Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  And, helplessly, flipped into the Territories.

  6

  Standing on the other side of the drop-gate was a figure in blackish, rusty armor. Its cylindrical helmet was broken only by a black horizontal eye-slit no more than an inch wide. The helmet was topped by a frowzy red plume—white bugs squirmed in and out of it. They were the same sort, Jason saw, as those which had come out of the walls first in Albert the Blob’s room and then all over Thayer School. The helmet ended in a coif of mail which draped the rusty knight’s shoulders like a lady’s stole. The upper arms and forearms were plated with heavy steel brassards. They were joined at the elbows with cubitieres. These were crusted with layers of ancient filth, and when the knight moved, the cubitieres squealed like the high, demanding voices of unpleasant children.

  Its armored fists were crazy with spikes.

  Jason stood against the stone wall, looking at it, unable in fact to look away; his mouth was dry as fever and his eyeballs seemed to be swelling rhythmically in their sockets in time to his heartbeat.

  In the knight’s right hand was le martel de fer—a battle-hammer with a rusty thirty-pound forged-steel head, as mute as murder.

  The drop-gate; remember that the drop-gate is between you and it—

  But then, although no human hand was near it, the windlass began to turn; the iron chain, each link as long as Jack’s forearm, began to wind around the drum, and the gate began to rise.

  7

  The mailed fist was withdrawn from the door, leaving a splintered hole that changed the mural at once from faded pastoral romantic to surrealist bar-sinister: it now looked as if some apocalyptic hunter, disappointed by his day in the marshes, had put a load of birdshot through the sky itself in a fit of pique. Then the head of the battle-hammer exploded through the door in a huge blunt swipe, obliterating one of the two herons struggling to achieve liftoff. Jack raised his hand in front of his face to protect it from splinters. The martel de fer was withdrawn. There was another brief pause, almost long enough for Jack to think about running again. Then the spiked fist tore through again. It twisted first one way and then the other, widening the hole, then withdrew. A second later the hammer slammed through the middle of a reed-bed and a large chunk of the right-hand door fell to the carpet.

  Jack could now see the hulking armored figure in the shadows of the Heron Bar. The armor was not the same as that worn by the figure confronting Jason in the black castle; that one wore a helmet which was nearly cylindrical, with a red plume. This one wore a helmet that looked like the polished head of a steel bird. Horns rose from either side, sprouting from the helmet at roughly ear level. Jack saw a breastplate, a kilt of plate-mail, a hemming of chain-mail below that. The hammer was the same in both worlds, and in both worlds the knight-Twinners dropped them at the same instant, as if in contempt—who would need a battle-hammer to deal with such a puny opponent as this?

  Run! Jack, run!

  That’s right, the hotel whispered. Run! That’s what fushing feeves are supposed to do! Run! RUN!

  But he would not run. He might die, but he would not run—because that sly, whispering voice was right. Running was exactly what fushing feeves did.

  But I’m no thief, Jack thought grimly. That thing may kill me, but I won’t run. Because I’m no thief.

  “I won’t run!” Jack shouted at the blank, polished-steel bird-face. “I’m no thief! Do you hear me? I’ve come for what’s mine and I’M NO THIEF!”

  A groaning scream came from the breathing-holes at the bottom of the bird-helmet. The knight raised its spiked fists and brought them down, one on the sagging left door, one on the sagging right. The pastoral marsh-world painted there was destroyed. The hinges snapped . . . and as the doors fell toward him, Jack actually saw the one painted heron who remained go flying away like a bird in a Walt Disney cartoon, its eyes bright and terrified.

  The suit of armor came toward him like a killer robot, its feet rising and then crashing down. It was more than seven feet tall, and when it came through the door the horns rising from its helmet tore a set of ragged slashes into the upper jamb. They looked like quotation marks.

  Run! a yammering voice in his mind screamed.

  Run, you feef, the hotel whispered.

  No, Jack answered. He stared up at the advancing knight, and his hand wrapped itself tightly around the guitar-pick in his pocket. The spike-studded gauntlets came up toward the visor of its bird-helmet. They raised it. Jack gaped.

  The inside of the helmet was empty.

  Then those studded hands were reaching for Jack.

