The Talisman

  The cow-sheep were the Territories' primary source of meat, cloth, tallow, and lamp-oil (Wolf did not tell Jack this, but Jack inferred it from what he said). All the cattle belonged to the Queen, and the Wolf family had been watching over them since time out of mind. It was their job. In this Jack found an oddly persuasive correlative to the relationship that had existed between the buffalo and the Indians of the American Plains . . . at least until the white man had come into those territories and upset the balance.

  "Behold, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the Wolf with the creep," Jack murmured, and smiled. He was lying on his back with his hands laced behind his head. The most marvellous feeling of peace and ease had stolen over him.

  "What, Jack?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Wolf, do you really change into an animal when the moon gets full?"

  " 'Course I do!" Wolf said. He looked astounded, as if Jack had asked him something like Wolf, do you really pull up your pants after you finish taking a crap? "Strangers don't, do they? Phil told me that."

  "The, ah, herd," Jack said. "When you change, do they--"

  "Oh, we don't go near the herd when we change," Wolf said seriously. "Good Jason, no! We'd eat them, don't you know that? And a Wolf who eats of his herd must be put to death. The Book of Good Farming says so. Wolf! Wolf! We have places to go when the moon is full. So does the herd. They're stupid, but they know they have to go away at the time of the big moon. Wolf! They better know, God pound them!"

  "But you do eat meat, don't you?" Jack asked.

  "Full of questions, just like your father," Wolf said. "Wolf! I don't mind. Yeah, we eat meat. Of course we do. We're Wolfs, aren't we?"

  "But if you don't eat from the herds, what do you eat?"

  "We eat well," Wolf said, and would say no more on that subject.

  Like everything else in the Territories, Wolf was a mystery--a mystery that was both gorgeous and frightening. The fact that he had known both Jack's father and Morgan Sloat--had, at least, met their Twinners on more than one occasion--contributed to Wolf's particular aura of mystery, but did not define it completely. Everything Wolf told him led Jack to a dozen more questions, most of which Wolf couldn't--or wouldn't--answer.

  The matter of Philip Sawtelle's and Orris's visits was a case in point. They had first appeared when Wolf was in the "little moon" and living with his mother and two "litter-sisters." They were apparently just passing through, as Jack himself was now doing, only they had been heading east instead of west ("Tell you the truth, you're just about the only human I've ever seen this far west who was still going west," Wolf said).

  They had been jolly enough company, both of them. It was only later that there had been trouble . . . trouble with Orris. That had been after the partner of Jack's father had "made himself a place in this world," Wolf told Jack again and again--only now he seemed to mean Sloat, in the physical guise of Orris. Wolf said that Morgan had stolen one of his litter-sisters ("My mother bit her hands and toes for a month after she knew for certain that he took her," Wolf told Jack matter-of-factly) and had taken other Wolfs from time to time. Wolf dropped his voice and, with an expression of fear and superstitious awe on his face, told Jack that the "limping man" had taken some of these Wolfs into the other world, the Place of the Strangers, and had taught them to eat of the herd.

  "That's very bad for guys like you, isn't it?" Jack asked.

  "They're damned," Wolf replied simply.

  Jack had thought at first that Wolf was speaking of kidnapping--the verb Wolf had used in connection with his litter-sister, after all, was the Territories version of take. He began to see now that kidnapping wasn't what was going on at all--unless Wolf, with unconscious poetry, had been trying to say that Morgan had kidnapped the minds of some of the Wolf family. Jack now thought that Wolf was really talking about werewolves who had thrown over their ancient allegiance to the Crown and the herd and had given it to Morgan instead . . . Morgan Sloat and Morgan of Orris.

  Which led naturally enough to thoughts of Elroy.

  A Wolf who eats of his herd must be put to death.

  To thoughts of the men in the green car who had stopped to ask him directions, and offered him a Tootsie Roll, and who had then tried to pull him into their car. The eyes. The eyes had changed.

  They're damned.

  He made himself a place in this world.

  Until now he had felt both safe and delighted: delighted to be back in the Territories where there was a nip in the air but nothing like the dull, cold gray bite of western Ohio, safe with big, friendly Wolf beside him, way out in the country, miles from anything or anyone.

