Excerpt
The Alhambra Inn and Gardens
On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and landcome together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steadyAtlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze sweptback 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 lastthree months—since the time when his mother had closed their house on RodeoDrive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estateagents, rented an apartment on Central Park West. From that apartment they hadfled to this quiet resort on New Hampshire's tiny seacoast. Order and regularityhad 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 theright. To the left was Arcadia Funworld, an amusement park that ran all racketand roar from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It stood empty and still now, a heartbetween beats. The roller coaster was a scaffold against that featureless,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 aboutSpeedy Parker now. To the right was the Alhambra Inn and Gardens, and that waswhere the boy's thoughts relentlessly took him. On the day of their arrival Jackhad momentarily thought he'd seen a rainbow over its dormered and gambreledroof. A sign of sorts, a promise of better things. But there had been norainbow. A weathervane spun right-left, left-right, caught in a crosswind. Hehad got out of their rented car, ignoring his mother's unspoken desire for himto do something about the luggage, and looked up. Above the spinning brass cockof the weathervane hung only a blank sky.
"Open the trunk and get the bags, sonny boy," his mother had called tohim. "This broken-down old actress wants to check in and hunt down adrink."
"An elementary martini," Jack had said.
" 'You're not so old,' you were supposed to say." She was pushingherself 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'sgoing to be okay here, Jacky," she had said. "Everything's going to beokay here. This is a good place."
A seagull drifted over the roof of the hotel, and for a second Jack had thedisquieting 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, shewanted no more wrangles with her dead husband's business partner, she wanted tocrawl 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 outoverhead.
"Andelay, kid, andelay," his mother had said. "Let's get into theGreat Good Place."
Then, Jack had thought: At least there's always Uncle Tommy to help out in casethings get really hairy.
But Uncle Tommy was already dead; it was just that the news was still on theother end of a lot of telephone wires.
2
The Alhambra hung out over the water, a great Victorian pile on gigantic graniteblocks which seemed to merge almost seamlessly with the low headland—a juttingcollarbone of granite here on the few scant miles of New Hampshire seacoast. Theformal gardens on its landward side were barely visible from Jack's beachfrontangle—a dark green flip of hedge, that was all. The brass cock stood againstthe sky, quartering west by northwest. A plaque in the lobby announced that itwas here, in 1838, that the Northern Methodist Conference had held the first ofthe great New England abolition rallies. Daniel Webster had spoken at fiery,inspired length. According to the plaque, Webster had said: "From this dayforward, know that slavery as an American institution has begun to sicken andmust 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 theirmonths in New York. In Arcadia Beach there were no lawyers employed by MorganSloat popping out of cars and waving papers which had to be signed, had to befiled, Mrs. Sawyer. In Arcadia Beach the telephones did not ring out from noonuntil three in the morning (Uncle Morgan appeared to forget that residents ofCentral Park West were not on California time). In fact the telephones inArcadia Beach rang not at all.
On the way into the little resort town, his mother driving with squinty-eyedconcentration, Jack had seen only one person on the streets—a mad old mandesultorily pushing an empty shopping cart along a sidewalk. Above them was thatblank gray sky, an uncomfortable sky. In total contrast to New York, here therewas only the steady sound of the wind, hooting up deserted streets that lookedmuch too wide with no traffic to fill them. Here were empty shops with signs inthe windows saying open weekends only or, even worse, see you in june! Therewere a hundred empty parking places on the street before the Alhambra, emptytables 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 littleplace," Lily told him, driving past the old man (who turned, Jack saw, tolook after them with frightened suspicion—he was mouthing something but Jackcould not tell what it was) and then swinging the car up the curved drivethrough the front gardens of the hotel.
For that was why they had bundled everything they could not live without intosuitcases and satchels and plastic shopping bags, turned the key in the lock onthe apartment door (ignoring the shrill ringing of the telephone, which seemedto penetrate that same keyhole and pursue them down the hall); that was why theyhad filled the trunk and back seat of the rented car with all their overflowingboxes and bags and spent hours crawling north along the Henry Hudson Parkway,then many more hours pounding up I-95—because Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had oncebeen happy here. In 1968, the year before Jack's birth, Lily had been nominatedfor an Academy Award for her role in a picture called Blaze. Blaze was a bettermovie than most of Lily's, and in it she had been able to demonstrate a muchricher talent than her usual bad-girl roles had revealed. Nobody expected Lilyto win, least of all Lily; but for Lily the customary clichŽ about the realhonor being in the nomination was honest truth—she did feel honored, deeply andgenuinely, and to celebrate this one moment of real professional recognition,Phil Sawyer had wisely taken her for three weeks to the Alhambra Inn andGardens, on the other side of the continent, where they had watched the Oscarswhile drinking champagne in bed. (If Jack had been older, and had he had anoccasion to care, he might have done the necessary subtraction and discoveredthat the Alhambra had been the place of his essential beginning.)
When the Supporting Actress nominations were read, according to family legend,Lily had growled to Phil, "If I win this thing and I'm not there, I'll dothe Monkey on your chest in my stiletto heels."
But when Ruth Gordon had won, Lily had said, "Sure, she deserves it, she'sa great kid." And had immediately poked her husband in the middle of thechest and said, "You'd better get me another part like that, you big-shotagent you."
