The Talisman

18

Wolf Goes to the Movies

1

Overhead, another truck pounded across the overpass, big diesel engine bellowing. The overpass shook. Wolf wailed and clutched at Jack, almost knocking them both into the water.

“Quit it!” Jack shouted. “Let go of me, Wolf! It’s just a truck! Let go!”

He slapped at Wolf, not wanting to do it—Wolf’s terror was pathetic. But, pathetic or not, Wolf had the best part of a foot and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds on Jack, and if he overbore him, they would both go into this freezing water and it would be pneumonia for sure.

“Wolf! Don’t like it! Wolf! Don’t like it! Wolf! Wolf!”

But his hold slackened. A moment later his arms dropped to his sides. When another truck snored by overhead, Wolf cringed but managed to keep from grabbing Jack again. But he looked at Jack with a mute, trembling appeal that said Get me out of this, please get me out of this, I’d rather be dead than in this world.

Nothing I’d like better, Wolf, but Morgan’s over there. Even if he weren’t, I don’t have the magic juice anymore.

He looked down at his left hand and saw he was holding the jagged neck of Speedy’s bottle, like a man getting ready to do some serious barroom brawling. Just dumb luck Wolf hadn’t gotten a bad cut when he grabbed Jack in his terror.

Jack tossed it away. Splash.

Two trucks this time—the noise was doubled. Wolf howled in terror and plastered his hands over his ears. Jack could see that most of the hair had disappeared from Wolf’s hands in the flip—most, but not all. And, he saw, the first two fingers of each of Wolf’s hands were exactly the same length.

“Come on, Wolf,” Jack said when the racket of the trucks had faded a little. “Let’s get out of here. We look like a couple of guys waiting to get baptized on a PTL Club special.”

He took Wolf’s hand, and then winced at the panicky way Wolf’s grip closed down. Wolf saw his expression and loosened up . . . a little.

“Don’t leave me, Jack,” Wolf said. “Please, please don’t leave me.”

“No, Wolf, I won’t,” Jack said. He thought: How do you get into these things, you asshole? Here you are, standing under a turnpike overpass somewhere in Ohio with your pet werewolf. How do you do it? Do you practice? And, oh, by the way, what’s happening with the moon, Jack-O? Do you remember?

He didn’t, and with clouds blanketing the sky and a cold rain falling, there was no way to tell.

What did that make the odds? Thirty to one in his favor? Twenty-eight to two?

Whatever the odds were, they weren’t good enough. Not the way things were going.

“No, I won’t leave you,” he repeated, and then led Wolf toward the far bank of the stream. In the shallows, the decayed remains of some child’s dolly floated belly-up, her glassy blue eyes staring into the growing dark. The muscles of Jack’s arm ached from the strain of pulling Wolf through into this world, and the joint in his shoulder throbbed like a rotted tooth.

As they came out of the water onto the weedy, trashy bank, Jack began to sneeze again.

2

This time, Jack’s total progress in the Territories had been half a mile west—the distance Wolf had moved his herd so they could drink in the stream where Wolf himself had later almost been drowned. Over here, he found himself ten miles farther west, as best he could figure. They struggled up the bank—Wolf actually ended up pulling Jack most of the way—and in the last of the daylight Jack could see an exit-ramp splitting off to the right some fifty yards up the road. A reflectorized sign read: ARCANUM LAST EXIT IN OHIO STATE LINE 15 MILES.

“We’ve got to hitch,” Jack said.

“Hitch?” Wolf said doubtfully.

“Let’s have a look at you.”

He thought Wolf would do, at least in the dark. He was still wearing the bib overalls, which now had an actual OSHKOSH label on them. His homespun shirt had become a machine-produced blue chambray that looked like an Army-Navy Surplus special. His formerly bare feet were clad in a huge pair of dripping penny loafers and white socks.

Oddest of all, a pair of round steel-rimmed spectacles of the sort John Lennon used to wear sat in the middle of Wolf’s big face.

“Wolf, did you have trouble seeing? Over in the Territories?”

“I didn’t know I did,” Wolf said. “I guess so. Wolf! I sure see better over here, with these glass eyes. Wolf, right here and now!” He looked out at the roaring turnpike traffic, and for just a moment Jack saw what he must be seeing: great steel beasts with huge yellow-white eyes, snarling through the night at unimaginable speeds, rubber wheels blistering the road. “I see better than I want to,” Wolf finished forlornly.

