The Talisman

42

Jack and the Talisman

1

You made a mistake—a ghostly voice in Jack Sawyer’s head spoke up as he stood outside the Heron Bar and watched these other suits of armor bear down on him. In his mind an eye opened wide and he saw an angry man—a man who was really not much more than an overgrown boy—striding up a Western street toward the camera, buckling on first one gunbelt and then another, so that they crisscrossed his belly. You made a mistake—you shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!

2

Of all his mother’s movies, the one Jack had always liked the best was Last Train to Hangtown, made in 1960 and released in 1961. It had been a Warner Brothers picture, and the major parts—as in many of the lower-budget pictures Warners made during that period—were filled by actors from the half-dozen Warner Brothers TV series which were in constant production. Jack Kelly from the Maverick show had been in Last Train (the Suave Gambler), and Andrew Duggan from Bourbon Street Beat (the Evil Cattle-Baron). Clint Walker, who played a character called Cheyenne Bodie on TV, starred as Rafe Ellis (the Retired Sheriff Who Must Strap on His Guns One Last Time). Inger Stevens had been originally slated to play the part of the Dance Hall Girl with Willing Arms and a Heart of Gold, but Miss Stevens had come down with a bad case of bronchitis and Lily Cavanaugh had stepped into the part. It was of a sort she could have done competently in a coma. Once, when his parents thought he was asleep and were talking in the living room downstairs, Jack overheard his mother say something striking as he padded barefoot to the bathroom to get a glass of water . . . it was striking enough, at any rate, so that Jack never forgot it. “All the women I played knew how to fuck, but not one of them knew how to fart,” she told Phil.

Will Hutchins, who starred in another Warner Brothers program (this one was called Sugarfoot), had also been in the film. Last Train to Hangtown was Jack’s favorite chiefly because of the character Hutchins played. It was this character—Andy Ellis, by name—who came to his tired, tottering, overtaxed mind now as he watched the suits of armor marching down the dark hallway toward him.

Andy Ellis had been the Cowardly Kid Brother Who Gets Mad in the Last Reel. After skulking and cowering through the entire movie, he had gone out to face Duggan’s evil minions after the Chief Minion (played by sinister, stubbly, wall-eyed Jack Elam, who played Chief Minions in all sorts of Warner epics, both theatrical and televisional) had shot his brother Rafe in the back.

Hutchins had gone striding down the dusty wide-screen street, strapping on his brother’s gunbelts with clumsy fingers, shouting, “Come on! Come on, I’m ready for ya! You made a mistake! You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!”

Will Hutchins had not been one of the greatest actors of all time, but in that moment he had achieved—at least in Jack’s eyes—a moment of clear truth and real brilliance. There was a sense that the kid was going to his death, and knew it, but meant to go on, anyway. And although he was frightened, he was not striding up that street toward the showdown with the slightest reluctance; he went eagerly, sure of what he meant to do, even though he had to fumble again and again with the buckles of the gunbelts.

The suits of armor came on, closing the distance, rocking from side to side like toy robots. They should have keys sticking out of their backs, Jack thought.

He turned to face them, the yellowed pick held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if to strum a tune.

They seemed to hesitate, as if sensing his fearlessness. The hotel itself seemed to suddenly hesitate, or to open its eyes to a danger that was deeper than it had at first thought; floors groaned their boards, somewhere a series of doors clapped shut one after the other, and on the roofs, the brass ornaments ceased turning for a moment.

Then the suits of armor clanked forward again. They now made a single moving wall of plate- and chain-mail, of greaves and helmets and sparkling gorgets. One held a spiked iron ball on a wooden haft; one a martel de fer; the one in the center held the double-pointed sword.

Jack suddenly began to walk toward them. His eyes lit up; he held the guitar-pick out before him. His face filled with that radiant Jason-glow. He

sideslipped

momentarily into the Territories and became Jason; here the shark’s tooth which had been a pick seemed to be aflame. As he approached the three knights, one pulled off its helmet, revealing another of those old, pale faces—this one was thick with jowls, and the neck hung with waxy wattles that looked like melting candlewax. It heaved its helmet at him. Jason dodged it easily

and

slipped back

into his Jack-self as a helmet crashed off a panelled wall behind him. Standing in front of him was a headless suit of armor.

