The Talisman by Stephen King

The woman in the shop cleared her throat. Jack thought

that he must have been staring at those words of Daniel Webster’s for entire minutes. “Yes?” the woman said behind him.

“Sorry,” Jack repeated, and pulled himself into the center

of the lobby. The hateful clerk lifted an eyebrow, then turned sideways to stare at a deserted staircase. Jack made himself approach the man.

“Mister,” he said when he stood before the desk. The clerk

was pretending to try to remember the capital of North Car-

olina or the principal export of Peru. “Mister.” The man

scowled to himself: he was nearly there, he could not be disturbed.

All of this was an act, Jack knew, and he said, “I wonder if you can help me.”

The man decided to look at him after all. “Depends on

what the help is, sonny.”

Jack consciously decided to ignore the hidden sneer. “Did

you see my mother go out a little while ago?”

“What’s a little while?” Now the sneer was almost visible.

“Did you see her go out? That’s all I’m asking.”

“Afraid she saw you and your sweetheart holding hands

out there?”

“God, you’re such a creep,” Jack startled himself by say-

ing. “No, I’m not afraid of that. I’m just wondering if she went out, and if you weren’t such a creep, you’d tell me.” His face had grown hot, and he realized that his hands were

bunched into fists.

“Well okay, she went out,” the clerk said, drifting away toward the bank of pigeonholes behind him. “But you’d better

watch your tongue, boy. You better apologize to me, fancy little Master Sawyer. I got eyes, too. I know things.”

“You run your mouth and I run my business,” Jack said,

dredging the phrase up from one of his father’s old records—

perhaps it did not quite fit the situation, but it felt right in his mouth, and the clerk blinked satisfactorily.

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“Maybe she’s in the gardens, I don’t know,” the man said

gloomily, but Jack was already on his way toward the door.

The Darling of the Drive-ins and Queen of the Bs was

nowhere in the wide gardens before the hotel, Jack saw

immediately—and he had known that she would not be in the

gardens, for he would have seen her on his way into the hotel.

Besides, Lily Cavanaugh did not dawdle through gardens:

that suited her as little as did setting up hurdles on the beach.

A few cars rolled down Boardwalk Avenue. A gull

screeched far overhead, and Jack’s heart tightened.

The boy pushed his fingers through his hair and looked up

and down the bright street. Maybe she had been curious about Speedy—maybe she’d wanted to check out this unusual new

pal of her son’s and had wandered down to the amusement

park. But Jack could not see her in Arcadia Funworld any

more than he could see her lingering picturesquely in the gardens. He turned in the less familiar direction, toward the town line.

Separated from the Alhambra’s grounds by a high thick

hedge, the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe stood first in a row of brightly colored shops. It and New England Drugs were the

only shops in the terrace to remain open after Labor Day. Jack hesitated a moment on the cracked sidewalk. A tea shop,

much less shoppe, was an unlikely situation for the Darling of the Drive-ins. But since it was the first place he might expect to find her, he moved across the sidewalk and peered in the window.

A woman with piled-up hair sat smoking before a cash

register. A waitress in a pink rayon dress leaned against the far wall. Jack saw no customers. Then at one of the tables

near the Alhambra end of the shop he saw an old woman lift-

ing a cup. Apart from the help, she was alone. Jack watched the old woman delicately replace the cup in the saucer, then fish a cigarette from her bag, and realized with a sickening jolt that she was his mother. An instant later, the impression of age had disappeared.

But he could remember it—and it was as if he were seeing

her through bifocals, seeing both Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer and that fragile old woman in the same body.

Jack gently opened the door, but still he set off the tinkle

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of the bell that he had known was above it. The blond woman at the register nodded, smiling. The waitress straightened up and smoothed the lap of her dress. His mother stared at him with what looked like genuine surprise, and then gave him an open smile.

“Well, Wandering Jack, you’re so tall that you looked just

like your father when you came through that door,” she said.

“Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.”

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“You called me ‘Wandering Jack,’ ” he said, pulling a chair out and dropping himself into it.

Her face was very pale, and the smudges beneath her eyes

looked almost like bruises.

“Didn’t your father call you that? I just happened to think of it—you’ve been on the move all morning.”

“He called me Wandering Jack?”

“Something like that . . . sure he did. When you were tiny.

Travelling Jack,” she said firmly. “That was it. He used to call you Travelling Jack—you know, when we’d see you tearing

down the lawn. It was funny, I guess. I left the door open, by the way. Didn’t know if you remembered to take your key

with you.”

“I saw,” he said, still tingling with the new information she had so casually given him.

“Want any breakfast? I just couldn’t take the thought of

eating another meal in that hotel.”

The waitress had appeared beside them. “Young man?”

she asked, lifting her order pad.

“How did you know I’d find you here?”

“Where else is there to go?” his mother reasonably asked,

and told the waitress, “Give him the three-star breakfast. He’s growing about an inch a day.”

Jack leaned against the back of his chair. How could he be-

gin this?

His mother glanced at him curiously, and he began—he

had to begin, now. “Mom, if I had to go away for a while,

would you be all right?”

“What do you mean, all right? And what do you mean, go

away for a while?”

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“Would you be able—ah, would you have trouble from

Uncle Morgan?”

“I can handle old Sloat,” she said, smiling tautly. “I can

handle him for a while, anyhow. What’s this all about, Jacky?

You’re not going anywhere.”

“I have to,” he said. “Honest.” Then he realized that he

sounded like a child begging for a toy. Mercifully, the waitress arrived with toast in a rack and a stubby glass of tomato juice. He looked away for a moment, and when he looked

back, his mother was spreading jam from one of the pots on

the table over a triangular section of toast.

“I have to go,” he said. His mother handed him the toast;

her face moved with a thought, but she said nothing.

“You might not see me for a while, Mom,” he said. “I’m

going to try to help you. That’s why I have to go.”

“Help me?” she asked, and her cool incredulity, Jack reck-

oned, was about seventy-five percent genuine.

“I want to try to save your life,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“I can do it.”

“You can save my life. That’s very entertaining, Jacky-boy; it ought to make prime time someday. Ever think about going into network programming?” She had put down the red-smeared knife and was widening her eyes in mockery: but be-

neath the deliberate incomprehension he saw two things. A

flare-up of her terror; a faint, almost unrecognized hope that he might after all be able to do something.

“Even if you say I can’t try, I’m going to do it anyhow. So you might as well give me your permission.”

“Oh, that’s a wonderful deal. Especially since I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, though—I think you do have some idea,

Mom. Because Dad would have known exactly what I’m talk-

ing about.”

Her cheeks reddened; her mouth thinned into a line.

“That’s so unfair it’s despicable, Jacky. You can’t use what Philip might have known as a weapon against me.”

“What he did know, not what he might have known.”

“You’re talking total horseshit, sonny boy.”

The waitress, setting a plate of scrambled eggs, home fries, and sausages before Jack, audibly inhaled.

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After the waitress had paraded off, his mother shrugged. “I don’t seem able to find the right tone with the help around here. But horseshit is still horseshit is still horseshit, to quote Gertrude Stein.”