Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

But before he could finish, he had fallen asleep. When he woke up it was evening and Muncie was behind them. Wolf had gotten off the main roads and on to a web of farm roads and dirt tracks. Totally unconfused by the lack of signs and the multitude of choices, he had continued west with all the unerring instinct of a migrating bird.

  They slept that night in an empty house north of Cammack, and Jack thought in the morning that his fever had gone down a little.

  It was midmorning—midmorning of October 28th—when Jack realized that the hair was back on Wolf’s palms.

  19

  Jack in the Box

  1

  They camped that night in the ruins of a burned-out house with a wide field on one side and a copse of woods on another. There was a farmhouse on the far side of the field, but Jack thought that he and Wolf would be safe enough if they were quiet and stayed in most of the time. After the sun went down, Wolf went off into the woods. He was moving slowly, his face close to the ground. Before Jack lost sight of him, he thought that Wolf looked like a nearsighted man hunting for his dropped spectacles. Jack became quite nervous (visions of Wolf caught in a steel-jawed trap had begun to come to him, Wolf caught and grimly not howling as he gnawed at his own leg . . .) before Wolf returned, walking almost upright this time, and carrying plants in both hands, the roots dangling out of his fists.

  “What have you got there, Wolf?” Jack asked.

  “Medicine,” Wolf said morosely. “But it’s not very good, Jack. Wolf! Nothing’s much good in your world!”

  “Medicine? What do you mean?”

  But Wolf would say no more. He produced two wooden matches from the bib pocket of his overalls and started a smokeless fire and asked Jack if he could find a can. Jack found a beer can in the ditch. Wolf smelled it and wrinkled his nose.

  “More bad smells. Need water, Jack. Clean water. I’ll go, if you’re too tired.”

  “Wolf, I want to know what you’re up to.”

  “I’ll go,” Wolf said. “There’s a farm right across that field. Wolf! There’ll be water there. You rest.”

  Jack had a vision of some farmer’s wife looking out the kitchen window as she did the supper dishes and seeing Wolf skulking around in the dooryard with a beer can in one hairy paw and a bunch of roots and herbs in the other.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  The farm was not five hundred feet away from where they had camped; the warm yellow lights were clearly visible across the field. Jack went, filled the beer can at a shed faucet without incident, and started back. Halfway across the field he realized he could see his shadow, and looked up at the sky.

  The moon, now almost full, rode the eastern horizon.

  Troubled, Jack went back to Wolf and gave him the can of water. Wolf sniffed, winced again, but said nothing. He put the can over the fire and began to sift crumbled bits of the things he had picked in through the pop-top hole. Five minutes or so later, a terrible smell—a reek, not to put too fine a point on it—began to rise on the steam. Jack winced. He had no doubt at all that Wolf would want him to drink that stuff, and Jack also had no doubt it would kill him. Slowly and horribly, probably.

  He closed his eyes and began snoring loudly and theatrically. If Wolf thought he was sleeping, he wouldn’t wake him up. No one woke up sick people, did they? And Jack was sick; his fever had come back at dark, raging through him, punishing him with chills even while he oozed sweat from every pore.

  Looking through his lashes, he saw Wolf set the can aside to cool. Wolf sat back and looked skyward, his hairy hands locked around his knees, his face dreamy and somehow beautiful.

  He’s looking at the moon, Jack thought, and felt a thread of fear.

  We don’t go near the herd when we change. Good Jason, no! We’d eat them!

  Wolf, tell me something: am I the herd now?

  Jack shivered.

  Five minutes later—Jack almost had gone to sleep by then—Wolf leaned over the can, sniffed, nodded, picked it up, and came over to where Jack was leaning against a fallen, fire-blackened beam with an extra shirt behind his neck to pad the angle. Jack closed his eyes tightly and resumed snoring.

  “Come on, Jack,” Wolf said jovially. “I know you’re awake. You can’t fool Wolf.”

  Jack opened his eyes and looked at Wolf with bleary resentment. “How did you know?”

  “People have a sleep-smell and a wake-smell,” Wolf said. “Even Strangers must know that, don’t they?”

  “I guess we don’t,” Jack said.

  “Anyway, you have to drink this. It’s medicine. Drink it up, Jack, right here and now.”

  “I don’t want it,” Jack said. The smell coming from the can was swampy and rancid.

