The Talisman (48 page)

“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.”

“Wolf . . . listen, Wolf—”

Wolf took his hands gently; as he held them, Jack could feel the hair melting from Wolf’s palms. It was a ghostly, terrible sensation.

“I love you, Jacky.”

“I love you, too, Wolf,” Jack said. “Right here and now.”

Wolf smiled.

“Going back, Jacky . . . I can feel it. Going back . . .”

Suddenly Wolf’s very hands felt insubstantial in Jack’s grip.

“Wolf!”
he screamed.

“Going back home . . .”

“Wolf, no!”
He felt his heart stagger and wrench in his chest. It would break, oh yes, hearts could break, he felt that.
“Wolf, come back, I love you!”
There was a sensation of lightness in Wolf now, a feeling that he was turning into something like a milkweed pod . . . or a shimmer of illusion. A Daydream.

“. . . goodbye . . .”

Wolf was fading glass. Fading . . . fading . . .

“Wolf!”

“ . . .love you J . . .”

Wolf was gone. There was only a bloody outline on the floor where he had been.

“Oh God,” Jack moaned. “Oh God, oh God.”

He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth in the demolished office, moaning.

27

Jack Lights Out Again

1

Time passed. Jack had no idea how much or how little. He sat with his arms wrapped around himself as if he were in the strait-jacket again, rocking back and forth, moaning, wondering if Wolf could really be gone.

He’s gone. Oh yes, he’s gone. And guess who killed him, Jack? Guess who?

At some point the feedback hum took on a rasping note. A moment later there was a high-gain crackle of static and everything shorted out—feedback hum, upstairs chatter, idling engines out front. Jack barely noticed.

Go on. Wolf said to go on.

I can’t. I can’t. I’m tired, and whatever I do is the wrong thing. People get killed—

Quit it, you self-pitying jerk! Think about your mother, Jack.

No! I’m tired. Let me be.

And the Queen.

Please, just leave me alone—

At last he heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and that roused him. He did not want to be found here. Let them take him outside, in the back yard, but not in this stinking, blood-spattered, smokey room where he had been tortured and his friend killed.

Barely thinking about what he was doing, Jack took up the envelope with
JACK PARKER
written across the front. He looked inside and saw the guitar-pick, the silver dollar, his beat-up wallet, the Rand McNally road atlas. He tilted the envelope and saw the marble. He stuck everything in the pack and slipped it on, feeling like a boy in a state of hypnosis.

Footfalls on the stairs, slow and cautious.

“—where’s the damn lights—”

“—funny smell, like a zoo—”

“—watch it, boys—”

Jack’s eyes happened on the steel file-tray, neatly stacked with envelopes reading
I’LL BE A SUNBEAM FOR JESUS
. He helped himself to two of them.

Now when they grab you coming out, they can get you for robbery as well as murder.

Didn’t matter. He was moving now for the simple sake of movement, no more than that.

The back yard appeared completely deserted. Jack stood at the top of the stairs that exited through a bulkhead and looked around, hardly able to believe it. There were voices from the front, and pulses of light, and occasional smears of static and dispatchers’ voices from police radios that had been cranked up all the way to high gain, but the back yard was empty. It made no sense. But he supposed if they were confused enough, rattled enough by what they had found inside . . .

Then a voice, muffled, less than twenty feet away on Jack’s left, said, “Christ! Do you believe this?”

Jack’s head snapped around. There, squatting on the beaten dirt like a crude Iron Age coffin, was the Box. A flashlight was moving around inside. Jack could see shoe-soles sticking out. A dim figure was crouching by the mouth of the Box, examining the door.

“Looks like this thing was ripped right off’n its hinges,” the fellow looking at the door called into the Box. “I don’t know how anyone coulda done it, though. Hinges are steel. But they’re just . . . 
twisted
.”

“Never mind the damn hinges,” the muffled voice came back. “This goddam thing . . . they kept
kids
in here, Paulie! I really think they did!
Kids!
There’s initials on the walls . . .”

The light moved.

“. . . and Bible verses . . .”

The light moved again.

“. . . and pictures. Little pictures. Little stick-men and -women, like kids draw . . . Christ, do you think Williams knew about this?”

“Must have,” Paulie said, still examining the torn and twisted steel hinges on the Box’s door.

Paulie was bending in; his colleague was backing out. Making no special attempt at concealment, Jack walked across the open yard behind them. He went along the side of the garage and came out on the shoulder of the road. From here he had an angle on the careless jam of police cars in the Sunlight Home’s front yard. As Jack stood watching, an ambulance came tearing up the road, flashers whirling, siren warbling.

“Loved you, Wolf,” Jack muttered, and wiped an arm across his wet eyes. He set off down the road into darkness, thinking he would most likely be picked up before he got a mile west of the Sunlight Home. But three hours later he was still walking; apparently the cops had more than enough to occupy them back there.

2

There was a highway up ahead, over the next rise or the rise after that. Jack could see the orangey glow of high-intensity sodium arcs on the horizon, could hear the whine of the big rigs.

He stopped in a trash-littered ravine and washed his face and hands in the trickle of water coming out of a culvert. The water was almost paralyzing cold, but at least it silenced the throbbing in his hands for a while. The old cautions were coming back almost unbidden.

Jack stood for a moment where he was, under the dark night sky of Indiana, listening to the whine of the big trucks.

The wind, murmuring in the trees, lifted his hair. His heart was heavy with the loss of Wolf, but even that could not change how good, how very good it was to be free.

An hour later a trucker slowed for the tired, pallid boy standing in the breakdown lane with his thumb cocked. Jack climbed in.

“Where you headed, kiddo?” the trucker asked.

Jack was too tired and too sick at heart to bother with the Story—he barely remembered it, anyway. He supposed it would come back to him.

“West,” he said. “Far as you’re going.”

“That’d be Midstate.”

“Fine,” Jack said, and fell asleep.

The big Diamond Reo rolled through the chilly Indiana night; Charlie Daniels on the tape-player, it rolled west, chasing its own headlights toward Illinois.