  Made himself a place in this world.

  He asked Wolf about his father--Philip Sawtelle in this world--but Wolf only shook his head. He had been a Godpounding good guy, and a Twinner--thus obviously a Stranger--but that was all Wolf seemed to know. Twinners, he said, was something that had something to do with litters of people, and about such business he could not presume to say. Nor could he describe Philip Sawtelle--he didn't remember. He only remembered the smell. All he knew, he told Jack, was that, while both of the Strangers had seemed nice, only Phil Sawyer had really been nice. Once he had brought presents for Wolf and his litter-sisters and litter-brothers. One of the presents, unchanged from the world of the Strangers, had been a set of bib overalls for Wolf.

  "I wore em all the time," Wolf said. "My mother wanted to throw em away after I'd wore em for five years or so. Said they were worn out! Said I was too big for them! Wolf! Said they were only patches holding more patches together. I wouldn't give em up, though. Finally, she bought some cloth from a drummer headed out toward the Outposts. I don't know how much she paid, and Wolf! I'll tell you the truth, Jack, I'm afraid to ask. She dyed it blue and made me six pairs. The ones your father brought me, I sleep on them now. Wolf! Wolf! It's my Godpounding pillow, I guess." Wolf smiled so openly--and yet so wistfully--that Jack was moved to take his hand. It was something he never could have done in his old life, no matter what the circumstances, but that now seemed like his loss. He was glad to take Wolf's warm, strong hand.

  "I'm glad you liked my dad, Wolf," he said.

  "I did! I did! Wolf! Wolf!"

  And then all hell broke loose.

  2

  Wolf stopped talking and looked around, startled.

  "Wolf? What's wr--"

  "Shhhh!"

  Then Jack heard it. Wolf's more sensitive ears had picked the sound up first, but it swelled quickly; before long, a deaf man would have heard it, Jack thought. The cattle looked around and then began to move away from the source of the sound in a rough, uneasy clot. It was like a radio sound-effect where someone is supposed to be ripping a bedsheet down the middle, very slowly. Only the volume kept going up and up and up until Jack thought he was going to go crazy.

  Wolf leaped to his feet, looking stunned and confused and frightened. That ripping sound, a low, ragged purr, continued to grow. The bleating of the cattle became louder. Some were backing into the stream, and as Jack looked that way he saw one go down with a splash and a clumsy flailing of legs. It had been pushed over by its milling, retreating comrades. It let out a shrill, baaa-ing cry. Another cow-sheep stumbled over it and was likewise trampled into the water by the slow retreat. The far side of the stream was low and wet, green with reeds, muddy-marshy. The cow-sheep who first reached this muck quickly became mired in it.

  "Oh you Godpounding good-for-nothing cattle!" Wolf bellowed, and charged down the hill toward the stream, where the first animal to fall over now looked as if it were in its death-throes.

  "Wolf!" Jack shouted, but Wolf couldn't hear him. Jack could barely hear himself over that ragged ripping sound. He looked a little to the right, on this side of the stream, and gaped with amazement. Something was happening to the air. A patch of it about three feet off the ground was rippling and blistering, seeming to twist and pull at itself. Jack could see the Western Road through this patch of air, but the road seemed
blurry and shimmery, as if seen through the heated, rippling air over an incinerator.

  Something's pulling the air open like a wound--something's coming through--from our side? Oh Jason, is that what I do when I come through? But even in his own panic and confusion he knew it was not.

  Jack had a good idea who would come through like this, like a rape in progress.

  Jack began to run down the hill.

  3

  The ripping sound went on and on and on. Wolf was down on his knees in the stream, trying to help the second downed animal to its feet. The first floated limply downstream, its body tattered and mangled.

  "Get up! God pound you, get up! Wolf!"

  Wolf shoved and slapped as best he could at the cow-sheep who milled and backed into him, then got both arms around the drowning animal's midriff and pulled upward. "WOLF! HERE AND NOW!" he screamed. The sleeves of his shirt split wide open along the biceps, reminding Jack of David Banner having one of the gamma-ray-inspired tantrums that turned him into The Incredible Hulk. Water sprayed everywhere and Wolf lurched to his feet, eyes blazing orange, blue overalls now soaked black. Water streamed from the nostrils of the animal, which Wolf held clutched against his chest as if it were an overgrown puppy. Its eyes were turned up to sticky whites.

