The Talisman

44

The Earthquake

1

It was some time before Jack became aware that the Agincourt was shaking itself to pieces around him, and this was not surprising. He was transported with wonder. In one sense he was not in the Agincourt at all, not in Point Venuti, not in Mendocino County, not in California, not in the American Territories, not in those other Territories; but he was in them, and in an infinite number of other worlds as well, and all at the same time. Nor was he simply in one place in all those worlds; he was in them everywhere because he was those worlds. The Talisman, it seemed, was much more than even his father had believed. It was not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves—the worlds, and the spaces between those worlds.

Here was enough transcendentalism to drive even a cavedwelling Tibetan holy man insane. Jack Sawyer was everywhere; Jack Sawyer was everything. A blade of grass on a world fifty thousand worlds down the chain from earth died of thirst on an inconsequential plain somewhere in the center of a continent which roughly corresponded in position to Africa; Jack died with that blade of grass. In another world, dragons were copulating in the center of a cloud high above the planet, and the fiery breath of their ecstasy mixed with the cold air and precipitated rain and floods on the ground below. Jack was the he-dragon; Jack was the she-dragon; Jack was the sperm; Jack was the egg. Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macrocosmic player-piano tapes which would play everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack’s happy teeth bit an orange: Jack’s unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open. He was a trillion dust-kitties under a billion beds. He was a joey dreaming of its previous life in its mother’s pouch as the mother bounced over a purple plain where rabbits the size of deer ran and gambolled. He was ham on a hock in Peru and eggs in a nest under one of the hens in the Ohio henhouse Buddy Parkins was cleaning. He was the powdered henshit in Buddy Parkins’s nose; he was the trembling hairs that would soon cause Buddy Parkins to sneeze; he was the sneeze; he was the germs in the sneeze; he was the atoms in the germs; he was the tachyons in the atoms travelling backward through time toward the big bang at the start of creation.

His heart skipped and a thousand suns flashed up in novas.

He saw a googolplex of sparrows in a googolplex of worlds and marked the fall or the well-being of each.

He died in the Gehenna of Territories ore-pit mines.

He lived as a flu-virus in Etheridge’s tie.

He ran in a wind over far places.

He was . . .

Oh he was . . .

He was God. God, or something so close as to make no difference.

No! Jack screamed in terror. No, I don’t want to be God! Please! Please, I don’t want to be God, I ONLY WANT TO SAVE MY MOTHER’S LIFE!

And suddenly infinitude closed up like a losing hand folding in a cardsharp’s grasp. It narrowed down to a beam of blinding white light, and this he followed back to the Territories Ballroom, where only seconds had passed. He still held the Talisman in his hands.

2

Outside, the ground had begun to do a carny kooch dancer’s bump and grind. The tide, which had been coming in, re-thought itself and began to run backward, exposing sand as deeply tanned as a starlet’s thighs. Flopping on this uncovered sand were strange fish, some which seemed to be no more than gelatinous clots of eyes.

The cliffs behind the town were nominally of sedimentary rock, but any geologist would have taken one look and told you at once that these rocks were to the sedimentary classification as the nouveau riche were to the Four Hundred. The Point Venuti Highlands were really nothing but mud with a hard-on and now they cracked and split in a thousand crazy directions. For a moment they held, the new cracks opening and closing like gasping mouths, and then they began to collapse in landslides on the town. Showers of dirt came sifting down. Amid the dirt were boulders as big as Toledo tire-factories.

Morgan’s Wolf Brigade had been decimated by Jack and Richard’s surprise attack on Camp Readiness. Now the number was even further reduced as many of them ran screaming and wailing in superstitious fear. Some catapulated back into their own world. Some of these got away, but most were swallowed by the upheavals that were happening there. A core of similar cataclysms ran from this place through all the worlds, as if punched through by a surveyor’s hollow sampling rod. One group of three Wolfs dressed in Fresno Demons motorcycle jackets gained their car—a horny old Lincoln Mark IV—and managed to drive a block and a half with Harry James bellowing brass out of the tapedeck before a chunk of stone fell from the sky and crushed the Connie flat.

