The Talisman (75 page)

“I got it,” Gardener said, lowering the gun. He’d got his courage back; his pecker was up again. He was smiling the way he had been smiling when he had come back from that errand in Utah. “It’s just a dead skin on the water now. You want a look in the scope?” He offered the rifle to Sloat.

“No,” Sloat said. “If you say you got it, you got it. Now he has to come out by land, and we know what direction he’ll be coming in. I think he’ll have what’s been in our way for so many years.”

Gardener looked at him, shiny-eyed.

“I suggest that we move up there.” He pointed to the old boardwalk. It was just inside the fence where he had spent so many hours watching the hotel and thinking about what was in the ballroom.

“All r—”

That was when the earth began to groan and heave under their feet—that subterranean creature had awakened; it was shaking itself and roaring.

At the same instant, dazzling white light filled every window of the Agincourt—the light of a thousand suns. The windows blew out all at once. Glass flew in diamond showers.

“REMEMBER YOUR SON AND FOLLOW ME!”
Sloat roared. That sense of predestination was clear in him now, clear and undeniable.
He was meant to win, after all
.

The two of them began to run up the heaving beach toward the boardwalk.

8

Jack moved slowly, filled with wonder, across the hardwood ballroom floor. He was looking up, his eyes sparkling. His face was bathed in a clear white radiance that was all colors—sunrise colors, sunset colors,
rainbow
colors. The Talisman hung in the air high above him, slowly revolving.

It was a crystal globe perhaps three feet in circumference—the corona of its glow was so brilliant it was impossible to tell exactly how big it was. Gracefully curving lines seemed to groove its surface, like lines of longitude and latitude . . . 
and why not?
Jack thought, still in a deep daze of awe and amazement.
It is the world—ALL worlds—in microcosm. More; it is the axis of all possible worlds
.

Singing; turning;
blazing
.

He stood beneath it, bathed in its warmth and clear sense of well-meant force; he stood in a dream, feeling that force flow into him like the clear spring rain which awakens the hidden power in a billion tiny seeds. He felt a terrible joy lift through his conscious mind like a rocket, and Jack Sawyer lifted both hands over his upturned face, laughing, both in response to that joy and in imitation of its rise.

“Come to me, then!”
he shouted,

                and slipped

                    
(through? across?)

                        into

Jason.

“Come to me, then!”
he shouted again in the sweetly liquid and slightly slippery tongue of the Territories—he cried it laughing, but tears coursed down his cheeks. And he understood that the quest had begun with the other boy and thus must end with him; so he let go and

                        slipped

                    back

                into

Jack Sawyer.

Above him, the Talisman trembled in the air, slowly turning, throwing off light and heat and a sensation of true goodness, of
whiteness
.

“Come to me!”

It began to descend through the air.

9

So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul)—after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:

He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura’s son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack’s quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to fulfill, had made Jason live again for a little while—Jack really
had
a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers. Jack would be killing him again.

Don’t worry, Jack,
a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.

Down it came, a globe, a world,
all
worlds—it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white. And, as has always been with the white and must always be, it was dreadfully fragile.

As it came down, worlds reeled about his head. He did not seem to be crashing through layers of reality now but seeing an entire cosmos of realities, all overlapping one another, linked like a shirt of

(reality)

chain-mail.

You’re reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack
—this voice was his father’s.
Don’t drop it, son. For Jason’s sake, don’t drop it.

Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, some gorgeous, some hellish, all of them for a moment illumined in the warm white light of this star that was a crystal globe chased with fine engraved lines. It came slowly down through the air toward Jack Sawyer’s trembling, outstretched fingers.

“Come to me!”
he shouted to it as it had sung to him.
“Come to me now!”

It was three feet above his hands, branding them with its soft, healing heat; now two; now one. It hesitated for a moment, rotating slowly, its axis slightly canted, and Jack could see the brilliant, shifting outlines of continents and oceans and ice-caps on its surface. It hesitated . . . and then slowly slipped down into the boy’s reaching hands.

