The Talisman by Stephen King

Sloat was a multimillion-dollar business.

Sloat discovered that he still detested his old classmate;

Tommy Woodbine had put on thirty pounds, and looked and

acted, in his blue three-piece suits, more than ever like a judge. His cheeks were always slightly flushed (alcoholic?

Sloat wondered), his manner still kindly and ponderous. The world had left its marks on him—clever little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the eyes themselves infinitely more

guarded than those of the gilded boy at Yale. Sloat understood almost at once, and knew that Phil Sawyer would never see it unless he were told, that Tommy Woodbine lived with an

enormous secret: whatever the gilded boy might have been,

Tommy was now a homosexual. Probably he’d call himself

gay. And that made everything easier—in the end, it even

made it easier to get rid of Tommy.

Because queers are always getting killed, aren’t they? And

did anybody really want a two-hundred-and-ten-pound pansy

responsible for bringing up a teenage boy? You could say that Sloat was just saving Phil Sawyer from the posthumous consequences of a serious lapse of judgment. If Sawyer had made Sloat the executor of his estate and the guardian of his son, there would have been no problems. As it was, the murderers from the Territories—the same two who had bungled the abduction of the boy—had blasted through a stoplight and

nearly been arrested before they could return home.

Things all would have been so much simpler, Sloat re-

flected for perhaps the thousandth time, if Phil Sawyer had never married. If no Lily, no Jack; if no Jack, no problems.

Phil may never even have looked at the reports about Lily

Cavanaugh’s early life Sloat had compiled: they listed where and how often and with whom, and should have killed that romance as readily as the black van turned Tommy Woodbine

into a lump on the road. If Sawyer read those meticulous reports, they left him amazingly unaffected. He wanted to

marry Lily Cavanaugh, and he did. As his damned Twinner

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had married Queen Laura. More underestimation. And repaid

in the same fashion, which seemed fitting.

Which meant, Sloat thought with some satisfaction, that

after a few details were taken care of, everything would finally be settled. After so many years—when he came back

from Arcadia Beach, he should have all of Sawyer & Sloat in his pocket. And in the Territories, all was placed just so: poised on the brink, ready to fall into Morgan’s hands. As

soon as the Queen died, her consort’s former deputy would

rule the country, introducing all the interesting little changes both he and Sloat desired. And then watch the money roll in.

Sloat thought, turning off the freeway into Marina del Rey.

Then watch everything roll in!

His client, Asher Dondorf, lived in the bottom half of a

new condo in one of the Marina’s narrow, alleylike streets just off the beach. Dondorf was an old character actor who had

achieved a surprising level of prominence and visibility in the late seventies through a role on a television series; he’d played the landlord of the young couple—private detectives, and

both cute as baby pandas—who were the series’ stars. Don-

dorf got so much mail from his few appearances in the early episodes that the writers increased his part, making him an unofficial father to the young detectives, letting him solve a murder or two, putting him in danger, etc., etc. His salary doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and when the series was cancelled after six years, he went back into film work. Which

was the problem. Dondorf thought he was a star, but the studios and producers still considered him a character actor—

popular, but not a serious asset to any project. Dondorf

wanted flowers in his dressing room, he wanted his own hair-dresser and dialogue coach, he wanted more money, more re-

spect, more love, more everything. Dondorf, in fact, was a

putz.

When he pulled his car tight into the parking bay and

eased himself out, being careful not to scratch the edge of his door on the brick, Sloat came to a realization: if he learned, or even suspected, sometime in the next few days, that Jack

Sawyer had discovered the existence of the Territories, he

would kill him. There was such a thing as an unacceptable

risk.

Sloat smiled to himself, popping another Di-Gel into his

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mouth, and rapped on the condo’s door. He knew it already:

Asher Dondorf was going to kill himself. He’d do it in the living room in order to create as much mess as possible. A temperamental jerk like his soon-to-be-ex-client would think a really sloppy suicide was revenge on the bank that held his mortgage. When a pale, trembling Dondorf opened the door,

the warmth of Sloat’s greeting was quite genuine.

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TWO

THE ROAD OF TRIALS

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6

The Queen’s Pavillion

1

The saw-toothed blades of grass directly before Jack’s eyes seemed as tall and stiff as sabres. They would cut the wind, not bend to it. Jack groaned as he lifted his head. He did not possess such dignity. His stomach still felt threateningly

liquid, his forehead and eyes burned. Jack pushed himself

up on his knees and then forced himself to stand. A long

horse-drawn cart rumbled toward him down the dusty track,

and its driver, a bearded red-faced man roughly the same

shape and size as the wooden barrels rattling behind him, was staring at him. Jack nodded and tried to take in as much as he could about the man while giving the appearance of a

loafing boy who had perhaps run off for an illicit snooze.

Upright, he no longer felt ill; he felt, in fact, better than at any time since leaving Los Angeles, not merely healthy but

somehow harmonious, mysteriously in tune with his body.

The warm, drifting air of the Territories patted his face with the gentlest, most fragrant of touches—its own delicate and flowery scent quite distinct beneath the stronger odor of

raw meat it carried. Jack ran his hands over his face and

peeked at the driver of the cart, his first sample of Territories Man.

If the driver addressed him, how should he answer? Did

they even speak English here? His kind of English? For a moment Jack imagined himself trying to pass unnoticed in a

world where people said “Prithee” and “Dost thou go cross-

gartered, yonder varlet?” and decided that if that was how

things went, he’d pretend to be a mute.

The driver finally took his eyes off Jack and clucked some-

thing decidedly not 1980’s American English to his horses.

But perhaps that was just the way you spoke to horses.

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Slusha, slusha! Jack edged backward into the sea-grass, wishing that he had managed to get on his feet a couple of seconds earlier. The man glanced at him again, and surprised Jack by nodding—a gesture neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely a communication between equals. I’ll be glad when this day’s work is done, brother. Jack returned the nod, tried to put his hands in his pockets, and for a moment must have looked

half-witted with astonishment. The driver laughed, not un-

pleasantly.

Jack’s clothes had changed—he wore coarse, voluminous

woolen trousers instead of the corduroy jeans. Above the

waist a close-fitting jacket of soft blue fabric covered him. Instead of buttons, the jacket—a jerkin? he speculated—had a

row of cloth hooks and eyes. Like the trousers, it was clearly hand-made. The Nikes, too, were gone, replaced by flat

leather sandals. The knapsack had been transmogrified into a leather sack held by a thin strap over his shoulder. The cart-driver wore clothing almost exactly similar—his jerkin was of leather stained so deeply and continuously that it showed

rings within rings, like an old tree’s heart.

All rattle and dust, the cart pulled past Jack. The barrels radiated a yeasty musk of beer. Behind the barrels stood a

triple pile of what Jack unthinkingly took to be truck tires. He smelled the “tires” and noticed that they were perfectly, flawlessly bald in the same moment—it was a creamy odor, full of secret depths and subtle pleasures, that instantly made him hungry. Cheese, but no cheese that he had ever tasted. Behind the wheels of cheese, near the back of the cart, an irregular mound of raw meat—long, peeled-looking sides of beef, big

slablike steaks, a heap of ropy internal organs he could not identify—slithered beneath a glistening mat of flies. The

powerful smell of the raw meat assailed Jack, killing the

hunger evoked by the cheese. He moved into the middle of

the track after the cart had passed him and watched it jounce toward the crest of a little rise. A second later he began to follow after, walking north.