The Talisman

43

News From Everywhere

1

Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack’s voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.

“Jason?” she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her son’s name. But in the dream from which she had just been startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course. The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.

“Jack?” she tried again. “Jack, where are you?”

No answer . . . but she sensed him, knew for sure that he was alive. For the first time in a long time—six months, maybe—she felt really good.

“Jack-O,” she said, and grabbed her cigarettes. She looked at them for a moment and then heaved them all the way across the room, where they landed in the fireplace on top of the rest of the shit she meant to burn later in the day. “I think I just quit smoking for the second and last time in my life, Jack-O,” she said. “Hang in there, kid. Your momma loves you.”

And she found herself for no reason grinning a large idiotic grin.

2

Donny Keegan, who had been pulling Sunlight Home kitchen duty when Wolf escaped from the box, had survived that terrible night—George Irwinson, the fellow who had been pulling the duty with him, had not been so lucky. Now Donny was in a more conventional orphans’ home in Muncie, Indiana. Unlike some of the other boys at the Sunlight Home, Donny had been a real orphan; Gardener had needed to take a token few to satisfy the state.

Now, mopping a dark upstairs hall in a dim daze, Donny looked up suddenly, his muddy eyes widening. Outside, clouds which had been spitting light snow into the used-up fields of December suddenly pulled open in the west, letting out a single broad ray of sunshine that was terrible and exalting in its isolated beauty.

“You’re right, I DO love him!” Donny shouted triumphantly. It was Ferd Janklow that Donny was shouting to, although Donny, who had too many toys in his attic to accommodate many brains, had already forgotten his name. “He’s beautiful and I DO love him!”

Donny honked his idiot laugh, only now even his laugh was nearly beautiful. Some of the other boys came to their doors and stared at Donny in wonder. His face was bathed in the sunlight from that one clear, ephemeral ray, and one of the other boys would whisper to a close friend that night that for a moment Donny Keegan had looked like Jesus.

The moment passed; the clouds moved over that weird clear place in the sky, and by evening the snow had intensified into the first big winter storm of the season. Donny had known—for one brief moment he had known—what that feeling of love and triumph actually meant. That passed quickly, the way dreams do upon waking . . . but he never forgot the feeling itself, that almost swooning sensation of grace for once fulfilled and delivered instead of promised and then denied; that feeling of clarity and sweet, marvellous love; that feeling of ecstasy at the coming once more of the white.

3

Judge Fairchild, who had sent Jack and Wolf to the Sunlight Home, was no longer a judge of any kind, and as soon as his final appeals ran out, he would be going to jail. There no longer seemed any question that jail was where he would fetch up, and that he would do hard time there. Might never come out at all. He was an old man, and not very healthy. If they hadn’t found the damned bodies . . .

He had remained as cheerful as possible under the circumstances, but now, as he sat cleaning his fingernails with the long blade of his pocketknife in his study at home, a great gray wave of depression crashed over him. Suddenly he pulled the knife away from his thick nails, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then inserted the tip of the blade into his right nostril. He held it there for a moment and then whispered, “Oh shit. Why not?” He jerked his fist upward, sending the six-inch blade on a short, lethal trip, skewering first his sinuses and then his brain.

4

Smokey Updike sat in a booth at the Oatley Tap, going over invoices and totting up numbers on his Texas Instruments calculator, just as he had been doing on the day Jack had met him. Only now it was early evening and Lori was serving the evening’s first customers. The jukebox was playing “I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobotomy).”

At one moment everything was normal. At the next Smokey sat bolt-upright, his little paper cap tumbling backward off his head. He clutched his white T-shirt over the left side of his chest, where a hammering bolt of pain had just struck like a silver spike. God pounds his nails, Wolf would have said.

At the same instant the grill suddenly exploded into the air with a loud bang. It hit a Busch display sign and tore it from the ceiling. It landed with a crash. A rich smell of LP gas filled the area in back of the bar almost at once. Lori screamed.

The jukebox speeded up: 45 rpms, 78, 150, 400! The woman’s seriocomic lament became the speedy gabble of deranged chipmunks on a rocket-sled. A moment later the top blew off the juke. Colored glass flew everywhere.

Smokey looked down at his calculator and saw a single word blinking on and off in the red window:

TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN

Then his eyes exploded.

