Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  Jack said nothing.

  “What are you going to do with the gun, Jack?”

  “I’m going to try and get rid of that train. Any objections?”

  Richard shuddered; his mouth pulled down in a grimace of distaste. “None whatever.”

  “Will the Uzi do it, do you think? If I shoot into that plastic junk?”

  “One bullet wouldn’t. A whole clip might.”

  “Let’s see.” Jack pushed off the safety.

  Richard grabbed his arm. “It might be wise to remove ourselves to the fence before making the experiment,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  At the ivy-covered fence, Jack trained the Uzi on the flat and squashy packages of plastique. He pulled the trigger, and the Uzi bellowed the silence into rags. Fire hung mystically from the end of the barrel for a moment. The gunfire was shockingly loud in the chapellike silence of the deserted camp. Birds squawked in surprised fear and headed out for quieter parts of the forest. Richard winced and pressed his palms against his ears. The tarpaulin flirted and danced. Then, although he was still pulling the trigger, the gun stopped firing. The clip was exhausted, and the train just sat there on the track.

  “Well,” Jack said, “that was great. Have you got any other i—”

  The flatcar erupted in a sheet of blue fire and a bellowing roar. Jack saw the flatcar actually starting to rise from the track, as if it were taking off. He grabbed Richard around the neck, shoved him down.

  The explosions went on for a long time. Metal whistled and flew overhead. It made a steady metallic rain-shower on the roof of the Quonset hut. Occasionally a larger piece made a sound like a Chinese gong, or a crunch as something really big just punched on through. Then something slammed through the fence just above Jack’s head, leaving a hole bigger than both of his fists laced together, and Jack decided it was time to cut out. He grabbed Richard and started pulling him toward the gates.

  “No!” Richard shouted. “The tracks!”

  “What?”

  “The tr—”

  Something whickered over them and both boys ducked. Their heads knocked together.

  “The tracks!” Richard shouted, rubbing his skull with one pale hand. “Not the road! Go for the tracks!”

  “Gotcha!” Jack was mystified but unquestioning. They had to go somewhere.

  The two boys began to crawl along the rusting chain-link fence like soldiers crossing no-man’s-land. Richard was slightly ahead, leading them toward the hole in the fence where the tracks exited the far side of the compound.

  Jack looked back over his shoulder as they went—he could see as much as he needed to, or wanted to, through the partially open gates. Most of the train seemed to have been simply vaporized. Twisted chunks of metal, some recognizable, most not, lay in a wide circle around the place where it had come back to America, where it had been built, bought, and paid for. That they had not been killed by flying shrapnel was amazing; that they had not been even so much as scratched seemed well-nigh impossible.

  The worst was over now. They were outside the gate, standing up (but ready to duck and run if there were residual explosions).

  “My father’s not going to like it that you blew up his train, Jack,” Richard said.

  His voice was perfectly calm, but when Jack looked at him, he saw that Richard was weeping.

  “Richard—”

  “No, he won’t like it at all,” Richard said, as if answering himself.

  3

  A thick and luxuriant stripe of weeds, knee-high, grew up the center of the railroad tracks leading away from the camp, leading away in a direction Jack believed to be roughly south. The tracks themselves were rusty and long unused; in places they had twisted strangely—rippled.

  Earthquakes did that, Jack thought with queasy awe.

  Behind them, the plastic explosive continued to explode. Jack would think it was finally over, and then there would be another long, hoarse BREEE-APPP!—it was, he thought, the sound of a giant clearing its throat. Or breaking wind. He glanced back once and saw a black pall of smoke hanging in the sky. He listened for the thick, heavy crackle of fire—like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire—but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture. Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous ivy (poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.

  He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off his track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard’s silence. He was toiling too hard to keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.

  They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still congratulating himself on this conversion-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, “Hey Jack—”

  Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his paper-white skin like birthmarks.

  Jack caught him—barely. Richard seemed to weigh no more than a paper bag.

  “Oh, Christ, Richard!”

  “Felt okay until a second or two ago,” Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could only see whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. “Just got . . . faint. Sorry.”

  From behind them came another heavy, belching explosion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof of the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.

  “Can you hang on to me? I’ll piggyback you a ways.” Shades of Wolf, he thought.

  “I can hang on.”

  “If you can’t, say so.”

  “Jack,” Richard said with a heartening trace of that old fussy Richard-irritation, “if I couldn’t hang on, I wouldn’t say I could.”

  Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack’s neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener’s Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world—gorgeous as it could be—rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.

  He did begin to jog.

