The Talisman

  Another high wave rocked the raft and threatened to push both raft and Jack Sawyer back toward the beach.

  Wave, Jack thought, what wave?

  He looked up over the front of the raft as soon as it dipped again into a trough. The broad gray back of something surely too large to be a mere fish was sinking beneath the surface. A shark? Jack was uneasily conscious of his two legs fluttering out behind him in the water. He ducked his head under, afraid he'd see a long cigar-shaped stomach with teeth sweeping toward him.

  He did not see that shape, not exactly, but what he saw astounded him.

  The water, which appeared now to be very deep, was as full as an aquarium, though one containing no fish of normal size or description. In this aquarium only monsters swam. Beneath Jack's legs moved a zoo of outsize, sometimes horrendously ugly animals. They must have been beneath him and the raft ever since the water had grown deep enough to accommodate them, for the water was crowded everywhere. The thing that had frightened the renegade Wolfs glided by ten feet down, long as a southbound freight train. It moved upward as he watched. A film over its eyes blinked. Long whiskers trailed back from its cavernous mouth--it had a mouth like an elevator door, Jack thought. The creature glided past him, pushing Jack closer to the hotel with the weight of the water it displaced, and raised its dripping snout above the surface. Its furry profile resembled Neanderthal Man's.

  Ole Bloat and his boys gotta steer clear of the water, Speedy had told him, and laughed.

  Whatever force had sealed the Talisman in the black hotel had set these creatures in the waters off Point Venuti to make sure that the wrong people kept away; and Speedy had known it. The great bodies of the creatures in the water delicately nudged the raft nearer and nearer the pilings, but the waves they made kept Jack from getting all but the most fragmentary view of what was happening on shore.

  He rode up a crest and saw Sunlight Gardener, his hair flowing out behind him, standing beside the black fence levelling a long heavy hunting rifle at his head. The raft sank into the trough; the shell sizzled past far overhead with the noise of a hummingbird's passing; the report came. When Gardener shot next, a fishlike thing ten feet long with a great sail of a dorsal fin rose straight up out of the water and stopped the bullet. In one motion, the creature rolled back down and sliced into the water again. Jack saw a great ragged hole in its side. The next time he rode up a crest, Gardener was trotting off across the beach, clearly on his way to the Kingsland Motel. The giant fish continued to wash him diagonally forward toward the pilings.

  5

  A ladder, Speedy had said, and as soon as Jack was under the wide deck he peered through the gloom to try to find it. The thick pilings, encrusted with algae and barnacles and dripping with seaweed, stood in four rows. If the ladder had been installed at the time the deck was built it might easily be useless now--at the least a wooden ladder would be hard to see, overgrown with weed and barnacles. The big shaggy pilings were now much thicker than they had been originally. Jack got his forearms over the back of the raft and used the thick rubbery tail to lever himself back inside. Then, shivering, he unbuttoned his sodden shirt--the same white button-down, at least one size too small, Richard had given him on the other side of the Blasted Lands--and dropped it squashily in the bottom of the raft. His shoes had fallen off in the water, and he peeled off the wet socks and tossed them on top of the shirt. Richard sat in the bow of the raft, slouching forward over his knees, his eyes shut and his mouth closed.

  "We're looking for a ladder," Jack said.

  Richard acknowledged this with a barely perceptible movement of his head.

  "Do you think you could get up a ladder, Richie?"

  "Maybe," Richard whispered.

  "Well, it's around here somewhere. Probably attached to one of these pilings."

  Jack paddled with both hands, bringing the raft between two of the pilings in the first row. The Talisman's call was continuous now, and seemed nearly strong enough to pick him up out of the raft and deposit him on the deck. They were drifting between the first and second rows of pilings, already under the heavy black line of the deck above; here as well as outside, little red flares ignited in the air, twisted, winked out. Jack counted: four rows of pilings, five pilings in each row. Twenty places where the ladder might be. With the darkness beneath the deck and the endless refinements of corridors suggested by the pilings, being here was like taking a tour of the Catacombs.

