The Talisman (80 page)

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!

46

Another Journey

1

He healed them, but he was never able to recall exactly how that had gone, or any of the specific details—for a while the Talisman had blazed and sung in his hands, and he had the vaguest possible memory of its fire’s actually seeming to
flow out over them
until they glowed in a bath of light. That was all he could bring back.

At the end of it, the glorious light in the Talisman faded . . . faded . . . went out.

Jack, thinking of his mother, uttered a hoarse, wailing cry.

Speedy staggered over to him through the melting snow and put an arm around Jack’s shoulders.

“It be back, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said. He smiled, but he looked twice as tired as Jack. Speedy had been healed . . . but he was still not well.
This world is killing him,
Jack thought dimly.
At least, it’s killing the part of him that’s Speedy Parker. The Talisman healed him . . . but he is still dying.

“You did for
it
,” Speedy said, “and you wanna believe that
it’s
gonna do for
you
. Don’t worry. Come on over here, Jack. Come on over to where your frien’ be layin.”

Jack did. Richard was sleeping in the melting snow. That horrid loose flap of skin was gone, but there was a long white streak of scalp showing in his hair now—a streak of scalp from which no hair would ever grow.

“Take his han’.”

“Why? What for?”

“We’re gonna flip.”

Jack looked at Speedy questioningly, but Speedy offered no explanation. He only nodded, as if to say
Yes; you heard me right.

Well,
Jack thought,
I trusted him this far
—

He reached down and took Richard’s hand. Speedy held Jack’s other hand.

With hardly a tug at all, the three of them went over.

2

It was as Jack had intuited—the figure standing beside him over here, on this black sand that was stitched everywhere by Morgan of Orris’s dragging foot, looked hale and hearty and healthy.

Jack stared with awe—and some unease—at this stranger who looked a bit like Speedy Parker’s younger brother.

“Speedy—Mr. Parkus, I mean—what are you—”

“You boys need rest,” Parkus said. “You for sure, this other young squire even more. He came closer to dying than anyone will ever know but himself . . . and I don’t think he’s the type to do much admitting, even
to
himself.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “You got
that
right.”

“He’ll rest better over here,” Parkus told Jack, and struck off up the beach, away from the castle, carrying Richard. Jack stumbled along as best he could, but gradually found himself falling behind. He was quickly out of breath, his legs rubbery. His head ached with reaction from the final battle—shock hangover, he supposed.

“Why . . . where . . .” That was all he could pant. He held the Talisman against his chest. It was dull now, its exterior sooty and opaque and uninteresting.

“Just up a little way,” Parkus said. “You and your friend don’t want to rest where
he
was, do you?”

And, exhausted as he was, Jack shook his head.

Parkus glanced back over his shoulder, then looked sadly at Jack.

“It stinks of his evil back there,” he said, “and it stinks of your world, Jack.

“To me, they smell too much alike for comfort.”

He set off again, Richard in his arms.

3

Forty yards up the beach he stopped. Here the black sand had moderated to a lighter color—not white, but a medium gray. Parkus set Richard down gently. Jack sprawled beside him. The sand was warm—blessedly warm. No snow here.

Parkus sat beside him, cross-legged.

“You’re going to have a sleep now,” he said. “Might be tomorrow before you wake up. Won’t anybody bother you, if so. Take a look.”

Parkus waved his arm toward the place where Point Venuti had been in the American Territories. Jack first saw the black castle, one entire side of it crumbled and burst, as if there had been a tremendous explosion inside. Now the castle looked almost pedestrian. Its menace was burnt out, its illicit treasure borne away. It was only stones piled up in patterns.

Looking farther, Jack saw that the earthquake had not been so violent over here—and there had been less to destroy. He saw a few overturned huts that looked as if they had been built mostly of driftwood; he saw a number of burst coaches that might or might not have been Cadillacs back in the American Territories; here and there he could see a fallen, shaggy body.

“Those who were here and survived have now gone,” Parkus said. “They know what has happened, they know Orris is dead, and they’ll not trouble you more. The evil that was here has gone. Do you know that? Can you
feel
it?”

