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, pla-
toons 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 repre-
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 315
The Road of Trials
315
senting 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 win-
dows, except in very early morning when light came stream-
ing 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.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 316
316
THE TALISMAN
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 mil-limeter. 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.
By the middle of the night, Jack had walked seven or eight
miles—he’d lost count of the number of times he had reached one hundred and sixty-five, but it was something like seven or eight. He was parched, and his stomach was rumbling. The
shed stank of urine, for Jack had been forced to pee against the far wall, where a crack in the boards meant that at least some of it went outside. His body was tired, but he did not think he could sleep. According to clock-time, Jack had been in the shed barely five hours; in shed-time it was more like twenty-four. He was afraid to lie down.
His mind would not let him go—that was how it felt. He
had tried making lists of all the books he’d read in the past year, of every teacher he’d had, of every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers . . . but disturbing, disorderly images kept breaking in. He kept seeing Morgan Sloat tearing a hole in the air. Wolf ’s face floated underwater, and his hands drifted
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 317
The Road of Trials
317
down like heavy weeds. Jerry Bledsoe twitched and rocked
before the electrical panel, his glasses smeared over his nose.
A man’s eyes turned yellow, and his hand became a claw-
hoof. Uncle Tommy’s false teeth coruscated in the Sunset
Strip gutter. Morgan Sloat came toward his mother, not him-
self.
“Songs by Fats Waller,” he said, sending himself around
another circuit in the dark. “ ‘Your Feets Too Big.’ ‘Ain’t Mis-behavin.’ ‘Jitterbug Waltz.’ ‘Keepin Out of Mischief Now.’ ”
The Elroy-thing reached out toward his mother, whisper-
ing lewdly, and clamped a hand down over her hip.
“Countries in Central America. Nicaragua. Honduras.
Guatemala. Costa Rica . . .”
Even when he was so tired he finally had to lie down and
curl into a ball on the floor, using his knapsack as a pillow, Elroy and Morgan Sloat rampaged through his mind. Osmond
flicked his bullwhip across Lily Cavanaugh’s back, and his
eyes danced. Wolf reared up, massive, absolutely inhuman,
and caught a rifle bullet directly in the heart.
The first light woke him, and he smelled blood. His whole
body begged for water, then for food. Jack groaned. Three
more nights of this would be impossible to survive. The low angle of the sunlight allowed him dimly to see the walls and roof of the shed. It all looked larger than he had felt it to be last night. He had to pee again, though he could scarcely believe that his body could afford to give up any moisture. Finally he realized that the shed seemed larger because he was lying on the floor.