Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  “Get him!” Osmond screamed at Elroy.

  Jack tried to lift the Uzi, but it suddenly seemed very heavy in his arms. Osmond was bad, the reappearance of Elroy was worse, but the thing between the two of them was a nightmare. It was the Territories version of Reuel Gardener, of course; the son of Osmond, the son of Sunlight. And it did indeed look a bit like a child—a child as drawn by a bright kindergarten student with a cruel turn of mind.

  It was curdy-white and skinny; one of its arms ended in a wormy tentacle that somehow reminded Jack of Osmond’s whip. Its eyes, one of them adrift, were on different levels. Fat red sores covered its cheeks.

  Some of it’s radiation sickness . . . Jason, I think Osmond’s boy might have gotten a little too close to one of those fireballs . . . but the rest of it . . . Jason . . . Jesus . . . what was its mother? In the name of all the worlds, WHAT WAS ITS MOTHER?

  “Get the Pretender!” Osmond was shrieking. “Save Morgan’s son but get the Pretender! Get the false Jason! Get out here, you cowards! They’re out of bullets!”

  Roars, bellows. In a moment, Jack knew, a fresh contingent of Wolfs, supported by Assorted Geeks and Freaks, was going to appear from the back end of the long barracks, where they would have been shielded from the explosion, where they had probably been cowering with their heads down, and where they would have remained . . . except for Osmond.

  “Should have stayed off the road, little chicken,” Elroy grunted, and ran at the train. His tail was swishing through the air. Reuel Gardener—or whatever Reuel was in this world—made a thick mewling sound and attempted to follow. Osmond reached out and hauled him back; his fingers, Jack saw, appeared to slide right into the monster-boy’s slatlike, repulsive neck.

  Then he raised the Uzi and fired an entire clip, point-blank, into Elroy’s face. It tore the goat-thing’s entire head off, and yet Elroy, headless, continued to climb for a moment, and one of his hands, the fingers melted together in two clumps to make a parody of a cloven hoof, pawed blindly for Jack’s head before it tumbled backward.

  Jack stared at it, stunned—he had dreamed that final night-marish confrontation at the Oatley Tap over and over again, trying to stumble away from the monster through what seemed to be a dark jungle filled with bedsprings and broken glass. Now here was that creature, and he had somehow killed it. It was hard to get his mind around the fact. It was as if he had killed childhood’s bogeyman.

  Richard was screaming—and his machine-gun roared, nearly deafening Jack.

  “It’s Reuel! Oh Jack oh my God oh Jason it’s Reuel, it’s Reuel—”

  The Uzi in Richard’s hands coughed out another short burst before falling silent, its clip spent. Reuel shook free of his father. He lurched and hopped toward the train, mewling. His upper lip curled back, revealing long teeth that looked false and flimsy, like the wax teeth children don at Halloween.

  Richard’s final burst took him in the chest and neck, punching holes in the brown kilt-cum-jumper he wore, ripping open flesh in long, ragged furrows. Sluggish rills of dark blood flowed from these wounds, but no more. Reuel might once have been human—Jack supposed it was just possible. If so, he was not human now; the bullets did not even slow him down. The thing which leaped clumsily over Elroy’s body was a demon. It smelled like a wet toadstool.

  Something was growing warm against Jack’s leg. Just warm at first . . . then hot. What was it? Felt like he had a teakettle in his pocket. But he didn’t have time to think. Things were unfolding in front of him. In Technicolor.

  Richard dropped his Uzi and staggered back, clapping his hands to his face. His horrified eyes stared out at the Reuel-thing through the bars of his fingers.

  “Don’t let him get me, Jack! Don’t let him get meeeee. . . .”

  Reuel bubbled and mewled. His hands slapped against the side of the engine and the sound was like large fins slapping down on thick mud.

  Jack saw there were indeed thick, yellowish webs between the fingers.

  “Come back!” Osmond was yelling at his son, and the fear in his voice was unmistakable. “Come back, he’s bad, he’ll hurt you, all boys are bad, it’s axiomatic, come back, come back!”

