The Talisman (66 page)

“Once,” Richard said, “when he was drunk, he said there was something inside that place. He said it had been there for a long time. We were lying in our beds, I remember. The wind was high that night. I could hear the waves hitting the beach, and the squeaky sound of those weathervanes turning on top of the Agincourt’s towers. It was a scary sound. I thought about that place, all those rooms, all of them empty—”

“Except for the ghosts,” Jack muttered. He thought he heard footsteps and looked quickly behind them. Nothing; no one. The roadbed was deserted for as far as he could see.

“That’s right; except for the ghosts,” Richard agreed. “So I said, ’Is it valuable, Daddy?’

“ ’It’s the most valuable thing there is,’ he said.

“ ’Then some junkie will probably break in and steal it,’ I said. It wasn’t—how can I say this?—it wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue, but I didn’t want him to go to sleep, either. Not with that wind blowing outside, and the sound of those vanes squeaking in the night.

“He laughed, and I heard a clink as he poured himself a little more bourbon from the bottle on the floor.

“ ’Nobody is going to steal it, Rich,’ he said. ’And any junkie who went into the Agincourt would see things he
never
saw before.’ He drank his drink, and I could tell he was getting sleepy. ’Only one person in the whole world could ever touch that thing, and he’ll never even get close to it, Rich. I can guarantee that. One thing that interests me is that it’s the same over there as over here. It doesn’t change—at least, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t change. I’d like to have it, but I’m not even going to try, at least not now, and maybe not ever. I could do things with it—you bet!—but on the whole, I think I like the thing best right where it is.’

“I was getting sleepy myself by then, but I asked him what
it
was that he kept talking about.”

“What did he say?” Jack asked, dry-mouthed.

“He called it—” Richard hesitated, frowning in thought. “He called it ’the axle of all possible worlds.’ Then he laughed. Then he called it something else. Something you wouldn’t like.”

“What was that?”

“It’ll make you mad.”

“Come on, Richard, spill it.”

“He called it . . . well . . . he called it ’Phil Sawyer’s folly.’ ”

It was not anger he felt but a burst of hot, dizzying excitement. That was it, all right; that was the Talisman. The axle of all possible worlds. How many worlds? God alone knew. The American Territories; the Territories themselves; the hypothetical Territories’ Territories; and on and on, like the stripes coming ceaselessly up and out of a turning barber pole. A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds—and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds. And was it also Phil Sawyer’s folly? Probably so. Phil’s folly . . . Jack’s folly . . . Morgan Sloat’s . . . Gardener’s . . . and the hope, of course, of two Queens.

“It’s more than Twinners,” he said in a low voice.

Richard had been plodding along, watching the rotted ties disappear beneath his feet. Now he looked nervously up at Jack.

“It’s more than Twinners, because there are more than two worlds. There are triplets . . . quadruplets . . . who knows? Morgan Sloat here; Morgan of Orris over there; maybe Morgan, Duke of Azreel, somewhere else.
But he never went inside the hotel!
”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard said in a resigned voice.
But I’m sure you’ll go right on, anyway,
that resigned tone said,
progressing from nonsense to outright insanity. All aboard for Seabrook Island!

“He
can’t
go inside. That is, Morgan of California can’t—and do you know why? Because Morgan of
Orris
can’t. And Morgan of Orris can’t because Morgan of
California
can’t. If one of them can’t go into
his
version of the black hotel, then
none
of them can. Do you see?”

“No.”

Jack, feverish with discovery, didn’t hear what Richard said at all.

“Two Morgans, or dozens. It doesn’t matter. Two Lilys, or dozens—dozens of Queens in dozens of worlds, Richard, think of that! How does that mess your mind? Dozens of black hotels—only in some worlds it might be a black amusement park . . . or a black trailer court . . . or I don’t know what. But Richard—”

He stopped, turned Richard by the shoulders, and stared at him, his eyes blazing. Richard tried to draw away from him for a moment, and then stopped, entranced by the fiery beauty on Jack’s face. Suddenly, briefly, Richard believed that all things might be possible. Suddenly, briefly, he felt
healed
.

