The Talisman

debt of gratitude. And in some way or other, I think most of them sense that.’
    Jack managed a smile.
    ‘Stay a little while,’ he managed to say.
    ‘All right,’ Parkus said. ‘Until you sleep. Feel no fret, Jack. Nothing will harm you here.’
    ‘My mom always said—’
    But before he finished the thought, sleep had claimed him.
    4
    And sleep continued to claim him, in some mysterious wise, the next day when he was technically awake – or if not sleep, then a protective numbing faculty of the mind which turned most of that day slow and dreamlike. He and Richard, who was similarly slow-moving and tentative, stood beneath the tallest tree in the world. All about them spangles of light lay across the floor of the forest. Ten grown men holding hands could not have reached around it. The tree soared up, massive and apart: in a forest of tall trees it was a leviathan, a pure example of Territories exuberance.
    Feel no fret , Parkus had said, even while he threatened to fade hazily away like the Cheshire Cat. Jack tilted his head to stare up toward the top of the tree. He did not quite know this, but he was emotionally exhausted. The immensity of the tree aroused only a flicker of wonder in him. Jack rested a hand against the surprisingly smooth bark. I killed the man who killed my father , he said to himself. He clutched the dark, seemingly dead ball of the Talisman in his other hand. Richard was staring upward at the giant head of the tree, a skyscraper’s height above them. Morgan was dead, Gardener too, and the snow must have melted from the beach by now. Yet not all of it was gone. Jack felt as though a whole beachful of snow filled his head. He had thought once – a thousand years ago, it seemed now – that if he could ever actually get his hands around the Talisman, he would be so inundated with triumph and excitement and awe that he’d have to fizz over. Instead he now felt only the tiniest hint of all that. It was snowing in his head, and he could see no farther than Parkus’s instructions. He realized that the enormous tree was holding him up.
    ‘Take my hand,’ he said to Richard.
    ‘But how are we going to get home?’ Richard asked.
    ‘Feel no fret,’ he said, and closed his hand around Richard’s. Jack Sawyer didn’t need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was brave and true . Jack Sawyer was a played-out twelve-year-old boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him.
    5
    The forest had contracted; now it was an American forest. The roof of gently moving boughs was noticeably lower, the trees about them conspicuously smaller than in the part of the Territories forest to which Parkus had directed them. Jack was dimly conscious of this alteration in the scale of everything about him before he saw the two-lane blacktop road in front of him: but twentieth-century reality kicked him almost immediately in the shins, for as soon as he saw the road he heard the eggbeater sound of a small motor and instinctively drew himself and Richard back just before a white little Renault Le Car zipped by him. The car sped past and went through the tunnel cut into the trunk of the redwood (which was slightly more than half the size of its Territories counterpart). But at least one adult and two children in the Renault were not looking at the redwoods they had come to see all the way from New Hampshire (‘Live Free or Die!’). The woman and the two small children in the back seat had swivelled around to gawp at Jack and Richard. Their mouths were small black caves, open wide. They had just seen two boys appear beside the road like ghosts, miraculously and instantaneously forming out of nothing, like Captain Kirk and Mr Spock after beaming down from the Enterprise .
    ‘You okay to walk for a little while?’
    ‘Sure,’ Richard said.
    Jack stepped onto the surface of Route 17 and walked through the huge hole in the tree.
    He might be dreaming all this, he thought. He might be still on the Territories beach, Richard knocked out beside him, both of them under Parkus’s kindly gaze. My mom always said . . . My mom always said . . .
    6
    Moving as if through thick fog (though that day in that part of northern California was in fact sunny and dry), Jack Sawyer led Richard Sloat out of the redwood forest and down a sloping road