The Talisman by Stephen King

his knees in the stream, trying to help the second downed animal to its feet. The first floated limply downstream, its body tattered and mangled.

“Get up! God pound you, get up! Wolf!”

Wolf shoved and slapped as best he could at the cow-sheep

who milled and backed into him, then got both arms around

the drowning animal’s midriff and pulled upward. “WOLF!

HERE AND NOW!” he screamed. The sleeves of his shirt split wide open along the biceps, reminding Jack of David Banner

having one of the gamma-ray-inspired tantrums that turned

him into The Incredible Hulk. Water sprayed everywhere and

Wolf lurched to his feet, eyes blazing orange, blue overalls now soaked black. Water streamed from the nostrils of the animal, which Wolf held clutched against his chest as if it were an overgrown puppy. Its eyes were turned up to sticky whites.

“Wolf!” Jack screamed. “It’s Morgan! It’s—”

“The herd!” Wolf screamed back. “Wolf! Wolf! My God-pounding herd! Jack! Don’t try—”

The rest was drowned out by a grinding clap of thunder

that shook the earth. For a moment the thunder even covered that maddening, monotonous ripping sound. Almost as confused as Wolf ’s cattle, Jack looked up and saw a clear blue sky, innocent of clouds save for a few puffy white ones that were miles away.

The thunder ignited outright panic in Wolf ’s herd. They

tried to bolt, but in their exquisite stupidity, many of them

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tried to do it by backing up. They crashed and splashed and were rolled underwater. Jack heard the bitter snap of a breaking bone, followed by the baaaa-ing scream of an animal in pain. Wolf bellowed in rage, dropped the cow-sheep he had

been trying to save, and floundered toward the muddy far

bank of the stream.

Before he could get there, half a dozen cattle struck him

and bore him down. Water splashed and flew in thin, bright

sprays. Now, Jack saw, Wolf was the one in danger of being

simultaneously trampled and drowned by the stupid, fleeing

animals.

Jack pushed into the stream, which was now dark with

roiling mud. The current tried continually to push him

off-balance. A bleating cow-sheep, its eyes rolling madly,

splashed past him, almost knocking him down. Water sprayed

into his face and Jack tried to wipe it out of his eyes.

Now that sound seemed to fill the whole world: RRRRRII-

IPPPP—

Wolf. Never mind Morgan, at least not for the moment.

Wolf was in trouble.

His shaggy, drenched head was momentarily visible above

the water, and then three of the animals ran right over him and Jack could only see one waving, fur-covered hand. He pushed forward again, trying to weave through the cattle, some still up, others floundering and drowning underfoot.

“Jack!” a voice bellowed over that ripping noise. It was a voice Jack knew. Uncle Morgan’s voice.

“Jack!”

There was another clap of thunder, this one a huge oaken

thud that rolled through the sky like an artillery shell.

Panting, his soaked hair hanging in his eyes, Jack looked

over his shoulder . . . and directly into the rest area on I-70

near Lewisburg, Ohio. He was seeing it as if through ripply, badly made glass . . . but he was seeing it. The edge of the brick toilet was on the left side of that blistered, tortured patch of air. The snout of what looked like a Chevrolet pick-up

truck was on the right, floating three feet above the field where he and Wolf had been sitting peacefully and talking not five minutes ago. And in the center, looking like an extra in a film about Admiral Byrd’s assault on the South Pole, was

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Morgan Sloat, his thick red face twisted with murderous rage.

Rage, and something else. Triumph? Yes. Jack thought that

was what it was.

He stood at midstream in water that was crotch-deep, cat-

tle passing on either side of him, baa-ing and bleating, staring at that window which had been torn in the very fabric of reality, his eyes wide, his mouth wider.

He’s found me, oh dear God, he’s found me.

“There you are, you little shithead!” Morgan bellowed at him. His voice carried, but it had a muffled, dead quality as it came from the reality of that world into the reality of this one.