3

Two days later a pair of tired, footsore boys limped past the MUNICIPAL TOWN LIMITS sign on one side of Highway 32 and the 10–4 Diner on the other side, and thus into the city of Muncie, Indiana. Jack was running a fever of a hundred and two degrees and coughing pretty steadily. Wolf’s face was swollen and discolored. He looked like a pug that has come out on the short end in a grudge match. The day before, he had tried to get them some late apples from a tree growing in the shade of an abandoned barn beside the road. He had actually been in the tree and dropping shrivelled autumn apples into the front of his overalls when the wall-wasps, which had built their nest somewhere in the eaves of the old barn, had found him. Wolf had come back down the tree as fast as he could, with a brown cloud around his head. He was howling. And still, with one eye completely closed and his nose beginning to resemble a large purple turnip, he had insisted that Jack have the best of the apples. None of them was very good—small and sour and wormy—and Jack didn’t feel much like eating anyway, but after what Wolf had gone through to get them, he hadn’t had the heart to refuse.

A big old Camaro, jacked in the back so that the nose pointed at the road, blasted by them. “Heyyyyy, assholes!” someone yelled, and there was a burst of loud, beer-fueled laughter. Wolf howled and clutched at Jack. Jack had thought that Wolf would eventually get over his terror of cars, but now he was really beginning to wonder.

“It’s all right, Wolf,” he said wearily, peeling Wolf’s arms off for the twentieth or thirtieth time that day. “They’re gone.”

“So loud!” Wolf moaned. “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! So loud, Jack, my ears, my ears!”

“Glasspack muffler,” Jack said, thinking wearily: You’d love the California freeways, Wolf. We’ll check those out if we’re still travelling together, okay? Then we’ll try a few stock-car races and motorcycle scrambles. You’ll be nuts about them. “Some guys like the sound, you know. They—” But he went into another coughing fit that doubled him over. For a moment the world swam away in gray shades. It came back very, very slowly.

“Like it,” Wolf muttered. “Jason! How could anyone like it, Jack? And the smells . . .”

Jack knew that, for Wolf, the smells were the worst. They hadn’t been over here four hours before Wolf began to call it the Country of Bad Smells. That first night Wolf had retched half a dozen times, at first throwing up muddy water from a stream which existed in another universe onto the Ohio ground, then simply dry-heaving. It was the smells, he explained miserably. He didn’t know how Jack could stand them, how anyone could stand them.

Jack knew—coming back from the Territories, you were bowled over by odors you barely noticed when you were living with them. Diesel fuel, car exhausts, industrial wastes, garbage, bad water, ripe chemicals. Then you got used to them again. Got used to them or just went numb. Only that wasn’t happening to Wolf. He hated the cars, he hated the smells, he hated this world. Jack didn’t think he was ever going to get used to it. If he didn’t get Wolf back into the Territories fairly soon, Jack thought he might go crazy. He’ll probably drive me crazy while he’s at it, Jack thought. Not that I’ve got far to go anymore.

A clattering farm-truck loaded with chickens ground by them, followed by an impatient line of cars, some of them honking. Wolf almost jumped into Jack’s arms. Weakened by the fever, Jack reeled into the brushy, trash-littered ditch and sat down so hard his teeth clicked together.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Wolf said miserably. “God pound me!”

“Not your fault,” Jack said. “Fall out. Time to take five.”

Wolf sat down beside Jack, remaining silent, looking at Jack anxiously. He knew how hard he was making it for Jack; he knew that Jack was in a fever to move faster, partly to outdistance Morgan, but mostly for some other reason. He knew that Jack moaned about his mother in his sleep, and sometimes cried. But the only time he had cried when awake was after Wolf went a little crazy on the Arcanum turnpike ramp. That was when he realized what Jack meant by “hitching.” When Wolf told Jack he didn’t think he could hitch rides—at least not for a while and maybe not ever—Jack had sat down on the top strand of guardrail cable and had wept into his hands. And then he had stopped, which was good . . . but when he took his face out of his hands, he had looked at Wolf in a way that made Wolf feel sure that Jack would leave him in this horrible Country of Bad Smells . . . and without Jack, Wolf would soon go quite mad.

