The Talisman

and then suddenly it scuttled back up into its web below the scrolled tin ceiling.
    Heart thumping, Jack crossed the dining room and put Richard on one of the tables. The boy moaned again, very faintly. Jack could feel the twisted bumps under Richard’s clothes.
    ‘Got to leave you for a little while, buddy,’ Jack said.
    From the shadows high above: ‘. . . I’ll take . . . take good . . . good care of him you fushing . . . fushing feef . . .’ There was a dark, buzzing little giggle.
    There was a pile of linen underneath the table where Jack had laid Richard down. The top two or three tablecloths were slimy with mildew, but halfway through the pile he found one that wasn’t too bad. He spread it out and covered Richard with it to the neck. He started away.
    The voice of the spider whispered thinly down from the angle of the fan-blades, down from a darkness that stank of decaying flies and silk-wrapped wasps. ‘. . . I’ll take care of him, you fushing feef . . .’
    Jack looked up, cold, but he couldn’t see the spider. He could imagine those cold little eyes, but imagination was all it was. A tormenting, sickening picture came to him: that spider scuttling onto Richard’s face, burrowing its way between Richard’s slack lips and into Richard’s mouth, crooning all the while fushing feef, fushing feef, fushing feef . . .
    He thought of pulling the tablecloth up over Richard’s mouth as well, and discovered he could not bring himself to turn Richard into something that would look so much like a corpse – it was almost like an invitation.
    He went back to Richard and stood there, indecisive, knowing that his very indecision must make whatever forces there were here very happy indeed – anything to keep him away from the Talisman.
    He reached into his pocket and came out with the large dark green marble. The magic mirror in the other world. Jack had no reason to believe it contained any special power against evil forces, but it came from the Territories . . . and, Blasted Lands aside, the Territories were innately good. And innate goodness, Jack reasoned, must have its own power over evil.
    He folded the marble into Richard’s hand. Richard’s hand closed, then fell slowly open again as soon as Jack removed his own hand.
    From somewhere overhead, the spider chuffed dirty laughter.
    Jack bent low over Richard, trying to ignore the smell of disease – so like the smell of this place – and murmured, ‘Hold it in your hand, Richie. Hold it tight, chum.’
    ‘Don’t . . . chum,’ Richard muttered, but his hand closed weakly on the marble.
    ‘Thanks, Richie-boy,’ Jack said. He kissed Richard’s cheek gently and then started across the dining room toward the closed double doors at the far end. It’s like the Alhambra , he thought. Dining room giving on the gardens there, dining room giving on a deck over the water here. Double doors in both places, opening on the rest of the hotel .
    As he crossed the room, he felt that dead hand pushing against him again – it was the hotel repelling him, trying to push him back out.
    Forget it , Jack thought, and kept going.
    The force seemed to fade almost at once.
    We have other ways , the double doors whispered as he approached them. Again, Jack heard the dim, hollow clank of metal.
    You’re worried about Sloat , the double doors whispered; only now it wasn’t just them – now the voice Jack was hearing was the voice of the entire hotel. You’re worried about Sloat, and bad Wolfs, and things that look like goats, and basketball coaches who aren’t really basketball coaches; you’re worried about guns and plastic explosive and magic keys. We in here don’t worry about any of those things, little one. They are nothing to us. Morgan Sloat is no more than a scurrying ant. He has only twenty years to live, and that is less than the space between breaths to us. We in the Black Hotel care only for the Talisman – the nexus of all possible worlds. You’ve come as a burglar to rob us of what is ours, and we tell you once more: we have other ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. And if you persist, you’ll find out what they are – you’ll find out for yourself.
    4
    Jack pushed open first one of the double doors, then the other. The casters squealed unpleasantly as they rolled along their recessed tracks for the first time in years.
    Beyond the doors was a dark hallway. That’ll go to the lobby, Jack thought. And then, if this place really is