Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  When he could be at least reasonably certain that the worm was not going to try to ingest the train, Jack went back to inspecting the ridge of rocky hills about him.

  7

  Before Richard woke up late that afternoon, Jack saw:

  at least one unmistakable head peering over the rim of the hills;

  two more jouncing and deadly fireballs careering down at him;

  the headless skeleton of what he at first took to be a large rabbit, then sickeningly knew was a human baby, picked shining clean, lying beside the tracks and closely followed by:

  the round babyish gleaming skull of the same baby, half-sunk in the loose soil. And he saw:

  a pack of the big-headed dogs, more damaged than the others he had seen, pathetically come crawling after the train, drooling with hunger;

  three board shacks, human habitations, propped up over the thick dust on stilts, promising that somewhere out in that stinking poisoned wilderness which was the Blasted Lands other people schemed and hunted for food;

  a small leathery bird, featherless, with—this a real Territories touch—a bearded monkeylike face, and clearly delineated fingers protruding from the tips of its wings;

  and worst of all (apart from what he thought he saw), two completely unrecognizable animals drinking from one of the black pools—animals with long teeth and human eyes and forequarters like those of pigs, hindquarters like those of big cats. Their faces were matted with hair. As the train pulled past the animals, Jack saw that the testicles of the male had swollen to the size of pillows and sagged onto the ground. What had made such monstrosities? Nuclear damage, Jack supposed, since scarcely anything else had such power to deform nature. The creatures, themselves poisoned from birth, snuffled up the equally poisoned water and snarled at the little train as it passed.

  Our world could look like this someday, Jack thought. What a treat.

  8

  Then there were the things he thought he saw. His skin began to feel hot and itchy—he had already dumped the serapelike overgarment which had replaced Myles P. Kiger’s coat onto the floor of the cab. Before noon he stripped off his homespun shirt, too. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, an acidic combination of rusty metal and rotten fruit. Sweat ran from his hairline into his eyes. He was so tired he began to dream standing up, eyes open and stinging with sweat. He saw great packs of the obscene dogs scuttling over the hills; he saw the reddish clouds overhead open up and reach down for Richard and himself with long flaming arms, devil’s arms. When at last his eyes finally did close, he saw Morgan of Orris, twelve feet tall and dressed in black, shooting thunderbolts all around him, tearing the earth into great dusty spouts and craters.

  Richard groaned and muttered, “No, no, no.”

  Morgan of Orris blew apart like a wisp of fog, and Jack’s painful eyes flew open.

  “Jack?” Richard said.

  The red land ahead of the train was empty but for the blackened trails of the fireballs. Jack wiped his eyes and looked at Richard, feebly stretching. “Yeah,” he said. “How are you?”

  Richard lay back against the stiff seat, blinking out of his drawn gray face.

  “Sorry I asked,” Jack said.

  “No,” Richard said, “I’m better, really,” and Jack felt at least a portion of his tension leave him. “I still have a headache, but I’m better.”

  “You were making a lot of noise in your . . . um . . .” Jack said, unsure of how much reality his friend could stand.

  “In my sleep. Yeah, I guess I probably did.” Richard’s face worked, but for once Jack did not brace himself against a scream. “I know I’m not dreaming now, Jack. And I know I don’t have a brain tumor.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “On that train. That old man’s train. In what he called the Blasted Lands.”

  “Well, I’ll be double-damned,” Jack said, smiling.

  Richard blushed beneath his gray pallor.

  “What brought this on?” Jack asked, still not quite sure that he could trust Richard’s transformation.