You think that scares me? he thought contemptuously. I’ve seen that trick before. It doesn’t scare me, you don’t scare me, and I’m going to get it, that’s all.

This time he did not just feel the hotel listening; this time it seemed to recoil all around him, as the tissue of a digestive organ might recoil from a poisoned bit of flesh. Upstairs, in the five rooms where the five Guardian Knights had died, five windows blew out like gunshots. Jack bore down on the suits of armor.

The Talisman sang out from somewhere above in its clear and sweetly triumphant voice:

JASON! TO ME!

“Come on!” Jack shouted at the suits of armor, and began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Never had laughter seemed so strong to him, so potent, so good as this—it was like water from a spring, or from some deep river. “Come on, I’m ready for ya! I don’t know what fucked-up Round Table you guys came from, but you shoulda stayed there! You made a mistake!”

Laughing harder than ever but as grimly determined inside as Wotan on the Valkyries’ rock, Jack leaped at the headless, swaying figure in the center.

“You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!” he shouted, and as Speedy’s guitar-pick passed into the zone of freezing air where the knight’s head should have been, the suit of armor fell apart.

3

In her bedroom at the Alhambra, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer suddenly looked up from the book she had been reading. She thought she had heard someone—no, not just someone, Jack!—call out from far down the deserted corridor, perhaps even from the lobby. She listened, eyes wide, lips pursed, heart hoping . . . but there was nothing. Jack-O was still gone, the cancer was still eating her up a bite at a time, and it was still an hour and a half before she could take another of the big brown horse-pills that damped down the pain a little bit.

She had begun to think more and more often of taking all the big brown horse-pills at once. That would do more than damp the pain for a bit; that would finish it off forever. They say we can’t cure cancer, but don’t you believe that bullshit, Mr. C—try eating about two dozen of these. What do you say? Want to go for it?

What kept her from doing it was Jack—she wanted so badly to see him again that now she was imagining his voice . . . not just doing a simple albeit corny sort of thing like calling her name, either, but quoting from one of her old pictures.

“You are one crazy old bitch, Lily,” she croaked, and lit a Herbert Tarrytoon with thin, shaking fingers. She took two puffs and then put it out. Any more than two puffs started the coughing these days, and the coughing tore her apart. “One crazy old bitch.” She picked up her book again but couldn’t read because the tears were coursing down her face and her guts hurt, they hurt, oh they hurt, and she wanted to take all the brown pills but she wanted to see him again first, her dear son with his clear handsome forehead and his shining eyes.

Come home, Jack-O, she thought, please come home soon or the next time I talk to you it’ll be by Ouija board. Please, Jack, please come home.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

4

The knight which had held the spike-ball swayed a moment longer, displaying its vacant middle, and then it also exploded. The one remaining raised its battle-hammer . . . and then simply fell apart in a heap. Jack stood amid the wreckage for a moment, still laughing, and then stopped as he looked at Speedy’s pick.

It was a deep and ancient yellow now; the crack-glaze had become a snarl of fissures.

Never mind, Travellin Jack. You get on. I think there may be one more o’ those walkin Maxwell House cans around someplace. If so, you’ll take it on, won’t you?

“If I have to, I will,” Jack muttered aloud.

Jack kicked aside a greave, a helmet, a breastplate. He strode down the middle of the hall, the carpet squelching under his sneakers. He reached the lobby and looked around briefly.

JACK! COME TO ME! JASON! COME TO ME! the Talisman sang.

Jack started up the staircase. Halfway up he looked at the landing and saw the last of the knights, standing and looking down at him. It was a gigantic figure, better than eleven feet tall; its armor and its plume were black, and a baleful red glare fell through the eye-slit in its helmet.

