Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  Nor was that all. In the course of the last week, she had contracted pneumonia.

  In her wasted condition she was, of course, a prime candidate for that or any other respiratory disease. It might have come under the best of circumstances . . . and these were definitely not those. The radiators in the Alhambra had ceased their nightly clankings some time ago. She wasn’t sure just how long—time had become as fuzzy and indefinable to her as it had been for Jack in the El Dorado. She only knew the heat had gone out on the same night she had punched her fist through the window, making the gull that had looked like Sloat fly away.

  In the time since that night the Alhambra had become a deserted coldbox. A crypt in which she would soon die.

  If Sloat was responsible for what had happened at the Alhambra, he had done one hell of a good job. Everyone was gone. Everyone. No more maids in the halls trundling their squeaky carts. No more whistling maintenance man. No more mealy-mouthed desk clerk. Sloat had put them all in his pocket and taken them away.

  Four days ago—when she could not find enough in the room to satisfy even her birdlike appetite—she had gotten out of bed and had worked her way slowly down the hall to the elevator. She brought a chair with her on this expedition, alternately sitting on it, her head hanging in exhaustion, and using it as a walker. It took her forty minutes to traverse forty feet of corridor to the elevator shaft.

  She had pushed the button for the car repeatedly, but the car did not come. The buttons did not even light.

  “Fuck a duck,” Lily muttered hoarsely, and then slowly worked herself another twenty feet down the hall to the stairwell.

  “Hey!” she shouted downstairs, and then broke into a fit of coughing, bent over the back of the chair.

  Maybe they couldn’t hear the yell but they sure as shit must have been able to hear me coughing out whatever’s left of my lungs, she thought.

  But no one came.

  She yelled again, twice, had another coughing fit, and then started back down the hallway, which looked as long as a stretch of Nebraska turnpike on a clear day. She didn’t dare go down those stairs. She would never get back up them. And there was no one down there; not in the lobby, not in The Saddle of Lamb, not in the coffee shop, not anywhere. And the phones were out. At least, the phone in her room was out, and she hadn’t heard a single ring anywhere else in this old mausoleum. Not worth it. A bad gamble. She didn’t want to freeze to death in the lobby.

  “Jack-O,” she muttered, “where the hell are y—”

  Then she began to cough again and this one was really bad and in the middle of it she collapsed to one side in a faint, pulling the ugly sitting-room chair over on top of her, and she lay there on the cold floor for nearly an hour, and that was probably when the pneumonia moved into the rapidly declining neighborhood that was Lily Cavanaugh’s body. Hey there, big C! I’m the new kid on the block! You can call me big P! Race you to the finish line!

  Somehow she had made it back to her room, and since then she had existed in a deepening spiral of fever, listening to her respiration grow louder and louder until her fevered mind began to imagine her lungs as two organic aquariums in which a number of submerged chains were rattling. And yet she held on—held on because part of her mind insisted with crazy, failing certainty that Jack was on his way back from wherever he had been.

  7

  The beginning of her final coma had been like a dimple in the sand—a dimple that begins to spin like a whirlpool. The sound of submerged chains in her chest became a long, dry exhalation—Hahhhhhhhh . . .

  Then something had brought her out of that deepening spiral and started her feeling along the wall in the cold darkness for the light-switch. She got out of bed. She did not have strength enough left to do this; a doctor would have laughed at the idea. And yet she did. She fell back twice, then finally made it to her feet, mouth turned down in a snarl of effort. She groped for the chair, found it, and began to lurch her way across the room to the window.

  Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the Bs, was gone. This was a walking horror, eaten by cancer, burned by rising fever.

  She reached the window and looked out.

  Saw a human shape down there—and a glowing globe.

  “Jack!” she tried to scream. Nothing came out but a gravelly whisper. She raised a hand, tried to wave. Faintness

  (Haahhhhhhhhh . . . )

  washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill.

  “Jack!”

  Suddenly the lighted ball in the figure’s hands flashed up brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jack’s face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home.

