So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul) - after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:
He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura's son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack's quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to ful-fill, had made Jason live again for a little while - Jack really had a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers. Jack would be killing him again.
Don't worry, Jack, a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.
Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds - it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white. And, as has always been with the white and must always be, it was dreadfully fragile.
As it came down, worlds reeled about his head. He did not seem to be crashing through layers of reality now but seeing an entire cosmos of realities, all overlapping one another, linked like a shirt of
(reality)
chain-mail.
You're reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack - this voice was his father's. Don't drop it, son. For Jason's sake, don't drop it.
Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, some gorgeous, some hellish, all of them for a moment illumined in the warm white light of this star that was a crystal globe chased with fine engraved lines. It came slowly down through the air toward Jack Sawyer's trembling, outstretched fingers.
'Come to me!' he shouted to it as it had sung to him. 'Come to me now!'
It was three feet above his hands, branding them with its soft, healing heat; now two; now one. It hesitated for a moment, rotating slowly, its axis slightly canted, and Jack could see the brilliant, shifting outlines of continents and oceans and ice-caps on its surface. It hesitated . . . and then slowly slipped down into the boy's reaching hands.
CHAPTER 43 News From Everywhere
1
Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack's voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.
'Jason?' she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her son's name. But in the dream from which she had just been startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course. The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.
'Jack?' she tried again. 'Jack, where are you?'
No answer . . . but she sensed him, knew for sure that he was alive. For the first time in a long time - six months, maybe - she felt really good.
'Jack-O,' she said, and grabbed her cigarettes. She looked at them for a moment and then heaved them all the way across the room, where they landed in the fireplace on top of the rest of the shit she meant to burn later in the day. 'I think I just quit smoking for the second and last time in my life, Jack-O,' she said. 'Hang in there, kid. Your momma loves you.'
And she found herself for no reason grinning a large idiotic grin.
2
Donny Keegan, who had been pulling Sunlight Home kitchen duty when Wolf escaped from the box, had survived that terrible night - George Irwinson, the fellow who had been pulling the duty with him, had not been so lucky. Now Donny was in a more conventional orphans' home in Muncie, Indiana. Unlike some of the other boys at the Sunlight Home, Donny had been a real orphan; Gardener had needed to take a token few to satisfy the state.
Now, mopping a dark upstairs hall in a dim daze, Donny looked up suddenly, his muddy eyes widening. Outside, clouds which had been spitting light snow into the used-up fields of December suddenly pulled open in the west, letting out a single broad ray of sunshine that was terrible and exalting in its isolated beauty.
'You're right, I DO love him!' Donny shouted triumphantly. It was Ferd Janklow that Donny was shouting to, although Donny, who had too many toys in his attic to accommodate many brains, had already forgotten his name. 'He's beautiful and I DO love him!'