The Talisman

  The Talisman. The Talisman is--

  The key?

  No; oh no.

  Not a key but a door; a locked door standing between him and his destiny. He did not want to open that door but to destroy it, destroy it utterly and completely and eternally, so it could never be shut again, let alone locked.

  When the Talisman was smashed, all those worlds would be his worlds.

  "Gard!" he said, and began to pace jerkily again.

  Gardener looked at Morgan questioningly.

  "What does it profit a man?" Morgan chirruped brightly.

  "My Lord? I don't underst--"

  Morgan stopped in front of Gardener, his eyes feverish and sparkling. His face rippled. Became the face of Morgan of Orris. Became the face of Morgan Sloat again.

  "It profits a man the world," Morgan said, putting his hands on Osmond's shoulders. When he took them away a second later, Osmond was Gardener again. "It profits a man the world, and the world is enough."

  "My Lord, you don't understand," Gardener said, looking at Morgan as if he might be crazy. "I think they've gone inside. Inside where IT is. We tried to shoot them, but the creatures . . . the deep-creatures . . . rose up and protected them, just as The Book of Good Farming said they would . . . and if they're inside . . ." Gardener's voice was rising. Osmond's eyes rolled with mingled hate and dismay.

  "I understand," Morgan said comfortingly. His face and voice were calm again, but his fists worked and worked, and blood dribbled down onto the mildewy carpet. "Yessirree-bob, yes-indeedy-doo, rooty-patootie. They've gone in, and my son is never going to come out. You've lost yours, Gard, and now I've lost mine."

  "Sawyer!" Gardener barked. "Jack Sawyer! Jason! That--"

  Gardener lapsed into a horrible bout of cursing that went on for nearly five minutes. He cursed Jack in two languages; his voice racketed and perspired with grief and insane rage. Morgan stood there and let him get it all out of his system.

  When Gardener paused, panting, and took another swallow from the flask, Morgan said:

  "Right! Doubled in brass! Now listen, Gard--are you listening?"

  "Yes, my Lord."

  Gardener/Osmond's eyes were bright with bitter attention.

  "My son is never going to come out of the black hotel, and I don't think Sawyer ever will, either. There's a very good chance that he isn't Jason enough yet to deal with what's in there. IT will probably kill him, or drive him mad, or send him a hundred worlds away. But he may come out, Gard. Yes, he may."

  "He's the baddest baddest bitch's bastard to ever draw breath," Gardener whispered. His hand tightened on the flask . . . tightened . . . tightened . . . and now his fingers actually began to make dents in the steel shell.

  "You say the old nigger man is down on the beach?"

  "Yes."

  "Parker," Morgan said, and at the same moment Osmond said, "Parkus."

  "Dead?" Morgan asked this without much interest.

  "I don't know. I think so. Shall I send men down to pick him up?"

  "No!" Morgan said sharply. "No--but we're going down near where he is, aren't we, Gard?"

  "We are?"

  Morgan began to grin.

  "Yes. You . . . me . . . all of us. Because if Jack comes out of the hotel, he'll go there first. He won't leave his old nightfighting buddy on the beach, will he?"

  Now Gardener also began to grin. "No," he said. "No."

  For the first time Morgan became aware of dull and throbbing pain in his hands. He opened them and looked thoughtfully at the blood which flowed out of the deep semi-circular wounds in his palms. His grin did not falter. Indeed, it widened.

  Gardener was staring at him solemnly. A great sense of power filled Morgan. He reached up to his neck and closed one bloody hand over the key that brought the lightning.

  "It profits a man the world," he whispered. "Can you gimme hallelujah."

  His lips pulled even farther back. He grinned the sick yellow grin of a rogue wolf--a wolf that is old but still sly and tenacious and powerful.

  "Come on, Gard," he said. "Let's go to the beach."

  41

  The Black Hotel

  1

  Richard Sloat wasn't dead, but when Jack picked his old friend up in his arms, he was unconscious.

  Who's the herd now? Wolf asked in his head. Be careful, Jacky! Wolf! Be--

  COME TO ME! COME NOW! the Talisman sang in its powerful, soundless voice. COME TO ME, BRING THE HERD, AND ALL WILL BE WELL AND ALL WILL BE WELL AND--

  "--a' manner a' things wi' be well," Jack croaked.