4

They had walked up to the Arcanum exit in the breakdown lane, Wolf cringing and pawing at Jack each time a car or truck passed in the deepening dusk. Jack had heard a mocking voice drift back on the slipstream: “Where’s your car, faggots?” He shook it off like a dog shaking water out of his eyes, and had simply kept going, taking Wolf’s hand and pulling him after when Wolf showed signs of lagging or drifting toward the woods. The important thing was to get off the turnpike proper, where hitchhiking was forbidden, and onto the westbound Arcanum entrance ramp. Some states had legalized hitching from the ramps (or so a road-bum with whom Jack had shared a barn one night had told him), and even in states where thumbing was technically a crime, the cops would usually wink if you were on a ramp.

So first, get to the ramp. Hope no state patrol happened along while you were getting there. What a state trooper might make of Wolf Jack didn’t want to think about. He would probably think he had caught an eighties incarnation of Charles Manson in Lennon glasses.

They made the ramp and crossed over to the westbound lane. Ten minutes later a battered old Chrysler had pulled up. The driver, a burly man with a bull neck and a cap which read CASE FARM EQUIPMENT tipped back on his head, leaned over and opened the door.

“Hop in, boys! Dirty night, ain’t it?”

“Thanks, mister, it sure is,” Jack said cheerfully. His mind was in overdrive, trying to figure out how he could work Wolf into the Story, and he barely noticed Wolf’s expression.

The man noticed it, however.

His face hardened.

“You smell anything bad, son?”

Jack was snapped back to reality by the man’s tone, which was as hard as his face. All cordiality had departed it, and he looked as if he might have just wandered into the Oatley Tap to eat a few beers and drink a few glasses.

Jack whipped around and looked at Wolf.

Wolf’s nostrils were flaring like the nostrils of a bear which smells a blown skunk. His lips were not just pulled back from his teeth; they were wrinkled back from them, the flesh below his nose stacked in little ridges.

“What is he, retarded?” the man in the CASE FARM EQUIPMENT hat asked Jack in a low voice.

“No, ah, he just—”

Wolf began to growl.

That was it.

“Oh, Christ,” the man said in the tones of one who simply cannot believe this is happening. He stepped on the gas and roared down the exit ramp, the passenger door flopping shut. His taillights dot-dashed briefly in the rainy dark at the foot of the ramp, sending reflections in smeary red arrows up the pavement toward where they stood.

“Boy, that’s great,” Jack said, and turned to Wolf, who shrank back from his anger. “That’s just great! If he’d had a CB radio, he’d be on Channel Nineteen right now, yelling for a cop, telling anyone and everyone that there are a couple of loonies trying to hitch a ride out of Arcanum! Jason! Or Jesus! Or Whoever, I don’t care! You want to see some fucking nails get pounded, Wolf? You do that a few more times and you’ll feel them get pounded! Us! We’ll get pounded!”

Exhausted, bewildered, frustrated, almost used up, Jack advanced on the cringing Wolf, who could have torn his head from his shoulders with one hard, swinging blow if he had wanted to, and Wolf backed up before him.

“Don’t shout, Jack,” he moaned. “The smells . . . to be in there . . . shut up in there with those smells . . .”

“I didn’t smell anything!” Jack shouted. His voice broke, his sore throat hurt more than ever, but he couldn’t seem to stop; it was shout or go mad. His wet hair had fallen in his eyes. He shook it away and then slapped Wolf on the shoulder. There was a smart crack and his hand began to hurt at once. It was as if he had slapped a stone. Wolf howled abjectly, and this made Jack angrier. The fact that he was lying made him angrier still. He had been in the Territories less than six hours this time, but that man’s car had smelled like a wild animal’s den. Harsh aromas of old coffee and fresh beer (there had been an open can of Stroh’s between his legs), an air-freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror that smelled like dry sweet powder on the cheek of a corpse. And there had been something else, something darker, something wetter . . .

“Not anything!” he shouted, his voice breaking hoarsely. He slapped Wolf’s other shoulder. Wolf howled again and turned around, hunching like a child who is being beaten by an angry father. Jack began to slap at his back, his smarting hands spatting up little sprays of water from Wolf’s overalls. Each time Jack’s hand descended, Wolf howled. “So you better get used to it (Slap!) because the next car to come along might be a cop (Slap!) or it might be Mr. Morgan Bloat in his puke-green BMW (Slap!) and if all you can be is a big baby, we’re going to be in one big fucking world of hurt! (Slap!) Do you understand that?”

Wolf said nothing. He stood hunched in the rain, his back to Jack, quivering. Crying. Jack felt a lump rise in his own throat, felt his eyes grow hot and stinging. All of this only increased his fury. Some terrible part of him wanted most of all to hurt himself, and knew that hurting Wolf was a wonderful way to do it.

