The Talisman

– cringing against it, actually – his eyes wide and his jaw agape, his anger forgotten in wonder and fear. Mr Dufrey had been crawling around on his rug, barking like a dog.
    Albert the Blob had just been getting himself a snack when the bells began to ring. He looked toward the window for a moment, frowning the way a person frowns when he is trying to remember something that is right on the tip of his tongue. He shrugged and went back to opening a bag of nacho chips – his mother had just sent him a whole case. His eyes widened. He thought – just for a moment, but a moment was long enough – that the bag was full of plump, squirming white bugs.
    He fainted dead away.
    When he awoke and worked up enough courage to peer into the bag again, he saw it had been nothing but a hallucination. Of course! What else? All the same, it was a hallucination which exercised a strange power over him in the future; whenever he opened a bag of chips, or a candy-bar, or a Slim Jim, or a package of Big Jerk beef jerky, he saw those bugs in his mind’s eye. By spring, Albert had lost thirty-five pounds, was playing on the Thayer tennis team, and had gotten laid. Albert was delirious with ecstasy. For the first time in his life he felt that he might survive his mother’s love.
    7
    They all looked around when the bells began to ring. Some laughed, some frowned, a few burst into tears. A pair of dogs howled from somewhere, and that was passing strange because no dogs were allowed on campus.
    The tune the bells rang was not in the computerized schedule of tunes – the disgruntled head custodian later verified it. A campus wag suggested in that week’s issue of the school paper that some eager beaver had programmed the tune with Christmas vacation in mind.
    It had been ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.
    8
    Although she had believed herself far too old to catch pregnant, no blood had come to the mother of Jack Sawyer’s Wolf at the time of the Change some twelve months ago. Three months ago she had given birth to triplets – two litter-sisters and one litter-brother. Her labor had been hard, and the foreknowledge that one of her older children was about to die had been upon her. That child, she knew, had gone into the Other Place to protect the herd, and he would die in that Other Place, and she would never see him anymore. This was very hard, and she had wept in more than the pain of her delivery.
    Yet now, as she slept with her new young beneath a full moon, all of them safely away from the herd for the time being, she rolled over with a smile on her face and pulled the newest litter-brother to her and began to lick him. Still sleeping himself, the Wolfling put his arms around his mother’s shaggy neck and pressed his cheek against her downy breast, and now they both smiled; in her alien sleep a human thought arose: God pounds his nails well and true . And the moonlight of that lovely world where all smells were good shone down on the two of them as they slept in each other’s arms with the litter-sisters nearby.
    9
    In the town of Goslin, Ohio (not far from Amanda, and some thirty miles south of Columbus), a man named Buddy Parkins was shovelling chickenshit in a henhouse at dusk. A cheesecloth mask was tied over his mouth and nose to keep the choking white cloud of powdered guano he was raising from getting up his nose and into his mouth. The air reeked of ammonia. The stink had given him a headache. He also had a backache, because he was tall and the henhouse wasn’t. All things considered, he would have to say that this was one bitch-kitty of a job. He had three sons, and every damned one of them seemed to be unavailable when the henhouse needed to be swamped out. Only thing to be said about it was that he was almost done, and –
    The kid! Jesus Christ! That kid!
    He suddenly remembered the boy who had called himself Lewis Farren with total clarity and a stunned kind of love. The boy who had claimed to be going to his aunt, Helen Vaughan, in the town of Buckeye Lake; the boy who had turned to Buddy when Buddy had asked him if he was running away and had, in that turning, revealed a face filled with honest goodness and an unexpected, amazing beauty – a beauty that had made Buddy think of rainbows glimpsed at the end of storms, and sunsets at the end of days that have groaned and sweated with work that has been well done and not scamped.
    He straightened up with a gasp and bonked his head on the henhouse beams hard