One mailed fist gripped a huge mace.

For a moment, Jack stood frozen on the staircase, and then he began to climb again.

5

They saved the worst for last, Jack thought, and as he advanced steadily upward toward the black knight he

slipped

through

again

into Jason. The knight still wore black armor, but of a different sort; its visor was tilted up to reveal a face that had been almost obliterated by old dried sores. Jason recognized them. This fellow had gotten a little too close to one of those rolling balls of fire in the Blasted Lands for his own good.

Other figures were passing him on the stairs, figures he could not quite see as his fingers trailed over a wide bannister that was not mahogany from the West Indies but ironwood from the Territories. Figures in doublets, figures in blouses of silk-sack, women in great belling gowns with gleaming white cowls thrown back from their gorgeously dressed hair; these people were beautiful but doomed—and so, perhaps, ghosts always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of ghosts inspire such terror?

JASON! TO ME! the Talisman sang, and for a moment all partitioned reality seemed to break down; he did not flip but seemed to fall through worlds like a man crashing through the rotted floors of an ancient wooden tower, one after the other. He felt no fear. The idea that he might never be able to get back—that he might just go on falling through a chain of realities forever, or become lost, as in a great wood—occurred to him, but he dismissed it out of hand. All of this was happening to Jason

(and Jack)

in an eyeblink; less time than it would take for his foot to go from one riser on the broad stairs to the next. He would come back; he was single-natured, and he did not believe it was possible for such a person to become lost, because he had a place in all of these worlds. But I do not exist simultaneously in all of them, Jason.

(Jack)

thought. That’s the important thing, that’s the difference; I’m flickering through each of them, probably too fast to see, and leaving a sound like a handclap or a sonic boom behind me as the air closes on the vacancy where, for a millisecond, I took up space.

In many of these worlds, the black hotel was a black ruin—these were worlds, he thought dimly, where the great evil that now impended on the tightwire drawn between California and the Territories had already happened. In one of them the sea which roared and snarled at the shore was a dead, sickly green; the sky had a similar gangrenous look. In another he saw a flying creature as big as a Conestoga wagon fold its wings and plummet earthward like a hawk. It grabbed a creature like a sheep and swooped up again, holding the bloody hindquarters in its beak.

Flip . . . flip . . . flip. Worlds passed by his eyes like cards shuffled by a riverboat gambler.

Here was the hotel again, and there were half a dozen different versions of the black knight above him, but the intent in each was the same, and the differences were as unimportant as the stylings of rival automobiles. Here was a black tent filled with the thick dry smell of rotting canvas—it was torn in many places so that the sun shone through in dusty, conflicting rays. In this world Jack/Jason was on some sort of rope rigging, and the black knight stood inside a wooden basket like a crow’s nest, and as he climbed he flipped again . . . and again . . . and again.

Here the entire ocean was on fire; here the hotel was much as it was in Point Venuti, except it had been half-sunk into the ocean. For a moment he seemed to be in an elevator car, the knight standing on top of it and peering down at him through the trapdoor. Then he was on a rampway, the top of which was guarded by a huge snake, its long, muscular body armored with gleaming black scales.

And when do I get to the end of everything? When do I stop crashing through floors and just smash my way into the blackness?

JACK! JASON! the Talisman called, and it called in all the worlds. TO ME!

And Jack came to it, and it was like coming home.

6

He was right, he saw; he had come up only a single stair. But reality had solidified again. The black knight—his black knight, Jack Sawyer’s black knight—stood blocking the stair-landing. It raised its mace.

Jack was afraid, but he kept climbing, Speedy’s pick held out in front of him.

“I’m not going to mess with you,” Jack said. “You better get out of my—”

The black figure swung the mace. It came down with incredible force. Jack dodged aside. The mace crashed into the stair where he had been standing and splintered the entire riser down into hollow blackness.

The figure wrenched the mace free. Jack lunged up two more stairs, Speedy’s pick still held between his thumb and forefinger . . . and suddenly it simply disintegrated, falling in a little eggshell rain of yellowed ivory fragments. Most of these sprinkled the tops of Jack’s sneakers. He stared stupidly at them.

