The Talisman

Hold out no false hope for yourself on that score. Jack Sawyer killed him, and I’ll gouge the eyes out of his living head for it.
    ‘But I killed him, too,’ Morgan whispered, stopping for a moment.
    Suddenly he thought of his father.
    Gordon Sloat had been a dour Lutheran minister in Ohio – Morgan had spent his whole boyhood trying to flee that harsh and frightening man. Finally he had escaped to Yale. He had set his entire mind and spirit on Yale in his sophomore year of high school for one reason above all others, unadmitted by his conscious mind but as deep as bedrock: it was a place where his rude, rural father would never dare to come. If his father ever tried to set foot on the Yale campus, something would happen to him. Just what that something might be, the high-school-age Sloat was not sure . . . but it would be roughly akin, he felt to what had happened to the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw the bucket of water over her. And this insight seemed to have been true: his father never had set foot on the Yale campus. From Morgan’s first day there, Gordon Sloat’s power over his son had begun to wane – that alone made all the striving and effort seem worthwhile.
    But now, as he stood with his fists clenched and his nails digging into his soft palms, his father spoke up: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?
    For a moment that wet yellow smell – the empty-motel-smell, the grandmother-smell, the death-smell – filled his nostrils, seeming to choke him, and Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris was afraid.
    What does it profit a man –
    For it says in The Book of Good Farming that a man shall not bring the get of his seed to any place of sacrifice, for what –
    What does it profit –
    That man shall be damned, and damned, and damned.
    – a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?
    Stinking plaster. The dry smell of vintage mouseturds turning to powder in the dark spaces behind the walls. Crazies. There were crazies in the streets.
    What does it profit a man?
    Dead. One son dead in that world, one son dead in this.
    What does it profit a man?
    Your son is dead, Morgan. Must be. Dead in the water, or dead under the pilings and floating around under there, or dead – for sure! – topside. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t –
    What does it profit –
    And suddenly the answer came to him.
    ‘ It profits a man the world! ’ Morgan shouted in the decaying room. He began to laugh and pace again. ‘It profits a man the world , and by Jason, the world is enough!’
    Laughing, he began to pace faster and faster, and before long, blood had begun to drip out of his clenched fists.
    A car pulled up out front about ten minutes later. Morgan went to the window and saw Sunlight Gardener come bursting out of the Cadillac.
    Seconds later he was hammering on the door with both fists, like a tantrumy three-year-old hammering on the floor. Morgan saw that the man had gone utterly crazy, and wondered if this was good or bad.
    ‘Morgan!’ Gardener bellowed. ‘Open for me, my Lord! News! I have news!’
    I saw all your news through my binoculars, I think. Hammer on that door awhile longer, Gardener, while I make up my mind on this. Is it good that you should be crazy, or is it bad?
    Good, Morgan decided. In Indiana, Gardener had turned Sunlight Yellow at the crucial moment and had fled without taking care of Jack once and for all. But now his wild grief had made him trustworthy again. If Morgan needed a kamikaze pilot, Sunlight Gardener would be the first one to the planes.
    ‘Open for me, my Lord! News! News! N—’
    Morgan opened the door. Although he himself was wildly excited, the face he presented to Gardener was almost eerily serene.
    ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Easy, Gard. You’ll pop a blood vessel.’
    ‘They’ve gone to the hotel . . . the beach . . . shot at them while they were on the beach . . . stupid assholes missed . . . in the water, I thought . . . we’ll get them in the water . . . then the deep-creatures rose up . . . I had him in my sights . . . I had that bad bad boy RIGHT IN MY SIGHTS . . . and then . . . the creatures . . . they . . . they . . .’
    ‘Slow down,’ Morgan said soothingly. He closed the door and took a flask out of his inside pocket. He handed it to Gardener, who spun the cap off and took two huge gulps. Morgan waited. His face was benign, serene, but a vein pulsed in the center of his forehead and his hands opened and