The Talisman by Stephen King
"Put the lock on the door."
"God pound it, that's what I'm doing now," Wolf said. "I'm putting the God-pounding lock on the God-pounding door, see?" He banged the door shut, immediately sealing Jack up in the darkness. "Hear that, Jacky? That's the God-pounding lock." Jack heard the lock click against the metal loop, then heard its ratchets catch as Wolf slid it home.
"Now the key," Jack said.
"God-pounding key, right here and now," Wolf said, and a key rattled into a slot, rattled out. A second later the key bounced off the dusty ground beneath the door high enough to skitter onto the shed's floorboards.
"Thanks," Jack breathed. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the boards until he touched the key. For a moment he clamped it so hard into his palm that he almost drove it through his skin--the bruise, shaped like the state of Florida, would endure nearly five days, when in the excitement of being arrested he would fail to notice that it had left him. Then Jack carefully slid the key into his pocket. Outside, Wolf was panting in hot regular agitated-sounding spurts.
"Are you angry with me, Wolf?" he whispered through the door.
A fist thumped the door, hard. "Not! Not angry! Wolf!"
"All right," Jack said. "No people, Wolf. Remember that. Or they'll hunt you down and kill you."
No peopOOOWWW-OOOOOOOOHHHOOOO!" The word turned into a long, liquid howl. Wolf's body bumped against the door, and his long black-furred feet slid into the opening beneath it. Jack knew that Wolf had flattened himself out against the shed door. "Not angry, Jack," Wolf whispered, as if his howl had embarrassed him. "Wolf isn't angry. Wolf is wanting, Jacky. It's so soon now, so God-pounding soon."
"I know," Jack said, now suddenly feeling as if he had to cry--he wished he could have hugged Wolf. More painfully, he wished that they had stayed the extra days at the farmhouse, and that he were now standing outside a root cellar where Wolf was safely jailed.
The odd, disturbing thought came to him again that Wolf was safely jailed.
Wolf's feet slid back under the door, and Jack thought he had a glimpse of them becoming more concentrated, slimmer, narrower.
Wolf grunted, panted, grunted again. He had moved well back from the door. He uttered a noise very like "Aaah."
"Wolf?" Jack said.
An earsplitting howl lifted up from above Jack: Wolf had moved to the top of the gully.
"Be careful," Jack said, knowing that Wolf would not hear him, and fearing that he would not understand him even if he were close enough to hear.
A series of howls followed soon after--the sound of a creature set free, or the despairing sound of one who wakes to find himself still confined, Jack could not tell which. Mournful and feral and oddly beautiful, the cries of poor Wolf flew up into the moonlit air like scarves flung into the night. Jack did not know he was trembling until he wrapped his arms around himself and felt his arms vibrating against his chest, which seemed to vibrate, too.
The howls diminished, retreating. Wolf was running with the moon.
10
For three days and three nights, Wolf was engaged in a nearly ceaseless search for food. He slept from each dawn until just past noon, in a hollow he had discovered beneath the fallen trunk of an oak. Certainly Wolf did not feel himself imprisoned, despite Jack's forebodings. The woods on the other side of the field were extensive, and full of a wolf's natural diet. Mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, squirrels--all these he found easily. He could have contained himself in the woods and eaten more than enough to carry him through to his next Change.
But Wolf was riding with the moon, and he could no more confine himself to the woods than he could have halted his transformation in the first place. He roamed, led by the moon, through barnyards and pastures, past isolated suburban houses and down unfinished roads where bulldozers and giant asymmetrical rollers sat like sleeping dinosaurs on the banks. Half of his intelligence was in his sense of smell, and it is not exaggerating to suggest that Wolf's nose, always acute, had attained a condition of genius. He could not only smell a coop full of chickens five miles away and distinguish their odors from those of the cows and pigs and horses on the same farm--that was elementary--he could smell when the chickens moved. He could smell that one of the sleeping pigs had an injured foot, and one of the cows in the barn an ulcerated udder.