  "Wolf!" Jack screamed. "It's Morgan! It's--"

  "The herd!" Wolf screamed back. "Wolf! Wolf! My Godpounding herd! Jack! Don't try--"

  The rest was drowned out by a grinding clap of thunder that shook the earth. For a moment the thunder even covered that maddening, monotonous ripping sound. Almost as confused as Wolf's cattle, Jack looked up and saw a clear blue sky, innocent of clouds save for a few puffy white ones that were miles away.

  The thunder ignited outright panic in Wolf's herd. They tried to bolt, but in their exquisite stupidity, many of them tried to do it by backing up. They crashed and splashed and were rolled underwater. Jack heard the bitter snap of a breaking bone, followed by the baaaa-ing scream of an animal in pain. Wolf bellowed in rage, dropped the cow-sheep he had been trying to save, and floundered toward the muddy far bank of the stream.

  Before he could get there, half a dozen cattle struck him and bore him down. Water splashed and flew in thin, bright sprays. Now, Jack saw, Wolf was the one in danger of being simultaneously trampled and drowned by the stupid, fleeing animals.

  Jack pushed into the stream, which was now dark with roiling mud. The current tried continually to push him off-balance. A bleating cow-sheep, its eyes rolling madly, splashed past him, almost knocking him down. Water sprayed into his face and Jack tried to wipe it out of his eyes.

  Now that sound seemed to fill the whole world: RRRRRIIIPPPP--

  Wolf. Never mind Morgan, at least not for the moment. Wolf was in trouble.

  His shaggy, drenched head was momentarily visible above the water, and then three of the animals ran right over him and Jack could only see one waving, fur-covered hand. He pushed forward again, trying to weave through the cattle, some still up, others floundering and drowning underfoot.

  "Jack!" a voice bellowed over that ripping noise. It was a voice Jack knew. Uncle Morgan's voice.

  "Jack!"

  There was another clap of thunder, this one a huge oaken thud that rolled through the sky like an artillery shell.

  Panting, his soaked hair hanging in his eyes, Jack looked over his shoulder . . . and directly into the rest area on I-70 near Lewisburg, Ohio. He was seeing it as if through ripply, badly made glass . . . but he was seeing it. The edge of the brick toilet was on the left side of that blistered, tortured patch of air. The snout of what looked like a Chevrolet pick-up truck was on the right, floating three feet above the field where he and Wolf had been sitting peacefully and talking not five minutes ago. And in the center, looking like an extra in a film about Admiral Byrd's assault on the South Pole, was Morgan Sloat, his thick red face twisted with murderous rage. Rage, and something else. Triumph? Yes. Jack thought that was what it was.

  He stood at midstream in water that was crotch-deep, cattle passing on either side of him, baa-ing and bleating, staring at that window which had been torn in the very fabric of reality, his eyes wide, his mouth wider.

  He's found me, oh dear God, he's found me.

  "There you are, you little shithead!" Morgan bellowed at him. His voice carried, but it had a muffled, dead quality as it came from the reality of that world into the reality of this one. It was like listening to a man shout inside a telephone booth. "Now we'll see, won't we? Won't we?"

  Morgan started forward, his face swimming and rippling as if made of limp plastic, and Jack had time to see there was something clutched in his hand, something hung around his neck, something small and silvery.

  Jack stood, paralyzed, as Sloat bulled his way through the hole between the two universes. As he came he did his own werewolf number, changing from Morgan Sloat, investor, land speculator, and sometime Hollywood agent, into Morgan of Orris, pretender to the throne of a dying Queen. His flushed, hanging jowls thinned. The color faded out of them. His hair renewed itself, growing forward, first tinting the rondure of his skull, as if some invisible being were coloring Uncle Morgan's head, then covering it. The hair of Sloat's Twinner was long, black, flapping, somehow dead-looking. It had been tied at the nape of his neck, Jack saw, but most of it had come loose.

  The parka wavered, disappeared for a moment, then came back as a cloak and hood.