43

News From Everywhere

1

Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack’s voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.

“Jason?” she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her son’s name. But in the dream from which she had just been startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course. The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.

“Jack?” she tried again. “Jack, where
are
you?”

No answer . . . but she
sensed
him, knew for sure that he was alive. For the first time in a long time—six months, maybe—she felt really good.

“Jack-O,” she said, and grabbed her cigarettes. She looked at them for a moment and then heaved them all the way across the room, where they landed in the fireplace on top of the rest of the shit she meant to burn later in the day. “I think I just quit smoking for the second and last time in my life, Jack-O,” she said. “Hang in there, kid. Your momma loves you.”

And she found herself for no reason grinning a large idiotic grin.

2

Donny Keegan, who had been pulling Sunlight Home kitchen duty when Wolf escaped from the box, had survived that terrible night—George Irwinson, the fellow who had been pulling the duty with him, had not been so lucky. Now Donny was in a more conventional orphans’ home in Muncie, Indiana. Unlike some of the other boys at the Sunlight Home, Donny had been a real orphan; Gardener had needed to take a token few to satisfy the state.

Now, mopping a dark upstairs hall in a dim daze, Donny looked up suddenly, his muddy eyes widening. Outside, clouds which had been spitting light snow into the used-up fields of December suddenly pulled open in the west, letting out a single broad ray of sunshine that was terrible and exalting in its isolated beauty.

“You’re right, I DO love him!”
Donny shouted triumphantly. It was Ferd Janklow that Donny was shouting to, although Donny, who had too many toys in his attic to accommodate many brains, had already forgotten his name.
“He’s beautiful and I DO love him!”

Donny honked his idiot laugh, only now even his
laugh
was nearly beautiful. Some of the other boys came to their doors and stared at Donny in wonder. His face was bathed in the sunlight from that one clear, ephemeral ray, and one of the other boys would whisper to a close friend that night that for a moment Donny Keegan had looked like Jesus.

The moment passed; the clouds moved over that weird clear place in the sky, and by evening the snow had intensified into the first big winter storm of the season. Donny had known—for one brief moment he had known—what that feeling of love and triumph actually meant. That passed quickly, the way dreams do upon waking . . . but he never forgot the feeling itself, that almost swooning sensation of grace for once fulfilled and delivered instead of promised and then denied; that feeling of clarity and sweet, marvellous love; that feeling of ecstasy at the coming once more of the white.

3

Judge Fairchild, who had sent Jack and Wolf to the Sunlight Home, was no longer a judge of any kind, and as soon as his final appeals ran out, he would be going to jail. There no longer seemed any question that jail was where he would fetch up, and that he would do hard time there. Might never come out at all. He was an old man, and not very healthy. If they hadn’t found the damned
bodies
 . . .

He had remained as cheerful as possible under the circumstances, but now, as he sat cleaning his fingernails with the long blade of his pocketknife in his study at home, a great gray wave of depression crashed over him. Suddenly he pulled the knife away from his thick nails, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then inserted the tip of the blade into his right nostril. He held it there for a moment and then whispered, “Oh shit. Why not?” He jerked his fist upward, sending the six-inch blade on a short, lethal trip, skewering first his sinuses and then his brain.

4

Smokey Updike sat in a booth at the Oatley Tap, going over invoices and totting up numbers on his Texas Instruments calculator, just as he had been doing on the day Jack had met him. Only now it was early evening and Lori was serving the evening’s first customers. The jukebox was playing “I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobotomy).”

At one moment everything was normal. At the next Smokey sat bolt-upright, his little paper cap tumbling backward off his head. He clutched his white T-shirt over the left side of his chest, where a hammering bolt of pain had just struck like a silver spike.
God pounds his nails,
Wolf would have said.

At the same instant the grill suddenly exploded into the air with a loud bang. It hit a Busch display sign and tore it from the ceiling. It landed with a crash. A rich smell of LP gas filled the area in back of the bar almost at once. Lori screamed.