  “If you make me seasick,” Richard said, his voice jiggling in time with Jack’s footfalls, “I’ll just vomit on your head.”

  “I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy,” Jack panted, grinning.

  “I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick.”

  “Probably just how you look, chum.”

  “Don’t . . . call me chum,” Richard whispered, and Jack’s grin widened. He thought, Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever.

  4

  “I knew that man,” Richard whispered from above Jack.

  It sta
rtled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.

  The tracks, Jack wondered. Do they go where I think they go?

  “What man?”

  “The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew him. I used to see him around.”

  “When?” Jack panted.

  “A long time ago. When I was a little kid.” Richard then added with great reluctance, “Around the time that I had that . . . that funny dream in the closet.” He paused. “Except I guess it wasn’t a dream, was it?”

  “No. I guess it wasn’t.”

  “Yes. Was the man with the whip Reuel’s dad?”

  “What do you think?”

  “It was,” Richard said glumly. “Sure it was.”

  Jack stopped.

  “Richard, where do these tracks go?”

  “You know where they go,” Richard said with a strange, empty serenity.

  “Yeah—I think I do. But I want to hear you say it.” Jack paused. “I guess I need to hear you say it. Where do they go?”

  “They go to a town called Point Venuti,” Richard said, and he sounded near tears again. “There’s a big hotel there. I don’t know if it’s the place you’re looking for or not, but I think it probably is.”

  “So do I,” Jack said. He set off once more, Richard’s legs in his arms, a growing ache in his back, following the tracks that would take him—both of them—to the place where his mother’s salvation might be found.

  5

  As they walked, Richard talked. He did not come on to the subject of his father’s involvement in this mad business all at once, but began to circle slowly in toward it.

  “I knew that man from before,” Richard said. “I’m pretty sure I did. He came to the house. Always to the back of the house. He didn’t ring the bell, or knock. He kind of . . . scratched on the door. It gave me the creeps. Scared me so bad I felt like peeing my pants. He was a tall man—oh, all grown men seem tall to little kids, but this guy was very tall—and he had white hair. He wore dark glasses most of the time. Or sometimes the kind of sunglasses that have the mirror lenses. When I saw that story on him they had on Sunday Report, I knew I’d seen him somewhere before. My father was upstairs doing some paperwork the night that show was on. I was sitting in front of the tube, and when my father came in and saw what was on, he almost dropped the drink he was holding. Then he changed the station to a Star Trek rerun.

  “Only the guy wasn’t calling himself Sunlight Gardener when he used to come and see my father. His name . . . I can’t quite remember. But it was something like Banlon . . . or Orlon . . .”

  “Osmond?”

  Richard brightened. “That was it. I never heard his first name. But he used to come once every month or two. Sometimes more often. Once he came almost every other night, for a week, and then he was gone for almost half a year. I used to lock myself in my room when he came. I didn’t like his smell. He wore some kind of scent . . . cologne, I suppose, but it really smelled stronger than that. Like perfume. Cheap dimestore perfume. But underneath it—”

  “Underneath it he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath for about ten years.”

  Richard looked at him, wide-eyed.

  “I met him as Osmond, too,” Jack explained. He had explained before—at least some of this—but Richard had not been listening then. He was listening now. “In the Territories version of New Hampshire, before I met him as Sunlight Gardener in Indiana.”

  “Then you must have seen that . . . that thing.”

  “Reuel?” Jack shook his head. “Reuel must have been out in the Blasted Lands then, having a few more radical cobalt treatments.” Jack thought of the running sores on the creature’s face, thought of the worms. He looked at his red, puffy wrists where the worms had bitten, and shuddered. “I never saw Reuel until the end, and I never saw his American Twinner at all. How old were you when Osmond started showing up?”

  “I must have been four. The thing about the . . . you know, the closet . . . that hadn’t happened yet. I remember I was more afraid of him after that.”

  “After the thing touched you in the closet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that happened when you were five.”

  “Yes.”

  “When we were both five.”

  “Yes. You can put me down. I can walk for a while.”

