Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  “You’ve got a degree of fever at most, Richard,” Jack said calmly. “Probably not even that—”

  “I’m burning up!” Richard protested.

  “They’re throwing stones, Richard.”

  “Hallucinations can’t throw stones, Jack,” Richard said, as if explaining some simple but vital fact to a mental defective. “That’s Seabrook Island stuff. It’s—”

  Another volley of rocks flew through the window.

  “Send out your passenger, Sloat!”

  “Come on, Richard,” Jack said, getting the other boy to his feet. He led him to the door and outside. He felt enormously sorry for Richard now—perhaps not as sorry as he had felt for Wolf . . . but he was getting there.

  “No . . . sick . . . fever . . . I can’t . . .”

  More rocks thudded against the bureau behind them.

  Richard shrieked and clutched at Jack like a boy who is drowning.

  Wild, cackling laughter from outside. Dogs howled and fought with each other.

  Jack saw Richard’s white face grow whiter still, saw him sway, and got up in a hurry. But he was not quite in time to catch Richard before he collapsed in Reuel Gardener’s doorway.

  5

  It was a simple fainting spell, and Richard came around quickly enough when Jack pinched the delicate webbings between his thumbs and forefingers. He would not talk about what was outside—affected, in fact, not to know what Jack was talking about.

  They moved cautiously down the hallway toward the stairs. At the common room Jack poked his head in and whistled. “Richard, look at this!”

  Richard looked reluctantly in. The common room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cushions on the couch had been slashed open. The oil portrait of Elder Thayer on the far wall had been defaced—someone had crayoned a pair of devil’s horns poking out of his neat white hair, someone else had added a moustache under his nose, and a third had used a nail-file or similar implement to scratch a crude phallus on his crotch. The glass of the trophy case was shattered.

  Jack didn’t much care for the look of drugged, unbelieving horror on Richard’s face. In some ways, elves trooping up and down the halls in glowing, unearthly platoons or dragons over the quad would have been easier for Richard to take than this constant erosion of the Thayer School he had come to know and love . . . the Thayer School Richard undoubtedly believed to be noble and good, an undisputed bulwark against a world where nothing could be counted on for long . . . not even, Jack thought, that fathers would come back out of the closets they had gone into.

  “Who did this?” Richard asked angrily. “Those freaks did it,” he answered himself. “That’s who.” He looked at Jack, a great, cloudy suspicion beginning to dawn on his face. “They might be Colombians,” he said suddenly. “They might be Colombians, and this might be some sort of drug-war, Jack. Has that occurred to you?”

  Jack had to throttle an urge to bellow out mad gusts of laughter. Here was an explanation which perhaps only Richard Sloat could have conceived. It was the Colombians. The cocaine range-wars had come to Thayer School in Springfield, Illinois. Elementary, my dear Watson; this problem has a seven and a half percent solution.

  “I guess anything’s possible,” Jack said. “Let’s take a look upstairs.”

  “What in God’s name for?”

  “Well . . . maybe we’ll find someone else,” Jack said. He didn’t really believe this, but it was something to say. “Maybe someone’s hiding out up there. Someone normal like us.”

  Richard looked at Jack, then back at the shambles of the common room. That look of haunted pain came back into his face again, the look that said I don’t really want to look at this, but for some reason it seems to be all I DO want to look at right now; it’s bitterly compulsive, like biting a lemon, or scratching your fingernails across a blackboard, or scraping the tines of a fork on the porcelain of a sink.

  “Dope is rampant in the country,” Richard said in eerie lecture-hall tones. “I read an article on drug proliferation in The New Republic just last week. Jack, all those people out there could be doped up! They could be freebasing! They could be—”

  “Come on, Richard,” Jack said quietly.

  “I’m not sure I can climb the stairs,” Richard said, weakly querulous. “My fever may be too bad for me to climb stairs.”

  “Well, give it the good old Thayer try,” Jack said, and continued to lead him in that direction.

  6

  As they reached the second-floor landing, sound bled back into the smooth, almost breathless silence that had held inside Nelson House.

