The Talisman

  "Wolf!" Jack screamed. "Wolf, for Christ's sake!"

  "Auh," Wolf moaned, and vomited warm muddy water over Jack's shoulder. "Auhhhhhhhhhhh . . ."

  Now Jack saw Morgan standing on the other bank, a tall, Puritanical figure in his black cloak. His hood framed his pallid, vampirelike face with a kind of cheerless romance. Jack had time to think that the Territories had worked their magic even here, on behalf of his dreadful uncle. Over here, Morgan was not an overweight, hypertensive actuarial toad with piracy in his heart and murder in his mind; over here, his face had narrowed and found a frigid masculine beauty. He pointed the silver rod like a toy magic wand, and blue fire tore the air open.

  "Now you and your dumb friend!" Morgan screamed. His thin lips split in a triumphant grin, revealing sunken yellow teeth that spoiled Jack's blurred impression of beauty once and forever.

  Wolf screamed and jerked in Jack's aching arms. He was staring at Morgan, his eyes orange and bulging with hate and fear.

  "You, devil!" Wolf screamed. "You, devil! My sister! My litter-sister! Wolf! Wolf! You, devil!"

  Jack pulled the bottle out of his jerkin. There was a single swallow left anyway. He couldn't hold Wolf up with his one arm; he was losing him, and Wolf seemed unable to support himself. Didn't matter. Couldn't take him back through into the other world anyway . . . or could he?

  "You, devil!" Wolf screamed, weeping, his wet face sliding down Jack's arm. The back of his bib overalls floated and belled in the water.

  Smell of burning grass and burning animals.

  Thunder, exploding.

  This time the river of fire in the air rushed by Jack so close that the hairs in his nostrils singed and curled.

  "OH YES, BOTH OF YOU, BOTH OF YOU!" Morgan howled. "I'LL TEACH YOU TO GET IN MY WAY, YOU LITTLE BASTARD! I'LL BURN BOTH OF YOU! I'LL POUND YOU DOWN!"

  "Wolf, hold on!" Jack yelled. He gave up his effort to hold Wolf up; instead, he snatched Wolf's hand in his own and held it as tightly as he could. "Hold on to me, do you hear?"

  "Wolf!"

  He tipped the bottle up, and the awful cold taste of rotted grapes filled his mouth for the last time. The bottle was empty. As he swallowed, he heard it shatter as one of Morgan's bolts of lightning struck it. But the sound of the breaking glass was faint . . . the tingle of electricity . . . even Morgan's screams of rage.

  He felt as if he were falling over backward into a hole. A grave, maybe. Then Wolf's hand squeezed down on Jack's so hard that Jack groaned. That feeling of vertigo, of having done a complete dipsy-doodle, began to fade . . . and then the sunlight faded, too, and became the sad purplish gray of an October twilight in the heartland of America. Cold rain struck Jack in the face, and he was faintly aware that the water he was standing in seemed much colder than it had only seconds ago. Somewhere not far away he could hear the familiar snoring drone of the big rigs on the interstate . . . except that now they seemed to be coming from directly overhead.

  Impossible, he thought, but was it? The bounds of that word seemed to be stretching with plastic ease. For one dizzy moment he had an image of flying Territories trucks driven by flying Territories men with big canvas wings strapped to their backs.

  Back, he thought. Back again, same time, same turnpike.

  He sneezed.

  Same cold, too.

  But two things were not the same now.

  No rest area here. They were standing thigh-deep in the icy water of a stream beneath a turnpike overpass.

  Wolf was with him. That was the other change.

  And Wolf was screaming.

  18

  Wolf Goes to the Movies

  1

  Overhead, another truck pounded across the overpass, big diesel engine bellowing. The overpass shook. Wolf wailed and clutched at Jack, almost knocking them both into the water.

  "Quit it!" Jack shouted. "Let go of me, Wolf! It's just a truck! Let go!"

  He slapped at Wolf, not wanting to do it--Wolf's terror was pathetic. But, pathetic or not, Wolf had the best part of a foot and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds on Jack, and if he overbore him, they would both go into this freezing water and it would be pneumonia for sure.

  "Wolf! Don't like it! Wolf! Don't like it! Wolf! Wolf!"

  But his hold slackened. A moment later his arms dropped to his sides. When another truck snored by overhead, Wolf cringed but managed to keep from grabbing Jack again. But he looked at Jack with a mute, trembling appeal that said Get me out of this, please get me out of this, I'd rather be dead than in this world.