“Turn around!”

Wolf did. Tears ran from his muddy brown eyes behind the round spectacles. Snot ran from his nose.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Wolf moaned. “Yes, I understand, but I couldn’t ride with him, Jack.”

“Why not?” Jack looked at him angrily, fisted hands on his hips. Oh, his head was aching.

“Because he was dying,” Wolf said in a low voice.

Jack stared at him, all his anger draining away.

“Jack, didn’t you know?” Wolf asked softly. “Wolf! You couldn’t smell it?”

“No,” Jack said in a small, whistling, out-of-breath voice. Because he had smelled something, hadn’t he? Something he had never smelled before. Something like a mixture of . . .

It came to him, and suddenly his strength was gone. He sat down heavily on the guardrail cable and looked at Wolf.

Shit and rotting grapes. That was what that smell had been like. That wasn’t it a hundred percent, but it was too hideously close.

Shit and rotting grapes.

“It’s the worst smell,” Wolf said. “It’s when people forget how to be healthy. We call it—Wolf!—the Black Disease. I don’t even think he knew he had it. And . . . these Strangers can’t smell it, can they, Jack?”

“No,” he whispered. If he were to be suddenly teleported back to New Hampshire, to his mother’s room in the Alhambra, would he smell that stink on her?

Yes. He would smell it on his mother, drifting out of her pores, the smell of shit and rotting grapes, the Black Disease.

“We call it cancer,” Jack whispered. We call it cancer and my mother has it.

“I just don’t know if I can hitch,” Wolf said. “I’ll try again if you want, Jack, but the smells . . . inside . . . they’re bad enough in the outside air, Wolf! but inside . . .”

That was when Jack put his face in his hands and wept, partly out of desperation, mostly out of simple exhaustion. And, yes, the expression Wolf believed he had seen on Jack’s face really had been there; for an instant the temptation to leave Wolf was more than a temptation, it was a maddening imperative. The odds against his ever making it to California and finding the Talisman—whatever it might be—had been long before; now they were so long they dwindled to a point on the horizon. Wolf would do more than slow him down; Wolf would sooner or later get both of them thrown in jail. Probably sooner. And how could he ever explain Wolf to Rational Richard Sloat?

What Wolf saw on Jack’s face in that moment was a look of cold speculation that unhinged his knees. He fell on them and held his clasped hands up to Jack like a suitor in a bad Victorian melodrama.

“Don’t go away an’ leave me, Jack,” he wept. “Don’t leave old Wolf, don’t leave me here, you brought me here, please, please don’t leave me alone. . . .”

Beyond this, conscious words were lost; Wolf was perhaps trying to talk but all he really seemed able to do was sob. Jack felt a great weariness fall over him. It fit well, like a jacket that one has worn often. Don’t leave me here, you brought me here . . .

There it was. Wolf was his responsibility, wasn’t he? Yes. Oh yes indeed. He had taken Wolf by the hand and dragged him out of the Territories and into Ohio and he had the throbbing shoulder to prove it. He had had no choice, of course; Wolf had been drowning, and even if he hadn’t drowned, Morgan would have crisped him with whatever that lightning-rod thing had been. So he could have turned on Wolf again, could have said: Which would you prefer, Wolf old buddy? To be here and scared, or there and dead?

He could, yes, and Wolf would have no answer because Wolf wasn’t too swift in the brains department. But Uncle Tommy had been fond of quoting a Chinese proverb that went: The man whose life you save is your responsibility for the rest of your life.

Never mind the ducking, never mind the fancy footwork; Wolf was his responsibility.

“Don’t leave me, Jack,” Wolf wept. “Wolf-Wolf! Please don’t leave good old Wolf, I’ll help you, I’ll stand guard at night, I can do lots, only don’t don’t—”

“Quit bawling and get up,” Jack said quietly. “I won’t leave you. But we’ve got to get out of here in case that guy does send a cop back to check on us. Let’s move it.”

5

“Did you figure out what to do next, Jack?” Wolf asked timidly. They had been sitting in the brushy ditch just over the Muncie town line for more than half an hour, and when Jack turned toward Wolf, Wolf was relieved to see he was smiling. It was a weary smile, and Wolf didn’t like the dark, tired circles under Jack’s eyes (he liked Jack’s smell even less—it was a sick smell), but it was a smile.

“I think I see what we should do next right over there,” Jack said. “I was thinking about it just a few days ago, when I got my new sneakers.”

