'Wolfs?'
'I guess so,' Richard said, almost angrily. 'Yeah, I guess some of them could have been Wolfs, or whatever you call them. They looked uncomfortable in their clothes - they were always scratching themselves, usually in those places where nice people aren't supposed to scratch. Others looked like the substitute coach. Kind of hard and mean. Some of those guys I used to see out at Camp Readiness, too. I'll tell you one thing, Jack - those guys were even more scared of that place than my father was. They just about cringed when they got near it.'
'Sunlight Gardener? Was he ever there?'
'Uh-huh,' Richard said. 'But in Point Venuti he looked more like the man we saw over there '
'Like Osmond.'
'Yes. But those people didn't come very often. Mostly it was just my father, by himself. Sometimes he'd get the restaurant at our motel to pack him some sandwiches, and he'd sit on a sidewalk bench and eat his lunch looking at the hotel. I stood at the window in the lobby of the Kingsland and looked at my father looking at the hotel. I never liked his face at those times. He looked afraid, but he also looked like . . . like he was gloating.'
'Gloating,' Jack mused.
'Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and I always said no. He'd nod and I remember once he said, 'There'll be time. You'll understand everything, Rich . . . in time.' I remember thinking that if it was about that black hotel, I didn't want to understand.
'Once,' Richard said, 'when he was drunk, he said there was something inside that place. He said it had been there for a long time. We were lying in our beds, I remember. The wind was high that night. I could hear the waves hitting the beach, and the squeaky sound of those weathervanes turning on top of the Agincourt's towers. It was a scary sound. I thought about that place, all those rooms, all of them empty - '
'Except for the ghosts,' Jack muttered. He thought he heard footsteps and looked quickly behind them. Nothing; no one. The roadbed was deserted for as far as he could see.
'That's right; except for the ghosts,' Richard agreed. 'So I said, 'Is it valuable, Daddy?' '
' 'It's the most valuable thing there is,' he said.
' 'Then some junkie will probably break in and steal it,' I said. It wasn't - how can I say this? - it wasn't a subject I wanted to pursue, but I didn't want him to go to sleep, either. Not with that wind blowing outside, and the sound of those vanes squeaking in the night.
'He laughed, and I heard a clink as he poured himself a little more bourbon from the bottle on the floor.
' 'Nobody is going to steal it, Rich,' he said. 'And any junkie who went into the Agincourt would see things he never saw before.' He drank his drink, and I could tell he was getting sleepy. 'Only one person in the whole world could ever touch that thing, and he'll never even get close to it, Rich. I can guarantee that. One thing that interests me is that it's the same over there as over here. It doesn't change - at least, as far as I can tell, it doesn't change. I'd like to have it, but I'm not even going to try, at least not now, and maybe not ever. I could do things with it - you bet! - but on the whole, I think I like the thing best right where it is.'
'I was getting sleepy myself by then, but I asked him what it was that he kept talking about.'
'What did he say?' Jack asked, dry-mouthed.
'He called it - ' Richard hesitated, frowning in thought. 'He called it 'the axle of all possible worlds.' Then he laughed. Then he called it something else. Something you wouldn't like.'
'What was that?'
'It'll make you mad.'
'Come on, Richard, spill it.'
'He called it . . . well . . . he called it 'Phil Sawyer's folly'. '
It was not anger he felt but a burst of hot, dizzying excitement. That was it, all right; that was the Talisman. The axle of all possible worlds. How many worlds? God alone knew. The American Territories; the Territories themselves; the hypothetical Territories' Territories; and on and on, like the stripes coming ceaselessly up and out of a turning barber pole. A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds - and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds. And was it also Phil Sawyer's folly? Probably so. Phil's folly . . . Jack's folly . . . Morgan Sloat's . . . Gardener's . . . and the hope, of course, of two Queens.
'It's more than Twinners,' he said in a low voice.
Richard had been plodding along, watching the rotted ties disappear beneath his feet. Now he looked nervously up at Jack.