Once, maybe.
Now the boards were warped and twisted and splintered. Jack didn't know what color the deck had been painted before, but now it had gone black, like the rest of the hotel - the color of this place was the color he imagined the malignant tumors in his mother's lungs must be.
Twenty feet away were Speedy's 'window-doors,' through which guests would have passed back and forth in those dim old days. They had been soaped over in wide white strokes so that they looked like blind eyes.
Written on one was:
YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GO HOME
Sound of the waves. Sound of the twirling ironmongery on the angled roofs. Stink of sea-salt and old spilled drinks - drinks spilled long ago by beautiful people who were now wrinkled and dead. Stink of the hotel itself. He looked at the soaped window again and saw with no real surprise that the message had already changed.
SHE'S ALREADY DEAD JACK SO WHY BOTHER?
(now who's the herd?)
'You are, Richie,' Jack said, 'but you ain't alone.'
Richard made a snoring, protesting sound in Jack's arms. 'Come on,' Jack said, and began to walk. 'One more mile. Give or take.'
2
The soaped-over windows actually seemed to widen as Jack walked toward the Agincourt, as if the black hotel were now regarding him with blind but contemptuous surprise.
Do you really think, little boy, that you can come in here and really hope to ever come out? Do you think there's really that much Jason in you?
Red sparks, like those he had seen in the air, flashed and twisted across the soaped glass. For a moment they took form. Jack watched, wondering, as they became tiny fire-imps. They skated down to the brass handles of the doors and converged there. The handles began to glow dully, like a smith's iron in the forge.
Go on, little boy. Touch one. Try.
Once, as a kid of six, Jack had put his finger on the cold coil of an electric range and had then turned the control knob onto the HIGH setting. He had simply been curious about how fast the burner would heat up. A second later he had pulled his finger, already blistering, away with a yell of pain. Phil Sawyer had come running, taken a look, and had asked Jack when he had started to feel this weird compulsion to burn himself alive.
Jack stood with Richard in his arms, looking at the dully glowing handles.
Go on, little boy. Remember how the stove burned? You thought you'd have plenty of time to pull your finger off - 'Hell,' you thought, 'the thing doesn't even start to get red for almost a minute' - but it burned right away, didn't it? Now, how do you think this is going to feel, Jack?
More red sparks skated liquidly down the glass to the handles of the French doors. The handles began to take on the delicate red-edged-with-white look of metal which is no more than six degrees from turning molten and starting to drip. If he touched one of those handles it would sink into his flesh, charring tissue and boiling blood. The agony would be like nothing he had ever felt before.
He waited for a moment with Richard in his arms, hoping the Talisman would call him again, or that the 'Jason-side' of him would surface. But it was his mother's voice that rasped in his head.
Has something or someone always got to push you, Jack-O? Come on, big guy - you set this going by yourself; you can keep going if you really want to. Has that other guy got to do everything for you?
'Okay, Mom,' Jack said. He was smiling a little, but his voice was trembling with fright. 'Here's one for you. I just hope someone remembered to pack the Solarcaine.'
He reached out and grasped one of the red-hot handles.
Except it wasn't; the whole thing had been an illusion. The handle was warm, but that was all. As Jack turned it, the red glow died from all the handles. And as he pushed the glass door inward, the Talisman sang out again, bringing gooseflesh out all over his body:
WELL DONE! JASON! TO ME! COME TO ME!
With Richard in his arms, Jack stepped into the dining room of the black hotel.
3
As he crossed the threshold, he felt an inanimate force - something like a dead hand - try to shove him back out. Jack pushed against it, and a second or two later, that feeling of being repelled ceased.
The room was not particularly dark - but the soaped windows gave it a monochrome whiteness Jack did not like. He felt fogged in, blind. Here were yellow smells of decay inside walls where the plaster was slowly turning to a vile soup: the smells of empty age and sour darkness. But there was more here, and Jack knew it and feared it.