  8

  The spike-studded hands came up and grasped either side of the cylindrical helmet. They lifted it slowly off, disclosing the livid, haggard face of a man who looked at least three hundred years old. One side of this ancient’s head had been bashed in. Splinters of bone like broken eggshell poked out through the skin, and the wound was caked with some black goop which Jason supposed was decayed brains. It was not breathing, but the red-rimmed eyes which regarded Jason were sparkling and hellishly avid. It grinned, and Jason saw the needle-sharp teeth with which this horror would rip him to pieces.

  It clanked unsteadily forward . . . but that wasn’t the only sound.

  He looked to his left, toward the main hall.

  (lobby)

  of the castle

  (hotel)

  and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow, bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vampires of some sort.

  Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.

  9

  Jack howled with the pain—the short blunt-tipped spikes on its hands were in him, in him, and he understood once and for all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.

  He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness inside that helmet—

  But was it really empty?

  Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.

  It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to

  (tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)

  freeze me solid—

  JACK! Speedy’s voice cried.

  (JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)

  The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

  Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph—that lovely sensation of Territories heat, that clear feeling of rainbow.

  The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs—and in that moment Jack

  (and Jason)

  saw those designs come together in a face—the face of Laura DeLoessian.

  (the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)

  10

  “In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” they shouted together—but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason. “Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

  Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny face of the old vampire-thing in the
suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, exploded, and a black, steaming inchor ran over his hand and wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.

  11

  Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.

  The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was swelling somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

  The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart—Jack thought if he had seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s enemy from running a blade or a spear-point through the knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.

  Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together. In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him. One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a symbol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign—but these were not Morgan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who presumed to steal away their only reason for being.

  “No more,” Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.

  The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking double point.

  “No more,” Jack moaned. “Oh God please, no more, I’m tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—”

  Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack—

  “Speedy, I can’t!” he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the inevitability of steel auto parts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.

  —you be here in California to bring her back.

  “Please, Speedy, no more!”

  Reaching for him—black-metal robot-faces, rusty greaves, mail splotched and smeared with moss and mould.

  Got to do your best, Travellin Jack, Speedy whispered, exhausted, and then he was gone and Jack was left to stand or fall on his own.

  42

  Jack and the Talisman

  1

  You made a mistake—a ghostly voice in Jack Sawyer’s head spoke up as he stood outside the Heron Bar and watched these other suits of armor bear down on him. In his mind an eye opened wide and he saw an angry man—a man who was really not much more than an overgrown boy—striding up a Western street toward the camera, buckling on first one gunbelt and then another, so that they crisscrossed his belly. You made a mistake—you shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!

  2

  Of all his mother’s movies, the one Jack had always liked the best was Last Train to Hangtown, made in 1960 and released in 1961. It had been a Warner Brothers picture, and the major parts—as in many of the lower-budget pictures Warners made during that period—were filled by actors from the half-dozen Warner Brothers TV series which were in constant production. Jack Kelly from the Maverick show had been in Last Train (the Suave Gambler), and Andrew Duggan from Bourbon Street Beat (the Evil Cattle-Baron). Clint Walker, who played a character called Cheyenne Bodie on TV, starred as Rafe Ellis (the Retired Sheriff Who Must Strap on His Guns One Last Time). Inger Stevens had been originally slated to play the part of the Dance Hall Girl with Willing Arms and a Heart of Gold, but Miss Stevens had come down with a bad case of bronchitis and Lily Cavanaugh had stepped into the part. It was of a sort she could have done competently in a coma. Once, when his parents thought he was asleep and were talking in the living room downstairs, Jack overheard his mother say something striking as he padded barefoot to the bathroom to get a glass of water . . . it was striking enough, at any rate, so that Jack never forgot it. “All the women I played knew how to fuck, but not one of them knew how to fart,” she told Phil.

  Will Hutchins, who starred in another Warner Brothers program (this one was called Sugarfoot), had also been in the film. Last Train to Hangtown was Jack’s favorite chiefly because of the character Hutchins played. It was this character—Andy Ellis, by name—who came to his tired, tottering, overtaxed mind now as he watched the suits of armor marching down the dark hallway toward him.

