The Talisman

CHAPTER ONE
    THE ALHAMBRA INN
AND GARDENS
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    1
    On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze swept back his brown hair, probably too long, from a fine, clear brow. He stood there, filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months – since the time when his mother had closed their house on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estate agents, rented an apartment on Central Park West. From that apartment they had fled to this quiet resort on New Hampshire’s tiny seacoast. Order and regularity had disappeared from Jack’s world. His life seemed as shifting, as uncontrolled, as the heaving water before him. His mother was moving him through the world, twitching him from place to place; but what moved his mother?
    His mother was running, running.
    Jack turned around, looking up the empty beach first to the left, then to the right. To the left was Arcadia Funworld, an amusement park that ran all racket and roar from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It stood empty and still now, a heart between beats. The roller coaster was a scaffold against that featureless, overcast sky, the uprights and angled supports like strokes done in charcoal. Down there was his new friend, Speedy Parker, but the boy could not think about Speedy Parker now. To the right was the Alhambra Inn and Gardens, and that was where the boy’s thoughts relentlessly took him. On the day of their arrival Jack had momentarily thought he’d seen a rainbow over its dormered and gambreled roof. A sign of sorts, a promise of better things. But there had been no rainbow. A weathervane spun right-left, left-right, caught in a crosswind. He had got out of their rented car, ignoring his mother’s unspoken desire for him to do something about the luggage, and looked up. Above the spinning brass cock of the weathervane hung only a blank sky.
    ‘Open the trunk and get the bags, sonny boy,’ his mother had called to him. ‘This broken-down old actress wants to check in and hunt down a drink.’
    ‘An elementary martini,’ Jack had said.
    ‘“you’re not so old,” you were supposed to say.’ She was pushing herself effortfully off the carseat.
    ‘you’re not so old.’
    She gleamed at him – a glimpse of the old, go-to-hell Lily Cavanaugh (Sawyer), queen of two decades’ worth of B movies. She straightened her back. ‘It’s going to be okay here, Jacky,’ she had said. ‘Everything’s going to be okay here. This is a good place.’
    A seagull drifted over the roof of the hotel, and for a second Jack had the disquieting sensation that the weathervane had taken flight.
    ‘We’ll get away from the phone calls for a while, right?’
    ‘Sure,’ Jack had said. She wanted to hide from Uncle Morgan, she wanted no more wrangles with her dead husband’s business partner, she wanted to crawl into bed with an elementary martini and hoist the covers over her head . . .
    Mom, what’s wrong with you?
    There was too much death, the world was half-made of death. The gull cried out overhead.
    ‘Andelay, kid, andelay,’ his mother had said. ‘Let’s get into the Great Good Place.’
    Then, Jack had thought: At least there’s always Uncle Tommy to help out in case things get really hairy .
    But Uncle Tommy was already dead; it was just that the news was still on the other end of a lot of telephone wires.
    2
    The Alhambra hung out over the water, a great Victorian pile on gigantic granite blocks which seemed to merge almost seamlessly with the low headland – a jutting collarbone of granite here on the few scant miles of New Hampshire seacoast. The formal gardens on its landward side were barely visible from Jack’s beachfront angle – a dark green flip of hedge, that was all. The brass cock stood against the sky, quartering west by northwest. A plaque in the lobby announced that it was here, in 1838, that the Northern Methodist Conference had held the first of the great New England abolition rallies. Daniel Webster had spoken at fiery, inspired length. According to the plaque, Webster had said: ‘From this day forward, know that slavery as an American institution has begun to sicken and must soon die in all our states and territorial lands.’
    3
    So they had arrived on that day last week which had