  He started forward and came within an inch of stepping right back through the trapdoor, like a kid participating in some bizarre double execution by hanging. Swing with a Friend, Jack thought crazily. His heart was hammering in his ears, and for a moment he thought he might vomit straight down into the gray water slapping at the pilings. Then he caught hold of himself and closed the trapdoor with his foot. Now there was only the sound of the weathervanes--cabalistic brass designs spinning restlessly in the sky.

  Jack turned toward the Agincourt.

  He was on a wide deck like an elevated verandah, he saw. Once, fashionable twenties and thirties folk had sat out here at the cocktail hour under the shade of umbrellas, drinking gin rickeys and sidecars, perhaps reading the latest Edgar Wallace or Ellery Queen novel, perhaps only looking out toward where Los Cavernes Island could be dimly glimpsed--a blue-gray whale's hump dreaming on the horizon. The men in whites, the women in pastels.

  Once, maybe.

  Now the boards were warped and twisted and splintered. Jack didn't know what color the deck had been painted before, but now it had gone black, like the rest of the hotel--the color of this place was the color he imagined the malignant tumors in his mother's lungs must be.

  Twenty feet away were Speedy's "window-doors," through which guests would have passed back and forth in those dim old days. They had been soaped over in wide white strokes so that they looked like blind eyes.

  Written on one was:

  YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GO HOME

  Sound of the waves. Sound of the twirling ironmongery on the angled roofs. Stink of sea-salt and old spilled drinks--drinks spilled long ago by beautiful people who were now wrinkled and dead. Stink of the hotel itself. He looked at the soaped window again and saw with no real surprise that the message had already changed.

  SHE'S ALREADY DEAD JACK SO WHY BOTHER?

  (now who's the herd?)

  "You are, Richie," Jack said, "but you ain't alone."

  Richard made a snoring, protesting sound in Jack's arms. "Come on," Jack said, and began to walk. "One more mile. Give or take."

  2

  The soaped-over windows actually seemed to widen as Jack walked toward the Agincourt, as if the black hotel were now regarding him with blind but contemptuous surprise.

  Do you really think, little boy, that you can come in here and really hope to ever come out? Do you think there's really that much Jason in you?

  Red sparks, like those he had seen in the air, flashed and twisted across the soaped glass. For a moment they took form. Jack watched, wondering, as they became tiny fire-imps. They skated down to the brass handles of the doors and converged there. The handles began to glow dully, like a smith's iron in the forge.

  Go on, little boy. Touch one. Try.

  Once, as a kid of six, Jack had put his finger on the cold coil of an electric range and had then turned the control knob onto the HIGH setting. He had simply been curious about how fast the burner would heat up. A second later he had pulled his finger, already blistering, away with a yell of pain. Phil Sawyer had come running, taken a look, and had asked Jack when he had started to feel this weird compulsion to burn himself alive.

  Jack stood with Richard in his arms, looking at the dully glowing handles.

  Go on, little boy. Remember how the stove burned? You thought you'd have plenty of time to pull your finger off--"Hell," you thought, "the thing doesn't even start to get red for
almost a minute"--but it burned right away, didn't it? Now, how do you think this is going to feel, Jack?

  More red sparks skated liquidly down the glass to the handles of the French doors. The handles began to take on the delicate red-edged-with-white look of metal which is no more than six degrees from turning molten and starting to drip. If he touched one of those handles it would sink into his flesh, charring tissue and boiling blood. The agony would be like nothing he had ever felt before.

  He waited for a moment with Richard in his arms, hoping the Talisman would call him again, or that the "Jason-side" of him would surface. But it was his mother's voice that rasped in his head.

  Has something or someone always got to push you, Jack-O? Come on, big guy--you set this going by yourself; you can keep going if you really want to. Has that other guy got to do everything for you?

  "Okay, Mom," Jack said. He was smiling a little, but his voice was trembling with fright. "Here's one for you. I just hope someone remembered to pack the Solarcaine."

  He reached out and grasped one of the red-hot handles.

