The Talisman

scrawled up the side of an isolated peeling building that had surely once been a boarding house. The words had been there a long time.
    JASON, I NEED YOU, the Talisman boomed out at him in a language both above and beneath speech.
    ‘I can’t,’ Richard whispered beside him. ‘Jack, I know I can’t.’
    After the row of peeling, hopeless-looking houses, the road dipped again, and Jack could see only the backs of a pair of black Cadillac limousines, one on either side of Main Street, parked with their noses pointed downhill, motors running. Like a trick photograph, looking impossibly large, impossibly sinister, the top – half? third? – of the black hotel reared up over the back ends of the Cadillacs and the despairing little houses. It seemed to float, cut off by the curve of the final hill. ‘I can’t go in there,’ Richard repeated.
    ‘I’m not even sure we can get past those trees,’ Jack said. ‘Hold your water, Richie.’
    Richard uttered an odd, snuffling noise which it took Jack a second to recognize as the sound of crying. He put his arm over Richard’s shoulder. The hotel owned the landscape – that much was obvious. The black hotel owned Point Venuti, the air above it, the ground beneath. Looking at it, Jack saw the weathervanes spin in contradictory directions, the turrets and gambrels rise like warts into the gray air. The Agincourt did look as if it were made of stone – thousand-year-old stone, black as tar. In one of the upper windows, a light suddenly flashed – to Jack, it was as if the hotel had winked at him, secretly amused to find him at last so near. A dim figure seemed to glide away from the window: a second later the reflection of a cloud swam across the glass.
    From somewhere inside, the Talisman trilled out its song only Jack could hear.
    3
    ‘I think it grew,’ Richard breathed. He had forgotten to scratch since he had seen the hotel floating past the final hill. Tears ran over and through the raised red bumps on his cheeks, and Jack saw that his eyes were now completely encased by the raised rash – Richard didn’t have to squint to squint anymore. ‘It’s impossible, but the hotel used to be smaller, Jack. I’m sure of it.’
    ‘Right now, nothing’s impossible,’ Jack said, almost unnecessarily – they had long ago passed into the realm of the impossible. And the Agincourt was so large, so dominating, that it was wildly out of scale with the rest of the town.
    The architectural extravagance of the black hotel, all the turrets and brass weathervanes attached to fluted towers, the cupolas and gambrels which should have made it a playful fantasy, instead made it menacing, nightmarish. It looked as though it belonged in some kind of anti-Disneyland where Donald Duck had strangled Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Mickey shot Minnie Mouse full of heroin.
    ‘I’m afraid,’ Richard said; and JASON COME NOW, sang out the Talisman.
    ‘Just stick close to me, pal, and we’ll go through that place like grease through a goose.’
    JASON COME NOW!
    The clump of Territories trees just ahead rustled as Jack stepped forward.
    Richard, frightened, hung back – it might have been, Jack realized, that Richard was nearly blind by now, deprived of his glasses and with his eyes gradually being squeezed shut. He reached behind him and pulled Richard forward, feeling as he did so how thin Richard’s hand and wrist had become.
    Richard came stumbling along. His skinny wrist burned in Jack’s hand. ‘Whatever you do, don’t slow down,’ Jack said. ‘All we have to do is get by them.’
    ‘I can’t,’ Richard sobbed.
    ‘Do you want me to carry you? I’m being serious, Richard. I mean, this could be a lot worse. I bet if we hadn’t blown so many of his troops away back there, he’d have guards every fifty feet.’
    ‘You couldn’t move fast enough if you carried me. I’d slow you down.’
    What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing now? went through Jack’s mind, but he said, ‘Stay on my far side and go like hell, Richie. When I say three. Got it? One . . . two . . . three!’
    He jerked Richard’s arm and began sprinting past the trees. Richard stumbled, gasped, then managed to right himself and keep on moving without falling down. Geysers of dust appeared at the base of the trees, a commotion of shredding earth and scrambling things that looked like enormous beetles, shiny as shoe polish. A small brown bird took off out of the weeds near the clump of