Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  (for his pipe he calls for his bowl he calls for his)

  father and when his father doesn’t answer he calls in a louder and louder voice and he goes closer and closer to the closet as he calls and finally, when fifteen minutes have gone by and his father still hasn’t come out, Richard pulls the folding door open and goes in. He goes into darkness like a cave.

  And something happens.

  After pushing through the rough tweeds and the smooth cottons and the occasional slick silks of his father’s coats and suits and sport jackets, the smell of cloth and mothballs and closed-up dark closet air begins to give way to another smell—a hot, fiery smell. Richard begins to blunder forward, screaming his father’s name, he thinking there must be a fire back here and his father may be burning in it, because it smells like a fire . . . and suddenly he realizes that the boards are gone under his feet, and he is standing in black dirt. Weird black insects with clustered eyes on the ends of long stalks are hopping all around his fuzzy slippers. Daddy! he screams. The coats and suits are gone, the floor is gone, but it isn’t crisp white snow underfoot; it’s stinking black dirt which is apparently the birthing ground for these unpleasant black jumping insects; this place is by no stretch of the imagination Narnia. Other screams answer Richard’s scream—screams and mad, demented laughter. Smoke drifts around him on a dark idiot wind and Richard turns, stumbling back the way he came, hands outstretched like the hands of a blind man, feeling frantically for the coats, smelling for the faint, acrid reek of mothballs—

  And suddenly a hand slithers around his wrist.

  Daddy? he asks, but when he looks down he sees not a human hand but a scaly green thing covered with writhing suckers, a green thing attached to a long, rubbery arm which stretches off into the darkness and toward a pair of yellow, upslanted eyes that stare at him with flat hunger.

  Screeching, he tears free and flings himself blindly into the black . . . and just as his groping fingers find his father’s sport coats and suits again, as he hears the blessed, rational sound of jangling coathangers, that green, sucker-lined hand waltzes dryly across the back of his neck again . . . and is gone.

  He waits, trembling, as pallid as day-old ashes in a cold stove, for three hours outside that damned closet, afraid to go back in, afraid of the green hand and the yellow eyes, more and more sure that his father must be dead. And when his father comes back into the room near the end of the fourth hour, not from the closet but from the door which communicates between the bedroom and the upstairs hall—the door BEHIND Richard—when that happens, Richard rejects fantasy for good and all; Richard negates fantasy; Richard refuses to deal with fantasy, or treat with it, or compromise with it. He has, quite simply, Had Enough, Forever. He jumps up, runs to his father, to the beloved Morgan Sloat, and hugs him so tightly that his arms will be sore all that week. Morgan lifts him up, laughs, and asks him why he looks so pale. Richard smiles, and tells him that it was probably something he ate for breakfast, but he feels better now, and he kisses his father’s cheek, and smells the beloved smell of mingled sweat and Raj cologne. And later that day, he takes all of his storybooks—the Little Golden Books, the pop-up books, the I-Can-Read books, the Dr. Seuss books, the Green Fairy Book for Young Folks, and he puts them in a carton, and he puts the carton down in the basement, and he thinks: “I would not care if an earthquake came now and opened a crack in the floor and swallowed up every one of those books. In fact, it would be a relief. In fact, it would be such a relief that I would probably laugh all day and most of the weekend.” This does not happen, but Richard feels a great relief when the books are shut in double darkness—the darkness of the carton and the darkness of the cellar. He never looks at them again, just as he never goes in his father’s closet with the folding door again, and although he sometimes dreams that there is something under his bed or in his closet, something with flat yellow eyes, he never thinks about that green, sucker-covered hand again until the strange time comes to Thayer School and he bursts into unaccustomed tears in his friend Jack Sawyer’s arms.

  He has Had Enough, Forever.

  4

  Jack had hoped that with the telling of his story and the passing of his tears, Richard would return—more or less—to his normal, sharply rational self. Jack didn’t really care if Richard bought the whole nine yards or not; if Richard could just reconcile himself to accepting the leading edge of this craziness, he could turn his formidable mind to helping Jack find a way out . . . a way off the Thayer campus, anyway, and out of Richard’s life before Richard went totally bananas.

