The Talisman

intention was only scornful.
    He went toward the elevators with a straight back and an unhurried step. Hang around with blackies, huh? Let them put their arms around you, huh? The elevator whirred down like a great heavy bird, the doors parted, and Jack stepped inside. He turned to punch the button marked with a glowing 4. The clerk was still posed spectrally behind the desk, sending out his dumdum’s message. Niggerlover Niggerlover Niggerlover ( like it that way, hey brat? Hot and black, that’s for you, hey? ). The doors mercifully shut. Jack’s stomach fell toward his shoes, the elevator lurched upward.
    The hatred stayed down there in the lobby: the very air in the elevator felt better once it had risen above the first floor. Now all Jack had to do was to tell his mother that he had to go to California by himself.
    Just don’t let Uncle Morgan sign any papers for you . . .
    As Jack stepped out of the elevator, he wondered for the first time in his life whether Richard Sloat understood what his father was really like.
    2
    Down past the empty sconces and paintings of little boats riding foamy, corrugated seas, the door marked 408 slanted inward, revealing a foot of the suite’s pale carpet. Sunlight from the living-room windows made a long rectangle on the inner wall. ‘Hey Mom,’ Jack said, entering the suite. ‘You didn’t close the door, what’s the big—’ He was alone in the room. ‘Idea?’ he said to the furniture. ‘Mom?’ Disorder seemed to ooze from the tidy room – an overflowing ashtray, a half-full tumbler of water left on the coffee table.
    This time, Jack promised himself, he would not panic.
    He turned in a slow circle. Her bedroom door was open, the room itself as dark as the lobby because Lily had never pulled open the curtains.
    ‘Hey, I know you’re here,’ he said, and then walked through her empty bedroom to knock at her bathroom door. No reply. Jack opened this door and saw a pink toothbrush beside the sink, a forlorn hairbrush on the dressing table. Bristles snarled with light hairs. Laura DeLoessian , announced a voice in Jack’s mind, and he stepped backward out of the little bathroom – that name stung him.
    ‘Oh, not again,’ he said to himself. ‘Where’d she go ?’
    Already he was seeing it.
    He saw it as he went to his own bedroom, saw it as he opened his own door and surveyed his rumpled bed, his flattened knapsack and little stack of paperback books, his socks balled up on top of the dresser. He saw it when he looked into his own bathroom, where towels lay in oriental disarray over the floor, the sides of the tub, and the Formica counters.
    Morgan Sloat thrusting through the door, grabbing his mother’s arms and hauling her downstairs . . .
    Jack hurried back into the living room and this time looked behind the couch.
    . . . yanking her out a side door and pushing her into a car, his eyes beginning to turn yellow . . .
    He picked up the telephone and punched 0. ‘This is, ah, Jack Sawyer, and I’m in, ah, room four-oh-eight. Did my mother leave any message for me? She was supposed to be here and . . . and for some reason . . . ah . . .’
    ‘I’ll check,’ said the girl, and Jack clutched the phone for a burning moment before she returned. ‘No message for four-oh-eight, sorry.’
    ‘How about four-oh-seven?’
    ‘That’s the same slot,’ the girl told him.
    ‘Ah, did she have any visitors in the last half hour or so? Anybody come this morning? To see her, I mean.’
    ‘That would be Reception,’ the girl said. ‘I wouldn’t know. Do you want me to check for you?’
    ‘Please,’ Jack said.
    ‘Oh, I’m happy to have something to do in this morgue,’ she told him. ‘Stay on the line.’
    Another burning moment. When she came back to him, it was with ‘No visitors. Maybe she left a note somewhere in your rooms.’
    ‘Yes, I’ll look,’ Jack said miserably and hung up. Would the clerk tell the truth? Or would Morgan Sloat have held out a hand with a twenty-dollar bill folded like a stamp into his meaty palm? That too Jack could see.
    He dropped himself on the couch, stifling an irrational desire to look under the cushions. Of course Uncle Morgan could not have come to the rooms and abducted her – he was still in California. But he could have sent other people to do it for him. Those people Speedy had mentioned, the Strangers with a foot in each world.
    Then Jack could stay in the room no longer. He bounced off the couch and went