  "They didn't shoot us," Richard said without affect. In the same tone of voice he might have said, "The store is out of bread."

  "We had some help." He looked at Richard, slumped over his knees. Richard would never be able to get up a ladder unless he were somehow galvanized.

  "We're coming up to a piling," Jack said. "Lean forward and shove us off, will you?"

  "What?"

  "Keep us from bumping into the piling," Jack repeated. "Come on, Richard. I need your help."

  It seemed to work. Richard cracked open his left eye and put his right hand on the edge of the raft. As they drifted nearer to the thick piling he held out his left hand to deflect them. Then something on the pillar made a smacking sound, as of lips pulled wetly apart.

  Richard grunted and retracted his hand.

  "What was it?" Jack said, and Richard did not have to answer--now both boys saw the sluglike creatures clinging to the pilings. Their eyes had been closed, too, and their mouths. Agitated, they began to shift positions on their pillars, clattering their teeth. Jack put his hands in the water and swung the bow of the raft around the piling.

  "Oh God," Richard said. Those lipless tiny mouths held a quantity of teeth. "God, I can't take--"

  "You have to take it, Richard," Jack said. "Didn't you hear Speedy back there on the beach? He might even be dead now, Richard, and if he is, he died so he could be certain that I knew you had to go in the hotel."

  Richard had closed his eyes again.

  "And I don't care how many slugs we have to kill to get up the ladder, you are going up the ladder, Richard. That's all. That's it."

  "Shit on you," Richard said. "You don't have to talk to me like that. I'm sick of you being so high and mighty. I know I'm going up the ladder, wherever it is. I probably have a fever of a hundred and five, but I know I'm going up that ladder. I just don't know if I can take it. So to hell with you." Richard had uttered this entire speech with his eyes shut. He effortfully forced both eyes open again. "Nuts."

  "I need you," Jack said.

  "Nuts. I'll get up the ladder, you asshole."

  "In that case, I'd better find it," Jack said, pushed the raft forward toward the next row of pilings, and saw it.

  6

  The ladder hung straight down between the two inner rows of pilings, ending some four feet above the surface of the water. A dim rectangle at the top of the ladder indicated that a trapdoor opened onto the deck. In the darkness it was only the ghost of a ladder, half-visible.

  "We're in business, Richie," Jack said. He guided the raft carefully past the next piling, making sure not to scrape against it. The hundreds of sluglike creatures clinging to the piling bared their teeth. In seconds the horse's head at the front of the raft was gliding beneath the bottom of the ladder, and then Jack could reach up to grab the bottom rung. "Okay," he said. First he tied one sleeve of his sodden shirt around the rung, the other around the stiff rubbery tail next to him. At least the raft would still be there--if they ever got out of the hotel. Jack's mouth abruptly dried. The Talisman sang out, calling to him. He stood up carefully in the raft and hung on to the ladder. "You first," he said. "It's not going to be easy, but I'll help you."

  "Don't need your help," Richard said. Standing up, he nearly pitched forward and threw both of them out of the raft.

  "Easy now."

  "Don't easy me." Richard extended both arms and steadied himself. His mouth was pinched. He looked afraid to breathe. He stepped forward.

  "Good."

  "Asshole." Richard moved his left foot
forward, raised his right arm, brought his right foot forward. Now he could find the bottom of the ladder with his hands, as he fiercely squinted through his right eye. "See?"

  "Okay," Jack said, holding both hands palm-out before him, fingers extended, indicating that he would not insult Richard with the offer of physical aid.

  Richard pulled on the ladder with his hands, and his feet slid irresistibly forward, pushing the raft with them. In a second he was suspended half over the water--only Jack's shirt kept the raft from zooming out from under Richard's feet.

  "Help!"

  "Pull your feet back."

  Richard did so, and stood upright again, breathing hard.

  "Let me give you a hand, okay?"

  "Okay."

  Jack crawled along the raft until he was immediately before Richard. He stood up with great care. Richard gripped the bottom rung with both hands, trembling. Jack put his hands on Richard's skinny hips. "I'm going to help lift you. Try not to kick out with your feet--just pull yourself up high enough to get your knee on the rung. First put your hands up on the next one." Richard cracked open an eye and did so.

