Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  “NO!” Richard screamed, almost making Jack fall out of the cab. “I CAN’T! CAN’T GO THERE!” He had drawn his head up from his knees, but he wasn’t seeing anything—his eyes were still clamped shut, and his whole face looked like a knuckle.

  “Be quiet,” Jack said. Ahead the tracks arrowed through the endless fields of waving grain; dim mountains, old teeth, floated in the western clouds. Jack glanced one last time over his shoulder and saw the little oasis of warmth and light which was The Depot and the octagonal shed, slipping slowly backward behind him. Anders was a tall shadow in a lighted doorway. Jack gave a final wave, and the tall shadow waved, too. Jack turned around again and looked over the immensity of grain, all that lyric distance. If this was what the Blasted Lands were like, the next two days were going to be positively restful.

  Of course they were not, not like that at all. Even in the moonlit dark he could tell that the grain was thinning out, becoming scrubby—about half an hour out of The Depot the change had begun. Even the color seemed wrong now, almost artificial, no longer the beautiful organic yellow he had seen before, but the yellow of something left too near a powerful heat source—the yellow of something with most of the life bleached out of it. Richard now had a similar quality. For a time he had hyperventilated, then he had wept as silently and shamelessly as a jilted girl, then he had fallen into a twitchy sleep. “Can’t go back,” he had muttered in his sleep, or such were the words Jack thought he had heard. In sleep he seemed to dwindle.

  The whole character of the landscape had begun to alter. From the broad sweep of the plains in Ellis-Breaks, the land had mutated to secretive little hollows and dark little valleys crowded with black trees. Huge boulders lay everywhere, skulls, eggs, giant teeth. The ground itself had changed, become much sandier. Twice the walls of the valleys grew up right alongside the tracks, and all Jack could see on either side were scrubby reddish cliffs covered with low creeping plants. Now and then he thought he saw an animal scurrying for cover, but the light was too weak, and the animal too quick, for him to identify it. But Jack had the eerie feeling that if the animal had frozen absolutely still in the middle of Rodeo Drive at high noon, he would still have been unable to identify it—a suggestion that the head was twice the size it should be, that this animal was better off hiding from human sight.

  By the time ninety minutes had elapsed, Richard was moaning in his sleep and the landscape had passed into utter strangeness. The second time they had emerged from one of the claustrophobic valleys, Jack had been surprised by a sense of sudden openness—at first it was like being back in the Territories again, the Daydreams-land. Then he had noticed, even in the dark, how the trees were stunted and bent; then he had noticed the smell. Probably this had been slowly growing in his consciousness, but it was only after he had seen how the few trees scattered on the black plain had coiled themselves up like tortured beasts that he finally noticed the faint but unmistakable odor of corruption in the air. Corruption, hellfire. Here the Territories stank, or nearly.

  The odor of long-dead flowers overlaid the land; and beneath it, as with Osmond, was a coarser, more potent odor. If Morgan, in either of his roles, had caused this, then he had in some sense brought death to the Territories, or so Jack thought.

  Now there were no more intricate valleys and hollows; now the land seemed a vast red desert. The queerly stunted trees dotted the sloping sides of this great desert. Before Jack, the twin silver rails of the tracks rolled on through darkened reddish emptiness; to his side, empty desert also rolled away through the dark.

  The red land seemed empty, anyhow. For several hours Jack never actually caught sight of anything larger than the deformed little animals concealing themselves on the slopes of the railway cuttings—but there were times when he thought he caught a sudden sliding movement in the corner of one eye, turned to see it, and it was gone. At first he thought he was being followed. Then, for a hectic time, no longer than twenty or thirty minutes, he imagined that he was being tracked by the dog-things from Thayer School. Wherever he looked, something had just ceased to move—had nipped behind one of the coiled-up trees or slipped into the sand. During this time the wide desert of the Blasted Lands did not seem empty or dead, but full of slithery, hidden life. Jack pushed forward on the train’s gearshift (as if that could help) and urged the little train to go faster, faster. Richard slumped in the ell of his seat, whimpering. Jack imagined all those beings, those things neither canine nor human, rushing toward them, and prayed that Richard’s eyes would stay closed.

