Gardener shook his head—but his eyes said what he believed. “No one knows for sure, my Lord. Some say they saw him move. Some say not.”

Doesn’t matter. If he wasn’t dead then, he’s dead now. One breath of the air in that place and his lungs will explode.

Gardener’s cheeks were full of whiskey-color and his eyes were watering. He didn’t give the flask back but stood holding it. That was fine with Sloat. He wanted neither whiskey nor cocaine. He was on what those sixties slobs had called a natural high.

“Start over,” Morgan said, “and this time be coherent.”

The only thing Gardener had to tell that Morgan hadn’t gleaned from the man’s first broken outburst was the fact of the old nigger’s presence down on the beach, and he almost could have guessed that. Still, he let Gardener go on. Gardener’s voice was soothing, his rage invigorating.

As Gardener talked, Morgan ran over his options one final time, dismissing his son from the equation with a brief throb of regret.

What does it profit a man? It profits a man the world, and the world is enough . . . or, in this case, worlds. Two to start with, and more when and if they play out. I can rule them all if I like—I can be something like the God of the Universe.

The Talisman. The Talisman is—

The key?

No; oh no.

Not a key but a door; a locked door standing between him and his destiny. He did not want to open that door but to destroy it, destroy it utterly and completely and eternally, so it could never be shut again, let alone locked.

When the Talisman was smashed, all those worlds would be his worlds.

“Gard!” he said, and began to pace jerkily again.

Gardener looked at Morgan questioningly.

“What does it profit a man?” Morgan chirruped brightly.

“My Lord? I don’t underst—”

Morgan stopped in front of Gardener, his eyes feverish and sparkling. His face rippled. Became the face of Morgan of Orris. Became the face of Morgan Sloat again.

“It profits a man the world,” Morgan said, putting his hands on Osmond’s shoulders. When he took them away a second later, Osmond was Gardener again. “It profits a man the world, and the world is enough.”

“My Lord, you don’t understand,” Gardener said, looking at Morgan as if he might be crazy. “I think they’ve gone inside. Inside where IT is. We tried to shoot them, but the creatures . . . the deep-creatures . . . rose up and protected them, just as The Book of Good Farming said they would . . . and if they’re inside . . .” Gardener’s voice was rising. Osmond’s eyes rolled with mingled hate and dismay.

“I understand,” Morgan said comfortingly. His face and voice were calm again, but his fists worked and worked, and blood dribbled down onto the mildewy carpet. “Yessirree-bob, yes-indeedy-doo, rooty-patootie. They’ve gone in, and my son is never going to come out. You’ve lost yours, Gard, and now I’ve lost mine.”

“Sawyer!” Gardener barked. “Jack Sawyer! Jason! That—”

Gardener lapsed into a horrible bout of cursing that went on for nearly five minutes. He cursed Jack in two languages; his voice racketed and perspired with grief and insane rage. Morgan stood there and let him get it all out of his system.

When Gardener paused, panting, and took another swallow from the flask, Morgan said:

“Right! Doubled in brass! Now listen, Gard—are you listening?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Gardener/Osmond’s eyes were bright with bitter attention.

“My son is never going to come out of the black hotel, and I don’t think Sawyer ever will, either. There’s a very good chance that he isn’t Jason enough yet to deal with what’s in there. IT will probably kill him, or drive him mad, or send him a hundred worlds away. But he may come out, Gard. Yes, he may.”

“He’s the baddest baddest bitch’s bastard to ever draw breath,” Gardener whispered. His hand tightened on the flask . . . tightened . . . tightened . . . and now his fingers actually began to make dents in the steel shell.

“You say the old nigger man is down on the beach?”

“Yes.”

“Parker,” Morgan said, and at the same moment Osmond said, “Parkus.”

“Dead?” Morgan asked this without much interest.

“I don’t know. I think so. Shall I send men down to pick him up?”

“No!” Morgan said sharply. “No—but we’re going down near where he is, aren’t we, Gard?”

“We are?”

Morgan began to grin.

“Yes. You . . . me . . . all of us. Because if Jack comes out of the hotel, he’ll go there first. He won’t leave his old nightfighting buddy on the beach, will he?”

Now Gardener also began to grin. “No,” he said. “No.”

For the first time Morgan became aware of dull and throbbing pain in his hands. He opened them and looked thoughtfully at the blood which flowed out of the deep semi-circular wounds in his palms. His grin did not falter. Indeed, it widened.

Gardener was staring at him solemnly. A great sense of power filled Morgan. He reached up to his neck and closed one bloody hand over the key that brought the lightning.

“It profits a man the world,” he whispered. “Can you gimme hallelujah.”

His lips pulled even farther back. He grinned the sick yellow grin of a rogue wolf—a wolf that is old but still sly and tenacious and powerful.

“Come on, Gard,” he said. “Let’s go to the beach.”