  Nothing I'd like better, Wolf, but Morgan's over there. Even if he weren't, I don't have the magic juice anymore.

  He looked down at his left hand and saw he was holding the jagged neck of Speedy's bottle, like a man getting ready to do some serious barroom brawling. Just dumb luck Wolf hadn't gotten a bad cut when he grabbed Jack in his terror.

  Jack tossed it away. Splash.

  Two trucks this time--the noise was doubled. Wolf howled in terror and plastered his hands over his ears. Jack could see that most of the hair had disappeared from Wolf's hands in the flip--most, but not all. And, he saw, the first two fingers of each of Wolf's hands were exactly the same length.

  "Come on, Wolf," Jack said when the racket of the trucks had faded a little. "Let's get out of here. We look like a couple of guys waiting to get baptized on a PTL Club special."

  He took Wolf's hand, and then winced at the panicky way Wolf's grip closed down. Wolf saw his expression and loosened up . . . a little.

  "Don't leave me, Jack," Wolf said. "Please, please don't leave me."

  "No, Wolf, I won't," Jack said. He thought: How do you get into these things, you asshole? Here you are, standing under a turnpike overpass somewhere in Ohio with your pet werewolf. How do you do it? Do you practice? And, oh, by the way, what's happening with the moon, Jack-O? Do you remember?

  He didn't, and with clouds blanketing the sky and a cold rain falling, there was no way to tell.

  What did that make the odds? Thirty to one in his favor? Twenty-eight to two?

  Whatever the odds were, they weren't good enough. Not the way things were going.

  "No, I won't leave you," he repeated, and then led Wolf toward the far bank of the stream. In the shallows, the decayed remains of some child's dolly floated belly-up, her glassy blue eyes staring into the growing dark. The muscles of Jack's arm ached from the strain of pulling Wolf through into this world, and the joint in his shoulder throbbed like a rotted tooth.

  As they came out of the water onto the weedy, trashy bank, Jack began to sneeze again.

  2

  This time, Jack's total progress in the Territories had been half a mile west--the distance Wolf had moved his herd so they could drink in the stream where Wolf himself had later almost been drowned. Over here, he found himself ten miles farther west, as best he could figure. They struggled up the bank--Wolf actually ended up pulling Jack most of the way--and in the last of the daylight Jack could see an exit-ramp splitting off to the right some fifty yards up the road. A reflectorized sign read: ARCANUM LAST EXIT IN OHIO STATE LINE 15 MILES.

  "We've got to hitch," Jack said.

  "Hitch?" Wolf said doubtfully.

  "Let's have a look at you."

  He thought Wolf would do, at least in the dark. He was still wearing the bib overalls, which now had an actual OSHKOSH label on them. His homespun shirt had become a machine-produced blue chambray that looked like an Army-Navy Surplus special. His formerly bare feet were clad in a huge pair of dripping penny loafers and white socks.

  Oddest of all, a pair of round steel-rimmed spectacles of the sort John Lennon used to wear sat in the middle of Wolf's big face.

  "Wolf, did you have trouble seeing? Over in the Territories?"

  "I didn't know I did," Wolf said. "I guess so. Wolf! I sure see better over here, with these glass eyes. Wolf, right here and now!" He looked out at the roaring turnpike traffic, and for just a moment Jack saw what he must be seeing: great ste
el beasts with huge yellow-white eyes, snarling through the night at unimaginable speeds, rubber wheels blistering the road. "I see better than I want to," Wolf finished forlornly.

  3

  Two days later a pair of tired, footsore boys limped past the MUNICIPAL TOWN LIMITS sign on one side of Highway 32 and the 10-4 Diner on the other side, and thus into the city of Muncie, Indiana. Jack was running a fever of a hundred and two degrees and coughing pretty steadily. Wolf's face was swollen and discolored. He looked like a pug that has come out on the short end in a grudge match. The day before, he had tried to get them some late apples from a tree growing in the shade of an abandoned barn beside the road. He had actually been in the tree and dropping shrivelled autumn apples into the front of his overalls when the wall-wasps, which had built their nest somewhere in the eaves of the old barn, had found him. Wolf had come back down the tree as fast as he could, with a brown cloud around his head. He was howling. And still, with one eye completely closed and his nose beginning to resemble a large purple turnip, he had insisted that Jack have the best of the apples. None of them was very good--small and sour and wormy--and Jack didn't feel much like eating anyway, but after what Wolf had gone through to get them, he hadn't had the heart to refuse.

