The Talisman

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“SHOOT HIM!” Morgan bellowed. He ran out his bleeding tongue again and made a hideously triumphant nursery-school sound: Yadda-yadda-yadda-yah! His feet, clad in dirty Gucci loafers, bumped up and down. One of them landed squarely on the severed tip of his tongue and tromped it deeper into the sand.

“SHOOT HIM! SHOOT IT!” Morgan howled.

The muzzle of the Weatherbee circled minutely as it had when Gardener was preparing to shoot the rubber horse. Then it settled. Jack was carrying the Talisman against his chest. The crosshairs were over its flashing, circular light. The .360 slug would pass right through it, shattering it, and the sun would turn black . . . but before it does, Gardener thought, I will see that baddest bad boy’s chest explode.

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and began to settle pressure against the Weatherbee’s trigger.

10

Richard raised his head with great effort and his eyes were sizzled by reflected sunlight.

Two men. One with his head slightly cocked, the other seeming to dance. That flash of sunlight again, and Richard understood. He understood . . . and Jack was looking in the wrong place. Jack was looking down toward the rocks where Speedy lay.

“Jack look out!” he screamed.

Jack looked around, surprised. “What—”

It happened fast. Jack missed it almost entirely. Richard saw it and understood it, but could never quite explain what had happened to Jack. The sunlight flashed off the shooter’s riflescope again. The ray of reflected light this time struck the Talisman. And the Talisman reflected it back directly at the shooter. This was what Richard later told Jack, but that was like saying the Empire State Building is a few stories high.

The Talisman did not just reflect the sunflash; it boosted it somehow. It sent back a thick ribbon of light like a deathray in a space movie. It was there only for a second, but it imprinted Richard’s retinas for almost an hour afterward, first white, then green, then blue, and finally, as it faded, the lemony yellow of sunshine.

11

“He’s dead meat,” Gardener whispered, and then the scope was full of living fire. Its thick glass lenses shattered. Smoking fused glass was driven backward into Gardener’s right eye. The shells in the Weatherbee’s magazine exploded, tearing its mid-section apart. One of the whickers of flying metal amputated most of Gardener’s right cheek. Other hooks and twists of steel flew around Sloat in a storm, leaving him incredibly untouched. Three Wolfs had remained through everything. Now two of them took to their heels. The third lay dead on his back, glaring into the sky. The Weatherbee’s trigger was planted squarely between his eyes.

“What?” Morgan bellowed. His bloody mouth hung open. “What? What?”

Gardener looked weirdly like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons after one of his devices from the Acme Company has misfired.

He cast the gun aside, and Sloat saw that all the fingers had been torn from Gard’s left hand.

Gardener’s right hand pulled out his shirt with effeminate tweezing delicacy. There was a knife-case clipped to the inner waistband of his pants—a narrow sleeve of fine-grained kid leather. From it Gardener took a piece of chrome-banded ivory. He pushed a button, and a slim blade seven inches long shot out.

“Bad,” he whispered. “Bad!” His voice began to rise. “All boys! Bad! It’s axiomatic! IT’S AXIOMATIC!” He began to run up the beach toward the Agincourt’s walk, where Jack and Richard stood. His voice continued to rise until it was a thin febrile shriek.

“BAD! EVIL! BAD! EEVIL! BAAAD! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—”

Morgan stood a moment longer, then grasped the key around his neck. By grasping it, he seemed also to grasp his own panicked, flying thoughts.

He’ll go to the old nigger. And that’s where I’ll take him.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—” Gardener shrieked, his killer knife held out before him as he ran.

Morgan turned and ran down the beach. He was vaguely aware that the Wolfs, all of them, had fled. That was all right.

He would take care of Jack Sawyer—and the Talisman—all by himself.

45

In Which Many Things are Resolved on the Beach

1

Sunlight Gardener ran dementedly toward Jack, blood streaming down his mutilated face. He was the center of a devastated madness. Under bright blistering sunshine for the first time in what must have been decades, Point Venuti was a ruin of collapsed buildings and broken pipes and sidewalks heaved up like books tilting and leaning on a shelf. Actual books lay here and there, their ripped jackets fluttering in raw seams of earth. Behind Jack the Agincourt Hotel uttered a sound uncannily like a groan; then Jack heard the sound of a thousand boards collapsing in on themselves, of walls tipping over in a shower of snapped lath and plaster-dust. The boy was faintly conscious of the beelike figure of Morgan Sloat slipping down the beach and realized with a stab of unease that his adversary was going toward Speedy Parker—or Speedy’s corpse.

“He’s got a knife, Jack,” Richard whispered.

Gardener’s ruined hand carelessly smeared blood on his once-spotless white silk shirt. “EEEEEEVIL!” he screeched, his voice still faint over the constant pounding of the water on the beach and the continuing, though intermittent, noises of destruction. “EEEEEEEEEEE . . .”

“What are you going to do?” Richard asked.

“How should I know?” Jack answered—it was the best, truest answer he could give. He had no idea of how he could defeat this madman. Yet he would defeat him. He was certain of that. “You shoulda killed