The sound of dead laughter.

The mace, tiny splinters of wood and chews of old dank stair-runner still clinging to it, was upraised in the knight’s two armored gloves. The specter’s hot glare fell through the slit in its helmet. It seemed to slice blood from Jack’s upturned face in a horizontal line across the bridge of his nose.

That chuffing sound of laughter again—not heard with his ears, because he knew this suit of armor was as empty as the rest, nothing but a steel jacket for an undead spirit, but heard inside his head. You’ve lost, boy—did you really think that puny little thing could get you past me?

The mace whistled down again, this time slicing on a diagonal, and Jack tore his eyes away from that red gaze just in time to duck low—he felt the head of the mace pass through the upper layer of his long hair a second before it ripped away a four-foot section of bannister and sent it sailing out into space.

A scraping clack of metal as the knight leaned toward him, its cocked helmet somehow a hideous and sarcastic parody of solicitude—then the mace drew back and up again for another of those portentous swings.

Jack, you didn’t need no magic juice to git ovah, and you don’t need no magic pick to pull the chain on this here coffee can, neither!

The mace came blasting through the air again—wheeee-ossshhhh! Jack lurched backward, sucking in his stomach; the web of muscles in his shoulders screamed as they pulled around the punctures the spiked gloves had left.

The mace missed the skin of his chest by less than an inch before passing beyond him and swiping through a line of thick mahogany balusters as if they had been toothpicks. Jack tottered on emptiness, feeling Buster Keatonish and absurd. He snatched at the ragged ruins of the bannister on his left and got splinters under two of his fingernails instead. The pain was so wire-thin excruciating that he thought for a moment that his eyeballs would explode with it. Then he got a good hold with his right hand and was able to stabilize himself and move away from the drop.

All the magic’s in YOU, Jack! Don’t you know that by now?

For a moment he only stood there, panting, and then he started up the stairs again, staring at the blank iron face above him.

“Better get thee gone, Sir Gawain.”

The knight cocked its great helmet again in that strangely delicate gesture—Pardon, my boy . . . can you actually be speaking to me? Then it swung the mace again.

Perhaps blinded by his fear, Jack hadn’t noticed until now how slow its setup for those swings was, how clearly it telegraphed the trajectory of each portentous blow. Maybe its joints were rusted, he thought. At any rate, it was easy enough for him to dive inside the circle of its swing now that his head was clear again.

He stood on his toes, reached up, and seized the black helmet in both hands. The metal was sickeningly warm—like hard skin that carried a fever.

“Get you off the skin of this world,” he said in a voice that was low and calm, almost conversational. “In her name I command you.”

The red light in the helmet puffed out like the candle inside a carved pumpkin, and suddenly the weight of the helmet—fifteen pounds at least—was all in Jack’s hands, because there was nothing else supporting it; beneath the helmet, the suit of armor had collapsed.

“You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers,” Jack said, and threw the empty helmet over the landing. It hit the floor far below with a hard bang and rolled away like a toy. The hotel seemed to cringe.

Jack turned toward the broad second-floor corridor, and here, at last, was light: clean, clear light, like that on the day he had seen the flying men in the sky. The hallway ended in another set of double doors and the doors were closed, but enough light came from above and below them, as well as through the vertical crack where they were latched together, to tell him that the light inside must be very bright indeed.

He wanted very badly to see that light, and the source of that light; he had come far to see it, and through much bitter darkness.

The doors were heavy and inlaid with delicate scrollwork. Written above them in gold leaf which had flaked a bit but which was still perfectly readable for a’ that an’ a’ that, were the words TERRITORIES BALLROOM.

“Hey, Mom,” Jack Sawyer said in a soft, wondering voice as he walked into that glow. Happiness lit his heart—that feeling was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. “Hey, Mom, I think I’m here, I really think I’m here.”

