The Talisman

you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right .
    You learned these things, or you died somewhere out in the world where there was no clear light.
    ‘No more killing,’ he said in the snow-filled darkness of this California beach afternoon. He should have felt utterly exhausted – it had been, all told, a four-day run of horrors, and now, at the end, he had coughed up the ball like a freshman quarterback with a lot to learn. Had thrown it all away. Yet it was the sure voice of Anders he heard, Anders who had knelt before Jack/Jason with his kilt spread out around him and his head bowed; Anders saying A’ wi’ be well, a’ wi’ be well, and a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well .
    The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required .
    ‘No more slaughter . Go on and break it if you can,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for you.’
    It was that last which surely destroyed Morgan Sloat. If he had retained a shred of rational thought, he would have unearthed a stone from the unearthly snow and smashed the Talisman . . . as it could have been smashed, in its simple unjacketed vulnerability.
    Instead, he turned the key on it.
    As he did so, his mind was filled with loving, hateful memories of Jerry Bledsoe, and Jerry Bledsoe’s wife. Jerry Bledsoe, whom he had killed, and Nita Bledsoe, who should have been Lily Cavanaugh . . . Lily, who had slapped him so hard his nose bled the one time when, drunk, he had tried to touch her.
    Fire sang out – green-blue fire spanning out from the cheapjack barrel of the tin key. It arrowed out at the Talisman, struck it, spread over it, turned it into a burning sun. Every color was there for a moment . . . for a moment every world was there. Then it was gone.
    The Talisman swallowed the fire from Morgan’s key.
    Ate it whole.
    Darkness came back. Jack’s feet slid out from under him and he sat down with a thud on Speedy Parker’s limply splayed calves. Speedy made a grunting noise and twitched.
    There was a two-second lag when everything held static . . . and then fire suddenly blew back out of the Talisman in a flood. Jack’s eyes opened wide in spite of his frantic, tortured thought
    (it’ll blind you! Jack! it’ll)
    and the altered geography of Point Venuti was lit up as if the God of All Universes had bent forward to snap a picture. Jack saw the Agincourt, slumped and half-destroyed; he saw the collapsed Highlands that were now the Lowlands; he saw Richard on his back; he saw Speedy lying on his belly with his face turned to one side. Speedy was smiling.
    Then Morgan Sloat was driven backward and enveloped in a field of fire from his own key – fire that had been absorbed inside the Talisman as the flashes of light from Sunlight Gardener’s telescopic sight had been absorbed – and which was returned to him a thousandfold.
    A hole opened between the worlds – a hole the size of the tunnel leading into Oatley – and Jack saw Sloat, his handsome brown suit burning, one skeletal, tallowy hand still clutching the key, driven through that hole. Sloat’s eyes were boiling in their sockets, but they were wide . . . they were aware .
    And as he passed, Jack saw him change – saw the cloak appear like the wings of a bat that has swooped through the flame of a torch, saw his burning boots, his burning hair. Saw the key become a thing like a miniature lightning-rod.
    Saw . . . daylight !
    8
    It came back in a flood. Jack rolled away from it on the snowy beach, dazzled. In his ears – ears deep inside his head – he heard Morgan Sloat’s dying scream as he was driven back through all the worlds that were, into oblivion.
    ‘Jack?’ Richard was sitting up woozily, holding his head. ‘Jack, what happened? I think I fell down the stadium steps.’
    Speedy was twitching in the snow, and now he did a sort of girl’s pushup and looked toward Jack. His eyes were exhausted . . . but his face was clear of blemishes.
    ‘Good job, Jack,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Good—’ He fell partway forward again, panting.
    Rainbow , Jack thought woozily. He stood up and then fell down again. Freezing snow coated his face and then began to melt like tears. He pushed himself to his knees, then stood up again. The field