The Talisman (37 page)

Wolf nodded his head. “I remembered. I remembered in time, Jacky. When I was waiting for you.”

Jack was still trying to adjust himself to Wolf’s idea. He would have to go three days without food. Wolf would be free to wander. He would be in prison, and Wolf would have the world. Yet it was probably the only way he would survive Wolf’s transformation. Given the choice of a three-day fast or death, he’d choose an empty stomach. And then it suddenly seemed to Jack that this reversal was really no reversal at all—he would still be free, locked in the shed, and Wolf out in the world would still be imprisoned. His cage would just be larger than Jack’s. “Then God bless
The Book of Good Farming
, because I would never have thought of it myself.”

Wolf gleamed at him again, and then looked up at the sky with a blank, yearning expression. “Not long now, Jacky. You’re the herd. I have to put you inside.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “I guess you do have to.”

And this too struck Wolf as uproariously funny. As he laughed his howling laugh, he threw an arm around Jack’s waist and picked him up and carried him all the way across the field. “Wolf will take care of you, Jacky,” he said when he had nearly howled himself inside-out. He set the boy gently on the ground at the top of the gully.

“Wolf,” Jack said.

Wolf widened his jaws and began rubbing his crotch.

“You can’t kill any people, Wolf,” Jack said. “Remember that—if you remembered that story, then you can remember not to kill any people. Because if you do, they’ll hunt you down for sure. If you kill any people, if you kill even one person, then a lot of people will come to kill you. And they’d get you, Wolf. I promise you. They’d nail your hide to a board.”

“No people, Jacky. Animals smell better than people. No people. Wolf!”

They walked down the slope into the gully. Jack removed the lock from his pocket and several times clipped it through the metal ring that would hold it, showing Wolf how to use the key. “Then you slide the key under the door, okay?” he asked. “When you’ve changed back, I’ll push it back to you.” Jack glanced down at the bottom of the door—there was a two-inch gap between it and the ground.

“Sure, Jacky. You’ll push it back to me.”

“Well, what do we do now?” Jack said. “Should I go in the shed right now?”

“Sit there,” Wolf said, pointing to a spot on the floor of the shed a foot from the door.

Jack looked at him curiously, then stepped inside the shed and sat down. Wolf hunkered back down just outside the shed’s open door, and without even looking at Jack, held out his hand toward the boy. Jack took Wolf’s hand. It was like holding a hairy creature about the size of a rabbit. Wolf squeezed so hard that Jack nearly cried out—but even if he had, he didn’t think that Wolf would have heard him. Wolf was staring upward again, his face dreamy and peaceful and rapt. After a second or two Jack was able to shift his hand into a more comfortable position inside Wolf’s grasp.

“Are we going to stay like this a long time?” he asked.

Wolf took nearly a minute to answer. “Until,” he said, and squeezed Jack’s hand again.

9

They sat like that, on either side of the doorframe, for hours, wordlessly, and finally the light began to fade. Wolf had been almost imperceptibly trembling for the previous twenty minutes, and when the air grew darker the tremor in his hand intensified. It was, Jack thought, the way a thoroughbred horse might tremble in its stall at the beginning of a race, waiting for the sound of a gun and the gate to be thrown open.

“She’s beginning to take me with her,” Wolf said softly. “Soon we’ll be running, Jack. I wish you could, too.”

He turned his head to look at Jack, and the boy saw that while Wolf meant what he had just said, there was a significant part of him that was silently saying:
I could run after you as well as beside you, little friend
.

“We have to close the door now, I guess,” Jack said. He tried to pull his hand from Wolf’s grasp, but could not free himself until Wolf almost disdainfully released him.

“Lock Jacky in, lock Wolf out.” Wolf’s eyes flared for a moment, becoming red molten Elroy-eyes.

“Remember, you’re keeping the herd safe,” Jack said. He stepped backward into the middle of the shed.

“The herd goes in the barn, and the lock goes on the door. He Would Not Injure His Herd.” Wolf’s eyes ceased to drip fire, shaded toward orange.

“Put the lock on the door.”