“What?” he whispered.

“
Some
things are not excluded. Some
people
are not excluded. They are . . . well . . . 
single-natured
. That’s the only way I can think of to say it. They are like
it
—the Talisman. Single-natured. Me. I’m single-natured. I had a Twinner, but he died. Not just in the Territories world, but in
all
worlds but this one. I know that—I feel that. My dad knew it, too. I think that’s why he called me Travelling Jack. When I’m here, I’m not there. When I’m there, I’m not here. And Richard,
neither are you!
”

Richard stared at him, speechless.

“You don’t remember; you were mostly in Freakout City while I was talking to Anders. But he said Morgan of Orris had a boy-child. Rushton. Do you know what he was?”

“Yes,” Richard whispered. He was still unable to pull his eyes away from Jack’s. “He was my Twinner.”

“That’s right. The little boy died, Anders said. The Talisman is single-natured.
We’re
single-natured. Your father isn’t. I’ve seen Morgan of Orris in that other world, and he’s
like
your father, but he’s
not
your father. He couldn’t go into the black hotel, Richard. He can’t now. But he knew you were single-natured, just as he knows I am. He’d like me dead. He needs you on his side.

“Because then, if he decided he
did
want the Talisman, he could always send
you
in to get it, couldn’t he?”

Richard began to tremble.

“Never mind,” Jack said grimly. “He won’t have to worry about it. We’re going to bring it out, but
he’s
not going to have it.”

“Jack, I don’t think I can go into that place,” Richard said, but he spoke in a low, strengthless whisper, and Jack, who was already walking on, didn’t hear him.

Richard trotted to catch up.

12

Conversation lapsed. Noon came and went. The woods had become very silent, and twice Jack had seen trees with strange, gnarly trunks and tangled roots growing quite close to the tracks. He did not much like the looks of these trees. They looked familiar.

Richard, staring at the ties as they disappeared beneath his feet, at last stumbled and fell over, hitting his head. After that, Jack piggybacked him again.

“There, Jack!” Richard called, after what seemed an eternity.

Up ahead, the tracks disappeared into an old car-barn. The doors hung open on a shadowy darkness that looked dull and moth-eaten. Beyond the car-barn (which might once have been as pleasant as Richard had said, but which only looked spooky to Jack now) was a highway—101, Jack guessed.

Beyond that, the ocean—he could hear the pounding waves.

“I guess we’re here,” he said in a dry voice.

“Almost,” Richard said. “Point Venuti’s a mile or so down the road. God, I wish we didn’t have to go there, Jack . . . Jack? Where are you going?”

But Jack didn’t look around. He stepped off the tracks, detoured around one of those strange-looking trees (this one not even shrub-high), and headed for the road. High grasses and weeds brushed his road-battered jeans. Something inside the trolley-barn—Morgan Sloat’s private train-station of yore—moved with a nasty slithering bump, but Jack didn’t even look toward it.

He reached the road, crossed it, and walked to the edge.

13

Near the middle of December in the year 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and the land came together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Pacific. He was twelve years old and extraordinarily beautiful for his age. His brown hair was long—probably too long—but the sea-breeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow. He stood thinking of his mother, who was dying, and of friends, both absent and present, and worlds within worlds, turning in their courses.

I’ve come the distance,
he thought, and shivered.
Coast to coast with Travelling Jack Sawyer
. His eyes abruptly filled with tears. He breathed deeply of the salt. Here he was—and the Talisman was close by.

“Jack!”

Jack didn’t look at him at first; his gaze was held by the Pacific, by the sunlight gleaming gold on top of the waves. He was here; he had made it. He—

“Jack!”
Richard struck his shoulder, bringing him out of his daze.

“Huh?”

“Look!” Richard was gaping, pointing at something down the road, in the direction in which Point Venuti presumably lay. “Look there!”

Jack looked. He understood Richard’s surprise, but he felt none himself—or no more than he had felt when Richard had told him the name of the motel where he and his father had stayed in Point Venuti. No, not much surprise, but—

But it was damned good to see his mother again.

