The Talisman

conspiring trees, and a limber root like an elephant’s trunk whipped out of the dust and snatched it from the air.
    Another root snaked toward Jack’s left ankle, but fell short. The mouths in the coarse bark howled and screamed.
    (LOVERRR? LOVER BOYYY?)
    Jack clenched his teeth together and tried to force Richard Sloat to fly. The heads of the complicated trees had begun to sway and bow. Whole nests and families of roots were slithering toward the white line, moving as though they had independent wills. Richard faltered, then unambiguously slowed as he turned his head to look past Jack toward the reaching trees.
    ‘Move!’ Jack yelled, and yanked at Richard’s arm. The red lumps felt like hot stones buried beneath the skin. He hauled away at Richard, seeing too many of the whickering roots crawl gleefully toward them across the white line.
    Jack put his arm around Richard’s waist at the same instant that a long root whistled through the air and wrapped itself around Richard’s arm.
    ‘Jesus!’ Richard yelled. ‘Jason! It got me! It got me!’
    In horror Jack saw the tip of the root, a blind worm’s head, lift up and stare at him. It twitched almost lazily in the air, then wound itself once again around Richard’s burning arm. Other roots came sliding toward them across the road.
    Jack yanked Richard back as hard as he could, and gained another six inches. The root around Richard’s arm grew taut. Jack locked his arms around Richard’s waist and hauled him mercilessly backward. Richard let out an unearthly, floating scream. For a second, Jack was afraid that Richard’s shoulder had separated, but a voice large within him said PULL! and he dug in his heels and pulled back even harder.
    Then they both nearly went tumbling into a nest of crawling roots, for the single tendril around Richard’s arm had neatly snapped. Jack stayed on his feet only by backpedalling frantically, bending over at the waist to keep Richard, too, off the road. In this way they got past the last of the trees just as they heard the rending, snapping sounds they had heard once before. This time, Jack did not have to tell Richard to run for it.
    The nearest tree came roaring up out of the ground and fell with a ground-shaking thud only three or four feet behind Richard. The others crashed to the surface of the road behind it, waving their roots like wild hair.
    ‘You saved my life,’ Richard said. He was crying again, more from weakness and exhaustion and shock than from fear.
    ‘From now on, my old pal, you ride piggy-back,’ Jack said, panting, and bent down to help Richard get on his back.
    4
    ‘I should have told you,’ Richard was whispering. His face burned against Jack’s neck, his mouth against Jack’s ear. ‘I don’t want you to hate me, but I wouldn’t blame you if you did, really I wouldn’t. I know I should have told you.’ He seemed to weigh no more than the husk of himself, as if nothing were left inside him.
    ‘About what?’ Jack settled Richard squarely in the center of his back, and again had the unsettling feeling that he was carrying only an empty sack of flesh.
    ‘The man who came to visit my father . . . and Camp Readiness . . . and the closet.’ Richard’s hollow-seeming body trembled against his friend’s back. ‘I should have told you. But I couldn’t even tell myself .’ His breath, hot as his skin, blew agitatedly into Jack’s ear.
    Jack thought, The Talisman is doing this to him . An instant later he corrected himself. No. The black hotel is doing this to him .
    The two limousines which had been parked nose-down at the brow of the next hill had disappeared sometime during the fight with the Territories trees, but the hotel endured, growing larger with every forward step Jack took. The skinny naked woman, another of the hotel’s victims, still performed her mad slow dance before the bleak row of shops. The little red flares danced, winked out, danced in the murky air. It was no time at all, neither morning nor afternoon nor night – it was time’s Blasted Lands. The Agincourt Hotel did seem made of stone, though Jack knew it was not – the wood seemed to have calcified and thickened, to have blackened of itself, from the inside out. The brass weathervanes, wolf and crow and snake and circular cryptic designs Jack did not recognize, swung about to contradictory winds. Several of the windows flashed a warning at Jack; but that might have been merely a reflection of one of the red