  Jack did. They walked in silence, heads down, not looking at each other. At five, something had reached out of the dark and touched Richard. When they were both six

  (six, Jacky was six)

  Jack had overheard his father and Morgan Sloat talking about a place they went to, a place that Jacky called the Day-dream-country. And later that year, something had reached out of the dark and had touched him and his mother. It had been nothing more or less than Morgan Sloat’s voice. Morgan Sloat calling from Green River, Utah. Sobbing. He, Phil Sawyer, and Tommy Woodbine had left three days before on their yearly November hunting trip—another college chum, Randy Glover, owned a luxurious hunting lodge in Blessington, Utah. Glover usually hunted with them, but that year he had been cruising in the Caribbean. Morgan called to say that Phil had been shot, apparently by another hunter. He and Tommy Woodbine had packed him out of the wilderness on a lashed-together stretcher. Phil had regained consciousness in the back of Glover’s Jeep Cherokee, Morgan said, and had asked that Morgan send his love to Lily and Jack. He died fifteen minutes later, as Morgan drove wildly toward Green River and the nearest hospital.

  Morgan had not killed Phil; there was Tommy to testify that the three of them had been together when the shot rang out, if any testimony had ever been required (and, of course, none ever was).

  But that was not to say he couldn’t have hired it done, Jack thought now. And it was not to say that Uncle Tommy might not have harbored his own long doubts about what had happened. If so, maybe Uncle Tommy hadn’t been killed just so that Jack and his dying mother would be totally unprotected from Morgan’s depredations. Maybe he had died because Morgan was tired of wondering if the old faggot might finally hint to the surviving son that there might have been more to Phil Sawyer’s death than an accident. Jack felt his skin crawl with dismay and revulsion.

  “Was that man around before your father and my father went hunting together that last time?” Jack asked fiercely.

  “Jack, I was four years old—”

  “No, you weren’t, you were six. You were four when he started coming, you were six when my father got killed in Utah. And you don’t forget much, Richard. Did he come around before my father died?”

  “That was the time he came almost every night for a week,” Richard said, his voice barely audible. “Just before that last hunting trip.”

  Although none of this was precisely Richard’s fault, Jack was unable to contain his bitterness. “My dad dead in a hunting accident in Utah, Uncle Tommy run down in L.A. The death-rate among your father’s friends is very fucking high, Richard.”

  “Jack—” Richard began in a small, trembling voice.

  “I mean it’s all water over the dam, or spilled milk, or pick your cliché,” Jack said. “But when I showed up at your school, Richard, you called me crazy.”

  “Jack, you don’t under—”

  “No, I guess I don’t. I was tired and you gave me a place to sleep. Fine. I was hungry and you got me some food. Great. But what I needed most was for you to believe me. I knew it was too much to expect, but jeepers! You knew the guy I was talking about! You knew he’d been in your father’s life before! And you just said something like ’Good old Jack’s been spending too much time in the hot sun out there on Seabrook Island and blah-blah-blah!’ Jesus, Richard, I thought we were better friends than that.”

  “You still don’t understand.”

  “What? That you were too afraid of Seabrook Island stuff to believe in me a little?” Jack’s voice wavered
with tired indignation.

  “No. I was afraid of more than that.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jack stopped and looked at Richard’s pale, miserable face truculently. “What could be more than that for Rational Richard?”

  “I was afraid,” Richard said in a perfectly calm voice. “I was afraid that if I knew any more about those secret pockets . . . that man Osmond, or what was in the closet that time, I wouldn’t be able to love my father anymore. And I was right.”

  Richard covered his face with his thin, dirty fingers and began to cry.

  6

  Jack stood watching Richard cry and damned himself for twenty kinds of fool. No matter what else Morgan was, he was still Richard Sloat’s father; Morgan’s ghost lurked in the shape of Richard’s hands and in the bones of Richard’s face. Had he forgotten those things? No—but for a moment his bitter disappointment in Richard had covered them up. And his increasing nervousness had played a part. The Talisman was very, very close now, and he felt it in his nerve-endings the way a horse smells water in the desert or a distant grass-fire in the plains. That nerviness was coming out in a kind of prancy skittishness.

  Yeah, well, this guy’s supposed to be your best buddy, Jack-O—get a little funky if you have to, but don’t trample Richard. The kid’s sick, just in case you hadn’t noticed.

  He reached for Richard. Richard tried to push him away. Jack was having none of that. He held Richard. The two of them stood that way in the middle of the deserted railroad bed for a while, Richard’s head on Jack’s shoulder.

  “Listen,” Jack said awkwardly, “try not to worry too much about . . . you know . . . everything . . . just yet, Richard. Just kind of try to roll with the changes, you know?” Boy, that sounded really stupid. Like telling somebody they had cancer but don’t worry because pretty soon we’re going to put Star Wars on the VCR and it’ll cheer you right up.

  “Sure,” Richard said. He pushed away from Jack. The tears had cut clean tracks on his dirty face. He wiped an arm across his eyes and tried to smile. “A’ wi’ be well an’ a’ wi’ be well—”