Gently then, and with awe, Jack grasped a handle with each hand, and pressed them down. He opened the doors, and as he did, a widening bar of clean white light fell on his upturned, wondering face.

7

Sunlight Gardener happened to be looking back up the beach at the exact moment Jack dispatched the last of the five Guardian Knights. He heard a dull boom, as if a low charge of dynamite had gone off somewhere inside the hotel. At the same moment, bright light flashed from all of the Agincourt’s second-floor windows, and all of the carved brass symbols—moons and stars and planetoids and weird crooked arrows—came to a simultaneous stop.

Gardener was decked out like some sort of goony Los Angeles SWAT squad cop. He had donned a puffy black flak-vest over his white shirt and carried a radio pack-set on a canvas strap over one shoulder. Its thick, stubby antenna wavered back and forth as he moved. Over his other shoulder was slung a Weatherbee .360. This was a hunting rifle almost as big as an anti-aircraft gun; it would have made Robert Ruark himself drool with envy. Gardener had bought it six years ago, after circumstances had dictated that he must get rid of his old hunting rifle. The Weatherbee’s genuine zebra-skin case was in the trunk of a black Cadillac, along with his son’s body.

“Morgan!”

Morgan did not turn around. He was standing behind and slightly to the left of a leaning grove of rocks that jutted out of the sand like black fangs. Twenty feet beyond this rock and only five feet above the high-tide line lay Speedy Parker, aka Parkus. As Parkus, he had once ordered Morgan of Orris marked—there were livid scars down the insides of that Morgan’s large white thighs, the marks by which a traitor is known in the Territories. It had only been through the intercession of Queen Laura herself that those scars had not been made to run down his cheeks instead of his inner thighs, where they were almost always hidden by his clothes. Morgan—this one as well as that one—had not loved the Queen any better for her intercession . . . but his hatred for Parkus, who had sniffed out that earlier plot, had grown exponentially.

Now Parkus/Parker lay face-down on the beach, his skull covered with festering sores. Blood dribbled listlessly from his ears.

Morgan wanted to believe that Parker was still alive, still suffering, but the last discernible rise and fall of his back had been just after he and Gardener arrived down here at these rocks, some five minutes ago.

When Gardener called, Morgan didn’t turn because he was rapt in his study of his old enemy, now fallen. Whoever had claimed revenge wasn’t sweet had been so wrong.

“Morgan!” Gardener hissed again.

Morgan turned this time, frowning. “Well? What?”

“Look! The roof of the hotel!”

Morgan saw that all of the weathercocks and roof ornaments—beaten brass shapes which spun at exactly the same speed whether the wind was perfectly calm or howling up a hurricane—had stopped moving. At the same instant the earth rippled briefly under their feet and then was still again. It was as if a subterranean beast of enormous size had shrugged in its hibernal sleep. Morgan would almost have believed he had imagined it if it had not been for the widening of Gardener’s bloodshot eyes. I’ll bet you wish you never left Indiana, Gard, Morgan thought. No earthquakes in Indiana, right?

Silent light flashed in all of the Agincourt’s windows again.

“What does it mean, Morgan?” Gardener asked hoarsely. His insane fury over the loss of his son had for the first time moderated into fear for himself, Morgan saw. That was a bore, but he could be whipped back into his previous frenzy again, if necessary. It was just that Morgan hated to have to waste energy on anything at this point that didn’t bear directly on the problem of ridding the world—all the worlds—of Jack Sawyer, who had begun as a pest and who had developed into the most monstrous problem of Sloat’s life.

Gardener’s pack-set squawked.

“Red Squad Leader Four to the Sunlight Man! Come in, Sunlight Man!”

“Sunlight Man here, Red Squad Leader Four,” Gardener snapped. “What’s up?”

In quick succession Gardener took four gabbling, excited reports that were all exactly the same. There was no intelligence the two of them hadn’t seen and felt for themselves—flashes of light, weathercocks at a standstill, something that might have been a ground-tremblor or possibly an earthquake preshock—but Gardener labored with sharp-eyed enthusiasm over each report just the same, asking sharp questions, snapping “Over!” at the end of each transmission, sometimes breaking in with “Say again” or “Roger.” Sloat thought he was acting like a bit player in a disaster movie.