“Lori, turn off the gas!” one of the customers screamed. He got down off his stool, and turned toward Smokey. “Smokey, tell her—” The man wailed with fright as he saw blood gushing from the holes where Smokey Updike’s eyes had been.

A moment later the entire Oatley Tap blew sky-high, and before the fire-trucks could arrive from Dogtown and Elmira, most of downtown was in flames.

No great loss, children, can you say amen.

5

At Thayer School, where normality now reigned as it always had (with one brief interlude which those on campus remembered only as a series of vague, related dreams), the last classes of the day had just begun. What was light snow in Indiana was a cold drizzle here in Illinois. Students sat dreaming and thoughtful in their classes.

Suddenly the bells in the chapel began to peal. Heads came up. Eyes widened. All over the Thayer campus, fading dreams suddenly seemed to renew themselves.

6

Etheridge had been sitting in advanced-math class and pressing his hand rhythmically up and down against a raging hard-on while he stared unseeingly at the logarithms old Mr. Hunkins was piling up on the blackboard. He was thinking about the cute little townie waitress he would be boffing later on. She wore garter-belts instead of pantyhose, and was more than willing to leave her stockings on while they fucked. Now Etheridge stared around at the windows, forgetting his erection, forgetting the waitress with her long legs and smooth nylons—suddenly, for no reason at all, Sloat was on his mind. Prissy little Richard Sloat, who should have been safely classifiable as a wimp but who somehow wasn’t. He thought about Sloat and wondered if he was all right. Somehow he thought that maybe Sloat, who had left school unexcused four days ago and who hadn’t been heard from since, wasn’t doing so good.

In the headmaster’s office, Mr. Dufrey had been discussing the expulsion of a boy named George Hatfield for cheating with his furious—and rich—father when the bells began to jingle out their unscheduled little tune. When it ended, Mr. Dufrey found himself on his hands and knees with his gray hair hanging in his eyes and his tongue lolling over his lips. Hatfield the Elder was standing by the door—cringing against it, actually—his eyes wide and his jaw agape, his anger forgotten in wonder and fear. Mr. Dufrey had been crawling around on his rug barking like a dog.

Albert the Blob had just been getting himself a snack when the bells began to ring. He looked toward the window for a moment, frowning the way a person frowns when he is trying to remember something that is right on the tip of his tongue. He shrugged and went back to opening a bag of nacho chips—his mother had just sent him a whole case. His eyes widened. He thought—just for a moment, but a moment was long enough—that the bag was full of plump, squirming white bugs.

He fainted dead away.

When he awoke and worked up enough courage to peer into the bag again, he saw it had been nothing but a hallucination. Of course! What else? All the same, it was a hallucination which exercised a strange power over him in the future; whenever he opened a bag of chips, or a candy bar, or a Slim Jim, or a package of Big Jerk beef jerky, he saw those bugs in his mind’s eye. By spring, Albert had lost thirty-five pounds, was playing on the Thayer tennis team, and had gotten laid. Albert was delirious with ecstasy. For the first time in his life he felt that he might survive his mother’s love.

7

They all looked around when the bells began to ring. Some laughed, some frowned, a few burst into tears. A pair of dogs howled from somewhere, and that was passing strange because no dogs were allowed on campus.

The tune the bells rang was not in the computerized schedule of tunes—the disgruntled head custodian later verified it. A campus wag suggested in that week’s issue of the school paper that some eager beaver had programmed the tune with Christmas vacation in mind.

It had been “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

8

Although she had believed herself far too old to catch pregnant, no blood had come to the mother of Jack Sawyer’s Wolf at the time of the Change some twelve months ago. Three months ago she had given birth to triplets—two litter-sisters and one litter-brother. Her labor had been hard, and the foreknowledge that one of her older children was about to die had been upon her. That child, she knew, had gone into the Other Place to protect the herd, and he would die in that Other Place, and she would never see him anymore. This was very hard, and she had wept in more than the pain of her delivery.

Yet now, as she slept with her new young beneath a full moon, all of them safely away from the herd for the time being, she rolled over with a smile on her face and pulled the newest litter-brother to her and began to lick him. Still sleeping himself, the Wolfling put his arms around his mother’s shaggy neck and pressed his cheek against her downy breast, and now they both smiled; in her alien sleep a human thought arose: God pounds his nails well and true. And the moonlight of that lovely world where all smells were good shone down on the two of them as they slept in each other’s arms with the litter-sisters nearby.

