The Talisman

JASON! TO ME!

“Come on!” Jack shouted at the suits of armor, and began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Never had laughter seemed so strong to him, so potent, so good as this—it was like water from a spring, or from some deep river. “Come on, I’m ready for ya! I don’t know what fucked-up Round Table you guys came from, but you shoulda stayed there! You made a mistake!”

Laughing harder than ever but as grimly determined inside as Wotan on the Valkyries’ rock, Jack leaped at the headless, swaying figure in the center.

“You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!” he shouted, and as Speedy’s guitar-pick passed into the zone of freezing air where the knight’s head should have been, the suit of armor fell apart.

3

In her bedroom at the Alhambra, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer suddenly looked up from the book she had been reading. She thought she had heard someone—no, not just someone, Jack!—call out from far down the deserted corridor, perhaps even from the lobby. She listened, eyes wide, lips pursed, heart hoping . . . but there was nothing. Jack-O was still gone, the cancer was still eating her up a bite at a time, and it was still an hour and a half before she could take another of the big brown horse-pills that damped down the pain a little bit.

She had begun to think more and more often of taking all the big brown horse-pills at once. That would do more than damp the pain for a bit; that would finish it off forever. They say we can’t cure cancer, but don’t you believe that bullshit, Mr. C—try eating about two dozen of these. What do you say? Want to go for it?

What kept her from doing it was Jack—she wanted so badly to see him again that now she was imagining his voice . . . not just doing a simple albeit corny sort of thing like calling her name, either, but quoting from one of her old pictures.

“You are one crazy old bitch, Lily,” she croaked, and lit a Herbert Tarrytoon with thin, shaking fingers. She took two puffs and then put it out. Any more than two puffs started the coughing these days, and the coughing tore her apart. “One crazy old bitch.” She picked up her book again but couldn’t read because the tears were coursing down her face and her guts hurt, they hurt, oh they hurt, and she wanted to take all the brown pills but she wanted to see him again first, her dear son with his clear handsome forehead and his shining eyes.

Come home, Jack-O, she thought, please come home soon or the next time I talk to you it’ll be by Ouija board. Please, Jack, please come home.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

4

The knight which had held the spike-ball swayed a moment longer, displaying its vacant middle, and then it also exploded. The one remaining raised its battle-hammer . . . and then simply fell apart in a heap. Jack stood amid the wreckage for a moment, still laughing, and then stopped as he looked at Speedy’s pick.

It was a deep and ancient yellow now; the crack-glaze had become a snarl of fissures.

Never mind, Travellin Jack. You get on. I think there may be one more o’ those walkin Maxwell House cans around someplace. If so, you’ll take it on, won’t you?

“If I have to, I will,” Jack muttered aloud.

Jack kicked aside a greave, a helmet, a breastplate. He strode down the middle of the hall, the carpet squelching under his sneakers. He reached the lobby and looked around briefly.

JACK! COME TO ME! JASON! COME TO ME! the Talisman sang.

Jack started up the staircase. Halfway up he looked at the landing and saw the last of the knights, standing and looking down at him. It was a gigantic figure, better than eleven feet tall; its armor and its plume were black, and a baleful red glare fell through the eye-slit in its helmet.

One mailed fist gripped a huge mace.

For a moment, Jack stood frozen on the staircase, and then he began to climb again.

5

They saved the worst for last, Jack thought, and as he advanced steadily upward toward the black knight he

            slipped

                    through

                            again

into Jason. The knight still wore black armor, but of a different sort; its visor was tilted up to reveal a face that had been almost obliterated by old dried sores. Jason recognized them. This fellow had gotten a little too close to one of those rolling balls of fire in the Blasted Lands for his own good.

Other figures were passing him on the stairs, figures he could not quite see as his fingers trailed over a wide bannister that was not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood from the Territories. Figures in doublets, figures in blouses of silk-sack, women in great belling gowns with gleaming white cowls thrown back from their gorgeously dressed hair; these people were beautiful but doomed—and so, perhaps, ghosts always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of ghosts inspire such terror?

JASON! TO ME! the Talisman sang, and for a moment all partitioned reality seemed to break down; he did not flip but seemed to fall through worlds like a man crashing through the rotted floors of an ancient wooden tower, one after the other. He felt no fear. The idea that he might never be able to get back—that he might just go on falling through a chain of realities forever, or become lost, as in a great wood—occurred to him, but he dismissed it out of hand. All of this was happening to Jason

(and Jack)

in an eyeblink; less time than it would take for his foot to go from one riser on the broad stairs to the next. He would come back; he was single-natured, and he did not believe it was possible for such a person to become lost, because he had a place in all of these worlds. But I do not exist simultaneously in all of them, Jason.