The Talisman

was, and that floating eye, and that he was as ugly as black, syphilitic sin.’
    Anders paused.
    ‘He liked to hurt things. Little things. He used to take them under the porch and I’d hear the most awful screams . . .’ Anders shuddered. ‘That was one of the reasons I kept to my house, you know. I don’t like to hear wee animals in pain. Makes me feel turrible bad, it does.’
    Everything Anders said raised a hundred fresh questions in Jack’s mind. He would particularly have liked to know all that Anders knew about the Wolfs – just hearing of them woke simultaneous pleasure and a deep, dully painful longing for his Wolf in his heart.
    But time was short; this man was scheduled to drive west into the Blasted Lands in the morning, a horde of crazy scholars led by Morgan himself might burst through from what the liveryman called the Other Place at any moment, Richard might wake up and want to know who this Morgan was they were discussing, and who this dim fellow was – this dim fellow who sounded suspiciously like the fellow who had lived next door to him in Nelson House.
    ‘They came,’ he prompted, ‘this crew came, and Osmond was their foreman – at least until he was called away or whenever he had to lead the devotions at night-chapel back in Indiana—’
    ‘My Lord?’ Anders’s face was again ponderous with puzzlement.
    ‘They came, and they built . . . what?’ He was sure he already knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear Anders himself say it.
    ‘Why, the tracks,’ Anders said. ‘The tracks going west into the Blasted Lands. The tracks I must travel myself tomorrow.’ He shuddered.
    ‘No,’ Jack said. A hot, terrible excitement exploded in his chest like a sun, and he rose to his feet. Again there was that click in his head, that terrible, persuasive feeling of great things coming together.
    Anders fell on his knees with a crash as a terrible, beautiful light filled Jack’s face. Richard stirred at the sound and sat sleepily up.
    ‘Not you,’ Jack said. ‘Me. And him.’ He pointed at Richard.
    ‘Jack?’ Richard looked at him with sleepy, nearsighted confusion. ‘What are you talking about? And why is that man sniffing the floor?’
    ‘My Lord . . . yer will, of course . . . but I don’t understand . . .’
    ‘Not you,’ Jack said, ‘us. We’ll take the train for you.’
    ‘But my Lord, why?’ Anders managed, not yet daring to look up.
    Jack Sawyer looked out into the darkness.
    ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I think there’s something at the end of the tracks – at the end of the tracks or near the end – that I have to get.’

INTERLUDE
    SLOAT IN THIS WORLD (IV)
----

    On the tenth of December, a bundled-up Morgan Sloat was sitting on the uncomfortable little wooden chair beside Lily Sawyer’s bed – he was cold, so he had his heavy cashmere coat wrapped around him and his hands thrust deep into its pockets, but he was having a much better time than his appearance suggested. Lily was dying. She was going out, away, to that place from which you never came back, not even if you were a Queen in a football-field-sized bed.
    Lily’s bed was not so grand, and she did not in the least resemble a Queen. Illness had subtracted her good looks, had skinned down her face and aged her a quick twenty years. Sloat let his eyes roam appreciatively over the prominent ridges of bone about her eyes, the tortoiselike shell of her forehead. Her ravaged body barely made a lump beneath the sheets and blankets. Sloat knew that the Alhambra had been well paid to leave Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer alone, for it was he who had paid them. They no longer bothered to send heat up to her room. She was the hotel’s only guest. Besides the desk clerk and cook, the only employees still in the Alhambra were three Portuguese maids who spent all their time cleaning the lobby – it must have been the maids who kept Lily piled high with blankets. Sloat himself had commandeered the suite across the hall, and ordered the desk clerk and the maids to keep a close eye on Lily.
    To see if she would open her eyes, he said, ‘You’re looking better, Lily. I really think I see signs of improvement.’
    Without moving anything but her mouth, Lily said, ‘I don’t know why you pretend to be human, Sloat.’
    ‘I’m the best friend you have,’ Sloat responded.
    Now she did open her eyes, and they were not dull enough to suit him. ‘Get out of here,’ she whispered. ‘You’re obscene.’
    ‘I’m