The Talisman

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.

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 . . .”

A little warble . . . a little fade . . . and then a stone came whistling out of the darkness on the right and struck Jack’s temple. He whirled, but Sloat was gone again, skipping nimbly back into the snow.

“She’d wrap those long legs around me until I howled for mercy!” Sloat declared from behind Jack and to the right “OWWWWOOOOOO!”

Don’t let him get you don’t let him psych you out don’t—

But he couldn’t help it. It was his mother this dirty man was talking about; his mother.

“You stop it! You shut up!”

Sloat was in front of him now—so close Jack should have been able to see him clearly in spite of the swirling snow, but there was only a glimmer, like a face seen underwater at night Another stone zoomed out of the dark and struck Jack in the back of the head. He staggered forward and nearly tripped over Richard again—a Richard who was rapidly disappearing under a mantle of snow.

He saw stars . . . and understood what was happening.

Sloat’s flipping! Flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back!

Jack turned in an unsteady circle, like a man beset with a hundred enemies instead of just one. Lightning-fire licked out of the dark in a narrow greenish-blue ray. He reached toward it with the Talisman, hoping to deflect it back at Sloat. Too late. It winked out.

Then how come I don’t see him over there? Over there in the Territories?

The answer came to him in a dazzling flash . . . and as if in response, the Talisman flashed a gorgeous fan of white light—it cut the snowy light like the headlamp of a locomotive.

I don’t see him over there, don’t respond to him over there, because I’m NOT over there! Jason’s gone . . . and I’m single-natured! Sloat’s flipping onto a beach where there’s no one but Morgan of Orris and a dead or dying man named Parkus—Richard isn’t there either, because Morgan of Orris’s son, Rushton, died a long time ago and Richard’s single-natured, too! When I flipped before, the Talisman was there . . . but Richard wasn’t! Morgan’s flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back . . . trying to freak me out. . . .

“Hoo-hoo! Jacky-boy!”

The left.

“Over here!”

The right.

But Jack wasn’t listening for the place anymore. He was looking into the Talisman, waiting for the downbeat. The most important downbeat of his life.

From behind. This time he would come from behind.

The Talisman flashed out, a strong lamp in the snow.

Jack pivoted . . . and as he pivoted he flipped into the Territories, into bright sunlight. And there was Morgan of Orris, big as life and twice as ugly. For a moment he didn’t realize Jack had tumbled to the trick; he was limping rapidly around to a place which would be behind Jack when he flipped back into the American Territories. There was a nasty little-boy grin on his face. His cloak popped and billowed behind him. His left boot dragged, and Jack saw the sand was covered with those dragging hashmarks all around him. Morgan had been running around him in a harrying circle, all the while goading Jack with obscene lies about his mother, throwing stones, and flipping back and forth.

Jack shouted:

“I SEE YOU!” at the top of his lungs.

Morgan stared around at him in utter stunned shock, one hand curled around that silver rod.

“SEE YOU!” Jack shouted again. “Should we go around one more time, Bloat?”

Morgan of Orris flicked the end of the rod at him, his face altering in a second from that rubbery simple-minded expression of shock to a much more characteristic look of craft—of a clever man quickly seeing all the possibilities in a situation. His eyes narrowed. Jack almost, in that second when Morgan of Orris looked down his lethal silver rod at him and narrowed his eyes into gunsights, flipped back into the American Territories, and that would have killed him. But an instant before prudence or panic caused him in effect to jump in front of a moving truck, the same insight that had told him that Morgan was flipping between worlds saved him again—Jack had learned the ways of his adversary. He held his ground, again waiting for that almost mystical downbeat. For a fraction of a second Jack Sawyer held his breath. If Morgan had been a shade less proud of his deviousness, he might well have murdered Jack Sawyer, which he so dearly wished to do, at that moment.

But instead, just as Jack had thought it would, Morgan’s image abruptly departed the Territories. Jack inhaled. Speedy’s body (Parkus’s body, Jack realized) lay motionless a short distance away. The downbeat came. Jack exhaled and flipped back.

A new streak of glass divided the sand on the Point Venuti beach, glimmeringly reflecting the sudden beam of white light which emanated from the Talisman.

“Missed one, did you?” Morgan Sloat whispered out of the darkness. Snow pelted Jack, cold wind froze his limbs, his throat, his forehead. A car’s length away, Sloat’s face hung before him, the forehead drawn up into its familiar corrugations, the bloody mouth open. He was extending the key toward Jack in the storm, and a ridge of powdery snow adhered to the brown sleeve of his suit. Jack saw a black trail of blood oozing from the left nostril of the incongruously small nose. Sloat’s eyes, bloodshot with pain, shone through the dark air.

6

Richard Sloat confusedly opened his eyes. Every part of him was cold. At first he thought, quite without emotion of any kind, that he was dead. He had fallen down somewhere, probably down those steep, tricky steps at the back of the Thayer School grandstand. Now he was cold and dead and nothing more could happen to him. He experienced a second of dizzying relief.

His head offered him a fresh surge of pain, and he felt warm blood ooze out over his cold hand—both of these sensations evidence that, whatever he might welcome at the moment, Richard Llewellyn Sloat was not yet dead. He was only a wounded suffering creature. The whole top of his head seemed to have been sliced off. He had no proper idea of where he was. It was cold. His eyes focused long enough to report to him that he was lying down in the snow. Winter had happened. More snow dumped on him from out of the sky. Then he heard his father’s voice, and everything returned to him.

Richard kept his hand on top of his head, but very slowly tilted his chin so that he could look in the direction of his father’s voice.

