The Talisman by Stephen King

“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

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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.

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Interlude

Sloat in This World (II)

From the pocket of his bulky parka (he had bought it con-

vinced that from the Rockies east, America was a frigid

wasteland after October 1st or so—now he was sweating

rivers), Morgan Sloat took a small steel box. Below the latch were ten small buttons and an oblong of cloudy yellow glass a quarter of an inch high and two inches long. He pushed several of the buttons carefully with the fingernail of his left-hand pinky, and a series of numbers appeared briefly in the readout window. Sloat had bought this gadget, billed as the world’s smallest safe, in Zurich. According to the man who

had sold it to him, not even a week in a crematory oven would breach its carbon-steel integrity.

Now it clicked open.

Sloat folded back two tiny wings of ebony jeweler’s velvet, revealing something he had had for well over twenty years—

since long before the odious little brat who was causing all this trouble had been born. It was a tarnished tin key, and once it had gone into the back of a mechanical toy soldier.

Sloat had seen the toy soldier in the window of a junkshop in the odd little town of Point Venuti, California—a town in

which he had great interest. Acting under a compulsion much too strong to deny (he hadn’t even wanted to deny it, not

really; he had always made a virtue of compulsion, had Mor-

gan Sloat), he had gone in and paid five dollars for the dusty, dented soldier . . . and it wasn’t the soldier he had wanted, anyway. It was the key that had caught his eye and then whispered to him. He had removed the key from the soldier’s back and pocketed it as soon as he was outside the junkshop door.

The soldier itself he threw in a litter-basket outside the Dangerous Planet Bookstore.

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Now, as Sloat stood beside his car in the Lewisburg rest

area, he held the key up and looked at it. Like Jack’s croaker, the tin key became something else in the Territories. Once, when coming back, he had dropped that key in the lobby of

the old office building. And there must have been some Territories magic left in it, because that idiot Jerry Bledsoe had gotten himself fried not an hour later. Had Jerry picked it up?

Stepped on it, perhaps? Sloat didn’t know and didn’t care.

Nor had he cared a tinker’s damn about Jerry—and consider-

ing the handyman had had an insurance policy specifying

double indemnity for accidental death (the building’s super, with whom Sloat sometimes shared a hashpipe, had passed

this little tidbit on to him), Sloat imagined that Nita Bledsoe had done nipups—but he had been nearly frantic about the

loss of his key. It was Phil Sawyer who had found it, giving it back to him with no comment other than “Here, Morg. Your

lucky charm, isn’t it? Must have a hole in your pocket. I

found it in the lobby after they took poor old Jerry away.”

Yes, in the lobby. In the lobby where everything smelled

like the motor of a Waring Blender that had been running

continuously on Hi Speed for about nine hours. In the lobby where everything had been blackened and twisted and fused.

Except for this humble tin key.

Which, in the other world, was a queer kind of lightning-

rod—and which Sloat now hung around his neck on a fine sil-

ver chain.

“Coming for you, Jacky,” said Sloat in a voice that was al-

most tender. “Time to bring this entire ridiculous business to a crashing halt.”

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17

Wolf and the Herd

1

Wolf talked of many things, getting up occasionally to shoo his cattle out of the road and once to move them to a stream about half a mile to the west. When Jack asked him where he lived, Wolf only waved his arm vaguely northward. He lived, he said, with his family. When Jack asked for clarification a few minutes later, Wolf looked surprised and said he had no mate and no children—that he would not come into what he

called the “big rut-moon” for another year or two. That he

looked forward to the “big rut-moon” was quite obvious from the innocently lewd grin that overspread his face.

“But you said you lived with your family.”

“Oh, family! Them! Wolf!” Wolf laughed. “Sure. Them!

We all live together. Have to keep the cattle, you know. Her cattle.”

“The Queen’s?”

“Yes. May she never, never die.” And Wolf made an ab-

surdly touching salute, bending briefly forward with his right hand touching his forehead.

Further questioning straightened the matter out somewhat

in Jack’s mind . . . at least, he thought it did. Wolf was a bach-elor (although that word barely fit, somehow). The family of which he spoke was a hugely extended one—literally, the

Wolf family. They were a nomadic but fiercely loyal race that moved back and forth in the great empty areas east of the

Outposts but west of “The Settlements,” by which Wolf

seemed to mean the towns and villages of the east.

Wolfs (never Wolves—when Jack once used the proper

plural, Wolf had laughed until tears spurted from the corners of his eyes) were solid, dependable workers, for the most part.

Their strength was legendary, their courage unquestioned.

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Some of them had gone east into The Settlements, where they served the Queen as guards, soldiers, even as personal body-guards. Their lives, Wolf explained to Jack, had only two

great touchstones: the Lady and the family. Most of the

Wolfs, he said, served the Lady as he did—watching the

herds.

The cow-sheep were the Territories’ primary source of

meat, cloth, tallow, and lamp-oil (Wolf did not tell Jack this, but Jack inferred it from what he said). All the cattle belonged to the Queen, and the Wolf family had been watching over

them since time out of mind. It was their job. In this Jack found an oddly persuasive correlative to the relationship that had existed between the buffalo and the Indians of the American Plains . . . at least until the white man had come into those territories and upset the balance.

“Behold, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the Wolf with the creep,” Jack murmured, and smiled. He was lying on his back with his hands laced behind his head. The

most marvellous feeling of peace and ease had stolen over