The Talisman. The Talisman is—
The key?
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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 lis-
tening?”
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“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 night-fighting 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 throb-
bing pain in his hands. He opened them and looked thought-
fully 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 yel-
low 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.”
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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—cabalis-
tic 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 to-
ward 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 be-
fore, but now it had gone black, like the rest of the hotel—the
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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
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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 han-
dles 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