But if it eased him, that was fine with Sloat. It saved him from having to answer Gardener’s question . . . and now that he thought about it, he supposed it was just possible that Gardener didn’t want his question answered, and that was why he was going through this rigmarole with the radio.

The Guardians were dead, or out of commission. That was why the weathercocks had stopped, and that’s what the flashes of light meant. Jack didn’t have the Talisman . . . at least, not yet. If he got that, things in Point Venuti would really shake, rattle, and roll. And Sloat now thought that Jack would get it . . . that he had always been meant to get it. This did not frighten him, however.

His hand reached up and touched the key around his neck.

Gardener had run out of overs and rogers and ten-fours. He reshouldered the pack-set and looked at Morgan with wide, frightened eyes. Before he could say a word, Morgan put gentle hands on Gardener’s shoulders. If he could feel love for anyone other than his poor dead son, he felt love—of a twisted variety, most certainly—for this man. They went back a long way, both as Morgan of Orris and Osmond and as Morgan Sloat and Robert “Sunlight” Gardener.

It had been with a rifle much like the one now slung over Gardener’s shoulder that Gardener had shot Phil Sawyer in Utah.

“Listen, Gard,” he said calmly. “We are going to win.”

“Are you sure of that?” Gardener whispered. “I think he’s killed the Guardians, Morgan. I know that sounds crazy, but I realy think—” He stopped, mouth trembling infirmly, lips sheened with a thin membrane of spittle.

“We are going to win,” Morgan repeated in that same calm voice, and he meant it. There was a sense of clear predestination in him. He had waited many years for this; his resolve had been true; it remained true now. Jack would come out with the Talisman in his arms. It was a thing of immense power . . . but it was fragile.

He looked at the scoped Weatherbee, which could drop a charging rhino, and then he touched the key that brought the lightning.

“We’re well equipped to deal with him when he comes out,” Morgan said, and added, “In either world. Just as long as you keep your courage, Gard. As long as you stick right by me.”

The trembling lips firmed a bit. “Morgan, of course I’ll—”

“Remember who killed your son,” Morgan said softly.

At the same instant that Jack Sawyer had jammed the burning coin into the forehead of a monstrosity in the Territories, Reuel Gardener, who had been afflicted with relatively harmless petit mal epileptic seizures ever since the age of six (the same age at which Osmond’s son had begun to show signs of what was called Blasted Lands Sickness), apparently suffered a grand mal seizure in the back of a Wolf-driven Cadillac on I-70, westbound to California from Illinois.

He had died, purple and strangling, in Sunlight Gardener’s arms.

Gardener’s eyes now began to bulge.

“Remember,” Morgan repeated softly.

“Bad,” Gardener whispered. “All boys. Axiomatic. That boy in particular.”

“Right!” Morgan agreed. “Hold that thought! We can stop him, but I want to make damn sure that he can only come out of the hotel on dry land.”

He led Gardener down to the rock where he had been watching Parker. Flies—bloated albino flies—had begun to light on the dead nigger, Morgan observed. That was just as fine as paint with him. If there had been a Variety magazine for flies, Morgan would gladly have bought space, advertising Parker’s location. Come one, come all. They would lay their eggs in the folds of his decaying flesh, and the man who had scarred his Twinner’s thighs would give birth to maggots. That was fine indeed.

He pointed out toward the dock.

“The raft’s under there,” he said. “It looks like a horse, Christ knows why. It’s in the shadows, I know. But you were always a hell of a shot. If you can pick it up, Gard, put a couple of bullets in it. Sink the fucking thing.”

Gardener unshouldered the rifle and peered into the scope. For a long time the muzzle of the big gun wandered minutely back and forth.

