The Talisman (74 page)

The black figure swung the mace. It came down with incredible force. Jack dodged aside. The mace crashed into the stair where he had been standing and splintered the entire riser down into hollow blackness.

The figure wrenched the mace free. Jack lunged up two more stairs, Speedy’s pick still held between his thumb and forefinger . . . and suddenly it simply disintegrated, falling in a little eggshell rain of yellowed ivory fragments. Most of these sprinkled the tops of Jack’s sneakers. He stared stupidly at them.

The sound of dead laughter.

The mace, tiny splinters of wood and chews of old dank stair-runner still clinging to it, was upraised in the knight’s two armored gloves. The specter’s hot glare fell through the slit in its helmet. It seemed to slice blood from Jack’s upturned face in a horizontal line across the bridge of his nose.

That chuffing sound of laughter again—not heard with his ears, because he knew this suit of armor was as empty as the rest, nothing but a steel jacket for an undead spirit, but heard inside his head.
You’ve lost, boy—did you really think that puny little thing could get you past me?

The mace whistled down again, this time slicing on a diagonal, and Jack tore his eyes away from that red gaze just in time to duck low—he felt the head of the mace pass through the upper layer of his long hair a second before it ripped away a four-foot section of bannister and sent it sailing out into space.

A scraping clack of metal as the knight leaned toward him, its cocked helmet somehow a hideous and sarcastic parody of solicitude—then the mace drew back and up again for another of those portentous swings.

Jack, you didn’t need no magic juice to git ovah, and you don’t need no magic pick to pull the chain on this here coffee can, neither!

The mace came blasting through the air again—
wheeee-ossshhhh!
Jack lurched backward, sucking in his stomach; the web of muscles in his shoulders screamed as they pulled around the punctures the spiked gloves had left.

The mace missed the skin of his chest by less than an inch before passing beyond him and swiping through a line of thick mahogany balusters as if they had been toothpicks. Jack tottered on emptiness, feeling Buster Keatonish and absurd. He snatched at the ragged ruins of the bannister on his left and got splinters under two of his fingernails instead. The pain was so wire-thin excruciating that he thought for a moment that his eyeballs would explode with it. Then he got a good hold with his right hand and was able to stabilize himself and move away from the drop.

All the magic’s in YOU, Jack! Don’t you know that by now?

For a moment he only stood there, panting, and then he started up the stairs again, staring at the blank iron face above him.

“Better get thee gone, Sir Gawain.”

The knight cocked its great helmet again in that strangely delicate gesture—
Pardon, my boy . . . can you actually be speaking to me?
Then it swung the mace again.

Perhaps blinded by his fear, Jack hadn’t noticed until now how slow its setup for those swings was, how clearly it telegraphed the trajectory of each portentous blow. Maybe its joints were rusted, he thought. At any rate, it was easy enough for him to dive inside the circle of its swing now that his head was clear again.

He stood on his toes, reached up, and seized the black helmet in both hands. The metal was sickeningly warm—like hard skin that carried a fever.

“Get you off the skin of this world,” he said in a voice that was low and calm, almost conversational. “In
her
name I command you.”

The red light in the helmet puffed out like the candle inside a carved pumpkin, and suddenly the weight of the helmet—fifteen pounds at least—was all in Jack’s hands, because there was nothing else supporting it; beneath the helmet, the suit of armor had collapsed.

“You shoulda killed
both
of the Ellis brothers,” Jack said, and threw the empty helmet over the landing. It hit the floor far below with a hard
bang
and rolled away like a toy. The hotel seemed to cringe.

Jack turned toward the broad second-floor corridor, and here, at last, was light: clean, clear light, like that on the day he had seen the flying men in the sky. The hallway ended in another set of double doors and the doors were closed, but enough light came from above and below them, as well as through the vertical crack where they were latched together, to tell him that the light inside must be very bright indeed.

He wanted very badly to see that light, and the source of that light; he had come far to see it, and through much bitter darkness.

The doors were heavy and inlaid with delicate scrollwork. Written above them in gold leaf which had flaked a bit but which was still perfectly readable for a’ that an’ a’ that, were the words
TERRITORIES BALLROOM
.