And this world--for was it not this world's moon which led him?--no longer stank of chemicals and death. An older, more primitive order of being met him on his travels. He inhaled whatever remained of the earth's original sweetness and power, whatever was left of qualities we might once have shared with the Territories. Even when he approached some human dwelling, even while he snapped the backbone of the family mutt and tore the dog into gristly rags he swallowed whole, Wolf was aware of pure cool streams moving far beneath the ground, of bright snow on a mountain somewhere a long way west. This seemed a perfect place for a transmogrified Wolf, and if he had killed any human being he would have been damned.
He killed no people.
He saw none, and perhaps that is why. During the three days of his Change, Wolf did kill and devour representatives of most other forms of life to be found in eastern Indiana, including one skunk and an entire family of bobcats living in limestone caves on a hillside two valleys away. On his first night in the woods he caught a low-flying bat in his jaws, bit off its head, and swallowed the rest while it was still jerking. Whole squadrons of domestic cats went down his throat, platoons of dogs. With a wild, concentrated glee he one night slaughtered every pig in a pen the size of a city block.
But twice Wolf found that he was mysteriously forbidden from killing his prey, and this too made him feel at home in the world through which he prowled. It was a question of place, not of any abstract moral concern--and on the surface, the places were merely ordinary. One was a clearing in the woods into which he had chased a rabbit, the other the scruffy back yard of a farmhouse where a whimpering dog lay chained to a stake. The instant he set a paw down in these places, his hackles rose and an electric tingling traversed the entire distance of his spine. These were sacred places, and in a sacred place a Wolf could not kill. That was all. Like all hallowed sites, they had been set apart a long time ago, so long ago that the word ancient could have been used to describe them--ancient is probably as close as we can come to representing the vast well of time Wolf sensed about him in the farmer's back yard and the little clearing, a dense envelope of years packed together in a small, highly charged location. Wolf simply backed off the sacred ground and took himself elsewhere. Like the wing-men Jack had seen, Wolf lived in a mystery and so was comfortable with all such things.
And he did not forget his obligations to Jack Sawyer.
11
In the locked shed, Jack found himself thrown upon the properties of his own mind and character more starkly than at any other time in his life.
The only furniture in the shed was the little wooden bench, the only distraction the nearly decade-old magazines. And these he could not actually read. Since there were no windows, except in very early morning when light came streaming under the door he had trouble just working out the pictures on the pages. The words were streams of gray worms, indecipherable. He could not imagine how he would get through the next three days. Jack went toward the bench, struck it painfully with his knee, and sat down to think.
One of the first things he realized was that shed-time was different from time on the outside. Beyond the shed, seconds marched quickly past, melted into minutes which melted into hours. Whole days ticked along like metronomes, whole weeks. In shed-time, the seconds obstinately refused to move--they stretched into grotesque monster-seconds, Plasticman-seconds. Outside, an hour might go by while four or five seconds swelled and bloated inside the shed.
The second thing Jack realized was that thinking about the slowness of time made it worse. Once you started concentrating on the passing of seconds, they more or less refused to move at all. So he tried to pace off the dimensions of his cell just to take
If he walked all the way around the inside of the shed, he'd walk about thirty-two feet.
If he walked around the inside of the shed a hundred and sixty-five times, he'd cover a mile.
He might not be able to eat, but he sure could walk. Jack took off his watch and put it in his pocket, promising himself that he would look at it only when he absolutely had to.
He was about one-fourth of the way through his first mile when he remembered that there was no water in the shed. No food and no water. He supposed that it took longer than three or four days to die of thirst. As long as Wolf came back for him, he'd be all right--well, maybe not all right, but at least alive. And if Wolf didn't come back? He would have to break the door down.
In that case, he thought, he'd better try it now, while he still had some strength.
Jack went to the door and pushed it with both hands. He pushed it harder, and the hinges squeaked. Experimentally, Jack threw his shoulder at the edge of the door, opposite the hinges. He hurt his shoulder, but he didn't think he had done anything to the door. He banged his shoulder against the door more forcefully. The hinges squealed but did not move a millimeter. Wolf could have torn the door off with one hand, but Jack did not think that he could move it if he turned his shoulders into hamburger by running into it. He would just have to wait for Wolf.
