The Talisman

hand into his own hand. “Please please please don’t—” He could not even allow himself to say it.

And then he realized how much an effort this shrunken woman had made. She had been looking for him, he understood in a great giddy rush of comprehension. His mother had known he was coming. She had trusted him to return and in a way that must have been connected to the fact of the Talisman itself, she had known the moment of his return.

“I’m here, Mom,” he whispered. A wad of wet stuff bubbled from his nostrils. He unceremoniously wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat.

He realized for the first time that his entire body was trembling.

“I brought it back,” he said. He experienced a moment of absolute radiant pride, of pure accomplishment. “I brought back the Talisman,” he said.

Gently he set her nutlike hand down on the counterpane.

Beside the chair, where he had placed it (every bit as gently) on the floor, the Talisman continued to glow. But its light was faint, hesitant, cloudy. He had healed Richard by simply rolling the globe down the length of his friend’s body; he had done the same for Speedy. But this was to be something else. He knew that, but not what “it” was to be . . . unless it was a question of knowing and not wanting to believe.

He could not possibly break the Talisman, not even to save his mother’s life—that much he did know.

Now the interior of the Talisman slowly filled with a cloudy whiteness. The pulses faded into one another and became a single steady light. Jack placed his hands on it, and the Talisman shot forth a blinding wall of light, rainbow! which seemed nearly to speak. AT LAST!

Jack went back across the room toward the bed, the Talisman bouncing and spraying light from floor to wall to ceiling, illuminating the bed fitfully, garishly.

As soon as he stood beside his mother’s bed, the texture of the Talisman seemed to Jack to subtly alter beneath his fingers. Its glassy hardness shifted somehow, became less slippery, more porous. The tips of his fingers seemed almost to sink into the Talisman. The cloudiness filling it boiled and darkened.

And at this moment Jack experienced a strong—in fact, passionate—feeling he would have thought was impossible, that day long ago when he had set off for his first day’s walk in the Territories. He knew that in some unforeseen way the Talisman, the object of so much blood and trouble, was going to alter. It was going to change forever, and he was going to lose it. The Talisman would no longer be his. Its clear skin was clouding over, too, and the entire beautiful grooved gravid surface was softening. The feeling now was not glass but warming plastic.

Jack hurriedly set the altering Talisman down in his mother’s hands. It knew its job; it had been made for this moment; in some fabulous smithy it had been created to answer the requirements of this particular moment and of none other.

He did not know what he expected to happen. An explosion of light? A smell of medicine? Creation’s big bang?

Nothing happened. His mother continued visibly but motionlessly to die.

“Oh please,” Jack blurted, “please—Mom—please—”

His breath solidified in the middle of his chest. A seam, once one of the vertical grooves in the Talisman, had soundlessly opened. Light slowly poured out and pooled over his mother’s hands. From the cloudy interior of the loose, emptying ball, more light spilled through the open seam.

From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence.

12

But of that Jack was only distractedly conscious. He leaned breathlessly forward and watched the Talisman pour itself out onto his mother’s bed. Cloudy brightness welled up within it. Seams and sparks of light enlivened it. His mother’s eyes twitched. “Oh Mom,” he whispered. “Oh . . .”

Gray-golden light flooded through the opening in the Talisman and cloudily drifted up his mother’s arms. Her sallow, wizened face very slightly frowned.

Jack inhaled unconsciously.

(What?)

(Music?)

The gray-golden cloud from the heart of the Talisman was lengthening over his mother’s body, coating her in a translucent but slightly opaque, delicately moving membrane. Jack watched this fluid fabric slide across Lily’s pitiful chest, down her wasted legs. From the open seam in the Talisman a wondrous odor spilled out with the gray- golden cloud, an odor sweet and unsweet, of flowers and earth, wholly good, yeasty; a smell of birth, Jack thought, though he had never attended an actual birth. Jack drew it into his lungs and in the midst of his wonder was gifted with the thought that he himself, Jack-O Sawyer, was being born at this minute—and then he imagined, with a barely perceptible shock of recognition, that the opening in the Talisman was like a vagina. (He had of course never seen a vagina and had only the most rudimentary idea of its structure.) Jack looked directly into the opening in the distended loosened Talisman.

Now he became conscious for the first time of the incredible racket, in some way all mixed up with faint music, of the birds outside the dark windows.

(Music? What . . . ?)

A small colored ball full of light shot past his vision, flashing in the open seam for a moment, then continued beneath the Talisman’s cloudy surface as it dove into the shifting moving gaseous interior. Jack blinked. It had resembled—Another followed, and this time he had time to see the demarcation of blue and brown and green on the tiny globe, the coastal shorelines and tiny mountain ranges. On that tiny world, it occurred to him, stood a paralyzed Jack Sawyer looking down at an even tinier colored speck, and on that speck stood a Jack-O the height of a dust mote staring at a little world the size of an atom. Another world followed the first two, spinning in, out, in, out of the widening cloud within the Talisman.

His mother moved her right hand and moaned.