The Talisman by Stephen King

to sell. Mrs. Henry stood near him, but a bit behind, giving the men room to trade. Her back was to Jack, but she had the baby hoisted in her arms— Jason, one of the little Henrys, Jack thought—but Jason saw him. The baby waved one

chubby hand at Jack and Jack turned away quickly, putting as much crowd as he could between himself and the Henrys.

Everywhere was the smell of roasting meat, it seemed. He

saw vendors slowly turning joints of beef over charcoal fires both small and ambitious; he saw ’prentices laying thick

slices of what looked like pork on slabs of homemade bread

and taking them to the buyers. They looked like runners at an auction. Most of the buyers were farmers like Henry, and it appeared that they also called for food the way people entered a bid at an auction—they simply raised one of their hands im-periously, the fingers splayed out. Jack watched several of these transactions closely, and in every case the medium of exchange was the jointed sticks . . . but how many knuckles would be enough? he wondered. Not that it mattered. He had

to eat, whether the transaction marked him as a stranger or not.

He passed a mime-show, barely giving it a glance although

the large audience that had gathered—women and children,

most of them—roared with appreciative laughter and ap-

plauded. He moved toward a stall with canvas sides where a

big man with tattoos on his slabbed biceps stood on one side of a trench of smouldering charcoal in the earth. An iron spit about seven feet long ran over the charcoal. A sweating, dirty boy stood at each end. Five large roasts were impaled along the length of the spit, and the boys were turning them in unison.

“Fine meats!” the big man was droning. “Fine meats! Fii-ine meats! Buy my fine meats! Fine meats here! Fine meats

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right here!” In an aside to the boy closest to him: “Put your back into it, God pound you.” Then back to his droning, huck-stering cry.

A farmer passing with his adolescent daughter raised his

hand, and then pointed at the joint of meat second from the left. The boys stopped turning the spit long enough for their boss to hack a slab from the roast and put in on a chunk of bread. One of them ran with it to the farmer, who produced

one of the jointed sticks. Watching closely, Jack saw him

break off two knuckles of wood and hand them to the boy. As the boy ran back to the stall the customer pocketed his

money-stick with the absent but careful gesture of any man

repocketing his change, took a gigantic bite of his open-faced sandwich, and handed the rest to his daughter, whose first

chomp was almost as enthusiastic as her father’s.

Jack’s stomach boinged and goinged. He had seen what he

had to see . . . he hoped.

“Fine meats! Fine meats! Fine—” The big man broke off

and looked down at Jack, his beetling brows drawing together over eyes that were small but not entirely stupid. “I hear the song your stomach is singing, friend. If you have money, I’ll take your trade and bless you to God in my prayers tonight. If you haven’t, then get your stupid sheep’s face out of here and go to the devil.”

Both boys laughed, although they were obviously tired—

they laughed as if they had no control over the sounds they were making.

But the maddening smell of the slowly cooking meat

would not let him leave. He held out the shorter of his jointed sticks and pointed to the roast which was second from the

left. He didn’t speak. It seemed safer not to. The vendor

grunted, produced his crude knife from his wide belt again, and cut a slice—it was a smaller slice than the one he had cut the farmer, Jack observed, but his stomach had no business

with such matters; it was rumbling crazily in anticipation.

The vendor slapped the meat on bread and brought it over

himself instead of handing it to either of the boys. He took Jack’s money-stick. Instead of two knuckles, he broke off

three.

His mother’s voice, sourly amused, spoke up in his mind:

Congratulations, Jack-O . . . you’ve just been screwed.

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The vendor was looking at him, grinning around a mouth-

ful of wretched blackish teeth, daring him to say anything, to protest in any way. You just ought to be grateful I only took three knuckles instead of all fourteen of them. I could have, you know. You might as well have a sign hung around your neck, boy: I AM A STRANGER HERE, AND ON MY OWN. So tell me, Sheep’ s-Face: do you want to make an issue of it?

What he wanted didn’t matter—he obviously couldn’t

make an issue of it. But he felt that thin, impotent anger

again.

“Go on,” the vendor said, tiring of him. He flapped a big

hand in Jack’s face. His fingers were scarred, and there was blood under his nails. “You got your food. Now get out of

here.”

Jack thought, I could show you a flashlight and you’d run like all the devils of hell were after you. Show you an airplane and you’d probably go crazy. You’re maybe not as tough as you think, chum.

He smiled, perhaps there was something in his smile that

the meat-vendor didn’t like, because he drew away from Jack, his face momentarily uneasy. Then his brows beetled together again.

“Get out, I said!” he roared. “Get out, God pound you!”

And this time Jack went.

2

The meat was delicious. Jack gobbled it and the bread it sat on, and then unselfconsciously licked the juice from his

palms as he strolled along. The meat did taste like pork . . .

and yet it didn’t. It was somehow richer, tangier than pork.

Whatever it was, it filled the hole in the middle of him with authority. Jack thought he could take it to school in bag

lunches for a thousand years.

Now that he had managed to shut his belly up—for a little

while, anyway—he was able to look about himself with more

interest . . . and although he didn’t know it, he had finally begun to blend into the crowd. Now he was only one more rube

from the country come to the market-town, walking slowly

between the stalls, trying to gawk in every direction at once.

Hucksters recognized him, but only as one more potential

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mark among many. They yelled and beckoned at him, and as

he passed by they yelled and beckoned at whoever happened

to be behind him—man, woman, or child. Jack gaped frankly

at the wares scattered all around him, wares both wonderful and strange, and amidst all the others staring at them he

ceased to be a stranger himself—perhaps because he had

given up his effort to seem blasé in a place where no one acted blasé. They laughed, they argued, they haggled . . . but no one seemed bored.

The market-town reminded him of the Queen’s pavillion

without the air of strained tension and too-hectic gaiety—

there was the same absurdly rich mingle of smells (dominated by roasting meat and animal ordure), the same brightly

dressed crowds (although even the most brightly dressed people Jack saw couldn’t hold a candle to some of the dandies he had seen inside the pavillion), the same unsettling but somehow exhilarating juxtaposition of the perfectly normal, cheek by jowl with the extravagantly strange.

He stopped at a stall where a man was selling carpets with

the Queen’s portrait woven into them. Jack suddenly thought of Hank Scoffler’s mom and smiled. Hank was one of the kids Jack and Richard Sloat had hung around with in L.A. Mrs.

Scoffler had a thing for the most garish decorations Jack had ever seen. And God, wouldn’t she have loved these rugs, with the image of Laura DeLoessian, her hair done up in a high,

regal coronet of braids, woven into them! Better than her velvet paintings of Alaskan stags or the ceramic diorama of the Last Supper behind the bar in the Scoffler living room. . . .

Then the face woven into the rugs seemed to change even

as he looked at it. The face of the Queen was gone and it was his mother’s face he saw, repeated over and over and over, her eyes too dark, her skin much too white.

Homesickness surprised Jack again. It rushed through his

mind in a wave and he called out for her in his heart— Mom!

Hey Mom! Jesus, what am I doing here? Mom!! —wondering with a lover’s longing intensity what she was doing now, right this minute. Sitting at the window, smoking, looking out at the ocean, a book open beside her? Watching TV? At a