By the middle of the night, Jack had walked seven or eight miles--he'd lost count of the number of times he had reached one hundred and sixty-five, but it was something like seven or eight. He was parched, and his stomach was rumbling. The shed stank of urine, for Jack had been forced to pee against the far wall, where a crack in the boards meant that at least some of it went outside. His body was tired, but he did not think he could sleep. According to clock-time, Jack had been in the shed barely five hours; in shed-time it was more like twenty-four. He was afraid to lie down.
His mind would not let him go--that was how it felt. He had tried making lists of all the books he'd read in the past year, of every teacher he'd had, of every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers . . . but disturbing, disorderly images kept breaking in. He kept seeing Morgan Sloat tearing a hole in the air. Wolf's face floated underwater, and his hands drifted down like heavy weeds. Jerry Bledsoe twitched and rocked before the electrical panel, his glasses smeared over his nose. A man's eyes turned yellow, and his hand became a claw-hoof. Uncle Tommy's false teeth coruscated in the Sunset Strip gutter. Morgan Sloat came toward his mother, not himself.
"Songs by Fats Waller," he said, sending himself around another circuit in the dark. " 'Your Feets Too Big.' 'Ain't Misbehavin.' 'Jitterbug Waltz.' 'Keepin Out of Mischief Now.' "
The Elroy-thing reached out toward his mother, whispering lewdly, and clamped a hand down over her hip.
"Countries in Central America. Nicaragua. Honduras. Guatemala. Costa Rica . . ."
Even when he was so tired he finally had to lie down and curl into a ball on the floor, using his knapsack as a pillow, Elroy and Morgan Sloat rampaged through his mind. Osmond flicked his bullwhip across Lily Cavanaugh's back, and his eyes danced. Wolf reared up, massive, absolutely inhuman, and caught a rifle bullet directly in the heart.
The first light woke him, and he smelled blood. His whole body begged for water, then for food. Jack groaned. Three more nights of this would be impossible to survive. The low angle of the sunlight allowed him dimly to see the walls and roof of the shed. It all looked larger than he had felt it to be last night. He had to pee again, though he could scarcely believe that his body could afford to give up any moisture. Finally he realized that the shed seemed larger because he was lying on the floor.
Then he smelled blood again, and looked sideways, toward the door. The skinned hindquarters of a rabbit had been thrust through the gap. They lay sprawled on the rough boards, leaking blood, glistening. Smudges of dirt and a long ragged scrape showed that they had been forced into the shed. Wolf was trying to feed him.
"Oh, Jeez," Jack groaned. The rabbit's stripped legs were disconcertingly human. Jack's stomach folded into itself. But instead of vomiting, he laughed, startled by an absurd comparison. Wolf was like the family pet who each morning presents his owners with a dead bird, an eviscerated mouse.
With two fingers Jack delicately picked up the horrible offering and deposited it under the bench. He still felt like laughing, but his eyes were wet. Wolf had survived the first night of his transformation, and so had Jack.
The next morning brought an absolutely anonymous, almost ovoid knuckle of meat around a startingly white bone splintered at both ends.
12
On the morning of the fourth day Jack heard someone sliding down into the gully. A startled bird squawked, then noisily lifted itself off the roof of the shed. Heavy footsteps advanced toward the door. Jack raised himself onto his elbows and blinked into the darkness.
A large body thudded against the door and stayed there. A pair of split and stained penny loafers was visible through the gap.
"Wolf?" Jack asked softly. "That's you, isn't it?"
"Give me the key, Jack."
Jack slipped his hand into his pocket, brought out the key, and pushed it directly between the penny loafers. A large brown hand dropped into view and picked up the key.
"Bring any water?" Jack asked. Despite what he had been able to extract from Wolf's gruesome presents, he had come close to serious dehydration--his lips were puffy and cracked, and his tongue felt swollen, baked. The key slid into the lock, and Jack heard it click open.