  Except it wasn't; the whole thing had been an illusion. The handle was warm, but that was all. As Jack turned it, the red glow died from all the handles. And as he pushed the glass door inward, the Talisman sang out again, bringing gooseflesh out all over his body:

  WELL DONE! JASON! TO ME! COME TO ME!

  With Richard in his arms, Jack stepped into the dining room of the black hotel.

  3

  As he crossed the threshold, he felt an inanimate force--something like a dead hand--try to shove him back out. Jack pushed against it, and a second or two later, that feeling of being repelled ceased.

  The room was not particularly dark--but the soaped windows gave it a monochrome whiteness Jack did not like. He felt fogged in, blind. Here were yellow smells of decay inside walls where the plaster was slowly turning to a vile soup: the smells of empty age and sour darkness. But there was more here, and Jack knew it and feared it.

  Because this place was not empty.

  Exactly what manner of things might be here he did not know--but he knew that Sloat had never dared to come in, and he guessed that no one else would, either. The air was heavy and unpleasant in his lungs, as if filled with a slow poison. He felt the strange levels and canted passageways and secret rooms and dead ends above him pressing down like the walls of a great and complex crypt. There was madness here, and walking death, and gibbering irrationality. Jack might not have had the words to express these things, but he felt them, all the same . . . he knew them for what they were. Just as he knew that all the Talismans in the cosmos could not protect him from those things. He had entered a strange, dancing ritual whose conclusion, he felt, was not at all pre-ordained.

  He was on his own.

  Something tickled against the back of his neck. Jack swept his hand at it and skittered to one side. Richard moaned thickly in his arms.

  It was a large black spider hanging on a thread. Jack looked up and saw its web in one of the stilled overhead fans, tangled in a dirty snarl between the hardwood blades. The spider's body was bloated. Jack could see its eyes. He couldn't remember ever having seen a spider's eyes before. Jack began to edge around the hanging spider toward the tables. The spider turned at the end of its thread, following him.

  "Fushing feef!" it suddenly squealed at him.

  Jack screamed and clutched Richard against him with panicky, galvanic force. His scream echoed across the high-ceilinged dining room. Somewhere in the shadows beyond, there was a hollow metallic clank, and something laughed.

  "Fushing feef, fushing FEEF!" the spider squealed, and then suddenly it scuttled back up into its web below the scrolled tin ceiling.

  Heart thumping, Jack crossed the dining room and put Richard on one of the tables. The boy moaned again, very faintly. Jack could feel the twisted bumps under Richard's clothes.

  "Got to leave you for a little while, buddy," Jack said.

  From the shadows high above: ". . . I'll take . . . take good . . . good care of him you fushing . . . fushing feef . . ." There was a dark, buzzing little giggle.

  There was a pile of linen underneath the table where Jack had laid Richard down. The top two or three tablecloths were slimy with mildew, but halfway through the pile he found one that wasn't too bad. He spread it out and covered Richard with it to the neck. He started away.

  The voice of the spider whispered thinly down from the angle of the fan-blades, down from a darkness that stank of decaying flies and silk-wrapped wasps. ". . . I'll take care of him, you fushing feef . . ."

  Jack looked up, cold, but he couldn't see the spider. He could imagine those cold little eyes, but imagination was all it was. A tormenting, sickening picture came to him: that spider scuttling onto Richard's face, burrowing its way between Richard's slack lips and into Richard's mouth, crooning all the while fushing feef, fushing feef, fushing feef . . .

  He thought of pulling the tablecloth up over Richard's mouth as well, and discovered he could not bring himself to turn Richard into something that would look so much like a corpse--it was almost like an invitation.

  He went back to Richard and stood there, indecisive, knowing that his very indecision must make whatever forces there were here very happy indeed--anything to keep him away from the Talisman.

  He reached into his pocket and came out with the large dark green marble. The magic mirror in the other world. Jack had no reason to believe it contained any special power against evil forces, but it came from the Territories . . . and, Blasted Lands aside, the Territories were innately good. And innate goodness, Jack reasoned, must have its own power over evil.

  He folded the marble into Richard's hand. Richard's hand closed, then fell slowly open again as soon as Jack removed his own hand.

