Talisman 01 - The Talisman

by Stephen King Peter Straub

  He went down the stairs on all fours, silent as oiled smoke, eyes as red as brake lights.

  16

  Gardener was becoming steadily more nervous; to Jack he looked like a man who was entering the freakout zone. His eyes moved jerkily in a triple play, from the studio where Casey was frantically listening to Jack, and then to the closed door which gave on the hall.

  Most of the noises from upstairs had stopped some time ago.

  Now Sonny Singer started for the door. “I’ll go up and see what’s—”

  “You’re not going anywhere! Come back here!”

  Sonny winced as if Gardener had struck him.

  “What the matter, Reverend Gardener?” Jack asked. “You look a little nervous.”

  Sonny rocked him with a slap. “You want to watch the way you talk, snotface! You just want to watch it!”

  “You look nervous, too, Sonny. And you, Warwick. And Casey in there—”

  “Shut him up!” Gardener suddenly screamed. “Can’t you do anything? Do I have to do everything around here myself?”

  Sonny slapped Jack again, much harder. Jack’s nose began to bleed, but he smiled. Wolf was very close now . . . and Wolf was being careful. Jack had begun to have a crazy hope that they might get out of this alive.

  Casey suddenly straightened up and then tore the cans off his head and flicked the intercom switch.

  “Reverend Gardener! I hear sirens on the outside mikes!”

  Gardener’s eyes, now too wide, skidded back to Casey.

  “What? How many? How far away?”

  “Sounds like a lot,” Casey said. “Not close yet. But they’re coming here. No doubt about that.”

  Gardener’s nerve broke then; Jack saw it happen. The man sat, indecisive, for a moment, and then he wiped his mouth delicately with the side of his hand.

  It isn’t whatever happened upstairs, not just the sirens, either. He knows that Wolf is close, too. In his own way he smells him . . . and he doesn’t like it. Wolf, we might have a chance! We just might!

  Gardener handed the pistol to Sonny Singer. “I haven’t time to deal with the police, or whatever mess there might be upstairs, right now,” he said. “The important thing is Morgan Sloat. I’m going to Muncie. You and Andy are coming with me, Sonny. You keep this gun on our friend Jack here while I get the car out of the garage. When you hear the horn, come on out.”

  “What about Casey?” Andy Warwick rumbled.

  “Yes, yes, all right, Casey, too,” Gardener agreed at once, and Jack thought, He’s running out on you, you stupid assholes. He’s running out on you, it’s so obvious that he might as well take out a billboard on the Sunset Strip and advertise the fact, and your brains are too blown to even know it. You’d go on sitting down here for ten years waiting to hear that horn blow, if the food and toilet paper held out that long.

  Gardener got up. Sonny Singer, his face flushed with new importance, sat down behind his desk and pointed the gun at Jack. “If his retarded friend shows up,” Gardener said, “shoot him.”

  “How could he show up?” Sonny asked. “He’s in the Box.”

  “Never mind,” Gardener said. “He’s evil, they’re both evil, it’s indubitable, it’s axiomatic, if the retard shows up, shoot him, shoot them both.”

  He fumbled through the keys on his ring and selected one. “When you hear the horn,” he said. He opened the door and went out. Jack strained his ears for the sound of sirens but heard nothing.

  The door closed behind Sunlight Gardener.

  17

  Time, stretching out.

  A minute that felt like two; two that felt like ten; four that felt like an hour. The three of Gardener’s “student aides” who had been left with Jack looked like boys who had been caught in a game of Statue Tag. Sonny sat bolt-upright behind Sunlight Gardener’s desk—a place he both relished and coveted. The gun pointed steadily at Jack’s face. Warwick stood by the door to the hall. Casey sat in the brightly lighted booth with the cans on his ears again, staring blankly out through the other glass square, into the darkness of the chapel, seeing nothing, only listening.

  “He’s not going to take you with him, you know,” Jack said suddenly. The sound of his voice surprised him a little. It was even and unafraid.

  “Shut up, snotface,” Sonny snapped.

  “Don’t hold your breath until you hear him honk that horn,” Jack said. “You’ll turn pretty blue.”

  “Next thing he says, Andy, break his nose,” Sonny said.

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “Break my nose, Andy. Shoot me, Sonny. The cops are coming, Gardener’s gone, and they’re going to find the three of you standing over a corpse in a strait-jacket.” He paused, and amended: “A corpse in a strait-jacket with a broken nose.”

