Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  In spite of this enthusiasm, Wolf’s grip was gentle enough, cushioned by the crisp, furry growth of hair on his hand. Bib overalls and a big handshake from a guy who looks like an overgrown Siberian husky and smells a little bit like a hayloft after a heavy rain, Jack thought. What next? An offer to come to his church this Sunday?

  “Good old Wolf, you bet! Good old Wolf right here and now!” Wolf wrapped his arms around his huge chest and laughed, delighted with himself. Then he grabbed Jack’s hand again.

  This time his hand was pumped vigorously up and down. Something seemed required of him at his point, Jack reflected. Otherwise, this pleasant if rather simple young man might go on shaking his hand until sundown.

  “Good old Wolf,” he said. It seemed to be a phrase of which his new acquaintance was particularly fond.

  Wolf laughed like a child and dropped Jack’s hand. This was something of a relief. The hand had been neither crushed nor eaten, but it did feel a bit seasick. Wolf had a faster pump than a slot-machine player on a hot streak.

  “Stranger, ain’tcha?” Wolf asked. He stuffed his hairy hands into the slit sides of his biballs and began playing pocket-pool with a complete lack of self-consciousness.

  “Yes,” Jack said, thinking of what that word meant over here. It had a very specific meaning over here. “Yes, I guess that’s just what I am. A stranger.”

  “God-pounding right! I can smell it on you! Right here and now, oh yeah, oh boy! Got it! Doesn’t smell bad, you know, but it sure is funny. Wolf! That’s me. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” He threw back his head and laughed. The sound ended being something that was disconcertingly like a howl.

  “Jack,” Jack said. “Jack Saw—”

  His hand was seized again and pumped with abandon.

  “Sawyer,” he finished, when he was released again. He smiled, feeling very much as though someone had hit him with a great big goofystick. Five minutes ago he had been standing scrunched against the cold brick side of a shithouse on I-70. Now he was standing here talking to a young fellow who seemed to be more animal than man.

  And damned if his cold wasn’t completely gone.

  3

  “Wolf meet Jack! Jack meet Wolf! Here and now! Okay! Good! Oh, Jason! Cows in the road! Ain’t they stupid! Wolf! Wolf!”

  Yelling, Wolf loped down the hill to the road, where about half of his herd was standing, looking around with expressions of bland surprise, as if to ask where the grass had gone. They really did look like some strange cross between cows and sheep, Jack saw, and wondered what you would call such a crossbreed. The only word to come immediately to mind was creeps—or perhaps, he thought, the singular would be more proper in this case, as in Here’s Wolf taking care of his flock of creep. Oh yeah. Right here and now.

  The goofystick came down on Jack’s head again. He sat down and began to giggle, his hands crisscrossed over his mouth to stifle the sounds.

  Even the biggest creep stood no more than four feet high. Their fur was woolly, but of a muddy shade that was similar to Wolf’s eyes—at least, when Wolf’s eyes weren’t blazing like Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. Their heads were topped with short, squiggly horns that looked good for absolutely nothing. Wolf herded them back out of the road. They went obediently, with no sign of fear. If a cow or a sheep on my side of the jump got a whiff of that guy, Jack thought, it’d kill itself trying to get out of his way.

  But Jack liked Wolf—liked him on sight, just as he had feared and disliked Elroy on sight. And that contrast was particularly apt, because the comparison between the two was undeniable. Except that Elroy had been goatish while Wolf was . . . well, wolfish.

  Jack walked slowly toward where Wolf had set his herd to graze. He remembered tiptoeing down the stinking back hall of the Oatley Tap toward the fire-door, sensing Elroy somewhere near, smelling him, perhaps, as a cow on the other side would undoubtedly smell Wolf. He remembered the way Elroy’s hands had begun to twist and thicken, the way his neck had swelled, the way his teeth had become a mouthful of blackening fangs.

  “Wolf?”

  Wolf turned and looked at him, smiling. His eyes flared a bright orange and looked for a moment both savage and intelligent. Then the glow faded and they were only that muddy, perpetually puzzled hazel again.

  “Are you . . . sort of a werewolf?”

  “Sure am,” Wolf said, smiling. “You pounded that nail, Jack. Wolf!”

  Jack sat down on a rock, looking at Wolf thoughtfully. He believed it would be impossible for him to be further surprised than he had already been, but Wolf managed the trick quite nicely.

  “How’s your father, Jack?” he asked, in that casual, by-the-way tone reserved for enquiring after the relatives of others. “How’s Phil doing these days? Wolf!”

  4

  Jack made a queerly apt cross-association: he felt as if all the wind had been knocked out of his mind. For a moment it just sat there in his head, not a thought in it, like a radio station broadcasting nothing but a carrier wave. Then he saw Wolf’s face change. The expression of happiness and childish curiosity was replaced by one of sorrow. Jack saw that Wolf’s nostrils were flaring rapidly.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he? Wolf! I’m sorry, Jack. God pound me! I’m stupid! Stupid!” Wolf crashed a hand into his forehead and this time he really did howl. It was a sound that chilled Jack’s blood. The herd of creep looked around uneasily.

  “That’s all right,” Jack said. He heard his voice more in his ears than in his head, as if someone else had spoken. “But . . . how did you know?”

  “Your smell changed,” Wolf said simply. “I knew he was dead because it was in your smell. Poor Phil! What a good guy! Tell you that right here and now, Jack! Your father was a good guy! Wolf!”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “he was. But how did you know him? And how did you know he was my father?”

  Wolf looked at Jack as though he had asked a question so simple it barely needed answering. “I remember his smell, of course. Wolfs remember all smells. You smell just like him.”