  “Well, I knew I wasn’t dreaming,” Richard said, and his cheeks grew even redder. “I guess I . . . I guess it was just time to stop fighting it. If we’re in the Territories, then we’re in the Territories, no matter how impossible it is.” His eyes found Jack’s, and the trace of humor in them startled his friend. “You remember that gigantic hourglass back in The Depot?” When Jack nodded, Richard said, “Well, that was it, really . . . when I saw that thing, I knew I wasn’t just making everything up. Because I knew I couldn’t have made up that thing. Couldn’t. Just . . . couldn’t. If I were going to invent a primitive clock, it’d have all sorts of wheels, and big pulleys . . . it wouldn’t be so simple. So I didn’t make it up. Therefore it was real. Therefore everything else was real, too.”

  “Well, how do you feel now?” Jack asked. “You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

  “I’m still so tired I can hardly hold my head up. I don’t feel very good in general, I’m afraid.”

  “Richard, I have to ask you this. Is there some reason why you’d be afraid to go to California?”

  Richard looked down and shook his head.

  “Have you ever heard of a place called the black hotel?”

  Richard continued to shake his head. He was not telling the truth, but as Jack recognized, he was facing as much of it as he could. Anything more—for Jack was suddenly sure that there was more, quite a lot of it—would have to wait. Until they actually reached the black hotel, maybe. Rushton’s Twinner, Jason’s Twinner: yes, together they would reach the Talisman’s home and prison.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “Can you walk okay?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good, because there’s something I want to do now—since you’re not dying of a brain tumor anymore, I mean. And I need your help.”

  “What’s that?” Richard asked. He wiped his face with a trembling hand.

  “I want to open up one or two of those cases on the flatcar and see if we can get ourselves some weapons.”

  “I hate and detest guns,” Richard said. “You should, too. If nobody had any guns, your father—”

  “Yeah, and if pigs had wings they’d fly,” Jack said. “I’m pretty sure somebody’s following us.”

  “Well, maybe it’s my dad,” Richard said in a hopeful voice.

  Jack grunted, and eased the little gearshift out of the first slot. The train appreciably began to lose power. When it had coasted to a halt, Jack put the shift in neutral. “Can you climb down okay, do you think?”

  “Oh sure,” Richard said, and stood up too quickly. His legs bowed out at the knees, and he sat down hard on the bench. His face now seemed even grayer than it had been, and moisture shone on his forehead and upper lip. “Ah, maybe not,” he whispered.

  “Just take it easy,” Jack said, and moved beside him and placed one hand on the crook of his elbow, the other on Richard’s damp, warm forehead. “Relax.” Richard closed his eyes briefly, then looked into Jack’s own eyes with an expression of perfect trust.

  “I tried to do it too fast,” he said. “I’m all pins and needles from staying in the same position for so long.”

  “Nice and easy, then,” Jack said, and helped a hissing Richard get to his feet.

  “Hurts.”

  “Only for a little while. I need your help, Richard.”

  Richard experimentally stepped forward, and hissed in air again. “Ooch.” He moved the other leg forward. Then he leaned forward slightly and slapped his palms against his thighs and calves. As Jack watched, Richard’s face altered, but this time not with pain—a look of almost rubbery astonishment had printed itself there.

  Jack followed the direction of his friend’s eyes and saw one of the featherless, monkey-faced birds gliding past the front of the train.

  “Yeah, there’re a lot of funny things out here,” Jack said. “I’m going to feel a lot better if we can find some guns under that tarp.”r />
  “What do you suppose is on the other side of those hills?” Richard asked. “More of the same?”

  “No, I think there are more people over there,” Jack said. “If you can call them people. I’ve caught somebody watching us twice.”

  At the expression of quick panic which flooded into Richard’s face, Jack said, “I don’t think it was anybody from your school. But it could be something just as bad—I’m not trying to scare you, buddy, but I’ve seen a little more of the Blasted Lands than you have.”

  “The Blasted Lands,” Richard said dubiously. He squinted out at the red dusty valley with its scabrous patches of piss-colored grass. “Oh—that tree—ah . . .”

  “I know,” Jack said. “You have to just sort of learn to ignore it.”

