The Talisman

some black with rot. Jack screamed. ‘Oh, you can trust Elroy,’ it said, its words now hardly discernible from a doglike growl. ‘He ain’t gonna hurt you too bad.
    ‘You’ll be all right,’ it growled, moving toward Jack, ‘you’ll be all right, oh yeah, you’ll . . .’ It continued to talk, but Jack could no longer tell what it was saying. Now it was only snarling.
    Jack’s foot hit the tall wastecan by the door. As the cowboy-thing reached for him with its hooflike hands, Jack grabbed the can and threw it. The can bounced off the Elroy-thing’s chest. Jack tore open the bathroom door and lunged to the left, toward the emergency door. He slammed into the crash-bar, aware that Elroy was right behind him. He lurched into the dark behind the Oatley Tap.
    There was a colony of overloaded garbage cans to the right of the door. Jack blindly swept three of them behind him, heard them clash and rattle – and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.
    He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was even a moment to realize – Oh dear Jesus a tail it’s got something like a tail – that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.
    Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back, trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion –
    – Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God please –
    – of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out what it was saying. ‘Now I’m not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I’m gonna kill you . . . after .’
    Hearing it with his ears ? Or in his head ?
    It didn’t matter. The space between this world and that had shrunk from a universe to a mere membrane.
    The Elroy-thing snarled and came toward him, now unsteady and awkward on its rear feet, its clothes bulging in all the wrong places, its tongue swinging from its fanged mouth. Here was the vacant lot behind Smokey Updike’s Oatley Tap, yes, here it was at last, choked with weeds and blown trash – a rusty bedspring here, the grille of a 1957 Ford over there, and a ghastly sickle moon like a bent bone in the sky overhead, turning every shard of broken glass into a dead staring eye, and this hadn’t begun in New Hampshire, had it? No. It hadn’t begun when his mother got sick, or with the appearance of Lester Parker. It had begun when –
    Jacky was six. When we all lived in California and no one lived anywhere else and Jack was –
    He fumbled at the straps of his pack.
    It came again, seeming almost to dance, for a moment reminding him of some animated Disney cartoon-figure in the chancy moonlight. Crazily, Jack began to laugh. The thing snarled and leaped at him. The swipe of those heavy hoof-claws again missed him by barest inches as he danced back through the weeds and litter. The Elroy-thing came down on the bedspring and somehow became entangled in it. Howling, snapping white gobbets of foam into the air, it pulled and twisted and lunged, one foot buried deep in the rusty coils.
    Jack groped inside his pack for the bottle. He dug past socks and dirty undershorts and a wadded, fragrant pair of jeans. He seized the neck of the bottle and yanked it out.
    The Elroy-thing split the air with a howl of rage, finally pulling free of the bedspring.
    Jack hit the cindery, weedy, scruffy ground and rolled over, the last two fingers of his left hand hooked around one pack-strap, his right hand holding the bottle. He worked at the cap with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, the pack dangling and swinging. The cap spun off.
    Can it follow me? he wondered incoherently, tipping the bottle to his lips. When I go, do I punch some kind of hole through the middle of things? Can it follow me through and finish me on the other side?
    Jack’s mouth filled with that rotten dead-grape taste. He gagged, his throat closing, seeming to actually reverse direction. Now that awful taste filled his sinuses and nasal passages as well and he uttered a deep, shaking groan. He could