“ ’Fraid so,” Jack said.
“That means the Territories are really close, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does.”
“So there’ll be more of those trees up ahead, won’t there?”
“If you know the answers, why ask the questions?” Jack asked. “Oh Jason, what a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry, Richie—I guess I was hoping that you didn’t see it. Yeah, I suppose there’ll be more of them up there. Let’s just not get too close to them.”
In any case, Jack thought, “up there” was hardly an accurate way to describe where they were going: the highway slid resolutely down a steady grade, and every hundred feet seemed to take it farther from the light. Everything seemed invaded by the Territories.
“Could you take a look at my back?” Richard asked.
“Sure.” Jack again lifted Richard’s shirt. He kept himself from saying anything, though his instinct was to groan. Richard’s back was now covered with raised red blotches which seemed almost to radiate heat. “It’s a little worse,” he said.
“I thought it had to be. Only a little, huh?”
“Only a little.”
Before long, Jack thought, Richard was going to look one hell of a lot like an alligator suitcase—Alligator Boy, son of Elephant Man.
Two of the trees grew together a short way ahead, their warty trunks twisted around each other in a way that suggested violence more than love. As Jack stared at them while they hurried past, he thought he saw the black holes in the bark mouthing at them, blowing curses or kisses: and he knew that he heard the roots gnashing together at the base of the joined trees. (BOY! A BOY’s out there! OUR boy’s out there!)
Though it was only mid-afternoon, the air was dark, oddly grainy, like an old newspaper photograph. Where grass had grown on the inland side of the highway, where Queen Anne’s lace had bloomed delicately and whitely, low unrecognizable weeds blanketed the earth. With no blossoms and few leaves, they resembled snakes coiled together and smelled faintly of diesel oil. Occasionally the sun flared through the granular murk like a dim orange fire. Jack was reminded of a photograph he had once seen of Gary, Indiana, at night—hellish flames feeding on poison in a black, poisoned sky. From down there the Talisman pulled at him as surely as if it were a giant with its hands on his clothes. The nexus of all possible worlds. He would take Richard into that hell—and fight for his life with all his strength—if he had to haul him along by the ankles. And Richard must have seen this determination in Jack, for, scratching at his sides and shoulders, he toiled along beside him.
I’m going to do this, Jack said to himself, and tried to ignore how greatly he was merely trying to bolster his courage. If I have to go through a dozen different worlds, I’m going to do it.
4
Three hundred yards farther down the road a stand of the ugly Territories trees hovered by the side of the highway like muggers. As he passed by on the other side of the road, Jack glanced at their coiling roots and saw half-embedded in the earth through which they wove a small bleached skeleton, once a boy of eight or nine, still wearing a moldering green-and-black plaid shirt. Jack swallowed and hurried on, trailing Richard behind like a pet on a leash.
5
A few minutes later Jack Sawyer beheld Point Venuti for the first time.
39
Point Venuti
1
Point Venuti hung low in the landscape, clinging to the sides of the cliff leading down to the ocean. Behind it, another range of cliffs rose massively but raggedly into the dark air. They looked like ancient elephants, hugely wrinkled. The road led down past high wooden walls until it turned a corner by a long brown metal building that was a factory or warehouse, where it disappeared into a descending series of terraces, the dull roofs of other warehouses. From Jack’s perspective, the road did not reappear again until it began to mount the rise opposite, going uphill and south toward San Francisco. He saw only the stairlike descent of the warehouse roofs, the fenced-in parking lots, and, way off to the right, the wintry gray of the water. No people moved on any portion of the road visible to him; nobody appeared in the row of little windows at the back of the nearest factory. Dust swirled through the empty parking lots. Point Venuti looked deserted, but Jack knew that it was not. Morgan Sloat and his cohorts—those who had survived the surprise arrival of the Territories choo-choo, anyway—would be waiting for the arrival of Travelling Jack and Rational Richard. The Talisman boomed out to Jack, urging him forward, and he said, “Well, this is it, kiddo,” and stepped forward.
