From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds cele-
brating their existence.
12
But of that Jack was only distractedly conscious. He leaned breathlessly forward and watched the Talisman pour itself out onto his mother’s bed. Cloudy brightness welled up within it.
Seams and sparks of light enlivened it. His mother’s eyes
twitched. “Oh Mom,” he whispered. “Oh . . .”
Gray-golden light flooded through the opening in the Tal-
isman and cloudily drifted up his mother’s arms. Her sallow, wizened face very slightly frowned.
Jack inhaled unconsciously.
(What?)
(Music?)
The gray-golden cloud from the heart of the Talisman was
lengthening over his mother’s body, coating her in a translu-
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THE TALISMAN
cent but slightly opaque, delicately moving membrane. Jack
watched this fluid fabric slide across Lily’s pitiful chest, down her wasted legs. From the open seam in the Talisman a wondrous odor spilled out with the gray-golden cloud, an odor
sweet and unsweet, of flowers and earth, wholly good, yeasty; a smell of birth, Jack thought, though he had never attended an actual birth. Jack drew it into his lungs and in the midst of his wonder was gifted with the thought that he himself, Jack-O Sawyer, was being born at this minute—and then he imag-
ined, with a barely perceptible shock of recognition, that the opening in the Talisman was like a vagina. (He had of course never seen a vagina and had only the most rudimentary idea
of its structure.) Jack looked directly into the opening in the distended loosened Talisman.
Now he became conscious for the first time of the incredi-
ble racket, in some way all mixed up with faint music, of the birds outside the dark windows.
(Music? What . . . ?)
A small colored ball full of light shot past his vision, flashing in the open seam for a moment, then continued beneath
the Talisman’s cloudy surface as it dove into the shifting moving gaseous interior. Jack blinked. It had resembled—Another followed, and this time he had time to see the demarcation of blue and brown and green on the tiny globe, the coastal shorelines and tiny mountain ranges. On that tiny world, it occurred to him, stood a paralyzed Jack Sawyer looking down at an
even tinier colored speck, and on that speck stood a Jack-O
the height of a dust mote staring at a little world the size of an atom. Another world followed the first two, spinning in, out, in, out of the widening cloud within the Talisman.
His mother moved her right hand and moaned.
Jack began openly to weep. She would live. He knew it
now. All had worked as Speedy had said, and the Talisman
was forcing life back into his mother’s exhausted, disease-
ridden body, killing the evil that was killing her. He bent forward, for a moment almost giving in to the image of himself kissing the Talisman which filled his mind. The odors of jas-mine and hibiscus and freshly overturned earth filled his nostrils. A tear rolled off the end of his nose and sparkled like a jewel in the shafts of light from the Talisman. He saw a belt of
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stars drift past the open seam, a beaming yellow sun swim-
ming in vast black space. Music seemed to fill the Talisman, the room, the whole world outside. A woman’s face, the face of a stranger, moved across the open seam. Children’s faces, too, then the faces of other women. . . . Tears rolled down his own face, for he had seen swimming in the Talisman his
mother’s own face, the confident wise-cracking tender fea-
tures of the Queen of half a hundred quick movies. When he
saw his own face drifting among all the worlds and lives
falling toward birth within the Talisman, he thought he would burst with feeling. He expanded. He breathed in light. And became at last aware of the astonishment of noises taking
place all about him when he saw his mother’s eyes stay open as long, at least, as a blessed two seconds . . .
(for alive as birds, as alive as the worlds contained within the Talisman, there came to him the sounds of trombones and trumpets, the cries of saxophones; the joined voices of frogs and turtles and gray doves singing, The people who know my magic have filled the land with smoke; there came to him the voices of Wolfs making Wolfmusic at the moon. Water
spanked against the bow of a ship and a fish spanked the surface of a lake with the side of its body and a rainbow spanked the ground and a travelling boy spanked a drop of spittle to tell him which way to go and a spanked baby squinched its
face and opened its throat; and there came the huge voice of an orchestra singing with its whole massive heart; and the
room filled with the smoky trail of a single voice rising and rising and rising over all these forays of sound. Trucks
jammed gears and factory whistles blew and somewhere a tire exploded and somewhere a firecracker loudly spent itself and a lover whispered again and a child squalled and the voice rose and rose and for a short time Jack was unaware that he could not see; but then he could again).
Lily’s eyes opened wide. They stared up into Jack’s face
with a startled where-am-I expression. It was the expression of a newborn infant who has just been spanked into the world.
Then she jerked in a startled breath—
—and a river of worlds and tilted galaxies and universes
were pulled up and out of the Talisman as she did. They were pulled up in a stream of rainbow colors. They streamed into
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her mouth and nose . . . they settled, gleaming, on her sallow skin like droplets of dew, and melted inward. For a moment
his mother was all clothed in radiance—
—for a moment his mother was the Talisman.
All the disease fled from her face. It did not happen in the manner of a time-lapse sequence in a movie. It happened all at once. It happened instantly. She was sick . . . and then she was well. Rosy good health bloomed in her cheeks. Wispy,
sparse hair was suddenly full and smooth and rich, the color of dark honey.
Jack stared at her as she looked up into his face.
“Oh . . . oh . . . my GOD . . .” Lily whispered.
That rainbow radiance was fading now—but the health re-
mained.
“Mom?” He bent forward. Something crumpled like cello-
phane under his fingers. It was the brittle husk of the Talisman. He put it aside on the nighttable. He pushed several of her medicine bottles out of the way to do it. Some crashed on the floor, and it didn’t matter. She would not be needing the medicines anymore. He put the husk down with gentle reverence, suspecting—no, knowing—that even that would be gone very soon.
His mother smiled. It was a lovely, fulfilled, somewhat surprised smile— Hello, world, here I am again! What do you know about that?
“Jack, you came home,” she said at last, and rubbed her
eyes as if to make sure it was no mirage.
“Sure,” he said. He tried to smile. It was a pretty good
smile in spite of the tears that were pouring down his face.
“Sure, you bet.”
“I feel . . . a lot better, Jack-O.”
“Yeah?” He smiled, rubbed his wet eyes with the heels of
his palms. “That’s good, Mom.”
Her eyes were radiant.
“Hug me, Jacky.”
In a room on the fourth floor of a deserted resort hotel on the minuscule New Hampshire seacoast, a thirteen-year-old
boy named Jack Sawyer leaned forward, closed his eyes, and
hugged his mother tightly, smiling. His ordinary life of school and friends and games and music, a life where there were
schools to go to and crisp sheets to slide between at night, the
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ordinary life of a thirteen-year-old boy (if the life of such a creature can ever, in its color and riot, be considered ordinary) had been returned to him, he realized. The Talisman had done that for him, too. When he remembered to turn and look for it, the Talisman was gone.
Epilogue
In a billowing white bedroom filled with anxious women,
Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, opened her eyes.
Conclusion
So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly the history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to
stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juve-
niles, he must stop where he best can.
Most of the characters who perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem