The Talisman (72 page)

But the feeling in the pit of his stomach was unmistakable.

They were there, all right. I flipped—for just a second I was in the Territories.

Clank.

Jack whirled back the other way, sweat breaking out on his cheeks and forehead, hair beginning to stiffen on the nape of his neck.

He saw it again—a flash of something metallic in the shadows of one of those rooms. He saw huge stones as black as sin, their rough surfaces splotched with green moss. Nasty, soft-looking albino bugs squirmed in and out of the large pores of the decaying mortar between the stones. Empty sconces stood at fifteen- or twenty-foot intervals. The torches that the sconces had once held were long since gone.

Clank.

This time he didn’t even blink. The world sideslipped before his eyes, wavering like an object seen through clear running water. The walls were blackish mahogany again instead of stone blocks. The doors were
doors
and not latticed-iron drop-gates. The two worlds, which had been separated by a membrane as thin as a lady’s silk stocking, had now actually begun to overlap.

And, Jack realized dimly, his Jason-side had begun to over-lap with his Jack-side—some third being which was an amalgamation of both was emerging.

I don’t know what that combination is, exactly, but I hope it’s strong—because there are things behind those doors . . . behind all of them.

Jack began to sidle up the hallway again toward the lobby.

Clank.

This time the worlds didn’t change; solid doors remained solid doors and he saw no movement.

Right behind there, though. Right behind—

Now he heard something behind the painted double doors—written in the sky above the marsh scene were the words
HERON BAR
. It was the sound of some large rusty machine that had been set in motion. Jack swung toward

(Jason swung toward)

toward that opening door

(that rising drop-gate)

his hand plunging into

(the poke)

the pocket

(he wore on the belt of his jerkin)

of his jeans and closing around the guitar-pick Speedy had given him so long ago.

(and closing arouind the shark’s tooth)

He waited to see what would come out of the Heron Bar, and the walls of the hotel whispered dimly:
We have ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. You should have left while there was still time . . .

 . . .because now, little boy, your time is up.

5

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

The noise was large and clumsy and metallic. There was something relentless and inhuman about it which frightened Jack more badly than a more human sound would have done.

It moved and shuffled its way forward with its own slow idiot rhythm:

Clank . . . THUD!

Clank . . . THUD!

There was a long pause. Jack waited, pressed against the far wall a few feet to the right of the painted doors, his nerves so tightly wound they seemed to hum. Nothing at all happened for a long time. Jack began to hope the clanker had fallen back through some interdimensional trapdoor and into the world it had come from. He became aware that his back ached from his artificially still and tautly erect posture. He slumped.

Then there was a splintering crash, and a huge mailed fist with blunt two-inch spikes sprouting from the knuckles slammed through the peeling blue sky on the door. Jack shrank back against the wall again, gaping.

And, helplessly, flipped into the Territories.

6

Standing on the other side of the drop-gate was a figure in blackish, rusty armor. Its cylindrical helmet was broken only by a black horizontal eye-slit no more than an inch wide. The helmet was topped by a frowzy red plume—white bugs squirmed in and out of it. They were the same sort, Jason saw, as those which had come out of the walls first in Albert the Blob’s room and then all over Thayer School. The helmet ended in a coif of mail which draped the rusty knight’s shoulders like a lady’s stole. The upper arms and forearms were plated with heavy steel brassards. They were joined at the elbows with cubitieres. These were crusted with layers of ancient filth, and when the knight moved, the cubitieres squealed like the high, demanding voices of unpleasant children.

Its armored fists were crazy with spikes.

Jason stood against the stone wall, looking at it, unable in fact to look away; his mouth was dry as fever and his eyeballs seemed to be swelling rhythmically in their sockets in time to his heartbeat.

In the knight’s right hand was
le martel de fer
—a battle-hammer with a rusty thirty-pound forged-steel head, as mute as murder.

The drop-gate; remember that the drop-gate is between you and it—

But then, although no human hand was near it, the windlass began to turn; the iron chain, each link as long as Jack’s forearm, began to wind around the drum, and the gate began to rise.

