The Talisman by Stephen King

him. I used to see him around.”

“When?” Jack panted.

“A long time ago. When I was a little kid.” Richard then

added with great reluctance, “Around the time that I had

that . . . that funny dream in the closet.” He paused. “Except I guess it wasn’t a dream, was it?”

“No. I guess it wasn’t.”

“Yes. Was the man with the whip Reuel’s dad?”

“What do you think?”

“It was,” Richard said glumly. “Sure it was.”

Jack stopped.

“Richard, where do these tracks go?”

“You know where they go,” Richard said with a strange,

empty serenity.

“Yeah—I think I do. But I want to hear you say it.” Jack

paused. “I guess I need to hear you say it. Where do they go?”

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“They go to a town called Point Venuti,” Richard said, and

he sounded near tears again. “There’s a big hotel there. I don’t know if it’s the place you’re looking for or not, but I think it probably is.”

“So do I,” Jack said. He set off once more, Richard’s legs

in his arms, a growing ache in his back, following the tracks that would take him—both of them—to the place where his

mother’s salvation might be found.

5

As they walked, Richard talked. He did not come on to the

subject of his father’s involvement in this mad business all at once, but began to circle slowly in toward it.

“I knew that man from before,” Richard said. “I’m pretty

sure I did. He came to the house. Always to the back of the house. He didn’t ring the bell, or knock. He kind of . . .

scratched on the door. It gave me the creeps. Scared me so

bad I felt like peeing my pants. He was a tall man—oh, all

grown men seem tall to little kids, but this guy was very tall—

and he had white hair. He wore dark glasses most of the time.

Or sometimes the kind of sunglasses that have the mirror

lenses. When I saw that story on him they had on Sunday Report, I knew I’d seen him somewhere before. My father was upstairs doing some paperwork the night that show was on. I was sitting in front of the tube, and when my father came in and saw what was on, he almost dropped the drink he was

holding. Then he changed the station to a Star Trek rerun.

“Only the guy wasn’t calling himself Sunlight Gardener

when he used to come and see my father. His name . . . I can’t quite remember. But it was something like Banlon . . . or

Orlon . . .”

“Osmond?”

Richard brightened. “That was it. I never heard his first name. But he used to come once every month or two. Sometimes more often. Once he came almost every other night, for a week, and then he was gone for almost half a year. I used to lock myself in my room when he came. I didn’t like his smell.

He wore some kind of scent . . . cologne, I suppose, but it really smelled stronger than that. Like perfume. Cheap dime-store perfume. But underneath it—”

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“Underneath it he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath for

about ten years.”

Richard looked at him, wide-eyed.

“I met him as Osmond, too,” Jack explained. He had ex-

plained before—at least some of this—but Richard had not

been listening then. He was listening now. “In the Territories version of New Hampshire, before I met him as Sunlight Gardener in Indiana.”

“Then you must have seen that . . . that thing.”

“Reuel?” Jack shook his head. “Reuel must have been out

in the Blasted Lands then, having a few more radical cobalt treatments.” Jack thought of the running sores on the creature’s face, thought of the worms. He looked at his red, puffy wrists where the worms had bitten, and shuddered. “I never

saw Reuel until the end, and I never saw his American Twin-

ner at all. How old were you when Osmond started show-

ing up?”

“I must have been four. The thing about the . . . you know, the closet . . . that hadn’t happened yet. I remember I was more afraid of him after that.”

“After the thing touched you in the closet.”

“Yes.”

“And that happened when you were five.”

“Yes.”

“When we were both five.”

“Yes. You can put me down. I can walk for a while.”

Jack did. They walked in silence, heads down, not looking

at each other. At five, something had reached out of the dark and touched Richard. When they were both six

(six, Jacky was six)

Jack had overheard his father and Morgan Sloat talking

about a place they went to, a place that Jacky called the Daydream-country. And later that year, something had reached

out of the dark and had touched him and his mother. It had

been nothing more or less than Morgan Sloat’s voice. Morgan Sloat calling from Green River, Utah. Sobbing. He, Phil

Sawyer, and Tommy Woodbine had left three days before on

their yearly November hunting trip—another college chum,

Randy Glover, owned a luxurious hunting lodge in Blessing-

ton, Utah. Glover usually hunted with them, but that year he had been cruising in the Caribbean. Morgan called to say that

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Phil had been shot, apparently by another hunter. He and

Tommy Woodbine had packed him out of the wilderness on a

lashed-together stretcher. Phil had regained consciousness in the back of Glover’s Jeep Cherokee, Morgan said, and had

asked that Morgan send his love to Lily and Jack. He died fifteen minutes later, as Morgan drove wildly toward Green

River and the nearest hospital.

Morgan had not killed Phil; there was Tommy to testify

that the three of them had been together when the shot rang out, if any testimony had ever been required (and, of course, none ever was).

But that was not to say he couldn’t have hired it done, Jack thought now. And it was not to say that Uncle Tommy might

not have harbored his own long doubts about what had hap-

pened. If so, maybe Uncle Tommy hadn’t been killed just so

that Jack and his dying mother would be totally unprotected from Morgan’s depredations. Maybe he had died because

Morgan was tired of wondering if the old faggot might finally hint to the surviving son that there might have been more to Phil Sawyer’s death than an accident. Jack felt his skin crawl with dismay and revulsion.

“Was that man around before your father and my father

went hunting together that last time?” Jack asked fiercely.

“Jack, I was four years old—”

“No, you weren’t, you were six. You were four when he started coming, you were six when my father got killed in

Utah. And you don’t forget much, Richard. Did he come

around before my father died?”

“That was the time he came almost every night for a

week,” Richard said, his voice barely audible. “Just before that last hunting trip.”

Although none of this was precisely Richard’s fault, Jack

was unable to contain his bitterness. “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.”

“Jack—” Richard began in a small, trembling voice.

“I mean it’s all water over the dam, or spilled milk, or pick your cliché,” Jack said. “But when I showed up at your

school, Richard, you called me crazy.”

“Jack, you don’t under—”

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“No, I guess I don’t. I was tired and you gave me a place to sleep. Fine. I was hungry and you got me some food. Great.

But what I needed most was for you to believe me. I knew it was too much to expect, but jeepers! You knew the guy I was talking about! You knew he’d been in your father’s life before!

And you just said something like ‘Good old Jack’s been

spending too much time in the hot sun out there on Seabrook Island and blah-blah-blah!’ Jesus, Richard, I thought we were better friends than that.”

“You still don’t understand.”

“What? That you were too afraid of Seabrook Island stuff

to believe in me a little?” Jack’s voice wavered with tired indignation.

“No. I was afraid of more than that.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack stopped and looked at Richard’s pale,

miserable face truculently. “What could be more than that for Rational Richard?”

“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