The Talisman

his breath. If Morgan had been a shade less proud of his deviousness, he might well have murdered Jack Sawyer, which he so dearly wished to do, at that moment.
    But instead, just as Jack had thought it would, Morgan’s image abruptly departed the Territories. Jack inhaled. Speedy’s body ( Parkus’s body, Jack realized) lay motionless a short distance away. The downbeat came. Jack exhaled and flipped back.
    A new streak of glass divided the sand on the Point Venuti beach, glimmeringly reflecting the sudden beam of white light which emanated from the Talisman.
    ‘Missed one, did you?’ Morgan Sloat whispered out of the darkness. Snow pelted Jack, cold wind froze his limbs, his throat, his forehead. A car’s length away, Sloat’s face hung before him, the forehead drawn up into its familiar corrugations, the bloody mouth open. He was extending the key toward Jack in the storm, and a ridge of powdery snow adhered to the brown sleeve of his suit. Jack saw a black trail of blood oozing from the left nostril of the incongruously small nose. Sloat’s eyes, bloodshot with pain, shone through the dark air.
    6
    Richard Sloat confusedly opened his eyes. Every part of him was cold. At first he thought, quite without emotion of any kind, that he was dead. He had fallen down somewhere, probably down those steep, tricky steps at the back of the Thayer School grandstand. Now he was cold and dead and nothing more could happen to him. He experienced a second of dizzying relief.
    His head offered him a fresh surge of pain, and he felt warm blood ooze out over his cold hand – both of these sensations evidence that, whatever he might welcome at the moment, Richard Llewellyn Sloat was not yet dead. He was only a wounded suffering creature. The whole top of his head seemed to have been sliced off. He had no proper idea of where he was. It was cold. His eyes focussed long enough to report to him that he was lying down in the snow. Winter had happened. More snow dumped on him from out of the sky. Then he heard his father’s voice, and everything returned to him.
    Richard kept his hand on top of his head, but very slowly tilted his chin so that he could look in the direction of his father’s voice.
    Jack Sawyer was holding the Talisman – that was the next thing Richard took in. The Talisman was unbroken. He felt the return of a portion of that relief he had experienced when he’d thought he was dead. Even without his glasses, Richard could see that Jack had an undefeated, unbowed look that moved him very deeply. Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.
    Jack was just Jack now, Richard now saw. That extraordinary extra quality, as of a movie star deigning to walk around as a shabbily dressed twelve-year-old, had gone. This made his heroism all the more impressive to Richard.
    His father smiled rapaciously. But that was not his father. His father had been hollowed out a long time ago – hollowed out by his envy of Phil Sawyer, by the greed of his ambitions.
    ‘We can keep on going around like this forever,’ Jack said. ‘I’m never going to give you the Talisman, and you’re never going to be able to destroy it with that gadget of yours. Give up.’
    The point of the key in his father’s hand slowly moved across and down, and it, like his father’s greedy needful face, pointed straight at him.
    ‘First I’ll blow Richard apart,’ his father said. ‘Do you really want to see your pal Richard turned into bacon? Hmmmm? Do you? And of course I won’t hesitate to do the same favor for that pest beside him.’
    Jack and Sloat exchanged short glances. His father was not kidding, Richard knew. He would kill him if Jack did not surrender the Talisman. And then he would kill the old black man, Speedy.
    ‘Don’t do it,’ he managed to whisper. ‘Stuff him, Jack. Tell him to screw himself.’
    Jack almost deranged Richard by winking at him.
    ‘Just drop the Talisman,’ he heard his father say.
    Richard watched in horror as Jack tilted the palms of his hands and let the Talisman tumble out.
    7
    Jack, no!’
    Jack didn’t look around at Richard. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up , his mind hammered at him. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school,