7

The mailed fist was withdrawn from the door, leaving a splintered hole that changed the mural at once from faded pastoral romantic to surrealist bar-sinister: it now looked as if some apocalyptic hunter, disappointed by his day in the marshes, had put a load of birdshot through the sky itself in a fit of pique. Then the head of the battle-hammer exploded through the door in a huge blunt swipe, obliterating one of the two herons struggling to achieve liftoff. Jack raised his hand in front of his face to protect it from splinters. The
martel de fer
was withdrawn. There was another brief pause, almost long enough for Jack to think about running again. Then the spiked fist tore through again. It twisted first one way and then the other, widening the hole, then withdrew. A second later the hammer slammed through the middle of a reed-bed and a large chunk of the right-hand door fell to the carpet.

Jack could now see the hulking armored figure in the shadows of the Heron Bar. The armor was not the same as that worn by the figure confronting Jason in the black castle; that one wore a helmet which was nearly cylindrical, with a red plume. This one wore a helmet that looked like the polished head of a steel bird. Horns rose from either side, sprouting from the helmet at roughly ear level. Jack saw a breastplate, a kilt of plate-mail, a hemming of chain-mail below that. The hammer was the same in both worlds, and in both worlds the knight-Twinners dropped them at the same instant, as if in contempt—who would need a battle-hammer to deal with such a puny opponent as this?

Run! Jack, run!

That’s right,
the hotel whispered.
Run! That’s what fushing feeves are supposed to do! Run! RUN!

But he would not run. He might die, but he would not run—because that sly, whispering voice was right. Running was exactly what fushing feeves did.

But I’m no thief,
Jack thought grimly.
That thing may kill me, but I won’t run. Because I’m no thief.

“I won’t run!”
Jack shouted at the blank, polished-steel bird-face.
“I’m no thief! Do you hear me? I’ve come for what’s mine and I’M NO THIEF!”

A groaning scream came from the breathing-holes at the bottom of the bird-helmet. The knight raised its spiked fists and brought them down, one on the sagging left door, one on the sagging right. The pastoral marsh-world painted there was destroyed. The hinges snapped . . . and as the doors fell toward him, Jack actually saw the one painted heron who remained go flying away like a bird in a Walt Disney cartoon, its eyes bright and terrified.

The suit of armor came toward him like a killer robot, its feet rising and then crashing down. It was more than seven feet tall, and when it came through the door the horns rising from its helmet tore a set of ragged slashes into the upper jamb. They looked like quotation marks.

Run!
a yammering voice in his mind screamed.

Run, you feef,
the hotel whispered.

No,
Jack answered. He stared up at the advancing knight, and his hand wrapped itself tightly around the guitar-pick in his pocket. The spike-studded gauntlets came up toward the visor of its bird-helmet. They raised it. Jack gaped.

The inside of the helmet was empty.

Then those studded hands were reaching for Jack.

8

The spike-studded hands came up and grasped either side of the cylindrical helmet. They lifted it slowly off, disclosing the livid, haggard face of a man who looked at least three hundred years old. One side of this ancient’s head had been bashed in. Splinters of bone like broken eggshell poked out through the skin, and the wound was caked with some black goop which Jason supposed was decayed brains. It was not breathing, but the red-rimmed eyes which regarded Jason were sparkling and hellishly avid. It grinned, and Jason saw the needle-sharp teeth with which this horror would rip him to pieces.

It clanked unsteadily forward . . . but that wasn’t the only sound.

He looked to his left, toward the main hall.

(lobby)

of the castle

(hotel)

and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow, bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vampires of some sort.

Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.

9

Jack howled with the pain—the short blunt-tipped spikes on its hands were
in
him,
in
him, and he understood once and for all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.

He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness inside that helmet—

But was it really empty?

Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.

It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to

(tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)

freeze me solid—

JACK!
Speedy’s voice cried.

(JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)

The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph—that lovely sensation of Territories
heat
, that clear feeling of
rainbow
.

The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs—and in that moment Jack

(and Jason)

saw those designs come together in a face—the face of Laura DeLoessian.

(the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)

10

“In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!”
they shouted together—but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason.
“Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny face of the old vampire-thing in the suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, exploded, and a black, steaming inchor ran over his hand and wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.

11

Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.

The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was
swelling
somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart—Jack thought if he had seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s enemy from running a blade or a spear-point through the knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.

Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together. In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him. One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a symbol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign—but these were not Morgan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who presumed to steal away their only reason for being.