He bowed his feet. He and Wolf regarded the sneakers in depressed silence. They were scuffed, battered, and dirty. The left sole was bidding a fond adieu to the left upper. Jack had owned them for . . . he wrinkled his forehead and thought. The fever made it hard to think. Three days. Only three days since he had picked them out of the bargain bin of the Fayva store. Now they looked old. Old.

“Anyway . . .” Jack sighed. Then he brightened. “See that building over there, Wolf?”

The building, an explosion of uninteresting angles in gray brick, stood like an island in the middle of a giant parking lot. Wolf knew what the asphalt in that parking lot would smell like: dead, decomposing animals. That smell would almost suffocate him, and Jack would barely notice it.

“For your information, the sign there said Town Line Sixplex,” Jack said. “It sounds like a coffee pot, but actually it’s a movie with six shows. There ought to be one we like.” And in the afternoon, there won’t be many people there and that’s good because you have this distressing habit of going Section Eight, Wolf. “Come on.” He got unsteadily to his feet.

“What’s a movie, Jack?” Wolf asked. He had been a dreadful problem to Jack, he knew—such a dreadful problem that he now hesitated to protest about anything, or even express unease. But a frightening intuition had come to him: that going to a movie and hitching a ride might be the same thing. Jack called the roaring carts and carriages “cars,” and “Chevys,” and “Jartrans,” and “station-wagons” (these latter, Wolf thought, must be like the coaches in the Territories which carried passengers from one coach-station to the next). Might the bellowing, stinking carriages also be called “movies”? It sounded very possible.

“Well,” Jack said, “it’s easier to show you than to tell you. I think you’ll like it. Come on.”

Jack stumbled coming out of the ditch and went briefly to his knees. “Jack, are you okay?” Wolf asked anxiously.

Jack nodded. They started across the parking lot, which smelled just as bad as Wolf had known it would.

6

Jack had come a good part of the thirty-five miles between Arcanum, Ohio, and Muncie, Indiana, on Wolf’s broad back. Wolf was frightened of cars, terrified of trucks, nauseated by the smells of almost everything, apt to howl and run at sudden loud noises. But he was also almost tireless. As far as that goes, you can strike the “almost,” Jack thought now. So far as I know, he is tireless.

Jack had moved them away from the Arcanum ramp as fast as he could, forcing his wet, aching legs into a rusty trot. His head had been throbbing like a slick, flexing fist inside his skull, waves of heat and cold rushing through him. Wolf moved easily to his left, his stride so long that he was keeping up with Jack easily by doing no more than a moderately fast walk. Jack knew that he had maybe gotten paranoid about the cops, but the man in the CASE FARM EQUIPMENT hat had looked really scared. And pissed.

They hadn’t gone even a quarter of a mile when a deep, burning stitch settled into his side and he asked Wolf if he could give him a piggyback for a while.

“Huh?” Wolf asked.

“You know,” Jack said, and pantomimed.

A big grin had overspread Wolf’s face. Here at last was something he understood; here was something he could do.

“You want a horseyback!” he cried, delighted.

“Yeah, I guess . . .”

“Oh, yeah! Wolf! Here and now! Used to give em to my litter-brothers! Jump up, Jack!” Wolf bent down, holding his curved hands ready, stirrups for Jack’s thighs.

“Now when I get too heavy, just put me d—”

Before he could finish, Wolf had swept him up and was running lightly down the road with him into the dark—really running. The cold, rainy air flipped Jack’s hair back from his hot brow.

“Wolf, you’ll wear yourself out!” Jack shouted.

“Not me! Wolf! Wolf! Runnin here and now!” For the first time since they had come over, Wolf sounded actually happy. He ran for the next two hours, until they were west of Arcanum and travelling along a dark, unmarked stretch of two-lane black-top. Jack saw a deserted barn standing slumped in a shaggy, untended field, and they slept there that night.

Wolf wanted nothing to do with downtown areas where the traffic was a roaring flood and the stinks rose up to heaven in a noxious cloud, and Jack didn’t want anything to do with them, either. Wolf stuck out too much. But he had forced one stop, at a roadside store just across the Indiana line, near Harrisville. While Wolf waited nervously out by the road, hunkering down, digging at the dirt, getting up, walking around in a stiff little circle, then hunkering again, Jack bought a newspaper and checked the weather page carefully. The next full moon was on October 31st—Halloween, that was fitting enough. Jack turned back to the front page so he could see what day it was today . . . yesterday, that had been now. It had been October 26th.