Others simply ran shrieking in the streets, their Change beginning. The woman with the chains in her nipples strolled serenely in front of one of these. She was serenely ripping her hair out in great chunks. She held one of these chunks out to the Wolf. The bloody roots wavered like the tips of sea-grass as she waltzed in place on the unsteady earth.

“Here!” she cried, smiling serenely. “A bouquet! For you!”

The Wolf, not a bit serene, tore her head off with a single snap of his jaws and ran on, on, on.

3

Jack studied what he had captured, as breathless as a child who has a shy woodland creature come out of the grass and eat from his hand.

It glowed between his palms, waxing and waning, waxing and waning.

With my heartbeat, he thought.

It seemed to be glass, but it had a faintly yielding feeling in his hands. He pressed and it gave a little. Color shot inward from the points of his pressure in enchanting billows: inky blue from his left hand, deepest carmine from the right. He smiled . . . and then the smile faded.

You may be killing a billion people doing that—fires, floods, God knows what. Remember the building that collapsed in Angola, New York, after—

No, Jack, the Talisman whispered, and he understood why it had yielded to the gentle pressure of his hands. It was alive; of course it was. No, Jack: All will be well . . . all will be well . . . and all manner of things will be well. Only believe; be true; stand; do not falter now.

Peace in him—oh such deep peace.

Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow, Jack thought, and wondered if he could ever bring himself to let this wondrous bauble go.

4

On the beach below the wooden walk, Gardener had fallen flat on his belly in terror. His fingers hooked into the loose sand. He was mewling.

Morgan reeled toward him like a drunk and ripped the pack-set from Gardener’s shoulder.

“Stay outside!” he roared into it, and then realized he had forgotten to press the SEND button. He did it now. “STAY OUTSIDE! IF YOU TRY TO GET OUT OF TOWN THE MOTHERFUCKING CLIFFS WILL FALL ON YOU! GET DOWN HERE! COME TO ME! THIS IS NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF GODDAM SPECIAL EFFECTS! GET DOWN HERE! FORM A RING AROUND THE BEACH! THOSE OF YOU WHO COME WILL BE REWARDED! THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T WILL DIE IN THE PITS AND IN THE BLASTED LANDS! GET DOWN HERE! IT’S OPEN! GET DOWN HERE WHERE NOTHING CAN FALL ON YOU! GET DOWN HERE, DAMMIT!”

He threw the pack-set aside. It split open. Beetles with long feelers began to squirm out by the dozens.

He bent down and yanked the howling, whey-faced Gardener up. “On your feet, beautiful,” he said.

5

Richard cried out in his unconsciousness as the table he was lying on bucked him off onto the floor. Jack heard the cry, and it dragged him out of his fascinated contemplation of the Talisman.

He became aware that the Agincourt was groaning like a ship in a high gale. As he looked around, boards snapped up, revealing dusty beamwork beneath. The beams were sawing back and forth like shuttles in a loom. Albino bugs scuttered and squirmed away from the Talisman’s clear light.

“I’m coming, Richard!” he shouted, and began to work his way back across the floor. He was thrown over once and he went down holding the glowing sphere high, knowing it was vulnerable—if it was hit hard enough, it would break. What then, God knew. He got to one knee, was thrown back down on his butt, and lurched to his feet again.

From below, Richard screamed again.

“Richard! Coming!”

From overhead, a sound like sleigh-bells. He looked up and saw the chandelier penduluming back and forth, faster and faster. Its crystal pendants were making that sound. As Jack watched, the chain parted and it hit the unravelling floor like a bomb with diamonds instead of high explosive in its nose. Glass flew.

He turned and exited the room in big, larruping strides—he looked like a burlesque comic doing a turn as a drunken sailor.