Her face was twenty feet high, and it was a younger face than Jack could remember. It was Lily as she had looked at the height of her career. Her hair, a glorious be-bop shade of brassy blond, was pulled back in a Tuesday Weld ponytail. Her insouciant go-to-hell grin was, however, all her own. No one else in films had ever smiled that way—she had invented it, and she still held the patent. She was looking back over one bare shoulder. At Jack . . . at Richard . . . at the blue Pacific.

It was his mother . . . but when he blinked, the face changed the slightest bit. The line of chin and jaw grew rounder, the cheekbones less pronounced, the hair darker, the eyes an even deeper blue. Now it was the face of Laura DeLoessian, mother of Jason. Jack blinked again, and it was his mother again—his mother at twenty-eight, grinning her cheerful
fuckya
-if-you-can’t-take-a-joke defiance at the world.

It was a billboard. Across the top of it ran this legend:

THIRD ANNUAL KILLER B FILM FESTIVAL

POINT VENUTI, CALIFORNIA

BITKER THEATER

DECEMBER 10TH-DECEMBER 20TH

THIS YEAR FEATURING LILY CAVANAUGH

“QUEEN OF THE B’S”

“Jack, it’s your
mother
,” Richard said. His voice was hoarse with awe. “Is it just a coincidence? It
can’t
be, can it?”

Jack shook his head. No, not a coincidence.

The word his eyes kept fixing on, of course, was
QUEEN
.

“Come on,” he said to Richard. “I think we’re almost there.”

The two of them walked side by side down the road toward Point Venuti.

38

The End of the Road

1

Jack inspected Richard’s drooping posture and glistening face carefully as they walked along. Richard now looked as though he were dragging himself along on will power alone. A few more wet-looking pimples had blossomed on his face.

“Are you okay, Richie?”

“No. I don’t feel too good. But I can still walk, Jack. You don’t have to carry me.” He bent his head and plodded glumly on. Jack saw that his friend, who had so many memories of that peculiar little railway and that peculiar little station, was suffering far more than he from the reality that now existed—rusty, broken ties, weeds, poison ivy . . . and at the end, a ram-shackle building from which all the bright, remembered paint had faded, a building where something slithered uneasily in the dark.

I feel like my leg is caught in some stupid trap,
Richard had said, and Jack thought he could understand that well enough . . . but not with the
depth
of Richard’s understanding. That was more understanding than he was sure he could bear. A slice of Richard’s childhood had been burned out of him, turned inside-out. The railway and the dead station with its staring glassless windows must have seemed like dreadful parodies of themselves to Richard—yet more bits of the past destroyed in the wake of everything he was learning or admitting about his father. Richard’s entire life, as much as Jack’s, had begun to fold into the pattern of the Territories, and Richard had been given much less preparation for this transformation.

2

As for what he had told Richard about the Talisman, Jack would have sworn it was the truth—the Talisman knew they were coming. He had begun feeling it just about when he had seen the billboard shining out with his mother’s picture; now the feeling was urgent and powerful. It was as if a great animal had awakened some miles away, and its purring made the earth resonate . . . or as if every single bulb inside a hundred-story building just over the horizon had just gone on, making a blaze of light strong enough to conceal the stars . . . or as if someone had switched on the biggest magnet in the world, which was tugging at Jack’s belt buckle, at the change in his pockets and the fillings in his teeth, and would not be satisfied until it had pulled him into its heart. That great animal purring, that sudden and drastic illumination, that magnetic yearning—all these echoed in Jack’s chest. Something out there, something in the direction of Point Venuti, wanted Jack Sawyer, and what Jack Sawyer chiefly knew of the object calling him so viscerally was that it was big. Big. No small thing could own such power. It was elephant-sized, city-sized.