7

Jack pulled open one of the glass doors and stepped inside the lobby of the Town Line Sixplex. He looked around sharply at Wolf, but Wolf looked—for the moment, at least—pretty much okay. Wolf was, in fact, cautiously optimistic . . . at least for the moment. He didn’t like being inside a building, but at least it wasn’t a car. There was a good smell in here—light and sort of tasty. Or would have been, except for a bitter, almost rancid undersmell. Wolf looked left and saw a glass box full of white stuff. That was the source of the good light smell.

“Jack,” he whispered.

“Huh?”

“I want some of that white stuff, please. But none of the pee.”

“Pee? What are you talking about?”

Wolf searched for a more formal word and found it. “Urine.” He pointed at a thing with a light going off and on inside it. BUTTERY FLAVORING, it read. “That’s some kind of urine, isn’t it? It’s got to be, the way it smells.”

Jack smiled tiredly. “A popcorn without the fake butter, right,” he said. “Now pipe down, okay?”

“Sure, Jack,” Wolf said humbly. “Right here and now.”

The ticket-girl had been chewing a big wad of grape-flavored bubble gum. Now she stopped. She looked at Jack, then at Jack’s big, hulking companion. The gum sat on her tongue inside her half-open mouth like a large purple tumor. She rolled her eyes at the guy behind the counter.

“Two, please,” Jack said. He took out his roll of bills, dirty, tag-eared ones with an orphan five hiding in the middle.

“Which show?” Her eyes moved back and forth, back and forth, Jack to Wolf and Wolf to Jack. She looked like a woman watching a hot table-tennis match.

“What’s just starting?” Jack asked her.

“Well . . .” She glanced down at the paper Scotch-taped beside her. “There’s The Flying Dragon in Cinema Four. It’s a kung-fu movie with Chuck Norris.” Back and forth went her eyes, back and forth, back and forth. “Then, in Cinema Six, there’s a double feature. Two Ralph Bakshi cartoons. Wizards and The Lord of the Rings.”

Jack felt relieved. Wolf was nothing but a big, overgrown kid, and kids loved cartoons. This could work out after all. Wolf would maybe find at least one thing in the Country of Bad Smells that would amuse him, and Jack could sleep for three hours.

“That one,” he said. “The cartoons.”

“That’ll be four dollars,” she said. “Bargain Matinee prices end at two.” She pushed a button and two tickets poked out of a slot with a mechanical ratcheting noise. Wolf flinched backward with a small cry.

The girl looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“You jumpy, mister?”

“No, I’m Wolf,” Wolf said. He smiled, showing a great many teeth. Jack would have sworn that Wolf showed more teeth now when he smiled than he had a day or two ago. The girl looked at all those teeth. She wet her lips.

“He’s okay. He just—” Jack shrugged. “He doesn’t get off the farm much. You know.” He gave her the orphan five. She handled it as if she wished she had a pair of tongs to do it with.

“Come on, Wolf.”

As they turned away to the candy-stand, Jack stuffing the one into the pocket of his grimy jeans, the ticket-girl mouthed to the counterman: Look at his nose!

Jack looked at Wolf and saw Wolf’s nose flaring rhythmically.

“Stop that,” he muttered.

“Stop what, Jack?”

“Doing that thing with your nose.”

“Oh. I’ll try, Jack, but—”

“Shh.”

“Help you, son?” the counterman asked.

“Yes, please. A Junior Mints, a Reese’s Pieces, and an extra-large popcorn without the grease.”

The counterman got the stuff and pushed it across to them. Wolf got the tub of popcorn in both hands and immediately began to snaffle it up in great jaw-cracking chomps.

The counterman looked at this silently.

“Doesn’t get off the farm much,” Jack repeated. Part of him was already wondering if these two had seen enough of sufficient oddness to get them thinking that a call to the police might be in order. He thought—not for the first time—that there was a real irony in all this. In New York or L.A., probably no one would have given Wolf a second look . . . or if a second look, certainly not a third. Apparently the weirdness-toleration level was a lot lower out in the middle of the country. But, of course, Wolf would have flipped out of his gourd long since if they had been in New York or L.A.

“I’ll bet he don’t,” the counterman said. “That’ll be two-eighty.”

Jack paid it with an inward wince, realizing he had just laid out a quarter of his cash for their afternoon at the movies.

