The Talisman

The raft slid forward, but Jack yanked Richard upright so high that he could easily place his right knee on the bottom rung. Then Jack grabbed the sides of the ladder and used the strength in his arms and legs to stabilize the raft. Richard was grunting, trying to get his other knee on the rung; in a second he had done it. In another two seconds, Richard Sloat stood upright on the ladder.

“I can’t go any farther,” he said. “I think I’m going to fall off. I feel so sick, Jack.”

“Just go up one more, please. Please. Then I can help you.”

Richard wearily moved his hands up a rung. Jack, looking toward the deck, saw that the ladder must be thirty feet long. “Now move your feet. Please, Richard.”

Richard slowly placed one foot, then the next, on the second rung.

Jack placed his hands on the outsides of Richard’s feet and pulled himself up. The raft swung out in a looping half-circle, but he raised his knees and got both legs securely on the lowest rung. Held by Jack’s outstretched shirt, the raft swung back around like a dog on a leash.

A third of the way up the ladder, Jack had to put one arm around Richard’s waist to keep him from falling into the black water.

At last the rectangular square of the trapdoor floated in the black wood directly above Jack’s head. He clamped Richard to himself—his unconscious head fell against Jack’s chest—by reaching around both Richard and ladder with his left hand, and tried the trapdoor with his right. Suppose it had been nailed shut? But it swung up immediately and banged flat against the top of the deck. Jack got his left arm firmly under Richard’s armpits and hauled him up out of the blackness and through the hole in the deck.

Interlude

Sloat in This World (V)

The Kingsland Motel had been empty for nearly six years, and it had the mouldy yellow-newspaper smell of buildings that have been deserted for a long time. This smell had disturbed Sloat at first. His maternal grandmother had died at home when Sloat was a boy—it had taken her four years, but she had finally made the grade—and the smell of her dying had been like this. He did not want such a smell, or such memories, at a moment which was supposed to be his greatest triumph.

Now, however, it didn’t matter. Not even the infuriating losses inflicted on him by Jack’s early arrival at Camp Readiness mattered. His earlier feelings of dismay and fury had turned into a frenzy of nervous excitement. Head down, lips twitching, eyes bright, he strode back and forth through the room where he and Richard had stayed in the old days. Sometimes he locked his hands behind his back, sometimes he slammed one fist into the other palm, sometimes he stroked his bald pate. Mostly, however, he paced as he had in college, with his hands clenched into tight and somehow anal little fists, the hidden nails digging viciously into his palms. His stomach was by turns sour and giddily light.

Things were coming to a head.

No; no. Right idea, wrong phrase.

Things were coming together.

Richard is dead by now. My son is dead. Got to be. He survived the Blasted Lands—barely—but he’ll never survive the Agincourt. He’s dead. Hold out no false hope for yourself on that score. Jack Sawyer killed him, and I’ll gouge the eyes out of his living head for it.

“But I killed him, too,” Morgan whispered, stopping for a moment.

Suddenly he thought of his father.

Gordon Sloat had been a dour Lutheran minister in Ohio—Morgan had spent his whole boyhood trying to flee that harsh and frightening man. Finally he had escaped to Yale. He had set his entire mind and spirit on Yale in his sophomore year of high school for one reason above all others, unadmitted by his conscious mind but as deep as bedrock: it was a place where his rude, rural father would never dare to come. If his father ever tried to set foot on the Yale campus, something would happen to him. Just what that something might be, the high-school-age Sloat was not sure . . . but it would be roughly akin, he felt, to what had happened to the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw the bucket of water over her. And this insight seemed to have been true: his father never had set foot on the Yale campus. From Morgan’s first day there, Gordon Sloat’s power over his son had begun to wane—that alone made all the striving and effort seem worthwhile.

But now, as he stood with his fists clenched and his nails digging into his soft palms, his father spoke up: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

For a moment that wet yellow smell—the empty-motel-smell, the grandmother-smell, the death-smell—filled his nostrils, seeming to choke him, and Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris was afraid.

What does it profit a man—

For it says in The Book of Good Farming that a man shall not bring the get of his seed to any place of sacrifice, for what—

What does it profit—

That man shall be damned, and damned, and damned

—a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

Stinking plaster. The dry smell of vintage mouseturds turning to powder in the dark spaces behind the walls. Crazies. There were crazies in the streets.

What does it profit a man?

Dead. One son dead in that world, one son dead in this.

What does it profit a man?

Your son is dead, Morgan. Must be. Dead in the water, or dead under the pilings and floating around under there, or dead—for sure!—topside. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t—