Then the lock came away from the door.
"A little," Wolf said. "Close your eyes, Jacky. You have night-eyes now."
Jack clasped his hands over his eyes as the door opened, but the light which boomed and thundered into the shed still managed to trickle through his fingers and stab his eyes. He hissed with the pain. "Better soon," Wolf said, very close to him. Wolf's arms circled and lifted him. "Eyes closed," Wolf warned, and stepped backward out of the shed.
Even as Jack said, "Water," and felt the rusty lip of an old cup meet his own lips, he knew why Wolf had not lingered in the shed. The air outside seemed unbelievably fresh and sweet--it might have been imported directly from the Territories. He sucked in a double tablespoon of water that tasted like the best meal on earth and wound down through him like a sparkling little river, reviving everything it touched. He felt as though he were being irrigated.
Wolf removed the cup from his lips long before Jack considered he was through with it. "If I give you more you'll just sick it up," Wolf said. "Open your eyes, Jack--but only a little bit."
Jack followed directions. A million particles of light stormed into his eyes. He cried out.
Wolf sat down, cradling Jack in his arms. "Sip," he said, and put the cup once more to Jack's lips. "Eyes open, little more."
Now the sunlight hurt much less. Jack peered out through the screen of his eyelashes at a flaring dazzle while another miraculous trickle of water slipped down his throat.
"Ah," Jack said. "What makes water so delicious?"
"The western wind," Wolf promptly replied.
Jack opened his eyes wider. The swarm and dazzle resolved into the weathered brown of the shed and the mixed green and lighter brown of the gully. His head rested against Wolf's shoulder. The bulge of Wolf's stomach pressed into his backbone.
"Are you okay, Wolf?" he asked. "Did you get enough to eat?"
"Wolfs always get enough to eat," Wolf said simply. He patted the boy's thigh.
"Thanks for bringing me those pieces of meat."
"I promised. You were the herd. Remember?"
"Oh, yes, I remember," Jack said. "Can I have some more of that water?" He slid off Wolf's huge lap and sat on the ground, where he could face him.
Wolf han
He looked more like an ordinary human being than at any other time since he and Jack had met. He did not look as if he could have made it through the simplest college course, but he could have been a great high-school football player.
Jack sipped again--Wolf's hand hovered above the rusty tin cup, ready to snatch it away if Jack gulped. "You're really okay?"
"Right here and now," Wolf said. He rubbed his other hand over his belly, so distended that it stretched the fabric at the bottom of the sweatshirt as taut as a hand would a rubber glove. "Just tired. Little sleep, Jack. Right here and now."
"Where'd you get the sweatshirt?"
"It was hanging on a line," Wolf said. "Cold here, Jacky."
"You didn't hurt any people, did you?"
"No people. Wolf! Drink that water slow, now." His eyes disconcertingly shaded into happy Halloween orange for a second, and Jack saw that Wolf could never really be said to resemble an ordinary human being. Then Wolf opened his wide mouth and yawned. "Little sleep." He hitched himself into a more comfortable position on the slope and put down his head. He was almost immediately asleep.
THREE
A COLLISION OF WORLDS
20
Taken by the Law
1
By two o'clock that afternoon they were a hundred miles west, and Jack Sawyer felt as if he too had been running with the moon--it had gone that easily. In spite of his extreme hunger, Jack sipped slowly at the water in the rusty can and waited for Wolf to awaken. Finally Wolf stirred, said, "Ready now, Jack," hitched the boy up onto his back, and trotted into Daleville.
While Wolf sat outside on the curb and tried to look inconspicuous, Jack entered the Daleville Burger King. He made himself go first to the men's room and strip to the waist. Even in the bathroom, the maddening smell of grilling meat caused the saliva to spill into his mouth. He washed his hands, arms, chest, face. Then he stuck his head under the tap and washed his hair with liquid soap. Crumpled paper towels fell, one after the other, to the floor.