  The figure broke into a run.

  Jack!

  Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks.

  8

  “Mom!”

  Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the old-fashioned telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awful—it had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window.

  “Mom!”

  He pounded up the stairs, first by twos, then by threes, the Talisman stuttering one burst of pink-red light and then falling dark in his hands.

  “Mom!”

  Down the hallway to their rooms, feet flying, and now, at last, he heard her voice—no brassy bellow or slightly throaty chuckle now; this was the dusty croak of a creature on the outer edge of death.

  “Jacky?”

  “Mom!”

  He burst into the room.

  9

  Down in the car, a nervous Richard Sloat stared upward through his polarized window. What was he doing here, what was Jack doing here? Richard’s eyes hurt. He strained to see the upper windows in the murky evening. As he bent sideways and stared upward, a blinding white flash erupted from several of the upstairs windows, sending a momentary, almost palpable sheet of dazzling light over the entire front of the hotel. Richard put his head between his knees and moaned.

  10

  She was on the floor beneath the window—he saw her there finally. The rumpled, somehow dusty-looking bed was empty, the whole bedroom, as disordered as a child’s room, seemed empty . . . Jack’s stomach had frozen and words backed up in his throat. Then the Talisman had shot out another of its great illuminating flashes, in and for an instant turning everything in the room a pure colorless white. She croaked, “Jacky?” once more, and he bellowed, “MOM!” seeing her crumpled like a candy wrapper under the window. Thin and lank, her hair trailed on the room’s dirty carpet. Her hands seemed like tiny animal paws, pale and scrabbling. “Oh Jesus, Mom, oh jeepers, oh holy moe,” he babbled, and somehow moved across the room without taking a step, he floated, he swam across Lily’s crowded frozen bedroom in an instant that seemed as sharp to him as an image on a photographic plate. Her hair puddled on the grimy carpet, her small knotty hands.

  He inhaled the thick odor of illness, of close death. Jack was no doctor, and he was ignorant of most of the things so wrong with Lily’s body. But he knew one thing—his mother was dying, her life was falling away through invisible cracks, and she had very little time left. She had uttered his name twice, and that was about all the life left in her would permit. Already beginning to weep, he put his hand on her unconscious head, and set the Talisman on the floor beside her.

  Her hair felt full of sand and her head was burning. “Oh Mom, Mom,” he said, and got his hands under her. He still could not see her face. Through her flimsy nightgown her hip felt as hot as the door of a stove. Against his other palm, her left shoulder blade pulsed with an equal warmth. She had no comfortable pads of flesh over her bones—for a mad second of stopped time it was as though she were a small dirty child somehow left ill and alone. Sudden unbidden tears squirted out of his eyes. He lifted her, and it was like picking up a bundle of clothes. Jack moaned. Lily’s arms sprawled loosely, gracelessly.

  (Richar
d)

  Richard had felt . . . not as bad as this, not even when Richard had felt like a dried husk on his back, coming down the final hill into poisoned Point Venuti. There had been little but pimples and a rash left of Richard at that point, but he, too, had burned with fever. But Jack realized with a sort of unthinking horror that there had been more actual life, more substance, to Richard than his mother now possessed. Still, she had called his name.

  (and Richard had nearly died)

  She had called his name. He clung to that. She had made it to the window. She had called his name. It was impossible, unthinkable, immoral to imagine that she could die. One of her arms dangled before him like a reed meant to be cut in half by a scythe . . . her wedding ring had fallen off her finger. He was crying steadily, unstoppably, unconsciously. “Okay, Mom,” he said, “okay, it’s okay now, okay, it’s okay.”

  From the limp body in his arms came a vibration that might have been assent.

  He gently placed her on the bed, and she rolled weightlessly sideways. Jack put a knee on the bed and leaned over her. The tired hair fell away from her face.

