thought. That's the important thing, that's the difference; I'm flickering through each of them, probably too fast to see, and leaving a sound like a handclap or a sonic boom behind me as the air closes on the vacancy where, for a millisecond, I took up space.
In many of these worlds, the black hotel was a black ruin - these were worlds, he thought dimly, where the great evil that now impended on the tightwire drawn between California and the Territories had already happened. In one of them the sea which roared and snarled at the shore was a dead, sickly green; the sky had a similar gangrenous look. In another he saw a flying creature as big as a Conestoga wagon fold its wings and plummet earthward like a hawk. It grabbed a creature like a sheep and swooped up again, holding the bloody hindquarters in its beak.
Flip . . . flip . . . flip. Worlds passed by his eyes like cards shuffled by a riverboat gambler.
Here was the hotel again, and there were half a dozen different versions of the black knight above him, but the intent in each was the same, and the differences were as unimportant as the stylings of rival automobiles. Here was a black tent filled with the thick dry smell of rotting canvas - it was torn in many places so that the sun shone through in dusty, conflicting rays. In this world Jack/Jason was on some sort of rope rigging, and the black knight stood inside a wooden basket like a crow's nest, and as he climbed he flipped again . . . and again . . . and again.
Here the entire ocean was on fire; here the hotel was much as it was in Point Venuti, except it had been half-sunk into the ocean. For a moment he seemed to be in an elevator car, the knight standing on top of it and peering down at him through the trapdoor. Then he was on a rampway, the top of which was guarded by a huge snake, its long, muscular body armored with gleaming black scales.
And when do I get to the end of everything? When do I stop crashing through floors and just smash my way into the blackness?
JACK! JASON! the Talisman called, and it called in all the worlds. TO ME!
And Jack came to it, and it was like coming home.
6
He was right, he saw; he had come up only a single stair. But reality had solidified again. The black knight - his black knight, Jack Sawyer's black knight - stood blocking the stair-landing. It raised its mace.
Jack was afraid, but he kept climbing, Speedy's pick held out in front of him.
'I'm not going to mess with you,' Jack said. 'You better get out of my - '
The black figure swung the mace. It came down with incredible force. Jack dodged aside. The mace crashed into the stair where he had been standing and splintered the entire riser down into hollow blackness.
The figure wrenched the mace free. Jack lunged up two more stairs, Speedy's pick still held between his thumb and forefinger . . . and suddenly it simply disintegrated, falling in a little eggshell rain of yellowed ivory fragments. Most of these sprinkled the tops of Jack's sneakers. He stared stupidly at them.
The sound of dead laughter.
The mace, tiny splinters of wood and chews of old dank stair-runner still clinging to it, was upraised in the knight's two armored gloves. The specter's hot glare fell through the slit in its helmet. It seemed to slice blood from Jack's upturned face in a horizontal line across the bridge of his nose.
That chuffing sound of laughter again - not heard with his ears, because he knew this suit of armor was as empty as the rest, nothing but a steel jacket for an undead spirit, but heard inside his head. You've lost, boy - did you really think that puny little thing could get you past me?
The mace whistled down again, this time slicing on a diagonal, and Jack tore his eyes away from that red gaze just in time to duck low - he felt the head of the mace pass through the upper layer of his long hair a second before it ripped away a four-foot section of bannister and sent it sailing out into space.
A scraping clack of metal as the knight leaned toward him, its cocked helmet somehow a hideous and sarcastic parody of solicitude - then the mace drew back and up again for another of those portentous swings.
Jack, you didn't need no magic juice to git ovah, and you don't need no magic pick to pull the chain on this here coffee can, neither!
The mace came blasting through the air again - wheeee-ossshhhh! Jack lurched backward, sucking in his stomach; the web of muscles in his shoulders screamed as they pulled around the punctures the spiked gloves had left.
The mace missed the skin of his chest by less than an inch before passing beyond him and swiping through a line of thick mahogany balusters as if they had been toothpicks. Jack tottered on emptiness, feeling Buster Keatonish and absurd. He snatched at the ragged ruins of the bannister on his left and got splinters under two of his fingernails instead. The pain was so wire-thin excruciating that he thought for a moment that his eyeballs would explode with it. Then he got a good hold with his right hand and was able to stabilize himself and move away from the drop.
All the magic's in YOU, Jack! Don't you know that by now?
For a moment he only stood there, panting, and then he started up the stairs again, staring at the blank iron face above him.