The Talisman (38 page)

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 handed him the cup. The John Lennon glasses were back; Wolf’s beard was now little more than a scurf covering his cheeks; his black hair, though still long and greasy, fell well short of his shoulders. Wolf’s face was friendly and peaceful, almost tired-looking. Over the bib overalls he wore a gray sweatshirt, about two sizes too small, with
INDIANA UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
stencilled on the front.

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.

At last he was ready to go to the counter. The uniformed girl there stared at him while he gave his order—his wet hair, he thought. While she waited for the order to come through, the girl stepped back and leaned against the service hatch, still unabashedly looking at him.

He was biting into the first Whopper as he turned away toward the glass doors. Juice ran down his chin. He was so hungry he could scarcely bother to chew. Three enormous bites took most of the big sandwich. He had just worked his mouth far enough around the remainder to take a fourth when he saw through the doors that Wolf had attracted a crowd of children. The meat congealed in his mouth, and his stomach slammed shut.

Jack hurried outside, still trying to swallow his mouthful of ground chuck, limp bread, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and sauce. The kids stood in the street on three sides of Wolf, staring at him every bit as frankly as the waitress had stared at Jack. Wolf had hunched down on the curb as far as he was able, bowing his back and pulling in his neck like a turtle. His ears seemed flattened against his head. The wad of food stuck in Jack’s throat like a golfball, and when he swallowed convulsively, it dropped down another notch.

Wolf glanced at him out of the side of his eye, and visibly relaxed. A tall blue-jeaned man in his twenties opened the door of a battered red pick-up five or six feet away down the curb, leaned against the cab, and watched, smiling. “Have a burger, Wolf,” Jack said as carelessly as he could. He handed Wolf the box, which Wolf sniffed. Then Wolf lifted his head and took a huge bite out of the box. He began methodically to chew. The children, astounded and fascinated, stepped nearer. A few of them were giggling. “What is he?” asked a little girl with blond pigtails tied with fuzzy pink gift-wrapping yarn. “Is he a monster?” A crewcut boy of seven or eight shoved himself in front of the girl and said, “He’s the Hulk, isn’t he? He’s really the Hulk. Hey? Hey? Huh? Right?”

Wolf had managed to extract what was left of his Whopper from its cardboard container. He pushed the whole thing into his mouth with his palm. Shreds of lettuce fell between his upraised knees, mayonnaise and meat juices smeared over his chin, his cheek. Everything else became a brownish pulp smacked to death between Wolf’s enormous teeth. When he swallowed he started to lick the inside of the box.

Jack gently took the container out of his hands. “No, he’s just my cousin. He’s not a monster, and he’s not the Hulk. Why don’t you kids get away and leave us alone, huh? Go on. Leave us alone.”

They continued to stare. Wolf was now licking his fingers.

“If you keep on gawping at him like that, you might make him mad. I don’t know what he’d do if he got mad.”

The boy with the crewcut had seen David Banner’s transformation often enough to have an idea of what anger might do to this monstrous Burger King carnivore. He stepped back. Most of the others moved back with him.

“Go on, please,” Jack said, but the children had frozen again.

Wolf rose up mountainously, his fists clenched. “GOD POUND YOU, DON’T LOOK AT ME!” he bellowed. “DON’T MAKE ME FEEL FUNNY! EVERYBODY MAKES ME FEEL FUNNY!”

The children scattered. Breathing hard, red-faced, Wolf stood and watched them disappear up Daleville’s Main Street and around the corner. When they were gone, he wrapped his arms around his chest and looked dartingly at Jack. He was miserable with embarrassment. “Wolf shouldn’t have yelled,” he said. “They were just little ones.”

“Big fat scare’ll do them a lot of good,” a voice said, and Jack saw that the young man from the red pick-up was still leaning against his cab, smiling at them. “Never saw anything like that before myself. Cousins, are you?”

Jack nodded suspiciously.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to get personal or anything.” He stepped forward, an easy, dark-haired young man in a sleeveless down vest and a plaid shirt. “I especially don’t want to make anybody feel funny now, ya know.” He paused, lifted his hands, palm-out. “Really. I was just thinking that you guys look like you’ve been on the road awhile.”

Jack glanced at Wolf, who was still hugging himself in embarrassment but also glowering through his round glasses at this figure.

