The Talisman

down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, exploded, and a black, steaming ichor ran over his hand and wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.
    11
    Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.
    The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was swelling somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.
    The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart – Jack thought if he had seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s enemy from running a blade or a spear-point through the knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.
    Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together. In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him. One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a symbol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign – but these were not Morgan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who presumed to steal away their only reason for being.
    ‘No more,’ Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.
    The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking double point.
    ‘No more,’ Jack moaned. ‘Oh God please, no more, I’m tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—’
    Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack –
    ‘ Speedy, I can’t! ’ he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the inevitability of steel autoparts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.
    – you be here in California to bring her back.
    ‘Please, Speedy, no more!’
    Reaching for him – black-metal robot-faces, rusty greaves, mail splotched and smeared with moss and mould.
    Got to do your best, Travellin Jack , Speedy whispered, exhausted, and then he was gone and Jack was left to stand or fall on his own.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
JACK AND THE TALISMAN
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    1
    You made a mistake – a ghostly voice in Jack Sawyer’s head spoke up as he stood outside the Heron Bar and watched these other suits of armor bear down on him. In his mind an eye opened wide and he saw an angry man – a man who was really not much more than an overgrown boy – striding up a Western street toward the camera, buckling on first one gunbelt and then another, so that they crisscrossed his belly. You made a mistake – you shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!
    2
    Of all his mother’s movies, the one Jack had always liked the best was Last Train to Hangtown , made in 1960 and released in 1961. It had been a Warner Brothers picture, and the major parts – as in many of the lower-budget pictures Warners made during that period – were filled by actors from the half-dozen Warner Brothers TV series which were in constant production. Jack Kelly from the Maverick show had been in Last Train (the Suave Gambler), and Andrew Duggan from Bourbon Street Beat (the Evil Cattle-Baron). Clint