The Talisman

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 ead: 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