mained go flying away like a bird in a Walt Disney cartoon, its eyes bright and terrified.
The suit of armor came toward him like a killer robot, its
feet rising and then crashing down. It was more than seven
feet tall, and when it came through the door the horns rising from its helmet tore a set of ragged slashes into the upper jamb. They looked like quotation marks.
Run! a yammering voice in his mind screamed.
Run, you feef, the hotel whispered.
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THE TALISMAN
No, Jack answered. He stared up at the advancing knight, and his hand wrapped itself tightly around the guitar-pick in his pocket. The spike-studded gauntlets came up toward the
visor of its bird-helmet. They raised it. Jack gaped.
The inside of the helmet was empty.
Then those studded hands were reaching for Jack.
8
The spike-studded hands came up and grasped either side of
the cylindrical helmet. They lifted it slowly off, disclosing the livid, haggard face of a man who looked at least three hundred years old. One side of this ancient’s head had been
bashed in. Splinters of bone like broken eggshell poked out through the skin, and the wound was caked with some black
goop which Jason supposed was decayed brains. It was not
breathing, but the red-rimmed eyes which regarded Jason
were sparkling and hellishly avid. It grinned, and Jason saw the needle-sharp teeth with which this horror would rip him to pieces.
It clanked unsteadily forward . . . but that wasn’t the only sound.
He looked to his left, toward the main hall.
(lobby)
of the castle
(hotel)
and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow,
bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it
were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vam-
pires of some sort.
Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt
spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and
wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.
9
Jack howled with the pain—the short blunt-tipped spikes on
its hands were in him, in him, and he understood once and for
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all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.
He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness in-
side that helmet—
But was it really empty?
Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red
glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had
somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.
It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to
(tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)
freeze me solid—
JACK! Speedy’s voice cried.
(JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)
The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph—
that lovely sensation of Territories heat, that clear feeling of rainbow.
The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a
strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs—and in that moment Jack
(and Jason)
saw those designs come together in a face—the face of
Laura DeLoessian.
(the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)
10
“In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” they shouted together—but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason. “Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”
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Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny
face of the old vampire-thing in the suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s
red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick
plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A
moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, ex-
ploded, and a black, steaming inchor ran over his hand and
wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.
11
Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.
The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was swelling somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.
The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart—Jack thought if he had
seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s
enemy from running a blade or a spear-point through the
knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel
bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.
Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as
if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together.
In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him.
One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a sym-
bol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen
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Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign—but these were not Mor-
gan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who
presumed to steal away their only reason for being.
“No more,” Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled
between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had
been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.
The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One
slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking
double point.
“No more,” Jack moaned. “Oh God please, no more, I’m
tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—”
Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack—
“Speedy, I can’t!” he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the in-evitability of steel auto parts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.
—you be here in California to bring her back.
“Please, Speedy, no more!”
Reaching for him—black-metal robot-faces, rusty greaves,
mail splotched and smeared with moss and mould.
Got to do your best, Travellin Jack, Speedy whispered, exhausted, and then he was gone and Jack was left to stand or fall on his own.
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Jack and the Talisman
1
You made a mistake—a ghostly voice in Jack Sawyer’s head spoke up as he stood outside the Heron Bar and watched these other suits of armor bear down on him. In his mind an eye
opened wide and he saw an angry man—a man who was
really not much more than an overgrown boy—striding up a
Western street toward the camera, buckling on first one gunbelt and then another, so that they crisscrossed his belly.
You made a mistake—you shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!
2
Of all his mother’s movies, the one Jack had always liked the best was Last Train to Hangtown, made in 1960 and released in 1961. It had been a Warner Brothers picture, and the major parts—as in many of the lower-budget pictures Warners made