The Talisman

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 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, and 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 10 TH-DECEMBER 20 TH

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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
THE END OF THE ROAD
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    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.
    ‘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 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 something 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