  Dogs snarled and barked outside—it sounded as if there were not just dozens or scores of them now, but hundreds. The bells in the chapel burst into a wild jangle of sound.

  The bells were driving the mongrel dogs racing back and forth across the quad absolutely nuts. They turned on each other, rolled over and over on the grass—which was beginning to look ragged, weedy, and unkempt—and savaged anything within mouthshot. As Jack watched, one of them attacked an elm tree. Another launched itself at the statue of Elder Thayer. As its biting, snapping muzzle collided with the solid bronze, blood splashed and sprayed.

  Jack turned away, sickened. “Come on, Richard,” Jack said.

  Richard came willingly enough.

  7

  The second floor was a jumbled confusion of overturned furniture, shattered windows, fistfuls of stuffing, records that had apparently been thrown like Frisbees, clothes that had been tossed everywhere.

  The third floor was cloudy with steam and as warmly moist as a tropical rain-forest. As they got closer to the door marked SHOWERS, the heat went up to sauna levels. The mist they had first encountered creeping down the stairs in thin tendrils grew foglike and opaque.

  “Stay here,” Jack said. “Wait for me.”

  “Sure, Jack,” Richard said serenely, raising his voice enough to be heard over the drumming showers. His glasses had fogged up, but he made no effort to wipe them off.

  Jack pushed the door open and went in. The heat was soggy and thick. His clothes were soaked at once from sweat and the hot, foggy moisture. The tile-lined room roared and drummed with water. All twenty of the showers had been turned on, and the driving needle-spray from all twenty had been focused on a pile of sports equipment in the middle of the tiled room. The water was able to drain through this crazy pile, but only slowly, and the room was awash. Jack took off his shoes and circled the room, sliding under the showers to keep himself as dry as possible, and also to keep himself from being scalded—whoever had turned on the showers hadn’t bothered with the cold faucets, apparently. He turned all of them off, one by one. There was no reason for him to do this, no reason at all, and he scolded himself for wasting time in such a way, when he should be trying to think of a way for them to get out of here—out of Nelson House and off the Thayer School grounds—before the axe fell.

  No reason for it, except that maybe Richard wasn’t the only one with a need to create order out of chaos . . . to create order and to maintain it.

  He went back into the hall and Richard was gone.

  “Richard?” He could feel his heartbeat picking up in his chest.

  There was no answer. “Richard!”

  Spilled cologne hung on the air, noxiously heavy.

  “Richard, where the hell are you!”

  Richard’s hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack shrieked.

  8

  “I don’t know why you had to yell like that,” Richard said later. “It was only me.”

  “I’m just nervous,” Jack said wanly.

  They were sitting in the third-floor room of a boy with the strangely harmonious name of Albert Humbert. Richard told him that Albert Humbert, whose nickname was Albert the Blob, was the fattest boy in school, and Jack could believe it; his room contained an amazing variety of junk food—it was the stash of a kid whose worst nightmare isn’t getting cut from the basketball team or flunking a trig test but rather waking
up in the night and not being able to find a Ring-Ding or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. A lot of the stuff had been thrown around. The glass jar containing the Marshmallow Fluff had been broken, but Jack had never been very wild about Marshmallow Fluff, anyway. He also passed on the licorice whips—Albert the Blob had a whole carton of them stashed on the upper shelf of his closet. Written across one of the carton-flaps was Happy birthday, dear, from Your Loving Mom.

  Some Loving Moms send cartons of licorice whips, and some Loving Dads send blazers from Brooks Brothers, Jack thought wearily, and if there’s any difference, Jason alone knows what it is.

  They found enough food in the room of Albert the Blob to make a crazy sort of meal—Slim Jims, pepperoni slices, Salt ’n Vinegar potato chips. Now they were finishing up with a package of cookies. Jack had retrieved Albert’s chair from the hall and was sitting by the window. Richard was sitting on Albert’s bed.

  “Well, you sure are nervous,” Richard agreed, shaking his head in refusal when Jack offered him the last cookie. “Paranoid, actually. It comes from spending the last couple of months on the road. You’ll be okay once you get home to your mother, Jack.”