“I’ve been there myself,” the man said. “Hey, dig it—the year I got out of good old DHS—Daleville High, you know—I hitched all the way to northern California and all the way back. Anyhow, if you’re sort of going west, I can give you a lift.”

“Can’t, Jacky.” Wolf spoke in a thunderous stage whisper.

“How far west?” Jack asked. “We’re trying to make it to Springfield. I have a friend in Springfield.”

“Hey, no probleema, seenyor.” He raised his hands again. “I’m going just this side of Cayuga, right next to the Illinois border. You let me scarf a burger, we gone. Straight shot. An hour and a half, maybe less—you’ll be about halfway to Springfield.”

“Can’t,”
Wolf rasped again.

“There’s one problem, okay? I got some stuff on the front seat. One of you guys’ll have to ride behind. It’s gonna be windy back there.”

“You don’t know how great that is,” Jack said, speaking nothing more than the truth. “We’ll see you when you come back out.” Wolf began to dance in agitation. “Honest. We’ll be out here, mister. And thanks.”

He turned to whisper to Wolf as soon as the man went through the doors.

And so when the young man—Bill “Buck” Thompson, for that was his name—returned to his pick-up carrying the containers for two more Whoppers, he found a sedate-looking Wolf kneeling in the open back, his arms resting on the side panel, mouth open, nose already lifting. Jack was in the passenger seat, crowded by a stack of bulky plastic bags which had been taped, then stapled shut, and then sprayed extensively with room freshener, to judge by the smell. Through the translucent sides the bags were visible long frondlike cuttings, medium green. Clusters of buds grew on these amputated fronds.

“I reckoned you still looked a little hungry,” he said, and tossed another Whopper to Wolf. Then he let himself in on the driver’s side, across the pile of plastic bags from Jack. “Thought he might catch it in his teeth, no reflection on your cousin. Here, take this one, he already pulverized his.”

And a hundred miles west they went, Wolf delirious with joy to have the wind whipping past his head, half-hypnotized by the speed and variety of the odors which his nose caught in flight. Eyes blazing and glowing, registering every nuance of the wind, Wolf twitched from side to side behind the cab, shoving his nose into the speeding air.

Buck Thompson spoke of himself as a farmer. He talked nonstop during the seventy-five minutes he kept his foot near the floor, and never once asked Jack any questions. And when he swung off onto a narrow dirt road just outside the Cayuga town line and stopped the car beside a cornfield that seemed to run for miles, he dug in his shirt pocket and brought out a faintly irregular cigarette rolled in almost tissuelike white paper. “I’ve heard of red-eye,” he said. “But your cousin’s ridiculous.” He dropped the cigarette into Jack’s hand. “Have him take some of this when he gets excited, willya? Doctor’s orders.”

Jack absently stuffed the joint into his shirt pocket and climbed out of the cab. “Thanks, Buck,” he called up to the driver.

“Man, I thought I’d seen something when I saw him eat,” Buck said. “How do you get him to go places? Yell
mush! mush!
at him?”

Once Wolf realized that the ride was over, he bounded off the back of the truck.

The red pick-up rolled off, leaving a long plume of dust behind it.

“Let’s do that again!” Wolf sang out. “Jacky! Let’s do that again!”

“Boy, I wish we could,” Jack said. “Come on, let’s walk for a while. Someone will probably come along.”

He was thinking that his luck had turned, that in no time at all he and Wolf would be over the border into Illinois—and he’d always been certain that things would go smoothly once he got to Springfield and Thayer School and Richard. But Jack’s mind was still partially in shed-time, where what is unreal bloats and distorts whatever is real, and when the bad things started to happen again, they happened so quickly that he was unable to control them. It was a long time before Jack saw Illinois, and during that time he found himself back in the shed.

2

The bewilderingly rapid series of events which led to the Sunlight Home began ten minutes after the two boys had walked past the stark little roadsign telling them that they were now in Cayuga, pop. 23,568. Cayuga itself was nowhere visible. To their right the endless cornfield rolled across the land; to their left a bare field allowed them to see how the road bent, then arrowed straight toward the flat horizon. Just after Jack had realized that they would probably have to walk all the way into town to get their next ride, a car appeared on this road, travelling fast toward them.

