The Talisman: A Novel
Stephen King, Peter Straub
Language: English
Pages: 944
ISBN: 145169721X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The iconic, “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) collaboration between #1 bestselling author Stephen King and Peter Straub—an epic thriller about a young boy’s quest to save his mother’s life.
Why had twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer’s mother frantically moved the two of them from Rodeo Drive to a New York City apartment to the Alhambra, a fading ocean resort and shuttered amusement park in New Hampshire? Who or what is she running from? She is dying . . . and even young Jack knows she can’t outrun death. But only he can save her—for he has been chosen to search for a prize across an epic landscape of dangers and lies, a realm of innocents and monsters, where everything Jack loves is on the line.
Parker was a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting through his cheeks. He was utterly unremarkable now despite whatever he had accomplished in his earlier life as a travelling blues musician. Nor had he said anything particularly remarkable. Yet as soon as Jack had walked aimlessly into Funworld’s game arcade and met Speedy’s pale eyes he felt all the fuzziness leave him. King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 10 10 THE TALISMAN He had become himself again. It
with women swept by them at an alarming pace. The women were laughing and shrieking. One got to her feet, raised her skirt all the way to her hairy crotch, and did a tipsy bump and grind. She would have tumbled over the side of the wagon and into the ditch— probably breaking her neck—if one of her colleagues hadn’t grabbed her by the back of the skirt and pulled her rudely back down. Jack blushed again: he saw the girl’s white breast, its nipple in the dirty baby’s working mouth. Oooooo, this
But Speedy’s bottle of magic juice was only half-full. Somehow that had to last him all the way across the United States. It wouldn’t last until he was out of New England if he sipped a little every time he got the willies. His mind also kept returning to the amazing distance he had travelled in his world when he had flipped back from the Territories. A hundred and fifty feet over here had equalled half a mile over there. At that rate—unless the ratio of distance travelled were somehow variable,
often, varying the names of the towns involved as he worked westward, that it had a slick, monologuelike feel in his mouth. “No, sir. It’s just that I have to go over to Oatley to live with my Aunt Helen for a little while. Helen Vaughan? That’s my mom’s sister. She’s a schoolteacher. My dad died last winter, see, and things have been pretty tough— then two weeks ago my mom’s cough got a lot worse and she could hardly get up the stairs and the doctor said she had to stay in bed for as long as she
again, presumably the better to center him for a second shot. At that moment a woman shrieked, from the Tap, “No, Glen! No!” There was a tangle of bellowing male voices, most of them alarmed. Another woman screamed—a high, drilling sound. Then a gunshot. “Shit on toast!” Smokey cried, enunciating each word as carefully as an actor on a Broadway stage. He threw Jack back against the wall, whirled, and slammed out through the King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 181 The Road of