  “Richard,” Jack said, tossing away the empty Famous Amos bag, “let’s cut the shit. Do you see what’s going on outside on your campus?”

  Richard wet his lips. “I explained that,” he said. “I have a fever. Probably none of this is happening at all, and if it is, then perfectly ordinary things are going on and my mind is twisting them, heightening them. That’s one possibility. The other is . . . well . . . drug-pushers.”

  Richard sat forward on Albert the Blob’s bed.

  “You haven’t been experimenting with drugs, have you, Jack? While you were on the road?” The old intelligent, incisive light had suddenly rekindled in Richard’s eyes. Here’s a possible explanation, a possible way out of this madness, his eyes said. Jack has gotten involved in some crazy drug-scam, and all these people have followed him here.

  “No,” Jack said wearily. “I always used to think of you as the master of reality, Richard,” Jack said. “I never thought I’d live to see you—you!—using your brains to twist the facts.”

  “Jack, that’s just a . . . a crock, and you know it!”

  “Drug-wars in Springfield, Illinois?” Jack asked. “Who’s talking Seabrook Island stuff now?”

  And that was when a rock suddenly crashed in through Albert Humbert’s window, spraying glass across the floor.

  33

  Richard in the Dark

  1

  Richard screamed and threw an arm up to shield his face. Glass flew.

  “Send him out, Sloat!”

  Jack got up. Dull fury filled him.

  Richard grabbed his arm. “Jack, no! Stay away from the window!”

  “Fuck that,” Jack almost snarled. “I’m tired of being talked about like I was a pizza.”

  The Etheridge-thing stood across the road. It was on the sidewalk at the edge of the quad, looking up at them.

  “Get out of here!” Jack shouted at it. A sudden inspiration burst in his head like a sunflare. He hesitated, then bellowed: “I order you out of here! All of you! I order you to leave in the name of my mother, the Queen!”

  The Etheridge-thing flinched as if someone had used a whip to lay a stripe across its face.

  Then the look of pained surprise passed and the Etheridge-thing began to grin. “She’s dead, Sawyer!” it shouted up—but Jack’s eyes had grown sharper, somehow, in his time on the road, and he saw the expression of twitchy unease under the manufactured triumph. “Queen Laura’s dead and your mother’s dead, too . . . dead back in New Hampshire . . . dead and stinking.”

  “Begone!” Jack bellowed, and he thought that the Etheridge-thing flinched back in baffled fury again.

  Richard had joined him at the window, pallid and distracted. “What are you two yelling about?” he asked. He looked fixedly at the grinning travesty below them and across the way. “How does Etheridge know your mother’s in New Hampshire?”

  “Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing yelled up. “Where’s your tie?”

  A spasm of guilt contracted Richard’s face; his hands jerked toward the open neck of his shirt.

  “We’ll let it go this time, if you send out your passenger, Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing yelled up. “If you send him out, everything can go back to the way it was! You want that, don’t you?”

  Richard was staring down at the Etheridge-thing, nodding—Jack was sure of it—quite unconsciously. His face was a knotted rag of misery, his eyes bright with unshed tears. He wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, oh yes.

  “Don’t you love this school, Sloat?” the Etheridge-thing bellowed up at Albert’s window.

  “Yes,” Richard muttered, and gulped down a sob. “Yes, of course I love it.”

  “You know what we do to little punks who don’t love this school? Give him to us! It’ll be like he was never here!”

  Richard turned slowly and looked at Jack with dreadfully blank eyes.

  “You decide, Richie-boy,” Jack said softly.

  “He’s carrying drugs, Richard!” the Etheridge-thing called up. “Four or five different kinds! Coke, hash, angel-dust! He’s been selling all of that stuff to finance his trip west! Where do you think he got that nice coat he was wearing when he showed up on your doorstep?”

  “Drugs,” Richard said with great, shuddery relief. “I knew it.”

