The Talisman (73 page)

“No more,” Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.

The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking double point.

“No more,” Jack moaned. “Oh God please, no more, I’m tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—”

Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack
—

“Speedy, I can’t!”
he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the inevitability of steel auto parts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.

—you be here in California to bring her back.

“Please, Speedy, no more!”

Reaching for him—black-metal robot-faces, rusty greaves, mail splotched and smeared with moss and mould.

Got to do your best, Travellin Jack,
Speedy whispered, exhausted, and then he was gone and Jack was left to stand or fall on his own.

42

Jack and the Talisman

1

You made a mistake
—a ghostly voice in Jack Sawyer’s head spoke up as he stood outside the Heron Bar and watched these other suits of armor bear down on him. In his mind an eye opened wide and he saw an angry man—a man who was really not much more than an overgrown boy—striding up a Western street toward the camera, buckling on first one gunbelt and then another, so that they crisscrossed his belly.
You made a mistake—you shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!

2

Of all his mother’s movies, the one Jack had always liked the best was
Last Train to Hangtown
, made in 1960 and released in 1961. It had been a Warner Brothers picture, and the major parts—as in many of the lower-budget pictures Warners made during that period—were filled by actors from the half-dozen Warner Brothers TV series which were in constant production. Jack Kelly from the
Maverick
show had been in
Last Train
(the Suave Gambler), and Andrew Duggan from
Bourbon Street Beat
(the Evil Cattle-Baron). Clint Walker, who played a character called Cheyenne Bodie on TV, starred as Rafe Ellis (the Retired Sheriff Who Must Strap on His Guns One Last Time). Inger Stevens had been originally slated to play the part of the Dance Hall Girl with Willing Arms and a Heart of Gold, but Miss Stevens had come down with a bad case of bronchitis and Lily Cavanaugh had stepped into the part. It was of a sort she could have done competently in a coma. Once, when his parents thought he was asleep and were talking in the living room downstairs, Jack overheard his mother say something striking as he padded barefoot to the bathroom to get a glass of water . . . it was striking enough, at any rate, so that Jack never forgot it. “All the women I played knew how to fuck, but not one of them knew how to fart,” she told Phil.

Will Hutchins, who starred in
another
Warner Brothers program (this one was called
Sugarfoot
), had also been in the film.
Last Train to Hangtown
was Jack’s favorite chiefly because of the character Hutchins played. It was this character—Andy Ellis, by name—who came to his tired, tottering, overtaxed mind now as he watched the suits of armor marching down the dark hallway toward him.

Andy Ellis had been the Cowardly Kid Brother Who Gets Mad in the Last Reel. After skulking and cowering through the entire movie, he had gone out to face Duggan’s evil minions after the Chief Minion (played by sinister, stubbly, wall-eyed Jack Elam, who played Chief Minions in all sorts of Warner epics, both theatrical and televisional) had shot his brother Rafe in the back.

Hutchins had gone striding down the dusty wide-screen street, strapping on his brother’s gunbelts with clumsy fingers, shouting, “Come on! Come on, I’m ready for ya! You made a mistake! You shoulda killed
both
of the Ellis brothers!”

Will Hutchins had not been one of the greatest actors of all time, but in that moment he had achieved—at least in Jack’s eyes—a moment of clear truth and real brilliance. There was a sense that the kid was going to his death, and knew it,
but meant to go on, anyway
. And although he was frightened, he was not striding up that street toward the showdown with the slightest reluctance; he went eagerly, sure of what he meant to do, even though he had to fumble again and again with the buckles of the gunbelts.

The suits of armor came on, closing the distance, rocking from side to side like toy robots.
They should have keys sticking out of their backs,
Jack thought.

He turned to face them, the yellowed pick held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if to strum a tune.

They seemed to hesitate, as if sensing his fearlessness. The hotel itself seemed to suddenly hesitate, or to open its eyes to a danger that was deeper than it had at first thought; floors groaned their boards, somewhere a series of doors clapped shut one after the other, and on the roofs, the brass ornaments ceased turning for a moment.

