The Talisman

voice, and triggered the gun. The echo pealed off across the water in a long curl that at last Dopplered away into nothing. The barrel of the gun rose, then came back down. Gardener fired again. And again.
    ‘I got it,’ Gardener said, lowering the gun. He’d got his courage back; his pecker was up again. He was smiling the way he had been smiling when he had come back from that errand in Utah. ‘It’s just a dead skin on the water now. You want a look in the scope?’ He offered the rifle to Sloat.
    ‘No,’ Sloat said. ‘If you say you got it, you got it. Now he has to come out by land, and we know what direction he’ll be coming in. I think he’ll have what’s been in our way for so many years.’
    Gardener looked at him, shiny-eyed.
    ‘I suggest that we move up there.’ He pointed to the old boardwalk. It was just inside the fence where he had spent so many hours watching the hotel and thinking about what was in the ballroom.
    ‘All r—’
    That was when the earth began to groan and heave under their feet – that subterranean creature had awakened; it was shaking itself and roaring.
    At the same instant, dazzling white light filled every window of the Agincourt – the light of a thousand suns. The windows blew out all at once. Glass flew in diamond showers.
    ‘REMEMBER YOUR SON AND FOLLOW ME!’ Sloat roared. That sense of predestination was clear in him now, clear and undeniable. He was meant to win, after all .
    The two of them began to run up the heaving beach toward the boardwalk.
    8
    Jack moved slowly, filled with wonder, across the hardwood ballroom floor. He was looking up, his eyes sparkling. His face was bathed in a clear white radiance that was all colors – sunrise colors, sunset colors, rainbow colors. The Talisman hung in the air high above him, slowly revolving.
    It was a crystal globe perhaps three feet in circumference – the corona of its glow was so brilliant it was impossible to tell exactly how big it was. Gracefully curving lines seemed to groove its surface, like lines of longitude and latitude . . . and why not? Jack thought, still in a deep daze of awe and amazement. It is the world – ALL worlds – in microcosm. More; it is the axis of all possible worlds .
    Singing; turning; blazing .
    He stood beneath it, bathed in its warmth and clear sense of well-meant force; he stood in a dream, feeling that force flow into him like the clear spring rain which awakens the hidden power in a billion tiny seeds. He felt a terrible joy lift through his conscious mind like a rocket, and Jack Sawyer lifted both hands over his upturned face, laughing, both in response to that joy and in imitation of its rise.
    ‘Come to me, then!’ he shouted,
    and slipped
    (through? across?)
    into
    Jason.
    ‘Come to me, then!’ he shouted again in the sweetly liquid and slightly slippery tongue of the Territories – he cried it laughing, but tears coursed down his cheeks. And he understood that the quest had begun with the other boy and thus must end with him; so he let go and
    slipped
    back
    into
    Jack Sawyer.
    Above him, the Talisman trembled in the air, slowly turning, throwing off light and heat and a sensation of true goodness, of whiteness .
    ‘Come to me!’
    It began to descend through the air.
    9
    So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul) – after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:
     
    He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura’s son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack’s quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to fulfill, had made Jason live again for a little while – Jack really had had a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers. Jack would be killing him again.
    Don’t worry, Jack , a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.
    Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds – it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the