The Talisman

by Stephen King

There was too much death, the world was half-made of death. The gull cried out overhead.

But Uncle Tommy was already dead; it was just that the news was still on the other end of a lot of telephone wires.

And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking.

He looked at Osmond with swift-awakening hatred, and it was good to feel that hatred. It was a welcome antidote to the fear and the confusion.

“He’s mad, you know. Mad as the man who chased the cake.” Jack had no idea what that might mean, but he agreed that Osmond was mad.

A final voice said andnowourfeaturepresentation and that was when Wolf lost control. Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings was in Dolby sound, and the projectionist had orders to really crank it in the afternoons, because that’s when the heads drifted in, and the heads really liked loud Dolby.

“Ah,” Jack said. “What makes water so delicious?” “The western wind,” Wolf promptly replied.

But now he was dying, and he was going with the moon, and because the latter made the former seem more than bearable—almost holy, and surely ordained—Wolf went in relief, and in gladness. It was wonderful not to have to struggle anymore.

“I don’t like it, Gridley,” Jack said first. “The native tom-toms have stopped. It’s too quiet.” “Ha-ha,” Richard said thinly.

They didn’t just leave; they disappeared.” “Over into the Territories, I suppose.” “I don’t know,” Jack said. “Maybe they’re still here, but on a slightly different level. Maybe they’re there. Maybe they’re in Cleveland. But they’re not where we are.”

All of this was of course only intuition, but Jack had come to believe that, in these universal matters, his intuition was the only thing he could trust.

Richard was still shrieking, but Jack no longer heard him—suddenly, triumphantly, that feeling of creeping doom cracked open like a black egg and his brain filled up with light—light and a sweet purity of air; air so pure that you could smell the radish a man pulled out of his garden half a mile away. Suddenly Jack felt as if he could simply push off and jump all the way across the quad . . . or fly, like those men with the wings strapped to their backs. Oh, there was light and clear air replacing that foul, garbagey stench and a sensation of crossing voids of darkness, and for a moment everything in him seemed clear and full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.

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

“Jack, you’re crazy!” “I know.” A hundred yards. The batteries hummed. A blue spark jumped, sizzling. Bare earth flowed past them on either side. No grain here, Jack thought. If Noël Coward had written a play about Morgan Sloat, I guess he would have called it Blight Spirit. “Jack, what if this creepy little train jumps its tracks?” “Well, it might, I guess,” Jack said. “Or what if it breaks through the gate and the tracks just end?” “That’d be one on us, wouldn’t it?” Fifty yards. “Jack, you really have lost your mind, haven’t you?” “I guess so. Take your gun off safety, Richard.” Richard flicked the safety.

Again Jack felt that sense of coming resolution, and thought, It’s so dark here because all those worlds are crowded together, jammed up like a triple exposure on film.

Morgan saw that the man had gone utterly crazy, and wondered if this was good or bad.

There was madness here, and walking death, and gibbering irrationality. Jack might not have had the words to express these things, but he felt them, all the same . . . he knew them for what they were.

these people were beautiful but doomed—and so, perhaps, ghosts always seem to the living. Why else would even the idea of ghosts inspire such terror?

“He’s in the moon now,” Wolf’s brother said. “He’ll be back. Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon. Come on. Want to get away from this stinking place.”

He sometimes played Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes—“Run Through the Jungle” seemed to be his favorite—at a volume just short of ear-shattering. Then he would spend long periods of time listening to the tonal variations in the wind as he worked the button that controlled his wing window. This seemed to fascinate him completely.