The Talisman

Jack began openly to weep. She would live. He knew it now. All had worked as Speedy had said, and the Talisman was forcing life back into his mother’s exhausted, disease-ridden body, killing the evil that was killing her. He bent forward, for a moment almost giving in to the image of himself kissing the Talisman which filled his mind. The odors of jasmine and hibiscus and freshly overturned earth filled his nostrils. A tear rolled off the end of his nose and sparkled like a jewel in the shafts of light from the Talisman. He saw a belt of stars drift past the open seam, a beaming yellow sun swimming in vast black space. Music seemed to fill the Talisman, the room, the whole world outside. A woman’s face, the face of a stranger, moved across the open seam. Children’s faces, too, then the faces of other women. . . . Tears rolled down his own face, for he had seen swimming in the Talisman his mother’s own face, the confident wise-cracking tender features of the Queen of half a hundred quick movies. When he saw his own face drifting among all the worlds and lives falling toward birth within the Talisman, he thought he would burst with feeling. He expanded. He breathed in light. And became at last aware of the astonishment of noises taking place all about him when he saw his mother’s eyes stay open as long, at least, as a blessed two seconds . . .

(for alive as birds, as alive as the worlds contained within the Talisman, there came to him the sounds of trombones and trumpets, the cries of saxophones; the joined voices of frogs and turtles and gray doves singing, The people who know my magic have filled the land with smoke; there came to him the voices of Wolfs making Wolfmusic at the moon. Water spanked against the bow of a ship and a fish spanked the surface of a lake with the side of its body and a rainbow spanked the ground and a travelling boy spanked a drop of spittle to tell him which way to go and a spanked baby squinched its face and opened its throat; and there came the huge voice of an orchestra singing with its whole massive heart; and the room filled with the smoky trail of a single voice rising and rising and rising over all these forays of sound. Trucks jammed gears and factory whistles blew and somewhere a tire exploded and somewhere a firecracker loudly spent itself and a lover whispered again and a child squalled and the voice rose and rose and for a short time Jack was unaware that he could not see; but then he could again).

Lily’s eyes opened wide. They stared up into Jack’s face with a startled where-am-I expression. It was the expression of a newborn infant who has just been spanked into the world. Then she jerked in a startled breath—

—and a river of worlds and tilted galaxies and universes were pulled up and out of the Talisman as she did. They were pulled up in a stream of rainbow colors. They streamed into her mouth and nose . . . they settled, gleaming, on her sallow skin like droplets of dew, and melted inward. For a moment his mother was all clothed in radiance—

—for a moment his mother was the Talisman.

All the disease fled from her face. It did not happen in the manner of a time-lapse sequence in a movie. It happened all at once. It happened instantly. She was sick . . . and then she was well. Rosy good health bloomed in her cheeks. Wispy, sparse hair was suddenly full and smooth and rich, the color of dark honey.

Jack stared at her as she looked up into his face.

“Oh . . . oh . . . my GOD . . .” Lily whispered.

That rainbow radiance was fading now—but the health remained.

“Mom?” He bent forward. Something crumpled like cellophane under his fingers. It was the brittle husk of the Talisman. He put it aside on the nighttable. He pushed several of her medicine bottles out of the way to do it. Some crashed on the floor, and it didn’t matter. She would not be needing the medicines anymore. He put the husk down with gentle reverence, suspecting—no, knowing—that even that would be gone very soon.

His mother smiled. It was a lovely, fulfilled, somewhat surprised smile—Hello, world, here I am again! What do you know about that?

“Jack, you came home,” she said at last, and rubbed her eyes as if to make sure it was no mirage.

“Sure,” he said. He tried to smile. It was a pretty good smile in spite of the tears that were pouring down his face. “Sure, you bet.”

“I feel . . . a lot better, Jack-O.”

“Yeah?” He smiled, rubbed his wet eyes with the heels of his palms. “That’s good, Mom.”

Her eyes were radiant.

“Hug me, Jacky.”

In a room on the fourth floor of a deserted resort hotel on the minuscule New Hampshire seacoast, a thirteen- year-old boy named Jack Sawyer leaned forward, closed his eyes, and hugged his mother tightly, smiling. His ordinary life of school and friends and games and music, a life where there were schools to go to and crisp sheets to slide between at night, the ordinary life of a thirteen-year-old boy (if the life of such a creature can ever, in its color and riot, be considered ordinary) had been returned to him, he realized. The Talisman had done that for him, too. When he remembered to turn and look for it, the Talisman was gone.

Epilogue

In a billowing white bedroom filled with anxious women, Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, opened her eyes.

Conclusion

So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly the history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.

Most of the characters who perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story again and see what . . . they turned out to be; therefore, it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.

—Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

Are you ready to continue the magnificent adventure that began with The Talisman?

Here, available for the first time, is Chapter 1 of

BLACK HOUSE,