And Jack wondered about his capacity to handle something so monumental. The Talisman had been imprisoned in a magical and sinister old hotel; presumably it had been put there not only to keep it from evil hands but at least in part because it was hard for anybody to handle it, whatever his intentions. Maybe, Jack wondered, Jason had been the only being capable of handling it—capable of dealing with it without doing harm either to himself or to the Talisman itself. Feeling the strength and urgency of its call to him, Jack could only hope that he would not weaken before the Talisman.

“ ’You’ll understand, Rich,’ ” Richard surprised him by saying. His voice was dull and low. “My father said that. He said I’d understand.
’You’ll understand, Rich.’
”

“Yeah,” Jack said, looking worriedly at his friend. “How are you feeling, Richard?”

In addition to the sores surrounding his mouth, Richard now had a collection of angry-looking raised red dots or bumps across his pimply forehead and his temples. It was as though a swarm of insects had managed to burrow just under the surface of his protesting skin. For a moment Jack had a flash of Richard Sloat on the morning he had climbed in his window at Nelson House, Thayer School; Richard Sloat with his glasses riding firmly on the bridge of his nose and his sweater tucked neatly into his pants. Would that maddeningly correct, unbudgeable boy ever return?

“I can still walk,” Richard said. “But is this what he meant? Is
this
the understanding I was supposed to get, or have, or whatever the hell . . . ?”

“You’ve got something new on your face,” Jack said. “You want to rest for a while?”

“Naw,” Richard said, still speaking from the bottom of a muddy barrel. “And I can feel that rash. It itches. I think I got it all over my back, too.”

“Let me see,” Jack said. Richard stopped in the middle of the road, obedient as a dog. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The red spots blazed on his forehead and temples. Jack stepped behind him, raised his jacket, and lifted the back of his stained and dirty blue button-down shirt. The spots were smaller here, not as raised or as angry-looking; they spread from Richard’s thin shoulder blades to the small of his back, no larger than ticks.

Richard let out a big dispirited unconscious sigh.

“You got em there, but it’s not so bad,” Jack said.

“Thanks,” Richard said. He inhaled, lifted his head. Overhead the gray sky seemed heavy enough to come crashing to earth. The ocean seethed against the rocks, far down the rough slope. “It’s only a couple of miles, really,” Richard said. “I’ll make it.”

“I’ll piggyback you when you need it,” Jack said, unwittingly exposing his conviction that before long Richard would need to be carried again.

Richard shook his head and made an inefficient stab at shoving his shirt back in his trousers. “Sometimes I think I . . . sometimes I think I can’t—”

“We’re going to go into that hotel, Richard,” Jack said, putting his arm through Richard’s and half-forcing him to step forward. “You and me. Together. I don’t have the faintest idea of what happens once we get in there, but you and I are going in. No matter who tries to stop us. Just remember that.”

Richard gave him a look half-fearful, half-grateful. Now Jack could see the irregular outlines of future bumps crowding beneath the surface of Richard’s cheeks. Again he was conscious of a powerful force pulling at him, forcing him along as he had forced Richard.

“You mean my father,” Richard said. He blinked, and Jack thought he was trying not to cry—exhaustion had magnified Richard’s emotions.

“I mean everything,” Jack said, not quite truthfully. “Let’s get going, old pal.”

“But what am I supposed to understand? I don’t get—” Richard looked around, blinking his unprotected eyes. Most of the world, Jack remembered, was a blur to Richard.

“You understand a lot more already, Richie,” Jack pointed out.

And then for a moment a disconcertingly bitter smile twisted Richard’s mouth. He had been made to understand a great deal more than he had ever wished to know, and his friend found himself momentarily wishing that he had run away from Thayer School in the middle of the night by himself. But the moment in which he might have preserved Richard’s innocence was far behind him, if it had ever really existed—Richard was a necessary part of Jack’s mission. He felt strong hands fold around his heart: Jason’s hands, the Talisman’s hands.

“We’re on our way,” he said, and Richard settled back into the rhythm of his strides.

“We’re going to see my dad down there in Point Venuti, aren’t we?” he asked.

Jack said, “I’m going to take care of you, Richard. You’re the herd now.”

“What?”

