Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  “A sight no man shall see!” West-Head rejoined, and although Jack was mystified, the children went into gales of laughter.

  The parrot solemnly shifted its talons on its perch and made droppings into the straw below it.

  “And what frightened Alan Destry to death in the night?”

  “He saw his wife—growwwwk!—getting out of the bath!”

  The farmer was now walking away and the one-eyed salesman still had charge of the rooster. He rounded furiously on the children. “Get out of here! Get out of here before I kick your asses square!”

  The children scattered. Jack went with them, sparing a last bemused look over his shoulder at the wonderful parrot.

  4

  At another stall he gave up two knuckles of wood for an apple and a dipper of milk—the sweetest, richest milk he had ever tasted. Jack thought that if they had milk like that back at home, Nestlé’s and Hershey’s would go bankrupt in a week.

  He was just finishing the milk when he saw the Henry family moving slowly in his direction. He handed the dipper back to the woman in the stall, who poured the lees thriftily back into the large wooden cask beside her. Jack hurried on, wiping a milk moustache from his upper lip and hoping uneasily that no one who had drunk from the dipper before him had had leprosy or herpes or anything like that. But he somehow didn’t think such awful things even existed over here.

  He walked up the market-town’s main thoroughfare, past the mimers, past two fat women selling pots and pans (Territories Tupperware, Jack thought, and grinned), past that wonderful two-headed parrot (its one-eyed owner was now drinking quite openly from a clay bottle, reeling wildly from one end of his booth to the other, holding the dazed-looking rooster by the neck and yelling truculently at passersby—Jack saw the man’s scrawny right arm was caked with yellowish-white guano, and grimaced), past an open area where farmers were gathered. He paused there for a moment, curious. Many of the farmers were smoking clay pipes, and Jack saw several clay bottles, much the same as the one the bird-salesman had been brandishing, go from hand to hand. In a long, grassy field, men were hitching stones behind large shaggy horses with lowered heads and mild, stupid eyes.

  Jack passed the rug-stall. The vendor saw him and raised a hand. Jack raised one in turn and thought of calling Use it, my man, but don’t abuse it! He decided he better not. He was suddenly aware that he felt blue. That feeling of strangeness, of being an outsider, had fallen over him again.

  He reached the crossroads. The way going north and south was little more than a country lane. The Western Road was much wider.

  Old Travelling Jack, he thought, and tried to smile. He straightened his shoulders and heard Speedy’s bottle clink lightly against the mirror. Here goes old Travelling Jack along the Territories version of Interstate 90. Feets don’t fail me now!

  He set off again, and soon that great dreaming land swallowed him.

  5

  About four hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, Jack sat down in the tall grass by the side of the road and watched as a number of men—from this distance they looked little bigger than bugs—climbed a tall, rickety-looking tower. He had chosen this place to rest and eat his apple because it was here that the Western Road seemed to make its closest approach to that tower. It was still at least three miles away (and perhaps much more than that—the almost supernatural clarity of the air made distances extremely hard to judge), but it had been in Jack’s view for an hour or more.

  Jack ate his apple, rested his tired feet, and wondered what that tower could be, standing out there all by itself in a field of rolling grass. And, of course, he wondered why those men should be climbing it. The wind had blown quite steadily ever since he had left the market-town, and the tower was downwind of Jack, but whenever it died away for a minute, Jack could hear them calling to each other . . . and laughing. There was a lot of laughing going on.

  Some five miles west of the market, Jack had walked through a village—if your definition of a village stretched to cover five tiny houses and one store that had obviously been closed for a long time. Those had been the last human habitations he had seen between then and now. Just before glimpsing the tower, he had been wondering if he had already come to the Outposts without even knowing it. He remembered well enough what Captain Farren had said: Beyond the Outposts the Western Road goes into nowhere . . . or into hell. I’ve heard it said that God Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. . . .

  Jack shivered a little.

  But he didn’t really believe he had come so far. Certainly there was none of the steadily deepening unease he had been feeling before he floundered into the living trees in his effort to get away from Morgan’s diligence . . . the living trees which now seemed like a hideous prologue to all the time he had spent in Oatley.

  Indeed, the good emotions he had felt from the time he woke up warm and rested inside the haystack until the time Henry the farmer had invited him to jump down from his wagon had now resurfaced: that feeling that the Territories, in spite of whatever evil they might harbor, were fundamentally good, and that he could be a part of this place anytime he wanted . . . that he was really no Stranger at all.

  He had come to realize that he was part of the Territories for long periods of time. A strange thought had come to him as he swung easily along the Western Road, a thought which came half in English and half in whatever the Territories language was: When I’m having a dream, the only time I really KNOW it’s a dream is when I’m starting to wake up. If I’m dreaming and just wake up all at once—if the alarm clock goes off, or something—then I’m the most surprised guy alive. At first it’s the waking that seems like a dream. And I’m no stranger over here when the dream gets deep—is that what I mean? No, but it’s getting close. I bet my dad dreamed deep a lot. And I’ll bet Uncle Morgan almost never does.

