The Talisman by Stephen King

The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.

“Jack?” she tried again. “Jack, where are you?”

No answer . . . but she sensed him, knew for sure that he was alive. For the first time in a long time—six months,

maybe—she felt really good.

“Jack-O,” she said, and grabbed her cigarettes. She looked

at them for a moment and then heaved them all the way across the room, where they landed in the fireplace on top of the rest of the shit she meant to burn later in the day. “I think I just quit smoking for the second and last time in my life, Jack-O,”

she said. “Hang in there, kid. Your momma loves you.”

And she found herself for no reason grinning a large idi-

otic grin.

2

Donny Keegan, who had been pulling Sunlight Home kitchen

duty when Wolf escaped from the box, had survived that terrible night—George Irwinson, the fellow who had been pulling

the duty with him, had not been so lucky. Now Donny was in

a more conventional orphans’ home in Muncie, Indiana. Un-

like some of the other boys at the Sunlight Home, Donny had been a real orphan; Gardener had needed to take a token few to satisfy the state.

Now, mopping a dark upstairs hall in a dim daze, Donny

looked up suddenly, his muddy eyes widening. Outside,

clouds which had been spitting light snow into the used-up

fields of December suddenly pulled open in the west, letting out a single broad ray of sunshine that was terrible and exalt-ing in its isolated beauty.

“You’re right, I DO love him!” Donny shouted tri-

umphantly. It was Ferd Janklow that Donny was shouting to,

although Donny, who had too many toys in his attic to accommodate many brains, had already forgotten his name. “He’s beautiful and I DO love him!”

Donny honked his idiot laugh, only now even his laugh

was nearly beautiful. Some of the other boys came to their

doors and stared at Donny in wonder. His face was bathed in the sunlight from that one clear, ephemeral ray, and one of the

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other boys would whisper to a close friend that night that for a moment Donny Keegan had looked like Jesus.

The moment passed; the clouds moved over that weird

clear place in the sky, and by evening the snow had intensified into the first big winter storm of the season. Donny had known—for one brief moment he had known—what that

feeling of love and triumph actually meant. That passed

quickly, the way dreams do upon waking . . . but he never forgot the feeling itself, that almost swooning sensation of grace for once fulfilled and delivered instead of promised and then denied; that feeling of clarity and sweet, marvellous

love; that feeling of ecstasy at the coming once more of the white.

3

Judge Fairchild, who had sent Jack and Wolf to the Sunlight Home, was no longer a judge of any kind, and as soon as his final appeals ran out, he would be going to jail. There no

longer seemed any question that jail was where he would

fetch up, and that he would do hard time there. Might never come out at all. He was an old man, and not very healthy. If they hadn’t found the damned bodies . . .

He had remained as cheerful as possible under the circum-

stances, but now, as he sat cleaning his fingernails with the long blade of his pocketknife in his study at home, a great gray wave of depression crashed over him. Suddenly he

pulled the knife away from his thick nails, looked at it

thoughtfully for a moment, and then inserted the tip of the blade into his right nostril. He held it there for a moment and then whispered, “Oh shit. Why not?” He jerked his fist upward, sending the six-inch blade on a short, lethal trip, skew-ering first his sinuses and then his brain.

4

Smokey Updike sat in a booth at the Oatley Tap, going over

invoices and totting up numbers on his Texas Instruments calculator, just as he had been doing on the day Jack had met

him. Only now it was early evening and Lori was serving the evening’s first customers. The jukebox was playing “I’d

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Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobot-

omy).”

At one moment everything was normal. At the next

Smokey sat bolt-upright, his little paper cap tumbling backward off his head. He clutched his white T-shirt over the left side of his chest, where a hammering bolt of pain had just

struck like a silver spike. God pounds his nails, Wolf would have said.

At the same instant the grill suddenly exploded into the air with a loud bang. It hit a Busch display sign and tore it from the ceiling. It landed with a crash. A rich smell of LP gas filled the area in back of the bar almost at once. Lori

screamed.

The jukebox speeded up: 45 rpms, 78, 150, 400! The

woman’s seriocomic lament became the speedy gabble of de-

ranged chipmunks on a rocket-sled. A moment later the top

blew off the juke. Colored glass flew everywhere.

Smokey looked down at his calculator and saw a single

word blinking on and off in the red window:

TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN

Then his eyes exploded.

“Lori, turn off the gas!” one of the customers screamed.

He got down off his stool, and turned toward Smokey.

“Smokey, tell her—” The man wailed with fright as he saw

blood gushing from the holes where Smokey Updike’s eyes

had been.

A moment later the entire Oatley Tap blew sky-high, and

before the fire-trucks could arrive from Dogtown and Elmira, most of downtown was in flames.

No great loss, children, can you say amen.

5

At Thayer School, where normality now reigned as it always

had (with one brief interlude which those on campus remem-

bered only as a series of vague, related dreams), the last

classes of the day had just begun. What was light snow in Indiana was a cold drizzle here in Illinois. Students sat dreaming and thoughtful in their classes.

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Suddenly the bells in the chapel began to peal. Heads came

up. Eyes widened. All over the Thayer campus, fading dreams suddenly seemed to renew themselves.

6

Etheridge had been sitting in advanced-math class and pressing his hand rhythmically up and down against a raging hard-on while he stared unseeingly at the logarithms old Mr.

Hunkins was piling up on the blackboard. He was thinking

about the cute little townie waitress he would be boffing later on. She wore garter-belts instead of pantyhose, and was more than willing to leave her stockings on while they fucked. Now Etheridge stared around at the windows, forgetting his erection, forgetting the waitress with her long legs and smooth nylons—suddenly, for no reason at all, Sloat was on his mind.

Prissy little Richard Sloat, who should have been safely classi-fiable as a wimp but who somehow wasn’t. He thought about

Sloat and wondered if he was all right. Somehow he thought

that maybe Sloat, who had left school unexcused four days ago and who hadn’t been heard from since, wasn’t doing so good.

In the headmaster’s office, Mr. Dufrey had been discussing

the expulsion of a boy named George Hatfield for cheating

with his furious—and rich—father when the bells began to

jingle out their unscheduled little tune. When it ended, Mr.

Dufrey found himself on his hands and knees with his gray

hair hanging in his eyes and his tongue lolling over his lips.

Hatfield the Elder was standing by the door—cringing against it, actually—his eyes wide and his jaw agape, his anger forgotten in wonder and fear. Mr. Dufrey had been crawling

around on his rug barking like a dog.

Albert the Blob had just been getting himself a snack when the bells began to ring. He looked toward the window for a moment, frowning the way a person frowns when he is trying to remember something that is right on the tip of his tongue. He shrugged and went back to opening a bag of nacho chips—his

mother had just sent him a whole case. His eyes widened. He thought—just for a moment, but a moment was long enough—

that the bag was full of plump, squirming white bugs.

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He fainted dead away.

When he awoke and worked up enough courage to peer

into the bag again, he saw it had been nothing but a hallucination. Of course! What else? All the same, it was a hallucination which exercised a strange power over him in the future; whenever he opened a bag of chips, or a candy bar, or a Slim Jim, or a package of Big Jerk beef jerky, he saw those bugs in his mind’s eye. By spring, Albert had lost thirty-five pounds, was playing on the Thayer tennis team, and had gotten laid.