The Talisman (The Talisman #1)

Anyhow, now he knew that he would somehow have to approach the black hotel from its sea side, which meant getting across the beach unseen.

When he straightened up again, he peeked around the side of the house and looked downhill. Morgan Sloat's reduced army sat in its limousines or, random as ants, milled before the high black fence. For a crazy moment Jack recalled with total precision his first sight of the Queen's summer palace. Then, too, he had stood above a scene crowded with people moving back and forth with apparent randomness. What was it like there, now? On that day - which seemed to have taken place in prehistory, so far must he look back - the crowds before the pavillion, the entire scene, had in spite of all an undeniable aura of peace, of order. That would be gone now, Jack knew. Now Osmond would rule the scene before the great tentlike structure, and those people brave enough to enter the pavillion would scurry in, heads averted. And what of the Queen? Jack wondered. He could not help remembering that shockingly familiar face cradled in the whiteness of bed linen.

And then Jack's heart nearly froze, and the vision of the pavillion and the sick Queen dropped back into a slot in Jack's memory. Sunlight Gardener strolled into Jack's line of vision, a bullhorn in his hand. Wind from the sea blew a thick strand of white hair across his sunglasses. For a second Jack was sure that he could smell his odor of sweet cologne and jungle rot. Jack forgot to breathe for perhaps five seconds, and just stood beside the cracked and peeling shingle wall, staring down as a madman yelled orders to black-suited men, pirouetted, pointed at something hidden from Jack, and made an expressive move of disapproval.

He remembered to breathe.

'Well, we've got an interesting situation here, Richard,' Jack said. 'We got a hotel that can double its size whenever it wants to, I guess, and down there we also have the world's craziest man.'

Richard, who Jack had thought was asleep, surprised him by mumbling something audible only as guffuf.

'What?'

'Go for it,' Richard whispered weakly. 'Move it, chum.'

Jack actually laughed. A second later, he was carefully moving downhill past the backs of houses, going through tall horsetail grass toward the beach.

CHAPTER 40 Speedy on the Beach

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At the bottom of the hill, Jack flattened out in the grass and crawled, carrying Richard as he had once carried his backpack. When he reached the border of high yellow weeds alongside the edge of the road, he inched forward on his belly and looked out. Directly ahead of him, on the other side of the road, the beach began. Tall weatherbeaten rocks jutted out of the grayish sand; grayish water foamed onto the shore. Jack looked leftward down the street. A short distance past the hotel, on the inland side of the beach road, stood a long crumbling structure like a sliced-off wedding cake. Above it a wooden sign with a great hole in it read KINGSLA     TEL. The Kingsland Motel, Jack remembered, where Morgan Sloat had installed himself and his little boy during his obsessive inspections of the black hotel. A flash of white that was Sunlight Gardener roamed farther up the street, clearly berating several of the black-suited men and flapping his hand toward the hill. He doesn't know I'm down here already, Jack realized as one of the men began to trudge across the beach road, looking from side to side. Gardener made another abrupt, commanding gesture, and the limousine parked at the foot of Main Street wheeled away from the hotel and began to coast alongside the man in the black suit. He unbuttoned his jacket as soon as he hit the sidewalk of Main Street and took out a pistol from a shoulder holster.

In the limousines the drivers turned their heads and stared up the hill. Jack blessed his luck - five minutes later, and a renegade Wolf with an oversized gun would have ended his quest for that great singing thing in the hotel.

He could see only the top two floors of the hotel, and the madly spinning devices attached to the architectural extravagances on the roof. Because of his worm's-eye angle, the break-water bisecting the beach on the right side of the hotel seemed to rear up twenty feet or more, marching down the sand and on into the water.

COME NOW COME NOW, called the Talisman in words that were not words, but almost physical expressions of urgency.