Down the hallway to their rooms, feet flying, and now, at
last, he heard her voice—no brassy bellow or slightly throaty chuckle now; this was the dusty croak of a creature on the
outer edge of death.
“Jacky?”
“Mom!”
He burst into the room.
9
Down in the car, a nervous Richard Sloat stared upward
through his polarized window. What was he doing here, what
was Jack doing here? Richard’s eyes hurt. He strained to see the upper windows in the murky evening. As he bent sideways and stared upward, a blinding white flash erupted from sev-
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eral of the upstairs windows, sending a momentary, almost
palpable sheet of dazzling light over the entire front of the hotel. Richard put his head between his knees and moaned.
10
She was on the floor beneath the window—he saw her there
finally. The rumpled, somehow dusty-looking bed was empty,
the whole bedroom, as disordered as a child’s room, seemed
empty . . . Jack’s stomach had frozen and words backed up in his throat. Then the Talisman had shot out another of its great illuminating flashes, in and for an instant turning everything in the room a pure colorless white. She croaked, “Jacky?”
once more, and he bellowed, “MOM!” seeing her crumpled like a candy wrapper under the window. Thin and lank, her
hair trailed on the room’s dirty carpet. Her hands seemed like tiny animal paws, pale and scrabbling. “Oh Jesus, Mom, oh
jeepers, oh holy moe,” he babbled, and somehow moved
across the room without taking a step, he floated, he swam across Lily’s crowded frozen bedroom in an instant that
seemed as sharp to him as an image on a photographic plate.
Her hair puddled on the grimy carpet, her small knotty hands.
He inhaled the thick odor of illness, of close death. Jack
was no doctor, and he was ignorant of most of the things so wrong with Lily’s body. But he knew one thing—his mother
was dying, her life was falling away through invisible cracks, and she had very little time left. She had uttered his name twice, and that was about all the life left in her would permit.
Already beginning to weep, he put his hand on her uncon-
scious head, and set the Talisman on the floor beside her.
Her hair felt full of sand and her head was burning. “Oh
Mom, Mom,” he said, and got his hands under her. He still
could not see her face. Through her flimsy nightgown her hip felt as hot as the door of a stove. Against his other palm, her left shoulder blade pulsed with an equal warmth. She had no comfortable pads of flesh over her bones—for a mad second
of stopped time it was as though she were a small dirty child somehow left ill and alone. Sudden unbidden tears squirted
out of his eyes. He lifted her, and it was like picking up a bundle of clothes. Jack moaned. Lily’s arms sprawled loosely,
gracelessly.
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(Richard)
Richard had felt . . . not as bad as this, not even when
Richard had felt like a dried husk on his back, coming down the final hill into poisoned Point Venuti. There had been little but pimples and a rash left of Richard at that point, but he, too, had burned with fever. But Jack realized with a sort of unthinking horror that there had been more actual life, more substance, to Richard than his mother now possessed. Still, she had called his name.
(and Richard had nearly died)
She had called his name. He clung to that. She had made it to the window. She had called his name. It was impossible, unthinkable, immoral to imagine that she could die. One of
her arms dangled before him like a reed meant to be cut in
half by a scythe . . . her wedding ring had fallen off her finger.
He was crying steadily, unstoppably, unconsciously. “Okay,
Mom,” he said, “okay, it’s okay now, okay, it’s okay.”
From the limp body in his arms came a vibration that
might have been assent.
He gently placed her on the bed, and she rolled weight-
lessly sideways. Jack put a knee on the bed and leaned over her. The tired hair fell away from her face.
11
Once, at the very beginning of his journey, he had for a
shameful moment seen his mother as an old woman—a spent,
exhausted old woman in a tea shop. As soon as he had recog-
nized her, the illusion had dissipated, and Lily Cavanaugh
Sawyer had been restored to her unaging self. For the real, the true Lily Cavanaugh could never have aged—she was eternally a blonde with a quick switchblade of a smile and a go-to-hell amusement in her face. This had been the Lily
Cavanaugh whose picture on a billboard had strengthened her son’s heart.
The woman on the bed looked very little like the actress on the billboard. Jack’s tears momentarily blinded him. “Oh
don’t don’t don’t,” he said, and laid one palm across her yellowed cheek.
She did not look as though she had enough strength to lift
her hand. He took her tight dry discolored claw of a hand into
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his own hand. “Please please please don’t—” He could not
even allow himself to say it.
And then he realized how much an effort this shrunken
woman had made. She had been looking for him, he under-
stood in a great giddy rush of comprehension. His mother had known he was coming. She had trusted him to return and in a way that must have been connected to the fact of the Talisman itself, she had known the moment of his return.
“I’m here, Mom,” he whispered. A wad of wet stuff bub-
bled from his nostrils. He unceremoniously wiped his nose
with the sleeve of his coat.
He realized for the first time that his entire body was trembling.
“I brought it back,” he said. He experienced a moment of
absolute radiant pride, of pure accomplishment. “I brought
back the Talisman,” he said.
Gently he set her nutlike hand down on the counterpane.
Beside the chair, where he had placed it (every bit as gen-
tly) on the floor, the Talisman continued to glow. But its light was faint, hesitant, cloudy. He had healed Richard by simply rolling the globe down the length of his friend’s body; he had done the same for Speedy. But this was to be something else.
He knew that, but not what “it” was to be . . . unless it was a question of knowing and not wanting to believe.
He could not possibly break the Talisman, not even to save
his mother’s life—that much he did know.
Now the interior of the Talisman slowly filled with a
cloudy whiteness. The pulses faded into one another and be-
came a single steady light. Jack placed his hands on it, and the Talisman shot forth a blinding wall of light, rainbow!
which seemed nearly to speak. AT LAST!
Jack went back across the room toward the bed, the Talis-
man bouncing and spraying light from floor to wall to ceiling, illuminating the bed fitfully, garishly.
As soon as he stood beside his mother’s bed, the texture of the Talisman seemed to Jack to subtly alter beneath his fingers. Its glassy hardness shifted somehow, became less slippery, more porous. The tips of his fingers seemed almost to sink into the Talisman. The cloudiness filling it boiled and darkened.
And at this moment Jack experienced a strong—in fact,
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passionate—feeling he would have thought was impossible,
that day long ago when he had set off for his first day’s walk in the Territories. He knew that in some unforeseen way the Talisman, the object of so much blood and trouble, was going to alter. It was going to change forever, and he was going to lose it. The Talisman would no longer be his. Its clear skin was clouding over, too, and the entire beautiful grooved
gravid surface was softening. The feeling now was not glass but warming plastic.
Jack hurriedly set the altering Talisman down in his
mother’s hands. It knew its job; it had been made for this moment; in some fabulous smithy it had been created to answer the requirements of this particular moment and of none other.
He did not know what he expected to happen. An explo-
sion of light? A smell of medicine? Creation’s big bang?
Nothing happened. His mother continued visibly but mo-
tionlessly to die.
“Oh please,” Jack blurted, “please—Mom—please—”
His breath solidified in the middle of his chest. A seam,
once one of the vertical grooves in the Talisman, had soundlessly opened. Light slowly poured out and pooled over his
mother’s hands. From the cloudy interior of the loose, emptying ball, more light spilled through the open seam.