The Talisman Read Online Free PDF Page B

room.
    Twenty minutes later he rapped softly at her door. “Mom?” A thick mumble answered him. Jack pushed the door open a crack and looked in. She was lifting her head off the pillow and peering back through half-closed eyes.
    “Jacky. Morning. What time?”
    “Around eight.”
    “God. You starving?” She sat up and pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes.
    “Kind of. I’m sort of sick of sitting in here. I just wondered if you were getting up soon.”
    “Not if I can help it. You mind? Go down to the dining room, get some breakfast. Mess around on the beach, okay? You’ll have a much better mother today if you give her another hour in bed.”
    “Sure,” he said. “Okay. See you later.”
    Her head had already dropped back down on the pillow.
    Jack switched off the television and let himself out of the room after making sure his key was in the pocket of his jeans.
    The elevator smelled of camphor and ammonia—a maid had tipped a bottle off a cart. The doors opened, and the gray desk clerk frowned at him and ostentatiously turned away. Being a movie star’s brat doesn’t make you anything special around here, sonny . . . and why aren’t you in school? Jack turned into the panelled entrance to the dining room—The Saddle of Lamb—and saw rows of empty tables in a shadowy vastness. Perhaps six had been set up. A waitress in a white blouse and red ruffled skirt looked at him, then looked away. Two exhausted-looking old people sat across a table from each other at the other end of the room. There were no other breakfasters. As Jack looked on, the old man leaned over the table and unselfconsciously cut his wife’s fried egg into four-inch square sections.
    “Table for one?” The woman in charge of The Saddle of Lamb during the day had materialized beside him, and was already plucking a menu off a stack beside the reservation book.
    “Changed my mind, sorry.” Jack escaped.
    The Alhambra’s coffee shop, The Beachcomber Lounge, lay all the way across the lobby and down a long bleak corridor lined with empty display cases. His hunger died at the thought of sitting by himself at the counter and watching the bored cook slap down strips of bacon on the crusty grill. He would wait until his mother got up: or, better yet, he would go out and see if he could get a doughnut and a little carton of milk at one of the shops up the street on the way into town.
    He pushed open the tall heavy front door of the hotel and went out into the sunlight. For a moment the sudden brightness stung his eyes—the world was a flat glaring dazzle. Jack squinted, wishing he had remembered to bring his sunglasses downstairs. He went across the apron of red brick and down the four curving steps to the main pathway through the gardens at the front of the hotel.
    What happened if she died?
    What happened to him—where would he go, who would take care of him, if the worst thing in the world actually took place and she died, for good and all
died,
up in that hotel room?
    He shook his head, trying to send the terrible thought away before a lurking panic could rush up out of the Alhambra’s well-ordered gardens and blast him apart. He would not cry, he would not let that happen to him—and he would not let himself think about the Tarrytoons and the weight she had lost, the feeling that he sometimes had that she was too helpless and without direction. He was walking very quickly now, and he shoved his hands into his pockets as he jumped down off the curving path through the gardens onto the hotel’s drive.
She on the run, son, and you on the run with her.
On the run, but from whom? And to where? Here—just to here, this deserted resort?
    He reached the wide street that travelled up the shoreline toward the town, and now all of the empty landscape before him was a whirlpool that could suck him down into itself and spit him out into a black place where peace and safety had never existed. A gull sailed out over the empty road, wheeled