  A big old Camaro, jacked in the back so that the nose pointed at the road, blasted by them. "Heyyyyy, assholes!" someone yelled, and there was a burst of loud, beer-fueled laughter. Wolf howled and clutched at Jack. Jack had thought that Wolf would eventually get over his terror of cars, but now he was really beginning to wonder.

  "It's all right, Wolf," he said wearily, peeling Wolf's arms off for the twentieth or thirtieth time that day. "They're gone."

  "So loud!" Wolf moaned. "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! So loud, Jack, my ears, my ears!"

  "Glasspack muffler," Jack said, thinking wearily: You'd love the California freeways, Wolf. We'll check those out if we're still travelling together, okay? Then we'll try a few stock-car races and motorcycle scrambles. You'll be nuts about them. "Some guys like the sound, you know. They--" But he went into another coughing fit that doubled him over. For a moment the world swam away in gray shades. It came back very, very slowly.

  "Like it," Wolf muttered. "Jason! How could anyone like it, Jack? And the smells . . ."

  Jack knew that, for Wolf, the smells were the worst. They hadn't been over here four hours before Wolf began to call it the Country of Bad Smells. That first night Wolf had retched half a dozen times, at first throwing up muddy water from a stream which existed in another universe onto the Ohio ground, then simply dry-heaving. It was the smells, he explained miserably. He didn't know how Jack could stand them, how anyone could stand them.

  Jack knew--coming back from the Territories, you were bowled over by odors you barely noticed when you were living with them. Diesel fuel, car exhausts, industrial wastes, garbage, bad water, ripe chemicals. Then you got used to them again. Got used to them or just went numb. Only that wasn't happening to Wolf. He hated the cars, he hated the smells, he hated this world. Jack didn't think he was ever going to get used to it. If he didn't get Wolf back into the Territories fairly soon, Jack thought he might go crazy. He'll probably drive me crazy while he's at it, Jack thought. Not that I've got far to go anymore.

  A clattering farm-truck loaded with chickens ground by them, followed by an impatient line of cars, some of them honking. Wolf almost jumped into Jack's arms. Weakened by the fever, Jack reeled into the brushy, trash-littered ditch and sat down so hard his teeth clicked together.

  "I'm sorry, Jack," Wolf said miserably. "God pound me!"

  "Not your fault," Jack said. "Fall out. Time to take five."

  Wolf sat down beside Jack, remaining silent, looking at Jack anxiously. He knew how hard he was making it for Jack; he knew that Jack was in a fever to move faster, partly to outdistance Morgan, but mostly for some other reason. He knew that Jack moaned about his mother in his sleep, and sometimes cried. But the only time he had cried when awake was after Wolf went a little crazy on the Arcanum turnpike ramp. That was when he realized what Jack meant by "hitching." When Wolf told Jack he didn't think he could hitch rides--at least not for a while and maybe not ever--Jack had sat down on the top strand of guardrail cable and had wept into his hands. And then he had stopped, which was good . . . but when he took his face out of his hands, he had looked at Wolf in a way that made Wolf feel sure that Jack would leave him in this horrible Country of Bad Smells . . . and without Jack, Wolf would soon go quite mad.

  4

  They had walked up to the Arcanum exit in the breakdown lane, Wolf cringing and pawing at Jack each time a car or truck passed in the deepening dusk. Jack had heard a mocking voice drift back on the slipstream: "Where's your car, faggots?" He shook it off like a dog shaking water out of his eyes, and had simply kept going, taking Wolf's hand and pulling him after when Wolf showed signs of lagging or drifting toward the woods. The important thing was to get off the turnpike proper, where hitchhiking was forbidden, and onto the westbound Arcanum entrance ramp. Some states had legalized hitching from the ramps (or so a road-bum with whom Jack had shared a barn one night had told him), and even in states where thumbing was technically a crime, the cops would usually wink if you were on a ramp.

  So first, get to the ramp. Hope no state patrol happened along while you were getting there. What a state trooper might make of Wolf Jack didn't want to think about. He would probably think he had caught an eighties incarnation of Charles Manson in Lennon glasses.