Down the hall. He was thrown against first one wall and then the other as the floor seesawed and split open. Each time he crashed into a wall he held the Talisman out from him, his arms like tongs in which it glowed like a white-hot coal.

You’ll never make it down the stairs.

Gotta. Gotta.

He reached the landing where he had faced the black knight. The world heaved a new way; Jack staggered and saw the helmet on the floor below roll crazily away.

Jack continued to look down. The stairs were moving in great tortured waves that made him feel like puking. A stair-level snapped upward, leaving a writhing black hole.

“Jack!”

“Coming, Richard!”

No way you can make it down those stairs. No way, baby.

Gotta. Gotta.

Holding the precious, fragile Talisman in his hands, Jack started down a flight of stairs that now looked like an Arabian flying carpet caught in a tornado.

The stairs heaved and he was flung toward the same gap through which the black knight’s helmet had fallen. Jack screamed and staggered backward toward the drop, holding the Talisman against his chest with his right hand and flailing behind him with his left. Flailing at nothing. His heels hit the drop and tilted backward over oblivion.

6

Fifty seconds had passed since the earthquake began. Only fifty seconds—but earthquake survivors will tell you that objective time, clock-time, loses all meaning in an earthquake. Three days after the ’64 earthquake in Los Angeles, a television news reporter asked a survivor who had been near the epicenter how long the quake had lasted.

“It’s still going on,” the survivor said calmly.

Sixty-two seconds after the quake began, almost all of the Point Venuti Highlands decided to give in to destiny and become the Point Venuti Lowlands. They fell on the town with a muddy kurrummmmp, leaving only a single jut of slightly harder rock, which pointed at the Agincourt like an accusing finger. From one of the new slumped hills a dirty smokestack pointed like a randy penis.

7

On the beach, Morgan Sloat and Sunlight Gardener stood supporting each other, appearing to hula. Gardener had unslung the Weatherbee. A few Wolfs, their eyes alternately bulging with terror and glaring with hellacious rage, had joined them. More were coming. They were all Changed or Changing. Their clothes hung from them in tatters. Morgan saw one of them dive at the ground and begin to bite at it, as if the uneasy earth were an enemy that could be killed. Morgan glanced at this madness and dismissed it. A van with the words WILD CHILD written on the sides in psychedelic lettering plowed hell-for-leather across Point Venuti Square, where children had once begged their parents for ice creams and pennants emblazoned with the Agincourt’s likeness. The van made it to the far side, jumped across the sidewalk, and then roared toward the beach, plowing through boarded-up concessions as it came. One final fissure opened in the earth and the WILD CHILD that had killed Tommy Woodbine disappeared forever, nose first. A jet of flame burst up as its gas-tank exploded. Watching, Sloat thought dimly of his father preaching about the Pentecostal Fire. Then the earth snapped shut.

“Hold steady,” he shouted at Gardener. “I think the place is going to fall on top of him and crush him flat, but if he gets out, you’re going to shoot him, earthquake or no earthquake.”

“Will we know if IT breaks?” Gardener squealed.

Morgan Sloat grinned like a boar in a canebrake.

“We’ll know,” he said. “The sun will turn black.”

Seventy-four seconds.

8

Jack’s left hand scrabbled a grip on the ragged remains of the bannister. The Talisman glowed fiercely against his chest, the lines of latitude and longitude which girdled it shining as brightly as the wire filaments in a lightbulb. His heels tilted and his soles began to slide.

Falling! Speedy! I’m going to—

Seventy-nine seconds.

It stopped.

Suddenly, it just stopped.

Only, for Jack, as for that survivor of the ’64 quake, it was still going on, at least in part of his brain. In part of his brain the earth would continue to shake like a church-picnic Jell-O forever.

He pulled himself back from the drop and staggered to the middle of the twisted stair. He stood, gasping, his face shiny with sweat, hugging the bright round star of the Talisman against his chest. He stood and listened to the silence.