  He had decided he would take a swig out of Speedy’s bottle and flip back the first time he saw anything that might be dangerous . . . even if he saw anything scary. Otherwise he would walk all day over here before returning to New York. In fact, he might have been tempted to spend the night in the Territories, if he’d had anything to eat beyond the one apple. But he didn’t, and along the wide, deserted dirt track of the Western Road there was not a 7-Eleven or a Stop-’n-Go in sight.

  The old trees which had surrounded the crossroads and the market-town had given way to open grassland on either side once Jack got past the final small settlement. He began to feel that he was walking along an endless causeway which crossed the middle of a limitless ocean. He travelled the Western Road alone that day under a sky that was bright and sunny but cool (late September now, of course it’s cool, he thought, except the word which came to mind was not September but a Territories word which really did translate better as ninemonth). No pedestrians passed him, no wagons either loaded or empty. The wind blew pretty steadily, sighing through the ocean of grasses with a low sound that was both autumnal and lonely. Great ripples ran across the grasses before that wind.

  If asked “How do you feel, Jack?,” the boy would have responded: “Pretty good, thanks. Cheerful.” Cheerful is the word which would have come into his mind as he hiked through those empty grasslands; rapture was a word he associated most easily with the pop hit of the same name by the rock group Blondie. And he would have been astounded if told he had wept several times as he stood watching those great ripples chase each other toward the horizon, drinking in a sight that only a very few American children of his time had ever seen—huge empty tracts of land under a blue sky of dizzying width and breadth and, yes, even depth. It was a sky unmarked by either jet contrails across its dome or smutty bands of smog at any of its lower edges.

  Jack was having an experience of remarkable sensory impact, seeing and hearing and smelling things which were brand-new to him, while other sensory input to which he had grown utterly accustomed was missing for the first time. In many ways he was a remarkably sophisticated child—brought up in a Los Angeles family wh
ere his father had been an agent and his mother a movie actress, it would have been odder if he had been naive—but he was still just a child, sophisticated or not, and that was undeniably his gain . . . at least in a situation such as this. That lonely day’s journey across the grasslands would surely have produced sensory overload, perhaps even a pervasive sense of madness and hallucination, in an adult. An adult would have been scrabbling for Speedy’s bottle—probably with fingers too shaky to grasp it very successfully—an hour west of the market-town, maybe less.

  In Jack’s case, the wallop passed almost completely through his conscious mind and into his subconscious. So when he blissed out entirely and began to weep, he was really unaware of the tears (except as a momentary doubling of vision which he attributed to sweat) and thought only: Jeez, I feel good . . . it should feel spooky out here with no one around, but it doesn’t.

  That was how Jack came to think of his rapture as no more than a good, cheerful feeling as he walked alone up the Western Road with his shadow gradually growing longer behind him. It did not occur to him that part of his emotional radiance might stem from the fact that hardly less than twelve hours before he had been a prisoner of Updike’s Oatley Tap (the blood-blisters from the last keg to land on his fingers were still fresh); that hardly less than twelve hours ago he had escaped—barely!—some sort of murdering beast that he had begun to think of as a were-goat; that for the first time in his life he was on a wide, open road that was utterly deserted except for him; there was not a Coca-Cola sign anywhere in view, or a Budweiser billboard showing the World-Famous Clydesdales; no ubiquitous wires ran beside the road on either side or crisscrossed above it, as had been the case on every road Jack Sawyer had ever travelled in his entire life; there was not so much as even the distant rolling sound of an airplane, let alone the rolling thunder of the 747s on their final approaches to LAX, or the F-111s that were always blasting off from the Portsmouth Naval Air Station and then cracking the air over the Alhambra like Osmond’s whip as they headed out over the Atlantic; there was only the sound of his feet on the road and the clean ebb and flow of his own respiration.

  Jeez, I feel good, Jack thought, wiping absently at his eyes, and defined it all as “cheerful.”

  6

  Now there was this tower to look at and wonder about.

  Boy, you’d never get me up on that thing, Jack thought. He had gnawed the apple right down to the core, and without thinking about what he was doing or even taking his eyes off the tower, he dug a hole in the tough, springy earth with his fingers and buried the apple-core in it.

  The tower seemed made of barn-boards, and Jack guessed it had to be at least five hundred feet high. It appeared to be a big hollow square, the boards rising on all sides in X after X. There was a platform on top, and Jack, squinting, could see a number of men strolling around up there.

  Wind pushed by him in a gentle gust as he sat at the side of the road, his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped around them. Another of those grassy ripples ran away in the direction of the tower. Jack imagined the way that rickety thing must be swaying and felt his stomach turn over.

  NEVER get me up there, he thought, not for a million bucks.

  And then the thing he had been afraid might happen since the moment he had observed that there were men on the tower now did happen: one of them fell.