  “NO!” Richard yelled, still sleeping.

  Jack nearly fell out of the cab. He could see Etheridge and Mr. Dufrey loping after them. They gained ground, their tongues lolling, their shoulders working. In the next second, he realized that he had seen only shadows travelling beside the train. The loping schoolboys and their headmaster had winked out like birthday candles.

  “NOT THERE!” Richard bawled. Jack inhaled carefully. He, they, were safe. The dangers of the Blasted Lands were overrated, mainly literary. In not very many hours the sun would lift itself up again. Jack raised his watch to the level of his eyes and saw that they had been on the train just under two hours. His mouth opened in a huge yawn, and he found himself regretting that he had eaten so much back in The Depot.

  A piece of cake, he thought, this is going to be—

  And just as he was about to complete his paraphrase of the Burns lines old Anders had rather startlingly quoted, he saw the first of the fireballs, which destroyed his complacency forever.

  4

  A ball of light at least ten feet in diameter tumbled over the edge of the horizon, sizzling hot, and at first arrowed straight toward the train. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered to himself, remembering what Anders had said about the balls of fire. If a man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick . . . loses his hair . . . sores’re apt to raise all over his body . . . he begins to vomit . . . vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts. . . . He swallowed, hard—it was like swallowing a pound of nails. “Please, God,” he said aloud. The giant ball of light sped straight toward him, as though it owned a mind and had decided to erase Jack Sawyer and Richard Sloat from the earth. Radiation poisoning. Jack’s stomach contracted, and his testicles froze up under his body. Radiation poisoning. Vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures . . .

  The excellent dinner Anders had given him nearly leaped out of his stomach. The fireball continued to roll straight toward the train, shooting out sparks and sizzling with its own fiery energy. Behind it lengthened a glowing golden trail which seemed magically to instigate other snapping, burning lines in the red earth. Just when the fireball bounced up off the earth and took a zagging bounce like a giant tennis ball, wandering harmlessly off to the left, Jack had his first clear glimpse of the creatures he had all along thought were following them. The reddish-golden light of the wandering fireball, and the residual glow of the old trails in the earth, illuminated a group of deformed-looking beasts which had evidently been following the train. They were dogs, or once had been dogs, or their ancestors had been dogs, and Jack glanced uneasily at Richard to make sure that he was still sleeping.

  The creatures falling behind the train flattened out on the ground like snakes. Their heads were doglike, Jack saw, but their bodies had only vestigial hind legs and were, as far as he could see, hairless and tailless. They looked wet—the pink hairless skin glistened like that of newborn mice. They snarled, hating to be seen. It had been these awful mutant dogs that Jack had seen on the banks of the railway cutting. Exposed, flattened out like reptiles, they hissed and snarled and began creeping away—they, too, feared the fireballs and the trails the fireballs left on the earth. Then Jack caught the odor of the fireball, now moving swiftly, somehow almost angrily, toward the horizon again, igniting an entire row of the stunted trees. Hellfire, corruption.

  Another of the fireballs came cruising over the horizon and blazed away off to the boys’ lef
t. The stink of missed connections, of blasted hopes and evil desires—Jack, with his heart lodged just under his tongue, imagined he found all this in the foul smell broadcast by the fireball. Mewing, the crowd of mutant dogs had dispersed into the threat of glinting teeth, a whisper of surreptitious movement, the hushushush of heavy legless bodies dragged through red dust. How many of them were there? From the base of a burning tree which tried to hide its head in its trunk two of the deformed dogs bared long teeth at him.

  Then another fireball lurched over the wide horizon, spinning off a wide glowing track a distance from the train, and Jack momentarily glimpsed what looked like a ramshackle little shed set just below the curve of the desert wall. Before it stood a large humanoid figure, male, looking toward him. An impression of size, hairiness, force, malice . . .

