The Talisman (The Talisman #1)

Then how come I don't see him over there? Over there in the Territories?

The answer came to him in a dazzling flash . . . and as if in response, the Talisman flashed a gorgeous fan of white light - it cut the snowy light like the headlamp of a locomotive.

I don't see him over there, don't respond to him over there, because I'm NOT over there! Jason's gone . . . and I'm single-natured! Sloat's flipping onto a beach where there's no one but Morgan of Orris and a dead or dying man named Parkus - Richard isn't there either, because Morgan of Orris's son, Rushton, died a long time ago and Richard's single-natured, too! When I flipped before, the Talisman was there . . . but Richard wasn't! Morgan's flipping . . . moving . . . flipping back . . . trying to freak me out . . . .

'Hoo-hoo! Jacky-boy!'

The left.

'Over here!'

The right.

But Jack wasn't listening for the place anymore. He was looking into the Talisman, waiting for the downbeat. The most important downbeat of his life.

From behind. This time he would come from behind.

The Talisman flashed out, a strong lamp in the snow.

Jack pivoted . . . and as he pivoted he flipped into the Territories, into bright sunlight. And there was Morgan of Orris, big as life and twice as ugly. For a moment he didn't realize Jack had tumbled to the trick; he was limping rapidly around to a place which would be behind Jack when he flipped back into the American Territories. There was a nasty little-boy grin on his face. His cloak popped and billowed behind him. His left boot dragged, and Jack saw the sand was covered with those dragging hashmarks all around him. Morgan had been running around him in a harrying circle, all the while goading Jack with obscene lies about his mother, throwing stones, and flipping back and forth.

Jack shouted:

'I SEE YOU!' at the top of his lungs.

Morgan stared around at him in utter stunned shock, one hand curled around that silver rod.

'SEE YOU!' Jack shouted again. 'Should we go around one more time, Bloat?'

Morgan of Orris flicked the end of the rod at him, his face altering in a second from that rubbery simple-minded expression of shock to a much more characteristic look of craft - of a clever man quickly seeing all the possibilities in a situation. His eyes narrowed. Jack almost, in that second when Morgan of Orris looked down his lethal silver rod at him and narrowed his eyes into gunsights, flipped back into the American Territories, and that would have killed him. But an instant before prudence or panic caused him in effect to jump in front of a moving truck, the same insight that had told him that Morgan was flipping between worlds saved him again - Jack had learned the ways of his adversary. He held his ground, again waiting for that almost mystical downbeat. For a fraction of a second Jack Sawyer held 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 focused 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.