  “Who on earth would create this kind of devastation?” Richard asked. “This isn’t natural, you know.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out someday.” Jack helped Richard leave the cab, so that both stood on a narrow running board that covered the tops of the wheels. “Don’t get down in that dust,” he warned Richard. “We don’t know how deep it is. I don’t want to have to pull you out of it.”

  Richard shuddered—but it may have been because he had just noticed out of the side of his eye another of the screaming, anguished trees. Together the two boys edged along the side of the stationary train until they could swing onto the coupling of the empty boxcar. From there a narrow metal ladder led to the roof of the car. On the boxcar’s far end another ladder let them descend to the flatcar.

  Jack pulled at the thick hairy rope, trying to remember how Anders had loosened it so easily. “I think it’s here,” Richard said, holding up a twisted loop like a hangman’s noose. “Jack?”

  “Give it a try.”

  Richard was not strong enough to loosen the knot by himself, but when Jack helped him tug on the protruding cord, the “noose” smoothly disappeared, and the tarpaulin collapsed over the nest of boxes. Jack pulled the edge back over those closest—MACHINE PARTS—and over a smaller set of boxes Jack had not seen before, marked LENSES. “There they are,” he said. “I just wish we had a crowbar.” He glanced up toward the rim of the valley, and a tortured tree opened its mouth and silently yowled. Was that another head up there, peering over? It might have been one of the enormous worms, sliding toward them. “Come on, let’s try to push the top off one of these boxes,” he said, and Richard meekly came toward him.

  After six mighty heaves against the top of one of the crates, Jack finally felt movement and heard the nails creak. Richard continued to strain at his side of the box. “That’s all right,” Jack said to him. Richard seemed even grayer and less healthy than he had before exerting himself. “I’ll get it, next push.” Richard stepped back and almost collapsed over one of the smaller boxes. He straightened himself and began to probe further under the loose tarpaulin.

  Jack set himself before the tall box and clamped his jaw shut. He placed his hands on the corner of the lid. After taking in a long breath, he pushed up until his muscles began to shake. Just before he was going to have to ease up, the nails creaked again and began to slide out of the wood. Jack yelled “AAAGH!” and heaved the top off the box.

  Stacked inside the carton, slimy with grease, were half a dozen guns of a sort Jack had never seen before—like grease-guns metamorphosing into butterflies, half-mechanical, half-insectile. He pulled one out and looked at it more closely, trying to see if he could figure out how it worked. It was an automatic weapon, so it would need a clip. He bent down and used the barrel of the weapon to pry off the top of one of the LENSES cartons. As he had expected, in the second, smaller box stood a little pile of heavily greased clips packed in plastic beads.

  “It’s an Uzi,” Richard said behind him. “Israeli machinegun. Pretty fashionable weapon, I gather. The terrorists’ favorite toy.”

  “How do you know that?” Jack asked, reaching in for another of the guns.

  “I watch television. How do you think?”

  Jack experimented with the clip, at first trying to fit it into the cavity upside-down, then finding the correct position. Next he found the safety and clicked it off, then on again.

  “Those things are so damn ugly,” Richard said.

  “You get one, too, so don’t complain.” Jack took a second clip for Richard, and after a moment’s consideration took all the clips out of the box, put two in his pockets, tossed two to Richard, who managed to catch them both, and slid the remaining clips into his haversack.

  “Ugh,” Richard said.

  “I guess it’s insurance,” Jack said.

  9

  Richard collapsed on the seat as soon as they got back to the cab—the trips up and down the two ladders and inching along the narrow strip of metal above the wheels had taken nearly all of his energy. But he made room for Jack to sit down and watched with heavy-lidded eyes while his friend started the train rolling again. Jack picked up his serape and began massaging his gun with it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rubbing the grease off. You’d better do it, too, when I’m done.”