Somewhere something heavy—a bureau or a wardrobe, perhaps—which had been tottering on the edge of balance now fell over with an echoing crash.

“Jack! Please! I think I’m dying!” Richard’s groaning, helpless voice did indeed sound like that of a boy in his last extremity.

“Richard! Coming!”

He began to work his way down the stairs, which were now twisted and bent and tottery. Many of the stair-levels were gone, and he had to step over these spaces. In one place four in a row were gone and he leaped, holding the Talisman to his chest with one hand and sliding his hand along the warped bannister with the other.

Things were still falling. Glass crashed and tinkled. Somewhere a toilet was flushing manically, again and again.

The redwood registration desk in the lobby had split down the middle. The double doors were ajar, however, and a bright wedge of sunlight came through them—the old dank carpet seemed to sizzle and steam in protest at that light.

The clouds have broken, Jack thought. Sun’s shining outside. And then: Going out those doors, Richie-boy. You and me. Big as life and twice as proud.

The corridor which led past the Heron Bar and down to the dining room reminded him of sets in some of the old Twilight Zone shows, where everything was askew and out of kilter. Here the floor tilted left; here to the right; here it was like the twin humps of a camel. He negotiated the dimness with the Talisman lighting his way like the world’s biggest flashlight.

He shoved into the dining room and saw Richard lying on the floor in a tangle of tablecloth. Blood was running from his nose. When he got closer he saw that some of those hard red bumps had split open and white bugs were working their way out of Richard’s flesh and crawling sluggishly over Richard’s cheeks. As he watched, one birthed itself from Richard’s nose.

Richard screamed, a weak, bubbling, wretched scream, and clawed at it. It was the scream of someone who is dying in agony.

His shirt humped and writhed with the things.

Jack stumbled across the distorted floor toward him . . . and the spider swung down from the dimness, squirting its poison blindly into the air.

“Flushing feef!” it gibbered in its whining, droning insect’s voice. “Oh you fushing feef, put it back put it back!”

Without thinking, Jack raised the Talisman. It flashed clean white fire—rainbow fire—and the spider shrivelled and turned black. In only a second it was a tiny lump of smoking coal penduluming slowly to a dead stop in the air.

No time to gawp at this wonder. Richard was dying.

Jack reached him, fell on his knees beside him, and stripped back the tablecloth as if it were a sheet.

“Finally made it, chum,” he whispered, trying not to see the bugs crawling out of Richard’s flesh. He raised the Talisman, considered, and then placed it on Richard’s forehead. Richard shrieked miserably and tried to writhe away. Jack placed an arm on Richard’s scrawny chest and held him—it wasn’t hard to do. There was a stench as the bugs beneath the Talisman fried away.

Now what? There’s more, but what?

He looked across the room and his eye happened to fix upon the green croaker marble that he had left with Richard—the marble that was a magic mirror in that other world. As he looked, it rolled six feet of its own volition, and then stopped. It rolled, yes. It rolled because it was a marble, and it was a marble’s job to roll. Marbles were round. Marbles were round and so was the Talisman.

Light broke in his reeling mind.

Holding Richard, Jack slowly rolled the Talisman down the length of his body. After he reached Richard’s chest, Richard stopped struggling. Jack thought he had probably fainted, but a quick glance showed him this wasn’t so. Richard was staring at him with dawning wonder . . .

. . . and the pimples on his face were gone! The hard red bumps were fading!

“Richard!” he yelled, laughing like a crazy loon. “Hey, Richard, look at this! Bwana make juju!”

He rolled the Talisman slowly down over Richard’s belly, using his palm. The Talisman glowed brightly, singing a clear, wordless harmonic of health and healing. Down over Richard’s crotch. Jack moved Richard’s thin legs together and rolled it down the groove between them to Richard’s ankles. The Talisman glowed bright blue . . . deep red . . . yellow . . . the green of June meadow-grass.

Then it was white again.