The jukebox speeded up: 45 rpms, 78, 150, 400! The woman’s seriocomic lament became the speedy gabble of deranged chipmunks on a rocket-sled. A moment later the top blew off the juke. Colored glass flew everywhere.

Smokey looked down at his calculator and saw a single word blinking on and off in the red window:

TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN

Then his eyes exploded.

“Lori, turn off the gas!”
one of the customers screamed. He got down off his stool, and turned toward Smokey. “Smokey, tell her—” The man wailed with fright as he saw blood gushing from the holes where Smokey Updike’s eyes had been.

A moment later the entire Oatley Tap blew sky-high, and before the fire-trucks could arrive from Dogtown and Elmira, most of downtown was in flames.

No great loss, children, can you say amen.

5

At Thayer School, where normality now reigned as it always had (with one brief interlude which those on campus remembered only as a series of vague, related dreams), the last classes of the day had just begun. What was light snow in Indiana was a cold drizzle here in Illinois. Students sat dreaming and thoughtful in their classes.

Suddenly the bells in the chapel began to peal. Heads came up. Eyes widened. All over the Thayer campus, fading dreams suddenly seemed to renew themselves.

6

Etheridge had been sitting in advanced-math class and pressing his hand rhythmically up and down against a raging hard-on while he stared unseeingly at the logarithms old Mr. Hunkins was piling up on the blackboard. He was thinking about the cute little townie waitress he would be boffing later on. She wore garter-belts instead of pantyhose, and was more than willing to leave her stockings on while they fucked. Now Etheridge stared around at the windows, forgetting his erection, forgetting the waitress with her long legs and smooth nylons—suddenly, for no reason at all, Sloat was on his mind. Prissy little Richard Sloat, who should have been safely classifiable as a wimp but who somehow wasn’t. He thought about Sloat and wondered if he was all right. Somehow he thought that maybe Sloat, who had left school unexcused four days ago and who hadn’t been heard from since, wasn’t doing so good.

In the headmaster’s office, Mr. Dufrey had been discussing the expulsion of a boy named George Hatfield for cheating with his furious—and rich—father when the bells began to jingle out their unscheduled little tune. When it ended, Mr. Dufrey found himself on his hands and knees with his gray hair hanging in his eyes and his tongue lolling over his lips. Hatfield the Elder was standing by the door—cringing against it, actually—his eyes wide and his jaw agape, his anger forgotten in wonder and fear. Mr. Dufrey had been crawling around on his rug barking like a dog.

Albert the Blob had just been getting himself a snack when the bells began to ring. He looked toward the window for a moment, frowning the way a person frowns when he is trying to remember something that is right on the tip of his tongue. He shrugged and went back to opening a bag of nacho chips—his mother had just sent him a whole case. His eyes widened. He thought—just for a moment, but a moment was long enough—that the bag was full of plump, squirming white bugs.

He fainted dead away.

When he awoke and worked up enough courage to peer into the bag again, he saw it had been nothing but a hallucination. Of course! What else? All the same, it was a hallucination which exercised a strange power over him in the future; whenever he opened a bag of chips, or a candy bar, or a Slim Jim, or a package of Big Jerk beef jerky, he saw those bugs in his mind’s eye. By spring, Albert had lost thirty-five pounds, was playing on the Thayer tennis team, and had gotten laid. Albert was delirious with ecstasy. For the first time in his life he felt that he might survive his mother’s love.

7

They all looked around when the bells began to ring. Some laughed, some frowned, a few burst into tears. A pair of dogs howled from somewhere, and that was passing strange because no dogs were allowed on campus.

The tune the bells rang was not in the computerized schedule of tunes—the disgruntled head custodian later verified it. A campus wag suggested in that week’s issue of the school paper that some eager beaver had programmed the tune with Christmas vacation in mind.

It had been “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

8

Although she had believed herself far too old to catch pregnant, no blood had come to the mother of Jack Sawyer’s Wolf at the time of the Change some twelve months ago. Three months ago she had given birth to triplets—two litter-sisters and one litter-brother. Her labor had been hard, and the foreknowledge that one of her older children was about to die had been upon her. That child, she knew, had gone into the Other Place to protect the herd, and he would die in that Other Place, and she would never see him anymore. This was very hard, and she had wept in more than the pain of her delivery.

