The Talisman

What does it profit—

And suddenly the answer came to him.

“It profits a man the world!” Morgan shouted in the decaying room. He began to laugh and pace again. “It profits a man the world, and by Jason, the world is enough!”

Laughing, he began to pace faster and faster, and before long, blood had begun to drip out of his clenched fists.

A car pulled up out front about ten minutes later. Morgan went to the window and saw Sunlight Gardener come bursting out of the Cadillac.

Seconds later he was hammering on the door with both fists, like a tantrumy three-year-old hammering on the floor. Morgan saw that the man had gone utterly crazy, and wondered if this was good or bad.

“Morgan!” Gardener bellowed. “Open for me, my Lord! News! I have news!”

I saw all your news through my binoculars, I think. Hammer on that door awhile longer, Gardener, while I make up my mind on this. Is it good that you should be crazy, or is it bad?

Good, Morgan decided. In Indiana, Gardener had turned Sunlight Yellow at the crucial moment and had fled without taking care of Jack once and for all. But now his wild grief had made him trustworthy again. If Morgan needed a kamikaze pilot, Sunlight Gardener would be the first one to the planes.

“Open for me, my Lord! News! News! N—”

Morgan opened the door. Although he himself was wildly excited, the face he presented to Gardener was almost eerily serene.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy, Gard. You’ll pop a blood vessel.”

“They’ve gone to the hotel . . . the beach . . . shot at them while they were on the beach . . . stupid assholes missed . . . in the water, I thought . . . we’ll get them in the water . . . then the deep-creatures rose up . . . I had him in my sights . . . I had that bad bad boy RIGHT IN MY SIGHTS . . . and then . . . the creatures . . . they . . . they . . .”

“Slow down,” Morgan said soothingly. He closed the door and took a flask out of his inside pocket. He handed it to Gardener, who spun the cap off and took two huge gulps. Morgan waited. His face was benign, serene, but a vein pulsed in the center of his forehead and his hands opened and closed, opened and closed.

Gone to the hotel, yes. Morgan had seen the ridiculous raft with its painted horse’s head and its rubber tail bobbing its way out there.

“My son,” he said to Gardener. “Do your men say he was alive or dead when Jack put him in the raft?”

Gardener shook his head—but his eyes said what he believed. “No one knows for sure, my Lord. Some say they saw him move. Some say not.”

Doesn’t matter. If he wasn’t dead then, he’s dead now. One breath of the air in that place and his lungs will explode.

Gardener’s cheeks were full of whiskey-color and his eyes were watering. He didn’t give the flask back but stood holding it. That was fine with Sloat. He wanted neither whiskey nor cocaine. He was on what those sixties slobs had called a natural high.

“Start over,” Morgan said, “and this time be coherent.”

The only thing Gardener had to tell that Morgan hadn’t gleaned from the man’s first broken outburst was the fact of the old nigger’s presence down on the beach, and he almost could have guessed that. Still, he let Gardener go on. Gardener’s voice was soothing, his rage invigorating.

As Gardener talked, Morgan ran over his options one final time, dismissing his son from the equation with a brief throb of regret.

What does it profit a man? It profits a man the world, and the world is enough . . . or, in this case, worlds. Two to start with, and more when and if they play out. I can rule them all if I like—I can be something like the God of the Universe.

The Talisman. The Talisman is—

The key?

No; oh no.

Not a key but a door; a locked door standing between him and his destiny. He did not want to open that door but to destroy it, destroy it utterly and completely and eternally, so it could never be shut again, let alone locked.

When the Talisman was smashed, all those worlds would be his worlds.

“Gard!” he said, and began to pace jerkily again.

Gardener looked at Morgan questioningly.

“What does it profit a man?” Morgan chirruped brightly.

“My Lord? I don’t underst—”

Morgan stopped in front of Gardener, his eyes feverish and sparkling. His face rippled. Became the face of Morgan of Orris. Became the face of Morgan Sloat again.

“It profits a man the world,” Morgan said, putting his hands on Osmond’s shoulders. When he took them away a second later, Osmond was Gardener again. “It profits a man the world, and the world is enough.”

“My Lord, you don’t understand,” Gardener said, looking at Morgan as if he might be crazy. “I think they’ve gone