“Yes,” Jack whispered. “But . . . Mr. Parkus . . . you’re not . . . not . . .”

“Going? Yes. Very soon. You and your friend are going to have a good sleep, but you and I must have a bit of a talk first. It won’t take long, so I want you to try and get your head up off your chest, at least for the moment.”

With some effort, Jack got his head up and his eyes all—well,
most
—of the way open again. Parkus nodded.

“When you wake up, strike east . . . but don’t flip! You stay right here for a while. Stay in the Territories. There’s going to be too much going on over there on your side—rescue units, news crews, Jason knows what else. At least the snow will melt before anybody knows it’s there, except for a few people who’ll be dismissed as crackpots—”

“Why do you have to go?”

“I just got to ramble some now, Jack. There’s a lot of work to be done over here. News of Morgan’s death will already be travelling east. Travelling fast. I’m behind that news right now, and I’ve got to get ahead of it if I can. I want to get back to the Outposts . . . and the east . . . before a lot of pretty bad folks start to head out for other places.” He looked out at the ocean, his eyes as cold and gray as flint. “When the bill comes due, people have to pay. Morgan’s gone, but there’s still a debt owing.”

“You’re something like a policeman over here, aren’t you?”

Parkus nodded. “I am what you’d call the Judge General and Lord High Executioner all rolled into one. Over here, that is.” He put a strong, warm hand on Jack’s head. “Over there, I’m just this fella who goes around from place to place, does a few odd jobs, strums a few tunes. And sometimes, believe me, I like that a lot better.”

He smiled again, and this time he
was
Speedy.

“And you be seein that guy from time to time, Jacky. Yeah, from time to time and place to place. In a shoppin center, maybe, or a park.”

He winked at Jack.

“But Speedy’s . . . not well,” Jack said. “Whatever was wrong with him, it was something the Talisman couldn’t touch.”

“Speedy’s
old
,” Parkus said. “He’s my age, but your world made him older than me. Just the same, he’s still got a few years left in him. Maybe quite a few. Feel no fret, Jack.”

“You promise?” Jack asked.

Parkus grinned. “Yeah-bob.”

Jack grinned tiredly back.

“You and your friend head out to the east. Go until you reckon you’ve done five miles. You get over those low hills and then you’ll be fine—easy walking. Look for a big tree—biggest damn tree you’ve ever seen. You get to that big old tree, Jack, and you take Richard’s hand, and you flip back. You’ll come out next to a giant redwood with a tunnel cut through the bottom of it to let the road through. The road’s Route Seventeen, and you’ll be on the outskirts of a little town in northern California called Storyville. Walk into town. There’s a Mobil station at the blinker-light.”

“And then?”

Parkus shrugged. “Don’t know, not for sure. Could be, Jack, you’ll meet someone you’ll recognize.”

“But how will we get h—”

“Shhh,” Parkus said, and put a hand on Jack’s forehead exactly as his mother had done when he was

(baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting, and all that good shit, la-la, go to sleep, Jacky, all’s well and all’s well and)

very small. “Enough questions. All will be well with you and Richard now, I think.”

Jack lay down. He cradled the dark ball in the crook of one arm. Each of his eyelids now seemed to have a cinderblock attached to it.

“You have been brave and true, Jack,” Parkus said with calm gravity. “I wish you were my own son . . . and I salute you for your courage. And your faith. There are people in many worlds who owe you a great debt of gratitude. And in some way or other, I think most of them sense that.”

Jack managed a smile.

“Stay a little while,” he managed to say.

“All right,” Parkus said. “Until you sleep. Feel no fret, Jack. Nothing will harm you here.”

“My mom always said—”

But before he finished the thought, sleep had claimed him.

4

And sleep continued to claim him, in some mysterious wise, the next day when he was technically awake—or if not sleep, then a protective numbing faculty of the mind which turned most of that day slow and dreamlike. He and Richard, who was similarly slow-moving and tentative, stood beneath the tallest tree in the world. All about them spangles of light lay across the floor of the forest. Ten grown men holding hands could not have reached around it. The tree soared up, massive and apart: in a forest of tall trees it was a leviathan, a pure example of Territories exuberance.

