Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  A family passing in an old station-wagon stopped squabbling long enough to look at him curiously. The man driving the wagon, a balding C.P.A. who sometimes awoke in the middle of the night fancying that he could feel shooting pains in his chest and down his left arm, had a sudden and absurd series of thoughts: Adventure. Danger. A quest of some noble purpose. Dreams of fear and glory. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and glanced at the boy in the wagon’s rear-view mirror just as the kid leaned over to look at something. Christ, the balding C.P.A. thought. Get it out of your head, Larry, you sound like a fucking boys’ adventure book.

  Larry shot into traffic, quickly getting the wagon up to seventy, forgetting about the kid in the dirty jeans by the side of the road. If he could get home by three, he’d be in good time to watch the middleweight title fight on ESPN.

  The coin came down. Jack bent over it. It was heads . . . but that was not all.

  The lady on the coin wasn’t Lady Liberty. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories. But God, what a difference here from the pale, still, sleeping face he had glimpsed for a moment in the pavillion, surrounded by anxious nurses in their billowing white wimples! This face was alert and aware, eager and beautiful. It was not a classic beauty; the line of the jaw was not clear enough for that, and the cheekbone which showed in profile was a little soft. Her beauty was in the regal set of her head combined with the clear sense that she was kind as well as capable.

  And oh it was so like the face of his mother.

  Jack’s eyes blurred with tears and he blinked them hard, not wanting the tears to fall. He had cried enough for one day. He had his answer, and it was not for crying over.

  When he opened his eyes again, Laura DeLoessian was gone; the woman on the coin was Lady Liberty again.

  He had his answer all the same.

  Jack bent over, picked up the coin out of the dust, put it in his pocket, and headed down the westbound ramp of Interstate 70.

  3

  A day later; white overcast in the air that tasted of chilly rain on its way; the Ohio-Indiana border not much more than a lick and a promise from here.

  “Here” was in a scrub of woods beyond the Lewisburg rest area on I-70. Jack was standing concealed—he hoped—among the trees, patiently waiting for the large bald man with the large bald voice to get back into his Chevy Nova and drive away. Jack hoped he would go soon, before it started to rain. He was cold enough without getting wet, and all morning his sinuses had been plugged, his voice foggy. He thought he must finally be getting a cold.

  The large bald man with the large bald voice had given his name as Emory W. Light. He had picked Jack up around eleven o’clock, north of Dayton, and Jack had felt a tired sinking sensation in the pit of his belly almost at once. He had gotten rides with Emory W. Light before. In Vermont Light had called himself Tom Ferguson, and said he was a shoe-shop foreman; in Pennsylvania the alias had been Bob Darrent (“Almost like that fellow who sang ’Splish-Splash,’ ah-ha-hah-hah”), and the job had changed to District High School Superintendent; this time Light said he was President of the First Mercantile Bank of Paradise Falls, in the town of Paradise Falls, Ohio. Ferguson had been lean and dark, Darrent as portly and pink as a freshly tubbed baby, and this Emory W. Light was large and owlish, with eyes like boiled eggs behind his rimless glasses.

  Yet all of these differences were only superficial, Jack had found. They all listened to the Story with the same breathless interest. They all asked him if he had had any girlfriends back home. Sooner or later he would find a hand (a large bald hand) lying on his thigh, and when he looked at Ferguson/Darrent/Light, he would see an expression of half-mad hope in the eyes (mixed with half-mad guilt) and a stipple of sweat on the upper lip (in the case of Darrent, the sweat had gleamed through a dark moustache like tiny white eyes peering through scant underbrush).

  Ferguson had asked him if he would like to make ten dollars.

  Darrent had upped that to twenty.

  Light, in a large bald voice that nonetheless cracked and quivered through several registers, asked him if he couldn’t use fifty dollars—he always kept a fifty in the heel of his left shoe, he said, and he’d just love to give it to Master Lewis Farren. There was a place they could go near Randolph. An empty barn.

  Jack did not make any correlation between the steadily increasing monetary offers from Light in his various incarnations and any changes his adventures might be working on him—he was not introspective by nature and had little interest in self-analysis.

