The Talisman

Uncle Morgan? Is he bothering you?’
    ‘I sent your Uncle away from here with a flea in his ear,’ she said.
    ‘He was there? He did come? Is he still bothering you?’
    ‘I got rid of the Stoat about two days after you left, baby. Don’t waste time worrying about him.’
    ‘Did he say where he was going?’ Jack asked her, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth the telephone uttered a tortured electronic squeal that seemed to bore right into his head. Jack grimaced and jerked the receiver away from his ear. The awful whining noise of static was so loud that anyone stepping into the corridor would have heard it. ‘MOM!’ Jack shouted, putting the phone as close to his head as he dared. The squeal of static increased, as if a radio between stations had been turned up to full volume.
    The line abruptly fell silent. Jack clamped the receiver to his ear and heard only the flat black silence of dead air. ‘Hey,’ he said, and jiggled the hook. The flat silence in the phone seemed to press up against his ear.
    Just as abruptly, and as if his jiggling the hook had caused it, the dial tone – an oasis of sanity, of regularity, now – resumed. Jack jammed his right hand in his pocket, looking for another coin.
    He was holding the receiver, awkwardly, in his left hand as he dug in his pocket; he froze when he heard the dial tone suddenly slot off into outer space.
    Morgan Sloat’s voice spoke to him as clearly as if good old Uncle Morgan were standing at the next telephone. ‘Get your ass back home, Jack.’ Sloat’s voice carved the air like a scalpel. ‘You just get your ass back home before we have to take you back ourselves.’
    ‘Wait,’ Jack said, as if he were begging for time: in fact, he was too terrified to know quite what he was saying.
    ‘Can’t wait any longer, little pal. You’re a murderer now. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a murderer. So we’re not able to give you any more chances. You just get your can back to that resort in New Hampshire. Now. Or maybe you’ll go home in a bag.’
    Jack heard the click of the receiver. He dropped it. The telephone Jack had used shuddered forward, then sagged off the wall. For a second it drooped on a network of wires; then crashed heavily to the floor.
    The door to the men’s room banged open behind Jack, and a voice yelled, ‘Holy SHIT!’
    Jack turned to see a thin crewcut boy of about twenty staring at the telephones. He was wearing a white apron and a bow tie: a clerk at one of the shops.
    ‘I didn’t do it,’ Jack said. ‘It just happened.’
    ‘Holy shit.’ The crewcut clerk goggled at Jack for a split-second, jerked as if to run, and then ran his hands over the crown of his head.
    Jack backed away down the hall. When he was halfway down the escalator he finally heard the clerk yelling, ‘Mr Olafson! The phone, Mr Olafson!’ Jack fled.
    Outside, the air was bright, surprisingly humid. Dazed, Jack wandered across the sidewalk. A half-mile away across the parking lot, a black-and-white police car swung in toward the mall. Jack turned sideways and began to walk down the pavement. Some way ahead, a family of six struggled to get a lawn chair in through the next entrance to the mall. Jack slowed down and watched the husband and wife tilt the long chair diagonally, hindered by the attempts of the smaller children to either sit on the chair or to assist them. At last, nearly in the posture of the flagraisers in the famous photograph of Iwo Jima, the family staggered through the doors. The police car lazily circled through the big parking lot.
    Just past the door where the disorderly family had succeeded in planting their chair, an old black man sat on a wooden crate, cradling a guitar in his lap. As Jack slowly drew nearer, he saw the metal cup beside the man’s feet. The man’s face was hidden behind big dirty sunglasses and beneath the brim of a stained felt hat. The sleeves of his denim jacket were as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide.
    Jack swerved out to the edge of the pavement to give the man all the room he seemed to warrant, and noticed that around the man’s neck hung a sign handwritten in big shaky capital letters on discolored white cardboard. A few steps later he could read the letters.
    BLIND SINCE BIRTH
    WILL PLAY ANY SONG
    GOD BLESS YOU
    He had nearly walked past the man holding the beat-up old guitar when he heard him utter, his voice a cracked and juicy whisper, ‘Yeah-bob.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SNOWBALL