  Jack came to his feet. His face wore the dismayed, slack-jawed expression of anyone who has ever been present at a circus performance where some dangerous trick has gone wrong—the tumbler who falls badly and lies in a huddled heap, the aerialist who misses her grip and bounces off the net with a thud, the human pyramid that unexpectedly collapses, spilling bodies into a heap.

  Oh shit, oh cripes, oh—

  Jack’s eyes suddenly widened. For a moment his jaw sagged even farther—until it was almost lying on his breastbone, in fact—and then it came up and his mouth spread in a dazed, unbelieving grin. The man hadn’t fallen from the tower, nor had he been blown off it. There were tonguelike protrusions on two sides of the platform—they looked like diving boards—and the man had simply walked out to the end of one of these and jumped off. Halfway down something began to unfurl—a parachute, Jack thought, but it would never have time to open.

  Only it hadn’t been a parachute.

  It was wings.

  The man’s fall slowed and then stopped completely while he was still some fifty feet above the high fieldgrass. Then it reversed itself. The man was now flying upward and outward, the wings going up so high they almost touched—like the crowns on the heads of that Henny Youngman parrot—and then driving downward again with immense power, like the arms of a swimmer in a finishing sprint.

  Oh wow, Jack thought, driven back to the dumbest cliché he knew by his total, utter amazement. This topped everything; this was an utter pisser. Oh wow, look at that, oh wow.

  Now a second man leaped from the diving board at the top of the tower; now a third; now a fourth. In less than five minutes there must have been fifty men in the air, flying complicated but discernible patterns: out from the tower, describe a figure-eight, back over the tower and out to the other side, another figure-eight, back to the tower, alight on the platform, do it all again.

  They spun and danced and crisscrossed in the air. Jack began to laugh with delight. It was a little like watching the water ballets in those corny old Esther Williams movies. Those swimmers—Esther Williams herself most of all, of course—always made it look easy, as if you yourself could dip and swirl like that, or as if you and a few of your friends could easily come off the opposite sides of the diving board in timed choreography, making a kind of human fountain.

  But there was a difference. The men flying out there did not give that sense of effortlessness; they seemed to be expending prodigious amounts of energy to stay in the air, and Jack felt with sudden certainty that it hurt, the way some of the calisthenics in phys ed—leg-lifts, or halfway sit-ups, for instance—hurt. No pain, no gain! Coach would roar if someone had the nerve to complain.

  And now something else occurred to him—the time his mother had taken him with her to see her friend Myrna, who was a real ballet dancer, practicing in the loft of a dance studio on lower Wilshire Boulevard. Myrna was part of a ballet troupe and Jack had seen her and the other dancers perform—his mother often made him go with her and it was mostly boring stuff, like church or Sunrise Semester on TV. But he had never seen Myrna in practice . . . never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stage, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes, and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music—only the choreographer rhythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise; only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it was, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer’s clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living; they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions—all that exhausted concentration, all that pain . . . but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it had scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. What kind of person could get off by subjecting himself or herself to such steady, throbbing, excruciating pain?

  And pain that he was seeing here, he thought. Were they actual winged men, like the bird-people in the old Flash Gordon serials, or were the wings more in the Icarus and Daedalus line, something that you strapped on? Jack found that it didn’t really matter . . . at least, not to him
.

  Joy.

  They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery.

  It’s joy that holds them up.

  That was what mattered. It was joy that held them up, no matter if the wings grew out of their backs or were somehow held on with buckles and clamps. Because what he saw, even from this distance, was the same sort of effort he had seen in the loft on lower Wilshire that day. All that profligate investment of energy to effect a splendid, momentary reversal of natural law. That such a reversal should demand so much and last such a short time was terrible; that people would go for it anyway was both terrible and wonderful.

  And it’s all just a game, he thought and suddenly felt sure of it. A game, or maybe not even that—maybe it was only practice for a game, the way that all the sweat and trembling exhaustion in the Wilshire loft that day had just been practice. Practice for a show that only a few people would probably care to attend and which would probably close quickly.

  Joy, he thought again, standing now, his face turned up to look at the flying men in the distance, the wind spilling his hair across his forehead. His time of innocence was fast approaching its end (and, if pressed, even Jack would have reluctantly agreed that he felt such an end approaching—a boy couldn’t go on the road for long, couldn’t go through many experiences such as the one he had gone through in Oatley, and expect to remain an innocent), but in those moments as he stood looking into the sky, innocence seemed to surrounded him, like the young fisherman during his brief moment of epiphany in the Elizabeth Bishop poem, everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.

  Joy—damn, but that’s a cheerful little word.

  Feeling better than he had since all of this began—and only God knew just how long ago that had been—Jack set off along the Western Road again, his step light, his face wreathed in that same silly, splendid grin. Every now and then he looked back over his shoulder, and he was able to see the fliers for a very long time. The Territories air was so clear it almost seemed to magnify. And even after he could no longer see them, that feeling of joy remained, like a rainbow inside his head.