“Jack!”
“Coming, Richard!”
No way you can make it down those stairs. No way, baby.
Gotta. Gotta.
Holding the precious, fragile Talisman in his hands, Jack
started down a flight of stairs that now looked like an Arabian flying carpet caught in a tornado.
The stairs heaved and he was flung toward the same gap
through which the black knight’s helmet had fallen. Jack
screamed and staggered backward toward the drop, holding
the Talisman against his chest with his right hand and flailing
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behind him with his left. Flailing at nothing. His heels hit the drop and tilted backward over oblivion.
6
Fifty seconds had passed since the earthquake began. Only
fifty seconds—but earthquake survivors will tell you that objective time, clock-time, loses all meaning in an earthquake.
Three days after the ’64 earthquake in Los Angeles, a television news reporter asked a survivor who had been near the
epicenter how long the quake had lasted.
“It’s still going on,” the survivor said calmly.
Sixty-two seconds after the quake began, almost all of the
Point Venuti Highlands decided to give in to destiny and become the Point Venuti Lowlands. They fell on the town with a muddy kurrummmmp, leaving only a single jut of slightly harder rock, which pointed at the Agincourt like an accusing finger. From one of the new slumped hills a dirty smokestack pointed like a randy penis.
7
On the beach, Morgan Sloat and Sunlight Gardener stood
supporting each other, appearing to hula. Gardener had un-
slung the Weatherbee. A few Wolfs, their eyes alternately
bulging with terror and glaring with hellacious rage, had
joined them. More were coming. They were all Changed or
Changing. Their clothes hung from them in tatters. Morgan
saw one of them dive at the ground and begin to bite at it, as if the uneasy earth were an enemy that could be killed. Morgan glanced at this madness and dismissed it. A van with the
words WILD CHILD written on the sides in psychedelic lettering plowed hell-for-leather across Point Venuti Square, where
children had once begged their parents for ice creams and
pennants emblazoned with the Agincourt’s likeness. The van
made it to the far side, jumped across the sidewalk, and then roared toward the beach, plowing through boarded-up conces-sions as it came. One final fissure opened in the earth and the WILD CHILD that had killed Tommy Woodbine disappeared forever, nose first. A jet of flame burst up as its gas-tank ex-
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ploded. Watching, Sloat thought dimly of his father preaching about the Pentecostal Fire. Then the earth snapped shut.
“Hold steady,” he shouted at Gardener. “I think the place is going to fall on top of him and crush him flat, but if he gets out, you’re going to shoot him, earthquake or no earthquake.”
“Will we know if IT breaks?” Gardener squealed.
Morgan Sloat grinned like a boar in a canebrake.
“We’ll know,” he said. “The sun will turn black.”
Seventy-four seconds.
8
Jack’s left hand scrabbled a grip on the ragged remains of the bannister. The Talisman glowed fiercely against his chest, the lines of latitude and longitude which girdled it shining as brightly as the wire filaments in a lightbulb. His heels tilted and his soles began to slide.
Falling! Speedy! I’m going to—
Seventy-nine seconds.
It stopped.
Suddenly, it just stopped.
Only, for Jack, as for that survivor of the ’64 quake, it was still going on, at least in part of his brain. In part of his brain the earth would continue to shake like a church-picnic Jell-O
forever.
He pulled himself back from the drop and staggered to the
middle of the twisted stair. He stood, gasping, his face shiny with sweat, hugging the bright round star of the Talisman
against his chest. He stood and listened to the silence.
Somewhere something heavy—a bureau or a wardrobe,
perhaps—which had been tottering on the edge of balance
now fell over with an echoing crash.
“Jack! Please! I think I’m dying!” Richard’s groaning, helpless voice did indeed sound like that of a boy in his last extremity.
“Richard! Coming!”
He began to work his way down the stairs, which were now
twisted and bent and tottery. Many of the stair-levels were gone, and he had to step over these spaces. In one place four in a row were gone and he leaped, holding the Talisman to his
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chest with one hand and sliding his hand along the warped
bannister with the other.