  Reuel burbled and grunted enthusiastically. He pulled himself up and Richard screamed insanely, backing into the far corner of the cab.

  “DON’T LET HIM GET MEEEEEEE—”

  More Wolfs, more strange freaks charging around the corner. One of them, a creature with curly ram’s horns jutting from the sides of its head and wearing only a pair of patched L’il Abner britches, fell down and was trampled by the others.

  Heat against Jack’s leg in a circle.

  Reuel, now throwing one reedy leg over the side of the cab. It was slobbering, reaching for him, and the leg was writhing, it wasn’t a leg at all, it was a tentacle. Jack raised the Uzi and fired.

  Half of the Reuel-thing’s face sheered away like pudding. A flood of worms began to fall out of what was left.

  Reuel was still coming.

  Reaching for him with those webbed fingers.

  Richard’s shrieks, Osmond’s shrieks merging, melting together into one.

  Heat like a branding iron against his leg and suddenly he knew what it was, even as Reuel’s hands squashed down on his shoulders he knew—it was the coin Captain Farren had given him, the coin Anders had refused to take.

  He drove his hand into his pocket. The coin was like a chunk of ore in his hand—he made a fist around it, and felt power ram through him in big volts. Reuel felt it, too. His triumphant slobberings and grunts became mewlings of fear. He tried to back away, his one remaining eye rolling wildly.

  Jack brought the coin out. It glowed red-hot in his hand. He felt the heat clearly—but it was not burning him.

  The profile of the Queen glowed like the sun.

  “In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” Jack shouted. “Get you off the skin of this world!” He opened his fist and slammed his hand into Reuel’s forehead.

  Reuel and his father shrieked in harmony—Osmond a tenor-verging-on-soprano, Reuel a buzzing, insectile bass. The coin slid into Reuel’s forehead like the tip of a hot poker into a tub of butter. A vile dark fluid, the color of overbrewed tea, ran out of Reuel’s head and over Jack’s wrist. The fluid was hot. There were tiny worms in it. They twisted and writhed on Jack’s skin. He felt them biting. Nevertheless, he pressed the first two fingers of his right hand harder, driving the coin farther into the monster’s head.

  “Get you off the skin of this world, vileness! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

  It shrieked and wailed; Osmond shrieked and wailed with it. The reinforcements had stopped and were milling behind Osmond, their faces full of superstitious terror. To them Jack seemed to have grown; he seemed to be giving off a bright light.

  Reuel jerked. Uttered one more bubbling screech. The black stuff running out of his head turned yellow. A final worm, long and thickly white, wriggled out of the hole the coin had made. It fell to the floor of the engine compartment. Jack stepped on it. It broke open under his heel and splattered. Reuel fell in a wet heap.

  Now such a screaming wail of grief and fury arose in the dusty stockade yard that Jack thought his skull might actually split open with it. Richard had curled into a fetal ball with his arms wrapped around his head.

  Osmond was wailing. He had dropped his whip and the machine-pistol.

  “Oh, filthy!” he cried, shaking his fists at Jack. “Look what you’ve done! Oh, you filthy, bad boy! I hate you, hate you forever and beyond forever! Oh, filthy Pretender! I’ll kill you! Morgan will kill you! Oh my darling only son! FILTHY! MORGAN WILL KILL YOU FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE! MORGAN—”

  The others took up the cry in a whispering voice, reminding Jack of the boys in the Sunlight Home: can you gimme hallelujah. And then they fell silent, because there was the other sound.

  Jack was tumbled back instantly to the pleasant afternoon he had spent with Wolf, the two
of them sitting by the stream, watching the herd graze and drink as Wolf talked about his family. It had been pleasant enough . . . pleasant enough, that is, until Morgan came.

  And now Morgan was coming again—not flipping over but bludgeoning his way through, raping his way in.

  “Morgan! It’s—”

  “—Morgan, Lord—”

  “Lord of Orris—”

  “Morgan . . . Morgan . . . Morgan . . .”

  The ripping sound grew louder and louder. The Wolfs were abasing themselves in the dust. Osmond danced a shuffling jig, his black boots trampling the steel-tipped rawhide thongs woven into his whip.

