The Talisman

“The man who came to visit my father . . . and Camp Readiness . . . and the closet.” Richard’s hollow-seeming body trembled against his friend’s back. “I should have told you. But I couldn’t even tell myself.” His breath, hot as his skin, blew agitatedly into Jack’s ear.

Jack thought, The Talisman is doing this to him. An instant later he corrected himself. No. The black hotel is doing this to him.

The two limousines which had been parked nose-down at the brow of the next hill had disappeared sometime during the fight with the Territories trees, but the hotel endured, growing larger with every forward step Jack took. The skinny naked woman, another of the hotel’s victims, still performed her mad slow dance before the bleak row of shops. The little red flares danced, winked out, danced in the murky air. It was no time at all, neither morning nor afternoon nor night—it was time’s Blasted Lands. The Agincourt Hotel did seem made of stone, though Jack knew it was not—the wood seemed to have calcified and thickened, to have blackened of itself, from the inside out. The brass weathervanes, wolf and crow and snake and circular cryptic designs Jack did not recognize, swung about to contradictory winds. Several of the windows flashed a warning at Jack; but that might have been merely a reflection of one of the red flares. He still could not see the bottom of the hill and the Agincourt’s ground floor, and would not be able to see them until he had gone past the bookstore, tea shop, and other stores that had escaped the fire. Where was Morgan Sloat?

Where, for that matter, was the whole god-forsaken reception committee? Jack tightened his grip on Richard’s sticklike legs, hearing the Talisman call him again, and felt a tougher, stronger being rear up within him.

“Don’t hate me because I couldn’t . . .” Richard said, his voice trailing off at the end.

JASON, COME NOW COME NOW!

Jack gripped Richard’s thin legs and walked down past the burned-over area where so many houses had once stood. The Territories trees which used these wasted blocks as their own private lunch counter whispered and stirred, but they were too far away to trouble Jack.

The woman in the midst of the empty littered street slowly swivelled around as she became aware of the boys’ progress down the hill. She was in the midst of a complex exercise, but all suggestion of Tai Chi Chuan left her when she dropped her arms and one outstretched leg and stood stockstill beside a dead dog, watching burdened Jack come down the hill toward her. For a moment she seemed to be a mirage, too hallucinatory to be real, this starved woman with her stick-out hair and face the same brilliant orange; then she awkwardly bolted across the street and into one of the shops without a name. Jack grinned, without knowing he was going to do it—the sense of triumph and of something he could only describe as armored virtue took him so much by surprise.

“Can you really make it there?” Richard gasped, and Jack said, “Right now I can do anything.”

He could have carried Richard all the way back to Illinois if the great singing object imprisoned in the hotel had ordered him to do it. Again Jack felt that sense of coming resolution, and thought, It’s so dark here because all those worlds are crowded together, jammed up like a triple exposure on film.

5

He sensed the people of Point Venuti before he saw them. They would not attack him—Jack had known that with absolute certainty ever since the madwoman had fled into one of the shops. They were watching him. From beneath porches, through lattices, from the backs of empty rooms, they peered out at him, whether with fear, rage, or frustration he could not tell.

Richard had fallen asleep or passed out on his back, and was breathing in heated harsh little puffs.

Jack skirted the body of the dog and glanced sideways into the hole where the window of the Dangerous Planet Bookstore should have been. At first he saw only the messy macaroni of used hypodermic needles which covered the floor, atop and beside the splayed books spread here and there. On the walls, the tall shelves stood empty as yawns. Then a convulsive movement in the dim back of the store caught his eye, and two pale figures coalesced out of the gloom. Both had beards and long naked bodies in which the tendons stood out like cords. The whites of four mad eyes flashed at him. One of the naked men had only one hand and was grinning. His erection waved before him, a thick pale club. He couldn’t have seen that, he told himself. Where was the man’s other hand? He glanced back. Now he saw only a tangle of skinny white limbs.

Jack did not look into the windows of any of the other shops, but eyes tracked him as he passed.

Soon he was walking past the tiny two-story houses. YOU’RE DEAD NOW splayed itself on a side wall. He would not look in the windows, he promised himself, he could not.

Orange faces topped with orange hair wagged through a downstairs window.

“Baby,” a woman whispered from the next house. “Sweet baby Jason.” This time he did look. You’re dead now. She stood just on the other side of a broken little window, twiddling the chains that had been inserted in her nipples, smiling at him lopsidedly. Jack stared at her vacant eyes, and the woman dropped her hands and hesitantly backed away from the window. The length of chain drooped between her breasts.

Eyes watched Jack from the backs of dark rooms, between lattices, from crawl spaces beneath porches.

The hotel loomed before him, but no longer straight ahead. The road must have delicately angled, for now the Agincourt stood decidedly off to his left. And did it, in fact, actually loom as commandingly as it had? His Jason-side, or Jason himself, blazed up within Jack, and saw that the black hotel, though still very large, was nothing like mountainous.

COME I NEED YOU NOW, sang out the Talisman. YOU ARE RIGHT IT IS NOT AS GREAT AS IT WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE.

At the top of the last hill he stopped and looked down. There they were, all right, all of them. And there was the black hotel, all of it. Main Street descended to the beach, which was white sand interrupted by big outcroppings of rocks like jagged discolored teeth. The Agincourt reared up a short distance off to his left, flanked on the ocean side by a massive stone breakwater running far out into the water. Before it, stretching out in a line, a dozen long black limousines, some dusty, others as polished as mirrors, sat, their motors running. Streamers of white exhaust, low-flying clouds whiter than the air, drifted out from many of the cars. Men in FBI-agent black suits patrolled along the fence, holding their hands up to their eyes. When Jack saw two red flashes of light stab out before one of the men’s faces, he reflexively dodged sideways around the side of the little houses, moving before he was actually conscious that the men carried binoculars.

For a second or two, he must have looked like a beacon, standing upright at the brow of a hill. Knowing that a momentary carelessness had nearly led to his capture, Jack breathed hard for a moment and rested his shoulder against the peeling gray shingles of the house. Jack hitched Richard up to a more comfortable position on his back.