It won’t take long, so I want you to try and get your head up off your chest, at least for the moment.”
With some effort, Jack got his head up and his eyes all—
well, most—of the way open again. Parkus nodded.
“When you wake up, strike east . . . but don’t flip! You stay right here for a while. Stay in the Territories. There’s going to be too much going on over there on your side—rescue units,
news crews, Jason knows what else. At least the snow will
melt before anybody knows it’s there, except for a few people who’ll be dismissed as crackpots—”
“Why do you have to go?”
“I just got to ramble some now, Jack. There’s a lot of work to be done over here. News of Morgan’s death will already be travelling east. Travelling fast. I’m behind that news right now, and I’ve got to get ahead of it if I can. I want to get back to the Outposts . . . and the east . . . before a lot of pretty bad folks start to head out for other places.” He looked out at the ocean, his eyes as cold and gray as flint. “When the bill comes due, people have to pay. Morgan’s gone, but there’s still a debt owing.”
“You’re something like a policeman over here, aren’t you?”
Parkus nodded. “I am what you’d call the Judge General
and Lord High Executioner all rolled into one. Over here, that is.” He put a strong, warm hand on Jack’s head. “Over there, I’m just this fella who goes around from place to place, does a few odd jobs, strums a few tunes. And sometimes, believe
me, I like that a lot better.”
He smiled again, and this time he was Speedy.
“And you be seein that guy from time to time, Jacky. Yeah,
from time to time and place to place. In a shoppin center,
maybe, or a park.”
He winked at Jack.
“But Speedy’s . . . not well,” Jack said. “Whatever was
wrong with him, it was something the Talisman couldn’t touch.”
“Speedy’s old,” Parkus said. “He’s my age, but your world made him older than me. Just the same, he’s still got a few years left in him. Maybe quite a few. Feel no fret, Jack.”
“You promise?” Jack asked.
Parkus grinned. “Yeah-bob.”
Jack grinned tiredly back.
Page 712
712
THE TALISMAN
“You and your friend head out to the east. Go until you
reckon you’ve done five miles. You get over those low hills and then you’ll be fine—easy walking. Look for a big tree—
biggest damn tree you’ve ever seen. You get to that big old tree, Jack, and you take Richard’s hand, and you flip back.
You’ll come out next to a giant redwood with a tunnel cut
through the bottom of it to let the road through. The road’s Route Seventeen, and you’ll be on the outskirts of a little town in northern California called Storyville. Walk into town.
There’s a Mobil station at the blinker-light.”
“And then?”
Parkus shrugged. “Don’t know, not for sure. Could be,
Jack, you’ll meet someone you’ll recognize.”
“But how will we get h—”
“Shhh,” Parkus said, and put a hand on Jack’s forehead ex-
actly as his mother had done when he was
(baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting, and all that good shit, la-la, go to sleep, Jacky, all’s well and all’s well and) very small. “Enough questions. All will be well with you
and Richard now, I think.”
Jack lay down. He cradled the dark ball in the crook of one arm. Each of his eyelids now seemed to have a cinderblock attached to it.
“You have been brave and true, Jack,” Parkus said with
calm gravity. “I wish you were my own son . . . and I salute you for your courage. And your faith. There are people in
many worlds who owe you a great debt of gratitude. And in
some way or other, I think most of them sense that.”
Jack managed a smile.
“Stay a little while,” he managed to say.
“All right,” Parkus said. “Until you sleep. Feel no fret,
Jack. Nothing will harm you here.”
“My mom always said—”
But before he finished the thought, sleep had claimed him.
4
And sleep continued to claim him, in some mysterious wise,
the next day when he was technically awake—or if not sleep, then a protective numbing faculty of the mind which turned
most of that day slow and dreamlike. He and Richard, who
Page 713
The Talisman
713
was similarly slow-moving and tentative, stood beneath the
tallest tree in the world. All about them spangles of light lay across the floor of the forest. Ten grown men holding hands could not have reached around it. The tree soared up, massive and apart: in a forest of tall trees it was a leviathan, a pure example of Territories exuberance.
Feel no fret, Parkus had said, even while he threatened to fade hazily away like the Cheshire Cat. Jack tilted his head to stare up toward the top of the tree. He did not quite know this, but he was emotionally exhausted. The immensity of the tree aroused only a flicker of wonder in him. Jack rested a hand against the surprisingly smooth bark. I killed the man who killed my father, he said to himself. He clutched the dark, seemingly dead ball of the Talisman in his other hand.
Richard was staring upward at the giant head of the tree, a skyscraper’s height above them. Morgan was dead, Gardener
too, and the snow must have melted from the beach by now.
Yet not all of it was gone. Jack felt as though a whole beach-ful of snow filled his head. He had thought once—a thousand years ago, it seemed now—that if he could ever actually get his hands around the Talisman, he would be so inundated with triumph and excitement and awe that he’d have to fizz over.
Instead he now felt only the tiniest hint of all that. It was snowing in his head, and he could see no farther than Parkus’s instructions. He realized that the enormous tree was holding him up.
“Take my hand,” he said to Richard.
“But how are we going to get home?” Richard asked.
“Feel no fret,” he said, and closed his hand around
Richard’s. Jack Sawyer didn’t need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was brave and true. Jack Sawyer was a played-out twelve-year-old boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him.
5
The forest had contracted; now it was an American forest. The roof of gently moving boughs was noticeably lower, the trees
Page 714
714
THE TALISMAN
about them conspicuously smaller than in the part of the Territories forest to which Parkus had directed them. Jack was dimly conscious of this alteration in the scale of everything about him before he saw the two-lane blacktop road in front of him: but twentieth-century reality kicked him almost immediately in the shins, for as soon as he saw the road he heard the eggbeater sound of a small motor and instinctively drew himself and Richard back just before a white little Renault Le Car zipped by him. The car sped past and went through the
tunnel cut into the trunk of the redwood (which was slightly more than half the size of its Territories counterpart). But at least one adult and two children in the Renault were not looking at the redwoods they had come to see all the way from
New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die!”). The woman and the
two small children in the back seat had swivelled around to gawp at Jack and Richard. Their mouths were small black
caves, open wide. They had just seen two boys appear beside the road like ghosts, miraculously and instantaneously forming out of nothing, like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock after
beaming down from the Enterprise.
“You okay to walk for a little while?”
“Sure,” Richard said.
Jack stepped onto the surface of Route 17 and walked
through the huge hole in the tree.
He might be dreaming all this, he thought. He might be
still on the Territories beach, Richard knocked out beside
him, both of them under Parkus’s kindly gaze. My mom always said . . . My mom always said . . .
6
Moving as if through thick fog (though that day in that part of northern California was in fact sunny and dry), Jack Sawyer led Richard Sloat out of the redwood forest and down a sloping road past dry December meadows.
. . . that the most important person in any movie is usually the cameraman . . .
His body needed more sleep. His mind needed a vacation.