The Talisman

by Stephen King

There was a face on the moon. Jack saw with no surprise that it was Wolf’s face . . . except it was not wide and open and a little surprised, a face of goodness and simplicity. This face was narrow, ah yes, and dark; it was dark with hair, but the hair didn’t matter. It was dark with intent.

Richard had never been interested in fairy tales as a child; he had remained unexcited by Disney films about fairy godmothers who turned pumpkins into coaches, about wicked queens who owned speaking mirrors. Such conceits were too absurd to snare Richard’s six-year-old (or eight-year-old, or ten-year-old) fancy—unlike, say, a photograph of an electron microscope. Richard’s enthusiasm had embraced Rubik’s Cube, which he could solve in less than ninety seconds, but Jack did not think it would go so far as to accept a six-foot-five, sixteen-year-old werewolf.

And then it suddenly seemed to Jack that this reversal was really no reversal at all—he would still be free, locked in the shed, and Wolf out in the world would still be imprisoned. His cage would just be larger than Jack’s.

Reality seemed to fold and buckle about Jack for a moment: he felt that he had been jerked back into the Territories, but that now the Territories were evil and threatening, and that foul smoke, jumping flames, the screams of tortured bodies filled the air.

Now that he missed his friend so completely, the memory of his impatience with Wolf shamed him, brought the blood to his face.

any story—which would please Richard, divert Richard, carry Richard away as good novels and stories sometimes carried Jack away . . . the good ones, he thought, were almost as good as the Daydreams, and each mapped out its own version of the Territories. But he was never able to produce any frisson, any spark, any reaction at all.

when that happens, Richard rejects fantasy for good and all; Richard negates fantasy; Richard refuses to deal with fantasy, or treat with it, or compromise with it. He has, quite simply, Had Enough, Forever.

He was, you might say, the first one to see the potential of shipping stuff by rail to the Outposts.

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.

Now the shoe is on the other foot; now it’s Richard who is the herd, who is my passenger. God help us both.

Morgan Sloat drew up to the curb just outside the main gates of Thayer School. He parked. The space was marked with a HANDICAPPED ONLY sign.

It hurt and enraged him to think that Richard was now with the Sawyer brat, but if a sacrifice was demanded . . . well, Orris had lost his son and survived.

They simply didn’t know how fundamentally unreal they all were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be.

Sloat had a taste for blood, but ultimately he was as allergic to it as Orris was to American food and American air. It was Morgan of Orris, once derided as Morgan Thudfoot, who had always done the deeds Sloat had planned.

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.

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.

“I know I’m not dreaming now, Jack. And I know I don’t have a brain tumor.” “Do you know where you are?”

Jack opened his mouth and cried out: for Uncle Tommy Woodbine, run down in the street; for an unknown carter, whipped to death in a muddy courtyard; for Ferd Janklow; for Wolf, dead in Sunlight Gardener’s filthy office; for his mother; but most of all, he discovered, for Queen Laura DeLoessian, who was also his mother, and for the crime that was being carried out on the body of the Territories. He cried out as Jason, and his voice was thunder. “TEAR THEM UP!” Jack Sawyer/Jason DeLoessian bellowed, and opened fire on the left.

Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world—gorgeous as it could be—rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.

“I was afraid,” Richard said in a perfectly calm voice. “I was afraid that if I knew any more about those secret pockets . . . that man Osmond, or what was in the closet that time, I wouldn’t be able to love my father anymore. And I was right.” Richard covered his face with his thin, dirty fingers and began to cry.

“nothing was so grownup back then. In the old days, when we were just kids. Back when we all lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.”

they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.

Although his face didn’t reveal it, Jack was stunned with amazement . . . and a deep, welling pity for the lonely child, eager for the last scrap of his father’s affection, that Richard was revealing to him, inadvertently or otherwise.

I had a Twinner, but he died. Not just in the Territories world, but in all worlds but this one. I know that—I feel that. My dad knew it, too.