  Jack was indelibly conscious of the slowness of Anders’s little train, of his and Richard’s exposure to anything that might want to investigate them a little more closely. The first fireball had dispatched the horrible dog-things, but human residents of the Blasted Lands might prove more difficult to overcome. Before the light diminished into the glowing trail, Jack saw that the figure before the shed was following his progress, turning a great shaggy head as the train passed by. If what he had seen were dogs, then what would the people be like? In the last of the flaring light from the ball of fire, the manlike being scuttled around the side of its dwelling. A thick reptilian tail swung from its hindquarters, and then the thing had slipped around the side of the building, and then it was dark again and nothing—dogs, man-beast, shed—was visible. Jack could not even be sure that he had really seen it.

  Richard jerked in his sleep, and Jack pushed his hand against the simple gearshift, vainly trying for more speed. The dog-noises gradually faded behind them. Sweating, Jack raised his left wrist again to the level of his eyes and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d checked his watch. He astonished himself by yawning again, and again regretted eating so much at The Depot.

  “NO!” Richard screamed. “NO! I CAN’T GO THERE!”

  There? Jack wondered. Where was “there”? California? Or was it anywhere threatening, anywhere Richard’s precarious control, as insecure as an unbroken horse, might slip away from him?

  5

  All night Jack stood at the gearshift while Richard slept, watching the trails of the departed fireballs flicker along the reddish surface of the earth. Their odor, of dead flowers and hidden corruption, filled the air. From time to time he heard the chatter of the mutant dogs, or of other poor creatures, rising from the roots of the stunted, ingrown trees which still dotted the landscape. The ranks of batteries occasionally sent up snapping arcs of blue. Richard was in a state beyond mere sleep, wrapped in an unconsciousness he both required and had willed. He made no more tortured outcries—in fact he did nothing but slump into his corner of the cab and breathe shallowly, as if even respiration took more energy than he had. Jack half-prayed for, half-feared the coming of the light. When morning came, he would be able to see the animals; but what else might he have to see?

  From time to time he glanced over at Richard. His friend’s skin seemed oddly pale, an almost ghostly shade of gray.

  6

  Morning came with a relaxation of the darkness. A band of pink appeared along the bowllike edge of the eastern horizon, and soon a rosy stripe grew up beneath it, pushing the optimistic pinkness higher in the sky. Jack’s eyes felt almost as red as that stripe, and his legs ached. Richard lay across the whole of the cab’s little seat, still breathing in a restricted, almost reluctant way. It was true, Jack saw—Richard’s face did seem peculiarly gray. His eyelids fluttered in a dream, and Jack hoped that his friend was not about to erupt in another of his screams. Richard’s mouth dropped open, but what emerged was the tip of his tongue, not a loud outcry. Richard passed his tongue along his upper lip, snorted, then fell back into his stupefied coma.

  Although Jack wished desperately to sit down and close his own eyes, he did not disturb Richard. For the more Jack saw as the new light filled in the details of the Blasted Lands, the more he hoped Richard’s unconsciousness would endure as long as he himself could endure the conditions of Anders’s cranky little train. He was anything but eager to witness the response of Richard Sloat to the idiosyncrasies of the Blasted Lands. A small amount of pain, a quantity of exhaustion—these were a minimal price to pay for what he knew must be a temporary peace.

  What he saw through his squinting eyes was a landscape in which nothing seemed to have escaped withering, crippling damage. By moonlight, it had seemed a vast desert, though a desert furnished with trees. Now Jack took in that his “desert” was actually nothing of the sort. What he had taken for a reddish variety of sand was a loose, powdery soil—it looked as though a man would sink in it up to his ankles, if not his knees. From this starved dry soil grew the wretched trees. Looked at directly, these were much as they had appeared by night, so stunted they seemed to be straining over in an attempt to flee back under their own coiling roots. This was bad enough—bad enough for Rational Richard, anyhow. But when you saw one of these trees obliquely, out of the side of your eye, then you saw a living creature in torment—the straining branches were arms thrown up over an agonized face caught in a frozen scream. As long as Jack was not looking directly at the trees, he saw their tortured faces in perfect detail, the open O of the mouth, the staring eyes and the drooping nose, the long, agonized wrinkles running down the cheeks. They were cursing, pleading, howling at him—their unheard voices hung in the air like smoke. Jack groaned. Like all the Blasted Lands, these trees had been poisoned.