  Morgan Sloat's suede boots became dark leather kneeboots, their tops turned down, what might have been the hilt of a knife poking out of one.

  And the small silver thing in his hand had turned to a small rod tipped with crawling blue fire.

  It's a lightning-rod. Oh Jesus, it's a--

  "Jack!"

  The cry was low, gargling, full of water.

  Jack whirled clumsily around in the stream, barely avoiding another cow-sheep, this one floating on its side, dead in the water. He saw Wolf's head going down again, both hands waving. Jack fought his way toward those hands, still dodging the cattle as best he could. One of them bunted his hip hard and Jack went over, inhaling water. He got up again quick, coughing and choking, one hand feeling inside his jerkin for the bottle, afraid it might have washed away. It was still there.

  "Boy! Turn around and look at me, boy!"

  No time just now, Morgan. Sorry, but I've got to see if I can avoid getting drowned by Wolf's herd before I see if I can avoid getting fried by your doomstick there. I--

  Blue fire arched over Jack's shoulder, sizzling--it was like a deadly electric rainbow. It struck one of the cow-sheep caught in the reedy muck on the other side of the stream and the unfortunate beast simply exploded, as if it had swallowed dynamite. Blood flew in a needle-spray of droplets. Gobbets of flesh began to rain down around Jack.

  "Turn and look at me, boy!"

  He could feel the force of that command, gripping his face with invisible hands, trying to turn it.

  Wolf struggled up again, his hair plastered against his face, his dazed eyes peering through a curtain of it like the eyes of an English sheepdog. He was coughing and staggering, seemingly no longer aware of where he was.

  "Wolf!" Jack screamed, but thunder exploded across the blue sky again, drowning him out.

  Wolf bent over and retched up a great muddy sheet of water. A moment later another of the terrified cow-sheep struck him and bore him under again.

  That's it, Jack thought despairingly. That's it, he's gone, must be, let him go, get out of here--

  But he struggled on toward Wolf, pushing a dying, weakly convulsing cow-sheep out of his way to get there.

  "Jason!" Morgan of Orris screamed, and Jack realized that Morgan was not cursing in the Territories argot; he was calling his, Jack's, name. Only here he was not Jack. Here he was Jason.

  But the Queen's son died an infant, died, he--

  The wet, sizzling zap of electricity again, seeming almost to part his hair. Again it struck the other bank, this time vaporizing one of Wolf's ca
ttle. No, Jack saw, at least not utterly. The animal's legs were still there, mired in the mud like shake-poles. As he watched, they began to sag tiredly outward in four different directions.

  "TURN AND LOOK AT ME, GOD POUND YOU!"

  The water, why doesn't he throw it at the water, fry me, Wolf, all these animals at the same time?

  Then his fifth-grade science came back to him. Once electricity went to water, it could go anywhere . . . including back to the generator of the current.

  Wolf's dazed face, floating underwater, drove these thoughts from Jack's flying mind. Wolf was still alive, but partially pinned under a cow-sheep, which, although apparently unhurt, had frozen in panic. Wolf's hands waved with pathetic, flagging energy. As Jack closed the last of the distance, one of those hands dropped and simply floated, limp as a water-lily.

  Without slowing, Jack lowered his left shoulder and hit the cow-sheep like Jack Armstrong in a boy's sports story.

  If it had been a full-sized cow instead of a Territories compact model, Jack would probably not have budged it, not with the stream's fairly stiff current working against him. But it was smaller than a cow, and Jack was pumped up. It bawled when Jack hit it, floundered backward, sat briefly on its haunches, and then lunged for the far bank. Jack grabbed Wolf's hands and pulled with all of his might.

  Wolf came up as reluctantly as a waterlogged tree-trunk, his eyes now glazed and half-closed, water streaming from his ears and nose and mouth. His lips were blue.

  Twin forks of lightning blazed to the right and left of where Jack stood holding Wolf, the two of them looking like a pair of drunks trying to waltz in a swimming pool. On the far bank, another cow-sheep flew in all directions, its severed head still bawling. Hot rips of fire zigzagged through the marshy area, lighting the reeds on the tussocks and then finding the drier grass of the field where the land began to rise again.