The Talisman

by Stephen King

According to the plaque, Webster had said: “From this day forward, know that slavery as an American institution has begun to sicken and must soon die in all our states and territorial lands.”

Jack Sawyer at twelve was a being who required things to do, and the noiseless passivity of these days, after the hubbub of Manhattan, had confused and undone him in some basic way.

Scared, he thought. I’m pretty damn scared. This is where the world ends, right?

Suddenly he wanted his mother—her dark blue eyes. He could not remember wanting her with such desperation since he had been very, very small. La-la, he heard her sing inside his head, and her voice was the wind’s voice, here for now, somewhere else all too soon.

The sand had begun to move by the instep of his left sneaker. The fine white grains were sliding around in a small circle perhaps a finger’s length in diameter. The sand in the middle of this circle suddenly collapsed, so that now there was a dimple in the sand. It was maybe two inches deep. The sides of this dimple were also in motion: around and around, moving in rapid counterclockwise circuits.

The sand was opening like a large dark eye: it was the eye of the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then pulled the living meat out of it like a rubber band.

The only time this week that Jack had seen the desk clerk smile had been when the man had recognized his mother. The smile had met only the minimum standards for graciousness.

Mom, for God’s sake, can’t you see his eyes? You think you’re being charming—he thinks you’re making fun of him! Can’t you see his eyes? No. She couldn’t. And that failure of empathy, when she had always been so sharp about how other people were feeling, was another stone against his heart. She was withdrawing . . . in all ways.

NIGHT and DAY, MOON and SUN; DARK and LIGHT, and the black man was the light in these polarities.

he still had no idea of how to begin expressing the things that troubled him. They could not be put into ordinary sentences, for ordinary sentences made everything seem rational.

“Well, I don’t know. Could be. I got my own name for it, son. I just call it the Territories.”

“You got a job, Travellin Jack,” Speedy told him. “A job that ain’t gonna let you go, and that’s the Lord’s truth. I wish it was different.”

“I . . .” . . . don’t know how, he meant to say, but a voice inside—a voice which came from that same previously locked room from which the memory of the two men and the attempted kidnapping had come that morning—rose up powerfully: You do know! You might need Speedy to get you started, but you do know, Jack. You do. He knew that voice so very well. It was his father’s voice.

“Yeah-bob! Him. He went, too. Only your dad, Jacky, he went to see and learn. The other fella, he just went to plunder him out a fortune.”

even if he was an ignorant pilgrim, he was going.

“If you’re going to leave, get out of here, Jacky. Call me tomorrow.”

It gonna be your burden but you got to be bigger than your burden.”

He had done those things . . . but he hadn’t exactly been Sloat when he did them.

Richard was, in a sense, his immortality. His son would be able to go to the best business schools and then pick up a law degree before he came into the company; and thus fully armed, Richard Sloat would carry all the complex and delicate machinery of Sawyer & Sloat into the next century.

The boy’s ridiculous ambition to become a chemist could not long survive his father’s determination to murder it—Richard was smart enough to see that what his father did was a hell of a lot more interesting, not to mention vastly more remunerative, than working with a test tube over a Bunsen burner.

it—if he had not already done it by himself, they’d change his mind for him. Even a small peek into the Territories shook your confidence in the omniscience of scientists.

Looking back on it, Sloat wasn’t sure how he had tolerated Phil Sawyer for as long as he had. His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes.

The others made him feel like a clenched fist: those morning bruises were shadowy little photographs of his soul.

As it was, the murderers from the Territories—the same two who had bungled the abduction of the boy—had blasted through a stoplight and nearly been arrested before they could return home.

Which meant, Sloat thought with some satisfaction, that after a few details were taken care of, everything would finally be settled. After so many years—when he came back from Arcadia Beach, he should have all of Sawyer & Sloat in his pocket. And in the Territories, all was placed just so: poised on the brink, ready to fall into Morgan’s hands.

if he learned, or even suspected, sometime in the next few days, that Jack Sawyer had discovered the existence of the Territories, he would kill him. There was such a thing as an unacceptable risk.

“It says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don’t have a teaspoonful of meekness among them.

Another light perhaps eight blocks down changed to green before a high dingy many-windowed building that looked like a mental hospital, and so was probably the high school.

he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.

He—it—blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.

and maybe the reason Phil Sawyer didn’t see it was that like everyone else he never paid quite enough attention to Morgan Sloat.

Because over there was the country of Jack’s Daydreams.

He doesn’t like him at all, not really, he thinks that music is too loud, he thinks it takes something from him. . . .

And should I tell you another crazy thing?” “Why not?” Sloat answered. “That’s not the only other world out there.”

Unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar patterns lay all over the sky above him—messages in a language he could not read.

When I’m having a dream, the only time I really KNOW it’s a dream is when I’m starting to wake up. If I’m dreaming and just wake up all at once—if the alarm clock goes off, or something—then I’m the most surprised guy alive. At first it’s the waking that seems like a dream. And I’m no stranger over here when the dream gets deep—is that what I mean? No, but it’s getting close. I bet my dad dreamed deep a lot. And I’ll bet Uncle Morgan almost never does.

Joy. They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery. It’s joy that holds them up.

For a second, for two seconds, three . . . for however long that moment lasted, Buddy Parkins saw that this unwashed boy sitting beside him was beautiful.

I’m different now, Jack thought: I’m not like them anymore. The recognition pierced him with loneliness.

Jack left the bench and dropped his old shoes in a tall black wastebasket with DON’T BE A LITTERBUG stencilled on it in white. Beneath that, in smaller letters, the wastebasket read The earth is our only home.

He is Speedy. He’s not Speedy.

Maybe you runnin, boy, and maybe you bein chased.”

Sometimes people get killed because somebody does somethin . . . but if somebody didn’t do that somethin, a whole lot of more people would have got killed. Do you see where I’m pushin, son?”

“Are you . . . sort of a werewolf?” “Sure am,” Wolf said, smiling. “You pounded that nail, Jack. Wolf!”

“Yes,” Jack said, “he was. But how did you know him? And how did you know he was my father?” Wolf looked at Jack as though he had asked a question so simple it barely needed answering. “I remember his smell, of course. Wolfs remember all smells. You smell just like him.”

Your father knew he was bad, but he couldn’t smell him as good as we could. He knew he was bad, but not how bad.”

All the cattle belonged to the Queen, and the Wolf family had been watching over them since time out of mind. It was their job. In this Jack found an oddly persuasive correlative to the relationship that had existed between the buffalo and the Indians of the American Plains . . . at least until the white man had come into those territories and upset the balance.

Jack knew that, for Wolf, the smells were the worst. They hadn’t been over here four hours before Wolf began to call it the Country of Bad Smells.

He could, yes, and Wolf would have no answer because Wolf wasn’t too swift in the brains department. But Uncle Tommy had been fond of quoting a Chinese proverb that went: The man whose life you save is your responsibility for the rest of your life.

Jack would never know of Wolf’s heroism in the next few minutes; Wolf did not really know of it himself. He only knew that he had to try to stick this nightmare out for Jack’s sake. It must be all right, he thought, look, Wolf, Jack’s going right to sleep, right to sleep right here and now. And you know Jack wouldn’t take you to a Hurt-Place, so just stick it out . . . just wait . . . Wolf! . . . it’ll be all right . . .