The Talisman (76 page)

As it happened, he would not have to. As the first snow began to spit down from the leaden skies over Cayuga (and as Jack Sawyer was touching the Talisman some two thousand miles away), the LP tanks behind the kitchen exploded. A workman from Eastern Indiana Gas and Electric had come the week before and had sucked all the gas back into his truck, and he would have sworn you could have crawled right inside one of those tanks and lit up a cigarette, but they exploded anyway—they exploded at the exact moment the windows of the Oatley Tap were exploding out into the street (along with a number of patrons wearing denim shirts and boots . . . and Elmira rescue units hauled em away).

The Sunlight Home burned to the ground in almost no time at all.

Can you gimme hallelujah?

11

In all worlds, something shifted and settled into a slightly new position like a great beast . . . but in Point Venuti the beast was in the earth; it had been awakened and was roaring. It did not go to sleep for the next seventy-nine seconds, according to the Institute of Seismology at CalTech.

The earthquake had begun.

44

The Earthquake

1

It was some time before Jack became aware that the Agincourt was shaking itself to pieces around him, and this was not surprising. He was transported with wonder. In one sense he was not in the Agincourt at all, not in Point Venuti, not in Mendocino County, not in California, not in the American Territories, not in those other Territories; but he
was
in them, and in an infinite number of other worlds as well, and all at the same time. Nor was he simply in one place in all those worlds; he was in them everywhere because he
was
those worlds. The Talisman, it seemed, was much more than even his father had believed. It was not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves—the worlds, and the spaces between those worlds.

Here was enough transcendentalism to drive even a cavedwelling Tibetan holy man insane. Jack Sawyer was everywhere; Jack Sawyer was everything. A blade of grass on a world fifty thousand worlds down the chain from earth died of thirst on an inconsequential plain somewhere in the center of a continent which roughly corresponded in position to Africa; Jack died with that blade of grass. In another world, dragons were copulating in the center of a cloud high above the planet, and the fiery breath of their ecstasy mixed with the cold air and precipitated rain and floods on the ground below. Jack was the he-dragon; Jack was the she-dragon; Jack was the sperm; Jack was the egg. Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macrocosmic player-piano tapes which would play everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack’s happy teeth bit an orange: Jack’s unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open. He was a trillion dust-kitties under a billion beds. He was a joey dreaming of its previous life in its mother’s pouch as the mother bounced over a purple plain where rabbits the size of deer ran and gambolled. He was ham on a hock in Peru and eggs in a nest under one of the hens in the Ohio henhouse Buddy Parkins was cleaning. He was the powdered henshit in Buddy Parkins’s nose; he was the trembling hairs that would soon cause Buddy Parkins to sneeze; he was the sneeze; he was the germs in the sneeze; he was the atoms in the germs; he was the tachyons in the atoms travelling backward through time toward the big bang at the start of creation.

His heart skipped and a thousand suns flashed up in novas.

He saw a googolplex of sparrows in a googolplex of worlds and marked the fall or the well-being of each.

He died in the Gehenna of Territories ore-pit mines.

He lived as a flu-virus in Etheridge’s tie.

He ran in a wind over far places.

He was . . .

Oh he was . . .

He was God. God, or something so close as to make no difference.

No!
Jack screamed in terror.
No, I don’t want to be God! Please! Please, I don’t want to be God, I ONLY WANT TO SAVE MY MOTHER’S LIFE!

And suddenly infinitude closed up like a losing hand folding in a cardsharp’s grasp. It narrowed down to a beam of blinding white light, and this he followed back to the Territories Ballroom, where only seconds had passed. He still held the Talisman in his hands.

2

Outside, the ground had begun to do a carny kooch dancer’s bump and grind. The tide, which had been coming in, re-thought itself and began to run backward, exposing sand as deeply tanned as a starlet’s thighs. Flopping on this uncovered sand were strange fish, some which seemed to be no more than gelatinous clots of eyes.

The cliffs behind the town were nominally of sedimentary rock, but any geologist would have taken one look and told you at once that these rocks were to the sedimentary classification as the nouveau riche were to the Four Hundred. The Point Venuti Highlands were really nothing but mud with a hard-on and now they cracked and split in a thousand crazy directions. For a moment they held, the new cracks opening and closing like gasping mouths, and then they began to collapse in landslides on the town. Showers of dirt came sifting down. Amid the dirt were boulders as big as Toledo tire-factories.

