The Talisman

raised its spiked fists and brought them down, one on the sagging left door, one on the sagging right. The pastoral marsh-world painted there was destroyed. The hinges snapped . . . and as the doors fell toward him, Jack actually saw the one painted heron who remained go flying away like a bird in a Walt Disney cartoon, its eyes bright and terrified.
    The suit of armor came toward him like a killer robot, its feet rising and then crashing down. It was more than seven feet tall, and when it came through the door the horns rising from its helmet tore a set of ragged slashes into the upper jamb. They looked like quotation marks.
    Run! a yammering voice in his mind screamed.
    Run, you feef , the hotel whispered.
    No , Jack answered. He stared up at the advancing knight, and his hand wrapped itself tightly around the guitar-pick in his pocket. The spike-studded gauntlets came up toward the visor of its bird-helmet. They raised it. Jack gaped.
    The inside of the helmet was empty.
    Then those studded hands were reaching for Jack.
    8
    The spike-studded hands came up and grasped either side of the cylindrical helmet. They lifted it slowly off, disclosing the livid, haggard face of a man who looked at least three hundred years old. One side of this ancient’s head had been bashed in. Splinters of bone like broken eggshell poked out through the skin, and the wound was caked with some black goop which Jason supposed was decayed brains. It was not breathing, but the red-rimmed eyes which regarded Jason were sparkling and hellishly avid. It grinned, and Jason saw the needle-sharp teeth with which this horror would rip him to pieces.
    It clanked unsteadily forward . . . but that wasn’t the only sound.
    He looked to his left, toward the main hall
    (lobby)
    of the castle
    (hotel)
    and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow, bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vampires of some sort.
    Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.
    9
    Jack howled with the pain – the short blunt-tipped spikes on its hands were in him, in him, and he understood once and for all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.
    He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness inside the helmet –
    But was it really empty?
    Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.
    It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to
    (tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)
    freeze me solid –
    JACK! Speedy’s voice cried.
    ( JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)
    The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
    Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph – that lovely sensation of Territories heat , that clear feeling of rainbow .
    The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs – and in that moment Jack
    (and Jason)
    saw those designs come together in a face – the face of Laura DeLoessian.
    (the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)
    10
    ‘In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!’ they shouted together – but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason. ‘Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world! ’
    Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny face of the old vampire-thing in the suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle