man sang.
Jack started up the staircase. Halfway up he looked at the
landing and saw the last of the knights, standing and looking down at him. It was a gigantic figure, better than eleven feet tall; its armor and its plume were black, and a baleful red glare fell through the eye-slit in its helmet.
One mailed fist gripped a huge mace.
For a moment, Jack stood frozen on the staircase, and then
he began to climb again.
5
They saved the worst for last, Jack thought, and as he advanced steadily upward toward the black knight he
slipped
through
again
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into Jason. The knight still wore black armor, but of a different sort; its visor was tilted up to reveal a face that had been almost obliterated by old dried sores. Jason recognized them.
This fellow had gotten a little too close to one of those rolling balls of fire in the Blasted Lands for his own good.
Other figures were passing him on the stairs, figures he
could not quite see as his fingers trailed over a wide bannister that was not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood
from the Territories. Figures in doublets, figures in blouses of silk-sack, women in great belling gowns with gleaming white cowls thrown back from their gorgeously dressed hair; these people were beautiful but doomed—and so, perhaps, ghosts
always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of
ghosts inspire such terror?
JASON! TO ME! the Talisman sang, and for a moment all partitioned reality seemed to break down; he did not flip but seemed to fall through worlds like a man crashing through the rotted floors of an ancient wooden tower, one after the other.
He felt no fear. The idea that he might never be able to get back—that he might just go on falling through a chain of realities forever, or become lost, as in a great wood—occurred to him, but he dismissed it out of hand. All of this was happening to Jason
(and Jack)
in an eyeblink; less time than it would take for his foot to go from one riser on the broad stairs to the next. He would come back; he was single-natured, and he did not believe it was possible for such a person to become lost, because he had a place in all of these worlds. But I do not exist simultaneously in all of them, Jason.
(Jack)
thought. That’s the important thing, that’s the difference; I’m flickering through each of them, probably too fast to see, and leaving a sound like a handclap or a sonic boom behind me as the air closes on the vacancy where, for a millisecond, I took up space.
In many of these worlds, the black hotel was a black
ruin—these were worlds, he thought dimly, where the great
evil that now impended on the tightwire drawn between Cali-
fornia and the Territories had already happened. In one of
them the sea which roared and snarled at the shore was a
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dead, sickly green; the sky had a similar gangrenous look. In another he saw a flying creature as big as a Conestoga wagon fold its wings and plummet earthward like a hawk. It grabbed a creature like a sheep and swooped up again, holding the
bloody hindquarters in its beak.
Flip . . . flip . . . flip. Worlds passed by his eyes like cards shuffled by a riverboat gambler.
Here was the hotel again, and there were half a dozen dif-
ferent versions of the black knight above him, but the intent in each was the same, and the differences were as unimportant
as the stylings of rival automobiles. Here was a black tent filled with the thick dry smell of rotting canvas—it was torn in many places so that the sun shone through in dusty, con-flicting rays. In this world Jack/Jason was on some sort of rope rigging, and the black knight stood inside a wooden basket like a crow’s nest, and as he climbed he flipped again . . .
and again . . . and again.
Here the entire ocean was on fire; here the hotel was much
as it was in Point Venuti, except it had been half-sunk into the ocean. For a moment he seemed to be in an elevator car, the knight standing on top of it and peering down at him through the trapdoor. Then he was on a rampway, the top of which was guarded by a huge snake, its long, muscular body armored
with gleaming black scales.
And when do I get to the end of everything? When do I stop crashing through floors and just smash my way into the blackness?
JACK! JASON! the Talisman called, and it called in all the worlds. TO ME!
And Jack came to it, and it was like coming home.
6
He was right, he saw; he had come up only a single stair. But reality had solidified again. The black knight— his black knight, Jack Sawyer’s black knight—stood blocking the stair-landing. It raised its mace.
Jack was afraid, but he kept climbing, Speedy’s pick held
out in front of him.
“I’m not going to mess with you,” Jack said. “You better
get out of my—”
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The black figure swung the mace. It came down with in-
credible force. Jack dodged aside. The mace crashed into the stair where he had been standing and splintered the entire
riser down into hollow blackness.
The figure wrenched the mace free. Jack lunged up two
more stairs, Speedy’s pick still held between his thumb and forefinger . . . and suddenly it simply disintegrated, falling in a little eggshell rain of yellowed ivory fragments. Most of these sprinkled the tops of Jack’s sneakers. He stared stupidly at them.
The sound of dead laughter.
The mace, tiny splinters of wood and chews of old dank
stair-runner still clinging to it, was upraised in the knight’s two armored gloves. The specter’s hot glare fell through the slit in its helmet. It seemed to slice blood from Jack’s upturned face in a horizontal line across the bridge of his nose.
That chuffing sound of laughter again—not heard with his
ears, because he knew this suit of armor was as empty as the rest, nothing but a steel jacket for an undead spirit, but heard inside his head. You’ve lost, boy—did you really think that puny little thing could get you past me?
The mace whistled down again, this time slicing on a diag-
onal, and Jack tore his eyes away from that red gaze just in time to duck low—he felt the head of the mace pass through
the upper layer of his long hair a second before it ripped away a four-foot section of bannister and sent it sailing out into space.
A scraping clack of metal as the knight leaned toward him,
its cocked helmet somehow a hideous and sarcastic parody of solicitude—then the mace drew back and up again for another of those portentous swings.
Jack, you didn’t need no magic juice to git ovah, and you don’t need no magic pick to pull the chain on this here coffee can, neither!
The mace came blasting through the air again— wheeee-
ossshhhh! Jack lurched backward, sucking in his stomach; the web of muscles in his shoulders screamed as they pulled
around the punctures the spiked gloves had left.
The mace missed the skin of his chest by less than an inch
before passing beyond him and swiping through a line of
thick mahogany balusters as if they had been toothpicks. Jack
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tottered on emptiness, feeling Buster Keatonish and absurd.
He snatched at the ragged ruins of the bannister on his left and got splinters under two of his fingernails instead. The pain was so wire-thin excruciating that he thought for a moment that his eyeballs would explode with it. Then he got a good hold with his right hand and was able to stabilize himself and move away from the drop.
All the magic’s in YOU, Jack! Don’t you know that by now?
For a moment he only stood there, panting, and then he
started up the stairs again, staring at the blank iron face above him.
“Better get thee gone, Sir Gawain.”
The knight cocked its great helmet again in that strangely
delicate gesture— Pardon, my boy . . . can you actually be speaking to me? Then it swung the mace again.
Perhaps blinded by his fear, Jack hadn’t noticed until now
how slow its setup for those swings was, how clearly it
telegraphed the trajectory of each portentous blow. Maybe its joints were rusted, he thought. At any rate, it was easy enough for him to dive inside the circle of its swing now that his head was clear again.
He stood on his toes, reached up, and seized the black hel-