The Talisman by Stephen King

The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him war-

ily.

“Okay,” Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own

cheek as hard as he could— Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.

He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the

spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living

room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot

of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Techni-

color Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from

the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.

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He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was

getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to

ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all

movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow

back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the

bathroom to urinate.

If his mother hadn’t come in to check on him almost im-

mediately . . .

Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.

Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told

him it had been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian,

Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.

At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer

had almost died in his crib . . . and Morgan Sloat had been there.

His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil

Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the

hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.

Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.

2

“Now come on,” the Captain said.

“All right,” Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. “All right, let’s g—”

“Shhhh! ” The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood

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but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pair. Soldiers’ boots.

One voice cut through the babble: “. . . didn’t know he had a son.”

“Well,” a second answered, “bastards sire bastards—a fact

you should well know, Simon.”

There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this—the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at

school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and

called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying

names: queerboy and humpa-jumpa and morphadite. Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband

of laughter exactly like this.

“Cork it! Cork it up!”—a third voice. “If he hears you, you’ll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!”

Mutters.

A muffled burst of laughter.

Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.

Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short

canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking

about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening . . . the wrong somebody. Somebody who might be

wondering just who this suddenly revealed bastard might

really be. Even a kid like him knew that.

“You heard enough?” the Captain said. “We’ve got to

move.” He looked as if he would like to shake Jack . . . but did not quite dare.

Your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, go west, is that correct?

He changed, Jack thought. He changed twice.

Once when Jack showed him the shark’s tooth that had

been a filigreed guitar-pick in the world where delivery trucks instead of horse-drawn carts ran the roads. And he had

changed again when Jack confirmed that he was going west.

He had gone from threat to a willingness to help to . . . what?

I can’t say . . . I can’t tell you what to do.

To something like religious awe . . . or religious terror.

He wants to get out of here because he’s afraid we’ll be

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caught, Jack thought. But there’s more, isn’t there? He’s afraid of me. Afraid of—

“Come on,” the Captain said. “Come on, for Jason’s sake.”

“Whose sake?” Jack asked stupidly, but the Captain was already propelling him out. He pulled Jack hard left and halfled, half-dragged him down a corridor that was wood on one

side and stiff, mouldy-smelling canvas on the other.

“This isn’t the way we came,” Jack whispered.

“Don’t want to go past those fellows we saw coming in,”

the Captain whispered back. “Morgan’s men. Did you see the

tall one? Almost skinny enough to look through?”

“Yes.” Jack remembered the thin smile, and the eyes which

did not smile. The others had looked soft. The thin man had looked hard. He had looked crazy. And one thing more: he

had looked dimly familiar.

“Osmond,” the Captain said, now pulling Jack to the right.

The smell of roasting meat had been growing gradually

stronger, and now the air was redolent of it. Jack had never smelled meat he wanted so badly to taste in his whole life. He was scared, he was mentally and emotionally on the ropes,

perhaps rocking on the edge of madness . . . but his mouth was watering crazily.

“Osmond is Morgan’s right-hand man,” the Captain

grunted. “He sees too much, and I’d just as soon he didn’t see you twice, boy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hsssst! ” He clamped Jack’s aching arm even tighter. They were approaching a wide cloth drape that hung in a doorway.

To Jack it looked like a shower-curtain—except the cloth was burlap of a weave so coarse and wide that it was almost net-like, and the rings it hung from were bone rather than chrome.

“Now cry,” the Captain breathed warmly in Jack’s ear.

He swept the curtain back and pulled Jack into a huge

kitchen which fumed with rich aromas (the meat still pre-

dominating) and billows of steamy heat. Jack caught a con-

fused glimpse of braziers, of a great stonework chimney, of women’s faces under billowy white kerchiefs that reminded

him of nuns’ wimples. Some of them were lined up at a long

iron trough which stood on trestles, their faces red and beaded with sweat as they washed pots and cooking utensils. Others stood at a counter which ran the width of the room, slicing

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and dicing and coring and paring. Another was carrying a

wire rack filled with uncooked pies. They all stared at Jack and the Captain as they pushed through into the kitchen.

“Never again!” the Captain bellowed at Jack, shaking him

as a terrier shakes a rat . . . and all the while he continued to move them both swiftly across the room, toward the double-hung doors at the far side. “Never again, do you hear me? The next time you shirk your duty, I’ll split your skin down the back and peel you like a baked potato!”

And under his breath, the Captain hissed, “They’ll all re-

member and they’ll all talk, so cry, dammit!”

And now, as the Captain with the scarred face dragged him

across the steaming kitchen by the scruff of his neck and one throbbing arm, Jack deliberately called up the dreadful image of his mother lying in a funeral parlor. He saw her in billowing folds of white organdy—she was lying in her coffin and

wearing the wedding dress she had worn in Drag Strip Rumble (RKO, 1953). Her face came clearer and clearer in Jack’s mind, a perfect wax effigy, and he saw she was wearing her