The Talisman

and she hadn’t heard a single ring anywhere else in this old mausoleum. Not worth it. A bad gamble. She didn’t want to freeze to death in the lobby.
    ‘Jack-O,’ she muttered, ‘where the hell are y—’
    Then she began to cough again and this one was really bad and in the middle of it she collapsed to one side in a faint, pulling the ugly sitting-room chair over on top of her, and she lay there on the cold floor for nearly an hour, and that was probably when the pneumonia moved into the rapidly declining neighborhood that was Lily Cavanaugh’s body. Hey there, big C! I’m the new kid on the block! You can call me big P! Race you to the finish line!
    Somehow she had made it back to her room, and since then she had existed in a deepening spiral of fever, listening to her respiration grow louder and louder until her fevered mind began to imagine her lungs as two organic aquariums in which a number of submerged chains were rattling. And yet she held on – held on because part of her mind insisted with crazy, failing certainty that Jack was on his way back from wherever he had been.
    7
    The beginning of her final coma had been like a dimple in the sand – a dimple that begins to spin like a whirlpool. The sound of submerged chains in her chest became a long, dry exhalation – Hahhhhhhhh . . .
    Then something had brought her out of that deepening spiral and started her feeling along the wall in the cold darkness for the light-switch. She got out of bed. She did not have strength enough left to do this; a doctor would have laughed at the idea. And yet she did. She fell back twice, then finally made it to her feet, mouth turned down in a snarl of effort. She groped for the chair, found it, and began to lurch her way across the room to the window.
    Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the Bs, was gone. This was a walking horror, eaten by cancer, burned by rising fever.
    She reached the window and looked out.
    Saw a human shape down there – and a glowing globe.
    ‘ Jack! ’ she tried to scream. Nothing came out but a gravelly whisper. She raised a hand, tried to wave. Faintness
    (Haahhhhhhhhh . . . )
    washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill.
    ‘Jack!’
    Suddenly the lighted ball in the figure’s hands flashed up brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jack’s face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home.
    The figure broke into a run.
    Jack!
    Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks.
    8
    ‘Mom!’
    Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the old-fashioned telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awful – it had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window.
    ‘Mom!’
    He pounded up the stairs, first by twos, then by threes, the Talisman stuttering one burst of pink-red light and then falling dark in his hands.
    ‘Mom!’
    Down the hallway to their rooms, feet flying, and now, at last, he heard her voice – no brassy bellow or slightly throaty chuckle now; this was the dusty croak of a creature on the outer edge of death.
    ‘Jacky?’
    ‘Mom!’
    He burst into the room.
    9
    Down in the car, a nervous Richard Sloat stared upward through his polarized window. What was he doing here, what was Jack doing here? Richard’s eyes hurt. He strained to see the upper windows in the murky evening. As he bent sideways and stared upward, a blinding white flash erupted from several of the upstairs windows, sending a momentary, almost palpable sheet of dazzling light over the entire front of the hotel. Richard put his head between his knees and moaned.
    10
    She was on the floor beneath the window – he saw her there finally. The rumpled, somehow dusty-looking bed was empty, the whole bedroom, as disordered as a child’s room, seemed empty . . . Jack’s stomach had frozen and words backed up in his throat. Then the Talisman had shot out another of its great illuminating flashes, in and for an instant turning everything in the room a pure colorless white. She croaked, ‘Jacky?’ once more, and he bellowed, ‘ MOM! ’seeing her crumpled like a candy wrapper under the window. Thin and lank, her hair trailed on the room’s dirty carpet. Her hands seemed like tiny animal paws, pale and scrabbling. ‘Oh Jesus, Mom, oh jeepers, oh holy moe,’ he babbled, and somehow moved across the room without taking a step, he