The Talisman

it read KINGSLA TEL . The Kingsland Motel, Jack remembered, where Morgan Sloat had installed himself and his little boy during his obsessive inspections of the black hotel. A flash of white that was Sunlight Gardener roamed farther up the street, clearly berating several of the black-suited men and flapping his hand toward the hill. He doesn’t know I’m down here already , Jack realized as one of the men began to trudge across the beach road, looking from side to side. Gardener made another abrupt, commanding gesture, and the limousine parked at the foot of Main Street wheeled away from the hotel and began to coast alongside the man in the black suit. He unbuttoned his jacket as soon as he hit the sidewalk of Main Street and took a pistol from a shoulder holster.
    In the limousines the drivers turned their heads and stared up the hill. Jack blessed his luck – five minutes later, and a renegade Wolf with an oversized gun would have ended his quest for that great singing thing in the hotel.
    He could see only the top two floors of the hotel, and the madly spinning devices attached to the architectural extravagances on the roof. Because of his worm’s-eye angle, the breakwater bisecting the beach on the right side of the hotel seemed to rear up twenty feet or more, marching down the sand and on into the water.
    COME NOW COME NOW, called the Talisman in words that were not words, but almost-physical expressions of urgency.
    The man with the gun was now out of sight, but the drivers still stared after him as he went uphill toward Point Venuti’s lunatics. Sunlight Gardener lifted his bullhorn and roared, ‘Root him out! I want him rooted out!’ He jabbed the bullhorn at another black-suited man, just raising his binoculars to look down the street in Jack’s direction. ‘You! Pig-brains! Take the other side of the street . . . and root that bad boy out , oh yes, that baddest baddest boy, baddest . . .’ His voice trailed away as the second man trotted across the street to the opposite sidewalk, his pistol already lengthening his fist.
    It was the best chance he’d ever get, Jack realized – nobody was facing down the length of the beach road. ‘Hang on tight,’ he whispered to Richard, who did not move. ‘Time to boogie.’ He got his feet up under him, and knew that Richard’s back was probably visible above the yellow weeds and tall grass. Bending over, he burst out of the weeds and set his feet on the beach road.
    In seconds Jack Sawyer was flat on his stomach in the gritty sand. He pushed himself forward with his feet. One of Richard’s hands tightened on his shoulder. Jack wiggled forward across the sand until he had made it behind the first tall outcropping of rock; then he simply stopped moving and lay with his head on his hands, Richard light as a leaf on his back, breathing hard. The water, no more than twenty feet away, beat against the edge of the beach. Jack could still hear Sunlight Gardener screeching about imbeciles and incompetents, his crazy voice drifting down from uphill on Main Street. The Talisman urged him forward, urged him on, on, on . . .
    Richard fell off his back.
    ‘You okay?’
    Richard raised a thin hand and touched his forehead with his fingers, his cheekbone with his thumb. ‘I guess. You see my father?’
    Jack shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
    ‘But he’s here.’
    ‘I guess. He has to be.’ The Kingsland, Jack remembered, seeing in his mind the dingy facade, the broken wooden sign. Morgan Sloat would have holed up in the motel he had used so often six or seven years ago. Jack immediately felt the furious presence of Morgan Sloat near him, as if knowing where Sloat was had summoned him up.
    ‘Well, don’t worry about him.’ Richard’s voice was paper-thin. ‘I mean, don’t worry about me worrying about him. I think he’s dead, Jack.’
    Jack looked at his friend with a fresh anxiety: could Richard actually be losing his mind? Certainly Richard was feverish. Up on the hill, Sunlight Gardener bawled ‘SPREAD OUT!’ through his bullhorn.
    ‘You think—’
    And then Jack heard another voice, one that had first whispered beneath Gardener’s angry command. It was a half-familiar voice, and Jack recognized its timbre and cadence before he had truly identified it. And, oddly, he recognized that the sound of this particular voice made him feel relaxed – almost as if he could stop scheming and fretting now, for everything would be taken care of – before he