The Talisman by Stephen King

they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter

experience, that is never quite good enough.

8

“The fence was new back then,” Richard said when he could

continue speaking. They had walked on a ways. A whippoor-

will sang from a tall sturdy oak. The smell of salt in the air was stronger. “I remember that. And the sign—CAMP READINESS, that’s what it said. There was an obstacle course, and ropes to climb, and other ropes that you hung on to and then swung over big puddles of water. It looked sort of like boot-camp in a World War Two movie about the Marines. But the

guys using the equipment didn’t look much like Marines.

They were fat, and they were all dressed the same—gray

sweat-suits with CAMP READINESS written on the chest in small letters, and red piping on the sides of the sweat-pants. They all looked like they were going to have heart-attacks or

strokes any minute. Maybe both at the same time. Sometimes

we stayed overnight. A couple of times we stayed the whole

weekend. Not in the Quonset hut; that was like a barracks for the guys who were paying to get in shape.”

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“If that’s what they were doing.”

“Yeah, right. If that’s what they were doing. Anyway, we

stayed in a big tent and slept on cots. It was a blast.” Again, Richard smiled wistfully. “But you’re right, Jack—not all the guys shagging around the place looked like businessmen trying to get in shape. The others—”

“What about the others?” Jack asked quietly.

“Some of them—a lot of them—looked like those big

hairy creatures in the other world,” Richard said in a low

voice Jack had to strain to hear. “The Wolfs. I mean, they

looked sort of like regular people, but not too much. They looked . . . rough. You know?”

Jack nodded. He knew.

“I remember I was a little afraid to look into their eyes

very closely. Every now and then there’d be these funny

flashes of light in them . . . like their brains were on fire.

Some of the others . . .” A light of realization dawned in Richard’s eyes. “Some of the others looked like that substitute basketball coach I told you about. The one who wore the

leather jacket and smoked.”

“How far is this Point Venuti, Richard?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But we used to do it in a couple of hours, and the train never went very fast. Running speed,

maybe, but not much more. It can’t be much more than

twenty miles from Camp Readiness, all told. Probably a little less.”

“Then we’re maybe fifteen miles or less from it. From—”

(from the Talisman)

“Yeah. Right.”

Jack looked up as the day darkened. As if to show that the

pathetic fallacy wasn’t so pathetic after all, the sun now sailed behind a deck of clouds. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees and the day seemed to grow dull—the whippoorwill

fell silent.

9

Richard saw the sign first—a simple whitewashed square of

wood painted with black letters. It stood on the left side of the tracks, and ivy had grown up its post, as if it had been here for a very long time. The sentiment, however, was quite current.

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It read: GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY; BAD BOYS MUST DIE. THIS IS YOUR

LAST CHANCE: GO HOME.

“You can go, Richie,” Jack said quietly. “It’s okay by me.

They’ll let you go, no sweat. None of this is your business.”

“I think maybe it is,” Richard said.

“I dragged you into it.”

“No,” Richard said. “My father dragged me into it. Or fate

dragged me into it. Or God. Or Jason. Whoever it was, I’m

sticking.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

As they passed the sign, Jack lashed out with one foot in a passably good kung-fu kick and knocked it over.

“Way to go, chum,” Richard said, smiling a little.

“Thanks. But don’t call me chum.”

10

Although he had begun to look wan and tired again, Richard

talked for the next hour as they walked down the tracks and into the steadily strengthening smell of the Pacific Ocean. He spilled out a flood of reminiscences that had been bottled up inside of him for years. 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.

He looked at Richard’s pallor, the sores on his cheeks and

forehead and around his mouth; listened to that tentative, almost whispering voice that nevertheless did not hesitate or falter now that the chance to tell all these things had finally come; and was glad once more that Morgan Sloat had never

been his father.

He told Jack that he remembered landmarks all along this

part of the railroad. They could see the roof of a barn over the trees at one point, with a faded ad for Chesterfield Kings

on it.

“ ‘Twenty great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes,’ ”

Richard said, smiling. “Only, in those days you could see the whole barn.”

He pointed out a big pine with a double top, and fifteen

minutes later told Jack, “There used to be a rock on the other

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side of this hill that looked just like a frog. Let’s see if it’s still there.”

It was, and Jack supposed it did look like a frog. A little. If you stretched your imagination. And maybe it helps to be three. Or four. Or seven. Or however old he was.

Richard had loved the railroad, and had thought Camp

Readiness was really neat, with its track to run on and its hurdles to jump over and its ropes to climb. But he hadn’t liked Point Venuti itself. After some self-prodding, Richard even remembered the name of the motel at which he and his father had stayed during their time in the little coastal town. The Kingsland Motel, he said . . . and Jack found that name did not surprise him much at all.

The Kingsland Motel, Richard said, was just down the

road from the old hotel his father always seemed interested in.

Richard could see the hotel from his window, and he didn’t

like it. It was a huge, rambling place with turrets and gables and gambrels and cupolas and towers; brass weathervanes in

strange shapes twirled from all of the latter. They twirled even when there was no wind, Richard said—he could clearly remember standing at the window of his room and watching

them go around and around and around, strange brass cre-

ations shaped like crescent moons and scarab beetles and

Chinese ideograms, winking in the sun while the ocean

foamed and roared below.

Ah yes, doc, it all comes back to me now, Jack thought.

“It was deserted?” Jack asked.

“Yes. For sale.”

“What was its name?”

“The Agincourt.” Richard paused, then added another

child’s color—the one most small children are apt to leave in the box. “It was black. It was made of wood, but the wood

looked like stone. Old black stone. And that’s what my father and his friends called it. The Black Hotel.”

11

It was partly—but not entirely—to divert Richard that Jack

asked, “Did your father buy that hotel? Like he did Camp

Readiness?”

Richard thought about it awhile and then nodded. “Yes,” he

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said. “I think he did. After a while. There was a For Sale sign on the gates in front of the place when he first started taking me there, but one time when we went there it was just gone.”

“But you never stayed there?”

“God, no!” Richard shuddered. “The only way he could

have gotten me in there would have been with a towing

chain . . . even then I might not have gone.”

“Never even went in?”

“No. Never did, never will.”

Ah, Richie-boy, didn’t anyone ever teach you to never say never?

“That goes for your father as well? He never even went in?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Richard said in his best professo-

rial voice. His forefinger went to the bridge of his nose, as if to push up the glasses that weren’t there. “I’d be willing to bet he never went in. He was as scared of it as I was. But with me, that’s all I felt . . . just scared. For my father, there was something more. He was . . .”

“Was what?”

Reluctantly, Richard said, “He was obsessed with the

place, I think.”

Richard paused, eyes vague, thinking back. “He’d go and

stand in front of it every day we were in Point Venuti. And I don’t mean just for a couple of minutes, or something like