charging rhino, and then he touched the key that brought the lightning.
“We’re well equipped to deal with him when he comes
out,” Morgan said, and added, “In either world. Just as long as you keep your courage, Gard. As long as you stick right
by me.”
The trembling lips firmed a bit. “Morgan, of course I’ll—”
“Remember who killed your son,” Morgan said softly.
At the same instant that Jack Sawyer had jammed the
burning coin into the forehead of a monstrosity in the Territories, Reuel Gardener, who had been afflicted with relatively harmless petit mal epileptic seizures ever since the age of six (the same age at which Osmond’s son had begun to show
signs of what was called Blasted Lands Sickness), apparently suffered a grand mal seizure in the back of a Wolf-driven
Cadillac on I-70, westbound to California from Illinois.
He had died, purple and strangling, in Sunlight Gardener’s
arms.
Gardener’s eyes now began to bulge.
“Remember,” Morgan repeated softly.
“Bad,” Gardener whispered. “All boys. Axiomatic. That
boy in particular.”
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“Right!” Morgan agreed. “Hold that thought! We can stop
him, but I want to make damn sure that he can only come out of the hotel on dry land.”
He led Gardener down to the rock where he had been
watching Parker. Flies—bloated albino flies—had begun to
light on the dead nigger, Morgan observed. That was just as fine as paint with him. If there had been a Variety magazine for flies, Morgan would gladly have bought space, advertising Parker’s location. Come one, come all. They would lay their eggs in the folds of his decaying flesh, and the man who had scarred his Twinner’s thighs would give birth to maggots.
That was fine indeed.
He pointed out toward the dock.
“The raft’s under there,” he said. “It looks like a horse,
Christ knows why. It’s in the shadows, I know. But you were always a hell of a shot. If you can pick it up, Gard, put a couple of bullets in it. Sink the fucking thing.”
Gardener unshouldered the rifle and peered into the scope.
For a long time the muzzle of the big gun wandered minutely back and forth.
“I see it,” Gardener whispered in a gloating voice, and triggered the gun. The echo pealed off across the water in a long curl that at last Dopplered away into nothing. The barrel of the gun rose, then came back down. Gardener fired again.
And again.
“I got it,” Gardener said, lowering the gun. He’d got his
courage back; his pecker was up again. He was smiling the
way he had been smiling when he had come back from that
errand in Utah. “It’s just a dead skin on the water now. You want a look in the scope?” He offered the rifle to Sloat.
“No,” Sloat said. “If you say you got it, you got it. Now he has to come out by land, and we know what direction he’ll be coming in. I think he’ll have what’s been in our way for so many years.”
Gardener looked at him, shiny-eyed.
“I suggest that we move up there.” He pointed to the old
boardwalk. It was just inside the fence where he had spent so many hours watching the hotel and thinking about what was
in the ballroom.
“All r—”
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That was when the earth began to groan and heave under
their feet—that subterranean creature had awakened; it was
shaking itself and roaring.
At the same instant, dazzling white light filled every win-
dow of the Agincourt—the light of a thousand suns. The win-
dows blew out all at once. Glass flew in diamond showers.
“REMEMBER YOUR SON AND FOLLOW ME!” Sloat
roared. That sense of predestination was clear in him now,
clear and undeniable. He was meant to win, after all.
The two of them began to run up the heaving beach toward
the boardwalk.
8
Jack moved slowly, filled with wonder, across the hardwood
ballroom floor. He was looking up, his eyes sparkling. His
face was bathed in a clear white radiance that was all colors—
sunrise colors, sunset colors, rainbow colors. The Talisman hung in the air high above him, slowly revolving.
It was a crystal globe perhaps three feet in circumfer-
ence—the corona of its glow was so brilliant it was impossible to tell exactly how big it was. Gracefully curving lines seemed to groove its surface, like lines of longitude and latitude . . . and why not? Jack thought, still in a deep daze of awe and amazement. It is the world—ALL worlds—in micro-cosm. More; it is the axis of all possible worlds.
Singing; turning; blazing.
He stood beneath it, bathed in its warmth and clear sense
of well-meant force; he stood in a dream, feeling that force flow into him like the clear spring rain which awakens the
hidden power in a billion tiny seeds. He felt a terrible joy lift through his conscious mind like a rocket, and Jack Sawyer
lifted both hands over his upturned face, laughing, both in response to that joy and in imitation of its rise.
“Come to me, then!” he shouted,
and slipped
(through? across?)
into
Jason.
“Come to me, then!” he shouted again in the sweetly liq-
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uid and slightly slippery tongue of the Territories—he cried it laughing, but tears coursed down his cheeks. And he understood that the quest had begun with the other boy and thus
must end with him; so he let go and
slipped
back
into
Jack Sawyer.
Above him, the Talisman trembled in the air, slowly turn-
ing, throwing off light and heat and a sensation of true goodness, of whiteness.
“Come to me!”
It began to descend through the air.
9
So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness
and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul)—after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:
He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to
flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura’s son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack’s quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to fulfill, had made Jason live again for a little while—Jack really had a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when
that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers.
Jack would be killing him again.
Don’t worry, Jack, a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.
Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds—it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white. And, as has always been with the white and must always be, it was dreadfully fragile.
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As it came down, worlds reeled about his head. He did not
seem to be crashing through layers of reality now but seeing an entire cosmos of realities, all overlapping one another, linked like a shirt of
(reality)
chain-mail.
You’re reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack—this voice was his father’s. Don’t drop it, son.
For Jason’s sake, don’t drop it.
Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, some gorgeous, some
hellish, all of them for a moment illumined in the warm white light of this star that was a crystal globe chased with fine en-graved lines. It came slowly down through the air toward Jack Sawyer’s trembling, outstretched fingers.
“Come to me!” he shouted to it as it had sung to him.
“Come to me now!”
It was three feet above his hands, branding them with its
soft, healing heat; now two; now one. It hesitated for a moment, rotating slowly, its axis slightly canted, and Jack could see the brilliant, shifting outlines of continents and oceans and ice-caps on its surface. It hesitated . . . and then slowly slipped down into the boy’s reaching hands.
43
News From Everywhere
1
Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack’s voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.
“Jason?” she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her
son’s name. But in the dream from which she had just been
startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that
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dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course.