The Talisman

41

The Black Hotel

1

Richard Sloat wasn’t dead, but when Jack picked his old friend up in his arms, he was unconscious.

Who’s the herd now? Wolf asked in his head. Be careful, Jacky! Wolf! Be—

COME TO ME! COME NOW! the Talisman sang in its powerful, soundless voice. COME TO ME, BRING THE HERD, AND ALL WILL BE WELL AND ALL WILL BE WELL AND—

“—a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well,” Jack croaked.

He started forward and came within an inch of stepping right back through the trapdoor, like a kid participating in some bizarre double execution by hanging. Swing with a Friend, Jack thought crazily. His heart was hammering in his ears, and for a moment he thought he might vomit straight down into the gray water slapping at the pilings. Then he caught hold of himself and closed the trapdoor with his foot. Now there was only the sound of the weathervanes—cabalistic brass designs spinning restlessly in the sky.

Jack turned toward the Agincourt.

He was on a wide deck like an elevated verandah, he saw. Once, fashionable twenties and thirties folk had sat out here at the cocktail hour under the shade of umbrellas, drinking gin rickeys and sidecars, perhaps reading the latest Edgar Wallace or Ellery Queen novel, perhaps only looking out toward where Los Cavernes Island could be dimly glimpsed—a blue-gray whale’s hump dreaming on the horizon. The men in whites, the women in pastels.

Once, maybe.

Now the boards were warped and twisted and splintered. Jack didn’t know what color the deck had been painted before, but now it had gone black, like the rest of the hotel—the color of this place was the color he imagined the malignant tumors in his mother’s lungs must be.

Twenty feet away were Speedy’s “window-doors,” through which guests would have passed back and forth in those dim old days. They had been soaped over in wide white strokes so that they looked like blind eyes.

Written on one was:

YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GO HOME

Sound of the waves. Sound of the twirling ironmongery on the angled roofs. Stink of sea-salt and old spilled drinks—drinks spilled long ago by beautiful people who were now wrinkled and dead. Stink of the hotel itself. He looked at the soaped window again and saw with no real surprise that the message had already changed.

SHE’S ALREADY DEAD JACK SO WHY BOTHER?

(now who’s the herd?)

“You are, Richie,” Jack said, “but you ain’t alone.”

Richard made a snoring, protesting sound in Jack’s arms. “Come on,” Jack said, and began to walk. “One more mile. Give or take.”

2

The soaped-over windows actually seemed to widen as Jack walked toward the Agincourt, as if the black hotel were now regarding him with blind but contemptuous surprise.

Do you really think, little boy, that you can come in here and really hope to ever come out? Do you think there’s really that much Jason in you?

Red sparks, like those he had seen in the air, flashed and twisted across the soaped glass. For a moment they took form. Jack watched, wondering, as they became tiny fire-imps. They skated down to the brass handles of the doors and converged there. The handles began to glow dully, like a smith’s iron in the forge.

Go on, little boy. Touch one. Try.

Once, as a kid of six, Jack had put his finger on the cold coil of an electric range and had then turned the control knob onto the HIGH setting. He had simply been curious about how fast the burner would heat up. A second later he had pulled his finger, already blistering, away with a yell of pain. Phil Sawyer had come running, taken a look, and had asked Jack when he had started to feel this weird compulsion to burn himself alive.

Jack stood with Richard in his arms, looking at the dully glowing handles.

Go on, little boy. Remember how the stove burned? You thought you’d have plenty of time to pull your finger off—“Hell,” you thought, “the thing doesn’t even start to get red for almost a minute”—but it burned right away, didn’t it? Now, how do you think this is going to feel, Jack?

More red sparks skated liquidly down the glass to the handles of the French doors. The handles began to take on the delicate red-edged-with-white look of metal which is no more than six degrees from turning molten and starting to drip. If he touched one of those handles it would sink into his flesh, charring tissue and boiling blood. The agony would be like nothing he had ever felt before.

He waited for a moment with Richard in his arms, hoping the Talisman would call him again, or that the “Jason-side” of him would surface. But it was his mother’s voice that rasped in his head.

Has something or someone always got to push you, Jack-O? Come on, big guy—you set this going by yourself; you can keep going if you really want to. Has that other guy got to do everything for you?