  "You ready?"

  "Go."

  The raft slid forward, but Jack yanked Richard upright so high that he could easily place his right knee on the bottom rung. Then Jack grabbed the sides of the ladder and used the strength in his arms and legs to stabilize the raft. Richard was grunting, trying to get his other knee on the rung; in a second he had done it. In another two seconds, Richard Sloat stood upright on the ladder.

  "I can't go any farther," he said. "I think I'm going to fall off. I feel so sick, Jack."

  "Just go up one more, please. Please. Then I can help you."

  Richard wearily moved his hands up a rung. Jack, looking toward the deck, saw that the ladder must be thirty feet long. "Now move your feet. Please, Richard."

  Richard slowly placed one foot, then the next, on the second rung.

  Jack placed his hands on the outsides of Richard's feet and pulled himself up. The raft swung out in a looping half-circle, but he raised his knees and got both legs securely on the lowest rung. Held by Jack's outstretched shirt, the raft swung back around like a dog on a leash.

  A third of the way up the ladder, Jack had to put one arm around Richard's waist to keep him from falling into the black water.

  At last the rectangular square of the trapdoor floated in the black wood directly above Jack's head. He clamped Richard to himself--his unconscious head fell against Jack's chest--by reaching around both Richard and ladder with his left hand, and tried the trapdoor with his right. Suppose it had been nailed shut? But it swung up immediately and banged flat against the top of the deck. Jack got his left arm firmly under Richard's armpits and hauled him up out of the blackness and through the hole in the deck.

  Interlude

  Sloat in This World (V)

  The Kingsland Motel had been empty for nearly six years, and it had the mouldy yellow-newspaper smell of buildings that have been deserted for a long time. This smell had disturbed Sloat at first. His maternal grandmother had died at home when Sloat was a boy--it had taken her four years, but she had finally made the grade--and the smell of her dying had been like this. He did not want such a smell, or such memories, at a moment which was supposed to be his greatest triumph.

  Now, however, it didn't matter. Not even the infuriating losses inflicted on him by Jack's early arrival at Camp Readiness mattered. His earlier feelings of dismay and fury had turned into a frenzy of nervous excitement. Head down, lips twitching, eyes bright, he strode back and forth through the room where he and Richard had stayed in the old days. Sometimes he locked his hands behind his back, sometimes he slammed one fist into the other palm, sometimes he stroked his bald pate. Mostly, however, he paced as he had in college, with his hands clenched into tight and somehow anal little fists, the hidden nails digging viciously into his palms. His stomach was by turns sour and giddily light.

  Things were coming to a head.

  No; no. Right idea, wrong phrase.

  Things were coming together.

  Richard is dead by now. My son is dead. Got to be. He survived the Blasted Lands--barely--but he'll never survive the Agincourt. He's dead. Hold out no false hope for yourself on that score. Jack Sawyer killed him, and I'll gouge the eyes out of his living head for it.

  "But I killed him, too," Morgan whispered, stopping for a moment.

  Suddenly he thought of his father.

  Gordon Sloat had been a dour Lutheran minister in Ohio--Morgan had spent his whole boyhood trying to flee that harsh and frightening man. Finally he had escaped to Yale. He had set his entire mind and spirit on Yale in his sophomore year of high school for one reason above all others, unadmitted by his conscious mind but as deep as bedrock: it was a place where his rude, rural father would never dare to come. If his father ever tried to set foot on the Yale campus, something would happen to him. Just what that something might be, the high-school-age Sloat was not sure . . . but it would be roughly akin, he felt, to what had happened to the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw the bucket of water over her. And this insight seemed to have been true: his father never had set foot on the Yale campus. From Morgan's first day there, Gordon Sloat's power over his son had begun to wane--that alone made all the striving and effort seem worthwhile.

  But now, as he stood with his fists clenched and his nails digging into his soft palms, his father spoke up: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

  For a moment that wet yellow smell--the empty-motel-smell, the grandmother-smell, the death-smell--filled his nostrils, seeming to choke him, and Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris was afraid.