  “Jack,” Wolf said, “you’ve got a sick-smell, too.”

  Jack looked at him, saying nothing.

  “Yes,” Wolf said. “And it keeps getting worse. It’s not really bad, not yet, but—Wolf!—it’s going to get bad if you don’t take some medicine.”

  “Wolf, I’ll bet you’re great at sniffing out herbs and things back in the Territories, but this is the Country of Bad Smells, remember? You’ve probably got ragweed in there, and poison oak, and bitter vetch, and—”

  “They’re good things,” Wolf said. “Just not very strong, God pound them.” Wolf looked wistful. “Not everything smells bad here, Jack. There are good smells, too. But the good smells are like the medicine plants. Weak. I think they were stronger, once.”

  Wolf was looking dreamily up at the moon again, and Jack felt a recurrence of his earlier unease.

  “I’ll bet this was a good place once,” Wolf said. “Clean and full of power . . .”

  “Wolf?” Jack asked in a low voice. “Wolf, the hair’s come back on your palms.”

  Wolf started and looked at Jack. For a moment—it might have been his feverish imagination, and even if not, it was only for a moment—Wolf looked at Jack with a flat, greedy hunger. Then he seemed to shake himself, as if out of a bad dream.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to talk about that, and I don’t want you to talk about that. It doesn’t matter, not yet. Wolf! Just drink your medicine, Jack, that’s all you have to do.”

  Wolf was obviously not going to take no for an answer; if Jack didn’t drink the medicine, then Wolf might feel duty-bound to simply pull open his jaws and pour it down his throat.

  “Remember, if this kills me, you’ll be alone,” Jack said grimly, taking the can. It was still warm.

  A look of terrible distress spread over Wolf’s face. He pushed the round glasses up on his nose. “Don’t want to hurt you, Jack—Wolf never wants to hurt Jack.” The expression was so large and so full of misery that it would have been ludicrous had it not been so obviously genuine.

  Jack gave in and drank the contents of the can. There was no way he could stand against that expression of hurt dismay. The taste was as awful as he had imagined it would be . . . and for a moment didn’t the world waver? Didn’t it waver as if he were about to flip back into the Territories?

  “Wolf!” he yelled. “Wolf, grab my hand!”

  Wolf did, looking both concerned and excited. “Jack? Jacky? What is it?”

  The taste of the medicine began to leave his mouth. At the same time, a warm glow—the sort of glow he got from a small sip of brandy on the few occasions his mother had allowed him to have one—began to spread in his stomach. And the world grew solid around him again. That brief wavering might also have been imagination . . . but Jack didn’t think so.

  We almost went. For a moment there it was very close. Maybe I can do it without the magic juice . . . maybe I can!

  “Jack? What is it?”

  “I feel better,” he said, and managed a smile. “I feel better, that’s all.” He discovered that he did, too.

  “You smell better, too,” Wolf said cheerfully. “Wolf! Wolf!”

  2

  He continued to improve the next day, but he was weak. Wolf carried him “horseyback” and they made slo
w progress west. Around dusk they started looking for a place to lie up for the night. Jack spotted a woodshed in a dirty little gully. It was surrounded by trash and bald tires. Wolf agreed without saying much. He had been quiet and morose all day long.

  Jack fell asleep almost at once and woke up around eleven needing to urinate. He looked beside him and saw that Wolf’s place was empty. Jack thought he had probably gone in search of more herbs in order to administer the equivalent of a booster shot. Jack wrinkled his nose, but if Wolf wanted him to drink more of the stuff, he would. It surely had made him feel one hell of a lot better.

  He went around to the side of the shed, a straight slim boy wearing Jockey shorts, unlaced sneakers, and an open shirt. He peed for what seemed like a very long time indeed, looking up at the sky as he did so. It was one of those misleading nights which sometimes comes to the midwest in October and early November, not so long before winter comes down with a cruel, iron snap. It was almost tropically warm, and the mild breeze was like a caress.

  Overhead floated the moon, white and round and lovely. It cast a clear and yet eerily misleading glow over everything, seeming to simultaneously enhance and obscure. Jack stared at it, aware that he was almost hypnotized, not really caring.

  We don’t go near the herd when we change. Good Jason, no!

  Am I the herd now, Wolf?