  He had learned quickly enough how to deal with fellows like Emory W. Light. His first experience with Light, when Light had been calling himself Tom Ferguson, had taught him that discretion was by far the better part of valor. When Ferguson put his hand on Jack’s thigh, Jack had responded automatically out of a California sensibility in which gays had been merely part of the scenery: “No thanks, mister. I’m strictly A.C.”

  He had been groped before, certainly—in movie theaters, mostly, but there had been the men’s-shop clerk in North Hollywood who had cheerfully offered to blow him in a changing booth (and when Jack told him no thanks, the clerk said, “Fine, now try on the blue blazer, okay?”).

  These were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your whole day. The deliberate passes, such as the one this Ferguson was making, were less of a problem than the sudden gropes from ambush. They could simply be shunted aside.

  At least in California they could. Eastern gays—especially out here in the sticks—apparently had a different way of dealing with rejection.

  Ferguson had come to a screeching, sliding halt, leaving forty yards of rubber behind his Pontiac and throwing a cloud of shoulder-dust into the air.

  “Who you calling D.C.?” he screamed. “Who you calling queer? I’m not queer! Jesus! Give a kid a fucking ride and he calls you a fucking queer!”

  Jack was looking at him, dazed. Unprepared for the sudden stop, he had thumped his head a damned good one on the padded dash. Ferguson, who had only a moment before been looking at him with melting brown eyes, now looked ready to kill him.

  “Get out!” Ferguson yelled. “You’re the queer, not me! You’re the queer! Get out, you little queerboy! Get out! I’ve got a wife! I’ve got kids! I’ve probably got bastards scattered all over New England! I’m not queer! You’re the queer, not me, SO GET OUT OF MY CAR!”

  More terrified than he had been since his encounter with Osmond, Jack had done just that. Ferguson tore out, spraying him with gravel, still raving. Jack staggered over to a rock wall, sat down, and began to giggle. The giggles became shrieks of laughter, and he decided right then and there that he would have to develop A POLICY, at least until he got out of the boondocks. “Any serious problem demands A POLICY,” his father had said once. Morgan had agreed vigorously, but Jack decided he shouldn’t let that hold him back.

  His POLICY had worked well enough with Bob Darrent, and he had no reason to believe it wouldn’t also work with Emory Light . . . but in the meantime he was cold and his nose was running. He wished Light would head em up and move em out. Standing in the trees, Jack could see him down there, walking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, his large bald head gleaming mellowly under the white-out sky. On the turnpike, big semis droned by, filling the air with the stink of burned diesel fuel. The woods here were trashed-out, the way the woods bordering any interstate rest area always were. Empty Dorito bags. Squashed Big Mac boxes. Crimped Pepsi and Budweiser cans with pop-tops that rattled inside if you kicked them. Smashed bottles of Wild Irish Rose and Five O’Clock gin. A pair of shredded nylon panties over there, with a mouldering sanitary napkin still glued to the crotch. A rubber poked over a broken branch. Plenty of nifty stuff, all right, hey-hey. And lots of graffiti jotted on the walls of the men’s room, almost all of it the sort a fellow lik
e Emory W. Light could really relate to: I LIKE TO SUK BIG FAT COX. BE HERE AT 4 FOR THE BEST BLOJOB YOU EVER HAD. REEM OUT MY BUTT. And here was a gay poet with large aspirations: LET THE HOLE HUMAN RACE/JERK OFF ON MY SMILING FACE.

  I’m homesick for the Territories, Jack thought, and there was no surprise at all in the realization. Here he stood behind two brick outhouses off I-70 somewhere in western Ohio, shivering in a ragged sweater he had bought in a thrift store for a buck and a half, waiting for that large bald man down there to get back on his horse and ride.

  Jack’s POLICY was simplicity itself: don’t antagonize a man with large bald hands and a large bald voice.

  Jack sighed with relief. Now it was starting to work. An expression that was half-anger, half-disgust, had settled over Emory W. Light’s large bald face. He went back to his car, got in, backed up so fast he almost hit the pick-up truck passing behind him (there was a brief blare of horns and the passenger in the truck shot Emory W. Light the finger), and then left.

