into his testicles. It was a dead-center hit, and Jack crumpled forward, suddenly living with the greatest pain of his life—a physical agony greater than any he had ever imagined. He
couldn’t even scream.
“It’s okay,” Morgan Sloat said, “but you don’t look so good. Jacky-boy. Not
at
all.”
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And now the man slowly advancing on Jack—advancing
slowly because he was savoring this—was a man to whom
Jack had never been properly introduced. He had been a white face in the window of a great black coach for a space of moments, a face with dark eyes that somehow sensed his pres-
ence; he had been a rippling, changing shape bludgeoning
itself into the reality of the field where he and Wolf had been talking of such wonders as litter-brothers and the big rut-moon; he had been a shadow in Anders’s eyes.
But I’ve never really seen Morgan of Orris until now, Jack thought. And he still was Jack—Jack in a pair of faded, dirty cotton pants of a sort you might expect to see an Asian coolie wearing, and sandals with rawhide thongs, but not Jason—
Jack. His crotch was a great frozen scream of pain.
Ten yards away was the Talisman, throwing its effulgent
glow along a beach of black sand. Richard was not there, but this fact did not impress itself on Jack’s conscious mind until a bit later.
Morgan was wearing a dark blue cape held at the neck
with a catch of beaten silver. His pants were the same light wool as Sloat’s pants, only here they were bloused into black boots.
This Morgan walked with a slight limp, his deformed left
foot leaving a line of short hyphens in the sand. The silver catch on his cloak swung loose and low as he moved, and Jack saw that the silver thing had nothing at all to do with the cape, which was held by a simple unadorned dark cord. This was
some sort of pendant. He thought for a moment that it was a tiny golf-club, the sort of thing a woman might take off her charm-bracelet and wear around her neck, just for the fun of it. But as Sloat got closer, he saw it was too slim—it did not end in a club-head but came to a point.
It looked like a lightning-rod.
“No, you don’t look well at all, boy,” Morgan of Orris said.
He stepped over to where Jack lay, moaning, holding his
crotch, legs drawn up. He bent forward, hands planted just
above his knees, and studied Jack as a man might study an animal his car has run over. A rather uninteresting animal like a woodchuck or a squirrel. “Not a bit well.”
Morgan leaned even closer.
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“You’ve been quite a problem for me,” Morgan of Orris
said, bending lower. “You’ve caused a great deal of damage.
But in the end—”
“I think I’m dying,” Jack whispered.
“Not yet. Oh, I know it feels like that, but believe me,
you’re not dying yet. In five minutes or so, you’ll know what dying really feels like.”
“No . . . really . . . I’m broken . . . inside,” Jack moaned.
“Lean down . . . I want to tell . . . to ask . . . beg . . .”
Morgan’s dark eyes gleamed in his pallid face. It was the
thought of Jack begging, perhaps. He leaned down until his
face was almost touching Jack’s. Jack’s legs had drawn up in response to the pain. Now he pistoned them out and up. For a moment it felt as if a rusty blade were ripping up from his genitals and into his stomach, but the sound of his sandals striking Morgan’s face, splitting his lips and crunching his nose to one side, more than made up for the pain.
Morgan of Orris flailed backward, roaring in pain and sur-
prise, his cape flapping like the wings of a great bat.
Jack got to his feet. For a moment he saw the black
castle—it was much larger than the Agincourt had been;
seemed, in fact, to cover acres—and then he was lunging
spastically past the unconscious (or dead!) Parkus. He lunged for the Talisman, which lay peacefully glowing on the sand, and as he ran he
flipped back
to the American Territories.
“Oh you bastard!” Morgan Sloat bellowed. “You rotten little bastard, my face, my face, you hurt my face!”
There was a crackling sizzle and a smell like ozone. A brilliant blue-white branch of lightning passed just to Jack’s right, fusing sand like glass.
Then he had the Talisman— had it again! The torn, throbbing ache in his crotch began to diminish at once. He turned to Morgan with the glass ball raised in his hands.
Morgan Sloat was bleeding from the lip and holding one
hand up to his cheek—Jack hoped that he had cracked a few
of Sloat’s teeth while he was at it. In Sloat’s other hand, outstretched in a curious echo of Jack’s own posture, was the
keylike thing which had just sent a lightning-bolt snapping into the sand beside Jack.
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Jack moved sideways, his arms straight out before him and
the Talisman shifting internal colors like a rainbow machine.
It seemed to understand that Sloat was near, for the great
grooved glass ball had begun a kind of subtonal humming that Jack felt—more than heard—as a tingle in his hands. A band
of clear bright white opened in the Talisman, like a shaft of light right through its center, and Sloat jerked himself sideways and pointed the key at Jack’s head.
He wiped a smear of blood away from his lower lip. “You
hurt me, you stinking little bastard,” he said. “Don’t think that glass ball can help you now. Its future is a little shorter than your own.”
“Then why are you afraid of it?” the boy asked, thrusting it forward again.
Sloat dodged sideways, as if the Talisman, too, could shoot out bolts of lightning. He doesn’t know what it can do, Jack realized: he doesn’t really know anything about it, he just knows he wants it.
“Drop it right now,” Sloat said. “Let go of it, you little
fraud. Or I’ll take the top of your head off right now. Drop it.”
“You’re afraid,” Jack said. “Now that the Talisman is right in front of you, you’re afraid to come and get it.”
“I don’t have to come and get it,” Sloat said. “You goddam
Pretender. Drop it. Let’s see you break it by yourself, Jacky.”
“Come for it, Bloat,” Jack said, feeling a blast of wholly
bracing anger shoot through him. Jacky. He hated hearing his mother’s nickname for him in Sloat’s wet mouth. “I’m not the black hotel, Bloat. I’m just a kid. Can’t you take a glass ball away from a kid?” Because it was clear to him that they were in stalemate as long as Jack held the Talisman in his hands. A deep blue spark, as vibrant as one of the sparks from Anders’s
“demons,” flared up and died in the Talisman’s center. An-
other immediately followed. Jack could still feel that powerful humming emanating from the heart of the grooved glass ball.
He had been destined to get the Talisman—he was supposed to get it. The Talisman had known of his existence since his birth, Jack now thought, and ever since had awaited him to set it free. It needed Jack Sawyer and no one else. “Come on and try for it,” Jack taunted.
Sloat pushed the key toward him, snarling. Blood drooled
down his chin. For a moment Sloat appeared baffled, as frus-
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trated and enraged as a bull in a pen, and Jack actually smiled at him. Then Jack glanced sideways to where Richard lay on
the sand, and the smile disappeared from his face. Richard’s face was literally covered with blood, his dark hair was matted with it.
“You bast—” he began, but it had been a mistake to look
away. A searing blast of blue and yellow light smacked into the beach directly beside him.
He turned to Sloat, who was just firing off another
lightning-bolt at his feet. Jack danced back, and the shaft of destructive light melted the sand at his feet into molten yellow liquid, which almost instantly cooled into a long straight slick of glass.
“Your son is going to die,” Jack said.
“Your mother is going to die,” Sloat snarled back at him.
“Drop that damned thing before I cut your head off. Now. Let go of it.”
Jack said, “Why don’t you go hump a weasel?”
Morgan Sloat opened his mouth and screeched, revealing a
row of square bloodstained teeth. “I’ll hump your corpse! ”
The pointing key wavered toward Jack’s head, wavered away.
Sloat’s eyes glittered, and he jerked his hand up so that the key pointed at the sky. A long skein of lightning seemed to erupt upward from Sloat’s fist, widening out as it ascended.