  Whack! The goofystick came down on his head again. Jack felt an urge to just roll back and forth on the tough, springy turf, holding his gut and howling. People had told him he had his father’s eyes and his father’s mouth, even his father’s knack for quick-sketching, but never before had he been told that he smelled like his father. Yet he supposed the idea had a certain crazy logic, at that.

  “How did you know him?” Jack asked again.

  Wolf looked at a loss. “He came with the other one,” he said at last. “The one from Orris. I was just little. The other one was bad. The other one stole some of us. Your father didn’t know,” he added hastily, as if Jack had shown anger. “Wolf! No! He was good, your father. Phil. The other one . . .”

  Wolf shook his head slowly. On his face was an expression even more simple than his pleasure. It was the memory of some childhood nightmare.

  “Bad,” Wolf said. “He made himself a place in this world, my father says. Mostly he was in his Twinner, but he was from your world. We knew he was bad, we could tell, but who listens to Wolfs? No one. Your father knew he was bad, but he couldn’t smell him as good as we could. He knew he was bad, but not how bad.”

  And Wolf threw his head back and howled again, a long, chilly ululation of sorrow that resounded against the deep blue sky.

  Interlude

  Sloat in This World (II)

  From the pocket of his bulky parka (he had bought it convinced that from the Rockies east, America was a frigid wasteland after October 1st or so—now he was sweating rivers), Morgan Sloat took a small steel box. Below the latch were ten small buttons and an oblong of cloudy yellow glass a quarter of an inch high and two inches long. He pushed several of the buttons carefully with the fingernail of his left-hand pinky, and a series of numbers appeared briefly in the readout window. Sloat had bought this gadget, billed as the world’s smallest safe, in Zurich. According to the man who had sold it to him, not even a week in a crematory oven would breach its c
arbon-steel integrity.

  Now it clicked open.

  Sloat folded back two tiny wings of ebony jeweler’s velvet, revealing something he had had for well over twenty years—since long before the odious little brat who was causing all this trouble had been born. It was a tarnished tin key, and once it had gone into the back of a mechanical toy soldier. Sloat had seen the toy soldier in the window of a junkshop in the odd little town of Point Venuti, California—a town in which he had great interest. Acting under a compulsion much too strong to deny (he hadn’t even wanted to deny it, not really; he had always made a virtue of compulsion, had Morgan Sloat), he had gone in and paid five dollars for the dusty, dented soldier . . . and it wasn’t the soldier he had wanted, anyway. It was the key that had caught his eye and then whispered to him. He had removed the key from the soldier’s back and pocketed it as soon as he was outside the junkshop door. The soldier itself he threw in a litter-basket outside the Dangerous Planet Bookstore.

  Now, as Sloat stood beside his car in the Lewisburg rest area, he held the key up and looked at it. Like Jack’s croaker, the tin key became something else in the Territories. Once, when coming back, he had dropped that key in the lobby of the old office building. And there must have been some Territories magic left in it, because that idiot Jerry Bledsoe had gotten himself fried not an hour later. Had Jerry picked it up? Stepped on it, perhaps? Sloat didn’t know and didn’t care. Nor had he cared a tinker’s damn about Jerry—and considering the handyman had had an insurance policy specifying double indemnity for accidental death (the building’s super, with whom Sloat sometimes shared a hashpipe, had passed this little tidbit on to him), Sloat imagined that Nita Bledsoe had done nipups—but he had been nearly frantic about the loss of his key. It was Phil Sawyer who had found it, giving it back to him with no comment other than “Here, Morg. Your lucky charm, isn’t it? Must have a hole in your pocket. I found it in the lobby after they took poor old Jerry away.”

  Yes, in the lobby. In the lobby where everything smelled like the motor of a Waring Blender that had been running continuously on Hi Speed for about nine hours. In the lobby where everything had been blackened and twisted and fused.

  Except for this humble tin key.

  Which, in the other world, was a queer kind of lightning-rod—and which Sloat now hung around his neck on a fine silver chain.

  “Coming for you, Jacky,” said Sloat in a voice that was almost tender. “Time to bring this entire ridiculous business to a crashing halt.”

  17

  Wolf and the Herd

  1

  Wolf talked of many things, getting up occasionally to shoo his cattle out of the road and once to move them to a stream about half a mile to the west. When Jack asked him where he lived, Wolf only waved his arm vaguely northward. He lived, he said, with his family. When Jack asked for clarification a few minutes later, Wolf looked surprised and said he had no mate and no children—that he would not come into what he called the “big rut-moon” for another year or two. That he looked forward to the “big rut-moon” was quite obvious from the innocently lewd grin that overspread his face.

  “But you said you lived with your family.”

  “Oh, family! Them! Wolf!” Wolf laughed. “Sure. Them! We all live together. Have to keep the cattle, you know. Her cattle.”

  “The Queen’s?”

  “Yes. May she never, never die.” And Wolf made an absurdly touching salute, bending briefly forward with his right hand touching his forehead.

  Further questioning straightened the matter out somewhat in Jack’s mind . . . at least, he thought it did. Wolf was a bachelor (although that word barely fit, somehow). The family of which he spoke was a hugely extended one—literally, the Wolf family. They were a nomadic but fiercely loyal race that moved back and forth in the great empty areas east of the Outposts but west of “The Settlements,” by which Wolf seemed to mean the towns and villages of the east.

  Wolfs (never Wolves—when Jack once used the proper plural, Wolf had laughed until tears spurted from the corners of his eyes) were solid, dependable workers, for the most part. Their strength was legendary, their courage unquestioned. Some of them had gone east into The Settlements, where they served the Queen as guards, soldiers, even as personal bodyguards. Their lives, Wolf explained to Jack, had only two great touchstones: the Lady and the family. Most of the Wolfs, he said, served the Lady as he did—watching the herds.

  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 replie
d 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 God-pounding 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.