Parkus—Richard isn’t there either, because Morgan of Orris’s son, Rushton, died a long time ago and Richard’s single-natured, too! When I flipped before, the Talisman was
there . . . but Richard wasn’t! Morgan’s flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back . . . trying to freak me out. . . .
“Hoo-hoo! Jacky-boy!”
The left.
“Over here!”
The right.
But Jack wasn’t listening for the place anymore. He was
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looking into the Talisman, waiting for the downbeat. The
most important downbeat of his life.
From behind. This time he would come from behind.
The Talisman flashed out, a strong lamp in the snow.
Jack pivoted . . . and as he pivoted he flipped into the Territories, into bright sunlight. And there was Morgan of Orris, big as life and twice as ugly. For a moment he didn’t realize Jack had tumbled to the trick; he was limping rapidly around to a place which would be behind Jack when he flipped back
into the American Territories. There was a nasty little-boy grin on his face. His cloak popped and billowed behind him.
His left boot dragged, and Jack saw the sand was covered with those dragging hashmarks all around him. Morgan had been
running around him in a harrying circle, all the while goading Jack with obscene lies about his mother, throwing stones, and flipping back and forth.
Jack shouted:
“I SEE YOU!” at the top of his lungs.
Morgan stared around at him in utter stunned shock, one
hand curled around that silver rod.
“SEE YOU!” Jack shouted again. “Should we go around
one more time, Bloat?”
Morgan of Orris flicked the end of the rod at him, his face altering in a second from that rubbery simple-minded expression of shock to a much more characteristic look of craft—of a clever man quickly seeing all the possibilities in a situation.
His eyes narrowed. Jack almost, in that second when Morgan
of Orris looked down his lethal silver rod at him and nar-
rowed his eyes into gunsights, flipped back into the American Territories, and that would have killed him. But an instant before prudence or panic caused him in effect to jump in front of a moving truck, the same insight that had told him that
Morgan was flipping between worlds saved him again—Jack
had learned the ways of his adversary. He held his ground,
again waiting for that almost mystical downbeat. For a fraction of a second Jack Sawyer held his breath. If Morgan had been a shade less proud of his deviousness, he might well
have murdered Jack Sawyer, which he so dearly wished to do, at that moment.
But instead, just as Jack had thought it would, Morgan’s
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image abruptly departed the Territories. Jack inhaled.
Speedy’s body (Parkus’s body, Jack realized) lay motionless a short distance away. The downbeat came. Jack exhaled and
flipped back.
A new streak of glass divided the sand on the Point Venuti
beach, glimmeringly reflecting the sudden beam of white
light which emanated from the Talisman.
“Missed one, did you?” Morgan Sloat whispered out of the
darkness. Snow pelted Jack, cold wind froze his limbs, his
throat, his forehead. A car’s length away, Sloat’s face hung before him, the forehead drawn up into its familiar corrugations, the bloody mouth open. He was extending the key toward
Jack in the storm, and a ridge of powdery snow adhered to the brown sleeve of his suit. Jack saw a black trail of blood oozing from the left nostril of the incongruously small nose.
Sloat’s eyes, bloodshot with pain, shone through the dark air.
6
Richard Sloat confusedly opened his eyes. Every part of him was cold. At first he thought, quite without emotion of any kind, that he was dead. He had fallen down somewhere, probably down those steep, tricky steps at the back of the Thayer School grandstand. Now he was cold and dead and nothing
more could happen to him. He experienced a second of dizzy-
ing relief.
His head offered him a fresh surge of pain, and he felt
warm blood ooze out over his cold hand—both of these sen-
sations evidence that, whatever he might welcome at the mo-
ment, Richard Llewellyn Sloat was not yet dead. He was only a wounded suffering creature. The whole top of his head
seemed to have been sliced off. He had no proper idea of
where he was. It was cold. His eyes focused long enough to
report to him that he was lying down in the snow. Winter had happened. More snow dumped on him from out of the sky.
Then he heard his father’s voice, and everything returned
to him.
Richard kept his hand on top of his head, but very slowly
tilted his chin so that he could look in the direction of his father’s voice.
Jack Sawyer was holding the Talisman—that was the next
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thing Richard took in. The Talisman was unbroken. He felt
the return of a portion of that relief he had experienced when he’d thought he was dead. Even without his glasses, Richard could see that Jack had an undefeated, unbowed look that moved him very deeply. Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously
youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.
Jack was just Jack now, Richard now saw. That extraordi-
nary extra quality, as of a movie star deigning to walk around as a shabbily dressed twelve-year-old, had gone. This made
his heroism all the more impressive to Richard.
His father smiled rapaciously. But that was not his father.
His father had been hollowed out a long time ago—hollowed
out by his envy of Phil Sawyer, by the greed of his ambitions.
“We can keep on going around like this forever,” Jack said.
“I’m never going to give you the Talisman, and you’re never going to be able to destroy it with that gadget of yours.
Give up.”
The point of the key in his father’s hand slowly moved
across and down, and it, like his father’s greedy needful face, pointed straight at him.
“First I’ll blow Richard apart,” his father said. “Do you
really want to see your pal Richard turned into bacon? Hm-
mmm? Do you? And of course I won’t hesitate to do the same
favor for that pest beside him.”
Jack and Sloat exchanged short glances. His father was not
kidding, Richard knew. He would kill him if Jack did not sur-render the Talisman. And then he would kill the old black
man, Speedy.
“Don’t do it,” he managed to whisper. “Stuff him, Jack.
Tell him to screw himself.”
Jack almost deranged Richard by winking at him.
“Just drop the Talisman,” he heard his father say.
Richard watched in horror as Jack tilted the palms of his
hands and let the Talisman tumble out.
7
“Jack, no!”
Jack didn’t look around at Richard. You don’t own a thing
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unless you can give it up, his mind hammered at him. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.
You learned these things, or you died somewhere out in the
world where there was no clear light.
“No more killing,” he said in the snow-filled darkness of
this California beach afternoon. He should have felt utterly exhausted—it had been, all told, a four-day run of horrors, and now, at the end, he had coughed up the ball like a freshman quarterback with a lot to learn. Had thrown it all away.
Yet it was the sure voice of Anders he heard, Anders who had knelt before Jack/Jason with his kilt spread out around him and his head bowed: Anders saying A’ wi’ be well, a’ wi’ be well, and a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well.
The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down
one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required.
“No more slaughter. Go on and break it if you can,” he said. “I’m sorry for you.”
It was that last which surely destroyed Morgan Sloat. If he had retained a shred of rational thought, he would have unearthed a stone from the unearthly snow and smashed the Talisman . . . as it could have been smashed, in its simple unjacketed vulnerability.
Instead, he turned the key on it.
As he did so, his mind was filled with loving, hateful