  Andy Ellis had been the Cowardly Kid Brother Who Gets Mad in the Last Reel. After skulking and cowering through the entire movie, he had gone out to face Duggan’s evil minions after the Chief Minion (played by sinister, stubbly, wall-eyed Jack Elam, who played Chief Minions in all sorts of Warner epics, both theatrical and televisional) had shot his brother Rafe in the back.

  Hutchins had gone striding down the dusty wide-screen street, strapping on his brother’s gunbelts with clumsy fingers, shouting, “Come on! Come on, I’m ready for ya! You made a mistake! You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!”

  Will Hutchins had not been one of the greatest actors of all time, but in that moment he had achieved—at least in Jack’s eyes—a moment of clear truth and real brilliance. There was a sense that the kid was going to his death, and knew it, but meant to go on, anyway. And although he was frightened, he was not striding up that street toward the showdown with the slightest reluctance; he went eagerly, sure of what he meant to do, even though he had to fumble again and again with the buckles of the gunbelts.

  The suits of armor came on, closing the distance, rocking from side to side like toy robots. They should have keys sticking out of their backs, Jack thought.

  He turned to face them, the yellowed pick held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if to strum a tune.

  They seemed to hesitate, as if sensing his fearlessness. The hotel itself seemed to suddenly hesitate, or to open its eyes to a danger that was deeper than it had at first thought; floors groaned their boards, somewhere a series of doors clapped shut one after the other, and on the roofs, the brass ornaments ceased turning for a moment.

  Then the suits of armor clanked forward again. They now made a single moving wall of plate- and chain-mail, of greaves and helmets and sparkling gorgets. One held a spiked iron ball on a wooden haft; one a martel de fer; the one in the center held the double-pointed sword.

  Jack suddenly began to walk toward them. His eyes lit up; he held the guitar-pick out before him. His face filled with that radiant Jason-glow. He

  sideslipped

  momentarily into the Territories and became Jason; here the shark’s tooth which had been a pick seemed to be aflame. As he approached the three knights, one pulled off its helmet, revealing another of those old, pale faces—this one was thick with jowls, and the neck hung with waxy wattles that looked like melting candlewax. It heaved its helmet at him. Jason dodged it easily

  and

  slipped back

  into his Jack-self as a
helmet crashed off a panelled wall behind him. Standing in front of him was a headless suit of armor.

  You think that scares me? he thought contemptuously. I’ve seen that trick before. It doesn’t scare me, you don’t scare me, and I’m going to get it, that’s all.

  This time he did not just feel the hotel listening; this time it seemed to recoil all around him, as the tissue of a digestive organ might recoil from a poisoned bit of flesh. Upstairs, in the five rooms where the five Guardian Knights had died, five windows blew out like gunshots. Jack bore down on the suits of armor.

  The Talisman sang out from somewhere above in its clear and sweetly triumphant voice:

  JASON! TO ME!

  “Come on!” Jack shouted at the suits of armor, and began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. Never had laughter seemed so strong to him, so potent, so good as this—it was like water from a spring, or from some deep river. “Come on, I’m ready for ya! I don’t know what fucked-up Round Table you guys came from, but you shoulda stayed there! You made a mistake!”

  Laughing harder than ever but as grimly determined inside as Wotan on the Valkyries’ rock, Jack leaped at the headless, swaying figure in the center.

  “You shoulda killed both of the Ellis brothers!” he shouted, and as Speedy’s guitar-pick passed into the zone of freezing air where the knight’s head should have been, the suit of armor fell apart.

  3

  In her bedroom at the Alhambra, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer suddenly looked up from the book she had been reading. She thought she had heard someone—no, not just someone, Jack!—call out from far down the deserted corridor, perhaps even from the lobby. She listened, eyes wide, lips pursed, heart hoping . . . but there was nothing. Jack-O was still gone, the cancer was still eating her up a bite at a time, and it was still an hour and a half before she could take another of the big brown horse-pills that damped down the pain a little bit.

  She had begun to think more and more often of taking all the big brown horse-pills at once. That would do more than damp the pain for a bit; that would finish it off forever. They say we can’t cure cancer, but don’t you believe that bullshit, Mr. C—try eating about two dozen of these. What do you say? Want to go for it?