Here:
Right here and now.
3
The back of the Caddy was lit with faint, uncertain light. The Talisman flickered . . . but its glow was weak, little more than the glow of a dying firefly.
Richard turned slowly toward Jack. His face was wan and
frightened. He was clutching Carl Sagan with both hands,
wringing the paperback the way a washerwoman might wring
a sheet.
Richard’s Talisman, Jack thought, and smiled.
“Jack, do you want—”
“No,” Jack said. “Wait until I call.”
He opened the rear right door, started to get out of the car, then looked back at Richard. Richard sat small and shrunken in his seat, wringing his paperback in his hand. He looked
miserable.
Not thinking, Jack came back in for a moment and kissed
Richard’s cheek. Richard put his arms around Jack’s neck for a moment, and hugged fiercely. Then he let Jack go. Neither of them said anything.
4
Jack started for the stairs leading up to the lobby-level . . .
and then turned right and walked for a moment to the edge of
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the driveway instead. There was an iron railing here. Below it, cracked and tiered rock fell to the beach. Farther to his right, standing against the darkling sky, was the Arcadia Funworld roller coaster.
Jack lifted his face to the east. The wind that was harrying through the formal gardens lifted his hair away from his forehead and blew it back.
He lifted the globe in his hands, as if as an offering to the ocean.
5
On December 21st, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood
near the place where the water and the land came together, hands cradling an object of some worth, looking out at the night-steady Atlantic. He had turned thirteen years old that day, although he did not know it, and he was extraordinarily beautiful. His brown hair was long—probably too long—but the sea-breeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow. He stood there thinking about his mother, and about the rooms in this place which they had shared. Was she going to turn on a light up there? He rather suspected she was.
Jack turned, eyes flashing wildly in the Talisman’s light.
6
Lily felt along the wall with one trembling, skeletal hand, groping for the light-switch. She found it and turned it on. Anyone who had seen her in that moment might well have turned away.
In the last week or so, the cancer had begun to sprint inside her, as if sensing that something might be on the way which would spoil all its fun. Lily Cavanaugh now weighed seventy-eight pounds. Her skin was sallow, stretched over her skull like
parchment. The brown circles under her eyes had turned a dead and final black; the eyes themselves stared from their sockets with fevered, exhausted intelligence. Her bosom was gone. The flesh on her arms was gone. On her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, bedsores had begun to flower.
Nor was that all. In the course of the last week, she had
contracted pneumonia.
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In her wasted condition she was, of course, a prime candi-
date for that or any other respiratory disease. It might have come under the best of circumstances . . . and these were definitely not those. The radiators in the Alhambra had ceased their nightly clankings some time ago. She wasn’t sure just how long—time had become as fuzzy and indefinable to her
as it had been for Jack in the El Dorado. She only knew the heat had gone out on the same night she had punched her fist through the window, making the gull that had looked like
Sloat fly away.
In the time since that night the Alhambra had become a de-
serted coldbox. A crypt in which she would soon die.
If Sloat was responsible for what had happened at the Al-
hambra, he had done one hell of a good job. Everyone was
gone. Everyone. No more maids in the halls trundling their squeaky carts. No more whistling maintenance man. No more
mealy-mouthed desk clerk. Sloat had put them all in his
pocket and taken them away.
Four days ago—when she could not find enough in the
room to satisfy even her birdlike appetite—she had gotten out of bed and had worked her way slowly down the hall to the elevator. She brought a chair with her on this expedition, alternately sitting on it, her head hanging in exhaustion, and using it as a walker. It took her forty minutes to traverse forty feet of corridor to the elevator shaft.
She had pushed the button for the car repeatedly, but the
car did not come. The buttons did not even light.
“Fuck a duck,” Lily muttered hoarsely, and then slowly
worked herself another twenty feet down the hall to the stairwell.
“Hey!” she shouted downstairs, and then broke into a fit of coughing, bent over the back of the chair.
Maybe they couldn’t hear the yell but they sure as shit must have been able to hear me coughing out whatever’s left of my lungs, she thought.
But no one came.
She yelled again, twice, had another coughing fit, and then started back down the hallway, which looked as long as a
stretch of Nebraska turnpike on a clear day. She didn’t dare go down those stairs. She would never get back up them. And there was no one down there; not in the lobby, not in The Sad-
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dle of Lamb, not in the coffee shop, not anywhere. And the phones were out. At least, the phone in her room was out, and she hadn’t heard a single ring anywhere else in this old mau-soleum. Not worth it. A bad gamble. She didn’t want to freeze to death in the lobby.
“Jack-O,” she muttered, “where the hell are y—”
Then she began to cough again and this one was really bad
and in the middle of it she collapsed to one side in a faint, pulling the ugly sitting-room chair over on top of her, and she lay there on the cold floor for nearly an hour, and that was probably when the pneumonia moved into the rapidly declin-ing neighborhood that was Lily Cavanaugh’s body. Hey there, big C! I’m the new kid on the block! You can call me big P!
Race you to the finish line!
Somehow she had made it back to her room, and since
then she had existed in a deepening spiral of fever, listening to her respiration grow louder and louder until her fevered mind began to imagine her lungs as two organic aquariums in which a number of submerged chains were rattling. And yet
she held on—held on because part of her mind insisted with
crazy, failing certainty that Jack was on his way back from wherever he had been.
7
The beginning of her final coma had been like a dimple in the sand—a dimple that begins to spin like a whirlpool. The
sound of submerged chains in her chest became a long, dry
exhalation— Hahhhhhhhh . . .
Then something had brought her out of that deepening spi-
ral and started her feeling along the wall in the cold darkness for the light-switch. She got out of bed. She did not have
strength enough left to do this; a doctor would have laughed at the idea. And yet she did. She fell back twice, then finally made it to her feet, mouth turned down in a snarl of effort.
She groped for the chair, found it, and began to lurch her way across the room to the window.
Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the Bs, was gone. This was a
walking horror, eaten by cancer, burned by rising fever.
She reached the window and looked out.
Saw a human shape down there—and a glowing globe.
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“Jack!” she tried to scream. Nothing came out but a gravelly whisper. She raised a hand, tried to wave. Faintness
(Haahhhhhhhhh . . . )
washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill.
“Jack!”
Suddenly the lighted ball in the figure’s hands flashed up
brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jack’s face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home.
The figure broke into a run.
Jack!
Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears
spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks.
8
“Mom!”
Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the old-fashioned
telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awful—it had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window.
“Mom!”
He pounded up the stairs, first by twos, then by threes, the Talisman stuttering one burst of pink-red light and then
falling dark in his hands.
“Mom!”