The Talisman

twirled from all of the latter. They twirled even when there was no wind, Richard said – he could clearly remember standing at the window of his room and watching them go around and around and around, strange brass creations shaped like crescent moons and scarab beetles and Chinese ideograms, winking in the sun while the ocean foamed and roared below.
    Ah yes, doc, it all comes back to me now , Jack thought.
    ‘It was deserted?’ Jack asked.
    ‘Yes. For sale.’
    ‘What was its name?’
    ‘The Agincourt.’ Richard paused, then added another child’s color – the one most small children are apt to leave in the box. ‘It was black. It was made of wood, but the wood looked like stone. Old black stone. And that’s what my father and his friends called it. The Black Hotel.’
    11
    It was partly – but not entirely – to divert Richard that Jack asked, ‘Did your father buy that hotel? Like he did Camp Readiness?’
    Richard thought about it awhile and then nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think he did. After a while. There was a For Sale sign on the gates in front of the place when he first started taking me there, but one time when we went there it was just gone.’
    ‘But you never stayed there?’
    ‘God, no!’ Richard shuddered. ‘The only way he could have gotten me in there would have been with a towing chain . . . even then I might not have gone.’
    ‘Never even went in?’
    ‘No. Never did, never will.’
    Ah, Richie-boy, didn’t anyone ever teach you to never say never?
    ‘That goes for your father as well? He never even went in?’
    ‘Not to my knowledge,’ Richard said in his best professional voice. His forefinger went to the bridge of his nose, as if to push up the glasses that weren’t there. ‘I’d be willing to bet he never went in. He was as scared of it as I was. But with me, that’s all I felt . . . just scared. For my father, there was something more. He was . . .’
    ‘Was what?’
    Reluctantly, Richard said, ‘He was obsessed with the place, I think.’
    Richard paused, eyes vague, thinking back. ‘He’d go and stand in front of it every day we were in Point Venuti. And I don’t mean just for a couple of minutes, or something like that – he’d stand in front of it for, like, three hours. Sometimes more. He was alone most of those times. But not always. He had . . . strange friends.’
    ‘Wolfs?’
    ‘I guess so,’ Richard said, almost angrily. ‘Yeah, I guess some of them could have been Wolfs, or whatever you call them. They looked uncomfortable in their clothes – they were always scratching themselves, usually in those places where nice people aren’t supposed to scratch. Others looked like the substitute coach. Kind of hard and mean. Some of those guys I used to see out at Camp Readiness, too. I’ll tell you one thing, Jack – those guys were even more scared of that place than my father was. They just about cringed when they got near it.’
    ‘Sunlight Gardener? Was he ever there?’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ Richard said. ‘But in Point Venuti he looked more like the man we saw over there . . .’
    ‘Like Osmond.’
    ‘Yes. But those people didn’t come very often. Mostly it was just my father, by himself. Sometimes he’d get the restaurant at our motel to pack him some sandwiches, and he’d sit on a sidewalk bench and eat his lunch looking at the hotel. I stood at the window in the lobby of the Kingsland and looked at my father looking at the hotel. I never liked his face at those times. He looked afraid, but he also looked like . . . like he was gloating.’
    ‘Gloating,’ Jack mused.
    ‘Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and I always said no. He’d nod and I remember once he said, “There’ll be time. You’ll understand everything, Rich . . . in time.” I remember thinking that if it was about that black hotel, I didn’t want to understand.
    ‘Once,’ Richard said, ‘when he was drunk, he said there was something inside that place. He said it had been there for a long time. We were lying in our beds, I remember. The wind was high that night. I could hear the waves hitting the beach, and the squeaky sound of those weathervanes turning on top of the Agincourt’s towers. It was a scary sound. I thought about that place, all those rooms, all of them empty—’
    ‘Except for the ghosts,’ Jack muttered. He thought he heard footsteps and looked quickly behind them. Nothing; no one. The roadbed was deserted for as far as he