  But it didn’t work that way. When Jack tried to talk to him—to tell Richard about the time his own father, Phil, had gone into the garage and hadn’t come out—Richard refused to listen. The old secret of what had happened that day in the closet was out (sort of; Richard still clung stubbornly to the idea that it had been a hallucination), but Richard had still Had Enough, Forever.

  The next morning, Jack went downstairs. He got all of his own things and those things he thought Richard might want—toothbrush, textbooks, notebooks, a fresh change of clothes. They would spend that day in Albert the Blob’s room, he decided. They could keep an eye on the quad and the gate from up there. When night fell again, maybe they could get away.

  5

  Jack hunted through Albert’s desk and found a bottle of baby aspirin. He looked at this for a moment, thinking that these little orange pills said almost as much about the departed Albert’s Loving Mom as the carton of licorice whips on the closet shelf. Jack shook out half a dozen pills. He gave them to Richard and Richard took them absently. “Come on over here and lie down,” Jack said.

  “No,” Richard answered—his tone was cross and restless and terribly unhappy. He returned to the window. “I ought to keep a watch. So a full report can be made to . . . to . . . to the trustees. Later.”

  Jack touched Richard’s brow lightly. And although it was cool—almost chilly—he said: “Your fever’s worse, Richard. Better lie down until that aspirin goes to work.”

  “Worse?” Richard looked at him with pathetic gratitude. “Is it?”

  “It is,” Jack said gravely. “Come on and lie down.”

  Richard was asleep five minutes after he lay down. Jack sat in Albert the Blob’s easy chair, its seat nearly as sprung as the middle of Albert’s mattress. Richard’s pale face glowed waxily in the growing daylight.

  6

  Somehow the day passed, and around four o’clock, Jack fell asleep. He awoke to darkness, not knowing how long he had been out. He only knew there had been no dreams, and for that he was grateful. Richard was stirring uneasily and Jack guessed he would be up soon. He stood and stretched, wincing at the stiffness in his back. He went to the window, looked out, and stood motionless, eyes wide. His first thought was I don’t want Richard to see this. Not if I can help it.

  O God, we’ve got to get out of here, and just as soon as we can, Jack thought, frightened. Even if, for whatever reasons, they’re afraid to come straight at us.

  But was he really going to take Richard out of here? They didn’t think he would do it, he knew that—they were counting on his refusing to expose his friend to any more of this craziness.

  Flip, Jack-O. You’ve got to flip over, and you know it. And you’ve got to take Richard with you because this place is going to hell.

  I can’t. Flipping into the Territories would blow Richard’s wheels completely.

  Doesn’t matter. You have to do it. It’s the best thing, anyway—maybe the only thing—because they won’t be expecting it.

  “Jack?” Richard was sitting up. His face had a strange, naked look without his glasses. “Jack, is it over? Was it a dream?”

  Jack sat down on the bed and put an arm around Richard’s shoulders. “No,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “It’s not over yet, Richard.”

  “I think my fever’s worse,” Richard announced, pulling away from Jack. He drifted over to the window, one of the bows of his glasses pinche
d delicately between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He put his spectacles on and looked out. Shapes with glowing eyes roamed back and forth. He stood there for a long time, and then he did something so un-Richardlike that Jack could barely credit it. He took his glasses off again and deliberately dropped them. There was a frigid little crunch as one lens cracked. Then he stepped deliberately back on them, shattering both lenses to powder.

  He picked them up, looked at them, and then tossed them unconcernedly toward Albert the Blob’s wastebasket. He missed by a wide margin. There was now something softly stubborn in Richard’s face, too—something that said I don’t want to see any more, so I won’t see any more, and I have taken care of the problem. I have Had Enough, Forever.

  “Look at that,” he said in a flat, unsurprised voice. “I broke my glasses. I had another pair, but I broke them in gym two weeks ago. I’m almost blind without them.”