  “Bad boy! Filthy boy! Now you’ll pay! Morgan’s coming! Morgan’s coming!”

  The air about twenty feet to Osmond’s right began to blur and shimmer, like the air over a burning incinerator.

  Jack looked around, saw Richard curled up in the litter of machine-guns and ammunition and grenades like a very small boy who has fallen asleep while playing war. Only Richard wasn’t asleep, he knew, and this was no game, and if Richard saw his father stepping through a hole between the worlds, he feared, Richard would go insane.

  Jack sprawled beside his friend and wrapped his arms tightly around him. That ripping-bedsheet sound grew louder, and suddenly he heard Morgan’s voice bellow in terrible rage:

  “What is the train doing here NOW, you fools?”

  He heard Osmond wail, “The filthy Pretender has killed my son!”

  “Here we go, Richie,” Jack muttered, and tightened his grip around Richard’s wasted upper body. “Time to jump ship.”

  He closed his eyes, concentrated . . . and there was that brief moment of spinning vertigo as the two of them flipped.

  37

  Richard Remembers

  1

  There was a sensation of rolling sideways and down, as if there were a short ramp between the two worlds. Dimly, fading, at last wavering into nothingness, Jack heard Osmond screaming, “Bad! All boys! Axiomatic! All boys! Filthy! Filthy!”

  For a moment they were in thin air. Richard cried out. Then Jack thudded to the ground on one shoulder. Richard’s head bounced against his chest. Jack did not open his eyes but only lay there on the ground hugging Richard, listening, smelling.

  Silence. Not utter and complete, but large—its size counterpointed by two or three singing birds.

  The smell was cool and salty. A good smell . . . but not as good as the world could smell in the Territories. Even here—wherever here was—Jack could smell a faint underodor, like the smell of old oil ground into the concrete floors of gas-station garage bays. It was the smell of too many people running too many motors, and it had polluted the entire atmosphere. His nose had been sensitized to it and he could smell it even here, in a place where he could hear no cars.

  “Jack? Are we okay?”

  “Sure,” Jack said, and opened his eyes to see whether he was telling the truth.

  His first glance brought a terrifying idea: somehow, in his frantic need to get out of there, to get away before Morgan could arrive, he had not flipped them into the American Territories but pushed them somehow forward in time. This seemed to be the same place, but older, now abandoned, as if a century or two had gone by. The train still sat on the tracks, and the train looked just as it had. Nothing else did. The tracks, which crossed the weedy exercise yard they were standing in and went on to God knew where, were old and thick with rust. The crossties looked spongy and rotted. High weeds grew up between them.

  He tightened his hold on Richard, who squirmed weakly in his grasp and opened his eyes.

  “Where are we?” he asked Jack, looking around. There was a long Quonset hut with a rust-splotched corrugated-tin roof where the bunkhouse-style barracks had been. The roof was all either of them could see clearly; the rest was buried in rambling woods ivy and wild weeds. There were a couple of poles in front of it which had perhaps once supported a sign. If so, it was long gone now.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, and then, looking at where the obstacle course had been—it was now a barely glimpsed dirt rut overgrown with the remains of wild phlox and goldenrod—he brought out his worst fear: “I may have pushed us forward in time.”

  To his amazement, Richard laughed. “It’s good to know nothing much is going to change in the future, then,” he said, and pointed to a sheet of paper nailed to one of the posts standing in front of the Quonset/barracks. It was somewhat weather-faded but still perfectly readable:

  NO TRESPASSING!

  By Order of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department

  By Order of the California State Police

  VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED!

  2

  “Well, if you knew where we were,” Jack said, feeling simultaneously foolish and very relieved, “why did you ask?”