Yet now, as she slept with her new young beneath a full moon, all of them safely away from the herd for the time being, she rolled over with a smile on her face and pulled the newest litter-brother to her and began to lick him. Still sleeping himself, the Wolfling put his arms around his mother’s shaggy neck and pressed his cheek against her downy breast, and now they both smiled; in her alien sleep a human thought arose:
God pounds his nails well and true
. And the moonlight of that lovely world where all smells were good shone down on the two of them as they slept in each other’s arms with the litter-sisters nearby.

9

In the town of Goslin, Ohio (not far from Amanda, and some thirty miles south of Columbus), a man named Buddy Parkins was shovelling chickenshit in a henhouse at dusk. A cheesecloth mask was tied over his mouth and nose to keep the choking white cloud of powdered guano he was raising from getting up his nose and into his mouth. The air reeked of ammonia. The stink had given him a headache. He also had a backache, because he was tall and the henhouse wasn’t. All things considered, he would have to say that this was one bitch-kitty of a job. He had three sons, and every damned one of them seemed to be unavailable when the henhouse needed to be swamped out. Only thing to be said about it was that he was almost done, and—

The kid! Jesus Christ! That kid!

He suddenly remembered the boy who had called himself Lewis Farren with total clarity and a stunned kind of love. The boy who had claimed to be going to his aunt, Helen Vaughan, in the town of Buckeye Lake; the boy who had turned to Buddy when Buddy had asked him if he was running away and had in that turning, revealed a face filled with honest goodness and an unexpected, amazing beauty—a beauty that had made Buddy think of rainbows glimpsed at the end of storms, and sunsets at the end of days that have groaned and sweated with work that has been well done and not scamped.

He straightened up with a gasp and bonked his head on the henhouse beams hard enough to make his eyes water . . . but he was grinning crazily all the same.
Oh my God, that boy is THERE, he’s THERE,
Buddy Parkins thought, and although he had no idea of where “there” was, he was suddenly overtaken by a sweet, violent feeling of absolute adventure; never, since reading
Treasure Island
at the age of twelve and cupping a girl’s breast in his hand for the first time at fourteen, had he felt so staggered, so excited, so full of warm joy. He began to laugh. He dropped his shovel, and while the hens stared at him with stupid amazement, Buddy Parkins danced a shuffling jig in the chickenshit, laughing behind his mask and snapping his fingers.

“He’s there!” Buddy Parkins yelled to the chickens, laughing. “By diddly-damn, he’s there, he made it after all, he’s there
and he’s got it!
”

Later, he almost thought—almost, but never quite—that he must have somehow gotten high on the stench of the chicken-dust. That
wasn’t
all, dammit, that
wasn’t
. He had had some kind of revelation, but he could no longer remember what it had been . . . he supposed it was like that British poet some high-school English teacher had told them about: the guy had taken a big dose of opium and had started to write some poems about a make-believe Chink whorehouse while he was stoned . . . except when he came down to earth again he couldn’t finish it.

Like that,
he thought, but somehow he knew it wasn’t; and although he couldn’t remember exactly what had caused the joy, he, like Donny Keegan, never forgot the way the joy had come, all deliciously unbidden—he never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.

10

There’s an old Bobby Darin song which goes:
“And the ground coughs up some roots/wearing denim shirts and boots,/haul em away . . . haul em away.”
This was a song the children in the area of Cayuga, Indiana, could have related to enthusiastically, if it hadn’t been popular quite a bit before their time. The Sunlight Home had been empty for only a little more than a week, and already it had gotten a reputation with the local kids as a haunted house. Considering the grisly remains the payloaders had found near the rock wall at the back of Far Field, this was not surprising. The local Realtor’s
FOR SALE
sign looked as if it had been standing on the lawn for a year instead of just nine days, and the Realtor had already dropped the price once and was thinking about doing it again.