“Nobody’s going to hurt you, not unless you scratch yourself to death.”

Richard muttered to himself as they plodded along. His hands slid over his inflamed temples, rubbing and rubbing. Now and then he dug his fingers in his hair, scratched himself like a dog, and grunted in an only partially fulfilled satisfaction.

3

Shortly after Richard lifted his shirt, revealing the red blotches on his back, they saw the first of the Territories trees. It grew on the inland side of the highway, its tangle of dark branches and column of thick, irregular bark emerging from a reddish, waxy tangle of poison ivy. Knotholes in the bark gaped, mouths or eyes, at the boys. Down in the thick mat of poison ivy a rustling, rustling of unsatisfied roots agitated the waxy leaves above them, as if a breeze blew through them. Jack said, “Let’s cross the road,” and hoped that Richard had not seen the tree. Behind him he could still hear the thick, rubbery roots prowling through the stems of the ivy.

Is that a BOY? Could that be a BOY up there? A SPECIAL boy perhaps?

Richard’s hands flew from his sides to his shoulders to his temples to his scalp. On his cheeks, the second wave of raised bumps resembled horror-movie makeup—he could have been a juvenile monster from one of Lily Cavanaugh’s old films. Jack saw that on the backs of Richard’s hands the red bumps of the rash had begun to grow together into great red welts.

“Can you really keep going, Richard?” he asked.

Richard nodded. “Sure. For a while.” He squinted back across the road. “That wasn’t a regular tree, was it? I never saw a tree like that before, not even in a book. It was a Territories tree, wasn’t it?”

“ ’Fraid so,” Jack said.

“That means the Territories are really close, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does.”

“So there’ll be more of those trees up ahead, won’t there?”

“If you know the answers, why ask the questions?” Jack asked. “Oh Jason, what a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry, Richie—I guess I was hoping that you didn’t see it. Yeah, I suppose there’ll be more of them up there. Let’s just not get too close to them.”

In any case, Jack thought, “up there” was hardly an accurate way to describe where they were going: the highway slid resolutely down a steady grade, and every hundred feet seemed to take it farther from the light. Everything seemed invaded by the Territories.

“Could you take a look at my back?” Richard asked.

“Sure.” Jack again lifted Richard’s shirt. He kept himself from saying anything, though his instinct was to groan. Richard’s back was now covered with raised red blotches which seemed almost to radiate heat. “It’s a little worse,” he said.

“I thought it had to be. Only a little, huh?”

“Only a little.”

Before long, Jack thought, Richard was going to look one hell of a lot like an alligator suitcase—Alligator Boy, son of Elephant Man.

Two of the trees grew together a short way ahead, their warty trunks twisted around each other in a way that suggested violence more than love. As Jack stared at them while they hurried past, he thought he saw the black holes in the bark mouthing at them, blowing curses or kisses: and he knew that he heard the roots gnashing together at the base of the joined trees.
(BOY! A BOY’s out there! OUR boy’s out there!)

Though it was only mid-afternoon, the air was dark, oddly grainy, like an old newspaper photograph. Where grass had grown on the inland side of the highway, where Queen Anne’s lace had bloomed delicately and whitely, low unrecognizable weeds blanketed the earth. With no blossoms and few leaves, they resembled snakes coiled together and smelled faintly of diesel oil. Occasionally the sun flared through the granular murk like a dim orange fire. Jack was reminded of a photograph he had once seen of Gary, Indiana, at night—hellish flames feeding on poison in a black, poisoned sky. From down there the Talisman pulled at him as surely as if it were a giant with its hands on his clothes. The nexus of all possible worlds. He would take Richard into that hell—and fight for his life with all his strength—if he had to haul him along by the ankles. And Richard must have seen this determination in Jack, for, scratching at his sides and shoulders, he toiled along beside him.

I’m going to do this,
Jack said to himself, and tried to ignore how greatly he was merely trying to bolster his courage.
If I have to go through a dozen different worlds, I’m going to do it.

4

Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like muggers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton, once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a leash.

5

A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.