There had been no more parts like that. Lily's last role, two years after Phil'sdeath, had been that of a cynical ex-prostitute in a film called MotorcycleManiacs.
It was that period Lily was commemorating now, Jack knew as he hauled thebaggage out of the trunk and the back seat. A D' Agostino bag had torn rightdown through the big d'ag, and a jumble of rolled-up socks, loose photographs,chessmen and the board, and comic books had dribbled over all else in the trunk.Jack managed to get most of this stuff into other bags. Lily was moving slowlyup the hotel steps, pulling herself along on the railing like an old lady."I'll find the bellhop," she said without turning around.
Jack straightened up from the bulging bags and looked again at the sky where hewas sure he had seen a rainbow. There was no rainbow, only that uncomfortable,shifting sky.
Then:
"Come to me," someone said behind him in a small and perfectly audiblevoice.
"What?" he asked, turning around. The empty gardens and drivestretched out before him.
"Yes?" his mother said. She looked crickle-backed, leaning over theknob of the great wooden door.
"Mistake," he said. There had been no voice, no rainbow. He forgotboth and looked up at his mother, who was struggling with the vast door."Hold on, I'll help," he called, and trotted up the steps, awkwardlycarrying a big suitcase and a straining paper bag filled with sweaters.
4
Until he met Speedy Parker, Jack had moved through the days at the hotel asunconscious of the passage of time as a sleeping dog. His entire life seemedalmost dreamlike to him during these days, full of shadows and inexplicabletransitions. Even the terrible news about Uncle Tommy which had come down thetelephone wires the night before had not entirely awakened him, as shocking asit had been. If Jack had been a mystic, he might have thought that other forceshad taken him over and were manipulating his mother's life and his own. JackSawyer at twelve was a being who required things to do, and the noiselesspassivity of these days, after the hubbub of Manhattan, had confused and undonehim in some basic way.
Jack had found himself standing on the beach with no recollection of having gonethere, no idea of what he was doing there at all. He supposed he was mourningUncle Tommy, but it was as though his mind had gone to sleep, leaving his bodyto fend for itself. He could not concentrate long enough to grasp the plots ofthe sitcoms he and Lily watched at night, much less keep the nuances of fictionin his head.
"You're tired from all this moving around," his mother said, draggingdeeply on a cigarette and squinting at him through the smoke. "All you haveto do, Jack-O, is relax for a little while. This is a good place. Let's enjoy itas long as we can."
Bob Newhart, before them in a slightly too-reddish color on the set, bemusedlyregarded a shoe he held in his right hand.
"That's what I'm doing, Jacky." She smiled at him. "Relaxing andenjoying it."
He peeked at his watch. Two hours had passed while they sat in front of thetelevision, and he could not remember anything that had preceded this program.
Jack was getting up to go to bed when the phone rang. Good old Uncle MorganSloat had found them. Uncle Morgan's news was never very great, but this wasapparently a blockbuster even by Uncle Morgan's standards. Jack stood in themiddle of the room, watching as his mother's face grew paler, palest. Her handcrept to her throat, where new lines had appeared over the last few months, andpressed lightly. She said barely a word until the end, when she whispered,"Thank you, Morgan," and hung up. She had turned to Jack then, lookingolder and sicker than ever.
"Got to be tough now, Jacky, all right?"
He hadn't felt tough.
She took his hand then and told him.
"Uncle Tommy was killed in a hit-and-run accident this afternoon,Jack."
He gasped, feeling as if the wind had been torn out of him.
"He was crossing La Cienega Boulevard and a van hit him. There was awitness who said it was black, and that the words wild child were written on theside, but that was . . . was all."
Lily began to cry. A moment later, almost surprised, Jack began to cry as well.All of that had happened three days ago, and to Jack it seemed forever.
5
On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood looking out at the steadywater as he stood on an unmarked beach before a hotel that looked like a castlein a Sir Walter Scott novel. He wanted to cry but was unable to release histears. He was surrounded by death, death made up half the world, there were norainbows. The wild child van had subtracted Uncle Tommy from the world. UncleTommy, dead in L.A., too far from the east coast, where even a kid like Jackknew he really belonged. A man who felt he had to put on a tie before going outto get a roast beef sandwich at Arby's had no business on the west coast at all.
His father was dead, Uncle Tommy was dead, his mother might be dying. He feltdeath here, too, at Arcadia Beach, where it spoke through telephones in UncleMorgan's voice. It was nothing as cheap or obvious as the melancholy feel of aresort in the off-season, where one kept stumbling over the Ghosts of SummersPast; it seemed to be in the texture of things, a smell on the ocean breeze. Hewas scared . . . and he had been scared for a long time. Being here, where itwas so quiet, had only helped him to realize it—had helped him to realize thatmaybe Death had driven all the way up I-95 from New York, squinting out throughcigarette smoke and asking him to find some bop on the car radio.
He could remember—vaguely—his father telling him that he was born with an oldhead, but his head didn't feel old now. Right now, his head felt very young.Scared, he thought. I'm pretty damn scared. This is where the world ends, right?
Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The silence was as gray as the air—asdeadly as the growing circles under her eyes.
Excerpted from The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Copyright © 1984 by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 1984 by Stephen King and Peter Straub. All rights reserved.
