The Talisman

by Stephen King

  Jack began his story.

  5

  Around the two boys the life of Nelson House went on, both calm and boisterous in the manner of boarding schools, punctuated with shouts and roars and laughter. Footsteps padded past the door but did not stop. From the room above came regular thumps and an occasional drift of music Jack finally recognized as a record by Blue Oyster Cult. He began by telling Richard about the Daydreams. From the Daydreams he went to Speedy Parker. He described the voice speaking to him from the whirling funnel in the sand. And then he told Richard of how he had taken Speedy's "magic juice" and first flipped into the Territories.

  "But I think it was just cheap wine, wino wine," Jack said. "Later, after it was all gone, I found out that I didn't need it to flip. I could just do it by myself."

  "Okay," Richard said noncommittally.

  He tried to truly represent the Territories to Richard: the cart-track, the sight of the summer palace, the timelessness and specificity of it. Captain Farren; the dying Queen, which brought him to Twinners; Osmond. The scene at All-Hands' Village; the Outpost Road which was the Western Road. He showed Richard his little collection of sacred objects, the guitar-pick and marble and coin. Richard merely turned these over in his fingers and gave them back without comment. Then Jack relived his wretched time in Oatley. Richard listened to Jack's tales of Oatley silent but wide-eyed.

  Jack carefully omitted Morgan Sloat and Morgan of Orris from his account of the scene at the Lewisburg rest area on I-70 in western Ohio.

  Then Jack had to describe Wolf as he had first seen him, that beaming giant in Oshkosh B'Gosh bib overalls, and he felt his tears building again behind his eyes. He did actually startle Richard by weeping while he told about trying to get Wolf into cars, and confessed his impatience with his companion, fighting not to weep again, and was fine for a long time--he managed to get through the story of Wolf's first Change without tears or a constricted throat. Then he struck trouble again. His rage kept him talking freely until he got to Ferd Janklow, and then his eyes grew hot again.

  Richard said nothing for a long time. Then he stood up and fetched a clean handkerchief from a bureau drawer. Jack noisily, wetly blew his nose.

  "That's what happened," Jack said. "Most of it, anyhow."

  "What have you been reading? What movies have you been seeing?"

  "Fuck you," Jack said. He stood up and walked across the room to get his pack, but Richard reached out and put his hand around Jack's wrist. "I don't think you made it all up. I don't think you made any of it up."

  "Don't you?"

  "No. I don't know what I do think, actually, but I'm sure you're not telling me deliberate lies." He dropped his hand. "I believe you were in the Sunlight Home, I believe that, all right. And I believe that you had a friend named Wolf, who died there. I'm sorry, but I cannot take the Territories seriously, and I cannot accept that your friend was a werewolf."

  "So you think I'm nuts," Jack said.

  "I think you're in trouble. But I'm not going to call my father, and I'm not going to make you leave now. You'll have to sleep in the bed here tonight. If we hear Mr. Haywood coming around to do bed checks, you'll be able to hide under the bed."

  Richard had taken on a faintly executive air, and he put his hands on his hips and glanced critically around his room. "You have to get some rest. I'm sure that's part of the problem. They worked you half to death in that horrible place, and your mind got twisted, and now you need to rest."

  "I do," Jack admitted.

  Richard rolled his eyes upward. "I have to go to intramural basketball pretty soon, but you can hide in here, and I'll bring some more food back from the dining room later on. The important thing is, you need rest and you need to get back home."

  Jack said, "New Hampshire isn't home."

  30

  Thayer Gets Weird

  1

  Through the window Jack could see boys in coats, hunched against the cold, crossing to and fro between the library and the rest of the school. Etheridge, the senior who had spoken to Jack that morning, bustled by, his scarf flying out behind him.

  Richard took a tweed sport jacket from the narrow closet beside the bed. "Nothing is going to make me think that you should do anything but go back to New Hampshire. I have to go to basketball now, because if I don't Coach Frazer'll make me do ten punishment laps as soon as he comes back. Some other coach is taking our practice today, and Frazer said he'd run us into the ground if we cut out. Do you want to borrow some clean clothes? I at least have a shirt that'll fit you--my father sent it to me from New York, and Brooks Brothers got the size wrong."