  What does it profit a man--

  For it says in The Book of Good Farming that a man shall not bring the get of his seed to any place of sacrifice, for what--

  What does it profit--

  That man shall be damned, and damned, and damned

  --a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

  Stinking plaster. The dry smell of vintage mouseturds turning to powder in the dark spaces behind the walls. Crazies. There were crazies in the streets.

  What does it profit a man?

  Dead. One son dead in that world, one son dead in this.

  What does it profit a man?

  Your son is dead, Morgan. Must be. Dead in the water, or dead under the pilings and floating around under there, or dead--for sure!--topside. Couldn't take it. Couldn't--

  What does it profit--

  And suddenly the answer came to him.

  "It profits a man the world!" Morgan shouted in the decaying room. He began to laugh and pace again. "It profits a man the world, and by Jason, the world is enough!"

  Laughing, he began to pace faster and faster, and before long, blood had begun to drip out of his clenched fists.

  A car pulled up out front about ten minutes later. Morgan went to the window and saw Sunlight Gardener come bursting out of the Cadillac.

  Seconds later he was hammering on the door with both fists, like a tantrumy three-year-old hammering on the floor. Morgan saw that the man had gone utterly crazy, and wondered if this was good or bad.

  "Morgan!" Gardener bellowed. "Open for me, my Lord! News! I have news!"

  I saw all your news through my binoculars, I think. Hammer on that door awhile longer, Gardener, while I make up my mind on this. Is it good that you should be crazy, or is it bad?

  Good, Morgan decided. In Indiana, Gardener had turned Sunlight Yellow at the crucial moment and had fled without taking care of Jack once and for all. But now his wild grief had made him trustworthy again. If Morgan needed a kamikaze pilot, Sunlight Gardener would be the first one to the planes.

  "Open for me, my Lord! News! News! N--"

  Morgan opened the door. Although he himself was wildly excited, the face he presented to Gardener was almost eerily serene.

  "Easy," he said. "Easy, Gard. You'll pop a blood vessel.
"

  "They've gone to the hotel . . . the beach . . . shot at them while they were on the beach . . . stupid assholes missed . . . in the water, I thought . . . we'll get them in the water . . . then the deep-creatures rose up . . . I had him in my sights . . . I had that bad bad boy RIGHT IN MY SIGHTS . . . and then . . . the creatures . . . they . . . they . . ."

  "Slow down," Morgan said soothingly. He closed the door and took a flask out of his inside pocket. He handed it to Gardener, who spun the cap off and took two huge gulps. Morgan waited. His face was benign, serene, but a vein pulsed in the center of his forehead and his hands opened and closed, opened and closed.

  Gone to the hotel, yes. Morgan had seen the ridiculous raft with its painted horse's head and its rubber tail bobbing its way out there.

  "My son," he said to Gardener. "Do your men say he was alive or dead when Jack put him in the raft?"

  Gardener shook his head--but his eyes said what he believed. "No one knows for sure, my Lord. Some say they saw him move. Some say not."

  Doesn't matter. If he wasn't dead then, he's dead now. One breath of the air in that place and his lungs will explode.

  Gardener's cheeks were full of whiskey-color and his eyes were watering. He didn't give the flask back but stood holding it. That was fine with Sloat. He wanted neither whiskey nor cocaine. He was on what those sixties slobs had called a natural high.

  "Start over," Morgan said, "and this time be coherent."

  The only thing Gardener had to tell that Morgan hadn't gleaned from the man's first broken outburst was the fact of the old nigger's presence down on the beach, and he almost could have guessed that. Still, he let Gardener go on. Gardener's voice was soothing, his rage invigorating.

  As Gardener talked, Morgan ran over his options one final time, dismissing his son from the equation with a brief throb of regret.

  What does it profit a man? It profits a man the world, and the world is enough . . . or, in this case, worlds. Two to start with, and more when and if they play out. I can rule them all if I like--I can be something like the God of the Universe.