Wolf was grinning at the counterman through a mouthful of popcorn. Jack recognized it as Wolf’s A #1 Friendly Smile, but he somehow doubted that the counterman was seeing it that way. There were all those teeth in that smile . . . hundreds of them, it seemed.

And Wolf was flaring his nostrils again.

Screw it, let them call the cops, if that’s what they want to do, he thought with a weariness that was more adult than child. It can’t slow us down much more than we’re slowed down already. He can’t ride in the new cars because he can’t stand the smell of the catalytic convertors and he can’t ride in old cars because they smell like exhaust and sweat and oil and beer and he probably can’t ride in any cars because he’s so goddam claustrophobic. Tell the truth, Jack-O, even if it’s only to yourself. You’re going along telling yourself he’s going to get over it pretty soon, but it’s probably not going to happen. So what are we going to do? Walk across Indiana, I guess. Correction, Wolf is going to walk across Indiana. Me, I’m going to cross Indiana riding horseyback. But first I’m going to take Wolf into this damn movie theater and sleep either until both pictures are over or until the cops arrive. And that is the end of my tale, sir.

“Well, enjoy the show,” the counterman said.

“You bet,” Jack replied. He started away and then realized Wolf wasn’t with him. Wolf was staring at something over the counterman’s head with vacant, almost superstitious wonder. Jack looked up and saw a mobile advertising the re-issue of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters floating around on drafts of convection.

“Come on, Wolf,” he said.

8

Wolf knew it wasn’t going to work as soon as they went through the door.

The room was small, dim, and dank. The smells in here were terrible. A poet, smelling what Wolf was smelling at that moment, might have called it the stink of sour dreams. Wolf was no poet. He only knew that the smell of the popcorn-urine predominated, and that he felt suddenly like throwing up.

Then the lights began to dim even further, turning the room into a cave.

“Jack,” he moaned, clutching at Jack’s arm. “Jack, we oughtta get out of here, okay?”

“You’ll like it, Wolf,” Jack muttered, aware of Wolf’s distress but not of its depth. Wolf was, after all, always distressed to some degree. In this world, the word distress defined him. “Try it.”

“Okay,” Wolf said, and Jack heard the agreement but not the thin waver that meant Wolf was holding on to the last thread of his control with both hands. They sat down with Wolf on the aisle, his knees accordioned up uncomfortably, the tub of popcorn (which he no longer wanted) clutched to his chest.

In front of them a match flared briefly yellow. Jack smelled the dry tang of pot, so familiar in the movies that it could be dismissed as soon as identified. Wolf smelled a forest-fire.

“Jack—!”

“Shhh, picture’s starting.”

And I’m dozing off.

Jack would never know of Wolf’s heroism in the next few minutes; Wolf did not really know of it himself. He only knew that he had to try to stick this nightmare out for Jack’s sake. It must be all right, he thought, look, Wolf, Jack’s going right to sleep, right to sleep right here and now. And you know Jack wouldn’t take you to a Hurt-Place, so just stick it out . . . just wait . . . Wolf! . . . it’ll be all right . . .

But Wolf was a cyclic creature, and his cycle was approaching its monthly climax. His instincts had become exquisitely refined, almost undeniable. His rational mind told him that he would be all right in here, that Jack wouldn’t have brought him otherwise. But that was like a man with an itchy nose telling himself not to sneeze in church because it was impolite.

He sat there smelling forest-fire in a dark, stinking cave, twitching each time a shadow passed down the aisle, waiting numbly for something to fall on him from the shadows overhead. And then a magic window opened at the front of the cave and he sat there in the acrid stink of his own terror-sweat, eyes wide, face a mask of horror, as cars crashed and overturned, as buildings burned, as one man chased another.

“Previews,” Jack mumbled. “Told you you’d like it. . . .”

There were Voices. One said nosmoking. One said don’t litter. One said groupratesavailable. One said Bargain Matinee-priceseveryweekdayuntilfourp.m.

“Wolf, we got screwed,” Jack mumbled. He started to say something else, but it turned into a snore.

A final voice said andnowourfeaturepresentation and that was when Wolf lost control. Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings was in Dolby sound, and the projectionist had orders to really crank it in the afternoons, because that’s when the heads drifted in, and the heads really liked loud Dolby.

There was a screeching, discordant crash of brass. The magic window opened again and now Wolf could see the fire—shifting oranges and reds.

He howled and leaped to his feet, pulling with him a Jack who was more asleep than awake.

