The Talisman

clear bright white opened in the Talisman, like a shaft of light right through its center, and Sloat jerked himself sideways and pointed the key at Jack’s head.

He wiped a smear of blood away from his lower lip. “You hurt me, you stinking little bastard,” he said. “Don’t think that glass ball can help you now. Its future is a little shorter than your own.”

“Then why are you afraid of it?” the boy asked, thrusting it forward again.

Sloat dodged sideways, as if the Talisman, too, could shoot out bolts of lightning. He doesn’t know what it can do, Jack realized: he doesn’t really know anything about it, he just knows he wants it.

“Drop it right now,” Sloat said. “Let go of it, you little fraud. Or I’ll take the top of your head off right now. Drop it.”

“You’re afraid,” Jack said. “Now that the Talisman is right in front of you, you’re afraid to come and get it.”

“I don’t have to come and get it,” Sloat said. “You goddam Pretender. Drop it. Let’s see you break it by yourself, Jacky.”

“Come for it, Bloat,” Jack said, feeling a blast of wholly bracing anger shoot through him. Jacky. He hated hearing his mother’s nickname for him in Sloat’s wet mouth. “I’m not the black hotel, Bloat. I’m just a kid. Can’t you take a glass ball away from a kid?” Because it was clear to him that they were in stalemate as long as Jack held the Talisman in his hands. A deep blue spark, as vibrant as one of the sparks from Anders’s “demons,” flared up and died in the Talisman’s center. Another immediately followed. Jack could still feel that powerful humming emanating from the heart of the grooved glass ball. He had been destined to get the Talisman—he was supposed to get it. The Talisman had known of his existence since his birth, Jack now thought, and ever since had awaited him to set it free. It needed Jack Sawyer and no one else. “Come on and try for it,” Jack taunted.

Sloat pushed the key toward him, snarling. Blood drooled down his chin. For a moment Sloat appeared baffled, as frustrated and enraged as a bull in a pen, and Jack actually smiled at him. Then Jack glanced sideways to where Richard lay on the sand, and the smile disappeared from his face. Richard’s face was literally covered with blood, his dark hair was matted with it.

“You bast—” he began, but it had been a mistake to look away. A searing blast of blue and yellow light smacked into the beach directly beside him.

He turned to Sloat, who was just firing off another lightning-bolt at his feet. Jack danced back, and the shaft of destructive light melted the sand at his feet into molten yellow liquid, which almost instantly cooled into a long straight slick of glass.

“Your son is going to die,” Jack said.

“Your mother is going to die,” Sloat snarled back at him. “Drop that damned thing before I cut your head off. Now. Let go of it.”

Jack said, “Why don’t you go hump a weasel?”

Morgan Sloat opened his mouth and screeched, revealing a row of square bloodstained teeth. “I’ll hump your corpse!” The pointing key wavered toward Jack’s head, wavered away. Sloat’s eyes glittered, and he jerked his hand up so that the key pointed at the sky. A long skein of lightning seemed to erupt upward from Sloat’s fist, widening out as it ascended. The sky blackened. Both the Talisman and Morgan Sloat’s face shone in the sudden dark, Sloat’s face because the Talisman shed its light upon it. Jack realized that his face, too, must be picked out by the Talisman’s fierce illumination. And as soon as he brandished the glowing Talisman toward Sloat, trying God knew what—to get him to drop the key, to anger him, to rub his nose in the fact that he was powerless—Jack was made to understand that he had not yet reached the end of Morgan Sloat’s capabilities. Fat snowflakes spun down out of the dark sky. Sloat disappeared behind the thickening curtain of snow; Jack heard his wet laughter.

4

She struggled out of her invalid’s bed and crossed to the window. She looked out at the dead December beach, which was lit by a single streetlight on the boardwalk. Suddenly a gull alighted on the sill outside the window. A string of gristle hung from one side of its beak, and in that moment she thought of Sloat. The gull looked like Sloat.

Lily first recoiled, and then came back. She felt a wholly ridiculous anger. A gull couldn’t look like Sloat, and a gull couldn’t invade her territory . . . it wasn’t right. She tapped the cold glass. The bird fluffed its wings briefly but did not fly. And she heard a thought come from its cold mind, heard it as clearly as a radio wave:

Jack’s dying, Lily . . . Jack’s dyyyyyinn . . .

It bent its head forward. Tapped on the glass as deliberately as Poe’s raven.

Dyyyyyyinnnn . . .

“NO!” she shrieked at it. “FUCK OFF, SLOAT!” She did not simply tap this time but slammed her fist forward, driving it through the glass. The gull fluttered backward, squawking, almost falling. Frigid air funnelled in through the hole in the window.

Blood was dripping from Lily’s hand—no; no, not just dripping. It was running. She had cut herself quite badly in two places. She picked shards of glass out of the pad on the side of her palm and then wiped her hand against the bodice of her nightdress.

“DIDN’T EXPECT THAT, DID YOU, FUCKHEAD?” she screamed at the bird, which was circling restlessly over the gardens. She burst into tears. “Now leave him alone! Leave him alone! LEAVE MY SON ALONE!”

She was covered all over in blood. Cold air blew in the pane she had shattered. And outside she saw the first flakes of snow come swirling down from the sky and into the white glow of that streetlight.

5

“Look out, Jacky.”

Soft. On the left.

Jack pivoted that way, holding the Talisman up like a searchlight. It sent out a beam of light filled with falling snow.