  "Let's see it," Jack said. His clothes had become definitely disreputable, so stiff with filth that whenever he noticed it Jack felt like Pigpen, the "Peanuts" character who lived in a mist of dirt and disapproval. Richard gave him a white button-down still in its plastic bag. "Great, thanks," Jack said. He took it out of the bag and began removing the pins. It would almost fit.

  "There's a jacket you might try on, too," Richard said. "The blazer hanging at the end of the closet. Try it on, okay? And you might as well use one of my ties, too. Just in case anyone comes in. Say you're from Saint Louis Country Day, and you're on a Newspaper Exchange. We do two or three of those a year--kids from here go there, kids from there come here, to work on the other school's paper." He went toward the door. "I'll come back before dinner and see how you are."

  Two ballpoints were clipped to a plastic insert in his jacket pocket, Jack noticed, and all the buttons of the jacket were buttoned.

  Nelson House grew perfectly quiet within minutes. From Richard's window Jack saw boys seated at desks in the big library windows. Nobody moved on the paths or over the crisp brown grass. An insistent bell rang, marking the beginning of fourth period. Jack stretched his arms out and yawned. A feeling of security returned to him--a school around him, with all those familiar rituals of bells and classes and basketball practices. Maybe he would be able to stay another day; maybe he would even be able to call his mother from one of the Nelson House phones. He would certainly be able to catch up on his sleep.

  Jack went to the closet and found the blazer hanging where Richard had said it would be. A tag still hung from one of the sleeves: Sloat had sent it from New York, but Richard had never worn it. Like the shirt, the blazer was one size too small for Jack and clung too tightly to his shoulders, but the cut was roomy and the sleeves allowed the white shirt cuffs to peek out half an inch.

  Jack lifted a necktie from the hook just inside the closet--red, with a pattern of blue anchors. Jack slipped the tie around his neck and laboriously knotted it. Then he examined himself in the mirror and laughed out loud. Jack saw that he had made it at last. He looked at the beautiful new blazer, the club tie, his snowy shirt, his rumpled jeans. He was there. He was a preppy.

  2

  Richard had become, Jack saw, an admirer of John McPhee and Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould. He picked The Panda's Thumb from the row of books on Richard's shelves because he liked the title and returned to the bed.

  Richard did not return from his basketball practice for what seemed an impossibly long time. Jack paced back and forth in the little room. He could not imagine what would keep Richard from returning to his room, but his imagination gave him one calamity after another.

  After the fifth or sixth time Jack checked his watch, he noticed that he could see no students on the grounds.

  Whatever had happened to Richard had happened to the entire school.

  The afternoon died. Richard too, he thought, was dead. Perhaps all Thayer School was dead--and he was a plague-bearer, a carrier of death. He had eaten nothing all day since the chicken Richard had brought him from the dining room, but he wasn't hungry. Jack sat in numb misery. He brought destruction wherever he went.

  3

  Then there were footfalls in the corridor once more.

  From the floor above, Jack now dimly heard the thud thud thud of a bass pattern, and then again recogn
ized it as being from a record by Blue Oyster Cult. The footsteps paused outside the door. Jack hurried to the door.

  Richard stood in the doorway. Two boys with cornsilk hair and half-mast ties glanced in and kept moving down the corridor. The rock music was much more audible in the corridor.

  "Where were you all afternoon?" Jack demanded.

  "Well, it was sort of freaky," Richard said. "They cancelled all the afternoon classes. Mr. Dufrey wouldn't even let kids go back to their lockers. And then we all had to go to basketball practice, and that was even weirder."

  "Who's Mr. Dufrey?"

  Richard looked at him as if he'd just tumbled out of a bassinette. "Who's Mr. Dufrey? He's the headmaster. Don't you know anything at all about this school?"

  "No, but I'm getting a few ideas," Jack said. "What was so weird about practice?"

  "Remember I told you that Coach Frazer got some friend of his to handle it today? Well, he said we'd all get punishment laps if we tried to cut out, so I thought his friend would be some Al Maguire type, you know, some real hotshot. Thayer School doesn't have a very good athletic tradition. Anyhow, I thought his replacement must be somebody really special."