“Hey, Mom,” Jack Sawyer said in a soft, wondering voice as he walked into that glow. Happiness lit his heart—that feeling was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. “Hey, Mom, I think I’m here, I really think I’m here.”

Gently then, and with awe, Jack grasped a handle with each hand, and pressed them down. He opened the doors, and as he did, a widening bar of clean white light fell on his upturned, wondering face.

7

Sunlight Gardener happened to be looking back up the beach at the exact moment Jack dispatched the last of the five Guardian Knights. He heard a dull boom, as if a low charge of dynamite had gone off somewhere inside the hotel. At the same moment, bright light flashed from all of the Agincourt’s second-floor windows, and all of the carved brass symbols—moons and stars and planetoids and weird crooked arrows—came to a simultaneous stop.

Gardener was decked out like some sort of goony Los Angeles SWAT squad cop. He had donned a puffy black flak-vest over his white shirt and carried a radio pack-set on a canvas strap over one shoulder. Its thick, stubby antenna wavered back and forth as he moved. Over his other shoulder was slung a Weatherbee .360. This was a hunting rifle almost as big as an anti-aircraft gun; it would have made Robert Ruark himself drool with envy. Gardener had bought it six years ago, after circumstances had dictated that he must get rid of his old hunting rifle. The Weatherbee’s genuine zebra-skin case was in the trunk of a black Cadillac, along with his son’s body.

“Morgan!”

Morgan did not turn around. He was standing behind and slightly to the left of a leaning grove of rocks that jutted out of the sand like black fangs. Twenty feet beyond this rock and only five feet above the high-tide line lay Speedy Parker, aka Parkus. As Parkus, he had once ordered Morgan of Orris marked—there were livid scars down the insides of that Morgan’s large white thighs, the marks by which a traitor is known in the Territories. It had only been through the intercession of Queen Laura herself that those scars had not been made to run down his cheeks instead of his inner thighs, where they were almost always hidden by his clothes. Morgan—this one as well as that one—had not loved the Queen any better for her intercession . . . but his hatred for Parkus, who had sniffed out that earlier plot, had grown exponentially.

Now Parkus/Parker lay face-down on the beach, his skull covered with festering sores. Blood dribbled listlessly from his ears.

Morgan wanted to believe that Parker was still alive, still suffering, but the last discernible rise and fall of his back had been just after he and Gardener arrived down here at these rocks, some five minutes ago.

When Gardener called, Morgan didn’t turn because he was rapt in his study of his old enemy, now fallen. Whoever had claimed revenge wasn’t sweet had been so wrong.

“Morgan!”
Gardener hissed again.

Morgan turned this time, frowning. “Well? What?”

“Look! The roof of the hotel!”

Morgan saw that all of the weathercocks and roof ornaments—beaten brass shapes which spun at exactly the same speed whether the wind was perfectly calm or howling up a hurricane—had stopped moving. At the same instant the earth rippled briefly under their feet and then was still again. It was as if a subterranean beast of enormous size had shrugged in its hibernal sleep. Morgan would almost have believed he had imagined it if it had not been for the widening of Gardener’s bloodshot eyes.
I’ll bet you wish you never left Indiana, Gard,
Morgan thought.
No earthquakes in Indiana, right?

Silent light flashed in all of the Agincourt’s windows again.

“What does it mean, Morgan?” Gardener asked hoarsely. His insane fury over the loss of his son had for the first time moderated into fear for himself, Morgan saw. That was a bore, but he could be whipped back into his previous frenzy again, if necessary. It was just that Morgan hated to have to waste energy on anything at this point that didn’t bear directly on the problem of ridding the world—
all the worlds
—of Jack Sawyer, who had begun as a pest and who had developed into the most monstrous problem of Sloat’s life.

Gardener’s pack-set squawked.

“Red Squad Leader Four to the Sunlight Man! Come in, Sunlight Man!”

“Sunlight Man here, Red Squad Leader Four,” Gardener snapped. “What’s up?”