  They made the ramp and crossed over to the westbound lane. Ten minutes later a battered old Chrysler had pulled up. The driver, a burly man with a bull neck and a cap which read CASE FARM EQUIPMENT tipped back on his head, leaned over and opened the door.

  "Hop in, boys! Dirty night, ain't it?"

  "Thanks, mister, it sure is," Jack said cheerfully. His mind was in overdrive, trying to figure out how he could work Wolf into the Story, and he barely noticed Wolf's expression.

  The man noticed it, however.

  His face hardened.

  "You smell anything bad, son?"

  Jack was snapped back to reality by the man's tone, which was as hard as his face. All cordiality had departed it, and he looked as if he might have just wandered into the Oatley Tap to eat a few beers and drink a few glasses.

  Jack whipped around and looked at Wolf.

  Wolf's nostrils were flaring like the nostrils of a bear which smells a blown skunk. His lips were not just pulled back from his teeth; they were wrinkled back from them, the flesh below his nose stacked in little ridges.

  "What is he, retarded?" the man in the CASE FARM EQUIPMENT hat asked Jack in a low voice.

  "No, ah, he just--"

  Wolf began to growl.

  That was it.

  "Oh, Christ," the man said in the tones of one who simply cannot believe this is happening. He stepped on the gas and roared down the exit ramp, the passenger door flopping shut. His taillights dot-dashed briefly in the rainy dark at the foot of the ramp, sending reflections in smeary red arrows up the pavement toward where they stood.

  "Boy, that's great," Jack said, and turned to Wolf, who shrank back from his anger. "That's just great! If he'd had a CB radio, he'd be on Channel Nineteen right now, yelling for a cop, telling anyone and everyone that there are a couple of loonies trying to hitch a ride out of Arcanum! Jason! Or Jesus! Or Whoever, I don't care! You want to see some fucking nails get pounded, Wolf? You do that a few more times and you'll feel them get pounded! Us! We'll get pounded!"

  Exhausted, bewildered, frustrated, almost used up, Jack advanced on the cringing Wolf, who could have torn his head from his shoulders with one hard, swinging blow if he had wanted to, and Wolf backed up before him.

  "Don't shout, Jack," he moaned. "The smells . . . to be in there . . . shut up in there with those smells . . ."

  "I didn't smell anything!" Jack shouted. His voice broke, his sore throat hurt more than ever, but he couldn't seem to stop; it was shout or go mad. His wet hair
had fallen in his eyes. He shook it away and then slapped Wolf on the shoulder. There was a smart crack and his hand began to hurt at once. It was as if he had slapped a stone. Wolf howled abjectly, and this made Jack angrier. The fact that he was lying made him angrier still. He had been in the Territories less than six hours this time, but that man's car had smelled like a wild animal's den. Harsh aromas of old coffee and fresh beer (there had been an open can of Stroh's between his legs), an air-freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror that smelled like dry sweet powder on the cheek of a corpse. And there had been something else, something darker, something wetter . . .

  "Not anything!" he shouted, his voice breaking hoarsely. He slapped Wolf's other shoulder. Wolf howled again and turned around, hunching like a child who is being beaten by an angry father. Jack began to slap at his back, his smarting hands spatting up little sprays of water from Wolf's overalls. Each time Jack's hand descended, Wolf howled. "So you better get used to it (Slap!) because the next car to come along might be a cop (Slap!) or it might be Mr. Morgan Bloat in his puke-green BMW (Slap!) and if all you can be is a big baby, we're going to be in one big fucking world of hurt! (Slap!) Do you understand that?"

  Wolf said nothing. He stood hunched in the rain, his back to Jack, quivering. Crying. Jack felt a lump rise in his own throat, felt his eyes grow hot and stinging. All of this only increased his fury. Some terrible part of him wanted most of all to hurt himself, and knew that hurting Wolf was a wonderful way to do it.

  "Turn around!"

  Wolf did. Tears ran from his muddy brown eyes behind the round spectacles. Snot ran from his nose.

  "Do you understand me?"

  "Yes," Wolf moaned. "Yes, I understand, but I couldn't ride with him, Jack."

  "Why not?" Jack looked at him angrily, fisted hands on his hips. Oh, his head was aching.

  "Because he was dying," Wolf said in a low voice.

  Jack stared at him, all his anger draining away.

  "Jack, didn't you know?" Wolf asked softly. "Wolf! You couldn't smell it?"