  11

  Once, at the very beginning of his journey, he had for a shameful moment seen his mother as an old woman—a spent, exhausted old woman in a tea shop. As soon as he had recognized her, the illusion had dissipated, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had been restored to her unaging self. For the real, the true Lily Cavanaugh could never have aged—she was eternally a blonde with a quick switchblade of a smile and a go-to-hell amusement in her face. This had been the Lily Cavanaugh whose picture on a billboard had strengthened her son’s heart.

  The woman on the bed looked very little like the actress on the billboard. Jack’s tears momentarily blinded him. “Oh don’t don’t don’t,” he said, and laid one palm across her yellowed cheek.

  She did not look as though she had enough strength to lift her hand. He took her tight dry discolored claw of a hand into his own hand. “Please please please don’t—” He could not even allow himself to say it.

  And then he realized how much an effort this shrunken woman had made. She had been looking for him, he understood in a great giddy rush of comprehension. His mother had known he was coming. She had trusted him to return and in a way that must have been connected to the fact of the Talisman itself, she had known the moment of his return.

  “I’m here, Mom,” he whispered. A wad of wet stuff bubbled from his nostrils. He unceremoniously wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat.

  He realized for the first time that his entire body was trembling.

  “I brought it back,” he said. He experienced a moment of absolute radiant pride, of pure accomplishment. “I brought back the Talisman,” he said.

  Gently he set her nutlike hand down on the counterpane.

  Beside the chair, where he had placed it (every bit as gently) on the floor, the Talisman continued to glow. But its light was faint, hesitant, cloudy. He had healed Richard by simply rolling the globe down the length of his friend’s body; he had done the same for Speedy. But this was to be something else. He knew that, but not what “it” was to be . . . unless it was a question of knowing and not wanting to believe.

  He could not possibly break the Talisman, not even to save his mother’s life—that much he did know.

  Now the interior of the Talisman slowly filled with a cloudy whiteness. The pulses faded into one another and became a single steady light. Jack placed his hands on it, and the Talisman shot forth a blinding wall of light, rainbow! which seemed nearly to speak. AT LAST!

  Jack went back across the room toward the bed, the Talisman bouncing and spraying light from floor to wall to ceiling, illuminating the bed fitfully, garishly.

  As soon as he stood beside his mother’s bed, the texture of the Talisman seemed to Jack to subtly alter beneath his fingers. Its glassy hardness shifted somehow, became less slippery, more porous. The tips of his fingers seemed almost to sink into the Talisman. The cloudiness filling it boiled and darkened.

  And at this moment Jack experienced a strong—in fact, passionate—feeling he would have thought was impossible, that day long ago when he had set off for his first day’s walk in the Territories. He knew that in some unforeseen way the Talisman, the object of so much blood and trouble, was going to alter. It was going to change forever, and he was going to lose it. The Talisman would no longer be his. Its clear skin was clouding over, too, and the entire beautiful grooved gravid surface was softening. The feeling now was not glass but warming plastic.

  Jack hurriedly set the altering Talisman down in his mother’s hands. It knew its job; it had been made for this moment; in some fabulous smithy it had been created to answer the requirements of this particular moment and of none other.

  He did not know what he expected to happen. An explosion of light? A smell of medicine? Creation’s big bang?

  Nothing happened. His mother continued visibly but motionlessly to die.

  “Oh please,” Jack blurted, “please—Mom—please—”

  His breath solidified in the middle of his chest. A seam, once one of the vertical grooves in the Talisman, had soundlessly opened. Light slowly poured out and pooled over his mother’s hands. From the cloudy interior of the loose, emptying ball, more light spilled through the open seam.

  From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence.

  12

  But of that Jack was only distractedly conscious. He leaned breathlessly forward and watched the Talisman pour itself out onto his mother’s bed. Cloudy brightness welled up within it. Seams and sparks of light enlivened it. His mother’s eyes twitched. “Oh Mom,” he whispered. “Oh . . .”

  Gray-golden light flooded through the opening in the Talisman and cloudily drifted up his mother’s arms. Her sallow, wizened face very slightly frowned.