“Jack!” he screamed. “Get out! Got to get out! Wolf! See the fire! Wolf! Wolf!”

“Down in front!” someone shouted.

“Shut up, hoser!” someone else yelled.

The door at the back of Cinema 6 opened. “What’s going on in here?”

“Wolf, shut up!” Jack hissed. “For God’s sake—”

“OWWWWWW-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Wolf howled.

A woman got a good look at Wolf as the white light from the lobby fell on him. She screamed and began dragging her little boy out by one arm. Literally dragging him; the kid had fallen to his knees and was skidding up the popcorn-littered carpet of the center aisle. One of his sneakers had come off.

“OWWWWWWWW-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH-HHOOOOOOHHHHOOOOOO!”

The pothead three rows down had turned around and was looking at them with bleary interest. He held a smouldering joint in one hand; a spare was cocked behind his ear. “Far . . . out,” he pronounced. “Fucking werewolves of London strike again, right?”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Okay, we’ll get out. No problem. Just . . . just don’t do that anymore, okay? Okay?”

He started leading Wolf out. The weariness had fallen over him again.

The light of the lobby hit his eyes sharply, needling them. The woman who had dragged the little boy out of the theater was backed into a corner with her arms around the kid. When she saw Jack lead the still-howling Wolf through the double doors of Cinema 6, she swept the kid up and made a break for it.

The counterman, the ticket-girl, the projectionist, and a tall man in a sportcoat that looked as if it belonged on the back of a racetrack tout were clustered together in a tight little group. Jack supposed the guy in the checkered sportcoat and white shoes was the manager.

The doors of the other cinemas in the hive had opened partway. Faces peered out of the darkness to see what all the hooraw was. To Jack, they all looked like badgers peering out of their holes.

“Get out!” the man in the checkered sportcoat said. “Get out, I’ve called the police already, they’ll be here in five minutes.”

Bullshit you did, Jack thought, feeling a ray of hope. You didn’t have time. And if we blow right away, maybe—just maybe—you won’t bother.

“We’re going,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . my big brother’s an epileptic and he just had a seizure. We . . . we forgot his medicine.”

At the word epileptic, the ticket-girl and the counterman recoiled. It was as if Jack had said leper.

“Come on, Wolf.”

He saw the manager’s eyes drop, saw his lip curl with distaste. Jack followed the glance and saw the wide dark stain on the front of Wolf’s Oshkosh biballs. He had wet himself.

Wolf also saw. Much in Jack’s world was foreign to him, but he apparently knew well enough what that look of contempt meant. He burst into loud, braying, heartbroken sobs.

“Jack, I’m sorry, Wolf is so SORRY!”

“Get him out of here,” the manager said contemptuously, and turned away.

Jack put an arm around Wolf and got him started toward the door. “Come on, Wolf,” he said. He spoke quietly, and with an honest tenderness. He had never felt quite so keenly for Wolf as he did now. “Come on, it was my fault, not yours. Let’s go.”

“Sorry.” Wolf wept brokenly. “I’m no good, God pound me, just no good.”

“You’re plenty good,” Jack said. “Come on.”

He pushed open the door and they went out into the thin, late-October warmth.

The woman with the child was easily twenty yards away, but when she saw Jack and Wolf, she retreated backward toward her car, holding her kid in front of her like a cornered gangster with a hostage.

“Don’t let him come near me!” she screamed. “Don’t let that monster come near my baby! Do you hear? Don’t let him come near me!”

Jack thought he should say something to calm her down, but he couldn’t think what it might be. He was too tired.

He and Wolf started away, heading across the parking lot at an angle. Halfway back to the road, Jack staggered. The world went briefly gray.

He was vaguely aware of Wolf sweeping him up in his arms and carrying him that way, like a baby. Vaguely aware that Wolf was crying.

“Jack, I’m so sorry, please don’t hate Wolf, I can be a good old Wolf, you wait, you’ll see . . .”

“I don’t hate you,” Jack said. “I know you’re . . . you’re a good old—”

But before he could finish, he had fallen asleep. When he woke up it was evening and Muncie was behind them. Wolf had gotten off the main roads and on to a web of farm roads and dirt tracks. Totally unconfused by the lack of signs and the multitude of choices, he had continued west with all the unerring instinct of a migrating bird.

They slept that night in an empty house north of Cammack, and Jack thought in the morning that his fever had gone down a little.

It was midmorning—midmorning of October 28th—when Jack realized that the hair was back on Wolf’s palms.