  From somewhere overhead, the spider chuffed dirty laughter.

  Jack bent low over Richard, trying to ignore the smell of disease--so like the smell of this place--and murmured, "Hold it in your hand, Richie. Hold it tight, chum."

  "Don't . . . chum," Richard muttered, but his hand closed weakly on the marble.

  "Thanks, Richie-boy," Jack said. He kissed Richard's cheek gently and then started across the dining room toward the closed double doors at the far end. It's like the Alhambra, he thought. Dining room giving on the gardens there, dining room giving on a deck over the water here. Double doors in both places, opening on the rest of the hotel.

  As he crossed the room, he felt that dead hand pushing against him again--it was the hotel repelling him, trying to push him back out.

  Forget it, Jack thought, and kept going.

  The force seemed to fade almost at once.

  We have other ways, the double doors whispered as he approached them. Again, Jack heard the dim, hollow clank of metal.

  You're worried about Sloat, the double doors whispered; only now it wasn't just them--now the voice Jack was hearing was the voice of the entire hotel. You're worried about Sloat, and bad Wolfs, and things that look like goats, and basketball coaches who aren't really basketball coaches; you're worried about guns and plastic explosive and magic keys. We in here don't worry about any of those things, little one. They are nothing to us. Morgan Sloat is no more than a scurrying ant. He has only twenty years to live, and that is less than the space between breaths to us. We in the Black Hotel care only for the Talisman--the nexus of all possible worlds. You've come as a burglar to rob us of what is ours, and we tell you once more: we have other ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. And if you persist, you'll find out what they are--you'll find out for yourself.

  4

  Jack pushed open first one of the double doors, then the other. The casters squealed unpleasantly as they rolled along their recessed tracks for the first time in years.

  Beyond the doors was a dark hallway. That'll go to the lobby, Jack thought. And then, if this place really is the same as the Alhambra, I'll have to go up the main staircase one flight.

  On the second
floor he would find the grand ballroom. And in the grand ballroom, he would find the thing he had come for.

  Jack took one look back, saw that Richard hadn't moved, and stepped into the hallway. He closed the doors behind him.

  He began to move slowly along the corridor, his frayed and dirty sneakers whispering over the rotting carpet.

  A little farther down, Jack could see another set of double doors, with birds painted on them.

  Closer by were a number of meeting-rooms. Here was the Golden State Room, directly opposite the Forty-Niner Room. Five paces farther up toward the double doors with the painted birds was the Mendocino Room (hacked into a lower panel of the mahogany door: YOUR MOTHER DIED SCREAMING!). Far down the corridor--impossibly far!--was watery light. The lobby.

  Clank.

  Jack wheeled around fast, and caught a glimmer of movement just beyond one of the peaked doorways in the stone throat of this corridor--

  (?stones?) (?peaked doorways?)

  Jack blinked uneasily. The corridor was lined with dark mahogany panelling which had now begun to rot in the oceanside damp. No stone. And the doors giving on the Golden State Room and the Forty-Niner Room and the Mendocino Room were just doors, sensibly rectangular and with no peaks. Yet for one moment he had seemed to see openings like modified cathedral arches. Filling these openings had been iron drop-gates--the sort that could be raised or lowered by turning a windlass. Drop-gates with hungry-looking iron spikes at the bottom. When the gate was lowered to block the entrance, the spikes fitted neatly into holes in the floor.

  No stone archways, Jack-O. See for yourself. Just doorways. You saw drop-gates like that in the Tower of London, on that tour you went on with Mom and Uncle Tommy, three years ago. You're just freaking a little, that's all . . .

  But the feeling in the pit of his stomach was unmistakable.

  They were there, all right. I flipped--for just a second I was in the Territories.

  Clank.

  Jack whirled back the other way, sweat breaking out on his cheeks and forehead, hair beginning to stiffen on the nape of his neck.

  He saw it again--a flash of something metallic in the shadows of one of those rooms. He saw huge stones as black as sin, their rough surfaces splotched with green moss. Nasty, soft-looking albino bugs squirmed in and out of the large pores of the decaying mortar between the stones. Empty sconces stood at fifteen-or twenty-foot intervals. The torches that the sconces had once held were long since gone.