The Talisman

and kissed Richard’s cheek. Richard put his arms around Jack’s neck for a moment, and hugged fiercely. Then he let Jack go. Neither of them said anything.
    4
    Jack started for the stairs leading up to the lobby-level . . . and then turned right and walked for a moment to the edge of the driveway instead. There was an iron railing here. Below it, cracked and tiered rock fell to the beach. Farther to his right, standing against the darkling sky, was the Arcadia Funworld roller coaster.
    Jack lifted his face to the east. The wind that was harrying through the formal gardens lifted his hair away from his forehead and blew it back.
    He lifted the globe in his hands, as if as an offering to the ocean.
    5
    On December 21st, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood near the place where the water and the land came together, hands cradling an object of some worth, looking out at the night-steady Atlantic. He had turned thirteen years old that day, although he did not know it, and he was extraordinarily beautiful. His brown hair was long – probably too long – but the sea-breeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow. He stood there thinking about his mother, and about the rooms in this place which they had shared. Was she going to turn on a light up there? He rather suspected she was.
     
    Jack turned, eyes flashing wildly in the Talisman’s light.
    6
    Lily felt along the wall with one trembling, skeletal hand, groping for the light-switch. She found it and turned it on. Anyone who had seen her in that moment might well have turned away. In the last week or so, the cancer had begun to sprint inside her, as if sensing that something might be on the way which would spoil all its fun. Lily Cavanaugh now weighed seventy-eight pounds. Her skin was sallow, stretched over her skull like parchment. The brown circles under her eyes had turned a dead and final black, the eyes themselves stared from their sockets with fevered, exhausted intelligence. Her bosom was gone. The flesh on her arms was gone. On her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, bedsores had begun to flower.
    Nor was that all. In the course of the last week, she had contracted pneumonia.
    In her wasted condition she was, of course, a prime candidate for that or any other respiratory disease. It might have come under the best of circumstances . . . and these were definitely not those. The radiators in the Alhambra had ceased their nightly clankings some time ago. She wasn’t sure just how long – time had become as fuzzy and indefinable to her as it had been for Jack in the El Dorado. She only knew the heat had gone out on the same night she had punched her fist through the window, making the gull that had looked like Sloat fly away.
    In the time since that night the Alhambra had become a deserted coldbox. A crypt in which she would soon die.
    If Sloat was responsible for what had happened at the Alhambra, he had done one hell of a good job. Everyone was gone. Everyone . No more maids in the halls trundling their squeaky carts. No more whistling maintenance man. No more mealy-mouthed desk clerk. Sloat had put them all in his pocket and taken them away.
    Four days ago – when she could not find enough in the room to satisfy even her birdlike appetite – she had gotten out of bed and had worked her way slowly down the hall to the elevator. She brought a chair with her on this expedition, alternately sitting on it, her head hanging in exhaustion, and using it as a walker. It took her forty minutes to traverse forty feet of corridor to the elevator shaft.
    She had pushed the button for the car repeatedly, but the car did not come. The buttons did not even light.
    ‘Fuck a duck,’ Lily muttered hoarsely, and then slowly worked herself another twenty feet down the hall to the stairwell.
    ‘Hey!’ she shouted downstairs, and then broke into a fit of coughing, bent over the back of the chair.
    Maybe they couldn’t hear the yell but they sure as shit must have been able to hear me coughing out whatever’s left of my lungs , she thought.
    But no one came.
    She yelled again, twice, had another coughing fit, and then started back down the hallway, which looked as long as a stretch of Nebraska turnpike on a clear day. She didn’t dare go down those stairs. She would never get back up them. And there was no one down there; not in the lobby, not in The Saddle of Lamb, not in the coffee shop, not anywhere . And the phones were out. At least, the phone in her room was out,