  Now it was only a matter of standing on the ramp where the rest-area traffic rejoined the turnpike traffic with his thumb out . . . and, he hoped, catching a ride before it started to rain.

  Jack spared another look around. Ugly, wretched. These words came quite naturally to mind as he looked around at the littery desolation here on the rest area’s pimply backside. It occurred to Jack that there was a feeling of death here—not just at this rest area or on the interstate roads but pressed deep into all the country he had travelled. Jack thought that sometimes he could even see it, a desperate shade of hot dark brown, like the exhaust from the shortstack of a fast-moving Jimmy-Pete.

  The new homesickness came back—the wanting to go to the Territories and see that dark blue sky, the slight curve at the edge of the horizon. . . .

  But it plays those Jerry Bledsoe changes.

  Don’t know nothin bout dat . . . All I know is you seem to have this idear of “moider” a little broad. . . .

  Walking down to the rest area—now he really did have to urinate—Jack sneezed three times, quickly. He swallowed and winced at the hot prickle in his throat. Getting sick, oh yeah. Great. Not even into Indiana yet, fifty degrees, rain in the forecast, no ride, and now I’m—

  The thought broke off cleanly. He stared at the parking lot, his mouth falling wide open. For one awful moment he thought he was going to wet his pants as everything below his breastbone seemed to cramp and squeeze.

  Sitting in one of the twenty or so slant parking spaces, its deep green surface now dulled with road-dirt, was Uncle Morgan’s BMW. No chance of a mistake; no chance at all. California vanity plates MLS, standing for Morgan Luther Sloat. It looked as if it had been driven fast and hard.

  But if he flew to New Hampshire, how can his car be here? Jack’s mind yammered. It’s a coincidence, Jack, just a—

  Then he saw the man standing with his back to him at the pay telephone and knew it was no coincidence. He was wearing a bulky Army-style anorak, fur-lined, a garment more suited to five below than to fifty degrees. Back-to or not, there was no mistaking those broad shoulders and that big, loose, hulking frame.

  The man at the phone started to turn around, crooking the phone between his ear and shoulder.

  Jack drew back against the brick side of the men’s toilet.

  Did he see me?

  No, he answered himself. No, I don’t think so. But—

  But Captain Farren had said that Morgan—that other Morgan—would smell him like a cat smells a rat, and so he had. From his hiding place in that dangerous forest, Jack had seen the hideous white face in the window of the diligence change.

  This Morgan would smell him, too. If given the time.

  Footfalls around the corner, approaching.

  Face numb and twisted with fear, Jack fumbled off his pack and then dropped it, knowing he was too late, too slow, that Morgan would come around the corner and seize him by the neck, smiling. Hi, Jacky! Allee-allee-in-free! Game’s over now, isn’t it, you little prick?

  A tall man in a houndstooth-check jacket passed the corner of the rest-room, gave Jack a disinterested glance, and went to the drinking fountain.

  Going back. He was going back. There was no guilt, at least not now; only that terrible trapped fear mingling oddly with feelings of relief and pleasure. Jack fumbled his pack open. Here was Speedy’s bottle, with less than an inch of the purple liquid now left

  (no boy needs dat poison to travel with but I do Speedy I do!)

  sloshing around in the bottom. No matter. He was going back. His heart leaped at the thought. A big Saturday-night grin dawned on his face, denying both the gray day and the fear in his heart. Going back, oh yeah, dig it.

  More footsteps approaching, and this was Uncle Morgan, no doubt about that heavy yet somehow mincing step. But the fear was gone. Uncle Morgan had smelled something, but when he turned the corner he would see nothing but empty Dorito bags and crimped beercans.

  Jack pulled in breath—pulled in the greasy stink of diesel fumes and car exhausts and cold autumn air. Tipped the bottle up to his lips. Took one of the two swallows left. And even with his eyes shut he squinted as—

  16

  Wolf

  1

  —the strong sunlight struck his closed lids.

  Through the gagging-sweet odor of the magic juice he could smell something else . . . the warm smell of animals. He could hear them, too, moving all about him.

  Frightened, Jack opened his eyes but at first could see nothing—the difference in the light was so sudden and abrupt that it was as if someone had suddenly turned on a cluster of two-hundred-watt bulbs in a black room.