“Okay, Mom,” Jack said. He was smiling a little, but his voice was trembling with fright. “Here’s one for you. I just hope someone remembered to pack the Solarcaine.”

He reached out and grasped one of the red-hot handles.

Except it wasn’t; the whole thing had been an illusion. The handle was warm, but that was all. As Jack turned it, the red glow died from all the handles. And as he pushed the glass door inward, the Talisman sang out again, bringing gooseflesh out all over his body:

WELL DONE! JASON! TO ME! COME TO ME!

With Richard in his arms, Jack stepped into the dining room of the black hotel.

3

As he crossed the threshold, he felt an inanimate force—something like a dead hand—try to shove him back out. Jack pushed against it, and a second or two later, that feeling of being repelled ceased.

The room was not particularly dark—but the soaped windows gave it a monochrome whiteness Jack did not like. He felt fogged in, blind. Here were yellow smells of decay inside walls where the plaster was slowly turning to a vile soup: the smells of empty age and sour darkness. But there was more here, and Jack knew it and feared it.

Because this place was not empty.

Exactly what manner of things might be here he did not know—but he knew that Sloat had never dared to come in, and he guessed that no one else would, either. The air was heavy and unpleasant in his lungs, as if filled with a slow poison. He felt the strange levels and canted passageways and secret rooms and dead ends above him pressing down like the walls of a great and complex crypt. There was madness here, and walking death, and gibbering irrationality. Jack might not have had the words to express these things, but he felt them, all the same . . . he knew them for what they were. Just as he knew that all the Talismans in the cosmos could not protect him from those things. He had entered a strange, dancing ritual whose conclusion, he felt, was not at all pre-ordained.

He was on his own.

Something tickled against the back of his neck. Jack swept his hand at it and skittered to one side. Richard moaned thickly in his arms.

It was a large black spider hanging on a thread. Jack looked up and saw its web in one of the stilled overhead fans, tangled in a dirty snarl between the hardwood blades. The spider’s body was bloated. Jack could see its eyes. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a spider’s eyes before. Jack began to edge around the hanging spider toward the tables. The spider turned at the end of its thread, following him.

“Fushing feef!” it suddenly squealed at him.

Jack screamed and clutched Richard against him with panicky, galvanic force. His scream echoed across the high-ceilinged dining room. Somewhere in the shadows beyond, there was a hollow metallic clank, and something laughed.

“Fushing feef, fushing FEEF!” the spider squealed, and then suddenly it scuttled back up into its web below the scrolled tin ceiling.

Heart thumping, Jack crossed the dining room and put Richard on one of the tables. The boy moaned again, very faintly. Jack could feel the twisted bumps under Richard’s clothes.

“Got to leave you for a little while, buddy,” Jack said.

From the shadows high above: “. . . I’ll take . . . take good . . . good care of him you fushing . . . fushing feef . . .” There was a dark, buzzing little giggle.

There was a pile of linen underneath the table where Jack had laid Richard down. The top two or three tablecloths were slimy with mildew, but halfway through the pile he found one that wasn’t too bad. He spread it out and covered Richard with it to the neck. He started away.

The voice of the spider whispered thinly down from the angle of the fan-blades, down from a darkness that stank of decaying flies and silk-wrapped wasps. “. . . I’ll take care of him, you fushing feef . . .”

Jack looked up, cold, but he couldn’t see the spider. He could imagine those cold little eyes, but imagination was all it was. A tormenting, sickening picture came to him: that spider scuttling onto Richard’s face, burrowing its way between Richard’s slack lips and into Richard’s mouth, crooning all the while fushing feef, fushing feef, fushing feef . . .

He thought of pulling the tablecloth up over Richard’s mouth as well, and discovered he could not bring himself to turn Richard into something that would look so much like a corpse—it was almost like an invitation.

He went back to Richard and stood there, indecisive, knowing that his very indecision must make whatever forces there were here very happy indeed—anything to keep him away from the Talisman.

He reached into his pocket and came out with the large dark green marble. The magic mirror in the other world. Jack had no reason to believe it contained any special power against evil forces, but it came from the Territories . . . and, Blasted Lands aside, the Territories were innately good. And innate goodness, Jack reasoned, must have its own power over evil.

