The Talisman

the same as the Alhambra, I’ll have to go up the main staircase one flight .
    On the second floor he would find the grand ballroom. And in the grand ballroom, he would find the thing he had come for.
    Jack took one look back, saw that Richard hadn’t moved, and stepped into the hallway. He closed the doors behind him.
    He began to move slowly along the corridor, his frayed and dirty sneakers whispering over the rotting carpet.
    A little further down, Jack could see another set of double doors, with birds painted on them.
    Closer by were a number of meeting-rooms. Here was the Golden State Room, directly opposite the Forty-Niner Room. Five paces farther up toward the double doors with the painted birds was the Mendocino Room (hacked into a lower panel of the mahogany door: YOUR MOTHER DIED SCREAMING !). Far down the corridor – impossibly far! – was watery light. The lobby.
    Clank.
    Jack wheeled around fast, and caught a glimmer of movement just beyond one of the peaked doorways in the stone throat of this corridor –
    (?stones?) (?peaked doorways?)
    Jack blinked uneasily. The corridor was lined with dark mahogany panelling which had now begun to rot in the oceanside damp. No stone. And the doors giving on the Golden State Room and the Forty-Niner Room and the Mendocino Room were just doors, sensibly rectangular and with no peaks. Yet for one moment he had seemed to see openings like modified cathedral arches. Filling these openings had been iron drop-gates – the sort that could be raised or lowered by turning a windlass. Drop-gates with hungry-looking iron spikes at the bottom. When the gate was lowered to block the entrance, the spikes fitted neatly into holes in the floor.
    No stone archways, Jack-O. See for yourself. Just doorways. You saw drop-gates like that in the Tower of London, on that tour you went on with Mom and Uncle Tommy, three years ago. You’re just freaking a little, that’s all . . .
    But the feeling in the pit of his stomach was unmistakable.
    They were there, all right. I flipped – for just a second I was in the Territories.
    Clank.
    Jack whirled back the other way, sweat breaking out on his cheeks and forehead, hair beginning to stiffen on the nape of his neck.
    He saw it again – a flash of something metallic in the shadows of one of those rooms. He saw huge stones as black as sin, their rough surfaces splotched with green moss. Nasty, soft-looking albino bugs squirmed in and out of the large pores of the decaying mortar between the stones. Empty sconces stood at fifteen – or twenty-foot intervals. The torches that the sconces had once held were long since gone.
    Clank.
    This time he didn’t even blink. The world sideslipped before his eyes, wavering like an object seen through clear running water. The walls were blackish mahogany again instead of stone blocks. The doors were doors and not latticed-iron drop-gates. The two worlds, which had been separated by a membrane as thin as a lady’s silk stocking, had now actually begun to overlap.
    And, Jack realized dimly, his Jasonside had begun to overlap with his Jack-side – some third being which was an amalgamation of both was emerging.
    I don’t know what that combination is, exactly, but I hope it’s strong – because there are things behind those doors . . . behind all of them.
    Jack began to sidle up the hallway again toward the lobby.
    Clank.
    This time the worlds didn’t change; solid doors remained solid doors and he saw no movement.
    Right behind there, though. Right behind –
    Now he heard something behind the painted double doors – written in the sky above the marsh scene were the words HERON BAR . It was the sound of some large rusty machine that had been set in motion. Jack swung toward
    ( Jason swung toward)
    toward that opening door
    (that rising drop-gate)
    his hand plunging into
    (the poke)
    the pocket
    (he wore on the belt of his jerkin)
    of his jeans and closing around the guitar-pick Speedy had given him so long ago.
    (and closing around the shark’s tooth)
    He waited to see what would come out of the Heron Bar, and the walls of the hotel whispered dimly: We have ways of dealing with fushing feeves like you. You should have left while there was still time . . .
    . . . because now, little boy, your time is up.
    5
    Clank . . . THUD!
    Clank . . . THUD!
    Clank . . . THUD!
    The noise was large and clumsy and metallic. There was something relentless and inhuman about it which frightened Jack more badly than