“Jack,” Richard whispered. “Is that what we came for?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful,” Richard said. He hesitated. “May I hold it?”

Jack felt a sudden twist of Scrooge-miserliness. He snatched the Talisman close to himself for a moment. No! You might break it! Besides, it’s mine! I crossed the country for it! I fought the knights for it! You can’t have it! Mine! Mine! Mi—

In his hands the Talisman suddenly radiated a terrible chill, and for a moment—a moment more frightening to Jack than all the earthquakes in all the worlds that ever had been or ever would be—it turned a Gothic black. Its white light was extinguished. In its rich, thundery, thanatropic interior he saw the black hotel. On turrets and gambrels and gables, on the roofs of cupolas which bulged like warts stuffed with thick malignancies, the cabalistic symbols turned—wolf and crow and twisted genital star.

Would you be the new Agincourt, then? the Talisman whispered. Even a boy can be a hotel . . . if he would be.

His mother’s voice, clear in his head: If you don’t want to share it, Jack-O, if you can’t bring yourself to risk it for your friend, then you might as well stay where you are. If you can’t bring yourself to share the prize—risk the prize—don’t even bother to come home. Kids hear that shit all their lives, but when it comes time to put up or shut up, it’s never quite the same, is it? If you can’t share it, let me die, chum, because I don’t want to live at that price.

The weight of the Talisman suddenly seemed immense, the weight of dead bodies. Yet somehow Jack lifted it, and put it in Richard’s hands. His hands were white and skeletal . . . but Richard held it easily, and Jack realized that sensation of weight had been only his own imagination, his own twisted and sickly wanting. As the Talisman flashed into glorious white light again, Jack felt his own interior darkness pass from him. It occurred to him dimly that you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up . . . and then that thought passed.

Richard smiled, and the smile made his face beautiful. Jack had seen Richard smile many times, but there was a peace in this smile he had never seen before; it was a peace which passed his understanding. In the Talisman’s white, healing light, he saw that Richard’s face, although still ravaged and haggard and sickly, was healing. He hugged the Talisman against his chest as if it were a baby, and smiled at Jack with shining eyes.

“If this is the Seabrook Island Express,” he said, “I may just buy a season ticket. If we ever get out of this.”

“You feel better?”

Richard’s smile shone like the Talisman’s light. “Worlds better,” he said. “Now help me up, Jack.”

Jack moved to take his shoulder. Richard held out the Talisman.

“Better take this first,” he said. “I’m still weak, and it wants to go back with you. I feel that.”

Jack took it and helped Richard up. Richard put an arm around Jack’s neck.

“You ready . . . chum?”

“Yeah,” Richard said. “Ready. But I somehow think the seagoing route’s out, Jack. I think I heard the deck out there collapse during the Big Rumble.”

“We’re going out the front door,” Jack said. “Even if God put down a gangway over the ocean from the windows back there to the beach, I’d still go out the front door. We ain’t ditching this place, Richie. We’re going out like paying guests. I feel like I’ve paid plenty. What do you think?”

Richard held out one thin hand, palm-up. Healing red blemishes still glared on it.

“I think we ought to go for it,” he said. “Gimme some skin, Jacky.”

Jack slapped his palm down on Richard’s, and then the two of them started back toward the hallway, Richard with one arm around Jack’s neck.

Halfway down the hall, Richard stared at the litter of dead metal. “What in heck?”

“Coffee cans,” Jack said, and smiled. “Maxwell House.”

“Jack, what in the world are you t—”

“Never mind, Richard,” Jack said. He was grinning, and he still felt good, but wires of tension were working into his body again just the same. The earthquake was over . . . but it wasn’t over. Morgan would be waiting for them now. And Gardener.

Never mind. Let it come down the way it will.

They reached the lobby and Richard looked around wonderingly at the stairs, the broken registration desk, the tumbled trophies and flagstands. The stuffed head of a black bear had its nose in one of the pigeonholes of the mail depository, as if smelling something good—honey, perhaps.