“Ride in back?” Wolf yelled, joyfully raising his arms up over his head. “Wolf ride in back! Right here and now!”

“It’s going the wrong way,” Jack said. “Just be calm and let it pass us, Wolf. Get your arms down or he’ll think you’re signalling him.”

Reluctantly Wolf lowered his arms. The car had come nearly to the bend in the road which would take it directly past Jack and Wolf. “No ride in the back now?” Wolf asked, pouting almost childishly.

Jack shook his head. He was staring at an oval medallion painted on the car’s dusty white doorpanel. County Parks Commission, this might have said, or State Wildlife Board. It might have been anything from the vehicle of the state agricultural agent to the property of the Cayuga Maintenance Department. But when it turned into the bend, Jack saw it was a police car.

“That’s a cop, Wolf. A policeman. Just keep walking and stay nice and loose. We don’t want him to stop.”

“What’s a coppiceman?” Wolf’s voice had dropped into a dark brown range; he had seen that the speeding car was now coming straight toward him. “Does a coppiceman kill Wolfs?”

“No,” Jack said, “they absolutely never kill Wolfs,” but it did no good. Wolf captured Jack’s hand in his own, which trembled.

“Let go of me, please, Wolf,” Jack pleaded. “He’ll think it’s funny.”

Wolf’s hand dropped away.

As the police car advanced toward them, Jack glanced at the figure behind the wheel, and then turned around and walked back a few paces so that he could watch Wolf. What he had seen was not encouraging. The policeman driving the car had a wide doughy domineering face with livid slabs of fat where he’d once had cheekbones. And Wolf’s terror was plain on his face. Eyes, nostrils flared; he was showing his teeth.

“You really liked riding in the back of that truck, didn’t you?” Jack asked him.

Some of the terror disappeared, and Wolf nearly managed a smile. The police car roared past—Jack was conscious of the driver turning his head to inspect them. “All right,” Jack said. “He’s on his way. We’re okay, Wolf.”

He had turned around again when he heard the sound of the police car suddenly begin to grow louder again.

“Coppiceman’s coming back!”

“Probably just going back to Cayuga,” Jack said. “Turn around and just act like me. Don’t stare at him.”

Wolf and Jack trudged along, pretending to ignore the car, which seemed to hang behind them deliberately. Wolf uttered a sound that was half-moan, half-howl.

The police car swung out into the road, passed them, flashed its brake lights, and then cut in diagonally before them. The officer pushed open his door and got his feet planted on the ground. Then he hoisted himself out of the seat. He was roughly Jack’s height, and all his weight was in his face and his stomach—his legs were twig-skinny, his arms and shoulders those of a normally developed man. His gut, trussed in the brown uniform like a fifteen-pound turkey, bulged out on both sides of the wide brown belt.

“I can’t wait for it,” he said, and cocked an arm and leaned on the open door. “What’s your story, anyhow? Give.”

Wolf padded up behind Jack and hunched his shoulders, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his overalls.

“We’re going to Springfield, officer,” Jack said. “We’ve been hitching—I guess maybe we shouldn’t.”

“You guess maybe you shouldn’t. Hol-eee shit. What’s this guy tryinna disappear behind you, a Wookie?”

“He’s my cousin.” Jack thought frantically for a moment—the Story had to be bent far enough to accommodate Wolf. “I’m supposed to be taking him home. He lives in Springfield with his Aunt Helen, I mean my Aunt Helen, the one who’s a schoolteacher. In Springfield.”

“What’d he do, escape from somewhere?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It was just that—”

The cop looked at him neutrally, his face sizzling. “Names.”

Now the boy met a dilemma: Wolf was certain to call him Jack, no matter what name he gave the cop. “I’m Jack Parker,” he said. “And he’s—”

“Hold it. I want the feeb to tell me himself. Come on, you. You remember your name, basket case?”

Wolf squirmed behind Jack, digging his chin into the top of his overalls. He muttered something.

“I couldn’t hear you, sonny.”

“Wolf,” he whispered.

“Wolf. Prob’ly I should have guessed. What’s your first name, or did they just give you a number?”

Wolf had squeezed his eyes shut, and was twisting his legs together.

“Come on, Phil,” Jack said, thinking that it was one of the few names Wolf might remember.