Morgan’s Wolf Brigade had been decimated by Jack and Richard’s surprise attack on Camp Readiness. Now the number was even further reduced as many of them ran screaming and wailing in superstitious fear. Some catapulated back into their own world. Some of these got away, but most were swallowed by the upheavals that were happening there. A core of similar cataclysms ran from this place through all the worlds, as if punched through by a surveyor’s hollow sampling rod. One group of three Wolfs dressed in Fresno Demons motorcycle jackets gained their car—a horny old Lincoln Mark IV—and managed to drive a block and a half with Harry James bellowing brass out of the tapedeck before a chunk of stone fell from the sky and crushed the Connie flat.

Others simply ran shrieking in the streets, their Change beginning. The woman with the chains in her nipples strolled serenely in front of one of these. She was serenely ripping her hair out in great chunks. She held one of these chunks out to the Wolf. The bloody roots wavered like the tips of sea-grass as she waltzed in place on the unsteady earth.

“Here!” she cried, smiling serenely. “A bouquet! For you!”

The Wolf, not a bit serene, tore her head off with a single snap of his jaws and ran on, on, on.

3

Jack studied what he had captured, as breathless as a child who has a shy woodland creature come out of the grass and eat from his hand.

It glowed between his palms, waxing and waning, waxing and waning.

With my heartbeat,
he thought.

It seemed to be glass, but it had a faintly yielding feeling in his hands. He pressed and it gave a little. Color shot inward from the points of his pressure in enchanting billows: inky blue from his left hand, deepest carmine from the right. He smiled . . . and then the smile faded.

You may be killing a billion people doing that—fires, floods, God knows what. Remember the building that collapsed in Angola, New York, after—

No, Jack,
the Talisman whispered, and he understood why it had yielded to the gentle pressure of his hands. It was alive; of course it was.
No, Jack: All will be well . . . all will be well . . . and all manner of things will be well. Only believe; be true; stand; do not falter now
.

Peace in him—oh such deep peace.

Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,
Jack thought, and wondered if he could ever bring himself to let this wondrous bauble go.

4

On the beach below the wooden walk, Gardener had fallen flat on his belly in terror. His fingers hooked into the loose sand. He was mewling.

Morgan reeled toward him like a drunk and ripped the pack-set from Gardener’s shoulder.

“Stay outside!”
he roared into it, and then realized he had forgotten to press the
SEND
button. He did it now.
“STAY OUTSIDE! IF YOU TRY TO GET OUT OF TOWN THE MOTHERFUCKING CLIFFS WILL FALL ON YOU! GET DOWN HERE! COME TO ME! THIS IS NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF GODDAM SPECIAL EFFECTS! GET DOWN HERE! FORM A RING AROUND THE BEACH! THOSE OF YOU WHO COME WILL BE REWARDED! THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T WILL DIE IN THE PITS AND IN THE BLASTED LANDS! GET DOWN HERE! IT’S OPEN! GET DOWN HERE WHERE NOTHING CAN FALL ON YOU! GET DOWN HERE, DAMMIT!”

He threw the pack-set aside. It split open. Beetles with long feelers began to squirm out by the dozens.

He bent down and yanked the howling, whey-faced Gardener up. “On your feet, beautiful,” he said.

5

Richard cried out in his unconsciousness as the table he was lying on bucked him off onto the floor. Jack heard the cry, and it dragged him out of his fascinated contemplation of the Talisman.

He became aware that the Agincourt was groaning like a ship in a high gale. As he looked around, boards snapped up, revealing dusty beamwork beneath. The beams were sawing back and forth like shuttles in a loom. Albino bugs scuttered and squirmed away from the Talisman’s clear light.

“I’m coming, Richard!”
he shouted, and began to work his way back across the floor. He was thrown over once and he went down holding the glowing sphere high, knowing it was vulnerable—if it was hit hard enough, it would break. What then, God knew. He got to one knee, was thrown back down on his butt, and lurched to his feet again.

From below, Richard screamed again.

“Richard! Coming!”

From overhead, a sound like sleigh-bells. He looked up and saw the chandelier penduluming back and forth, faster and faster. Its crystal pendants were making that sound. As Jack watched, the chain parted and it hit the unravelling floor like a bomb with diamonds instead of high explosive in its nose. Glass flew.

He turned and exited the room in big, larruping strides—he looked like a burlesque comic doing a turn as a drunken sailor.

Down the hall. He was thrown against first one wall and then the other as the floor seesawed and split open. Each time he crashed into a wall he held the Talisman out from him, his arms like tongs in which it glowed like a white-hot coal.

You’ll never make it down the stairs.

Gotta. Gotta.

He reached the landing where he had faced the black knight. The world heaved a new way; Jack staggered and saw the helmet on the floor below roll crazily away.

Jack continued to look down. The stairs were moving in great tortured waves that made him feel like puking. A stair-level snapped upward, leaving a writhing black hole.

“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 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 unslung 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 concessions 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 exploded. 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 chest with one hand and sliding his hand along the warped bannister with the other.