“Wow,” Richard said. “Whole place just about fell down.”

Jack got Richard over to the double doors, and observed Richard’s almost greedy appreciation of that little spray of sunlight.

“Are you really ready for this, Richard?”

“Yes.”

“Your father’s out there.”

“No, he’s not. He’s dead. All that’s out there is his . . . what do you call it? His Twinner.”

“Oh.”

Richard nodded. In spite of the Talisman’s proximity, he was beginning to look exhausted again. “Yes.”

“There’s apt to be a hell of a fight.”

“Well, I’ll do what I can.”

“I love you, Richard.”

Richard smiled wanly. “I love you, too, Jack. Now let’s go for it before I lose my nerve.”

9

Sloat really believed he had everything under control—the situation, of course, but more important, himself. He went right on believing this until he saw his son, obviously weak, obviously sick, but still very much alive, come out of the black hotel with his arm around Jack Sawyer’s neck and his head leaning against Jack’s shoulder.

Sloat had also believed he finally had his feelings about Phil Sawyer’s brat under control—it was his previous rage that had caused him to miss Jack, first at the Queen’s pavillion, then in the midwest. Christ, he had crossed Ohio unscathed—and Ohio was only an eyeblink from Orris, that other Morgan’s stronghold. But his fury had led to uncontrolled behavior, and so the boy had slipped through. He had suppressed his rage—but now it flared up with wicked and unbridled freedom. It was as if someone had hosed kerosene on a well-banked fire.

His son, still alive. And his beloved son, to whom he had meant to turn over the kingship of worlds and universes, was leaning on Sawyer for support.

Nor was that all. Glimmering and flashing in Sawyer’s hands like a star which had fallen to earth was the Talisman. Even from here Sloat could feel it—it was as if the planet’s gravitational field had suddenly gotten stronger, pulling him down, making his heart labor; as if time were speeding up, drying out his flesh, dimming his eyes.

“It hurts!” Gardener wailed beside him.

Most of the Wolfs who had stood up to the quake and rallied to Morgan were now reeling away, hands before their faces. A couple of them were vomiting helplessly.

Morgan felt a moment of swooning fear . . . and then his rage, his excitement, and the lunacy that had been feeding on his increasingly grandiose dreams of overlordship—these things burst apart the webbing of his self-control.

He raised his thumbs to his ears and slammed them deep inside, so deep it hurt. Then he stuck out his tongue and waggled his fingers at Mr. Jack Dirty Motherfuck and Soon-to-be-Dead Sawyer. A moment later his upper teeth descended like a drop-gate and seered the tip of his wagging tongue. Sloat didn’t even notice it. He seized Gardener by the flak-vest.

Gardener’s face was moony with fear. “They’re out, he’s got IT, Morgan . . . my Lord . . . we ought to run, we must run—”

“SHOOT HIM!” Morgan screamed into Gardener’s face. Blood from his severed tongue flew in a fine spray. “SHOOT HIM, YOU ETHIOPIAN JUG-FUCKER, HE KILLED YOUR BOY! SHOOT HIM AND SHOOT THE FUCKING TALISMAN! SHOOT RIGHT THROUGH HIS ARMS AND BREAK IT!”

Sloat now began to dance slowly up and down before Gardener, his face working horribly, his thumbs back in his ears, his fingers waggling beside his head, his amputated tongue popping in and out of his mouth like one of those New Year’s Eve party favors that unroll with a tooting sound. He looked like a murderous child—hilarious, and at the same time awful.

“HE KILLED YOUR SON! AVENGE YOUR SON! SHOOT HIM! SHOOT IT! YOU SHOT HIS FATHER, NOW SHOOT HIM!”

“Reuel,” Gardener said thoughtfully. “Yes. He killed Reuel. He’s the baddest bitch’s bastard to ever draw a breath. All boys. Axiomatic. But he . . . he . . .”