It was like listening to a man shout inside a telephone booth.

“Now we’ll see, won’t we? Won’t we?”

Morgan started forward, his face swimming and rippling

as if made of limp plastic, and Jack had time to see there was something clutched in his hand, something hung around his

neck, something small and silvery.

Jack stood, paralyzed, as Sloat bulled his way through the

hole between the two universes. As he came he did his own

werewolf number, changing from Morgan Sloat, investor,

land speculator, and sometime Hollywood agent, into Morgan

of Orris, pretender to the throne of a dying Queen. His

flushed, hanging jowls thinned. The color faded out of them.

His hair renewed itself, growing forward, first tinting the ron-dure of his skull, as if some invisible being were coloring Uncle Morgan’s head, then covering it. The hair of Sloat’s

Twinner was long, black, flapping, somehow dead-looking. It had been tied at the nape of his neck, Jack saw, but most of it had come loose.

The parka wavered, disappeared for a moment, then came

back as a cloak and hood.

Morgan Sloat’s suede boots became dark leather knee-

boots, their tops turned down, what might have been the hilt of a knife poking out of one.

And the small silver thing in his hand had turned to a small rod tipped with crawling blue fire.

It’s a lightning-rod. Oh Jesus, it’s a—

“Jack!”

The cry was low, gargling, full of water.

Jack whirled clumsily around in the stream, barely avoid-

ing another cow-sheep, this one floating on its side, dead in

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the water. He saw Wolf ’s head going down again, both hands waving. Jack fought his way toward those hands, still dodging the cattle as best he could. One of them bunted his hip hard and Jack went over, inhaling water. He got up again quick,

coughing and choking, one hand feeling inside his jerkin for the bottle, afraid it might have washed away. It was still there.

“Boy! Turn around and look at me, boy!”

No time just now, Morgan. Sorry, but I’ve got to see if I can avoid getting drowned by Wolf’s herd before I see if I can avoid getting fried by your doomstick there. I—

Blue fire arched over Jack’s shoulder, sizzling—it was like a deadly electric rainbow. It struck one of the cow-sheep

caught in the reedy muck on the other side of the stream and the unfortunate beast simply exploded, as if it had swallowed dynamite. Blood flew in a needle-spray of droplets. Gobbets of flesh began to rain down around Jack.

“Turn and look at me, boy!”

He could feel the force of that command, gripping his face with invisible hands, trying to turn it.

Wolf struggled up again, his hair plastered against his face, his dazed eyes peering through a curtain of it like the eyes of an English sheepdog. He was coughing and staggering, seemingly no longer aware of where he was.

“Wolf!” Jack screamed, but thunder exploded across the blue sky again, drowning him out.

Wolf bent over and retched up a great muddy sheet of wa-

ter. A moment later another of the terrified cow-sheep struck him and bore him under again.

That’s it, Jack thought despairingly. That’s it, he’s gone, must be, let him go, get out of here—

But he struggled on toward Wolf, pushing a dying, weakly

convulsing cow-sheep out of his way to get there.

“Jason!” Morgan of Orris screamed, and Jack realized that Morgan was not cursing in the Territories argot; he was calling his, Jack’s, name. Only here he was not Jack. Here he was Jason.

But the Queen’s son died an infant, died, he—

The wet, sizzling zap of electricity again, seeming almost

to part his hair. Again it struck the other bank, this time vaporizing one of Wolf ’s cattle. No, Jack saw, at least not utterly. The animal’s legs were still there, mired in the mud like

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shake-poles. As he watched, they began to sag tiredly outward in four different directions.

“TURN AND LOOK AT ME, GOD POUND YOU!”

The water, why doesn’t he throw it at the water, fry me, Wolf, all these animals at the same time?

Then his fifth-grade science came back to him. Once elec-

tricity went to water, it could go anywhere . . . including back to the generator of the current.

Wolf ’s dazed face, floating underwater, drove these