  There was a face on the moon. Jack saw with no surprise that it was Wolf’s face . . . except it was not wide and open and a little surprised, a face of goodness and simplicity. This face was narrow, ah yes, and dark; it was dark with hair, but the hair didn’t matter. It was dark with intent.

  We don’t go near them, we’d eat them, eat them, we’d eat them, Jack, when we change we’d—

  The face in the moon, a chiaroscuro carved in bone, was the face of a snarling beast, its head cocked in that final moment before the lunge, the mouth open and filled with teeth.

  We’d eat we’d kill we’d kill, kill, KILL KILL

  A finger touched Jack’s shoulder and ran slowly down to his waist.

  Jack had only been standing there with his penis in his hand, the foreskin pinched lightly between thumb and forefinger, looking at the moon. Now a fresh, hard jet of urine spurted out of him.

  “I scared you,” Wolf said from behind him. “I’m sorry, Jack. God pound me.”

  But for a moment Jack didn’t think Wolf was sorry.

  For a moment it sounded as if Wolf were grinning.

  And Jack was suddenly sure he was going to be eaten up.

  House of bricks? he thought incoherently. I don’t even have a house of straw that I can run to.

  Now the fear came, dry terror in his veins hotter than any fever.

  Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolf the big bad Wolf the big bad—

  “Jack?”

  I am, I am, oh God I am afraid of the big bad Wolf—

  He turned around slowly.

  Wolf’s face, which had been lightly scruffed with stubble when the two of them crossed to the shed and lay down, was now heavily bearded from a point so high on his cheekbones that the hair almost seemed to begin at his temples. His eyes glared a bright red-orange.

  “Wolf, are you all right?” Jack asked in a husky, breathy whisper. It was as loud as he could talk.

  “Yes,” Wolf said. “I’ve been running with the moon. It’s beautiful. I ran . . . and ran . . . and ran. But I’m all right, Jack.” Wolf smiled to show how all right he was, and revealed a mouthful of giant, rending teeth. Jack recoiled in numb horror. It was like looking into the mouth of that Alien thing in the movies.

  Wolf saw his expression, and dismay crossed his roughened, thickening features. But under the dismay—and not far under, either—was something else. Something that capered and grinned and showed its teeth. Something that would chase prey until blood flew from the prey’s nose in its terror, until it moaned and begged. Something that would laugh as it tore the screaming prey open.

  It would laugh even if he were the prey.

  Especially if he were the prey.

  “Jack, I’m sorry,” he said. “The time . . . it’s coming. We’ll have to do something. We’ll . . . tomorrow. We’ll have to . . . have to . . .” He looked up and that hypnotized expression spread over his face as he looked into the sky.

  He raised his head and howled.

  And Jack thought he heard—very faintly—the Wolf in the moon howl back.

  Horror stole through him, quietly and completely. Jack slept no more that night.

  3

  The next day Wolf was better. A little better, anyway, but he was almost sick with tension. As he was trying to tell Jack what to do—as well as he could, anyway—a jet plane passed high overhead. Wolf jumped to his feet, rushed out, and howled at it, shaking his fists at the sky. His hairy feet were bare again. They had swelled and split the cheap penny loafers wide open.

  He tried to tell Jack what to do, but he had little to go on except old tales and rumors. He knew what the change was in his own world, but he sensed it might be much worse—more powerful and more dangerous—in the land of the Strangers. And he felt that now. He felt that power sweeping through him, and tonight when the moon rose he felt sure it would sweep him away.

  Over and over again he reiterated that he didn’t want to hurt Jack, that he would rather kill himself than hurt Jack.

  4

  Daleville was the closest small town. Jack got there shortly after the courthouse clock struck noon, and went into the True Value hardware store. One hand was stuffed into his pants pocket, touching his depleted roll of bills.

  “Help you, son?”

  “Yes sir,” Jack said. “I want to buy a padlock.”

  “Well, step over here and let’s us have a look. We’ve got Yales, and Mosslers, and Lok-Tites, and you name it. What kind of padlock you want?”

  “A big one,” Jack said, looking at the clerk with his shadowed, somehow disquieting eyes. His face was gaunt but still persuasive in its odd beauty.

  “A big one,” the clerk mused. “And what would you be wanting it for, might I ask?”