Two new facets of Point Venuti immediately came into view. The first was the appearance of approximately nine inches of the rear of a Cadillac limousine—Jack saw the glossy black paint, the shiny bumper, part of the right taillight. Jack wished fervently that the renegade Wolf behind the wheel had been one of the Camp Readiness casualties. Then he looked out toward the ocean again. Gray water lathered toward the shore. A slow movement up above the factory and warehouse roofs took his attention in the middle of his next step. COME HERE, the Talisman called in that urgent, magnetic manner. Point Venuti seemed somehow to contract like a hand into a fist. Up above the roofs, and only now visible, a dark but colorless weathervane shaped like the head of a wolf spun erratically back and forth, obeying no wind.
When Jack saw the lawless weathervane tracking left-right, then right–left, and continuing around in a complete circle, he knew that he had just had his first sight of the black hotel—at least a portion of it. From the roofs of the warehouses, from the road ahead, from all of the unseen town, rose an unmistakable feeling of enmity as palpable as a slap in the face. The Territories were bleeding through into Point Venuti, Jack realized; here, reality had been sanded thin. The wolf’s head whirled meaninglessly in mid-air, and the Talisman continued to pull at Jack. COME HERE COME HERE COME NOW COME NOW NOW . . . Jack realized that along with its incredible and increasing pull, the Talisman was singing to him. Wordlessly, tunelessly, but singing, a curving rise and fall of whale’s melody that would be inaudible to anyone else.
The Talisman knew he had just seen the hotel’s weathervane.
Point Venuti might be the most depraved and dangerous place in all North and South America, Jack thought, suddenly bolder by half, but it could not keep him from going into the Agincourt Hotel. He turned to Richard, feeling now as if he had been doing nothing but resting and exercising for a month, and tried not to let his dismay at his friend’s condition show in his face. Richard could not stop him, either—if he had to, he’d shove Richard right through the walls of the damned hotel. He saw tormented Richard drag his fingernails through his hair and down the hivelike rash on his temples and cheeks.
“We’re going to do this, Richard,” he said. “I know we are. I don’t care how much crazy bullshit they throw at us. We are going to do this.”
“Our troubles are going to have troubles with us,” said Richard, quoting—surely unconsciously—from Dr. Seuss. He paused. “I don’t know if I can make it. That’s the truth. I’m dead on my feet.” He gave Jack a look of utterly naked anguish. “What’s happening to me, Jack?”
“I don’t know, but I know how to stop it.” And hoped that that was true.
“Is my father doing this to me?” Richard asked miserably. He ran his hands experimentally over his puffy face. Then he lifted his shirt out of his trousers and examined the red coalescing rash on his stomach. The bumps, shaped vaguely like the state of Oklahoma, began at his waistline and extended around both sides and up nearly to his neck. “It looks like a virus or something. Did my father give it to me?”
“I don’t think he did it on purpose, Richie,” Jack said. “If that means anything.”
“It doesn’t,” Richard said.
“It’s all going to stop. The Seabrook Island Express is coming to the end of the line.”
Richard right beside him, Jack stepped forward—and saw the taillights of the Cadillac flash on, then off, before the car slipped forward out of his sight.
There would be no surprise attack this time, no wonderful slam-bang arrival through a fence with a trainful of guns and ammunition, but even if everybody in Point Venuti knew they were coming, Jack was on his way. He felt suddenly as if he had strapped on armor, as if he held a magic sword. Nobody in Point Venuti had the power to harm him, at least not until he got to the Agincourt Hotel. He was on his way, Rational Richard beside him, and all would be well. And before he had taken three more steps, his muscles singing along with the Talisman, he had a better, more accurate image of himself than of a knight going out to do battle. The image came straight from one of his mother’s movies, delivered by celestial telegram. It was as if he were on a horse, a broad-brimmed hat on his head and a gun tied to his hip, riding in to clean up Deadwood Gulch.
Last Train to Hangtown, he remembered: Lily Cavanaugh, Clint Walker, and Will Hutchins, 1960. So be it.
