The Talisman by Stephen King

Six. I was six. Jacky Sawyer was six.

Over and over, round and round she goes.

The storeroom shared a wall in common with the taproom

itself, and tonight that wall was actually vibrating with noise; it throbbed like a drumhead. Until twenty minutes before, it had been Friday night, and both Oatley Textiles and Weaving and Dogtown Custom Rubber paid on Friday. Now the Oatley

Tap was full to the overflow point . . . and past. A big poster to the left of the bar read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 220 PERSONS IS IN VIOLATION OF GENESEE COUNTY FIRE CODE 331. Ap-

parently fire code 331 was suspended on the weekends,

because Jack guessed there were more than three hundred

people out there now, boogying away to a country-western

band which called itself The Genny Valley Boys. It was a terrible band, but they had a pedal-steel guitar. “There’s guys around here that’d fuck a pedal-steel, Jack,” Smokey had said.

“Jack!” Lori yelled over the wall of sound.

Lori was Smokey’s woman. Jack still didn’t know what her

last name was. He could barely hear her over the juke, which was playing at full volume while the band was on break. All five of them were standing at the far end of the bar, Jack

knew, tanking up on half-price Black Russians. She stuck her head through the storeroom door. Tired blond hair, held back with childish white plastic barrettes, glittered in the overhead fluorescent.

“Jack, if you don’t run that keg out real quick, I guess he’ll give your arm a try.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

He felt gooseflesh on his arms, and it didn’t come entirely from the storeroom’s damp chill. Smokey Updike was no one

to fool with—Smokey who wore a succession of paper fry-

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cook’s hats on his narrow head, Smokey with his large plastic mail-order dentures, grisly and somehow funereal in their

perfect evenness, Smokey with his violent brown eyes, the

scleras an ancient, dirty yellow. Smokey Updike who in some way still unknown to Jack—and who was all the more frightening for that—had somehow managed to take him prisoner.

The jukebox fell temporarily silent, but the steady roar of the crowd actually seemed to go up a notch to make up for it.

Some Lake Ontario cowboy raised his voice in a big, drunken

“Yeeeee-HAW!” A woman screamed. A glass broke. Then the jukebox took off again, sounding a little like a Saturn rocket achieving escape velocity.

Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the

road.

Raw.

Jack bent over one of the aluminum kegs and dragged it

out about three feet, his mouth screwed down in a painful

wince, sweat standing out on his forehead in spite of the air-conditioned chill, his back protesting. The keg gritted and squealed on the unadorned cement. He stopped, breathing

hard, his ears ringing.

He wheeled the hand-truck over to the keg of Busch, stood

it up, then went around to the keg again. He managed to rock it up on its rim and walk it forward, toward where the hand-truck stood. As he was setting it down he lost control of it—

the big bar-keg weighed only a few pounds less than Jack did himself. It landed hard on the foot of the hand-truck, which had been padded with a remnant of carpet so as to soften just such landings. Jack tried to both steer it and get his hands out of the way in time. He was slow. The keg mashed his fingers against the back of the hand-truck. There was an agonizing

thud, and he somehow managed to get his throbbing, pulsing

fingers out of there. Jack stuck all the fingers of his left hand in his mouth and sucked on them, tears standing in his eyes.

Worse than jamming his fingers, he could hear the slow

sigh of gases escaping through the breather-cap on top of the keg. If Smokey hooked up the keg and it came out foamy . . .

or, worse yet, if he popped the cap and the beer went a gusher in his face . . .

Best not to think of those things.

Last night, Thursday night, when he’d tried to “run

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Smokey out a keg,” the keg had gone right over on its side.

The breather-cap had shot clear across the room. Beer foamed white-gold across the storeroom floor and ran down the drain.

Jack had stood there, sick and frozen, oblivious to Smokey’s shouts. It wasn’t Busch, it was Kingsland. Not beer but ale—

the Queen’s Own.

That was when Smokey hit him for the first time—a quick

looping blow that drove Jack into one of the storeroom’s

splintery walls.

“There goes your pay for today,” Smokey had said. “And

you never want to do that again, Jack.”

What chilled Jack most about that phrase you never want to do that again was what it assumed: that there would be lots of opportunities for him to do that again; as if Smokey Updike expected him to be here a long, long time.

“Jack, hurry it up!”

“Coming.” Jack puffed. He pulled the hand-truck across the room to the door, felt behind himself for the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. He hit something large and soft and yielding.

“Christ, watch it!”

“Whoops, sorry,” Jack said.

“I’ll whoops you, asshole,” the voice replied.

Jack waited until he heard heavy steps moving on down

the hall outside the storeroom and then tried the door again.

The hall was narrow and painted a bilious green. It stank

of shit and piss and TidyBowl. Holes had been punched

through both plaster and lath here and there; graffiti lurched and staggered everywhere, written by bored drunks waiting to use either POINTERS or SETTERS. The largest of them all had been slashed across the green paint with a black Magic

Marker, and it seemed to scream out all of Oatley’s dull and objectless fury. SEND ALL AMERICAN NIGGERS AND JEWS TO

IRAN, it read.

The noise from the taproom was loud in the storeroom; out

here it was a great wave of sound which never seemed to

break. Jack took one glance back into the storeroom over the top of the keg tilted on the hand-truck, trying to make sure his pack wasn’t visible.

He had to get out. Had to. The dead phone that had finally spoken, seeming to encase him in a capsule of dark ice . . .

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that had been bad. Randolph Scott was worse. The guy wasn’t really Randolph Scott; he only looked the way Scott had looked in his fifties films. Smokey Updike was perhaps worse still . . . although Jack was no longer sure of that. Not since he had seen (or thought he had seen) the eyes of the man who looked like Randolph Scott change color.

But that Oatley itself was worst of all . . . he was sure of that.

Oatley, New York, deep in the heart of Genny County,

seemed now to be a horrible trap that had been laid for

him . . . a kind of municipal pitcher plant. One of nature’s real marvels, the pitcher plant. Easy to get in. Almost impossible to get out.

2

A tall man with a great swinging gut porched in front of him stood waiting to use the men’s room. He was rolling a plastic toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and glaring at Jack. Jack supposed that it was the big man’s gut that he had hit with the door.

“Asshole,” the fat man repeated, and then the men’s-room

door jerked open. A man strode out. For a heart-stopping moment his eyes and Jack’s eyes met. It was the man who looked like Randolph Scott. But this was no movie-star; this was just an Oatley millhand drinking up his week’s pay. Later on he

would leave in a half-paid-for doorsucker Mustang or maybe

on a three-quarters-paid-for motorcycle—a big old Harley

with a BUY AMERICAN sticker plastered on the nacelle, probably.

His eyes turned yellow.

No, your imagination, Jack, just your imagination. He’s just—

—just a millhand who was giving him the eye because he

was new. He had probably gone to high school here in town,

played football, knocked up a Catholic cheerleader and mar-

ried her, and the cheerleader had gotten fat on chocolates and Stouffer’s frozen dinners; just another Oatley oaf, just—

But his eyes turned yellow.

Stop it! They did not!

Yet there was something about him that made Jack think of

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what had happened when he was coming into town . . . what

had happened in the dark.