He couldn’t go into the black hotel, Richard. He can’t now. But he knew you were single-natured, just as he knows I am. He’d like me dead. He needs you on his side.

Jack realized that along with its incredible and increasing pull, the Talisman was singing to him. Wordlessly, tunelessly, but singing, a curving rise and fall of whale’s melody that would be inaudible to anyone else.

“But I killed him, too,” Morgan whispered, stopping for a moment. Suddenly he thought of his father. Gordon Sloat had been a dour Lutheran minister in Ohio—Morgan had spent his whole boyhood trying to flee that harsh and frightening man. Finally he had escaped to Yale. He had set his entire mind and spirit on Yale in his sophomore year of high school for one reason above all others, unadmitted by his conscious mind but as deep as bedrock: it was a place where his rude, rural father would never dare to come.

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?

He waited for a moment with Richard in his arms, hoping the Talisman would call him again, or that the “Jason-side” of him would surface. But it was his mother’s voice that rasped in his head. Has something or someone always got to push you, Jack-O? Come on, big guy—you set this going by yourself; you can keep going if you really want to. Has that other guy got to do everything for you?

Jack had no reason to believe it contained any special power against evil forces, but it came from the Territories . . . and, Blasted Lands aside, the Territories were innately good. And innate goodness, Jack reasoned, must have its own power over evil.

And Sloat now thought that Jack would get it . . . that he had always been meant to get it. This did not frighten him, however.

it is the axis of all possible worlds.

after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul)—after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:

You’re reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack—this voice was his father’s. Don’t drop it, son. For Jason’s sake, don’t drop it.

Donny had known—for one brief moment he had known—what that feeling of love and triumph actually meant.

For the first time in his life he felt that he might survive his mother’s love.

Like that, he thought, but somehow he knew it wasn’t; and although he couldn’t remember exactly what had caused the joy, he, like Donny Keegan, never forgot the way the joy had come, all deliciously unbidden—he never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.

He was God. God, or something so close as to make no difference. No! Jack screamed in terror. No, I don’t want to be God! Please! Please, I don’t want to be God, I ONLY WANT TO SAVE MY MOTHER’S LIFE!

It occurred to him dimly that you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up . . .

He is as light as a thistle. He has his own cancer. He’s had it all his life. Morgan Sloat is radioactive with evil and Richard is dying of the fallout.

He doesn’t know what it can do, Jack realized: he doesn’t really know anything about it, he just knows he wants it.

The Talisman had known of his existence since his birth, Jack now thought, and ever since had awaited him to set it free. It needed Jack Sawyer and no one else. “Come on and try for it,” Jack taunted.

Jack looked like . . . like a hero. That was all. He looked like a dirty, dishevelled, outrageously youthful hero, wrong for the role on almost every count, but undeniably still a hero.

You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.

The Talisman glowed on the beach, snow melting down one sweetly gravid side in droplets, and in each droplet was a rainbow, and in that moment Jack knew the staggering cleanliness of giving up the thing which was required.

“But how are we going to get home?” Richard asked. “Feel no fret,” he said, and closed his hand around Richard’s. Jack Sawyer didn’t need a tree to hold him up. Jack Sawyer had been to the Blasted Lands, he had vanquished the black hotel, Jack Sawyer was brave and true. Jack Sawyer was a played-out twelve-year-old boy with snow falling in his brain. He flipped effortlessly back into his own world, and Richard slid through whatever barriers there were right beside him.

“I loved your brother,” he said. “He saved my life. Except for Richard here, he was just about the best friend I ever had, I guess. I’m sorry he died.” “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.”

For the real, the true Lily Cavanaugh could never have aged—she was eternally a blonde with a quick switchblade of a smile and a go-to-hell amusement in her face. This had been the Lily Cavanaugh whose picture on a billboard had strengthened her son’s heart.

From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence.