The Talisman

“QUEEN OF THE B’S”

“Jack, it’s your mother,” Richard said. His voice was hoarse with awe. “Is it just a coincidence? It can’t be, can it?”

Jack shook his head. No, not a coincidence.

The word his eyes kept fixing on, of course, was QUEEN.

“Come on,” he said to Richard. “I think we’re almost there.”

The two of them walked side by side down the road toward Point Venuti.

38

The End of the Road

1

Jack inspected Richard’s drooping posture and glistening face carefully as they walked along. Richard now looked as though he were dragging himself along on will power alone. A few more wet-looking pimples had blossomed on his face.

“Are you okay, Richie?”

“No. I don’t feel too good. But I can still walk, Jack. You don’t have to carry me.” He bent his head and plodded glumly on. Jack saw that his friend, who had so many memories of that peculiar little railway and that peculiar little station, was suffering far more than he from the reality that now existed—rusty, broken ties, weeds, poison ivy . . . and at the end, a ram-shackle building from which all the bright, remembered paint had faded, a building where something slithered uneasily in the dark.

I feel like my leg is caught in some stupid trap, Richard had said, and Jack thought he could understand that well enough . . . but not with the depth of Richard’s understanding. That was more understanding than he was sure he could bear. A slice of Richard’s childhood had been burned out of him, turned inside-out. The railway and the dead station with its staring glassless windows must have seemed like dreadful parodies of themselves to Richard—yet more bits of the past destroyed in the wake of everything he was learning or admitting about his father. Richard’s entire life, as much as Jack’s, had begun to fold into the pattern of the Territories, and Richard had been given much less preparation for this transformation.

2

As for what he had told Richard about the Talisman, Jack would have sworn it was the truth—the Talisman knew they were coming. He had begun feeling it just about when he had seen the billboard shining out with his mother’s picture; now the feeling was urgent and powerful. It was as if a great animal had awakened some miles away, and its purring made the earth resonate . . . or as if every single bulb inside a hundred-story building just over the horizon had just gone on, making a blaze of light strong enough to conceal the stars . . . or as if someone had switched on the biggest magnet in the world, which was tugging at Jack’s belt buckle, at the change in his pockets and the fillings in his teeth, and would not be satisfied until it had pulled him into its heart. That great animal purring, that sudden and drastic illumination, that magnetic yearning—all these echoed in Jack’s chest. Something out there, something in the direction of Point Venuti, wanted Jack Sawyer, and what Jack Sawyer chiefly knew of the object calling him so viscerally was that it was big. Big. No small thing could own such power. It was elephant- sized, city-sized.

And Jack wondered about his capacity to handle something so monumental. The Talisman had been imprisoned in a magical and sinister old hotel; presumably it had been put there not only to keep it from evil hands but at least in part because it was hard for anybody to handle it, whatever his intentions. Maybe, Jack wondered, Jason had been the only being capable of handling it—capable of dealing with it without doing harm either to himself or to the Talisman itself. Feeling the strength and urgency of its call to him, Jack could only hope that he would not weaken before the Talisman.

“ ’You’ll understand, Rich,’ ” Richard surprised him by saying. His voice was dull and low. “My father said that. He said I’d understand. ’You’ll understand, Rich.’ ”

“Yeah,” Jack said, looking worriedly at his friend. “How are you feeling, Richard?”

In addition to the sores surrounding his mouth, Richard now had a collection of angry-looking raised red dots or bumps across his pimply forehead and his temples. It was as though a swarm of insects had managed to burrow just under the surface of his protesting skin. For a moment Jack had a flash of Richard Sloat on the morning he had climbed in his window at Nelson House, Thayer School; Richard Sloat with his glasses riding firmly on the bridge of his nose and his sweater tucked neatly into his pants. Would that maddeningly correct, unbudgeable boy ever return?

“I can still walk,” Richard said. “But is this what he meant? Is this the understanding I was supposed to get, or have, or whatever the hell . . . ?”

“You’ve got something new on your face,” Jack said. “You want to rest for a while?”

“Naw,” Richard said, still speaking from the bottom of a muddy barrel. “And I can feel that rash. It itches. I think I got it all over my back, too.”

“Let me see,” Jack said. Richard stopped in the middle of the road, obedient as a dog. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The red spots blazed on his forehead and temples. Jack stepped behind him, raised his jacket, and lifted the back of his stained and dirty blue button-down shirt. The spots were smaller here, not as raised or as angry-looking; they spread from Richard’s thin shoulder blades to the small of his back, no larger than ticks.

Richard let out a big dispirited unconscious sigh.

“You got em there, but it’s not so bad,” Jack said.

“Thanks,” Richard said. He inhaled, lifted his head. Overhead the gray sky seemed heavy enough to come crashing to earth. The ocean seethed against the rocks, far down the rough slope. “It’s only a couple of miles, really,” Richard said. “I’ll make it.”

“I’ll piggyback you when you need it,” Jack said, unwittingly exposing his conviction that before long Richard would need to be carried again.

Richard shook his head and made an inefficient stab at shoving his shirt back in his trousers. “Sometimes I think I . . . sometimes I think I can’t—”

“We’re going to go into that hotel, Richard,” Jack said, putting his arm through Richard’s and half-forcing him to step forward. “You and me. Together. I don’t have the faintest idea of what happens once we get in there, but you and I are going in. No matter who tries to stop us. Just remember that.”