  “Hit him, Andy,” Sonny said.

  Andy Warwick moved from the door to where Jack sat, strait-jacketed, his pants and underpants puddled around his ankles.

  Jack turned his face openly up to Warwick’s.

  “That’s right, Andy,” he said. “Hit me. I’ll hold still. Hell of a target.”

  Andy Warwick balled up his fist, drew it back . . . and then hesitated. Uncertainty flickered in his eyes.

  There was a digital clock on Gardener’s desk. Jack’s eyes shifted to it for a moment, and then back to Warwick’s face. “It’s been four minutes, Andy. How long does it take a guy to back a car out of the garage? Especially when he’s in a hurry?”

  Sonny Singer bolted out of Sunlight Gardener’s chair, came around the desk, and charged at Jack. His narrow, secretive face was furious. His fists were balled up. He made as if to hit Jack. Warwick, who was bigger, restrained him. There was trouble on Warwick’s face now—deep trouble.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t—”

  “Why don’t you ask Casey how close those sirens are getting?” Jack asked, and Warwick’s frown deepened. “You’ve been left in the lurch, don’t you know that? Do I have to draw you a picture? It’s going bad here. He knew it—he smelled it! He’s leaving you with a bag. From the sounds upstairs—”

  Singer broke free of Warwick’s half-hearted hold and clouted Jack on the side of the face. His head rocked to one side, then came slowly back.

  “—it’s a big, messy bag,” Jack finished.

  “You shut up or I’ll kill you,” Sonny hissed.

  The digits on the clock had changed.

  “Five minutes now,” Jack said.

  “Sonny,” Warwick said with a catch in his voice. “Let’s get him out of that thing.”

  “No!” Sonny’s cry was wounded, furious . . . ultimately frightened.

  “You know what the Rev’rend said,” Warwick said rapidly. “Before. When the TV people came. Nobody can see the strait-jackets. They wouldn’t understand. They—”

  Click! The intercom.

  “Sonny! Andy!” Casey sounded panicky. “They’re closer! The sirens! Christ! What are we supposed to do?”

  “Let him out now!” Warwick’s face was pallid, except for two red spots high on his cheekbones.

  “Reverend Gardener also said—”

  “I don’t give a fuck what he also said!” Warwick’s voice dropped, and now he voiced the child’s deepest fear: “We’re gonna get caught, Sonny! We’re gonna get caught!”

  And Jack thought that now he could hear sirens, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

  Sonny’s eyes rolled toward Jack with horrible, trapped indecision. He half-raised the gun and for one moment Jack believed Sonny was really going to shoot him.

  But it was six minutes now, and still no honk from the Godhead, announcing that the deus ex machina was now boarding for Muncie.

  “You let him loose,” Sonny said sulkily to Andy Warwick. “I don’t even want to touch him. He’s a sinner. And he’s a queer.”

  Sonny retreated to the desk as Andy Warwick’s fingers fumbled with the strait-jacket’s lacings.

  “You be
tter not say anything,” he panted. “You better not say anything or I’ll kill you myself.”

  Right arm free.

  Left arm free.

  They collapsed bonelessly into his lap. Pins and needles coming back.

  Warwick hauled the hateful restraint off him, a horror of dun-colored canvas and rawhide lacings. Warwick looked at it in his hands and grimaced. He darted across the room and began to stuff it into Sunlight Gardener’s safe.

  “Pull up your pants,” Sonny said. “You think I want to look at your works?”

  Jack fumbled up his shorts, got the waistband of his pants, dropped them, and managed to pull them up.

  Click! The intercom.

  “Sonny! Andy!” Casey’s voice, panicked. “I hear something!”

  “Are they turning in?” Sonny almost screamed. Warwick redoubled his efforts to stuff the strait-jacket into the safe. “Are they turning in the front—”

  “No! In the chapel! I can’t see nothing but I can hear something in the—”

  There was an explosion of shattering glass as Wolf leaped from the darkness of the chapel and into the studio.

  18

  Casey’s screams as he pushed back from the control board in his wheel-footed chair were hideously amplified.

  Inside the studio there was a brief storm of glass. Wolf landed four-footed on the slanted control board and half-climbed, half-slid down it, his eyes throwing a red glare. His long claws turned dials and flicked switches at random. The big reel-to-reel Sony tape recorder started to turn.

