The Talisman

the door, okay?’ he asked. ‘When you’ve changed back, I’ll push it back to you.’ Jack glanced down at the bottom of the door – there was a two-inch gap between it and the ground.
    ‘Sure, Jacky. You’ll push it back to me.’
    ‘Well, what do we do now?’ Jack asked. ‘Should I go in the shed right now?’
    ‘Sit there,’ Wolf said, pointing to a spot on the floor of the shed a foot from the door.
    Jack looked at him curiously, then stepped inside the shed and sat down. Wolf hunkered back down just outside the shed’s open door, and without even looking at Jack, held out his hand toward the boy. Jack took Wolf’s hand. It was like holding a hairy creature about the size of a rabbit. Wolf squeezed so hard that Jack nearly cried out – but even if he had, he didn’t think that Wolf would have heard him. Wolf was staring upward again, his face dreamy and peaceful and rapt. After a second or two Jack was able to shift his hand into a more comfortable position inside Wolf’s grasp.
    ‘Are we going to stay like this a long time?’ he asked. Wolf took nearly a minute to answer. ‘Until,’ he said, and squeezed Jack’s hand again.
    9
    They sat like that, on either side of the doorframe, for hours, wordlessly, and finally the light began to fade. Wolf had been almost imperceptibly trembling for the previous twenty minutes, and when the air grew darker the tremor in his hand intensified. It was, Jack thought, the way a thoroughbred horse might tremble in its stall at the beginning of a race, waiting for the sound of a gun and the gate to be thrown open.
    ‘She’s beginning to take me with her,’ Wolf said softly. ‘Soon we’ll be running, Jack. I wish you could, too.’
    He turned his head to look at Jack, and the boy saw that while Wolf meant what he had just said, there was a significant part of him that was silently saying: I could run after you as well as beside you, little friend .
    ‘We have to close the door now, I guess,’ Jack said. He tried to pull his hand from Wolf’s grasp, but could not free himself until Wolf almost disdainfully released him.
    ‘Lock Jacky in, lock Wolf out.’ Wolf’s eyes flared for a moment, becoming red molten Elroy-eyes.
    ‘Remember, you’re keeping the herd safe,’ Jack said. He stepped backward into the middle of the shed.
    ‘The herd goes in the barn, and the lock goes on the door. He Would Not Injure His Herd.’ Wolf’s eyes ceased to drip fire, shaded toward orange.
    ‘Put the lock on the door.’
    ‘God pound it, that’s what I’m doing now,’ Wolf said. ‘I’m putting the God-pounding lock on the God-pounding door, see?’ He banged the door shut, immediately sealing Jack up in darkness. ‘Hear that, Jacky? That’s the God-pounding lock.’ Jack heard the lock click against the metal loop, then heard its ratchets catch as Wolf slid it home.
    ‘Now the key,’ Jack said.
    ‘God-pounding key, right here and now,’ Wolf said, and a key rattled into a slot, rattled out. A second later the key bounced off the dusty ground beneath the door high enough to skitter onto the shed’s floorboards.
    ‘Thanks,’ Jack breathed. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the boards until he touched the key. For a moment he clamped it so hard into his palm that he almost drove it through his skin – the bruise, shaped like the state of Florida, would endure nearly five days, when in the excitement of being arrested he would fail to notice that it had left him. Then Jack carefully slid the key into his pocket. Outside, Wolf was panting in hot regular agitated-sounding spurts.
    ‘Are you angry with me, Wolf!’ he whispered through the door.
    A fist thumped the door, hard. ‘Not! Not angry! Wolf!’
    ‘All right,’ Jack said. ‘No people, Wolf. Remember that. Or they’ll hunt you down and kill you.’
    ‘No peopOOOWWW-OOOOOOOOHHH-OOOO!’ The word turned into a long, liquid howl. Wolf’s body bumped against the door, and his long black-furred feet slid into the opening beneath it. Jack knew that Wolf had flattened himself out against the shed door. ‘Not angry, Jack,’ Wolf whispered, as if his howl had embarrassed him. ‘Wolf isn’t angry. Wolf is wanting , Jacky. It’s so soon now, so God-pounding soon .’
    ‘I know,’ Jack said, now suddenly feeling as if he had to cry – he wished he could have hugged Wolf. More painfully, he wished that they had stayed the extra days at the farmhouse, and that he were now standing