  Jack inhaled unconsciously.

  (What?)

  (Music?)

  The gray-golden cloud from the heart of the Talisman was lengthening over his mother’s body, coating her in a translucent but slightly opaque, delicately moving membrane. Jack watched this fluid fabric slide across Lily’s pitiful chest, down her wasted legs. From the open seam in the Talisman a wondrous odor spilled out with the gray-golden cloud, an odor sweet and unsweet, of flowers and earth, wholly good, yeasty; a smell of birth, Jack thought, though he had never attended an actual birth. Jack drew it into his lungs and in the midst of his wonder was gifted with the thought that he himself, Jack-O Sawyer, was being born at this minute—and then he imagined, with a barely perceptible shock of recognition, that the opening in the Talisman was like a vagina. (He had of course never seen a vagina and had only the most rudimentary idea of its structure.) Jack looked directly into the opening in the distended loosened Talisman.

  Now he became conscious for the first time of the incredible racket, in some way all mixed up with faint music, of the birds outside the dark windows.

  (Music? What . . . ?)

  A small colored ball full of light shot past his vision, flashing in the open seam for a moment, then continued beneath the Talisman’s cloudy surface as it dove into the shifting moving gaseous interior. Jack blinked. It had resembled—Another followed, and this time he had time to see the demarcation of blue and brown and green on the tiny globe, the coastal shorelines and tiny mountain ranges. On that tiny world, it occurred to him, stood a paralyzed Jack Sawyer looking down at an even tinier colored speck, and on that speck stood a Jack-O the height of a dust mote staring at a little world the size of an atom. Another world followed the first two, spinning in, out, in, out of the widening cloud within the Talisman.

  His mother moved her right hand and moaned.

  Jack began openly to weep. She would live. He knew it now. All had worked as Speedy had said, and the Talisman was forcing life back into his mother’s exhausted, disease-ridden body, killing the evil that was killing her. He bent forward, for a moment almost giving in to the image of himself kissing the Talisman which
filled his mind. The odors of jasmine and hibiscus and freshly overturned earth filled his nostrils. A tear rolled off the end of his nose and sparkled like a jewel in the shafts of light from the Talisman. He saw a belt of stars drift past the open seam, a beaming yellow sun swimming in vast black space. Music seemed to fill the Talisman, the room, the whole world outside. A woman’s face, the face of a stranger, moved across the open seam. Children’s faces, too, then the faces of other women. . . . Tears rolled down his own face, for he had seen swimming in the Talisman his mother’s own face, the confident wise-cracking tender features of the Queen of half a hundred quick movies. When he saw his own face drifting among all the worlds and lives falling toward birth within the Talisman, he thought he would burst with feeling. He expanded. He breathed in light. And became at last aware of the astonishment of noises taking place all about him when he saw his mother’s eyes stay open as long, at least, as a blessed two seconds . . .

  (for alive as birds, as alive as the worlds contained within the Talisman, there came to him the sounds of trombones and trumpets, the cries of saxophones; the joined voices of frogs and turtles and gray doves singing, The people who know my magic have filled the land with smoke; there came to him the voices of Wolfs making Wolfmusic at the moon. Water spanked against the bow of a ship and a fish spanked the surface of a lake with the side of its body and a rainbow spanked the ground and a travelling boy spanked a drop of spittle to tell him which way to go and a spanked baby squinched its face and opened its throat; and there came the huge voice of an orchestra singing with its whole massive heart; and the room filled with the smoky trail of a single voice rising and rising and rising over all these forays of sound. Trucks jammed gears and factory whistles blew and somewhere a tire exploded and somewhere a firecracker loudly spent itself and a lover whispered again and a child squalled and the voice rose and rose and for a short time Jack was unaware that he could not see; but then he could again).

  Lily’s eyes opened wide. They stared up into Jack’s face with a startled where-am-I expression. It was the expression of a newborn infant who has just been spanked into the world. Then she jerked in a startled breath—