Other Worlds Than These

The third novel in the Talisman series, following The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001), picks up decades after Jack Sawyer's boyhood quest for the Talisman, a powerful magical object, across the Territories, a parallel world now called Mid-World. Jack lives in Dezi, a terraced seaside town of pink stone overlooking the Clean Sea. Years earlier, he was shot in the chest at a press conference, and his old friend Speedy Parker brought him to Mid-World to heal. The bullet damaged his heart so severely that he can only return to America for short periods before his health deteriorates. He is haunted by the memory of his wife, Sophie, who once held the royal title of Shadow Queen of the Territories. He addresses her as though she is still alive; it gradually becomes clear that Sophie has been dead for ten years.

Jack serves Edward Youngblood, the corpulent, self-proclaimed governor of the region, known as the Big Kahuna. Youngblood controls Dezi through inherited wealth and a Door of the Worlds, a portal between Mid-World and America, accessible only through his factotum, Ayden Hestin. Youngblood tasks Jack with fetching Coca-Cola and a signed crime novel from America and with investigating the Great Gorge, or the Gullet, a growing danger near the Blasted Lands. Jack must bring along Payton "Pay" Orville, an overweight comedian who serves as Youngblood's court jester. On impulse, Jack also invites Mary Klee, a failed psychic with an alcohol addiction, sensing he may need her.

The three board a decrepit trolley for the journey to Pernil. Upon arriving, Jack "flips," his term for crossing between worlds, to Hemingford County, Nebraska. There he learns about Roy Kinneston and Tara Lynne Speckhoffer, two teenagers on a killing spree that mirrors the 1958 murders committed by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Jack also discovers that his old friend, county sheriff Dale Gilbertson, has gone missing while pursuing the teens.

Jack completes Youngblood's errands and tries without success to reach Dale. As Kaposi-like blemishes and cardiac arrhythmia set in, he flips back to Pernil. He finds Pay protecting an unconscious Mary in a barroom. A constable agrees to keep Mary locked up while Jack and Pay head toward Riven, a mostly abandoned town inhabited by Manni-folk, a mystical religious community, and, at night, vampires called wympis.

Jack leaves Pay at a remote train depot while he flips to America for news of Dale. While being questioned by Detective Rolf Handler in Taylor City, Nebraska, Jack receives a psychic flash of Pay screaming. He flips back to find the depot destroyed by Dragonfire missiles. Pay lies dying, horribly burned. He reveals the attackers were teenagers with powerful weapons. Jack buries Pay and continues alone with Golden Boy, his surviving horse.

In Riven, the Manni elders explain that Kinneston and Speckhoffer drove through town and dumped their bound-and-gagged prisoner, Dale, in the street at sunset for the vampires. Jack sees Dale among the wympis at night, his intelligence erased. Following the Manni's instructions, Jack beheads Dale with an axe, freeing his spirit.

Jack presses on to Hold 19, a vast underground military installation built by North Central Positronics, an ancient technology company. He takes a small armored vehicle called a Binny Ding, equips it with an AI system he names Mrs. Talbot, and drives toward the Gullet. The journey takes him across a dangerous bridge and through forests populated by Slow Mutants, radiation-disfigured humans. He spends one night guarded by friendly Wolfs, humanoid wolf-like beings, who recognize him from his childhood.

At the Gullet, a zigzagging crevasse of blinding light in a sunken plain, the magnetic pull nearly kills Jack. Mrs. Talbot is swallowed. Jack concentrates on a California Raisin toy from Dale's cruiser dashboard as a mental anchor and flips away. He materializes in Dale's impounded cruiser in Taylor City, where he is tased and hospitalized with severe arrhythmia.

After days of interrogation, Jack escapes the hospital with help from Dale's widow, Sarah Gilbertson, and their grown son, David. Desperately ill, Jack flips back to Mid-World and arrives in the town of Mejis. An ancient seeress named Maeve Quiller, who has waited her entire life for Jack, heals him with herbal potions and tells him the Gullet is animated by a malevolent force, possibly the remnants of the Crimson King, that threatens all worlds. Maeve dies that night, having fulfilled her purpose.

Jack's journey back toward Dezi is marked by encounters with teenage marauders who have dyed their hair red with birdberry juice, infected by the same force behind Kinneston and Speckhoffer. He survives an attempted murder by the infected daughter of a village mayor, destroys an abandoned bus and burns massacre sites in ravaged towns, rescues Mary from atop a collapsing water tower in Pernil, and befriends a billy-bumbler, a rare, intelligent creature he names Richard after his childhood friend Richard Sloat. Meanwhile, on America-side, Kinneston and Speckhoffer drive back through a crack in reality into Nebraska and wreak havoc in Hemingford Home with alien weaponry before both are killed in a gasoline explosion.

Jack returns to find Dezi in ruins. Youngblood is dying. Jack's surviving companions, Ryall Connors, George Elgin, Larry Magruder, and Alice Stines, a noblewoman who led warrior women armed with razor-sharp throwing plates, regroup around him. Hestin reveals himself as an ancient AI who has been the true power behind Dezi's governors for generations. He leads the group to the Arrowhead Project, a sealed underground installation containing two mysterious gray boxes kept cool by failing machinery. Hestin claims these must be transported to the Gullet to close it.

Jack organizes a convoy across hundreds of miles of hostile territory. The gray boxes begin changing: Their edges soften, their surfaces pulse with voices from each person's past. Jack realizes they are alive. The convoy loses members one by one. George dies from an allergic reaction to spider bites. Larry, infected by a Slow Mutant's soul-kiss, shoots himself to protect his companions. Alice is killed in a Wolf ambush. Ry is struck down by bah-bolts, arrows, from redhead sentries within sight of the Gullet.

Mary, wounded by a bah-bolt, immerses her leg in one of the gray masses, now called the Grande Plasum, which heals her completely. Jack immerses his head and recovers his suppressed memories of finding the Talisman, a glowing, rainbow-colored sphere he caught in the Agincourt Hotel's Territories Ballroom as a boy. The two masses merge into a single entity, revealing they were always one thing, split by their creators. As the convoy reaches the Gullet, the malevolent force orders a thousand Slow Mutants to lie across the road as living shields. Jack gives the agonizing order to drive over them. The Talisman appears overhead, called by the merged entity. Jack and Mary drive their trucks into the crevasse, and the Talisman follows. The Gullet begins to close.

In an epilogue, Mary wakes in April 1976, young again, moments before a successful television appearance, carrying only fading memories of Mid-World. In October 1981, twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer stands on a New Hampshire beach near the hotel where his dying mother is staying. He finds a glass paperweight containing a miniature pink-stone town, an image of Dezi. Written on its bottom is one word: KA, the Mid-World term for destiny. He runs to check on his mother, beginning the journey that The Talisman recounts.