Then the suits of armor clanked forward again. They now made a single moving wall of plate- and chain-mail, of greaves and helmets and sparkling gorgets. One held a spiked iron ball on a wooden haft; one a
martel de fer;
the one in the center held the double-pointed sword.

Jack suddenly began to walk toward them. His eyes lit up; he held the guitar-pick out before him. His face filled with that radiant Jason-glow. He

            sideslipped

                momentarily into the Territories and
became
Jason; here the shark’s tooth which had been a pick seemed to be aflame. As he approached the three knights, one pulled off its helmet, revealing another of those old, pale faces—this one was thick with jowls, and the neck hung with waxy wattles that looked like melting candlewax. It heaved its helmet at him. Jason dodged it easily

                    and

                        slipped back

into his Jack-self as a helmet crashed off a panelled wall behind him. Standing in front of him was a headless suit of armor.

You think that scares me?
he thought contemptuously.
I’ve seen that trick before. It doesn’t scare me, you don’t scare me, and I’m going to get it, that’s all.

This time he did not just feel the hotel
listening;
this time it seemed to recoil all around him, as the tissue of a digestive organ might recoil from a poisoned bit of flesh. Upstairs, in the five rooms where the five Guardian Knights had died, five windows blew out like gunshots. Jack bore down on the suits of armor.

The Talisman sang out from somewhere above in its clear and sweetly triumphant voice:

JASON! TO ME!

“Come on!”
Jack shouted at the suits of armor, and began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Never had laughter seemed so strong to him, so potent, so good as this—it was like water from a spring, or from some deep river.
“Come on, I’m ready for ya! I don’t know what fucked-up Round Table you guys came from, but you shoulda stayed there! You made a mistake!”

Laughing harder than ever but as grimly determined inside as Wotan on the Valkyries’ rock, Jack leaped at the headless, swaying figure in the center.

“You shoulda killed
both
of the Ellis brothers!”
he shouted, and as Speedy’s guitar-pick passed into the zone of freezing air where the knight’s head should have been, the suit of armor fell apart.

3

In her bedroom at the Alhambra, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer suddenly looked up from the book she had been reading. She thought she had heard someone—no, not just someone,
Jack!
—call out from far down the deserted corridor, perhaps even from the lobby. She listened, eyes wide, lips pursed, heart hoping . . . but there was nothing. Jack-O was still gone, the cancer was still eating her up a bite at a time, and it was still an hour and a half before she could take another of the big brown horse-pills that damped down the pain a little bit.

She had begun to think more and more often of taking all the big brown horse-pills at once. That would do more than damp the pain for a bit; that would finish it off forever.
They say we can’t cure cancer, but don’t you believe that bullshit, Mr. C—try eating about two dozen of these. What do you say? Want to go for it?

What kept her from doing it was Jack—she wanted so badly to see him again that now she was imagining his voice . . . not just doing a simple albeit corny sort of thing like calling her name, either, but quoting from one of her old pictures.

“You are one crazy old bitch, Lily,” she croaked, and lit a Herbert Tarrytoon with thin, shaking fingers. She took two puffs and then put it out. Any more than two puffs started the coughing these days, and the coughing tore her apart. “One crazy old bitch.” She picked up her book again but couldn’t read because the tears were coursing down her face and her guts hurt, they hurt, oh they hurt, and she wanted to take all the brown pills but she wanted to see him again first, her dear son with his clear handsome forehead and his shining eyes.

Come home, Jack-O,
she thought,
please come home soon or the next time I talk to you it’ll be by Ouija board. Please, Jack, please come home.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

4

The knight which had held the spike-ball swayed a moment longer, displaying its vacant middle, and then it also exploded. The one remaining raised its battle-hammer . . . and then simply fell apart in a heap. Jack stood amid the wreckage for a moment, still laughing, and then stopped as he looked at Speedy’s pick.

It was a deep and ancient yellow now; the crack-glaze had become a snarl of fissures.

Never mind, Travellin Jack. You get on. I think there may be one more o’ those walkin Maxwell House cans around someplace. If so, you’ll take it on, won’t you?

“If I have to, I will,” Jack muttered aloud.