He folded the marble into Richard’s hand. Richard’s hand closed, then fell slowly open again as soon as Jack removed his own hand.

From somewhere overhead, the spider chuffed dirty laughter.

Jack bent low over Richard, trying to ignore the smell of disease—so like the smell of this place—and murmured, “Hold it in your hand, Richie. Hold it tight, chum.”

“Don’t . . . chum,” Richard muttered, but his hand closed weakly on the marble.

“Thanks, Richie-boy,” Jack said. He kissed Richard’s cheek gently and then started across the dining room toward the closed double doors at the far end. It’s like the Alhambra, he thought. Dining room giving on the gardens there, dining room giving on a deck over the water here. Double doors in both places, opening on the rest of the hotel.

As he crossed the room, he felt that dead hand pushing against him again—it was the hotel repelling him, trying to push him back out.

Forget it, Jack thought, and kept going.

The force seemed to fade almost at once.

We have other ways, the double doors whispered as he approached them. Again, Jack heard the dim, hollow clank of metal.

You’re worried about Sloat, the double doors whispered; only now it wasn’t just them—now the voice Jack was hearing was the voice of the entire hotel. You’re worried about Sloat, and bad Wolfs, and things that look like goats, and basketball coaches who aren’t really basketball coaches; you’re worried about guns and plastic explosive and magic keys. We in here don’t worry about any of those things, little one. They are nothing to us. Morgan Sloat is no more than a scurrying ant. He has only twenty years to live, and that is less than the space between breaths to us. We in the Black Hotel care only for the Talisman—the nexus of all possible worlds. You’ve come as a burglar to rob us of what is ours, and we tell you once more: we have other ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. And if you persist, you’ll find out what they are—you’ll find out for yourself.

4

Jack pushed open first one of the double doors, then the other. The casters squealed unpleasantly as they rolled along their recessed tracks for the first time in years.

Beyond the doors was a dark hallway. That’ll go to the lobby, Jack thought. And then, if this place really is the same as the Alhambra, I’ll have to go up the main staircase one flight.

On the second floor he would find the grand ballroom. And in the grand ballroom, he would find the thing he had come for.

Jack took one look back, saw that Richard hadn’t moved, and stepped into the hallway. He closed the doors behind him.

He began to move slowly along the corridor, his frayed and dirty sneakers whispering over the rotting carpet.

A little farther down, Jack could see another set of double doors, with birds painted on them.

Closer by were a number of meeting-rooms. Here was the Golden State Room, directly opposite the Forty-Niner Room. Five paces farther up toward the double doors with the painted birds was the Mendocino Room (hacked into a lower panel of the mahogany door: YOUR MOTHER DIED SCREAMING!). Far down the corridor—impossibly far!—was watery light. The lobby.

Clank.

Jack wheeled around fast, and caught a glimmer of movement just beyond one of the peaked doorways in the stone throat of this corridor—

(?stones?) (?peaked doorways?)

Jack blinked uneasily. The corridor was lined with dark mahogany panelling which had now begun to rot in the oceanside damp. No stone. And the doors giving on the Golden State Room and the Forty-Niner Room and the Mendocino Room were just doors, sensibly rectangular and with no peaks. Yet for one moment he had seemed to see openings like modified cathedral arches. Filling these openings had been iron drop-gates—the sort that could be raised or lowered by turning a windlass. Drop-gates with hungry-looking iron spikes at the bottom. When the gate was lowered to block the entrance, the spikes fitted neatly into holes in the floor.

No stone archways, Jack-O. See for yourself. Just doorways. You saw drop-gates like that in the Tower of London, on that tour you went on with Mom and Uncle Tommy, three years ago. You’re just freaking a little, that’s all . . .

But the feeling in the pit of his stomach was unmistakable.

They were there, all right. I flipped—for just a second I was in the Territories.

Clank.

Jack whirled back the other way, sweat breaking out on his cheeks and forehead, hair beginning to stiffen on the nape of his neck.

He saw it again—a flash of something metallic in the shadows of one of those rooms. He saw huge stones as black as sin, their rough surfaces splotched with green moss. Nasty, soft-looking albino bugs squirmed in and out of the large pores of the decaying mortar between the stones. Empty sconces stood at fifteen- or twenty-foot intervals. The torches that the sconces had once held were long since gone.

