The Talisman

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.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
NEWS FROM EVERYWHERE
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    1
    Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack’s voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.
    ‘Jason?’ she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her son’s name. But in the dream from which she had just been startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course. The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.
    ‘Jack?’ she tried again. ‘Jack, where are you?’
    No answer . . . but she sensed him, knew for sure that he was alive. For the first time in a long time – six months, maybe – she felt really good.
    ‘Jack-O,’ she said, and grabbed her cigarettes. She looked at them for a moment and then heaved them all the way across the room, where they landed in the fireplace on top of the rest of the shit she meant to burn later in the day. ‘I think I just quit smoking for the second and last time in my life, Jack-O,’ she said. ‘Hang in there, kid. Your momma loves you.’
    And she found herself for no reason grinning a large idiotic grin.
    2
    Donny Keegan, who had been pulling Sunlight Home kitchen duty when Wolf escaped from the box, had survived that terrible night – George Irwinson, the fellow who had been pulling the duty with him, had not been so lucky. Now Donny was in a more conventional orphans’ home in Muncie, Indiana. Unlike some of the other boys at the Sunlight Home, Donny had been a real orphan; Gardener had needed to take a token few to satisfy the state.
    Now, mopping a dark upstairs hall in a dim daze, Donny looked up suddenly, his muddy eyes widening. Outside, clouds which had been spitting light snow into the used-up fields of December suddenly pulled open in the west, letting out a single broad ray of sunshine that was terrible and exalting in its isolated beauty.
    ‘ You’re right, I DO love him! ’ Donny shouted triumphantly. It was Ferd Janklow that Donny was shouting to, although Donny, who had too many toys in his attic to accommodate many brains, had already forgotten his name. ‘ He’s beautiful and I DO love him! ’
    Donny honked his idiot laugh, only now even his laugh was nearly beautiful. Some of the other boys came to their doors and stared at Donny in wonder. His face was bathed in the sunlight from that one clear, ephemeral ray, and one of the other boys would whisper to a close friend that night that for a moment Donny Keegan had looked like Jesus.
    The moment passed; the clouds moved over that weird clear place in the sky, and by evening the snow had intensified into the first big winter storm of the season. Donny had known – for one brief moment he had known – what that feeling of love and triumph actually meant. That passed quickly, the way dreams do upon waking . . . but he never forgot the feeling itself, that almost swooning sensation of grace for once fulfilled and delivered instead of promised and then denied; that feeling of clarity and sweet, marvellous love; that feeling of ecstasy at the coming once more of the white.
    3
    Judge Fairchild, who had sent Jack and Wolf to the