Things were still falling. Glass crashed and tinkled. Some-
where a toilet was flushing manically, again and again.
The redwood registration desk in the lobby had split down
the middle. The double doors were ajar, however, and a bright wedge of sunlight came through them—the old dank carpet
seemed to sizzle and steam in protest at that light.
The clouds have broken, Jack thought. Sun’s shining outside. And then: Going out those doors, Richie-boy. You and me. Big as life and twice as proud.
The corridor which led past the Heron Bar and down to the
dining room reminded him of sets in some of the old Twilight Zone shows, where everything was askew and out of kilter.
Here the floor tilted left; here to the right; here it was like the twin humps of a camel. He negotiated the dimness with the
Talisman lighting his way like the world’s biggest flashlight.
He shoved into the dining room and saw Richard lying on
the floor in a tangle of tablecloth. Blood was running from his nose. When he got closer he saw that some of those hard red bumps had split open and white bugs were working their way
out of Richard’s flesh and crawling sluggishly over Richard’s cheeks. As he watched, one birthed itself from Richard’s nose.
Richard screamed, a weak, bubbling, wretched scream,
and clawed at it. It was the scream of someone who is dying in agony.
His shirt humped and writhed with the things.
Jack stumbled across the distorted floor toward him . . .
and the spider swung down from the dimness, squirting its
poison blindly into the air.
“Flushing feef! ” it gibbered in its whining, droning insect’s voice. “Oh you fushing feef, put it back put it back!”
Without thinking, Jack raised the Talisman. It flashed
clean white fire—rainbow fire—and the spider shrivelled and turned black. In only a second it was a tiny lump of smoking coal penduluming slowly to a dead stop in the air.
No time to gawp at this wonder. Richard was dying.
Jack reached him, fell on his knees beside him, and
stripped back the tablecloth as if it were a sheet.
“Finally made it, chum,” he whispered, trying not to see
the bugs crawling out of Richard’s flesh. He raised the Talis-
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man, considered, and then placed it on Richard’s forehead.
Richard shrieked miserably and tried to writhe away. Jack
placed an arm on Richard’s scrawny chest and held him—it
wasn’t hard to do. There was a stench as the bugs beneath the Talisman fried away.
Now what? There’s more, but what?
He looked across the room and his eye happened to fix
upon the green croaker marble that he had left with
Richard—the marble that was a magic mirror in that other
world. As he looked, it rolled six feet of its own volition, and then stopped. It rolled, yes. It rolled because it was a marble, and it was a marble’s job to roll. Marbles were round. Marbles were round and so was the Talisman.
Light broke in his reeling mind.
Holding Richard, Jack slowly rolled the Talisman down the
length of his body. After he reached Richard’s chest, Richard stopped struggling. Jack thought he had probably fainted, but a quick glance showed him this wasn’t so. Richard was staring at him with dawning wonder . . .
. . . and the pimples on his face were gone! The hard red bumps were fading!
“Richard!” he yelled, laughing like a crazy loon. “Hey,
Richard, look at this! Bwana make juju!”
He rolled the Talisman slowly down over Richard’s belly,
using his palm. The Talisman glowed brightly, singing a clear, wordless harmonic of health and healing. Down over
Richard’s crotch. Jack moved Richard’s thin legs together and rolled it down the groove between them to Richard’s ankles.
The Talisman glowed bright blue . . . deep red . . . yellow . . .
the green of June meadow-grass.
Then it was white again.
“Jack,” Richard whispered. “Is that what we came for?”
“Yes.”
“It’s beautiful,” Richard said. He hesitated. “May I
hold it?”
Jack felt a sudden twist of Scrooge-miserliness. He
snatched the Talisman close to himself for a moment. No! You might break it! Besides, it’s mine! I crossed the country for it! I fought the knights for it! You can’t have it! Mine!
Mine! Mi—