  “—COMMUNISTS!” the voice of Sunlight Gardener bellowed. He was cranked to maximum volume, drowning out Casey’s shrieks and Warwick’s screams to shoot it, Sonny, shoot it, shoot it! But the voice of Gardener was not alone. In the background, like music from hell, came the mingled warble of many sirens as Casey’s mikes picked up a caravan of police cruisers turning into the Sunlight Home’s drive.

  “OH, THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT’S ALL RIGHT TO LOOK AT THOSE DIRTY BOOKS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T MATTER THAT IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO PRAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T EVEN MATTER THAT THERE ARE SIXTEEN U.S. REPRESENTATIVES AND TWO U.S. GOVERNORS WHO ARE AVOWED HOMOSEXUALS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU—”

  Casey’s chair rolled back against the glass wall between the studio and Sunlight Gardener’s office. His head turned, and for one moment they could all see his agonized, bulging eyes. Then Wolf leaped from the edge of the control panel. His head struck Casey’s gut . . . and plowed into it. His jaws began to open and close with the speed of a cane-cutting machine. Blood flew up and splattered the window as Casey began to convulse.

  “Shoot it, Sonny, shoot the fucking thing!” Warwick whooped.

  “Think I’m gonna shoot him instead,” Sonny said, looking around at Jack. He spoke with the air of a man who has finally arrived at a great conclusion. He nodded, began to grin.

  “—DAY IS COMING, BOYS! OH YES, A MIGHTY DAY, AND ON THAT DAY THOSE COMMUNIST HUMANIST HELLBOUND ATHEISTS ARE GONNA FIND OUT THAT THE ROCK WILL NOT SHIELD THEM, THE DEAD TREE WILL NOT GIVE THEM SHELTER! THEY’RE GONNA, OH SAY HALLELUJAH, THEY’RE GONNA—”

  Wolf, snarling and ripping.

  Sunlight Gardener, ranting about communism and humanism, the hellbound dope-pushers who wanted to see that prayer never made it back into the public schools.

  Sirens from outside; slamming car doors; someone telling someone else to take it slow, the kid had sounded scared.

  “Yes, you’re the one, you made all this trouble.”

  He raised the .45. The muzzle of the .45 looked as big as the mouth of the Oatley tunnel.

  The glass wall between the studio and the office blew inward with a loud, coughing roar. A gray-black shaggy shape exploded into the room, its muzzle torn nearly in two by a jag of glass, its feet bleeding. It bellowed an almost human sound, and the thought came to Jack so powerfully that it sent him reeling backward:

  YOU WILL NOT HARM THE HERD!

  “Wolf!” he wailed. “Look out! Look out, he got a g—”

  Sonny pulled the trigger of the .45 twice. The reports were defeaning in the closed space. The bullets were not aimed at Wolf; they were aimed at Jack. But they tore into Wolf instead, because at that instant he was between the two boys, in midleap. Jack saw huge, ragged, bloody holes open in Wolf’s side as the bullets exited. The paths of both slugs were deflected as they pulverized Wolf’s ribs, and neither touched Jack, although he felt one whiff past his left cheek.

  “Wolf!”

  Wolf’s dextrous, limber leap had turned awkward. His right shoulder rolled forward and he crashed into the wall, splattering blood and knocking down a framed photograph of Sunlight Gardener in a Shriner’s fez.

  Laughing, Sonny Singer turned toward Wolf, and shot him again. He held the gun in both hands and his shoulders jerked with the recoil. Gunsmoke hung in a thick, noxious, unmoving rafter. Wolf struggled up on all fours and then rose somehow to his feet. A shattering, wounded bellow of pain and rage overtopped Sunlight Gardener’s thundering recorded voice.

  Sonny shot Wolf a fourth time. The slug tore a gaping hole in his left arm. Blood and gristle flew.

  JACKY! JACKY! OH JACKY, HURTS, THAT HURTS ME—

  Jacky shambled forward and grabbed Gardener’s digital clock; it was simply the first thing that came to hand.

  “Sonny, look out!” Warwick shouted. “Look—” Then Wolf, his entire midsection now a gory tangle of blood-matted hair, pounced on him. Warwick grappled with Wolf and for a moment they appeared almost to be dancing.

  “—IN A LAKE OF FIRE FOREVER! FOR THE BIBLE SAYS—”

  Jack brought the digital radio down on Sonny’s head with all the force he could muster as Sonny began to turn around. Plastic crunched. The numbers on the front of the clock began to blink randomly.