  A warm, hide-covered flank brushed him, not in a threatening way (or so Jack hoped), but most definitely in an I’m-in-a-hurry-to-be-gone-thank-you-very-much way. Jack, who had been getting up, thumped back to the ground again.

  “Hey! Hey! Get away from im! Right here and right now!” A loud, healthy whack followed by a disgruntled animal sound somewhere between a moo and a baa. “God’s nails! Got no sense! Get away from im fore I bite your God-pounding eyes out!”

  Now his eyes had adjusted enough to the brightness of this almost flawless Territories autumn day to make out a young giant standing in the middle of a herd of milling animals, whacking their sides and slightly humped backs with what appeared to be great gusto and very little real force. Jack sat up, automatically finding Speedy’s bottle with its one precious swallow left and putting it away. He never took his eyes from the young man who stood with his back to him.

  Tall he was—six-five at least, Jack guessed—and with shoulders so broad that his across still looked slightly out of proportion to his high. Long, greasy black hair shagged down his back to the shoulder blades. Muscles bulged and rippled as he moved amid the animals, which looked like pygmy cows. He was driving them away from Jack and toward the Western Road.

  He was a striking figure, even when seen from behind, but what amazed Jack was his dress. Everyone he had seen in the Territories (including himself) had been wearing tunics, jerkins, or rough breeches.

  This fellow appeared to be wearing Oshkosh bib overalls.

  Then he turned around and Jack felt a horrible shocked dismay well up in his throat. He shot to his feet.

  It was the Elroy-thing.

  The herdsman was the Elroy-thing.

  2

  Except it wasn’t.

  Jack perhaps would not have lingered to see that, and everything that happened thereafter—the movie theater, the shed, and the hell of the Sunlight Home—would not have happened (or would, at the very least, have happened in some completely different way), but in the extremity of his terror he froze completely after getting up. He was no more able to run than a deer is when it is frozen in a hunter’s jacklight.

  As the figure in the bib overalls approached, he thought: Elroy wasn’t that tall or that broad. And his eyes were yellow—The eyes of this creature were a bright, impossible shade of orange. Looking into them was like
looking into the eyes of a Halloween pumpkin. And while Elroy’s grin had promised madness and murder, the smile on this fellow’s face was large and cheerful and harmless.

  His feet were bare, huge, and spatulate, the toes clumped into groups of three and two, barely visible through curls of wiry hair. Not hooflike, as Elroy’s had been, Jack realized, half-crazed with surprise, fear, a dawning amusement, but padlike-pawlike.

  As he closed the distance between himself and Jack,

  (his? its?)

  eyes flared an even brighter orange, going for a moment to the Day-Glo shade favored by hunters and flagmen on road-repair jobs. The color faded to a muddy hazel. As it did, Jack saw that his smile was puzzled as well as friendly, and understood two things at once: first, that there was no harm in this fellow, not an ounce of it, and second, that he was slow. Not feeble, perhaps, but slow.

  “Wolf!” the big, hairy boy-beast cried, grinning. His tongue was long and pointed, and Jack thought with a shudder that a wolf was exactly what he looked like. Not a goat but a wolf. He hoped he was right about there not being any harm in him. But if I made a mistake about that, at least I won’t have to worry about making any more mistakes . . . ever again. “Wolf! Wolf!” He stuck out one hand, and Jack saw that, like his feet, his hands were covered with hair, although this hair was finer and more luxuriant—actually quite handsome. It grew especially thick in the palms, where it was the soft white of a blaze on a horse’s forehead.

  My God I think he wants to shake hands with me!

  Gingerly, thinking of Uncle Tommy, who had told him he must never refuse a handshake, not even with his worst enemy (“Fight him to the death afterward if you must, but shake his hand first,” Uncle Tommy had said), Jack put his own hand out, wondering if it was about to be crushed . . . or perhaps eaten.

  “Wolf! Wolf! Shakin hands right here and now!” the boything in the Oshkosh biballs cried, delighted. “Right here and now! Good old Wolf! God-pound it! Right here and now! Wolf!”