Jack Sawyer was holding the Talisman—that was the next thing Richard took in. The Talisman was unbroken. He felt the return of a portion of that relief he had experienced when he’d thought he was dead. Even without his glasses, Richard could see that Jack had an undefeated, unbowed look that moved him very deeply. Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.

Jack was just Jack now, Richard now saw. That extraordinary extra quality, as of a movie star deigning to walk around as a shabbily dressed twelve-year-old, had gone. This made his heroism all the more impressive to Richard.

His father smiled rapaciously. But that was not his father. His father had been hollowed out a long time ago—hollowed out by his envy of Phil Sawyer, by the greed of his ambitions.

“We can keep on going around like this forever,” Jack said. “I’m never going to give you the Talisman, and you’re never going to be able to destroy it with that gadget of yours. Give up.”

The point of the key in his father’s hand slowly moved across and down, and it, like his father’s greedy needful face, pointed straight at him.

“First I’ll blow Richard apart,” his father said. “Do you really want to see your pal Richard turned into bacon? Hmmmm? Do you? And of course I won’t hesitate to do the same favor for that pest beside him.”

Jack and Sloat exchanged short glances. His father was not kidding, Richard knew. He would kill him if Jack did not surrender the Talisman. And then he would kill the old black man, Speedy.

“Don’t do it,” he managed to whisper. “Stuff him, Jack. Tell him to screw himself.”

Jack almost deranged Richard by winking at him.

“Just drop the Talisman,” he heard his father say.

Richard watched in horror as Jack tilted the palms of his hands and let the Talisman tumble out.

7

“Jack, no!”

Jack didn’t look around at Richard. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, his mind hammered at him. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.

You learned these things, or you died somewhere out in the world where there was no clear light.

“No more killing,” he said in the snow-filled darkness of this California beach afternoon. He should have felt utterly exhausted—it had been, all told, a four-day run of horrors, and now, at the end, he had coughed up the ball like a freshman quarterback with a lot to learn. Had thrown it all away. Yet it was the sure voice of Anders he heard, Anders who had knelt before Jack/Jason with his kilt spread out around him and his head bowed: Anders saying A’ wi’ be well, a’ wi’ be well, and a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well.

The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required.

“No more slaughter. Go on and break it if you can,” he said. “I’m sorry for you.”

It was that last which surely destroyed Morgan Sloat. If he had retained a shred of rational thought, he would have unearthed a stone from the unearthly snow and smashed the Talisman . . . as it could have been smashed, in its simple unjacketed vulnerability.

Instead, he turned the key on it.

As he did so, his mind was filled with loving, hateful memories of Jerry Bledsoe, and Jerry Bledsoe’s wife. Jerry Bledsoe, whom he had killed, and Nita Bledsoe, who should have been Lily Cavanaugh . . . Lily, who had slapped him so hard his nose bled the one time when, drunk, he had tried to touch her.

Fire sang out—green-blue fire spanning out from the cheapjack barrel of the tin key. It arrowed out at the Talisman, struck it, spread over it, turning it into a burning sun. Every color was there for a moment . . . for a moment every world was there. Then it was gone.

The Talisman swallowed the fire from Morgan’s key.

Ate it whole.

Darkness came back. Jack’s feet slid out from under him and he sat down with a thud on Speedy Parker’s limply splayed calves. Speedy made a grunting noise and twitched.

There was a two-second lag when everything held static . . . and then fire suddenly blew back out of the Talisman in a flood. Jack’s eyes opened wide in spite of his frantic, tortured thought

(it’ll blind you! Jack! it’ll)

and the altered geography of Point Venuti was lit up as if the God of All Universes had bent forward to snap a picture. Jack saw the Agincourt, slumped and half-destroyed; he saw the collapsed Highlands that were now the Lowlands; he saw Richard on his back; he saw Speedy lying on his belly with his face turned to one side. Speedy was smiling.

Then Morgan Sloat was driven backward and enveloped in a field of fire from his own key—fire that had been absorbed inside the Talisman as the flashes of light from Sunlight Gardener’s telescopic sight had been absorbed—and which was returned to him a thousandfold.

A hole opened between the worlds—a hole the size of the tunnel leading into Oatley—and Jack saw Sloat, his handsome brown suit burning, one skeletal, tallowy hand still clutching the key, driven through that hole. Sloat’s eyes were boiling in their sockets, but they were wide . . . they were aware.

And as he passed, Jack saw him change—saw the cloak appear like the wings of a bat that has swooped through the flame of a torch, saw his burning boots, his burning hair. Saw the key become a thing like a miniature lightning-rod.

Saw . . . daylight!

8

It came back in a flood. Jack rolled away from it on the snowy beach, dazzled. In his ears—ears deep inside his head—he heard Morgan Sloat’s dying scream as he was driven back through all the worlds that were, into oblivion.

“Jack?” Richard was sitting up woozily, holding his head. “Jack, what happened? I think I fell down the stadium steps.”

Speedy was twitching in the snow, and now he did a sort of girl’s pushup and looked toward Jack. His eyes were exhausted . . . but his face was clear of blemishes.

“Good job, Jack,” he said, and grinned. “Good—” He fell partway forward again, panting.

Rainbow, Jack thought woozily. He stood up and then fell down again. Freezing snow coated his face and then began to melt like tears. He pushed himself to his knees, then stood up again. The field of his vision was filled with spots . . . but he saw the enormous burned swatch in the snow where Morgan had stood. It tailed away like a teardrop.

“Rainbow!” Jack Sawyer shouted, and raised his hands to the sky, weeping and laughing. “Rainbow! Rainbow!”

He went to the Talisman, and picked it up, still weeping.

He took it to Richard Sloat, who had been Rushton; to Speedy Parker, who was what he was.

He healed them.

Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!