The Talisman

enough to make his eyes water . . . but he was grinning crazily all the same. Oh my God, that boy is THERE, he’s THERE , Buddy Parkins thought, and although he had no idea of where ‘there’ was, was suddenly overtaken by a sweet, violent feeling of absolute adventure; never, since reading Treasure Island at the age of twelve and cupping a girl’s breast in his hand for the first time at fourteen, had he felt so staggered, so excited, so full of warm joy. He began to laugh. He dropped his shovel, and while the hens stared at him with stupid amazement, Buddy Parkins danced a shuffling jig in the chickenshit, laughing behind his mask and snapping his fingers.
    ‘He’s there!’ Buddy Parkins yelled to the chickens, laughing. ‘By diddly-damn, he’s there, he made it after all, he’s there and he’s got it !’
    Later, he almost thought – almost, but never quite – that he must have somehow gotten high on the stench of the chicken-dust. That wasn’t all, dammit, that wasn’t . He had had some kind of revelation, but he could no longer remember what it had been . . . he supposed it was like that British poet some high-school English teacher had told them about: the guy had taken a big dose of opium and had started to write some poem about a make-believe Chink whorehouse while he was stoned . . . except when he came down to earth again he couldn’t finish it.
    Like that , he thought, but somehow he knew it wasn’t; and although he couldn’t remember exactly what had caused the joy, he, like Donny Keegan, never forgot the way the joy had come, all deliciously unbidden – he never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.
    10
    There’s an old Bobby Darin song which goes:‘ And the ground coughs up some roots/wearing denim shirts and boots,/haul em away . . . haul em away .’ This was a song the children in the area of Cayuga, Indiana, could have related to enthusiastically, if it hadn’t been popular quite a bit before their time. The Sunlight Home had been empty for only a little more than a week, and already it had gotten a reputation with the local kids as a haunted house. Considering the grisly remains the payloaders had found near the rock wall at the back of Far Field, this was not surprising. The local realtor’s FOR SALE sign looked as if it had been standing on the lawn for a year instead of just nine days, and the realtor had already dropped the price once and was thinking about doing it again.
    As it happened, he would not have to. As the first snow began to spit down from the leaden skies over Cayuga (and as Jack Sawyer was touching the Talisman some two thousand miles away), the LP tanks behind the kitchen exploded. A workman from Eastern Indiana Gas and Electric had come the week before and had sucked all the gas back into his truck, and he would have sworn you could have crawled right inside one of those tanks and lit up a cigarette, but they exploded anyway – they exploded at the exact moment the windows of the Oatley Tap were exploding out into the street (along with a number of patrons wearing denim shirts and boots . . . the Elmira rescue units hauled em away).
    The Sunlight Home burned to the ground in almost no time at all.
    Can you gimme hallelujah?
    11
    In all worlds, something shifted and settled into a slightly new position like a great beast . . . but in Point Venuti the beast was in the earth; it had been awakened and was roaring. It did not go to sleep for the next seventy-nine seconds, according to the Institute of Seismology at CalTech.
    The earthquake had begun.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE EARTHQUAKE
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    1
    It was some time before Jack became aware that the Agincourt was shaking itself to pieces around him, and this was not surprising. He was transported with wonder. In one sense he was not in the Agincourt at all, not in Point Venuti, not in Mendocino County, not in California, not in the American Territories, not in those other Territories; but he was in them, and in an infinite number of other worlds as well, and all at the same time. Nor was he simply in one place in all those worlds; he was in them everywhere because he was those worlds. The Talisman, it seemed, was much more than even his father had believed. It was not just the axle of all possible worlds, but the worlds themselves – the worlds, and the spaces between