Clank.

This time he didn’t even blink. The world sideslipped before his eyes, wavering like an object seen through clear running water. The walls were blackish mahogany again instead of stone blocks. The doors were doors and not latticed-iron drop-gates. The two worlds, which had been separated by a membrane as thin as a lady’s silk stocking, had now actually begun to overlap.

And, Jack realized dimly, his Jason-side had begun to over-lap with his Jack-side—some third being which was an amalgamation of both was emerging.

I don’t know what that combination is, exactly, but I hope it’s strong—because there are things behind those doors . . . behind all of them.

Jack began to sidle up the hallway again toward the lobby.

Clank.

This time the worlds didn’t change; solid doors remained solid doors and he saw no movement.

Right behind there, though. Right behind—

Now he heard something behind the painted double doors—written in the sky above the marsh scene were the words HERON BAR. It was the sound of some large rusty machine that had been set in motion. Jack swung toward

(Jason swung toward)

toward that opening door

(that rising drop-gate)

his hand plunging into

(the poke)

the pocket

(he wore on the belt of his jerkin)

of his jeans and closing around the guitar-pick Speedy had given him so long ago.

(and closing arouind the shark’s tooth)

He waited to see what would come out of the Heron Bar, and the walls of the hotel whispered dimly: We have ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. You should have left while there was still time . . .

. . .because now, little boy, your time is up.

5

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

The noise was large and clumsy and metallic. There was something relentless and inhuman about it which frightened Jack more badly than a more human sound would have done.

It moved and shuffled its way forward with its own slow idiot rhythm:

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

There was a long pause. Jack waited, pressed against the far wall a few feet to the right of the painted doors, his nerves so tightly wound they seemed to hum. Nothing at all happened for a long time. Jack began to hope the clanker had fallen back through some interdimensional trapdoor and into the world it had come from. He became aware that his back ached from his artificially still and tautly erect posture. He slumped.

Then there was a splintering crash, and a huge mailed fist with blunt two-inch spikes sprouting from the knuckles slammed through the peeling blue sky on the door. Jack shrank back against the wall again, gaping.

And, helplessly, flipped into the Territories.

6

Standing on the other side of the drop-gate was a figure in blackish, rusty armor. Its cylindrical helmet was broken only by a black horizontal eye-slit no more than an inch wide. The helmet was topped by a frowzy red plume—white bugs squirmed in and out of it. They were the same sort, Jason saw, as those which had come out of the walls first in Albert the Blob’s room and then all over Thayer School. The helmet ended in a coif of mail which draped the rusty knight’s shoulders like a lady’s stole. The upper arms and forearms were plated with heavy steel brassards. They were joined at the elbows with cubitieres. These were crusted with layers of ancient filth, and when the knight moved, the cubitieres squealed like the high, demanding voices of unpleasant children.

Its armored fists were crazy with spikes.

Jason stood against the stone wall, looking at it, unable in fact to look away; his mouth was dry as fever and his eyeballs seemed to be swelling rhythmically in their sockets in time to his heartbeat.

In the knight’s right hand was le martel de fer—a battle-hammer with a rusty thirty-pound forged-steel head, as mute as murder.

The drop-gate; remember that the drop-gate is between you and it—

But then, although no human hand was near it, the windlass began to turn; the iron chain, each link as long as Jack’s forearm, began to wind around the drum, and the gate began to rise.

7

The mailed fist was withdrawn from the door, leaving a splintered hole that changed the mural at once from faded pastoral romantic to surrealist bar-sinister: it now looked as if some apocalyptic hunter, disappointed by his day in the marshes, had put a load of birdshot through the sky itself in a fit of pique. Then the head of the battle-hammer exploded through the door in a huge blunt swipe, obliterating one of the two herons struggling to achieve liftoff. Jack raised his hand in front of his face to protect it from splinters. The martel de fer was withdrawn. There was another brief pause, almost long enough for Jack to think about running again. Then the spiked fist tore through again. It twisted first one way and then the other, widening the hole, then withdrew. A second later the hammer slammed through the middle of a reed-bed and a large chunk of the right-hand door fell to the carpet.