  "Let me guess. The new guy didn't look like he had anything to do with sports."

  Richard lifted his chin, startled. "No," he said. "No, he didn't." He gave Jack a considering look. "He smoked all the time. And his hair was really long and greasy--he didn't look anything like a coach. He looked like somebody most coaches would like to step on, to tell you the truth. Even his eyes looked funny. I bet you he smokes pot." Richard tugged at his sweater. "I don't think he knew anything about basketball. He didn't even make us practice our patterns--that's what we usually do, after the warm-up period. We sort of ran around and threw baskets and he shouted at us. Laughing. Like kids playing basketball was the most ridiculous thing he'd seen in his whole life. You ever see a coach who thought sports was funny? Even the warm-up period was strange. He just said, 'Okay, do push-ups,' and smoked his cigarette. No count, no cadence, everybody just doing them by themselves. After that it was 'Okay, run around a little bit.' He looked . . . really wild. I think I'm going to complain to Coach Frazer tomorrow."

  "I wouldn't complain to him or the headmaster either," Jack said.

  "Oh, I get it," Richard said. "Mr. Dufrey's one of them. One of the Territories people."

  "Or he works for them," Jack said.

  "Don't you see that you could fit anything into that pattern? Anything that goes wrong? It's too easy--you could explain everything that way. That's how craziness works. You make connections that aren't real."

  "And see things that aren't there."

  Richard shrugged, and despite the insouciance of the gesture, his face was miserable. "You said it."

  "Wait a minute," Jack said. "You remember me telling you about the building that collapsed in Angola, New York?"

  "The Rainbird Towers."

  "What a memory. I think that accident was my fault."

  "Jack, you're--"

  Jack said: "Crazy, I know. Look, would anyone blow the whistle on me if we went out and watched the evening news?"

  "I doubt it. Most kids are studying now, anyway. Why?"

  Because I want to know what's been happening around here, Jack thought but did not say. Sweet little fires, nifty little earthquakes--signs that they're coming through. For me. For us.

  "I need a change of scenery, Richard old chum," Jack said, and followed Richard down the watery green corridor.

  31

  Thayer Goes to Hell

  1

  Jack became aware of the change first and recognized what had happened; it had happened before, while Richard was out, and he was sensitized to it.

  The screaming heavy metal of Blue Oyster Cult's "Tattoo Vampire" was gone. The TV in the common room, which had been cackling out an episode of Hogan's Heroes instead of the news, had fallen dormant.

  Richard turned toward Jack, opening his mouth to speak.

  "I don't like it, Gridley," Jack said first. "The native tomtoms have stopped. It's too quiet."

  "Ha-ha," Richard said thinly.

  "Richard, can I ask you something?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Are you scared?"

  Richard's face said that he wanted more than anything to say No, of course not--it always gets quiet around Nelson House this time of the evening. Unfortunately, Richard was utterly incapable of telling a lie. Dear old Richard. Jack felt a wave of affection.

  "Yes," Richard said. "I'm a little scared."

  "Can I ask you something else?"

  "I guess so."

  "Why are we both whispering?"

  Richard looked at him for a long time without saying anything. Then he started down the green corridor again.

  The doors of the other rooms on the other corridor were either open or ajar. Jack smelled a very familiar odor wafting through the half-open door of Suite 4, and pushed the door all the way open with tented fingers.

  "Which one of them is the pothead?" Jack asked.

  "What?" Richard replied uncertainly.

  Jack sniffed loudly. "Smell it?"

  Richard came back and looked into the room. Both study lamps were on. There was an open history text on one desk, an issue of Heavy Metal on the other. Posters decorated the walls: the Costa del Sol, Frodo and Sam trudging across the cracked and smoking plains of Mordor toward Sauron's castle, Eddie Van Halen. Earphones lay on the open issue of Heavy Metal, giving out little tinny squeaks of music.

  "If you can get expelled for letting a friend sleep under your bed, I doubt if they just slap your wrist for smoking pot, do they?" Jack said.

