'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