2
Four or five of the Territories trees struggled out of the hard brown soil beside the first of the abandoned buildings. Maybe they had been there all along, snaking their branches over the road nearly to the white line, maybe not; Jack could not remember seeing them when he first looked down toward the concealed town. It was scarcely more conceivable, though, that he could overlook the trees than he could a pack of wild dogs. He could hear their roots rustling along the surface of the ground as he and Richard approached the warehouse.
(OUR boy? OUR boy?)
“Let’s get on the other side of the road,” he said to Richard, and took his lumpy hand to lead him across.
As soon as they reached the opposite side of the road, one of the Territories trees visibly stretched out, root and branch, for them. If trees had stomachs, they could have heard its stomach growl. The gnarly branch and the smooth snakelike root whipped across the yellow line, then across half the remaining distance to the boys. Jack prodded gasping Richard in the side with his elbow, then grasped his arm and pulled him along.
(MY MY MY MY BOY! YESSS!!)
A tearing, ripping sound suddenly filled the air, and for a moment Jack thought that Morgan of Orris was raping a passage through the worlds again, becoming Morgan Sloat . . . Morgan Sloat with a final, not-to-be-refused offer involving a machine-gun, a blowtorch, a pair of red-hot pincers . . . but instead of Richard’s furious father, the crown of the Territories tree struck the middle of the road, bounced once in a snapping of branches, then rolled over on its side like a dead animal.
“Oh my God,” Richard said. “It came right out of the ground after us.”
Which was precisely what Jack had been thinking. “Kamikaze tree,” he said. “I think things are going to be a little wild here in Point Venuti.”
“Because of the black hotel?”
“Sure—but also because of the Talisman.” He looked down the road and saw another clump of the carnivorous trees about ten yards down the hill. “The vibes or the atmosphere or whatever the ding-dong you want to call it are all screwed up—because everything’s evil and good, black and white, all mixed up.”
Jack was keeping his eye on the clump of trees they now slowly approached as he talked, and saw the nearest tree twitch its crown toward them, as if it had heard his voice.
Maybe this whole town is a big Oatley, Jack was thinking, and maybe he would come through after all—but if there was a tunnel up ahead, the last thing Jack Sawyer was going to do was enter it. He really did not want to meet the Point Venuti version of Elroy.
“I’m afraid,” Richard said behind him. “Jack, what if more of those trees can jump out of the ground like that?”
“You know,” Jack said, “I’ve noticed that even when trees are mobile, they can’t actually get very far. Even a turkey like you ought to be able to outrun a tree.”
He was rounding the last curve in the road, going downhill past the final warehouses. The Talisman called and called, as vocal as the giant’s singing harp in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” At last Jack came around the curve, and the rest of Point Venuti lay beneath him.
His Jason-side kept him going. Point Venuti might once have been a pleasant little resort town, but those days had passed long ago. Now Point Venuti itself was the Oatley tunnel, and he would have to walk through all of it. The cracked, broken surface of the road dipped toward an area of burned-out houses surrounded by Territories trees—the workers in the empty factories and warehouses would have lived in these small frame houses. Enough was left of one or two of them to show what they had been. The twisted hulks of burned cars lay here and there about the houses, entwined with thick weeds. Through the wasted foundations of the little houses, the roots of the Territories trees slowly prowled. Blackened bricks and boards, upended and smashed bathtubs, twisted pipes littered the burned-out lots. A flash of white caught Jack’s eye, but he looked away as soon as he saw that it was the white bone of a disarranged skeleton hooked beneath the tangle of roots. Once children had piloted bikes through these streets, housewives had gathered in kitchens to complain about wages and unemployment, men had waxed their cars in their driveways—all gone, now. A tipped-over swingset, powdery with rust, poked its limbs through rubble and weeds.
Reddish little flares winked on and off in the murky sky.
