COME I NEED YOU NOW, sang out the Talisman. YOU
ARE RIGHT IT IS NOT AS GREAT AS IT WANTS YOU
TO BELIEVE.
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•
•
•
At the top of the last hill he stopped and looked down. There they were, all right, all of them. And there was the black hotel, all of it. Main Street descended to the beach, which was white sand interrupted by big outcroppings of rocks like jagged discolored teeth. The Agincourt reared up a short distance off to his left, flanked on the ocean side by a massive stone breakwater running far out into the water. Before it, stretching out in a line, a dozen long black limousines, some dusty, others as polished as mirrors, sat, their motors running. Streamers of white exhaust, low-flying clouds whiter than the air, drifted out from many of the cars. Men in FBI-agent black suits pa-trolled along the fence, holding their hands up to their eyes.
When Jack saw two red flashes of light stab out before one of the men’s faces, he reflexively dodged sideways around the
side of the little houses, moving before he was actually conscious that the men carried binoculars.
For a second or two, he must have looked like a beacon,
standing upright at the brow of a hill. Knowing that a momentary carelessness had nearly led to his capture, Jack breathed hard for a moment and rested his shoulder against the peeling gray shingles of the house. Jack hitched Richard up to a more comfortable position on his back.
Anyhow, now he knew that he would somehow have to ap-
proach the black hotel from its sea side, which meant getting across the beach unseen.
When he straightened up again, he peeked around the side
of the house and looked downhill. Morgan Sloat’s reduced
army sat in its limousines or, random as ants, milled before the high black fence. For a crazy moment Jack recalled with total precision his first sight of the Queen’s summer palace.
Then, too, he had stood above a scene crowded with people
moving back and forth with apparent randomness. What was
it like there, now? On that day—which seemed to have taken
place in prehistory, so far must he look back—the crowds before the pavillion, the entire scene, had in spite of all an undeniable aura of peace, of order. That would be gone now, Jack knew. Now Osmond would rule the scene before the great
tentlike structure, and those people brave enough to enter the pavillion would scurry in, heads averted. And what of the
Queen? Jack wondered. He could not help remembering that
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shockingly familiar face cradled in the whiteness of bed
linen.
And then Jack’s heart nearly froze, and the vision of the
pavillion and the sick Queen dropped back into a slot in
Jack’s memory. Sunlight Gardener strolled into Jack’s line of vision, a bullhorn in his hand. Wind from the sea blew a thick strand of white hair across his sunglasses. For a second Jack was sure that he could smell his odor of sweet cologne and
jungle rot. Jack forgot to breathe for perhaps five seconds, and just stood beside the cracked and peeling shingle wall, staring down as a madman yelled orders to black-suited men, pirouetted, pointed at something hidden from Jack, and made an expressive move of disapproval.
He remembered to breathe.
“Well, we’ve got an interesting situation here, Richard,”
Jack said. “We got a hotel that can double its size whenever it wants to, I guess, and down there we also have the world’s
craziest man.”
Richard, who Jack had thought was asleep, surprised him
by mumbling something audible only as guffuf.
“What?”
“Go for it,” Richard whispered weakly. “Move it, chum.”
Jack actually laughed. A second later, he was carefully
moving downhill past the backs of houses, going through tall horsetail grass toward the beach.
40
Speedy on the Beach
1
At the bottom of the hill, Jack flattened out in the grass and crawled, carrying Richard as he had once carried his backpack. When he reached the border of high yellow weeds
alongside the edge of the road, he inched forward on his belly
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and looked out. Directly ahead of him, on the other side of the road, the beach began. Tall weatherbeaten rocks jutted out of the grayish sand; grayish water foamed onto the shore. Jack looked leftward down the street. A short distance past the hotel, on the inland side of the beach road, stood a long crumbling structure like a sliced-off wedding cake. Above it a
wooden sign with a great hole in it read KINGSLAND MOTEL.
The Kingsland Motel, Jack remembered, where Morgan Sloat
had installed himself and his little boy during his obsessive inspections of the black hotel. A flash of white that was Sunlight Gardener roamed farther up the street, clearly berating several of the black-suited men and flapping his hand toward the hill. He doesn’t know I’m down here already, Jack realized as one of the men began to trudge across the beach road, looking from side to side. Gardener made another abrupt,
commanding gesture, and the limousine parked at the foot of Main Street wheeled away from the hotel and began to coast
alongside the man in the black suit. He unbuttoned his jacket as soon as he hit the sidewalk of Main Street and took out a pistol from a shoulder holster.
In the limousines the drivers turned their heads and stared up the hill. Jack blessed his luck—five minutes later, and a renegade Wolf with an oversized gun would have ended his
quest for that great singing thing in the hotel.
He could see only the top two floors of the hotel, and the
madly spinning devices attached to the architectural extravagances on the roof. Because of his worm’s-eye angle, the
break-water bisecting the beach on the right side of the hotel seemed to rear up twenty feet or more, marching down the
sand and on into the water.
COME NOW COME NOW, called the Talisman in words
that were not words, but almost physical expressions of ur-
gency.
The man with the gun was now out of sight, but the drivers
still stared after him as he went uphill toward Point Venuti’s lunatics. Sunlight Gardener lifted his bullhorn and roared,
“Root him out! I want him rooted out!” He jabbed the bull-
horn at another black-suited man, just raising his binoculars to look down the street in Jack’s direction. “You! Pig-brains!
Take the other side of the street . . . and root that bad boy out,
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oh yes, that baddest baddest boy, baddest . . .” His voice trailed away as the second man trotted across the street to the opposite sidewalk, his pistol already lengthening his fist.
It was the best chance he’d ever get, Jack realized—
nobody was facing down the length of the beach road. “Hang
on tight,” he whispered to Richard, who did not move. “Time to boogie.” He got his feet up under him, and knew that
Richard’s back was probably visible above the yellow weeds
and tall grass. Bending over, he burst out of the weeds and set his feet on the beach road.
In seconds Jack Sawyer was flat on his stomach in the
gritty sand. He pushed himself forward with his feet. One of Richard’s hands tightened on his shoulder. Jack wiggled forward across the sand until he had made it behind the first tall outcropping of rock; then he simply stopped moving and lay
with his head on his hands, Richard light as a leaf on his back, breathing hard. The water, no more than twenty feet away,
beat against the edge of the beach. Jack could still hear Sunlight Gardener screeching about imbeciles and incompetents, his crazy voice drifting down from uphill on Main Street. The Talisman urged him forward, urged him on, on, on. . . .
Richard fell off his back.
“You okay?”
Richard raised a thin hand and touched his forehead with
his fingers, his cheekbone with his thumb. “I guess. You see my father?”
Jack shook his head. “Not yet.”
“But he’s here.”
“I guess. He has to be.” The Kingsland, Jack remembered,
seeing in his mind the dingy facade, the broken wooden sign.
Morgan Sloat would have holed up in the hotel he had used so often six or seven years ago. Jack immediately felt the furious presence of Morgan Sloat near him, as if knowing where
Sloat was had summoned him up.
“Well, don’t worry about him.” Richard’s voice was paper-
thin. “I mean, don’t worry about me worrying about him. I
think he’s dead, Jack.”
Jack looked at his friend with a fresh anxiety: could
Richard actually be losing his mind? Certainly Richard was
feverish. Up on the hill, Sunlight Gardener bawled “SPREAD
OUT!” through his bullhorn.
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