“God pound it, that’s what I’m doing now,” Wolf said. “I’m putting the God-pounding lock on the God-pounding door, see?” He banged the door shut, immediately sealing Jack up in the darkness. “Hear that, Jacky? That’s the God-pounding lock.” Jack heard the lock click against the metal loop, then heard its ratchets catch as Wolf slid it home.

“Now the key,” Jack said.

“God-pounding key, right here and now,” Wolf said, and a key rattled into a slot, rattled out. A second later the key bounced off the dusty ground beneath the door high enough to skitter onto the shed’s floorboards.

“Thanks,” Jack breathed. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the boards until he touched the key. For a moment he clamped it so hard into his palm that he almost drove it through his skin—the bruise, shaped like the state of Florida, would endure nearly five days, when in the excitement of being arrested he would fail to notice that it had left him. Then Jack carefully slid the key into his pocket. Outside, Wolf was panting in hot regular agitated-sounding spurts.

“Are you angry with me, Wolf?” he whispered through the door.

A fist thumped the door, hard. “Not! Not angry! Wolf!”

“All right,” Jack said. “No people, Wolf. Remember that. Or they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

No peopOOOWWW-OOOOOOOOHHHOOOO!” The word turned into a long, liquid howl. Wolf’s body bumped against the door, and his long black-furred feet slid into the opening beneath it. Jack knew that Wolf had flattened himself out against the shed door. “Not angry, Jack,” Wolf whispered, as if his howl had embarrassed him. “Wolf isn’t angry. Wolf is
wanting
, Jacky. It’s so soon now, so God-pounding
soon
.”

“I know,” Jack said, now suddenly feeling as if he had to cry—he wished he could have hugged Wolf. More painfully, he wished that they had stayed the extra days at the farmhouse, and that he were now standing outside a root cellar where Wolf was safely jailed.

The odd, disturbing thought came to him again that Wolf
was
safely jailed.

Wolf’s feet slid back under the door, and Jack thought he had a glimpse of them becoming more concentrated, slimmer, narrower.

Wolf grunted, panted, grunted again. He had moved well back from the door. He uttered a noise very like “Aaah.”

“Wolf?” Jack said.

An earsplitting howl lifted up from above Jack: Wolf had moved to the top of the gully.

“Be careful,” Jack said, knowing that Wolf would not hear him, and fearing that he would not understand him even if he were close enough to hear.

A series of howls followed soon after—the sound of a creature set free, or the despairing sound of one who wakes to find himself still confined, Jack could not tell which. Mournful and feral and oddly beautiful, the cries of poor Wolf flew up into the moonlit air like scarves flung into the night. Jack did not know he was trembling until he wrapped his arms around himself and felt his arms vibrating against his chest, which seemed to vibrate, too.

The howls diminished, retreating. Wolf was running with the moon.

10

For three days and three nights, Wolf was engaged in a nearly ceaseless search for food. He slept from each dawn until just past noon, in a hollow he had discovered beneath the fallen trunk of an oak. Certainly Wolf did not feel himself imprisoned, despite Jack’s forebodings. The woods on the other side of the field were extensive, and full of a wolf’s natural diet. Mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, squirrels—all these he found easily. He could have contained himself in the woods and eaten more than enough to carry him through to his next Change.

But Wolf was riding with the moon, and he could no more confine himself to the woods than he could have halted his transformation in the first place. He roamed, led by the moon, through barnyards and pastures, past isolated suburban houses and down unfinished roads where bulldozers and giant asymmetrical rollers sat like sleeping dinosaurs on the banks. Half of his intelligence was in his sense of smell, and it is not exaggerating to suggest that Wolf’s nose, always acute, had attained a condition of genius. He could not only smell a coop full of chickens five miles away and distinguish their odors from those of the cows and pigs and horses on the same farm—that was elementary—he could smell when the chickens moved. He could smell that one of the sleeping pigs had an injured foot, and one of the cows in the barn an ulcerated udder.

And this world—for was it not this world’s moon which led him?—no longer stank of chemicals and death. An older, more primitive order of being met him on his travels. He inhaled whatever remained of the earth’s original sweetness and power, whatever was left of qualities we might once have shared with the Territories. Even when he approached some human dwelling, even while he snapped the backbone of the family mutt and tore the dog into gristly rags he swallowed whole, Wolf was aware of pure cool streams moving far beneath the ground, of bright snow on a mountain somewhere a long way west. This seemed a perfect place for a transmogrified Wolf, and if he had killed any human being he would have been damned.