  "They expel you for it, of course." Richard was looking at the joint as if mesmerized, and Jack thought he looked more shocked and bewildered than he had at any other time, even when Jack had shown him the healing burns between his fingers.

  "Nelson House is empty," Jack said.

  "Don't be ridiculous!" Richard's voice was sharp.

  "It is, though." Jack gestured down the hall. "We're the only ones left. And you don't get thirty-some boys out of a dorm without a sound. They didn't just leave; they disappeared."

  "Over into the Territories, I suppose."

  "I don't know," Jack said. "Maybe they're still here, but on a slightly different level. Maybe they're there. Maybe they're in Cleveland. But they're not where we are."

  "Close that door," Richard said abruptly, and when Jack didn't move quickly enough to suit him, Richard closed it himself.

  "Do you want to put out the--"

  "I don't even want to touch it," Richard said. "I ought to report them, you know. I ought to report them both to Mr. Haywood."

  "Would you do that?" Jack asked, fascinated.

  Richard looked chagrined. "No . . . probably not," he said. "But I don't like it."

  "Not orderly," Jack said.

  "Yeah." Richard's eyes flashed at him from behind his spectacles, telling him that was exactly right, he had hit the nail on the head, and if Jack didn't like it, he could lump it. He started down the hall again. "I want to know what's going on around here," he said, "and believe me, I'm going to find out."

  That might be a lot more hazardous to your health than marijuana, Richie-boy, Jack thought, and followed his friend.

  2

  They stood in the lounge, looking out. Richard pointed toward the quad. In the last of the dying light, Jack saw a bunch of boys grouped loosely around the greenish-bronze statue of Elder Thayer.

  "They're smoking!" Richard cried angrily. "Right on the quad, they're smoking!"

  Jack thought immediately of the pot-smell in Richard's hall.

  "They're smoking, all right," he said to Richard, "and not the kind of cigarettes you get out of a cigarette machine, either."

  Richard rapped his knuckles angrily on the glass. For him, Jack saw, the weirdly deserted dorm was forgotten; the leather-jacketed, chain-smoking substitute coach was forgotten; Jack's apparent menta
l aberration was forgotten. That look of outraged propriety on Richard's face said When a bunch of boys stand around like that, smoking joints within touching distance of the statue of the founder of this school, it's as if someone were trying to tell me that the earth is flat, or that prime numbers may sometimes be divisible by two, or something equally ridiculous.

  Jack's heart was full of pity for his friend, but it was also full of admiration for an attitude which must seem so reactionary and even eccentric to his school-mates. He wondered again if Richard could stand the shocks which might be on the way.

  "Richard," he said, "those boys aren't from Thayer, are they?"

  "God, you really have gone crazy, Jack. They're Uppers. I recognize every last one of them. The guy wearing that stupid leather flying hat is Norrington. The one in the green sweat-pants is Buckley. I see Garson . . . Littlefield . . . the one with the scarf is Etheridge," he finished.

  "Are you sure it's Etheridge?"

  "Of course it's him!" Richard shouted. He suddenly turned the catch on the window, rammed it up, and leaned out into the cold air.

  Jack pulled Richard back. "Richard, please, just listen--"

  Richard didn't want to. He turned and leaned out into the cold twilight.

  "Hey!"

  No, don't attract their attention, Richard, for Christ's sake--

  "Hey, you guys! Etheridge! Norrington! Littlefield! What in the hell is going on out there?"

  The talk and rough laughter broke off. The fellow who was wearing Etheridge's scarf turned toward the sound of Richard's voice. He tilted his head slightly to look up at them. The lights from the library and the sullen furnace afterglow of the winter sunset fell on his face. Richard's hands flew to his mouth.

  The right half of the face disclosed was actually a bit like Etheridge's--an older Etheridge, an Etheridge who had been in a lot of places nice prep-school boys didn't go and who had done a lot of things nice prep-school boys didn't do. The other half was a twisted mass of scars. A glittery crescent that might have been an eye peered from a crater in the lumpy mess of flesh below the forehead. It looked like a marble that had been shoved deeply into a puddle of half-melted tallow. A single long fang hooked out of the left corner of the mouth.