They looked familiar.
Richard, staring at the ties as they disappeared beneath his feet, at last stumbled and fell over, hitting his head. After that, Jack piggybacked him again.
“There, Jack!” Richard called, after what seemed an eter-
nity.
Up ahead, the tracks disappeared into an old car-barn. The
doors hung open on a shadowy darkness that looked dull and
moth-eaten. Beyond the car-barn (which might once have
been as pleasant as Richard had said, but which only looked spooky to Jack now) was a highway—101, Jack guessed.
Beyond that, the ocean—he could hear the pounding
waves.
“I guess we’re here,” he said in a dry voice.
“Almost,” Richard said. “Point Venuti’s a mile or so down
the road. God, I wish we didn’t have to go there, Jack . . .
Jack? Where are you going?”
But Jack didn’t look around. He stepped off the tracks, de-
toured around one of those strange-looking trees (this one not even shrub-high), and headed for the road. High grasses and weeds brushed his road-battered jeans. Something inside the
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trolley-barn—Morgan Sloat’s private train-station of yore—
moved with a nasty slithering bump, but Jack didn’t even look toward it.
He reached the road, crossed it, and walked to the edge.
13
Near the middle of December in the year 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and the land came together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Pacific. He was twelve years old and extraordinarily beautiful for his age. His brown hair was long—probably too long—but the sea-breeze swept it back from a fine, clear brow.
He stood thinking of his mother, who was dying, and of
friends, both absent and present, and worlds within worlds, turning in their courses.
I’ve come the distance, he thought, and shivered. Coast to coast with Travelling Jack Sawyer. His eyes abruptly filled with tears. He breathed deeply of the salt. Here he was—and the Talisman was close by.
“Jack!”
Jack didn’t look at him at first; his gaze was held by the
Pacific, by the sunlight gleaming gold on top of the waves. He was here; he had made it. He—
“Jack!” Richard struck his shoulder, bringing him out of his daze.
“Huh?”
“Look!” Richard was gaping, pointing at something down
the road, in the direction in which Point Venuti presumably lay. “Look there!”
Jack looked. He understood Richard’s surprise, but he felt
none himself—or no more than he had felt when Richard had
told him the name of the motel where he and his father had
stayed in Point Venuti. No, not much surprise, but—
But it was damned good to see his mother again.
Her face was twenty feet high, and it was a younger face
than Jack could remember. It was Lily as she had looked at
the height of her career. Her hair, a glorious be-bop shade of brassy blond, was pulled back in a Tuesday Weld ponytail.
Her insouciant go-to-hell grin was, however, all her own. No one else in films had ever smiled that way—she had invented
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it, and she still held the patent. She was looking back over one bare shoulder. At Jack . . . at Richard . . . at the blue Pacific.
It was his mother . . . but when he blinked, the face changed the slightest bit. The line of chin and jaw grew rounder, the cheekbones less pronounced, the hair darker, the eyes an even deeper blue. Now it was the face of Laura DeLoessian, mother of Jason. Jack blinked again, and it was his mother again—his mother at twenty-eight, grinning her cheerful fuckya-if-you-can’t-take-a-joke defiance at the world.
It was a billboard. Across the top of it ran this legend:
THIRD ANNUAL KILLER B FILM FESTIVAL
POINT VENUTI, CALIFORNIA
BITKER THEATER
DECEMBER 10TH-DECEMBER 20TH
THIS YEAR FEATURING LILY CAVANAUGH
“QUEEN OF THE B’S”
“Jack, it’s your mother,” Richard said. His voice was hoarse with awe. “Is it just a coincidence? It can’t be, can it?”
Jack shook his head. No, not a coincidence.
The word his eyes kept fixing on, of course, was QUEEN.
“Come on,” he said to Richard. “I think we’re almost
there.”
The two of them walked side by side down the road toward
Point Venuti.
38
The End of the Road
1
Jack inspected Richard’s drooping posture and glistening face carefully as they walked along. Richard now looked as though he were dragging himself along on will power alone. A few
more wet-looking pimples had blossomed on his face.
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“Are you okay, Richie?”
“No. I don’t feel too good. But I can still walk, Jack. You don’t have to carry me.” He bent his head and plodded glumly on. Jack saw that his friend, who had so many memories of
that peculiar little railway and that peculiar little station, was suffering far more than he from the reality that now existed—
rusty, broken ties, weeds, poison ivy . . . and at the end, a ramshackle building from which all the bright, remembered paint had faded, a building where something slithered uneasily in the dark.
I feel like my leg is caught in some stupid trap, Richard had said, and Jack thought he could understand that well
enough . . . but not with the depth of Richard’s understanding.
That was more understanding than he was sure he could bear.
A slice of Richard’s childhood had been burned out of him,
turned inside-out. The railway and the dead station with its staring glassless windows must have seemed like dreadful
parodies of themselves to Richard—yet more bits of the past destroyed in the wake of everything he was learning or admitting about his father. Richard’s entire life, as much as Jack’s, had begun to fold into the pattern of the Territories, and
Richard had been given much less preparation for this transformation.
2
As for what he had told Richard about the Talisman, Jack
would have sworn it was the truth—the Talisman knew they
were coming. He had begun feeling it just about when he had seen the billboard shining out with his mother’s picture; now the feeling was urgent and powerful. It was as if a great animal had awakened some miles away, and its purring made the
earth resonate . . . or as if every single bulb inside a hundred-story building just over the horizon had just gone on, making a blaze of light strong enough to conceal the stars . . . or as if someone had switched on the biggest magnet in the world,
which was tugging at Jack’s belt buckle, at the change in his pockets and the fillings in his teeth, and would not be satisfied until it had pulled him into its heart. That great animal
purring, that sudden and drastic illumination, that magnetic yearning—all these echoed in Jack’s chest. Something out
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there, something in the direction of Point Venuti, wanted Jack Sawyer, and what Jack Sawyer chiefly knew of the object calling him so viscerally was that it was big. Big. No small thing could own such power. It was elephant-sized, city-sized.
And Jack wondered about his capacity to handle some-
thing so monumental. The Talisman had been imprisoned in a
magical and sinister old hotel; presumably it had been put
there not only to keep it from evil hands but at least in part because it was hard for anybody to handle it, whatever his intentions. Maybe, Jack wondered, Jason had been the only be-
ing capable of handling it—capable of dealing with it without doing harm either to himself or to the Talisman itself. Feeling the strength and urgency of its call to him, Jack could only hope that he would not weaken before the Talisman.
“ ‘You’ll understand, Rich,’ ” Richard surprised him by
saying. His voice was dull and low. “My father said that. He said I’d understand. ‘You’ll understand, Rich.’ ”
“Yeah,” Jack said, looking worriedly at his friend. “How
are you feeling, Richard?”
In addition to the sores surrounding his mouth, Richard
now had a collection of angry-looking raised red dots or
bumps across his pimply forehead and his temples. It was as though a swarm of insects had managed to burrow just under
the surface of his protesting skin. For a moment Jack had a flash of Richard Sloat on the morning he had climbed in his window at Nelson House, Thayer School; Richard Sloat with
his glasses riding firmly on the bridge of his nose and his sweater tucked neatly into his pants. Would that maddeningly correct, unbudgeable boy ever return?
“I can still walk,” Richard said. “But is this what he
meant? Is this the understanding I was supposed to get, or have, or whatever the hell . . . ?”
“You’ve got something new on your face,” Jack said. “You
want to rest for a while?”