He turned toward the black hotel and raised the Weatherbee to his shoulder. Jack and Richard had reached the bottom of the twisted front steps and were beginning to move down the broad walkway, which had been flat a few minutes ago and which was now crazy-paved. In the Judkins scope, the two boys were as big as house-trailers.

“SHOOT HIM!” Morgan bellowed. He ran out his bleeding tongue again and made a hideously triumphant nursery-school sound: Yadda-yadda-yadda-yah! His feet, clad in dirty Gucci loafers, bumped up and down. One of them landed squarely on the severed tip of his tongue and tromped it deeper into the sand.

“SHOOT HIM! SHOOT IT!” Morgan howled.

The muzzle of the Weatherbee circled minutely as it had when Gardener was preparing to shoot the rubber horse. Then it settled. Jack was carrying the Talisman against his chest. The crosshairs were over its flashing, circular light. The .360 slug would pass right through it, shattering it, and the sun would turn black . . . but before it does, Gardener thought, I will see that baddest bad boy’s chest explode.

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and began to settle pressure against the Weatherbee’s trigger.

10

Richard raised his head with great effort and his eyes were sizzled by reflected sunlight.

Two men. One with his head slightly cocked, the other seeming to dance. That flash of sunlight again, and Richard understood. He understood . . . and Jack was looking in the wrong place. Jack was looking down toward the rocks where Speedy lay.

“Jack look out!” he screamed.

Jack looked around, surprised. “What—”

It happened fast. Jack missed it almost entirely. Richard saw it and understood it, but could never quite explain what had happened to Jack. The sunlight flashed off the shooter’s riflescope again. The ray of reflected light this time struck the Talisman. And the Talisman reflected it back directly at the shooter. This was what Richard later told Jack, but that was like saying the Empire State Building is a few stories high.

The Talisman did not just reflect the sunflash; it boosted it somehow. It sent back a thick ribbon of light like a deathray in a space movie. It was there only for a second, but it imprinted Richard’s retinas for almost an hour afterward, first white, then green, then blue, and finally, as it faded, the lemony yellow of sunshine.

11

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and then the scope was full of living fire. Its thick glass lenses shattered. Smoking fused glass was driven backward into Gardener’s right eye. The shells in the Weatherbee’s magazine exploded, tearing its mid-section apart. One of the whickers of flying metal amputated most of Gardener’s right cheek. Other hooks and twists of steel flew around Sloat in a storm, leaving him incredibly untouched. Three Wolfs had remained through everything. Now two of them took to their heels. The third lay dead on his back, glaring into the sky. The Weatherbee’s trigger was planted squarely between his eyes.

“What?” Morgan bellowed. His bloody mouth hung open. “What? What?”

Gardener looked weirdly like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons after one of his devices from the Acme Company has misfired.

He cast the gun aside, and Sloat saw that all the fingers had been torn from Gard’s left hand.

Gardener’s right hand pulled out his shirt with effeminate tweezing delicacy. There was a knife-case clipped to the inner waistband of his pants—a narrow sleeve of fine-grained kid leather. From it Gardener took a piece of chrome-banded ivory. He pushed a button, and a slim blade seven inches long shot out.

“Bad,” he whispered. “Bad!” His voice began to rise. “All boys! Bad! It’s axiomatic! IT’S AXIOMATIC!” He began to run up the beach toward the Agincourt’s walk, where Jack and Richard stood. His voice continued to rise until it was a thin febrile shriek.

“BAD! EVIL! BAD! EEVIL! BAAAD! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—”

Morgan stood a moment longer, then grasped the key around his neck. By grasping it, he seemed also to grasp his own panicked, flying thoughts.

He’ll go to the old nigger. And that’s where I’ll take him.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—” Gardener shrieked, his killer knife held out before him as he ran.

Morgan turned and ran down the beach. He was vaguely aware that the Wolfs, all of them, had fled. That was all right.

He would take care of Jack Sawyer—and the Talisman—all by himself.