The Talisman

Lennon glasses were gone. And –
    – and Wolf was blundering toward the edge of a precipice less than four feet away.
    ‘ Wolf! ’ He lunged at Wolf and wrapped his arms around Wolf’s waist. ‘Wolf, no!’
    ‘Jacky, can’t stay,’ Wolf moaned. ‘It’s a Pit, one of the Pits, Morgan made these places, oh I heard that Morgan made them, I can smell it—’
    ‘Wolf, there’s a cliff, you’ll fall!’
    Wolf’s eyes opened. His jaw dropped as he saw the smokey chasm which spread at their feet. In its deepest, cloudy depths, red fire winked like infected eyes.
    ‘A Pit,’ Wolf moaned. ‘Oh Jacky, it’s a Pit. Furnaces of the Black Heart down there. Black Heart at the middle of the world. Can’t stay, Jacky, it’s the worst bad there is.’
    Jack’s first cold thought as he and Wolf stood at the edge of the Pit, looking down into hell, or the Black Heart at the middle of the world, was that Territories geography and Indiana geography weren’t the same. There was no corresponding place in the Sunlight Home to this cliff, this hideous Pit.
    Four feet to the right , Jack thought with sudden, sickening horror. That’s all it would have taken – just four feet to the right. And if Wolf had done what I told him –
    If Wolf had done just what Jack had told him, they would have flipped from that first stall. And if they had done that, they would have come into the Territories just over this cliff’s edge.
    The strength ran out of his legs. He groped at Wolf again, this time for support.
    Wolf held him absently, his eyes wide and glowing a steady orange. His face was a grue of dismay and fear. ‘It’s a Pit, Jacky.’
    It looked like the huge open-pit molybdenum mine he had visited with his mother when they had vacationed in Colorado three winters ago – they had gone to Vail to ski but one day it had been too bitterly cold for that and so they had taken a bus tour to the Continental Minerals molybdenum mine outside the little town of Sidewinder. ‘It looks like Gehenna to me, Jack-O,’ she had said, and her face as she looked out the frost-bordered bus window had been dreamy and sad. ‘I wish they’d shut those places down, every one of them. They’re pulling fire and destruction out of the earth. It’s Gehenna, all right.’
    Thick, choking vines of smoke rose from the depths of the Pit. Its sides were veined with thick lodes of some poisonous green metal. It was perhaps half a mile across. A road leading downward spiraled its inner circumference. Jack could see figures toiling both upward and downward upon this road.
    It was a prison of some kind, just as the Sunlight Home was a prison, and these were the prisoners and their keepers. The prisoners were naked, harnessed in pairs to carts like rickshaws – carts filled with huge chunks of that green, greasy-looking ore. Their faces were drawn in rough woodcuts of pain. Their faces were blackened with soot. Their faces ran with thick red sores.
    The guards toiled beside them, and Jack saw with numb dismay that they were not human; in no sense at all could they be called human. They were twisted and humped, their hands were claws, their ears pointed like Mr Spock’s. Why, they’re gargoyles! he thought. All those nightmare monsters on those cathedrals in France – Mom had a book and I thought we were going to have to see every one in the whole country but she stopped when I had a bad dream and wet the bed – did they come from here? Did somebody see them here? Somebody from the Middle Ages who flipped over, saw this place, and thought he’d had a vision of hell?
    But this was no vision.
    The gargoyles had whips, and over the rumble of the wheels and the sounds of rock cracking steadily under some steady, baking heat, Jack heard their pop and whistle. As he and Wolf watched, one team of men paused near the very top of the spiral road, their heads down, tendons on their necks standing out in harsh relief, their legs trembling with exhaustion.
    The monstrosity who was guarding them – a twisted creature with a breechclout twisted around its legs and a patchy line of stiff hair growing from the scant flesh over the knobs of its spine – brought its whip down first on one and then on the other, howling at them in a high, screeching language that seemed to drive silver nails of pain into Jack’s head. Jack saw the same silver beads of metal that had decorated Osmond’s whip, and before he could blink, the arm of one prisoner had been torn open