Below the two-block-square area of burned houses and feeding trees, a dead stoplight hung over an empty intersection. Across the intersection, the side of a charred building still showed letters reading UH OH! BETTER GET MAA over a pocked, blistered picture of the front end of a car protruding through a plate-glass window. The fire had gone no farther, but Jack wished that it had. Point Venuti was a blighted town; and fire was better than rot. The building with the half-destroyed advertisement for Maaco paint stood first in a row of shops. The Dangerous Planet Bookstore, Tea & Sympathy, Ferdy’s Wholefood Healthstore, Neon Village: Jack could read only a few of the names of the shops, for above most of them the paint had long ago flaked and curdled off the facades. These shops appeared to be closed, as abandoned as the factories and warehouses up the hill. Even from where he stood, Jack could see that the plate-glass windows had been broken so long ago they were like empty eyeglass frames, blank idiot eyes. Smears of paint decorated the fronts of the shops, red and black and yellow, oddly bright and scarlike in the dull gray air. A naked woman, so starved Jack could have counted her ribs, twisted slowly and ceremoniously as a weathervane in the littered street before the shops. Above her pale body with its drooping breasts and mop of pubic hair, her face had been painted blazing orange. Orange, too, was her hair. Jack stopped moving and watched the insane woman with the painted face and dyed hair raise her arms, twist her upper body as deliberately as one doing a Tai Chi movement, kick her left foot out over the flyblown corpse of a dog, and freeze into position like a statue. An emblem of all Point Venuti, the madwoman held her posture. Slowly the foot came down, and the skinny body revolved.
Past the woman, past the row of empty shops, Main Street turned residential—at least Jack supposed that it had once been residential. Here, too, bright scars of paint defaced the buildings, tiny two-story houses once bright white, now covered with the slashes of paint and graffiti. One slogan jumped out at him: YOU’RE DEAD NOW, scrawled up the side of an isolated peeling building that had surely once been a boarding house. The words had been there a long time.
JASON, I NEED YOU, the Talisman boomed out at him in a language both above and beneath speech.
“I can’t,” Richard whispered beside him. “Jack, I know I can’t.”
After the row of peeling, hopeless-looking houses, the road dipped again, and Jack could see only the backs of a pair of black Cadillac limousines, one on either side of Main Street, parked with their noses pointed downhill, motors running. Like a trick photograph, looking impossibly large, impossibly sinister, the top—half? third?—of the black hotel reared up over the back ends of the Cadillacs and the despairing little houses. It seemed to float, cut off by the curve of the final hill. “I can’t go in there,” Richard repeated.
“I�
��m not even sure we can get past those trees,” Jack said. “Hold your water, Richie.”
Richard uttered an odd, snuffling noise which it took Jack a second to recognize as the sound of crying. He put his arm over Richard’s shoulder. The hotel owned the landscape—that much was obvious. The black hotel owned Point Venuti, the air above it, the ground beneath. Looking at it, Jack saw the weathervanes spin in contradictory directions, the turrets and gambrels rise like warts into the gray air. The Agincourt did look as if it were made of stone—thousand-year-old stone, black as tar. In one of the upper windows, a light suddenly flashed—to Jack, it was as if the hotel had winked at him, secretly amused to find him at last so near. A dim figure seemed to glide away from the window: a second later the reflection of a cloud swam across the glass.
From somewhere inside, the Talisman trilled out its song only Jack could hear.
3
“I think it grew,” Richard breathed. He had forgotten to scratch since he had seen the hotel floating past the final hill. Tears ran over and through the raised red bumps on his cheeks, and Jack saw that his eyes were now completely encased by the raised rash—Richard didn’t have to squint to squint anymore. “It’s impossible, but the hotel used to be smaller, Jack. I’m sure of it.”
“Right now, nothing’s impossible,” Jack said, almost unnecessarily—they had long ago passed into the realm of the impossible. And the Agincourt was so large, so dominating, that it was wildly out of scale with the rest of the town.
The architectural extravagance of the black hotel, all the turrets and brass weathervanes attached to fluted towers, the cupolas and gambrels which should have made it a playful fantasy, instead made it menacing, nightmarish. It looked as though it belonged in some kind of anti-Disneyland where Donald Duck had strangled Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Mickey shot Minnie Mouse full of heroin.
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 67