Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  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 steel 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 usuall
y 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?”

  “No,” Jack said in a small, whistling, out-of-breath voice. Because he had smelled something, hadn’t he? Something he had never smelled before. Something like a mixture of . . .

  It came to him, and suddenly his strength was gone. He sat down heavily on the guardrail cable and looked at Wolf.

  Shit and rotting grapes. That was what that smell had been like. That wasn’t it a hundred percent, but it was too hideously close.

  Shit and rotting grapes.

  “It’s the worst smell,” Wolf said. “It’s when people forget how to be healthy. We call it—Wolf!—the Black Disease. I don’t even think he knew he had it. And . . . these Strangers can’t smell it, can they, Jack?”

  “No,” he whispered. If he were to be suddenly teleported back to New Hampshire, to his mother’s room in the Alhambra, would he smell that stink on her?

  Yes. He would smell it on his mother, drifting out of her pores, the smell of shit and rotting grapes, the Black Disease.

  “We call it cancer,” Jack whispered. We call it cancer and my mother has it.

  “I just don’t know if I can hitch,” Wolf said. “I’ll try again if you want, Jack, but the smells . . . inside . . . they’re bad enough in the outside air, Wolf! but inside . . .”

  That was when Jack put his face in his hands and wept, partly out of desperation, mostly out of simple exhaustion. And, yes, the expression Wolf believed he had seen on Jack’s face really had been there; for an instant the temptation to leave Wolf was more than a temptation, it was a maddening imperative. The odds against his ever making it to California and finding the Talisman—whatever it might be—had been long before; now they were so long they dwindled to a point on the horizon. Wolf would do more than slow him down; Wolf would sooner or later get both of them thrown in jail. Probably sooner. And how could he ever explain Wolf to Rational Richard Sloat?

  What Wolf saw on Jack’s face in that moment was a look of cold speculation that unhinged his knees. He fell on them and held his clasped hands up to Jack like a suitor in a bad Victorian melodrama.

  “Don’t go away an’ leave me, Jack,” he wept. “Don’t leave old Wolf, don’t leave me here, you brought me here, please, please don’t leave me alone. . . .”

  Beyond this, conscious words were lost; Wolf was perhaps trying to talk but all he really seemed able to do was sob. Jack felt a great weariness fall over him. It fit well, like a jacket that one has worn often. Don’t leave me here, you brought me here . . .

  There it was. Wolf was his responsibility, wasn’t he? Yes. Oh yes indeed. He had taken Wolf by the hand and dragged him out of the Territories and into Ohio and he had the throbbing shoulder to prove it. He had had no choice, of course; Wolf had been drowning, and even if he hadn’t drowned, Morgan would have crisped him with whatever that lightning-rod thing had been. So he could have turned on Wolf again, could have said: Which would you prefer, Wolf old buddy? To be here and scared, or there and dead?

  He could, yes, and Wolf would have no answer because Wolf wasn’t too swift
in the brains department. But Uncle Tommy had been fond of quoting a Chinese proverb that went: The man whose life you save is your responsibility for the rest of your life.

  Never mind the ducking, never mind the fancy footwork; Wolf was his responsibility.

  “Don’t leave me, Jack,” Wolf wept. “Wolf-Wolf! Please don’t leave good old Wolf, I’ll help you, I’ll stand guard at night, I can do lots, only don’t don’t—”

  “Quit bawling and get up,” Jack said quietly. “I won’t leave you. But we’ve got to get out of here in case that guy does send a cop back to check on us. Let’s move it.”

  5

  “Did you figure out what to do next, Jack?” Wolf asked timidly. They had been sitting in the brushy ditch just over the Muncie town line for more than half an hour, and when Jack turned toward Wolf, Wolf was relieved to see he was smiling. It was a weary smile, and Wolf didn’t like the dark, tired circles under Jack’s eyes (he liked Jack’s smell even less—it was a sick smell), but it was a smile.

  “I think I see what we should do next right over there,” Jack said. “I was thinking about it just a few days ago, when I got my new sneakers.”

  He bowed his feet. He and Wolf regarded the sneakers in depressed silence. They were scuffed, battered, and dirty. The left sole was bidding a fond adieu to the left upper. Jack had owned them for . . . he wrinkled his forehead and thought. The fever made it hard to think. Three days. Only three days since he had picked them out of the bargain bin of the Fayva store. Now they looked old. Old.

  “Anyway . . .” Jack sighed. Then he brightened. “See that building over there, Wolf?”

  The building, an explosion of uninteresting angles in gray brick, stood like an island in the middle of a giant parking lot. Wolf knew what the asphalt in that parking lot would smell like: dead, decomposing animals. That smell would almost suffocate him, and Jack would barely notice it.

  “For your information, the sign there said Town Line Sixplex,” Jack said. “It sounds like a coffee pot, but actually it’s a movie with six shows. There ought to be one we like.” And in the afternoon, there won’t be many people there and that’s good because you have this distressing habit of going Section Eight, Wolf. “Come on.” He got unsteadily to his feet.