The Talisman by Stephen King

The Talisman

Stephen King

CONTENTS:

PART I: JACK LIGHTS OUT

1 The Alhambra Inn and Gardens 3

2 The Funnel Opens 12

3 Speedy Parker 25

4 Jack Goes Over 45

5 Jack and Lily 62

INTERLUDE Sloat in This World (I) 77

PART II: THE ROAD OF TRIALS

6 The Queen’s Pavillion 91

7 Farren 102

8 The Oatley Tunnel 138

9 Jack in the Pitcher Plant 149

10 Elroy 173

11 The Death of Jerry Bledsoe 186

12 Jack Goes to the Market 201

13 The Men in the Sky 207

14 Buddy Parkins 227

15 Snowball Sings 241

16 Wolf 256

INTERLUDE Sloat in This World (II) 263

17 Wolf and the Herd 265

18 Wolf Goes to the Movies 277

19 Jack in the Box 296

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PART III: A COLLISION OF WORLDS

20 Taken by the Law 323

21 The Sunlight Home 336

22 The Sermon 348

23 Ferd Janklow 365

24 Jack Names the Planets 379

25 Jack and Wolf Go to Hell 387

26 Wolf in the Box 398

27 Jack Lights Out Again 424

28 Jack’s Dream 427

29 Richard at Thayer 434

30 Thayer Gets Weird 446

31 Thayer Goes to Hell 450

32 “Send Out Your Passenger!” 455

33 Richard in the Dark 465

INTERLUDE Sloat in This World/

Orris in the Territories (III) 482

PART IV: THE TALISMAN

34 Anders 495

INTERLUDE Sloat in This World (IV) 512

35 The Blasted Lands 516

36 Jack and Richard Go to War 548

37 Richard Remembers 566

38 The End of the Road 592

39 Point Venuti 599

40 Speedy on the Beach 612

INTERLUDE Sloat in This World (V) 627

41 The Black Hotel 633

42 Jack and the Talisman 648

43 News From Everywhere 664

44 The Earthquake 672

45 In Which Many Things are Resolved on the Beach 688

46 Another Journey 708

47 Journey’s End 721

Epilogue 735

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ONE

JACK LIGHTS OUT

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1

The Alhambra Inn and Gardens

1

On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood

where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze swept back his brown hair, probably too long, from a fine, clear brow. He

stood there, filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months—since the time when his mother had closed their house on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estate agents, rented an apartment on Central Park West. From that apartment they had fled to this quiet resort on New Hampshire’s tiny seacoast. Order and regularity had disappeared from Jack’s world. His life seemed as shifting, as uncontrolled, as the heaving water before him. His mother was

moving him through the world, twitching him from place to

place; but what moved his mother?

His mother was running, running.

Jack turned around, looking up the empty beach first to the left, then to the right. To the left was Arcadia Funworld, an amusement park that ran all racket and roar from Memorial

Day to Labor Day. It stood empty and still now, a heart be-

tween beats. The roller coaster was a scaffold against that fea-tureless, overcast sky, the uprights and angled supports like strokes done in charcoal. Down there was his new friend,

Speedy Parker, but the boy could not think about Speedy

Parker now. To the right was the Alhambra Inn and Gardens,

and that was where the boy’s thoughts relentlessly took him.

On the day of their arrival Jack had momentarily thought he’d seen a rainbow over its dormered and gambreled roof. A sign of sorts, a promise of better things. But there had been no

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rainbow. A weathervane spun right-left, left-right, caught in a crosswind. He had got out of their rented car, ignoring his mother’s unspoken desire for him to do something about the

luggage, and looked up. Above the spinning brass cock of the weathervane hung only a blank sky.

“Open the trunk and get the bags, sonny boy,” his mother

had called to him. “This broken-down old actress wants to

check in and hunt down a drink.”

“An elementary martini,” Jack had said.

“ ‘You’re not so old,’ you were supposed to say.” She was

pushing herself effortfully off the carseat.

“You’re not so old.”

She gleamed at him—a glimpse of the old, go-to-hell Lily

Cavanaugh (Sawyer), queen of two decades’ worth of B

movies. She straightened her back. “It’s going to be okay

here, Jacky,” she had said. “Everything’s going to be okay

here. This is a good place.”

A seagull drifted over the roof of the hotel, and for a second Jack had the disquieting sensation that the weathervane had taken flight.

“We’ll get away from the phone calls for a while, right?”

“Sure,” Jack had said. She wanted to hide from Uncle

Morgan, she wanted no more wrangles with her dead hus-

band’s business partner, she wanted to crawl into bed with an elementary martini and hoist the covers over her head. . . .

Mom, what’s wrong with you?

There was too much death, the world was half-made of

death. The gull cried out overhead.

“Andelay, kid, andelay,” his mother had said. “Let’s get

into the Great Good Place.”

Then, Jack had thought: At least there’s always Uncle

Tommy to help out in case things get really hairy.

But Uncle Tommy was already dead; it was just that the

news was still on the other end of a lot of telephone wires.

2

The Alhambra hung out over the water, a great Victorian pile on gigantic granite blocks which seemed to merge almost

seamlessly with the low headland—a jutting collarbone of

granite here on the few scant miles of New Hampshire sea-

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Jack Lights Out

5

coast. The formal gardens on its landward side were barely

visible from Jack’s beachfront angle—a dark green flip of

hedge, that was all. The brass cock stood against the sky,

quartering west by northwest. A plaque in the lobby an-

nounced that it was here, in 1838, that the Northern

Methodist Conference had held the first of the great New

England abolition rallies. Daniel Webster had spoken at fiery, inspired length. According to the plaque, Webster had said:

“From this day forward, know that slavery as an American institution has begun to sicken and must soon die in all our

states and territorial lands.”

3

So they had arrived, on that day last week which had ended

the turmoil of their months in New York. In Arcadia Beach

there were no lawyers employed by Morgan Sloat popping out

of cars and waving papers which had to be signed, had to be filed, Mrs. Sawyer. In Arcadia Beach the telephones did not ring out from noon until three in the morning (Uncle Morgan appeared to forget that residents of Central Park West were not on California time). In fact the telephones in Arcadia

Beach rang not at all.

On the way into the little resort town, his mother driving

with squinty-eyed concentration, Jack had seen only one person on the streets—a mad old man desultorily pushing an

empty shopping cart along a sidewalk. Above them was that

blank gray sky, an uncomfortable sky. In total contrast to New York, here there was only the steady sound of the wind, hooting up deserted streets that looked much too wide with no

traffic to fill them. Here were empty shops with signs in the windows saying OPEN WEEKENDS ONLY or, even worse, SEE YOU

IN JUNE! There were a hundred empty parking places on the

street before the Alhambra, empty tables in the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe next door.

And shabby-crazy old men pushed shopping carts along

deserted streets.

“I spent the happiest three weeks of my life in this funny

little place,” Lily told him, driving past the old man (who turned, Jack saw, to look after them with frightened

suspicion—he was mouthing something but Jack could not

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tell what it was) and then swinging the car up the curved drive through the front gardens of the hotel.

For that was why they had bundled everything they could

not live without into suitcases and satchels and plastic shopping bags, turned the key in the lock on the apartment door (ignoring the shrill ringing of the telephone, which seemed to penetrate that same keyhole and pursue them down the hall); that was why they had filled the trunk and back seat of the rented car with all their overflowing boxes and bags and spent hours crawling north along the Henry Hudson Parkway, then