“I see it,” Gardener whispered in a gloating voice, and triggered the gun. The echo pealed off across the water in a long curl that at last Dopplered away into nothing. The barrel of the gun rose, then came back down. Gardener fired again. And again.

“I got it,” Gardener said, lowering the gun. He’d got his courage back; his pecker was up again. He was smiling the way he had been smiling when he had come back from that errand in Utah. “It’s just a dead skin on the water now. You want a look in the scope?” He offered the rifle to Sloat.

“No,” Sloat said. “If you say you got it, you got it. Now he has to come out by land, and we know what direction he’ll be coming in. I think he’ll have what’s been in our way for so many years.”

Gardener looked at him, shiny-eyed.

“I suggest that we move up there.” He pointed to the old boardwalk. It was just inside the fence where he had spent so many hours watching the hotel and thinking about what was in the ballroom.

“All r—”

That was when the earth began to groan and heave under their feet—that subterranean creature had awakened; it was shaking itself and roaring.

At the same instant, dazzling white light filled every window of the Agincourt—the light of a thousand suns. The windows blew out all at once. Glass flew in diamond showers.

“REMEMBER YOUR SON AND FOLLOW ME!” Sloat roared. That sense of predestination was clear in him now, clear and undeniable. He was meant to win, after all.

The two of them began to run up the heaving beach toward the boardwalk.

8

Jack moved slowly, filled with wonder, across the hardwood ballroom floor. He was looking up, his eyes sparkling. His face was bathed in a clear white radiance that was all colors—sunrise colors, sunset colors, rainbow colors. The Talisman hung in the air high above him, slowly revolving.

It was a crystal globe perhaps three feet in circumference—the corona of its glow was so brilliant it was impossible to tell exactly how big it was. Gracefully curving lines seemed to groove its surface, like lines of longitude and latitude . . . and why not? Jack thought, still in a deep daze of awe and amazement. It is the world—ALL worlds—in microcosm. More; it is the axis of all possible worlds.

Singing; turning; blazing.

He stood beneath it, bathed in its warmth and clear sense of well-meant force; he stood in a dream, feeling that force flow into him like the clear spring rain which awakens the hidden power in a billion tiny seeds. He felt a terrible joy lift through his conscious mind like a rocket, and Jack Sawyer lifted both hands over his upturned face, laughing, both in response to that joy and in imitation of its rise.

“Come to me, then!” he shouted,

and slipped

(through? across?)

into

Jason.

“Come to me, then!” he shouted again in the sweetly liquid and slightly slippery tongue of the Territories—he cried it laughing, but tears coursed down his cheeks. And he understood that the quest had begun with the other boy and thus must end with him; so he let go and

slipped

back

into

Jack Sawyer.

Above him, the Talisman trembled in the air, slowly turning, throwing off light and heat and a sensation of true goodness, of whiteness.

“Come to me!”

It began to descend through the air.

9

So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul)—after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:

He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura’s son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack’s quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to fulfill, had made Jason live again for a little while—Jack really had a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers. Jack would be killing him again.

Don’t worry, Jack, a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.

Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds—it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white. And, as has always been with the white and must always be, it was dreadfully fragile.

As it came down, worlds reeled about his head. He did not seem to be crashing through layers of reality now but seeing an entire cosmos of realities, all overlapping one another, linked like a shirt of

(reality)

chain-mail.

You’re reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack—this voice was his father’s. Don’t drop it, son. For Jason’s sake, don’t drop it.

Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, some gorgeous, some hellish, all of them for a moment illumined in the warm white light of this star that was a crystal globe chased with fine engraved lines. It came slowly down through the air toward Jack Sawyer’s trembling, outstretched fingers.

“Come to me!” he shouted to it as it had sung to him. “Come to me now!”

It was three feet above his hands, branding them with its soft, healing heat; now two; now one. It hesitated for a moment, rotating slowly, its axis slightly canted, and Jack could see the brilliant, shifting outlines of continents and oceans and ice-caps on its surface. It hesitated . . . and then slowly slipped down into the boy’s reaching hands.