The Talisman by Stephen King

He walked up the market-town’s main thoroughfare, past

the mimers, past two fat women selling pots and pans ( Terri-

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tories Tupperware, Jack thought, and grinned), past that wonderful two-headed parrot (its one-eyed owner was now drink-

ing quite openly from a clay bottle, reeling wildly from one end of his booth to the other, holding the dazed-looking

rooster by the neck and yelling truculently at passersby—Jack saw the man’s scrawny right arm was caked with yellowish-white guano, and grimaced), past an open area where farmers were gathered. He paused there for a moment, curious. Many

of the farmers were smoking clay pipes, and Jack saw several clay bottles, much the same as the one the bird-salesman had been brandishing, go from hand to hand. In a long, grassy

field, men were hitching stones behind large shaggy horses

with lowered heads and mild, stupid eyes.

Jack passed the rug-stall. The vendor saw him and raised a

hand. Jack raised one in turn and thought of calling Use it, my man, but don’t abuse it! He decided he better not. He was suddenly aware that he felt blue. That feeling of strangeness, of being an outsider, had fallen over him again.

He reached the crossroads. The way going north and south

was little more than a country lane. The Western Road was

much wider.

Old Travelling Jack, he thought, and tried to smile. He straightened his shoulders and heard Speedy’s bottle clink

lightly against the mirror. Here goes old Travelling Jack along the Territories version of Interstate 90. Feets don’t fail me now!

He set off again, and soon that great dreaming land swal-

lowed him.

5

About four hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, Jack sat down in the tall grass by the side of the road and watched as a number of men—from this distance they looked little

bigger than bugs—climbed a tall, rickety-looking tower. He

had chosen this place to rest and eat his apple because it was here that the Western Road seemed to make its closest approach to that tower. It was still at least three miles away (and perhaps much more than that—the almost supernatural clarity of the air made distances extremely hard to judge), but it had been in Jack’s view for an hour or more.

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Jack ate his apple, rested his tired feet, and wondered what that tower could be, standing out there all by itself in a field of rolling grass. And, of course, he wondered why those men

should be climbing it. The wind had blown quite steadily ever since he had left the market-town, and the tower was downwind of Jack, but whenever it died away for a minute, Jack

could hear them calling to each other . . . and laughing. There was a lot of laughing going on.

Some five miles west of the market, Jack had walked

through a village—if your definition of a village stretched to cover five tiny houses and one store that had obviously been closed for a long time. Those had been the last human habitations he had seen between then and now. Just before glimps-

ing the tower, he had been wondering if he had already come to the Outposts without even knowing it. He remembered well enough what Captain Farren had said: Beyond the Outposts the Western Road goes into nowhere . . . or into hell. I’ve heard it said that God Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. . . .

Jack shivered a little.

But he didn’t really believe he had come so far. Certainly

there was none of the steadily deepening unease he had been feeling before he floundered into the living trees in his effort to get away from Morgan’s diligence . . . the living trees

which now seemed like a hideous prologue to all the time he had spent in Oatley.

Indeed, the good emotions he had felt from the time he

woke up warm and rested inside the haystack until the time

Henry the farmer had invited him to jump down from his

wagon had now resurfaced: that feeling that the Territories, in spite of whatever evil they might harbor, were fundamentally good, and that he could be a part of this place anytime he

wanted . . . that he was really no Stranger at all.

He had come to realize that he was part of the Territories for long periods of time. A strange thought had come to him as he swung easily along the Western Road, a thought which

came half in English and half in whatever the Territories language was: When I’m having a dream, the only time I really KNOW it’s a dream is when I’m starting to wake up. If I’m dreaming and just wake up all at once—if the alarm clock goes off, or something—then I’m the most surprised guy

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alive. At first it’s the waking that seems like a dream. And I’m no stranger over here when the dream gets deep—is that what I mean? No, but it’s getting close. I bet my dad dreamed deep a lot. And I’ll bet Uncle Morgan almost never does.

He had decided he would take a swig out of Speedy’s bot-

tle and flip back the first time he saw anything that might be dangerous . . . even if he saw anything scary. Otherwise he would walk all day over here before returning to New York. In fact, he might have been tempted to spend the night in the

Territories, if he’d had anything to eat beyond the one apple.

But he didn’t, and along the wide, deserted dirt track of the Western Road there was not a 7-Eleven or a Stop-’n-Go in

sight.

The old trees which had surrounded the crossroads and the

market-town had given way to open grassland on either side

once Jack got past the final small settlement. He began to feel that he was walking along an endless causeway which crossed the middle of a limitless ocean. He travelled the Western

Road alone that day under a sky that was bright and sunny but cool (late September now, of course it’s cool, he thought, except the word which came to mind was not September but a Territories word which really did translate better as ninemonth). No pedestrians passed him, no wagons either loaded or empty. The wind blew pretty steadily, sighing through the ocean of grasses with a low sound that was both autumnal

and lonely. Great ripples ran across the grasses before that wind.

If asked “How do you feel, Jack?,” the boy would have re-

sponded: “Pretty good, thanks. Cheerful.” Cheerful is the word which would have come into his mind as he hiked

through those empty grasslands; rapture was a word he associated most easily with the pop hit of the same name by the rock group Blondie. And he would have been astounded if

told he had wept several times as he stood watching those

great ripples chase each other toward the horizon, drinking in a sight that only a very few American children of his time had ever seen—huge empty tracts of land under a blue sky of

dizzying width and breadth and, yes, even depth. It was a sky unmarked by either jet contrails across its dome or smutty

bands of smog at any of its lower edges.

Jack was having an experience of remarkable sensory im-

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pact, seeing and hearing and smelling things which were

brand-new to him, while other sensory input to which he had grown utterly accustomed was missing for the first time. In many ways he was a remarkably sophisticated child—brought

up in a Los Angeles family where his father had been an

agent and his mother a movie actress, it would have been

odder if he had been naive—but he was still just a child, sophisticated or not, and that was undeniably his gain . . . at least in a situation such as this. That lonely day’s journey across the grasslands would surely have produced sensory

overload, perhaps even a pervasive sense of madness and hallucination, in an adult. An adult would have been scrabbling for Speedy’s bottle—probably with fingers too shaky to grasp it very successfully—an hour west of the market-town, maybe less.

In Jack’s case, the wallop passed almost completely

through his conscious mind and into his subconscious. So

when he blissed out entirely and began to weep, he was really unaware of the tears (except as a momentary doubling of vision which he attributed to sweat) and thought only: Jeez, I feel good . . . it should feel spooky out here with no one around, but it doesn’t.

That was how Jack came to think of his rapture as no more