  “My dog,” Jack said steadily. A Story. Always they wanted a Story. He had gotten this one ready on the way in from the shed where they had spent the last two nights. “I need it for my dog. I have to lock him up. He bites.”

  5

  The padlock he picked out cost ten dollars, leaving Jack with about ten dollars to his name. It hurt him to spend that much, and he almost went for a cheaper item . . . and then he had a memory of how Wolf had looked the night before, howling at the moon with orange fire spilling from his eyes.

  He paid the ten dollars.

  He stuck out his thumb at every passing car as he hurried back to the shed, but of course none of them stopped. Perhaps he looked too wild-eyed, too frantic. He certainly felt wild-eyed and frantic. The newspaper the hardware store clerk had let him look at promised sunset at six o’clock P.M. on the dot. Moonrise was not listed, but Jack guessed seven, at the latest. It was already one p.m., and he had no idea where he was going to put Wolf for the night.

  You have to lock me up, Jack, Wolf had said. Have to lock me up good. Because if I get out, I’ll hurt anything I can run down and catch hold of. Even you, Jack. Even you. So you have to lock me up and keep me locked up, no matter what I do or what I say. Three days, Jack, until the moon starts to get thin again. Three days . . . even four, if you’re not completely sure.

  Yes, but where? It had to be someplace away from people, so no one would hear Wolf if—when, he amended reluctantly—he began to howl. And it had to be someplace a lot stronger than the shed they had been staying in. If Jack used his fine new ten-dollar padlock on the door of that place, Wolf would bust right out through the back.

  Where?

  He didn’t know, but he knew he had only six hours to find a place . . . maybe less.

  Jack began to hurry along even faster.

  6

  They had passed several empty houses to come this far, h
ad even spent the night in one, and Jack watched all the way back from Daleville for the signs of lack of occupancy: for blank uncovered windows and FOR SALE signs, for grass grown as high as the second porch step and the sense of lifelessness common to empty houses. It was not that he hoped he could lock Wolf into some farmer’s bedroom for the three days of his Change. Wolf would be able to knock down the door of the shed. But one farmhouse had a root cellar; that would have worked.

  A stout oaken door set into a grassy mound like a door in a fairy tale, and behind it a room without walls or ceiling—an underground room, a cave no creature could dig its way out of in less than a month. The cellar would have held Wolf, and the earthen floor and walls would have kept him from injuring himself.

  But the empty farmhouse, and the root cellar, must have been at least thirty or forty miles behind them. They would never make it back there in the time remaining before moonrise. And would Wolf still be willing to run forty miles, especially for the purpose of putting himself in a foodless solitary confinement, so close to the time of his Change?

  Suppose, in fact, that too much time had passed. Suppose that Wolf had come too close to the edge and would refuse any sort of imprisonment? What if that capering, greedy underside of his character had climbed up out of the pit and was beginning to look around this odd new world, wondering where the food was hiding? The big padlock threatening to rip the seams out of Jack’s pocket would be useless.

  He could turn around, Jack realized. He could walk back to Daleville and keep on going. In a day or two he’d be nearly to Lapel or Cicero, and maybe he would work an afternoon at a feed store or get in some hours as a farmhand, make a few dollars or scrounge a meal or two, and then push all the way to the Illinois border in the next few days. Illinois would be easy, Jack thought—he didn’t know how he was going to do this, exactly, but he was pretty sure he could get to Springfield and the Thayer School only a day or two after he made it into Illinois.

  And, Jack puzzled as he hesitated a quarter-mile down the road from the shed, how would he explain Wolf to Richard Sloat? His old buddy Richard, in his round glasses and ties and laced cordovans? Richard Sloat was thoroughly rational and, though very intelligent, hard-headed. If you couldn’t see it, it probably didn’t exist. Richard had never been interested in fairy tales as a child; he had remained unexcited by Disney films about fairy godmothers who turned pumpkins into coaches, about wicked queens who owned speaking mirrors. Such conceits were too absurd to snare Richard’s six-year-old (or eight-year-old, or ten-year-old) fancy—unlike, say, a photograph of an electron microscope. Richard’s enthusiasm had embraced Rubik’s Cube, which he could solve in less than ninety seconds, but Jack did not think it would go so far as to accept a six-foot-five, sixteen-year-old werewolf.