The Talisman

suffocating as the fear, when his fingers touched the nylon.
    Jack donned the pack and looked longingly toward the loading door at the back of the storeroom. He would much rather use that door – he didn’t want to go down to the fire-door at the end of the hall. That was too close to the men’s bathroom. But if he opened the loading door, a red light would go on at the bar. Even if Smokey was still sorting out the ruckus on the floor, Lori would see that light and tell him.
    So . . .
    He went to the door which gave on the back corridor. He eased it open a crack and applied one eye. The corridor was empty. All right, that was cool. Randolph Scott had tapped a kidney and gone back to where the action was while Jack was getting his backpack. Great.
    Yeah, except maybe he’s still in there. You want to meet him in the hall, Jacky? Want to watch his eyes turn yellow again? Wait until you’re sure.
    But he couldn’t do that. Because Smokey would see he wasn’t out in the Tap, helping Lori and Gloria swab tables, or behind the bar, unloading the dishwasher. He would come back here to finish teaching Jack what his place was in the great scheme of things. So –
    So what? Get going!
    Maybe he’s in there waiting for you, Jacky . . . maybe he’s going to jump out just like a big bad Jack-in-the-Box . . .
    The lady or the tiger? Smokey or the millhand? Jack hesitated a moment longer in an agony of indecision. That the man with the yellow eyes was still in the bathroom was a possibility; that Smokey would be back was a certainty.
    Jack opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. The pack on his back seemed to gain weight – an eloquent accusation of his planned escape to anyone who might see it. He started down the hallway, moving grotesquely on tiptoe in spite of the thundering music and the roar of the crowd, his heart hammering in his chest.
    I was six, Jacky was six.
    So what? Why did that keep coming back?
    Six.
    The corridor seemed longer. It was like walking on a treadmill. The fire-door at the far end seemed to draw closer only by agonizing degrees. Sweat now coated his brow and his upper lip. His gaze flicked steadily toward the door to the right, with the black outline of a dog on it. Beneath this outline was the word POINTERS . And at the end of the corridor, a door of fading, peeling red. The sign on the door said EMERGENCY USE ONLY ! ALARM WILL SOUND ! In fact, the alarm bell had been broken for two years. Lori had told him so when Jack had hesitated about using the door to take out the trash.
    Finally almost there. Directly opposite POINTERS .
    He’s in there, I know he is . . . and if he jumps out I’ll scream . . . I . . . I’ll . . .
    Jack put out a trembling right hand and touched the crash-bar of the emergency door. It felt blessedly cool to his touch. For one moment he really believed he would simply fly out of the pitcher plant and into the night . . . free.
    Then the door behind him suddenly banged open, the door to SETTERS , and a hand grabbed his backpack. Jack uttered the high-pitched, despairing shriek of a trapped animal and lunged at the emergency door, heedless of the pack and the magic juice inside it. If the straps had broken he would have simply gone fleeing through the trashy, weedy vacant lot behind the Tap, and never mind anything else.
    But the straps were tough nylon and didn’t break. The door opened a little way, revealing a brief dark wedge of the night, and then thumped shut again. Jack was pulled into the women’s room. He was whirled around and then thrown backward. If he had hit the wall dead on, the bottle of magic juice would undoubtedly have shattered in the pack, drenching his few clothes and good old Rand McNally with the odor of rotting grapes. Instead, he hit the room’s one wash-basin with the small of his back. The pain was giant, excruciating.
    The millhand was walking toward him slowly, hitching up his jeans with hands that had begun to twist and thicken.
    ‘You were supposed to be gone, kid,’ he said, his voice roughening, becoming at every moment more like the snarl of an animal.
    Jack began to edge to his left, his eyes never leaving the man’s face. His eyes now seemed almost transparent, not just yellow but lighted from within . . . the eyes of a hideous Halloween jack-o’-lantern.
    ‘But you can trust old Elroy,’ the cowboy-thing said, and now it grinned to reveal a mouthful of great curving teeth, some of them jaggedly broken off,