The Talisman

hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.

Jack was just Jack now, Richard now saw. That extraordinary extra quality, as of a movie star deigning to walk around as a shabbily dressed twelve-year-old, had gone. This made his heroism all the more impressive to Richard.

His father smiled rapaciously. But that was not his father. His father had been hollowed out a long time ago— hollowed out by his envy of Phil Sawyer, by the greed of his ambitions.

“We can keep on going around like this forever,” Jack said. “I’m never going to give you the Talisman, and you’re never going to be able to destroy it with that gadget of yours. Give up.”

The point of the key in his father’s hand slowly moved across and down, and it, like his father’s greedy needful face, pointed straight at him.

“First I’ll blow Richard apart,” his father said. “Do you really want to see your pal Richard turned into bacon? Hmmmm? Do you? And of course I won’t hesitate to do the same favor for that pest beside him.”

Jack and Sloat exchanged short glances. His father was not kidding, Richard knew. He would kill him if Jack did not surrender the Talisman. And then he would kill the old black man, Speedy.

“Don’t do it,” he managed to whisper. “Stuff him, Jack. Tell him to screw himself.”

Jack almost deranged Richard by winking at him.

“Just drop the Talisman,” he heard his father say.

Richard watched in horror as Jack tilted the palms of his hands and let the Talisman tumble out.

7

“Jack, no!”

Jack didn’t look around at Richard. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, his mind hammered at him. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.

You learned these things, or you died somewhere out in the world where there was no clear light.

“No more killing,” he said in the snow-filled darkness of this California beach afternoon. He should have felt utterly exhausted—it had been, all told, a four-day run of horrors, and now, at the end, he had coughed up the ball like a freshman quarterback with a lot to learn. Had thrown it all away. Yet it was the sure voice of Anders he heard, Anders who had knelt before Jack/Jason with his kilt spread out around him and his head bowed: Anders saying A’ wi’ be well, a’ wi’ be well, and a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well.

The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required.

“No more slaughter. Go on and break it if you can,” he said. “I’m sorry for you.”

It was that last which surely destroyed Morgan Sloat. If he had retained a shred of rational thought, he would have unearthed a stone from the unearthly snow and smashed the Talisman . . . as it could have been smashed, in its simple unjacketed vulnerability.

Instead, he turned the key on it.

As he did so, his mind was filled with loving, hateful memories of Jerry Bledsoe, and Jerry Bledsoe’s wife. Jerry Bledsoe, whom he had killed, and Nita Bledsoe, who should have been Lily Cavanaugh . . . Lily, who had slapped him so hard his nose bled the one time when, drunk, he had tried to touch her.

Fire sang out—green-blue fire spanning out from the cheapjack barrel of the tin key. It arrowed out at the Talisman, struck it, spread over it, turning it into a burning sun. Every color was there for a moment . . . for a moment every world was there. Then it was gone.

The Talisman swallowed the fire from Morgan’s key.

Ate it whole.

Darkness came back. Jack’s feet slid out from under him and he sat down with a thud on Speedy Parker’s limply splayed calves. Speedy made a grunting noise and twitched.

There was a two-second lag when everything held static . . . and then fire suddenly blew back out of the Talisman in a flood. Jack’s eyes opened wide in spite of his frantic, tortured thought

(it’ll blind you! Jack! it’ll)

and the altered geography of Point Venuti was lit up as if the God of All Universes had bent forward to snap a picture. Jack saw the Agincourt, slumped and half-destroyed; he saw the collapsed Highlands that were now the Lowlands; he saw Richard on his back; he saw Speedy lying on his belly with his face turned to one side. Speedy was smiling.

Then Morgan Sloat was driven backward and enveloped in a field of fire from his own key—fire that had been absorbed inside the Talisman as the flashes of light from Sunlight Gardener’s telescopic sight had been absorbed— and which was returned to him a thousandfold.

A hole opened between the worlds—a hole the size of the tunnel leading into Oatley—and Jack saw Sloat, his handsome brown suit burning, one skeletal, tallowy hand still clutching the key, driven through that hole. Sloat’s eyes were boiling in their sockets, but they were wide . . . they were aware.

And as he passed, Jack saw him change—saw the cloak appear like the wings of a bat that has swooped through the flame of a torch, saw his burning boots, his burning hair. Saw the key become a thing like a miniature lightning-rod.

Saw . . . daylight!

8

It came back in a flood. Jack rolled away from it on the snowy beach, dazzled. In his ears—ears deep inside his head—he heard Morgan Sloat’s dying scream as he was driven back through all the worlds that were, into