In quick succession Gardener took four gabbling, excited reports that were all exactly the same. There was no intelligence the two of them hadn’t seen and felt for themselves—flashes of light, weathercocks at a standstill, something that might have been a ground-tremblor or possibly an earthquake preshock—but Gardener labored with sharp-eyed enthusiasm over each report just the same, asking sharp questions, snapping
“Over!”
at the end of each transmission, sometimes breaking in with “Say again” or “Roger.” Sloat thought he was acting like a bit player in a disaster movie.

But if it eased him, that was fine with Sloat. It saved him from having to answer Gardener’s question . . . and now that he thought about it, he supposed it was just possible that Gardener didn’t
want
his question answered, and that was why he was going through this rigmarole with the radio.

The Guardians were dead, or out of commission. That was why the weathercocks had stopped, and that’s what the flashes of light meant. Jack didn’t have the Talisman . . . at least, not yet. If he got that, things in Point Venuti would
really
shake, rattle, and roll. And Sloat now thought that Jack
would
get it . . . that he had always been
meant
to get it. This did not frighten him, however.

His hand reached up and touched the key around his neck.

Gardener had run out of
overs
and
rogers
and
ten-fours
. He reshouldered the pack-set and looked at Morgan with wide, frightened eyes. Before he could say a word, Morgan put gentle hands on Gardener’s shoulders. If he could feel love for anyone other than his poor dead son, he felt love—of a twisted variety, most certainly—for this man. They went back a long way, both as Morgan of Orris and Osmond and as Morgan Sloat and Robert “Sunlight” Gardener.

It had been with a rifle much like the one now slung over Gardener’s shoulder that Gardener had shot Phil Sawyer in Utah.

“Listen, Gard,” he said calmly. “We are going to win.”

“Are you sure of that?” Gardener whispered. “I think he’s killed the Guardians, Morgan. I know that sounds crazy, but I realy think—” He stopped, mouth trembling infirmly, lips sheened with a thin membrane of spittle.

“We are going to win,” Morgan repeated in that same calm voice, and he meant it. There was a sense of clear predestination in him. He had waited many years for this; his resolve had been true; it remained true now. Jack would come out with the Talisman in his arms. It was a thing of immense power . . . but it was fragile.

He looked at the scoped Weatherbee, which could drop a charging rhino, and then he touched the key that brought the lightning.

“We’re well equipped to deal with him when he comes out,” Morgan said, and added, “In either world. Just as long as you keep your courage, Gard. As long as you stick right by me.”

The trembling lips firmed a bit. “Morgan, of course I’ll—”

“Remember who killed your son,” Morgan said softly.

At the same instant that Jack Sawyer had jammed the burning coin into the forehead of a monstrosity in the Territories, Reuel Gardener, who had been afflicted with relatively harmless petit mal epileptic seizures ever since the age of six (the same age at which Osmond’s son had begun to show signs of what was called Blasted Lands Sickness), apparently suffered a grand mal seizure in the back of a Wolf-driven Cadillac on I-70, westbound to California from Illinois.

He had died, purple and strangling, in Sunlight Gardener’s arms.

Gardener’s eyes now began to bulge.

“Remember,” Morgan repeated softly.

“Bad,” Gardener whispered. “All boys. Axiomatic. That boy in particular.”

“Right!” Morgan agreed. “Hold that thought! We can stop him, but I want to make damn sure that he can only come out of the hotel on dry land.”

He led Gardener down to the rock where he had been watching Parker. Flies—bloated albino flies—had begun to light on the dead nigger, Morgan observed. That was just as fine as paint with him. If there had been a
Variety
magazine for flies, Morgan would gladly have bought space, advertising Parker’s location. Come one, come all. They would lay their eggs in the folds of his decaying flesh, and the man who had scarred his Twinner’s thighs would give birth to maggots. That was fine indeed.

He pointed out toward the dock.

“The raft’s under there,” he said. “It looks like a horse, Christ knows why. It’s in the shadows, I know. But you were always a hell of a shot. If you can pick it up, Gard, put a couple of bullets in it. Sink the fucking thing.”

Gardener unshouldered the rifle and peered into the scope. For a long time the muzzle of the big gun wandered minutely back and forth.

“I see it,” Gardener whispered in a gloating voice, and triggered the gun. The echo pealed off across the water in a long curl that at last Dopplered away into nothing. The barrel of the gun rose, then came back down. Gardener fired again. And again.