Jack could now see the hulking armored figure in the shadows of the Heron Bar. The armor was not the same as that worn by the figure confronting Jason in the black castle; that one wore a helmet which was nearly cylindrical, with a red plume. This one wore a helmet that looked like the polished head of a steel bird. Horns rose from either side, sprouting from the helmet at roughly ear level. Jack saw a breastplate, a kilt of plate-mail, a hemming of chain-mail below that. The hammer was the same in both worlds, and in both worlds the knight-Twinners dropped them at the same instant, as if in contempt—who would need a battle-hammer to deal with such a puny opponent as this?

Run! Jack, run!

That’s right, the hotel whispered. Run! That’s what fushing feeves are supposed to do! Run! RUN!

But he would not run. He might die, but he would not run—because that sly, whispering voice was right. Running was exactly what fushing feeves did.

But I’m no thief, Jack thought grimly. That thing may kill me, but I won’t run. Because I’m no thief.

“I won’t run!” Jack shouted at the blank, polished-steel bird-face. “I’m no thief! Do you hear me? I’ve come for what’s mine and I’M NO THIEF!”

A groaning scream came from the breathing-holes at the bottom of the bird-helmet. The knight raised its spiked fists and brought them down, one on the sagging left door, one on the sagging right. The pastoral marsh-world painted there was destroyed. The hinges snapped . . . and as the doors fell toward him, Jack actually saw the one painted heron who remained go flying away like a bird in a Walt Disney cartoon, its eyes bright and terrified.

The suit of armor came toward him like a killer robot, its feet rising and then crashing down. It was more than seven feet tall, and when it came through the door the horns rising from its helmet tore a set of ragged slashes into the upper jamb. They looked like quotation marks.

Run! a yammering voice in his mind screamed.

Run, you feef, the hotel whispered.

No, Jack answered. He stared up at the advancing knight, and his hand wrapped itself tightly around the guitar-pick in his pocket. The spike-studded gauntlets came up toward the visor of its bird-helmet. They raised it. Jack gaped.

The inside of the helmet was empty.

Then those studded hands were reaching for Jack.

8

The spike-studded hands came up and grasped either side of the cylindrical helmet. They lifted it slowly off, disclosing the livid, haggard face of a man who looked at least three hundred years old. One side of this ancient’s head had been bashed in. Splinters of bone like broken eggshell poked out through the skin, and the wound was caked with some black goop which Jason supposed was decayed brains. It was not breathing, but the red-rimmed eyes which regarded Jason were sparkling and hellishly avid. It grinned, and Jason saw the needle-sharp teeth with which this horror would rip him to pieces.

It clanked unsteadily forward . . . but that wasn’t the only sound.

He looked to his left, toward the main hall.

(lobby)

of the castle

(hotel)

and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow, bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vampires of some sort.

Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.

9

Jack howled with the pain—the short blunt-tipped spikes on its hands were in him, in him, and he understood once and for all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.

He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness inside that helmet—

But was it really empty?

Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.

It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to

(tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)

freeze me solid—

JACK! Speedy’s voice cried.

(JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)

The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph—that lovely sensation of Territories heat, that clear feeling of rainbow.

The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs—and in that moment Jack

(and Jason)

saw those designs come together in a face—the face of Laura DeLoessian.

(the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)

10

“In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” they shouted together—but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason. “Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny face of the old vampire-thing in the suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, exploded, and a black, steaming inchor ran over his hand and wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.

11

Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.

The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was swelling somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart—Jack thought if he had seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s enemy from running a blade or a spear-point through the knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.

Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together. In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him. One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a symbol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign—but these were not Morgan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who presumed to steal away their only reason for being.

“No more,” Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.

The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking double point.

“No more,” Jack moaned. “Oh God please, no more, I’m tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—”

Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack—

“Speedy, I can’t!” he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the inevitability of steel auto parts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.

—you be here in California to bring her back.

“Please, Speedy, no more!”

Reaching for him—black-metal robot-faces, rusty greaves, mail splotched and smeared with moss and mould.

Got to do your best, Travellin Jack, Speedy whispered, exhausted, and then he was gone and Jack was left to stand or fall on his own.