The Talisman

16

Wolf

1

—the strong sunlight struck his closed lids.

Through the gagging-sweet odor of the magic juice he could smell something else . . . the warm smell of animals. He could hear them, too, moving all about him.

Frightened, Jack opened his eyes but at first could see nothing—the difference in the light was so sudden and abrupt that it was as if someone had suddenly turned on a cluster of two-hundred-watt bulbs in a black room.

A warm, hide-covered flank brushed him, not in a threatening way (or so Jack hoped), but most definitely in an I’m-in-a-hurry-to-be-gone-thank-you-very-much way. Jack, who had been getting up, thumped back to the ground again.

“Hey! Hey! Get away from im! Right here and right now!” A loud, healthy whack followed by a disgruntled animal sound somewhere between a moo and a baa. “God’s nails! Got no sense! Get away from im fore I bite your God-pounding eyes out!”

Now his eyes had adjusted enough to the brightness of this almost flawless Territories autumn day to make out a young giant standing in the middle of a herd of milling animals, whacking their sides and slightly humped backs with what appeared to be great gusto and very little real force. Jack sat up, automatically finding Speedy’s bottle with its one precious swallow left and putting it away. He never took his eyes from the young man who stood with his back to him.

Tall he was—six-five at least, Jack guessed—and with shoulders so broad that his across still looked slightly out of proportion to his high. Long, greasy black hair shagged down his back to the shoulder blades. Muscles bulged and rippled as he moved amid the animals, which looked like pygmy cows. He was driving them away from Jack and toward the Western Road.

He was a striking figure, even when seen from behind, but what amazed Jack was his dress. Everyone he had seen in the Territories (including himself) had been wearing tunics, jerkins, or rough breeches.

This fellow appeared to be wearing Oshkosh bib overalls.

Then he turned around and Jack felt a horrible shocked dismay well up in his throat. He shot to his feet.

It was the Elroy-thing.

The herdsman was the Elroy-thing.

2

Except it wasn’t.

Jack perhaps would not have lingered to see that, and everything that happened thereafter—the movie theater, the shed, and the hell of the Sunlight Home—would not have happened (or would, at the very least, have happened in some completely different way), but in the extremity of his terror he froze completely after getting up. He was no more able to run than a deer is when it is frozen in a hunter’s jacklight.

As the figure in the bib overalls approached, he thought: Elroy wasn’t that tall or that broad. And his eyes were yellow—The eyes of this creature were a bright, impossible shade of orange. Looking into them was like looking into the eyes of a Halloween pumpkin. And while Elroy’s grin had promised madness and murder, the smile on this fellow’s face was large and cheerful and harmless.

His feet were bare, huge, and spatulate, the toes clumped into groups of three and two, barely visible through curls of wiry hair. Not hooflike, as Elroy’s had been, Jack realized, half-crazed with surprise, fear, a dawning amusement, but padlike-pawlike.

As he closed the distance between himself and Jack,

(his? its?)

eyes flared an even brighter orange, going for a moment to the Day-Glo shade favored by hunters and flagmen on road-repair jobs. The color faded to a muddy hazel. As it did, Jack saw that his smile was puzzled as well as friendly, and understood two things at once: first, that there was no harm in this fellow, not an ounce of it, and second, that he was slow. Not feeble, perhaps, but slow.

“Wolf!” the big, hairy boy-beast cried, grinning. His tongue was long and pointed, and Jack thought with a shudder that a wolf was exactly what he looked like. Not a goat but a wolf. He hoped he was right about there not being any harm in him. But if I made a mistake about that, at least I won’t have to worry about making any more mistakes . . . ever again. “Wolf! Wolf!” He stuck out one hand, and Jack saw that, like his feet, his hands were covered with hair, although this hair was finer and more luxuriant—actually quite handsome. It grew especially thick in the palms, where it was the soft white of a blaze on a horse’s forehead.

My God I think he wants to shake hands with me!

Gingerly, thinking of Uncle Tommy, who had told him he must never refuse a handshake, not even with his worst enemy (“Fight him to the death afterward if you must, but shake his hand first,” Uncle Tommy had said), Jack put his own hand out, wondering if it was about to be crushed . . . or perhaps eaten.

“Wolf! Wolf! Shakin hands right here and now!” the boything in the Oshkosh biballs cried, delighted. “Right here and now! Good old Wolf! God-pound it! Right here and now! Wolf!”

In spite of this enthusiasm, Wolf’s grip was gentle enough, cushioned by the crisp, furry growth of hair on his hand. Bib overalls and a big handshake from a guy who looks like an overgrown Siberian husky and smells a little bit like a hayloft after a heavy rain, Jack thought. What next? An offer to come to his church this Sunday?

“Good old Wolf, you bet! Good old Wolf right here and now!” Wolf wrapped his arms around his huge chest and laughed, delighted with himself. Then he grabbed Jack’s hand again.

This time his hand was pumped vigorously up and down. Something seemed required of him at his point, Jack reflected. Otherwise, this pleasant if rather simple young man might go on shaking his hand until sundown.

“Good old Wolf,” he said. It seemed to be a phrase of which his new acquaintance was particularly fond.

Wolf laughed like a child and dropped Jack’s hand. This was something of a relief. The hand had been neither crushed nor eaten, but it did feel a bit seasick. Wolf had a faster pump than a slot-machine player on a hot streak.

“Stranger, ain’tcha?” Wolf asked. He stuffed his hairy hands into the slit sides of his biballs and began playing pocket-pool with a complete lack of self-consciousness.