  “But you don’t believe it,” Jack said. “Drugs didn’t change your school, Richard. And the dogs—”

  “Send him out, Sl . . .” the Etheridge-thing’s voice was fading, fading.

  When the two boys looked down again, it was gone.

  “Where did your father go, do you think?” Jack asked softly. “Where do you think he went when he didn’t come out of the closet, Richard?”

  Richard turned slowly to look at him, and Richard’s face, usually so calm and intelligent and serene, now began to shiver into pieces. His chest began to hitch irregularly. Richard suddenly fell into Jack’s arms, clutching at him with a blind, panicky urgency. “It t-t-touched muh-me-eeee!” he screamed at Jack. His body trembled under Jack’s hands like a winchwire under a near-breaking strain. “It touched me, it t-touched m-me, something in there t-t-touched me AND I DON’T NUH-NUH-KNOW WHAT IT WAS!”

  2

  With his burning forehead pressed against Jack’s shoulder, Richard coughed out the story he had held inside him all these years. It came in hard little chunks, like deformed bullets. As he listened, Jack found himself remembering the time his own father had gone into the garage . . . and had come back two hours later, from around the block. That had been bad, but what had happened to Richard had been a lot worse. It explained Richard’s iron, no-compromise insistence on reality, the whole reality, and nothing but the reality. It explained his rejection of any sort of fantasy, even science fiction . . . and, Jack knew from his own school experience, techies like Richard usually ate and drank sf . . . as long as it was the hard stuff, that was, your basic Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven—spare us the metaphysical bullshit of the Robert Silverbergs and Barry Malzbergs, please, but we’ll read the stuff where they get all the stellar quadrants and logarithms right until it’s running out of our ears. Not Richard, though. Richard’s dislike of fantasy ran so deep that he would not pick up any novel unless it was an assignment—as a kid, he had let Jack pick out the books he read for free-choice book reports, not caring what they were, chewing them up as if they were cereal. It became a challenge to Jack to find a story—any story—which would please Richard, divert Richard, carry Richard away as good novels and stories sometimes carried Jack away . . . the good ones, he thought, were almost as good as the Daydreams, and each mapped out its own version of the Territories. But he was never able to produce any frisson, any spark, any reaction at all. Whether it was The Red Pony, Dragstrip Demon, The Catcher in the Rye, or I Am Legend, the reaction was always the same—frownin
g, dull-eyed concentration, followed by a frowning, dull-eyed book report that would earn either a hook or, if his English teacher was feeling particularly generous that day, a B-. Richard’s Cs in English were what kept him off the honor roll during the few marking periods when he missed it.

  Jack had finished William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, feeling hot and cold and trembly all over—both exalted and frightened, most of all wishing what he always wished when the story was most particularly good—that it didn’t have to stop, that it could just roll on and on, the way that life did (only life was always so much more boring and so much more pointless than stories). He knew Richard had a book report due and so he had given him the lap-eared paperback, thinking that this must surely do it, this would turn the trick, Richard must react to the story of these lost boys and their descent into savagery. But Richard had plodded through Lord of the Flies as he had plodded through all the other novels before it, and wrote another book report which contained all the zeal and fire of a hungover pathologist’s post-mortem on a traffic accident victim. What is it with you? Jack had burst out, exasperated. What in God’s name have you got against a good story, Richard? And Richard had looked at him, flabbergasted, apparently really not understanding Jack’s anger. Well, there’s really no such thing as a good made-up story, is there? Richard had responded.

  Jack had gone away that day sorely puzzled by Richard’s total rejection of make-believe, but he thought he understood better now—better than he really wanted to, perhaps. Perhaps to Richard each opening storybook cover had looked a little like an opening closet door; perhaps each bright paperback cover, illustrating people who never were as if they were perfectly real, reminded Richard of the morning when he had Had Enough, Forever.

  3

  Richard sees his father go into the closet in the big front bedroom, pulling the folding door shut behind him. He is five, maybe . . . or six . . . surely not as old as seven. He waits five minutes, then ten, and when his father still hasn’t come out of the closet he begins to be a little frightened. He calls. He calls