The Talisman

stairs. No way, baby.
    Gotta. Gotta.
    Holding the precious, fragile Talisman in his hands, Jack started down a flight of stairs that now looked like an Arabian flying carpet caught in a tornado.
    The stairs heaved and he was flung toward the same gap through which the black knight’s helmet had fallen. Jack screamed and staggered backward toward the drop, holding the Talisman against his chest with his right hand and flailing behind him with his left. Flailing at nothing. His heels hit the drop and tilted backward over oblivion.
    6
    Fifty seconds had passed since the earthquake began. Only fifty seconds – but earthquake survivors will tell you that objective time, clock-time, loses all meaning in an earthquake. Three days after the ’53 earthquake in Los Angeles, a television news reporter asked a survivor who had been near the epicenter how long the quake had lasted.
    ‘It’s still going on,’ the survivor said calmly.
    Sixty-two seconds after the quake began, almost all of the Point Venuti Highlands decided to give in to destiny and become the Point Venuti Lowlands. They fell on the town with a muddy kurrummmmp , leaving only a single jut of slightly harder rock, which pointed at the Agincourt like an accusing finger. From one of the new slumped hills a dirty smokestack pointed like a randy penis.
    7
    On the beach, Morgan Sloat and Sunlight Gardener stood supporting each other, appearing to hula. Gardener had unslung the Weatherbee. A few Wolfs, their eyes alternately bulging with terror and glaring with hellacious rage, had joined them. More were coming. They were all Changed or Changing. Their clothes hung from them in tatters. Morgan saw one of them dive at the ground and begin to bite at it, as if the uneasy earth were an enemy that could be killed. Morgan glanced at this madness and dismissed it. A van with the words WILD CHILD written on the sides in psychedelic lettering plowed hell-for-leather across Point Venuti Square, where children had once begged their parents for ice creams and pennants emblazoned with the Agincourt’s likeness. The van made it to the far side, jumped across the sidewalk, and then roared toward the beach, plowing through boarded-up concessions as it came. One final fissure opened in the earth and the WILD CHILD that had killed Tommy Woodbine disappeared forever, nose first. A jet of flame burst up as its gas-tank exploded. Watching, Sloat thought dimly of his father preaching about the Pentecostal Fire. Then the earth snapped shut.
    ‘Hold steady,’ he shouted at Gardener. ‘I think the place is going to fall on top of him and crush him flat, but if he gets out, you’re going to shoot him, earthquake or no earthquake.’
    ‘Will we know if IT breaks?’ Gardener squealed.
    Morgan Sloat grinned like a boar in a canebrake.
    ‘We’ll know,’ he said. ‘The sun will turn black.’
    Seventy-four seconds.
    8
    Jack’s left hand scrabbled a grip on the ragged remains of the bannister. The Talisman glowed fiercely against his chest, the lines of latitude and longitude which girdled it shining as brightly as the wire filaments in a lightbulb. His heels tilted and his soles began to slide.
    Falling! Speedy! I’m going to –
    Seventy-nine seconds.
    It stopped.
    Suddenly, it just stopped.
    Only, for Jack, as for that survivor of the ’53 quake, it was still going on, at least in part of his brain. In part of his brain the earth would continue to shake like a church-picnic Jell-O forever.
    He pulled himself back from the drop and staggered to the middle of the twisted stair. He stood, gasping, his face shiny with sweat, hugging the bright round star of the Talisman against his chest. He stood and listened to the silence.
    Somewhere something heavy – a bureau or a wardrobe, perhaps – which had been tottering on the edge of balance now fell over with an echoing crash.
    ‘Jack! Please! I think I’m dying!’ Richard’s groaning, helpless voice did indeed sound like that of a boy in his last extremity.
    ‘Richard! Coming!’
    He began to work his way down the stairs, which were now twisted and bent and tottery. Many of the stair-levels were gone, and he had to step over these spaces. In one place four in a row were gone and he leaped, holding the Talisman to his chest with one hand and sliding his hand along the warped bannister with the other.
    Things were still falling. Glass crashed and tinkled. Somewhere a toilet was flushing manically, again and again.
    The redwood