The Talisman by Stephen King

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 coun-

terpointed 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 at-

mosphere. 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.

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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

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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 an-

gry red weals that itched and smarted.

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“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 fore-

head. 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 ques-

tions 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.

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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