The Talisman

pulled-back cuff Jack caught a blurred glimpse of a perfectly proper brown nylon sock) suddenly stuck straight out from behind the last rock like a toll-gate.
    Shit! Jack’s mind screamed. He was waiting for you! You total nerd!
    Richard cried out. Jack tried to pull up and couldn’t.
    Morgan tripped him up as easily as a schoolyard bully trips up a younger boy on the play-yard. After Smokey Updike, and Osmond, and Gardener, and Elroy, and something that looked like a cross between an alligator and a Sherman tank, all it really took to bring him down was overweight, hypertensive Morgan Sloat crouched behind a rock, watching and waiting for an overconfident boy named Jack Sawyer to come boogying right down on top of him.
    ‘ Yiyyy! ’ Richard cried as Jack stumbled forward. He was dimly aware of their combined shadow tracking out to his left – it seemed to have as many arms as a Hindu idol. He felt the psychic weight of the Talisman shift . . . and then overshift.
    ‘ WATCH OUT FOR IT, RICHARD! ’ Jack screamed.
    Richard fell over the top of Jack’s head, his eyes huge and dismayed. The cords on his neck stood out like piano wire. He held the Talisman up as he went down. His mouth was pulled down at the corners in a desperate snarl. He hit the ground face-first like the nosecone of a defective rocket. The sand here around the place where Speedy had gone to earth was not precisely sand at all but a rough-textured scree stubbly with smaller rocks and shells. Richard came down on a rock that had been burped up by the earthquake. There was a compact thudding sound. For a moment Richard looked like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. His butt, clad in dirty polished-cotton slacks, wagged drunkenly back and forth in the air. In other circumstances – circumstances unattended by that dreadful compact thudding sound, for instance – it would have been a comic pose, worthy of a Kodachrome: ‘Rational Richard Acts Wild and Crazy at the Beach.’ But it wasn’t funny at all. Richard’s hands opened slowly . . . and the Talisman rolled three feet down the gentle slope of the beach and stopped there, reflecting sky and clouds, not on its surface but in its gently lighted interior.
    ‘ Richard! ’ Jack bellowed again.
    Morgan was somewhere behind him, but Jack had momentarily forgotten him. All his reassurance was gone; it had left him at the moment when that leg, clad in light brown wool, had stuck out in front of him like a toll-gate. Fooled like a kid in a nursery-school play-yard, and Richard . . . Richard was . . .
    ‘Rich—’
    Richard rolled over and Jack saw that Richard’s poor, tired face was covered with running blood. A flap of his scalp hung down almost to one eye in a triangular shape like a ragged sail. Jack could see hair sticking out of the underside and brushing Richard’s cheek like sand-colored grass . . . and where that hair-covered skin had come from he could see the naked gleam of Richard Sloat’s skull.
    ‘Did it break?’ Richard asked. His voice cracked toward a scream. ‘ Jack, did it break when I fell? ’
    ‘It’s okay, Richie – it’s—’
    Richard’s blood-rimmed eyes bulged widely at something behind him. ‘ Jack! Jack, look o—! ’
    Something that felt like a leather brick – one of Morgan Sloat’s Gucci loafers – crashed up between Jack’s legs and into his testicles. It was a dead-center hit, and Jack crumpled forward, suddenly living with the greatest pain of his life – a physical agony greater than any he had ever imagined. He couldn’t even scream.
    ‘It’s okay,’ Morgan Sloat said, ‘but you don’t look so good, Jacky-boy. Not

at
    all.’
    And now the man slowly advancing on Jack – advancing slowly because he was savoring this – was a man to whom Jack had never been properly introduced. He had been a white face in the window of a great black coach for a space of moments, a face with dark eyes that somehow sensed his presence; he had been a rippling, changing shape bludgeoning itself into the reality of the field where he and Wolf had been talking of such wonders as litter-brothers and the big rut-moon; he had been a shadow in Anders’s eyes.
    But I’ve never really seen Morgan of Orris until now , Jack thought. And he still was Jack – Jack in a pair of faded, dirty cotton pants of a sort you might expect to see an Asian coolie wearing, and sandals with rawhide thongs, but not Jason – Jack. His crotch was a great frozen scream of