Feel no fret,
Parkus had said, even while he threatened to fade hazily away like the Cheshire Cat. Jack tilted his head to stare up toward the top of the tree. He did not quite know this, but he was emotionally exhausted. The immensity of the tree aroused only a flicker of wonder in him. Jack rested a hand against the surprisingly smooth bark.
I killed the man who killed my father,
he said to himself. He clutched the dark, seemingly dead ball of the Talisman in his other hand. Richard was staring upward at the giant head of the tree, a skyscraper’s height above them. Morgan was dead, Gardener too, and the snow must have melted from the beach by now. Yet not all of it was gone. Jack felt as though a whole beachful of snow filled his head. He had thought once—a thousand years ago, it seemed now—that if he could ever actually get his hands around the Talisman, he would be so inundated with triumph and excitement and awe that he’d have to fizz over. Instead he now felt only the tiniest hint of all that. It was snowing in his head, and he could see no farther than Parkus’s instructions. He realized that the enormous tree was holding him up.

“Take my hand,” he said to Richard.

“But how are we going to get home?” Richard asked.

“Feel no fret,” he said, and closed his hand around Richard’s. Jack Sawyer didn’t need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was
brave and true
. Jack Sawyer was a played-out twelve-year-old boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him.

5

The forest had contracted; now it was an American forest. The roof of gently moving boughs was noticeably lower, the trees about them conspicuously smaller than in the part of the Territories forest to which Parkus had directed them. Jack was dimly conscious of this alteration in the scale of everything about him before he saw the two-lane blacktop road in front of him: but twentieth-century reality kicked him almost immediately in the shins, for as soon as he saw the road he heard the eggbeater sound of a small motor and instinctively drew himself and Richard back just before a white little Renault Le Car zipped by him. The car sped past and went through the tunnel cut into the trunk of the redwood (which was slightly more than half the size of its Territories counterpart). But at least one adult and two children in the Renault were not looking at the redwoods they had come to see all the way from New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die!”). The woman and the two small children in the back seat had swivelled around to gawp at Jack and Richard. Their mouths were small black caves, open wide. They had just seen two boys appear beside the road like ghosts, miraculously and instantaneously forming out of nothing, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock after beaming down from the
Enterprise
.

“You okay to walk for a little while?”

“Sure,” Richard said.

Jack stepped onto the surface of Route 17 and walked through the huge hole in the tree.

He might be dreaming all this, he thought. He might be still on the Territories beach, Richard knocked out beside him, both of them under Parkus’s kindly gaze.
My mom always said . . . My mom always said . . .

6

Moving as if through thick fog (though that day in that part of northern California was in fact sunny and dry), Jack Sawyer led Richard Sloat out of the redwood forest and down a sloping road past dry December meadows.

 . . . that the most important person in any movie is usually the cameraman . . .

His body needed more sleep. His mind needed a vacation.

 . . . that vermouth is the ruination of a good martini . . .

Richard followed silently along, brooding. He was so much slower that Jack had to stop still on the side of the road and wait for Richard to catch up with him. A little town that must have been Storyville was visible a half-mile or so ahead. A few low white buildings sat on either side of the road.
ANTIQUES
, read the sign atop one of them. Past the buildings a blinking stoplight hung over an empty intersection. Jack could see the corner of the
MOBIL
sign outside the gas station. Richard trudged along, his head so far down his chin nearly rested on his chest. When Richard drew nearer, Jack finally saw that his friend was weeping.

Jack put his arm around Richard’s shoulders. “I want you to know something,” he said.

“What?” Richard’s small face was tear-streaked but defiant.

“I love you,” Jack said.

Richard’s eyes snapped back to the surface of the road. Jack kept his arm over his friend’s shoulders. In a moment Richard looked up—looked straight at Jack—and nodded. And that was like something Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer once or twice really had said to her son:
Jack-O, there are times you don’t have to spill your guts out of your mouth
.