The Talisman

afraid to breathe. He stepped forward.
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Asshole.’ Richard moved his left foot forward, raised his right arm, brought his right foot forward. Now he could find the bottom of the ladder with his hands, as he fiercely squinted through his right eye. ‘See?’
    ‘Okay,’ Jack said, holding both hands palm-out before him, fingers extended, indicating that he would not insult Richard with the offer of physical aid.
    Richard pulled on the ladder with his hands, and his feet slid irresistibly forward, pushing the raft with them. In a second he was suspended half over the water – only Jack’s shirt kept the raft from zooming out from under Richard’s feet.
    ‘Help!’
    ‘Pull your feet back.’
    Richard did so, and stood upright again, breathing hard.
    ‘Let me give you a hand, okay?’
    ‘Okay.’
    Jack crawled along the raft until he was immediately before Richard. He stood up with great care. Richard gripped the bottom rung with both hands, trembling. Jack put his hands on Richard’s skinny hips. ‘I’m going to help lift you. Try not to kick out with your feet – just pull yourself up high enough to get your knee on the rung. First put your hands up on the next one.’ Richard cracked open an eye and did so.
    ‘You ready?’
    ‘Go.’
    The raft slid forward, but Jack yanked Richard upright so high that he could easily place his right knee on the bottom rung. Then Jack grabbed the sides of the ladder and used the strength in his arms and legs to stabilize the raft. Richard was grunting, trying to get his other knee on the rung; in a second he had done it. In another two seconds, Richard Sloat stood upright on the ladder.
    ‘I can’t go any farther,’ he said. ‘I think I’m going to fall off. I feel so sick, Jack.’
    ‘Just go up one more, please. Please. Then I can help you.’
    Richard wearily moved his hands up a rung. Jack, looking toward the deck, saw that the ladder must be thirty feet long. ‘Now move your feet. Please, Richard.’
    Richard slowly placed one foot, then the next, on the second rung.
    Jack placed his hands on the outsides of Richard’s feet and pulled himself up. The raft swung out in a looping half-circle, but he raised his knees and got both legs securely on the lowest rung. Held by Jack’s outstretched shirt, the raft swung back around like a dog on a leash.
    A third of the way up the ladder, Jack had to put one arm around Richard’s waist to keep him from falling in the black water.
    At last the rectangular square of the trapdoor floated in the black wood directly above Jack’s head. He clamped Richard to himself – his unconscious head fell against Jack’s chest – by reaching around both Richard and ladder with his left hand, and tried the trapdoor with his right. Suppose it had been nailed shut? But it swung up immediately and banged flat against the top of the deck. Jack got his left arm firmly under Richard’s armpits and hauled him up out of the blackness and through the hole in the deck.

INTERLUDE
    SLOAT IN THIS WORLD (V)
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    The Kingsland Motel had been empty for nearly six years, and it had the mouldy yellow-newspaper smell of buildings that have been deserted for a long time. This smell had disturbed Sloat at first. His maternal grandmother had died at home when Sloat was a boy – it had taken her four years, but she had finally made the grade – and the smell of her dying had been like this. He did not want such a smell, or such memories, at a moment which was supposed to be his greatest triumph.
    Now, however, it didn’t matter. Not even the infuriating losses inflicted on him by Jack’s early arrival at Camp Readiness mattered. His earlier feelings of dismay and fury had turned into a frenzy of nervous excitement. Head down, lips twitching, eyes bright, he strode back and forth through the room where he and Richard had stayed in the old days. Sometimes he locked his hands behind his back, sometimes he slammed one fist into the other palm, sometimes he stroked his bald pate. Mostly, however, he paced as he had in college, with his hands clenched into tight and somehow anal little fists, the hidden nails digging viciously into his palms. His stomach was by turns sour and giddily light.
    Things were coming to a head.
    No; no. Right idea, wrong phrase.
    Things were coming together .
    Richard is dead by now. My son is dead. Got to be. He survived the Blasted Lands – barely – but he’ll never survive the Agincourt. He’s dead.