The Talisman

both of the Ellis brothers,” Jack said to himself.

Gardener, still shrieking, came racing across the sand. He was even now a good distance away, about halfway between the end of the fence and the front of the hotel. A red mask covered half his face. His useless left hand leaked a steady spattering stream of blood onto the sandy ground. The distance between the madman and the boys seemed to halve in a second. Was Morgan Sloat on the beach by now? Jack felt an urgency like the Talisman’s, pushing him forward; pushing him on.

“Evil! Axiomatic! Evil!” Gardener screamed.

“Flip!” Richard loudly said—

and Jack

            sidestepped

as he had inside the black hotel.

And then found himself standing in front of Osmond in blistering Territories sunlight. Most of his certainty abruptly left him. Everything was the same but everything was different. Without looking, he knew that behind him was something much worse than the Agincourt—he had never seen the exterior of the castle the hotel became in the Territories, but he suddenly knew that through the great front doors a tongue was coiling out for him . . . and that Osmond was going to drive him and Richard back toward it.

Osmond wore a patch over his right eye and a stained glove on his left hand. The complicated tendrils of his whip came slithering off his shoulder. “Oh, yes,” he half-hissed, half-whispered. “This boy. Captain Farren’s boy.” Jack pulled the Talisman protectively into his belly. The intricacies of the whip slid over the ground, as responsive to Osmond’s minute movements of hand and wrist as is a racehorse to the hand of the jockey. “What does it profit a boy to gain a glass bauble if he loses the world?” The whip seemed almost to lift itself off the ground. “NOTHING! NAUGHT!” Osmond’s true smell, that of rot and filth and hidden corruption, boomed out, and his lean crazy face somehow rippled, as if a lightning-bolt had cracked beneath it. He smiled brightly, emptily, and raised the coiling whip above his shoulder.

“Goat’s-penis,” Osmond said, almost lovingly. The thongs of the whip came singing down toward Jack, who stepped backward, though not far enough, in a sudden sparkling panic.

Richard’s hand gripped his shoulder as he flipped again, and the horrible, somehow laughing noise of the whip instantly erased itself from the air.

Knife! he heard Speedy say.

Fighting his instincts, Jack stepped inside the space where the whip had been, not backward as almost all of him wished to do. Richard’s hand fell away from the ridge of his shoulder, and Speedy’s voice went wailing and lost. Jack clutched the glowing Talisman into his belly with his left hand and reached up with his right. His fingers closed magically around a bony wrist.

Sunlight Gardener giggled.

“JACK!” Richard bellowed behind him.

He was standing in this world again, under streaming cleansing light, and Sunlight Gardener’s knife hand was straining down toward him. Gardener’s ruined face hung only inches from his own. A smell as of garbage and long- dead animals left on the road blanketed them. “Naught,” Gardener said. “Can you give me hallelujah?” He pushed down with the elegant lethal knife, and Jack managed to hold it back.

“JACK!” Richard yelled again.

Sunlight Gardener stared at him with a bright birdlike air. He continued to push down with his knife.

Don’t you know what Sunlight done? said Speedy’s voice. Don’t you yet?

Jack looked straight into Gardener’s crazily dancing eye. Yes.

Richard rushed in and kicked Gardener in the ankle, then clouted a weak fist into his temple.

“You killed my father,” Jack said.

Gardener’s single eye sparkled back. “You killed my boy, baddest bastard!”

“Morgan Sloat told you to kill my father and you did.”

Gardener pushed the knife down a full two inches. A knot of yellow gristly stuff and a bubble of blood squeezed out of the hole that had been his right eye.

Jack screamed—with horror, rage, and all the long-hidden feelings of abandonment and helplessness which had followed his father’s death. He found that he had pushed Gardener’s knife hand all the way back up. He screamed again. Gardener’s fingerless left hand battered against Jack’s own left arm. Jack was just managing to twist Gardener’s wrist back when he felt that dripping pad of flesh insinuate itself between his chest and his arm. Richard continued to skirmish about Gardener, but Gardener was managing to get his fingerless hand very near the Talisman.

Gardener tilted his face right up to Jack’s.

“Hallelujah,” he whispered.

Jack twisted his entire body around, using more strength than he’d known he had. He hauled down on Gardener’s knife hand. The other, fingerless hand flew to the side. Jack squeezed the wrist of the knife hand. Corded tendons wriggled in his grasp. Then the knife dropped, as harmless now as the fingerless cushion of skin which struck repeatedly at Jack’s ribs. Jack rolled his whole body into the off-center Gardener and sent him lurching away.

He shoved the Talisman toward Gardener. Richard squawked, What are you doing? This was right, right, right. Jack moved in toward Gardener, who was still gleaming at him, though with less assurance, and thrust the Talisman out toward him. Gardener grinned, another bubble of blood bulging fatly in the empty eye-socket, and swung wildly at the Talisman. Then he ducked for the knife. Jack rushed in and touched the Talisman’s grooved warm skin against Gardener’s own skin. Like Reuel, like Sunlight. He jumped back.

Gardener howled like a lost, wounded animal. Where the Talisman had brushed against him, the skin had