  For the rest of the day the two boys sat in the open cab of the train, sweating, trying not to take into account the wailing trees, the corrupt stink of the passing landscape, their hunger. Jack noticed that a little garden of open sores had bloomed around Richard’s mouth. Finally Jack took Richard’s Uzi from his hand, wiped it free of grease, and pushed in the clip. Sweat burned saltily in cracks on his lips.

  Jack closed his eyes. Maybe he had not seen those heads peering over the rim of the valley; maybe they were not being followed after all. He heard the batteries sizzle and send off a big snapping spark, and felt Richard jump at it. An instant later he was asleep, dreaming of food.

  10

  When Richard shook Jack’s shoulder, bringing him up out of a world in which he had been eating a pizza the size of a truck tire, the shadows were just beginning to spread across the valley, softening the agony of the wailing trees. Even they, bending low and spreading their hands across their faces, seemed beautiful in the low, receding light. The deep red dust shimmered and glowed. The shadows printed themselves out along it, almost perceptibly lengthening. The terrible yellow grass was melting toward an almost mellow orange. Fading red sunlight painted itself slantingly along the rocks at the valley’s rim. “I just thought you might want to see this,” Richard said. A few more small sores seemed to have appeared about his mouth. Richard grinned weakly. “It seemed sort of special—the spectrum, I mean.”

  Jack feared that Richard was going to launch into a scientific explanation of the color shift at sunset, but his friend was too tired or sick for physics. In silence the two boys watched the twilight deepen all the colors about them, turning the western sky into purple glory.

  “You know what else you’re carrying on this thing?” Richard asked.

  “What else?” Jack asked. In truth, he hardly cared. It could be nothing good. He hoped he might live to see another sunset as rich as this one, as large with feeling.

  “Plastic explosive. All wrapped up in two-pound packages—I think two pounds, anyhow. You’ve got enough to blow up a whole city. If one of these guns goes off accidentally, or if someone else puts a bullet into those bags, this train is going to be nothing but a hole in the ground.”

  “I won’t if you won’t,” Jack said. And let himself be taken by the sunset—it seemed oddly premonitory, a dream of accomplishment, and led him into memories of all he had undergone since leaving the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He saw his mother drinking tea in the little shop, suddenly a tired old woman; Speedy Parker sitting at the base of a tree; Wolf tending his herd; Smokey and Lori from Oatley’s horrible Tap; all the hated faces from the Sunlight Home: Heck Bast, Sonny Singer, and the others. He missed Wolf with a particular and sharp poignancy, for the unfolding and deepening sunset summoned him up wholly, though Jack could not have explained why. He wished he could take Richard’s hand. Then he thought, Well, why not
? and moved his hand along the bench until he encountered his friend’s rather grubby, clammy paw. He closed his fingers around it.

  “I feel so sick,” Richard said. “This isn’t like—before. My stomach feels terrible, and my whole face is tingling.”

  “I think you’ll get better once we finally get out of this place,” Jack said. But what proof do you have of that, doctor? he wondered. What proof do you have that you’re not just poisoning him? He had none. He consoled himself with his newly invented (newly discovered?) idea that Richard was an essential part of whatever was going to happen at the black hotel. He was going to need Richard Sloat, and not just because Richard Sloat could tell plastic explosive from bags of fertilizer.

  Had Richard ever been to the black hotel before? Had he actually been in the Talisman’s vicinity? He glanced over at his friend, who was breathing shallowly and laboriously. Richard’s hand lay in his own like a cold waxen sculpture.

  “I don’t want this gun anymore,” Richard said, pushing it off his lap. “The smell is making me sick.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, taking it onto his own lap with his free hand. One of the trees crept into his peripheral vision and howled soundlessly in torment. Soon the mutant dogs would begin foraging. Jack glanced up toward the hills to his left—Richard’s side—and saw a manlike figure slipping through the rocks.

  11

  “Hey,” he said, almost not believing. Indifferent to his shock, the lurid sunset continued to beautify the unbeautifiable. “Hey, Richard.”