  Sonny reeled around, trying to bring the gun up. Jack swung the radio in a flat, rising arc that ended at Sonny’s mouth. Sonny’s lips flew back in a great funhouse grin. There was a brittle crunch as his teeth broke. His finger jerked the trigger of the gun again. The bullet went between his feet.

  He hit the wall, rebounded, and grinned at Jack from his bloody mouth. Swaying on his feet, he raised the gun.

  “Hellbound—”

  Wolf threw Warwick. Warwick flew through the air with the greatest of ease and struck Sonny in the back as Sonny fired. The bullet went wild, hitting one of the turning tapereels in the sound-studio and pulverizing it. The ranting, screaming voice of Sunlight Gardener ceased. A great bass hum of feedback began to rise from the speakers.

  Roaring, staggering, Wolf advanced on Sonny Singer. Sonny pointed the .45 at him and pulled the trigger. There was a dry, impotent click. Sonny’s wet grin faltered.

  “No,” he said mildly, and pulled the trigger again . . . and again . . . and again. As Wolf reached for him, he threw the gun and tried to run around Gardener’s big desk. The pistol bounced off Wolf’s skull, and with a final, failing burst of strength, Wolf leaped across Sunlight Gardener’s desk after Sonny, scattering everything that had been there. Sonny backed away, but Wolf was able to grab his arm.

  “No!” Sonny screamed. “No, you better not, you’ll go back in the Box, I’m a big man around here, I . . . I . . . IYYYYYYYYYYYY—!”

  Wolf twisted Sonny’s arm. There was a ripping sound, the sound of a turkey drumstick being torn from the cooked bird by an overenthusiastic child. Suddenly Sonny’s arm was in Wolf’s big front paw. Sonny staggered away, blood jetting from his shoulder. Jack saw a wet white knob of bone. He turned away and was violently sick.

  For a moment the whole world swam into grayness.

  19

  When he looked around again, Wolf was swaying in the middle of the carnage that had been Gardener’s office. His eyes guttered pale yellow, like dying candles. Something was happening to his face, to his arms and legs—he was becoming Wolf again, Jack saw . . . and then understood fully what that meant. The old legends had lied about how
only silver bullets could destroy a werewolf, but apparently about some things they did not lie. Wolf was changing back because he was dying.

  “Wolf, no!” he wailed, and managed to get to his feet. He got halfway to Wolf, slipped in a puddle of blood, went to one knee, got up again. “No!”

  “Jacky—” The voice was low, guttural, little more than a growl . . . but understandable.

  And, incredibly, Wolf was trying to smile.

  Warwick had gotten Gardener’s door open. He was backing slowly up the steps, his eyes wide and shocked.

  “Go on!” Jack screamed. “Go on, get outta here!”

  Andy Warwick fled like a scared rabbit.

  A voice from the intercom—Franky Williams’s voice—cut through the droning buzz of feedback. It was horrified, but filled with a terrible, sickly excitement. “Christ, lookit this! Looks like somebody went bullshit with a meat-cleaver! Some of you guys check the kitchen!”

  “Jacky—”

  Wolf collapsed like a falling tree.

  Jack knelt, turned him over. The hair was melting away from Wolf’s cheeks with the eerie speed of time-lapse photography. His eyes had gone hazel again. And to Jack he looked horribly tired.

  “Jacky—” Wolf raised a bloody hand and touched Jack’s cheek. “Shoot . . . you? Did he . . .”

  “No,” Jack said, cradling his friend’s head. “No, Wolf, never got me. Never did.”

  “I . . .” Wolf’s eyes closed and then opened slowly again. He smiled with incredible sweetness and spoke carefully, enunciating each word, obviously needing to convey this if nothing else. “I . . . kept . . . my herd . . . safe.”

  “Yes, you did,” Jack said, and his tears began to flow. They hurt. He cradled Wolf’s shaggy, tired head and wept. “You sure did, good old Wolf—”

  “Good . . . good old Jacky.”

  “Wolf, I’m gonna go upstairs . . . there are cops . . . an ambulance . . .”

  “No!” Wolf once again seemed to rouse himself to a great effort. “Go on . . . you go on . . .”

  “Not without you, Wolf!” All the lights had blurred double, treble. He held Wolf’s head in his burned hands. “Not without you, huh-uh, no way—”

  “Wolf . . . doesn’t want to live in this world.” He pulled a great, shuddering breath into his broad, shattered chest and tried another smile. “Smells . . . smells too bad.”