  “I just saw it,” Richard replied, and any urge Jack might have had to chaff Richard anymore over it blew away. Richard looked awful; he looked as if he had developed some weird tuberculosis which was working on his mind instead of on his lungs. Nor was it just his sanity-shaking round trip to the Territories and back—he had actually seemed to be adapting to that. But now he knew something else as well. It wasn’t just a reality which was radically different from all of his carefully developed notions; that he might have been able to adapt to, if given world enough and time. But finding out that your dad is one of the guys in the black hats, Jack reflected, can hardly be one of life’s groovier moments.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to sound cheerful—he actually did feel a little cheerful. Getting away from such a monstrosity as Reuel would have made even a kid dying of terminal cancer feel a little cheerful, he figured. “Up you go and up you get, Richie-boy. We’ve got promises we must keep, miles to go before we sleep, and you are still an utter creep.”

  Richard winced. “Whoever gave you the idea you had a sense of humor should be shot, chum.”

  “Bitez mon crank, mon ami.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, “but it’s somewhere around here. I can feel it. It’s like a fishhook in my mind.”

  “Point Venuti?”

  Jack turned his head and looked at Richard for a long time. Richard’s tired eyes were unreadable.

  “Why did you ask that, chum?”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  Jack shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not.

  They began walking slowly across the weed-grown parade ground and Richard changed the subject. “Was all of that real?” They were approaching the rusty double gate. A lane of faded blue sky showed above the green. “Was any of it real?”

  “We spent a couple of days on an electric train that ran at about twenty-five miles an hour, thirty tops,” Jack said, “and somehow we got from Springfield, Illinois, into northern California, near the coast. Now you tell me if it was real.”

  “Yes . . . yes, but . . .”

  Jack held out his arms. The wrists were covered with angry red weals that itched and smarted.

  “Bites,” Jack said. “From the worms. The worms that fell out of Reuel Gardener’s head.”

  Richard turned away and was noisily sick.

  Jack held him. Otherwise, he thought, Richard simply would have fallen sprawling. He was appalled at how thin Richard had become, at how hot his flesh felt through his preppy shirt.

  “I’m sorry I said that,” Jack said when Richard seemed a little better. “It was pretty crude.”

  “Yeah, it was. But I guess maybe it’s the only thing that could have . . . you know . . .”

  “Convinced you?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Richard looked at him with his naked, wounded eyes. There were now pimples all across his forehead. Sores surrounded his mouth. “Jack, I have to ask you something, and I want you to answer me . . . you know, straight. I want to ask you—”

  Oh, I know what you want to ask me, Richie-boy.

  “In a few minutes,” Jack said. “We’ll get to all the q
uestions and as many of the answers as I know in a few minutes. But we’ve got a piece of business to take care of first.”

  “What business?”

  Instead of answering, Jack went over to the little train. He stood there for a moment, looking at it: stubby engine, empty boxcar, flatcar. Had he somehow managed to flip this whole thing into northern California? He didn’t think so. Flipping with Wolf had been a chore, dragging Richard into the Territories from the Thayer campus had nearly torn his arm out of its socket, and doing both had been a conscious effort on his part. So far as he could remember, he hadn’t been thinking of the train at all when he flipped—only getting Richard out of the Wolfs’ paramilitary training camp before he saw his old man. Everything else had taken a slightly different form when it went from one world into the other—the act of Migrating seemed to demand an act of translation, as well. Shirts might become jerkins; jeans might become woolen trousers; money might become jointed sticks. But this train looked exactly the same here as it had over there. Morgan had succeeded in creating something which lost nothing in the Migration.

  Also, they were wearing blue jeans over there, Jack-O.

  Yeah. And although Osmond had his trusty whip, he also had a machine-pistol.

  Morgan’s machine-pistol. Morgan’s train.

  Chilly gooseflesh rippled up his back. He heard Anders muttering, A bad business.

  It was that, all right. A very bad business. Anders was right; it was devils all hurtled down together. Jack reached into the engine compartment, got one of the Uzis, slapped a fresh clip into it, and started back toward where Richard stood looking around with pallid, contemplative interest.

  “This looks like an old survivalist camp,” he said.

  “You mean the kind of place where soldier-of-fortune types get ready for World War Three?”

  “Yes, sort of. There are quite a few places like that in northern California . . . they spring up and thrive for a while, and then the people lose interest when World War Three doesn’t start right away, or they get busted for illegal guns or dope, or something. My . . . my father told me that.”