9

In the town of Goslin, Ohio (not far from Amanda, and some thirty miles south of Columbus), a man named Buddy Parkins was shovelling chickenshit in a henhouse at dusk. A cheesecloth mask was tied over his mouth and nose to keep the choking white cloud of powdered guano he was raising from getting up his nose and into his mouth. The air reeked of ammonia. The stink had given him a headache. He also had a backache, because he was tall and the henhouse wasn’t. All things considered, he would have to say that this was one bitch-kitty of a job. He had three sons, and every damned one of them seemed to be unavailable when the henhouse needed to be swamped out. Only thing to be said about it was that he was almost done, and—

The kid! Jesus Christ! That kid!

He suddenly remembered the boy who had called himself Lewis Farren with total clarity and a stunned kind of love. The boy who had claimed to be going to his aunt, Helen Vaughan, in the town of Buckeye Lake; the boy who had turned to Buddy when Buddy had asked him if he was running away and had in that turning, revealed a face filled with honest goodness and an unexpected, amazing beauty—a beauty that had made Buddy think of rainbows glimpsed at the end of storms, and sunsets at the end of days that have groaned and sweated with work that has been well done and not scamped.

He straightened up with a gasp and bonked his head on the henhouse beams hard enough to make his eyes water . . . but he was grinning crazily all the same. Oh my God, that boy is THERE, he’s THERE, Buddy Parkins thought, and although he had no idea of where “there” was, he was suddenly overtaken by a sweet, violent feeling of absolute adventure; never, since reading Treasure Island at the age of twelve and cupping a girl’s breast in his hand for the first time at fourteen, had he felt so staggered, so excited, so full of warm joy. He began to laugh. He dropped his shovel, and while the hens stared at him with stupid amazement, Buddy Parkins danced a shuffling jig in the chickenshit, laughing behind his mask and snapping his fingers.

“He’s there!” Buddy Parkins yelled to the chickens, laughing. “By diddly-damn, he’s there, he made it after all, he’s there and he’s got it!”

Later, he almost thought—almost, but never quite—that he must have somehow gotten high on the stench of the chicken-dust. That wasn’t all, dammit, that wasn’t. He had had some kind of revelation, but he could no longer remember what it had been . . . he supposed it was like that British poet some high-school English teacher had told them about: the guy had taken a big dose of opium and had started to write some poems about a make-believe Chink whorehouse while he was stoned . . . except when he came down to earth again he couldn’t finish it.

Like that, he thought, but somehow he knew it wasn’t; and although he couldn’t remember exactly what had caused the joy, he, like Donny Keegan, never forgot the way the joy had come, all deliciously unbidden—he never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.

10

There’s an old Bobby Darin song which goes: “And the ground coughs up some roots/wearing denim shirts and boots,/haul em away . . . haul em away.” This was a song the children in the area of Cayuga, Indiana, could have related to enthusiastically, if it hadn’t been popular quite a bit before their time. The Sunlight Home had been empty for only a little more than a week, and already it had gotten a reputation with the local kids as a haunted house. Considering the grisly remains the payloaders had found near the rock wall at the back of Far Field, this was not surprising. The local Realtor’s FOR SALE sign looked as if it had been standing on the lawn for a year instead of just nine days, and the Realtor had already dropped the price once and was thinking about doing it again.

As it happened, he would not have to. As the first snow began to spit down from the leaden skies over Cayuga (and as Jack Sawyer was touching the Talisman some two thousand miles away), the LP tanks behind the kitchen exploded. A workman from Eastern Indiana Gas and Electric had come the week before and had sucked all the gas back into his truck, and he would have sworn you could have crawled right inside one of those tanks and lit up a cigarette, but they exploded anyway—they exploded at the exact moment the windows of the Oatley Tap were exploding out into the street (along with a number of patrons wearing denim shirts and boots . . . and Elmira rescue units hauled em away).

The Sunlight Home burned to the ground in almost no time at all.

Can you gimme hallelujah?

11

In all worlds, something shifted and settled into a slightly new position like a great beast . . . but in Point Venuti the beast was in the earth; it had been awakened and was roaring. It did not go to sleep for the next seventy-nine seconds, according to the Institute of Seismology at CalTech.

The earthquake had begun.