  Jack knew this wasn’t true, but he was too flabbergasted to say anything. He could think of absolutely no appropriate response to the radical action Richard had just taken—it had been too much like a calculated last-ditch stand against madness.

  “I think my fever’s worse too,” Richard said. “Have you got any more of those aspirin, Jack?”

  Jack opened the desk drawer and wordlessly handed Richard the bottle. Richard swallowed six or eight of them, then lay down again.

  7

  As the night deepened, Richard, who repeatedly promised to discuss their situation, repeatedly went back on his word. He couldn’t discuss leaving, he said, couldn’t discuss any of this, not now, his fever had come back and it felt much, much worse, he thought it might be as high as a hundred and five, possibly a hundred and six. He said he needed to go back to sleep.

  “Richard, for Christ’s sake!” Jack roared. “You’re punking out on me! Of all the things I never expected from you—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Richard said, falling back onto Albert’s bed. “I’m just sick, Jack. You can’t expect me to talk about all these crazy things when I’m sick.”

  “Richard, do you want me to go away and leave you?”

  Richard looked back over his shoulder at Jack for a moment, blinking slowly. “You won’t,” he said, and then went back to sleep.

  8

  Around nine o’clock, the campus entered another of those mysterious quiet periods, and Richard, perhaps sensing that there would be less strain put on his tottering sanity now, woke up and swung his legs over the bed. Brown spots had appeared on the walls, and he stared at them until he saw Jack coming toward him.

  “I feel a lot better, Jack,” he said hastily, “but it really won’t do us any good to talk about leaving, it’s dark, and—”

  “We have to leave tonight,” Jack said grimly. “All they have to do is wait us out. There’s fungus growing on the walls, and don’t tell me you don’t see that.”

  Richard smiled with a blind tolerance that nearly drove Jack mad. He loved Richard, but he could cheerfully have pounded him through the nearest fungus-rotted wall.

  At that precise moment, long, fat white bugs began to squirm into Albert the Blob’s room. They came pushing out of the brown fungoid spots on the wall as if the fungus were in some unknown way giving birth to them. They twisted and writhed half in and half out of the soft brown spots, then plopped to the floor and began squirming blindly toward the bed.

  Jack had begun to wonder if Richard’s sight weren’t really a lot worse than he remembered, or if it had degenerated badly since he had last seen Richard. Now he saw that he had been right the first time. Richard could see quite well. He certainly wasn’t having any trouble picking up the gelatinous things that were coming out of the walls, anyway. He screamed and pressed against Jack, his face frantic with revulsion.

  “Bugs, Jack! Oh, Jesus! Bugs! Bugs!”

  “We’ll be all right—right, Richard?” Jack said. He held Richard in place with a strength he didn’t know he had. “We’ll just wait for the morning, right? No problem, right?”

  They were squirming out in dozens, in hundreds, plump, waxy-white things like overgrown maggots. Some burst open when they struck the floor. The rest humped sluggishly across the floor toward them.

  “Bugs, Jesus, we have to get out, we have to—”

  “Thank God, this kid finally sees the light,” Jack said.

  He slung his knapsack over his left arm and grabbed Richard’s elbow in his right hand. He hustled Richard to the door. White bugs squashed and splattered under their shoes. Now they were pouring out of the brown patches in a flood; an obscene, ongoing multiple birth that was happening all over Albert’s room. A stream of the white bugs fell from a patch on the ceiling and landed, squirming, on Jack’s hair and shoulders; he brushed them away as best he could and hauled the screaming, flailing Richard out the door.

  I think we’re on our way, Jack thought. God help us, I really think we are.

  9

  They were in the common room again. Richard, it turned out, had even less idea of how to sneak off the Thayer campus than Jack did himself. Jack knew one thing very well: he was not going to trust that deceptive quiet and go out any of Nelson House’s Entry doors.

  Looking hard to the left out of the wide common-room window, Jack could see a squat octagonal brick building.

