The Talisman (The Talisman #1)

'Jack!'

Jack didn't look at him at first; his gaze was held by the Pacific, by the sunlight gleaming gold on top of the waves. He was here; he had made it. He -

'Jack!' Richard struck his shoulder, bringing him out of his daze.

'Huh?'

'Look!' Richard was gaping, pointing at something down the road, in the direction in which Point Venuti presumably lay. 'Look there!'

Jack looked. He understood Richard's surprise, but he felt none himself - or no more than he had felt when Richard had told him the name of the motel where he and his father had stayed in Point Venuti. No, not much surprise, but -

But it was damned good to see his mother again.

Her face was twenty feet high, and it was a younger face than Jack could remember. It was Lily as she had looked at the height of her career. Her hair, a glorious be-bop shade of brassy blond, was pulled back in a Tuesday Weld ponytail. Her insouciant go-to-hell grin was, however, all her own. No one else in films had ever smiled that way - she had invented it, and she still held the patent. She was looking back over one bare shoulder. At Jack . . . at Richard . . . at the blue Pacific.

It was his mother . . . but when he blinked, the face changed the slightest bit. The line of chin and jaw grew rounder, the cheekbones less pronounced, the hair darker, the eyes an even deeper blue. Now it was the face of Laura DeLoessian, mother of Jason. Jack blinked again, and it was his mother again - his mother at twenty-eight, grinning her cheerful f**kya-if-you-can't-take-a-joke defiance at the world.

It was a billboard. Across the top of it ran this legend:

THIRD ANNUAL KILLER B FILM FESTIVAL

POINT VENUTI, CALIFORNIA

BITKER THEATER

DECEMBER 10TH - DECEMBER 20TH

THIS YEAR FEATURING LILY CAVANAUGH

'QUEEN OF THE B'S'

'Jack, it's your mother,' Richard said. His voice was hoarse with awe. 'Is it just a coincidence? It can't be, can it?'

Jack shook his head. No, not a coincidence.

The word his eyes kept fixing on, of course, was QUEEN.

'Come on,' he said to Richard. 'I think we're almost there.'

The two of them walked side by side down the road toward Point Venuti.

CHAPTER 38 The End of the Road

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Jack inspected Richard's drooping posture and glistening face carefully as they walked along. Richard now looked as though he were dragging himself along on will power alone. A few more wet-looking pimples had blossomed on his face.

'Are you okay, Richie?'

'No. I don't feel too good. But I can still walk, Jack. You don't have to carry me.' He bent his head and plodded glumly on. Jack saw that his friend, who had so many memories of that peculiar little railway and that peculiar little station, was suffering far more than he from the reality that now existed - rusty, broken ties, weeds, poison ivy . . . and at the end, a ramshackle building from which all the bright, remembered paint had faded, a building where something slithered uneasily in the dark.

I feel like my leg is caught in some stupid trap, Richard had said, and Jack thought he could understand that well enough . . . but not with the depth of Richard's understanding. That was more understanding than he was sure he could bear. A slice of Richard's childhood had been burned out of him, turned inside-out. The railway and the dead station with its staring glassless windows must have seemed like dreadful parodies of themselves to Richard - yet more bits of the past destroyed in the wake of everything he was learning or admitting about his father. Richard's entire life, as much as Jack's, had begun to fold into the pattern of the Territories, and Richard had been given much less preparation for this transformation.

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