“I’m going to save your life, Mom,” he repeated. “And I
have to go a long way away and bring something back to do it.
And so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I wish I knew what you were talking about.”
Just an ordinary conversation, Jack told himself: as ordi-
nary as asking permission to spend a couple of nights at a
friend’s house. He cut a sausage in half and popped one of the pieces in his mouth. She was watching him carefully. Sausage chewed and swallowed, Jack inserted a forkful of egg into his mouth. Speedy’s bottle lumped like a rock against his backside.
“I also wish you’d act as though you could hear the little
remarks I send your way, as obtuse as they may be.”
Jack stolidly swallowed the eggs and inserted a salty wad
of the crisp potatoes into his mouth.
Lily put her hands in her lap. The longer he said nothing,
the more she would listen when he did talk. He pretended to concentrate on his breakfast, eggs sausage potatoes, sausage potatoes eggs, potatoes eggs sausage, until he sensed that she was near to shouting at him.
My father called me Travelling Jack, he thought to himself.
This is right; this is as right as I’ll ever get.
“Jack—”
“Mom,” he said, “sometimes didn’t Dad call you up from a
long way away, and you knew he was supposed to be in
town?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“And sometimes didn’t you, ah, walk into a room because
you thought he was there, maybe even knew he was there—
but he wasn’t?”
Let her chew on that.
“No,” she said.
Both of them let the denial fade away.
“Almost never.”
“Mom, it even happened to me,” Jack said.
“There was always an explanation, you know there was.”
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“My father—this is what you know—was never too bad at explaining things. Especially the stuff that really couldn’t be explained. He was very good at that. That’s part of the reason he was such a good agent.”
Now she was silent again.
“Well, I know where he went,” Jack said. “I’ve been there
already. I was there this morning. And if I go there again, I can try to save your life.”
“My life doesn’t need you to save it, it doesn’t need anyone to save it,” his mother hissed. Jack looked down at his devastated plate and muttered something. “What was that?” she
drilled at him.
“I think it does, I said.” He met her eyes with his own.
“Suppose I ask how you propose to go about saving my
life, as you put it.”
“I can’t answer. Because I don’t really understand it yet.
Mom, I’m not in school, anyhow . . . give me a chance. I might only be gone a week or so.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“It could be longer,” he admitted.
“I think you’re nuts,” she said. But he saw that part of her wanted to believe him, and her next words proved it. “If— if—
I were mad enough to allow you to go off on this mysterious errand, I’d have to be sure that you wouldn’t be in any danger.”
“Dad always came back,” Jack pointed out.
“I’d rather risk my life than yours,” she said, and this truth, too, lay hugely between them for a long moment.
“I’ll call when I can. But don’t get too worried if a couple of weeks go by without my calling. I’ll come back, too, just like Dad always did.”
“This whole thing is nuts,” she said. “Me included. How
are you going to get to this place you have to go to? And
where is it? Do you have enough money?”
“I have everything I need,” he said, hoping that she would
not press him on the first two questions. The silence stretched out and out, and finally he said, “I guess I’ll mainly walk. I can’t talk about it much, Mom.”
“Travelling Jack,” she said. “I can almost believe . . .”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Yes.” He was nodding. And maybe, he
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THE TALISMAN
thought, you know some of what she knows, the real Queen, and that’s why you are letting go this easily. “That’s right. I can believe, too. That’s what makes it right.”
“Well . . . since you say you’ll go no matter what I say . . .”
“I will, too.”
“. . . then I guess it doesn’t matter what I say.” She looked at him bravely. “It does matter, though. I know. I want you to get back here as quick as you can, sonny boy. You’re not going right away, are you?”
“I have to.” He inhaled deeply. “Yes. I am going right away.
As soon as I leave you.”
“I could almost believe in this rigamarole. You’re Phil
Sawyer’s son, all right. You haven’t found a girl somewhere in this place, have you . . . ?” She looked at him very sharply.
“No. No girl. Okay. Save my life. Off with you.” She shook
her head, and he thought he saw an extra brightness in her
eyes. “If you’re going to leave, get out of here, Jacky. Call me tomorrow.”
“If I can.” He stood up.
“If you can. Of course. Forgive me.” She looked down at
nothing, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused. Red dots
burned in the middle of her cheeks.
Jack leaned over and kissed her, but she just waved him
away. The waitress stared at the two of them as if they were performing a play. Despite what his mother had just said, Jack thought that he had brought the level of her disbelief down to something like fifty percent; which meant that she no longer knew what to believe.
She focused on him for a moment, and he saw that hectic
brightness blazing in her eyes again. Anger; tears? “Take
care,” she said, and signalled the waitress.
“I love you,” Jack said.
“Never get off on a line like that.” Now she was almost
smiling. “Get travelling, Jack. Get going before I realize how crazy this is.”
“I’m gone,” he said, and turned away and marched out of
the restaurant. His head felt tight, as if the bones in his skull had just grown too large for their covering of flesh. The empty yellow sunlight attacked his eyes. Jack heard the door of the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe banging shut an instant after the little bell had sounded. He blinked; ran across Boardwalk Av-
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enue without looking for cars. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he realized that he would have to go back to their suite for some clothes. His mother had still not emerged from the tea shop by the time Jack was pulling open the hotel’s great front door.
The desk clerk stepped backward and sullenly stared. Jack
felt some sort of emotion steaming off the man, but for a second could not remember why the clerk should react so
strongly to the sight of him. The conversation with his
mother—actually much shorter than he had imagined it
would be—seemed to have lasted for days. On the other side
of the vast gulf of time he’d spent in the Tea and Jam Shoppe, he had called the clerk a creep. Should he apologize? He no longer actually remembered what had caused him to flare up
at the clerk. . . .
His mother had agreed to his going—she had given him
permission to take his journey, and as he walked through the crossfire of the deskman’s glare he finally understood why. He had not mentioned the Talisman, not explicitly, but even if he had—if he had spoken of the most lunatic aspect of his
mission—she would have accepted that too. And if he’d said
that he was going to bring back a foot-long butterfly and roast it in the oven, she’d have agreed to eat roast butterfly. It would have been an ironic, but a real, agreement. In part this showed the depth of her fear, that she would grasp at such straws.
But she would grasp because at some level she knew that
these were bricks, not straws. His mother had given him permission to go because somewhere inside her she, too, knew
about the Territories.
Did she ever wake up in the night with that name, Laura DeLoessian, sounding in her mind?
Up in 407 and 408, he tossed clothes into his knapsack al-
most randomly: if his fingers found it in a drawer and it was not too large, in it went. Shirts, socks, a sweater, Jockey shorts. Jack tightly rolled up a pair of tan jeans and forced them in, too; then he realized that the pack had become uncomfortably heavy, and pulled out most of the shirts and