  The reddish land stretched out for miles on either side, dotted here and there with patches of acrid-looking yellow grass bright as urine or new paint. If it had not been for the hideous coloration of the long grass, these areas would have resembled oases, for each lay beside a small round body of water. The water was black, and oily patches floated on its skin. Thicker than water, somehow; itself oily, poisonous. The second of these false oases that Jack saw began to ripple sluggishly as the train went past, and at first Jack thought with horror that the black water itself was alive, a being as tormented as the trees he no longer wished to see. Then he momentarily saw something break the surface of the thick fluid, a broad black back or side which rolled over before a wide, ravenous mouth appeared, biting down on nothing. A suggestion of scales that would have been iridescent if the creature had not been discolored by the pool. Holy cow, Jack thought, was that a fish? It seemed to him to have been nearly twenty feet long, too big to inhabit the little pool. A long tail roiled the water before the entire enormous creature slipped back down into what must have been the pool’s considerable depth.

  Jack looked up sharply at the horizon, imagining that he had momentarily seen the round shape of a head peering over it. And then he had another of those shocks of a sudden displacement, similar to that the Loch Ness monster, or whatever it was, had given him. How could a head peer over the horizon, for God’s sake?

  Because the horizon wasn’t the real horizon, he finally understood—all night, and for as long as it took him to really see what lay at the end of his vision, he had drastically under-estimated the size of the Blasted Lands. Jack finally understood, as the sun began to force its way up into the world again, that he was in a broad valley, and the rim far off to either side was not the edge of the world but the craggy top of a range of hills. Anybody or anything could be tracking him, keeping just out of sight past the rim of the surrounding hills. He remembered the humanoid being with the crocodile’s tail that had slipped around the side of the little shed. Could he have been following Jack all night, waiting for him to fall asleep?

  The train poop-pooped through the lurid valley, moving with a suddenly maddening lack of speed.

  He scanned the entire rim of hills about him, seeing nothing but new morning sunlight gild the upright rocks far above him. Jack turned around completely in the cab, fear and tensi
on for the moment completely negating his tiredness. Richard threw one arm over his eyes, and slept on. Anything, anybody might have been keeping pace with them, waiting them out.

  A slow, almost hidden movement off to his left made him catch his breath. A movement huge, slithery . . . Jack had a vision of a half-dozen of the crocodile-men crawling over the rim of the hills toward him, and he shielded his eyes with his hands and stared at the place where he thought he had seen them. The rocks were stained the same red as the powdery soil, and between them a deep trail wound its way over the crest of the hills through a cleft in the high-standing rocks. What was moving between two of the standing rocks was a shape not even vaguely human. It was a snake—at least, Jack thought it was . . . It had slipped into a concealed section of the trail, and Jack saw only a huge sleek round reptilian body disappearing behind the rocks. The skin of the creature seemed oddly ridged; burned, too—a suggestion, just before it disappeared, of ragged black holes in its side . . . Jack craned to see the place where it would emerge, and in seconds witnessed the wholly unnerving spectacle of the head of a giant worm, one-quarter buried in the thick red dust, swivelling toward him. It had hooded, filmy eyes, but it was the head of a worm.

  Some other animal bolted from under a rock, heavy head and dragging body, and as the worm’s big head darted toward it, Jack saw that the fleeing creature was one of the mutant dogs. The worm opened a mouth like the slot of a corner mailbox and neatly scooped up the frantic dog-thing. Jack clearly heard the snapping of bones. The dog’s wailing ceased. The huge worm swallowed the dog as neatly as if it were a pill. Now, immediately before the worm’s monstrous form, lay one of the black trails left by the fireballs, and as Jack watched, the long creature burrowed into the dust like a cruise ship sinking beneath the surface of the ocean. It apparently understood that the traces of the fireballs could do it damage and, wormlike, it would dig beneath them. Jack watched as the ugly thing completely disappeared into the red powder. And then cast his eyes uneasily over the whole of the long red slope dotted with pubic outpatches of the shiny yellow grass, wondering where it would surface again.