“Yes,” Jack said, thinking of what that word meant over here. It had a very specific meaning over here. “Yes, I guess that’s just what I am. A stranger.”

“God-pounding right! I can smell it on you! Right here and now, oh yeah, oh boy! Got it! Doesn’t smell bad, you know, but it sure is funny. Wolf! That’s me. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” He threw back his head and laughed. The sound ended being something that was disconcertingly like a howl.

“Jack,” Jack said. “Jack Saw—”

His hand was seized again and pumped with abandon.

“Sawyer,” he finished, when he was released again. He smiled, feeling very much as though someone had hit him with a great big goofystick. Five minutes ago he had been standing scrunched against the cold brick side of a shithouse on I-70. Now he was standing here talking to a young fellow who seemed to be more animal than man.

And damned if his cold wasn’t completely gone.

3

“Wolf meet Jack! Jack meet Wolf! Here and now! Okay! Good! Oh, Jason! Cows in the road! Ain’t they stupid! Wolf! Wolf!”

Yelling, Wolf loped down the hill to the road, where about half of his herd was standing, looking around with expressions of bland surprise, as if to ask where the grass had gone. They really did look like some strange cross between cows and sheep, Jack saw, and wondered what you would call such a crossbreed. The only word to come immediately to mind was creeps—or perhaps, he thought, the singular would be more proper in this case, as in Here’s Wolf taking care of his flock of creep. Oh yeah. Right here and now.

The goofystick came down on Jack’s head again. He sat down and began to giggle, his hands crisscrossed over his mouth to stifle the sounds.

Even the biggest creep stood no more than four feet high. Their fur was woolly, but of a muddy shade that was similar to Wolf’s eyes—at least, when Wolf’s eyes weren’t blazing like Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. Their heads were topped with short, squiggly horns that looked good for absolutely nothing. Wolf herded them back out of the road. They went obediently, with no sign of fear. If a cow or a sheep on my side of the jump got a whiff of that guy, Jack thought, it’d kill itself trying to get out of his way.

But Jack liked Wolf—liked him on sight, just as he had feared and disliked Elroy on sight. And that contrast was particularly apt, because the comparison between the two was undeniable. Except that Elroy had been goatish while Wolf was . . . well, wolfish.

Jack walked slowly toward where Wolf had set his herd to graze. He remembered tiptoeing down the stinking back hall of the Oatley Tap toward the fire-door, sensing Elroy somewhere near, smelling him, perhaps, as a cow on the other side would undoubtedly smell Wolf. He remembered the way Elroy’s hands had begun to twist and thicken, the way his neck had swelled, the way his teeth had become a mouthful of blackening fangs.

“Wolf?”

Wolf turned and looked at him, smiling. His eyes flared a bright orange and looked for a moment both savage and intelligent. Then the glow faded and they were only that muddy, perpetually puzzled hazel again.

“Are you . . . sort of a werewolf?”

“Sure am,” Wolf said, smiling. “You pounded that nail, Jack. Wolf!”

Jack sat down on a rock, looking at Wolf thoughtfully. He believed it would be impossible for him to be further surprised than he had already been, but Wolf managed the trick quite nicely.

“How’s your father, Jack?” he asked, in that casual, by-the-way tone reserved for enquiring after the relatives of others. “How’s Phil doing these days? Wolf!”

4

Jack made a queerly apt cross-association: he felt as if all the wind had been knocked out of his mind. For a moment it just sat there in his head, not a thought in it, like a radio station broadcasting nothing but a carrier wave. Then he saw Wolf’s face change. The expression of happiness and childish curiosity was replaced by one of sorrow. Jack saw that Wolf’s nostrils were flaring rapidly.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Wolf! I’m sorry, Jack. God pound me! I’m stupid! Stupid!” Wolf crashed a hand into his forehead and this time he really did howl. It was a sound that chilled Jack’s blood. The herd of creep looked around uneasily.

“That’s all right,” Jack said. He heard his voice more in his ears than in his head, as if someone else had spoken. “But . . . how did you know?”

“Your smell changed,” Wolf said simply. “I knew he was dead because it was in your smell. Poor Phil! What a good guy! Tell you that right here and now, Jack! Your father was a good guy! Wolf!”

“Yes,” Jack said, “he was. But how did you know him? And how did you know he was my father?”

Wolf looked at Jack as though he had asked a question so simple it barely needed answering. “I remember his smell, of course. Wolfs remember all smells. You smell just like him.”

Whack! The goofystick came down on his head again. Jack felt an urge to just roll back and forth on the tough, springy turf, holding his gut and howling. People had told him he had his father’s eyes and his father’s mouth, even his father’s knack for quick-sketching, but never before had he been told that he smelled like his father. Yet he supposed the idea had a certain crazy logic, at that.

“How did you know him?” Jack asked again.

Wolf looked at a loss. “He came with the other one,” he said at last. “The one from Orris. I was just little. The other one was bad. The other one stole some of us. Your father didn’t know,” he added hastily, as if Jack had shown anger. “Wolf! No! He was good, your father. Phil. The other one . . .”

Wolf shook his head slowly. On his face was an expression even more simple than his pleasure. It was the memory of some childhood nightmare.

“Bad,” Wolf said. “He made himself a place in this world, my father says. Mostly he was in his Twinner, but he was from your world. We knew he was bad, we could tell, but who listens to Wolfs? No one. Your father knew he was bad, but he couldn’t smell him as good as we could. He knew he was bad, but not how bad.”

And Wolf threw his head back and howled again, a long, chilly ululation of sorrow that resounded against the deep blue sky.