Jack kicked aside a greave, a helmet, a breastplate. He strode down the middle of the hall, the carpet squelching under his sneakers. He reached the lobby and looked around briefly.

JACK! COME TO ME! JASON! COME TO ME!
the Talisman sang.

Jack started up the staircase. Halfway up he looked at the landing and saw the last of the knights, standing and looking down at him. It was a gigantic figure, better than eleven feet tall; its armor and its plume were black, and a baleful red glare fell through the eye-slit in its helmet.

One mailed fist gripped a huge mace.

For a moment, Jack stood frozen on the staircase, and then he began to climb again.

5

They saved the worst for last,
Jack thought, and as he advanced steadily upward toward the black knight he

            slipped

                    through

                            again

into Jason. The knight still wore black armor, but of a different sort; its visor was tilted up to reveal a face that had been almost obliterated by old dried sores. Jason recognized them. This fellow had gotten a little too close to one of those rolling balls of fire in the Blasted Lands for his own good.

Other figures were passing him on the stairs, figures he could not quite see as his fingers trailed over a wide bannister that was not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood from the Territories. Figures in doublets, figures in blouses of silk-sack, women in great belling gowns with gleaming white cowls thrown back from their gorgeously dressed hair; these people were beautiful but doomed—and so, perhaps, ghosts always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of ghosts inspire such terror?

JASON! TO ME!
the Talisman sang, and for a moment all partitioned reality seemed to break down; he did not flip but seemed to
fall
through worlds like a man crashing through the rotted floors of an ancient wooden tower, one after the other. He felt no fear. The idea that he might never be able to get back—that he might just go on falling through a chain of realities forever, or become lost, as in a great wood—occurred to him, but he dismissed it out of hand. All of this was happening to Jason

(and Jack)

in an eyeblink; less time than it would take for his foot to go from one riser on the broad stairs to the next. He would come back; he was single-natured, and he did not believe it was possible for such a person to become lost, because he had a place in all of these worlds.
But I do not exist simultaneously in all of them,
Jason.

(Jack)

thought.
That’s the important thing, that’s the difference; I’m flickering through each of them, probably too fast to see, and leaving a sound like a handclap or a sonic boom behind me as the air closes on the vacancy where, for a millisecond, I took up space.

In many of these worlds, the black hotel was a black ruin—these were worlds, he thought dimly, where the great evil that now impended on the tightwire drawn between California and the Territories had already happened. In one of them the sea which roared and snarled at the shore was a dead, sickly green; the sky had a similar gangrenous look. In another he saw a flying creature as big as a Conestoga wagon fold its wings and plummet earthward like a hawk. It grabbed a creature like a sheep and swooped up again, holding the bloody hindquarters in its beak.

Flip . . . flip . . . flip
. Worlds passed by his eyes like cards shuffled by a riverboat gambler.

Here was the hotel again, and there were half a dozen different versions of the black knight above him, but the intent in each was the same, and the differences were as unimportant as the stylings of rival automobiles. Here was a black tent filled with the thick dry smell of rotting canvas—it was torn in many places so that the sun shone through in dusty, conflicting rays. In this world Jack/Jason was on some sort of rope rigging, and the black knight stood inside a wooden basket like a crow’s nest, and as he climbed he flipped again . . . and again . . . and again.

Here the entire ocean was on fire; here the hotel was much as it was in Point Venuti, except it had been half-sunk into the ocean. For a moment he seemed to be in an elevator car, the knight standing on top of it and peering down at him through the trapdoor. Then he was on a rampway, the top of which was guarded by a huge snake, its long, muscular body armored with gleaming black scales.

And when do I get to the end of everything? When do I stop crashing through floors and just smash my way into the blackness?

JACK! JASON!
the Talisman called, and it called in all the worlds.
TO ME!

And Jack came to it, and it was like coming home.

6

He was right, he saw; he had come up only a single stair. But reality had solidified again. The black knight—
his
black knight, Jack Sawyer’s black knight—stood blocking the stair-landing. It raised its mace.

Jack was afraid, but he kept climbing, Speedy’s pick held out in front of him.

“I’m not going to mess with you,” Jack said. “You better get out of my—”