The Talisman by Stephen King

He thought, I am drinking the magic juice. In my mind I’m drinking it, right here and now I’m drinking it, I can smell it, so purple and so thick and new, I can taste it, I can feel my throat closing on it—

As the taste filled his throat, the world swayed under them, around them. Wolf cried out, “Jacky, it’s working!”

It startled him out of his fierce concentration and for a moment he became aware that it was only a trick, like trying to get to sleep by counting sheep, and the world steadied again.

The smell of the Lysol flooded back. Faintly he heard some-

one answer the phone querulously: “Yes, hello, who is it?”

Never mind, it’s not a trick, not a trick at all—it’s magic.

It’s magic and I did it before when I was little and I can do it again, Speedy said so that blind singer Snowball said so, too, THE MAGIC JUICE IS IN MY MIND—

He bore down with all his force, all his effort of will . . .

and the ease with which they flipped was stupefying, as if a punch aimed at something which looked like granite hit a

cleverly painted papier-mâché shell instead, so that the blow you thought would break all your knuckles instead encountered no resistance at all.

4

To Jack, with his eyes screwed tightly shut, it felt as if the floor had first crumbled under his feet . . . and then disappeared completely.

Oh shit we’re going to fall anyway, he thought dismally.

But it wasn’t really a fall, only a minor sideslip. A moment later he and Wolf were standing firmly, not on hard bathroom tile but on dirt.

A reek of sulphur mingled with what smelled like raw

sewage flooded in. It was a deathly smell, and Jack thought it meant the end of all hope.

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“Jason! What’s that smell?” Wolf groaned. “Oh Jason that smell, can’t stay here, Jacky, can’t stay—”

Jack’s eyes snapped open. At the same moment Wolf let

go of Jack’s hands and blundered forward, his own eyes

still tightly shut. Jack saw that Wolf ’s ill-fitting chinos and checked shirt had been replaced by the Oshkosh biballs in

which Jack had originally seen the big herdsman. The John

Lennon glasses were gone. And—

—and Wolf was blundering toward the edge of a precipice

less than four feet away.

“Wolf!” He lunged at Wolf and wrapped his arms around Wolf ’s waist. “Wolf, no!”

“Jacky, can’t stay,” Wolf moaned. “It’s a Pit, one of the

Pits, Morgan made these places, oh I heard that Morgan made them, I can smell it—”

“Wolf, there’s a cliff, you’ll fall!”

Wolf ’s eyes opened. His jaw dropped as he saw the

smokey chasm which spread at their feet. In its deepest,

cloudy depths, red fire winked like infected eyes.

“A Pit,” Wolf moaned. “Oh Jacky, it’s a Pit. Furnaces of the Black Heart down there. Black Heart at the middle of the

world. Can’t stay, Jacky, it’s the worst bad there is.”

Jack’s first cold thought as he and Wolf stood at the edge of the Pit, looking down into hell, or the Black Heart at the middle of the world, was that Territories geography and Indiana geography weren’t the same. There was no corresponding place in the Sunlight Home to this cliff, this hideous Pit.

Four feet to the right, Jack thought with sudden, sickening horror. That’s all it would have taken—just four feet to the right. And if Wolf had done what I told him—

If Wolf had done just what Jack had told him, they would

have flipped from that first stall. And if they had done that, they would have come into the Territories just over this cliff ’s edge.

The strength ran out of his legs. He groped at Wolf again,

this time for support.

Wolf held him absently, his eyes wide and glowing a

steady orange. His face was a grue of dismay and fear. “It’s a Pit, Jacky.”

It looked like the huge open-pit molybdenum mine he had

visited with his mother when they had vacationed in Colorado

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three winters ago—they had gone to Vail to ski but one day it had been too bitterly cold for that and so they had taken a bus tour to the Continental Minerals molybdenum mine outside

the little town of Sidewinder. “It looks like Gehenna to me, Jack-O,” she had said, and her face as she looked out the

frost-bordered bus window had been dreamy and sad. “I wish

they’d shut those places down, every one of them. They’re

pulling fire and destruction out of the earth. It’s Gehenna, all right.”

Thick, choking vines of smoke rose from the depths of the

Pit. Its sides were veined with thick lodes of some poisonous green metal. It was perhaps half a mile across. A road leading downward spiraled its inner circumference. Jack could see

figures toiling both upward and downward upon this road.

It was a prison of some kind, just as the Sunlight Home

was a prison, and these were the prisoners and their keepers.

The prisoners were naked, harnessed in pairs to carts like

rickshaws—carts filled with huge chunks of that green,

greasy-looking ore. Their faces were drawn in rough wood-

cuts of pain. Their faces were blackened with soot. Their

faces ran with thick red sores.

The guards toiled beside them, and Jack saw with numb

dismay that they were not human; in no sense at all could they be called human. They were twisted and humped, their hands

were claws, their ears pointed like Mr. Spock’s. Why, they’re gargoyles! he thought. All those nightmare monsters on those cathedrals in France—Mom had a book and I thought we

were going to have to see every one in the whole country but she stopped when I had a bad dream and wet the bed—did

they come from here? Did somebody see them here? Some-

body from the Middle Ages who flipped over, saw this place, and thought he’d had a vision of hell?

But this was no vision.

The gargoyles had whips, and over the rumble of the

wheels and the sounds of rock cracking steadily under some

steady, baking heat, Jack heard their pop and whistle. As he and Wolf watched, one team of men paused near the very top

of the spiral road, their heads down, tendons on their necks standing out in harsh relief, their legs trembling with exhaustion.

The monstrosity who was guarding them—a twisted crea-

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ture with a breechclout twisted around its legs and a patchy line of stiff hair growing from the scant flesh over the knobs of its spine—brought its whip down first on one and then on the other, howling at them in a high, screeching language that seemed to drive silver nails of pain into Jack’s head. Jack saw the same silver beads of metal that had decorated Osmond’s

whip, and before he could blink, the arm of one prisoner had been torn open and the nape of the other’s neck lay in ruined flaps.

The men wailed and leaned forward even farther, their

blood the deepest color in the yellowish murk. The thing

screeched and gibbered and its grayish, plated right arm

flexed as it whirled the whip over the slaves’ heads. With a final staggering jerk, they yanked the cart up and onto the level.

One of them fell forward onto his knees, exhausted, and the forward motion of the cart knocked him sprawling. One of

the wheels rolled over his back. Jack heard the sound of the downed prisoner’s spine as it broke. It sounded like a track referee’s starter-gun.

The gargoyle shrieked with rage as the cart tottered and

then fell over, dumping its load onto the split, cracked, arid ground at the top of the Pit. He reached the fallen prisoner in two lunging steps and raised his whip. As he did, the dying man turned his head and looked into Jack Sawyer’s eyes.

It was Ferd Janklow.

Wolf saw, too.

They groped for each other.

And flipped back.

5

They were in a tight, closed place—a bathroom stall, in

fact—and Jack could barely breathe because Wolf ’s arms

were wrapped around him in a crushing embrace. And one of

his feet was sopping wet. He had somehow managed to flip

back with one foot in a toilet-bowl. Oh, great. Things like this never happen to Conan the Barbarian, Jack thought dismally.

“Jack no, Jack no, the Pit, it was the Pit, no, Jack—”

“Quit it! Quit it, Wolf! We’re back!”

“No, no, n—”

Wolf broke off. He opened his eyes slowly.

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“Back?”

“You bet, right here and now, so let go of me, you’re breaking my ribs, and besides, my foot’s stuck in the damn—”