The Talisman

by Stephen King

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

The question was, had he ever been in that other world at all?

Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.

“Women ain’t as bad as men, though. Almost, but not quite.”

“They have magic like we have physics, right? We’re talking about an agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science.”

“It was the first of September, 1939. Over here, it was the day Germany invaded Poland.”

“Their war started ours? Do you really believe that?”

To tell you the truth, I think we’re affected all the time by things that go on in the Territories.

“That’s not the only other world out there.”

But what had he looked like before? Like a human earthquake, like a man crumbling apart over the fault-line behind his eyes, like something all wound up and waiting to explode. . . .

Jerry Bledsoe had been, at least part of the time, Sawyer & Sloat’s electrician and handyman.

Does a fly or a ladybug feel relief if an unexpected gust of wind comes along and tilts the pitcher plant just enough to allow the drowning insect to fly out?

They live in a mystery, he thought. When you live in a mystery, you don’t question a village simply because you never heard of it.

God pounds all His nails sooner or later. And what happens to little people when they meddle into the affairs of the great is that they get hurt.”

The farmer was right—little people had no business meddling in the affairs of the great. Not if they were smart.

Here goes old Travelling Jack along the Territories version of Interstate 90. Feets don’t fail me now!

What kind of person could get off by subjecting himself or herself to such steady, throbbing, excruciating pain?

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

“Can’t wait any longer, little pal. You’re a murderer now. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a murderer. So we’re not able to give you any more chances.

This was how it felt to be on your own, just young enough to be at everyone’s mercy and to be anyone’s meat—anyone

He was tired of being on the road. Maybe when you rode it in a Cadillac it was a road of dreams, but when you had to hitch it, riding on your thumb and a story that was just about worn out, when you were at everybody’s mercy and anyone’s meat, it was nothing but a road of trials.

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.

“Any serious problem demands A POLICY,”

unless Wolf, with unconscious poetry, had been trying to say that Morgan had kidnapped the minds of some of the Wolf family.

Twinners, he said, was something that had something to do with litters of people, and about such business he could not presume to say.

As he came he did his own werewolf number, changing from Morgan Sloat, investor, land speculator, and sometime Hollywood agent, into Morgan of Orris, pretender to the throne of a dying Queen.

How do you get into these things, you asshole? Here you are, standing under a turnpike overpass somewhere in Ohio with your pet werewolf. How do you do it? Do you practice?

LOL

In front of them a match flared briefly yellow. Jack smelled the dry tang of pot, so familiar in the movies that it could be dismissed as soon as identified. Wolf smelled a forest-fire.

LOOOL

“GOD POUND YOU, DON’T LOOK AT ME!” he bellowed. “DON’T MAKE ME FEEL FUNNY! EVERYBODY MAKES ME FEEL FUNNY!”

the Sunlight Gardener Scripture Home for Wayward Boys.

“What’s the matter, Jack? You smell like something’s really funny.”

For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit his Territory.”

This Psalm here says that if you WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE SO COOL!

“They found HAPPY boys! They found HEALTHY boys! They found boys who were willing to WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, oh can you say hallelujah?” They could. “Can you say oh-yeah?” They could do that, too.

“But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you! Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.

Guess what I found out when I turned eight or so? I found out that I was getting a royal fucking from life, and that things weren’t going to change in a hurry. Or maybe they were never going to change. And although it bums me out, it also has its funny side. You know what I mean, jellybean?

Just another week in the Sunlight Home, can you say amen, brothers and sisters. Just another long, long week.

I know the secrets of both boys and devils.”

“Don’t you sometimes think there’s more to life than order?”

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.

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

Here’s a story for you, Richie-boy, and I’m very glad you’re asleep so I don’t have to tell it to you. Morgan knows I’m coming, and he’s planning a surprise party. Only it’s werewolves instead of naked girls who are going to jump out of the cake, and they’re supposed to have Uzi machine-guns and grenades as party-favors. Well, we sort of hijacked his train, and we’re running ten or twelve hours ahead of schedule, but if we’re heading into an encampment full of Wolfs waiting to catch the Territories choo-choo—and I think that’s just what we’re doing—we’re going to need all the surprise we can get.

“Bad! All boys! Axiomatic! All boys! Filthy! Filthy!”

“My dad dead in a hunting accident in Utah, Uncle Tommy run down in L.A. The death-rate among your father’s friends is very fucking high, Richard.”

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.

GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY; BAD BOYS MUST DIE. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE: GO HOME.

‘the axle of all possible worlds.’

A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds—and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds.

And was it also Phil Sawyer’s folly? Probably so. Phil’s folly . . . Jack’s folly . . . Morgan Sloat’s . . . Gardener’s . . . and the hope, of course, of two Queens.

“Some things are not excluded. Some people are not excluded. They are . . . well . . . single-natured. That’s the only way I can think of to say it. They are like it—the Talisman. Single-natured. Me. I’m single-natured. 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. I think that’s why he called me Travelling Jack. When I’m here, I’m not there. When I’m there, I’m not here. And Richard, neither are you!”