The Talisman

bannister that was not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood from the Territories. Figures in doublets, figures in blouses of silk-sack, women in great belling gowns with gleaming white cowls thrown back from their gorgeously dressed hair; these people were beautiful but doomed – and so, perhaps, ghosts always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of ghosts inspire such terror?
    JASON! TO ME! the Talisman sang, and for a moment all partitioned reality seemed to break down; he did not flip but seemed to fall through worlds like a man crashing through the rotted floors of an ancient wooden tower, one after the other. He felt no fear. The idea that he might never be able to get back – that he might just go on falling through a chain of realities forever, or become lost, as in a great wood – occurred to him, but he dismissed it out of hand. All of this was happening to Jason
    (and Jack)
    in an eyeblink; less time than it would take for his foot to go from one riser on the broad stairs to the next. He would come back; he was single-natured, and he did not believe it was possible for such a person to become lost, because he had a place in all of these worlds. But I do not exist simultaneously in all of them , Jason
    (Jack)
    thought. That’s the important thing, that’s the difference; I’m flickering through each of them, probably too fast to see, and leaving a sound like a handclap or a sonic boom behind me as the air closes on the vacancy where, for a millisecond, I took up space .
    In many of these worlds, the black hotel was a black ruin – these were worlds, he thought dimly, where the great evil that now impended on the tightwire drawn between California and the Territories had already happened. In one of them the sea which roared and snarled at the shore was a dead, sickly green; the sky had a similar gangrenous look. In another he saw a flying creature as big as a Conestoga wagon fold its wings and plummet earthward like a hawk. It grabbed a creature like a sheep and swooped up again, holding the bloody hindquarters in its beak.
    Flip . . . flip . . . flip . Worlds passed by his eyes like cards shuffled by a riverboat gambler.
    Here was the hotel again, and there were half a dozen different versions of the black knight above him, but the intent in each was the same, and the differences were as unimportant as the stylings of rival automobiles. Here was a black tent filled with the thick dry smell of rotting canvas – it was torn in many places so that the sun shone through in dusty, conflicting rays. In this world Jack/Jason was on some sort of rope rigging, and the black knight stood inside a wooden basket like a crow’s nest, and as he climbed he flipped again . . . and again . . . and again.
    Here the entire ocean was on fire; here the hotel was much as it was in Point Venuti, except it had been half-sunk into the ocean. For a moment he seemed to be in an elevator car, the knight standing on top of it and peering down at him through the trapdoor. Then he was on a rampway, the top of which was guarded by a huge snake, its long, muscular body armored with gleaming black scales.
    And when do I get to the end of everything? When do I stop crashing through floors and just smash my way into the blackness?
    JACK! JASON! the Talisman called, and it called in all the worlds. TO ME!
    And Jack came to it, and it was like coming home.
    6
    He was right, he saw; he had come up only a single stair. But reality had solidified again. The black knight – his black knight, Jack Sawyer’s black knight – stood blocking the stair-landing. It raised its mace.
    Jack was afraid, but he kept climbing, Speedy’s pick held out in front of him.
    ‘I’m not going to mess with you,’ Jack said. ‘You better get out of my—’
    The black figure swung the mace. It came down with incredible force. Jack dodged aside. The mace crashed into the stair where he had been standing and splintered the entire riser down into hollow blackness.
    The figure wrenched the mace free. Jack lunged up two more stairs, Speedy’s pick still held between his thumb and forefinger . . . and suddenly it simply disintegrated, falling in a little eggshell rain of yellowed ivory fragments. Most of these sprinkled the tops of Jack’s sneakers. He stared stupidly at them.
    The sound of dead laughter.
    The mace, tiny splinters of wood and chews of old dank stair-runner still clinging to it, was upraised in the knight’s two armored