The Talisman

blackened, then turned to a slowly sliding fluid, skimming away from the skull. Jack retreated another step. Gardener fell to his knees. All the skin on his head turned waxy. Within half a second, only a gleaming skull protruded through the collar of the ruined shirt.

That’s you taken care of, Jack thought, and good riddance!

2

“All right,” Jack said. He felt full of crazy confidence. “Let’s go get him, Richie. Let’s—”

He looked at Richard and saw that his friend was on the verge of collapsing again. He stood swaying on the sand, his eyes half-lidded and dopey.

“Maybe you better just sit this one out, on second thought,” Jack said.

Richard shook his head. “Coming, Jack. Seabrook Island. All the way . . . to the end of the line.”

“I’m going to have to kill him,” Jack said. “That is, if I can.”

Richard shook his head with dogged, stubborn persistence. “Not my father. Told you. Father’s dead. If you leave me I’ll crawl. Crawl right through the muck that guy left behind, if I have to.”

Jack looked toward the rocks. He couldn’t see Morgan, but he didn’t think there was much question that Morgan was there. And if Speedy was still alive, Morgan might at this moment be taking steps to remedy that situation.

Jack tried to smile but couldn’t make it. “Think of the germs you might pick up.” He hesitated a moment longer, then held the Talisman reluctantly out to Richard. “I’ll carry you, but you’ll have to carry this. Don’t drop the ball, Richard. If you drop it—”

What was it Speedy had said?

“If you drop it, all be lost.”

“I won’t drop it.”

Jack put the Talisman into Richard’s hands, and again Richard seemed to improve at its touch . . . but not so much. His face was terribly wan. Washed in the Talisman’s bright glow, it looked like the face of a dead child caught in the glare of a police photographer’s flash.

It’s the hotel. It’s poisoning him.

But it wasn’t the hotel; not entirely. It was Morgan. Morgan was poisoning him.

Jack turned around, discovering he was loath to look away from the Talisman even for a moment. He bent his back and curved his hands into stirrups.

Richard climbed on. He held to the Talisman with one hand and curled the other around Jack’s neck. Jack grabbed Richard’s thighs.

He is as light as a thistle. He has his own cancer. He’s had it all his life. Morgan Sloat is radioactive with evil and Richard is dying of the fallout.

He started to jog down toward the rocks behind which Speedy lay, conscious of the light and heat of the Talisman just above him.

3

He ran around the left side of the clump of rocks with Richard on his back, still full of that crazy assurance . . . and that it was crazy was brought home to him with rude suddenness. A plumpish leg clad in light brown wool (and just below the pulled-back cuff Jack caught a blurred glimpse of a perfectly proper brown nylon sock) suddenly stuck straight out from behind the last rock like a toll-gate.

Shit! Jack’s mind screamed. He was waiting for you! You total nerd!

Richard cried out. Jack tried to pull up and couldn’t.

Morgan tripped him up as easily as a schoolyard bully trips up a younger boy in the play-yard. After Smokey Updike, and Osmond, and Gardener, and Elroy, and something that looked like a cross between an alligator and a Sherman tank, all it really took to bring him down was overweight, hypertensive Morgan Sloat crouched behind a rock, watching and waiting for an overconfident boy named Jack Sawyer to come boogying right down on top of him.

“Yiyyy!” Richard cried as Jack stumbled forward. He was dimly aware of their combined shadow tracking out to his left—it seemed to have as many arms as a Hindu idol. He felt the psychic weight of the Talisman shift . . . and then overshift.

“WATCH OUT FOR IT, RICHARD!” Jack screamed.

Richard fell over the top of Jack’s head, his eyes huge and dismayed. The cords on his neck stood out like piano wire. He held the Talisman up as he went down. His mouth was pulled down at the corners in a desperate snarl. He hit the ground face-first like the nosecone of a defective rocket. The sand here around the place where Speedy had gone to earth was not precisely sand at all but a rough-textured scree stubbly with smaller rocks and shells. Richard came down on a rock that had been burped up by the earthquake. There was a compact thudding sound. For a moment Richard looked like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. His butt, clad in dirty polished-cotton slacks, wagged drunkenly back and forth in the air. In other circumstances—circumstances unattended by that dreadful compact thudding sound, for instance—it would have been a comic pose, worthy of a Kodachrome: “Rational Richard Acts Wild and Crazy at the Beach.” But it wasn’t funny at all. Richard’s hands opened slowly . . . and the Talisman rolled three feet down the gentle slope of the beach and stopped there, reflecting sky and clouds, not on its surface but in its gently lighted interior.

“Richard!” Jack bellowed again.

Morgan was somewhere behind him, but Jack had momentarily forgotten him. All his reassurance was gone; it had left him at the moment when that leg, clad in light brown wool, had stuck out in front of him like a toll-gate. Fooled like a kid in a nursery-school play-yard, and Richard . . . Richard was . . .

“Rich—”

Richard rolled over and Jack saw that Richard’s poor, tired face was covered with running blood. A flap of his scalp hung down almost to one eye in a triangular shape like a ragged sail. Jack could see hair sticking out of the