He killed no people.

He saw none, and perhaps that is why. During the three days of his Change, Wolf did kill and devour representatives of most other forms of life to be found in eastern Indiana, including one skunk and an entire family of bobcats living in limestone caves on a hillside two valleys away. On his first night in the woods he caught a low-flying bat in his jaws, bit off its head, and swallowed the rest while it was still jerking. Whole squadrons of domestic cats went down his throat, platoons of dogs. With a wild, concentrated glee he one night slaughtered every pig in a pen the size of a city block.

But twice Wolf found that he was mysteriously forbidden from killing his prey, and this too made him feel at home in the world through which he prowled. It was a question of place, not of any abstract moral concern—and on the surface, the places were merely ordinary. One was a clearing in the woods into which he had chased a rabbit, the other the scruffy back yard of a farmhouse where a whimpering dog lay chained to a stake. The instant he set a paw down in these places, his hackles rose and an electric tingling traversed the entire distance of his spine. These were sacred places, and in a sacred place a Wolf could not kill. That was all. Like all hallowed sites, they had been set apart a long time ago, so long ago that the word
ancient
could have been used to describe them—
ancient
is probably as close as we can come to representing the vast well of time Wolf sensed about him in the farmer’s back yard and the little clearing, a dense envelope of years packed together in a small, highly charged location. Wolf simply backed off the sacred ground and took himself elsewhere. Like the wing-men Jack had seen, Wolf lived in a mystery and so was comfortable with all such things.

And he did not forget his obligations to Jack Sawyer.

11

In the locked shed, Jack found himself thrown upon the properties of his own mind and character more starkly than at any other time in his life.

The only furniture in the shed was the little wooden bench, the only distraction the nearly decade-old magazines. And these he could not actually read. Since there were no windows, except in very early morning when light came streaming under the door he had trouble just working out the pictures on the pages. The words were streams of gray worms, indecipherable. He could not imagine how he would get through the next three days. Jack went toward the bench, struck it painfully with his knee, and sat down to think.

One of the first things he realized was that shed-time was different from time on the outside. Beyond the shed, seconds marched quickly past, melted into minutes which melted into hours. Whole days ticked along like metronomes, whole weeks. In shed-time, the seconds obstinately refused to move—they stretched into grotesque monster-seconds, Plasticman-seconds. Outside, an hour might go by while four or five seconds swelled and bloated inside the shed.

The second thing Jack realized was that thinking about the slowness of time made it worse. Once you started concentrating on the passing of seconds, they more or less refused to move at all. So he tried to pace off the dimensions of his cell just to take his mind off the eternity of seconds it took to make up three days. Putting one foot in front of another and counting his steps, he worked out that the shed was approximately seven feet by nine feet. At least there would be enough room for him to stretch out at night.

If he walked all the way around the inside of the shed, he’d walk about thirty-two feet.

If he walked around the inside of the shed a hundred and sixty-five times, he’d cover a mile.

He might not be able to eat, but he sure could walk. Jack took off his watch and put it in his pocket, promising himself that he would look at it only when he absolutely had to.

He was about one-fourth of the way through his first mile when he remembered that there was no water in the shed. No food and no water. He supposed that it took longer than three or four days to die of thirst. As long as Wolf came back for him, he’d be all right—well, maybe not all right, but at least alive. And if Wolf didn’t come back? He would have to break the door down.

In that case, he thought, he’d better try it now, while he still had some strength.

Jack went to the door and pushed it with both hands. He pushed it harder, and the hinges squeaked. Experimentally, Jack threw his shoulder at the edge of the door, opposite the hinges. He hurt his shoulder, but he didn’t think he had done anything to the door. He banged his shoulder against the door more forcefully. The hinges squealed but did not move a millimeter. Wolf could have torn the door off with one hand, but Jack did not think that he could move it if he turned his shoulders into hamburger by running into it. He would just have to wait for Wolf.