  “What’s that, Richard?”

  “Huh?” Richard was looking at the gluey, sluggish torrents of mud flowing over the darkening quad.

  “Little squatty brick building. You can just barely see it from here.”

  “Oh. The Depot.”

  “What’s a Depot?”

  “The name itself doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Richard said, still looking uneasily out at the mud-drenched quad. “Like our infirmary. It’s called The Creamery because there used to be a real dairy barn and milk-bottling plant over there. Until 1910 or so there was, anyway. Tradition, Jack. It’s very important. It’s one of the reason I like Thayer.”

  Richard looked forlornly out at the muddy campus again.

  “One of the reasons I always did, anyway.”

  “The Creamery, okay. How come The Depot?”

  Richard was slowly warming to the twin ideas of Thayer and Tradition.

  “This whole area of Springfield used to be a railhead,” he said. “In fact, in the old days—”

  “Which old days are we talking about, Richard?”

  “Oh. The eighteen-eighties. Eighteen-nineties. You see . . .”

  Richard trailed off. His nearsighted eyes began moving around the common room—looking for more bugs, Jack supposed. There weren’t any . . . at least not yet. But he could already see a few brown patches beginning to form on the walls. The bugs weren’t here yet, but they would be along.

  “Come on, Richard,” Jack prompted. “No one used to have to prime you to get you to run your mouth.”

  Richard smiled a little. His eyes returned to Jack. “Spring-field was one of the three or four biggest American railheads during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was geographically handy to all the points of the compass.” He raised his right hand toward his face, forefinger extended to push his glasses up on his nose in a scholarly gesture, realized they were no longer there, and lowered the hand again, looking a bit embarrassed. “There were main rail routes leaving Springfield for everywhere. This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities. He made a fortune in rail shippage. Mostly to the west coast. He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west as well as east.”

  A bright light suddenly went on in Jack’s head, bathing all of his thoughts in its harsh glare.

  “West coast?” His stomach lurched. He could not yet identify the new shape that bright light had shown him, but the word that leaped into his mind was fiery and utterly clear!

  Talisman!

  “West coast, did you say?”

  “Of course I did.” Richard looked at Jack strangely. “Jack, are you going deaf?”

  “No,” J
ack said. Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . “No, I’m fine.” He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . .

  “Well, you looked damn funny for a minute.”

  He was, you might say, the first one to see the potential of shipping stuff by rail to the Outposts.

  Jack knew, utterly knew, that Springfield was still a pressure point of some kind, perhaps still a shipping point. That was, perhaps, why Morgan’s magic worked so well here.

  “There were coal-piles and switching yards and roundhouses and boxcar sheds and about a billion miles of tracks and sidings,” Richard was saying. “It covered this whole area where Thayer School is now. If you dig down a few feet under this turf anywhere, you find cinders and pieces of rail and all sorts of stuff. But all that’s left now is that little building. The Depot. Of course it never was a real depot; it’s too small, anyone could see that. It was the main railyard office, where the stationmaster and the rail-boss did their respective things.”

  “You know a hell of a lot about it,” Jack said, speaking almost automatically—his head was still filled with that savage new light.

  “It’s part of the Thayer tradition,” Richard said simply.

  “What’s it used for now?”

  “There’s a little theater in there. It’s for Dramatics Club productions, but the Dramatics Club hasn’t been very active over the last couple of years.”

  “Do you think it’s locked?”

  “Why would anyone lock The Depot?” Richard asked. “Unless you think someone would be interested in stealing a few flats from the 1979 production of The Fantasticks.”

  “So we could get in there?”

  “I think so, yes. But why—”

  Jack pointed to a door just beyond the Ping-Pong tables. “What’s in there?”

  “Vending machines. And a coin-op microwave to heat up snacks and frozen dinners. Jack—”

  “Come on.”

  “Jack, I think my fever’s coming back again.” Richard smiled weakly. “Maybe we should just stay here for a while. We could rack out on the sofas for the night—”