The Talisman (43 page)

Ferd hawked back snot, grimaced, twisted his head, and spat into the dirt.

“You’re kidding,” Jack said.

“Ferd Janklow never kids about the Marching Morons of the Sunlight Home,” Ferd said solemnly. “He’s rich, he doesn’t have to declare any of it to the Internal Revenue, he’s got the local school board buffaloed—I mean, they’re scared to death of him; there’s this one woman who practically
skitters
every time she’s out here, looks like she’d like to give him the sign against the evil eye, or something—and like I said, he always seems to know when someone from the State Education Board is going to pay us a surprise visit. We clean this place from top to bottom, Bast the Bastard takes the canvas overcoats up to the attic, and the Box gets filled with hay from the barn. And when they come, we’re always in class. How many classes you been in since you landed here in Indiana’s version of the
Love Boat
, Jack?”

“None,” Jack said.

“None!” Ferd agreed, delighted. He laughed his cynical, hurt laugh again—that laugh said,
Guess what I found out when I turned eight or so? I found out that I was getting a royal fucking from life, and that things weren’t going to change in a hurry. Or maybe they were never going to change. And although it bums me out, it also has its funny side. You know what I mean, jellybean?

4

Such was the run of Jack’s thoughts when hard fingers suddenly grasped the back of his neck at the pressure-points below the ears and lifted him out of his chair. He was turned around into a cloud of foul breath and treated—if that was the word—to the sterile moonscape of Heck Bast’s face.

“Me and the Reverend was still in Muncie when they brought your queer troublemaker friend into the hospital,” he said. His fingers pulsed and squeezed, pulsed and squeezed. The pain was excruciating. Jack moaned and Heck grinned. The grin allowed bad breath to escape his mouth in even greater quantities. “Reverend got the news on his beeper. Janklow looked like a taco that spent about forty-five minutes in a microwave oven. It’s gonna be a while before they put
that
boy back together again.”

He’s not talking to me,
Jack thought.
He’s talking to the whole room. We’re supposed to get the message that Ferd’s still alive.

“You’re a stinking liar,” he said. “Ferd’s—”

Heck Bast hit him. Jack went sprawling on the floor. Boys scattered away from him. From somewhere, Donny Keegan hee-hawed.

There was a roar of rage. Jack looked up, dazed, and shook his head in an effort to clear it. Heck turned and saw Wolf standing protectively over Jack, his upper lip pulled back, the overhead lights sending weird orange glints off his round glasses.

“So the dumbhead finally wants to dance,” Heck said, beginning to grin. “Hey, all right! I
love
to dance. Come on, snotface. Come on over here and let’s dance.”

Still growling, saliva now coating his lower lip, Wolf began to move forward. Heck moved to meet him. Chairs scraped across linoleum as people moved back hurriedly to give them room.

“What’s going on h—”

From the door. Sonny Singer. No need to finish his question; he saw what was going on here. Smiling, he pulled the door shut and leaned against it, watching, arms crossed over his narrow chest, his dark narrow face now alight.

Jack switched his gaze back to Wolf and Heck.

“Wolf, be careful!” he shouted.

“I’ll be careful, Jack,” Wolf said, his voice little more than a growl. “I’ll—”

“Let’s
dance
, asshole,” Heck Bast grunted, and threw a whistling, country-boy roundhouse. It hit Wolf high on the right cheekbone, driving him backward three or four steps. Donny Keegan laughed his high, whinnying laugh, which Jack now knew was as often a signal of dismay as of glee.

The roundhouse was a good, heavy blow. Under other circumstances, the fight would probably have ended right there. Unfortunately for Hector Bast, it was also the only blow he landed.

He advanced confidently, big fists up at chest height, and drove the roundhouse again. This time Wolf’s arm moved upward and outward to meet it. Wolf caught Heck’s fist.

Heck’s hand was big. Wolf’s hand was bigger.

Wolf’s fist swallowed Heck’s.

Wolf’s fist clenched.

From within it came a sound like small dry sticks first cracking, then breaking.

Heck’s confident smile first curdled, then froze solid. A moment later he began to shriek.

“Shouldn’t have hurt the herd, you bastard,” Wolf whispered. “Oh your Bible this and oh your Bible that—
Wolf!
—and all you have to do is hear six verses of
The Book of Good Farming
to know you never . . .”

Crackle!

“. . . never . . .”

Crunch!

“
NEVER
hurt the herd.”

Heck Bast fell to his knees, howling and weeping. Wolf still held Heck’s fist in his own, and Heck’s arm angled up. Heck looked like a Fascist giving a
Heil Hitler
salute on his knees. Wolf’s arm was as rigid as stone, but his face showed no real effort; it was, except for the blazing eyes, almost serene.

Blood began to drip out of Wolf’s fist.

“Wolf, stop! That’s enough!”

Jack looked around swiftly and saw that Sonny was gone, the door standing open. Almost all of the boys were on their feet now. They had drawn away from Wolf as far as the room’s walls would allow, their faces awed and fearful. And still the tableau held in the center of the room: Heck Bast on his knees, arms up and out, his fist swallowed in Wolf’s, blood pouring onto the floor from Wolf’s fist.

People crowded back into the doorway. Casey, Warwick, Sonny Singer, three more big guys. And Sunlight Gardener, with a small black case, like a glasses-case, in one hand.

“That’s enough, I said!”
Jack took one look at the new-comers and raced toward Wolf.
“Right here and now! Right here and now!”

“All right,” Wolf said quietly. He let go of Heck’s hand, and Jack saw a horrible crushed thing that looked like a mangled pinwheel. Heck’s fingers stuck off at jagged angles. Heck mewled and held his destroyed hand against his chest.

“All right, Jack.”

The six of them grabbed Wolf. Wolf made a half-turn, slipped one arm free, pushed, and suddenly Warwick went rattling against the wall. Someone screamed.

“Hold him!” Gardener yelled. “Hold him! Hold him, for Jesus’ sake!” He was opening the flat black case.

“No, Wolf!”
Jack shouted.
“Quit it!”

For a moment Wolf went on struggling, and then he slumped back, allowing them to push him to the wall. To Jack they looked like Lilliputians clinging to Gulliver. Sonny looked afraid of Wolf at last.

“Hold him,” Gardener repeated, taking a glittering hypodermic out of the flat case. That mincing, almost coy smile had come onto his face. “Hold him, praise Jesus!”

“You don’t need that,” Jack said.

“Jack?” Wolf looked suddenly frightened. “Jack?
Jack?
”

Gardener, headed for Wolf, pushed Jack as he went by. There was good whipcord muscle in that push. Jack went reeling into Morton, who squealed and shrank away as if Jack were contaminated. Belatedly, Wolf began to struggle again—but they were six, and that was too many. Perhaps, when the Change was on him, it wouldn’t have been.

“Jack!”
he howled.
“Jack! Jack!”

“Hold him, praise God,” Gardener whispered, his lips skinned back brutally from his teeth, and plunged the hypodermic into Wolf’s arm.

Wolf went rigid, threw his head back, and howled.

Kill you, you bastard
, Jack thought incoherently.
Kill you, kill you, kill you
.

Wolf struggled and thrashed. Gardener stood back, watching coldly. Wolf got a knee up into Casey’s expansive gut. Casey
whoofed
air out, staggered backward, then came back. A minute or two later, Wolf began first to flag . . . then to sag.

Jack got to his feet, weeping with rage. He tried to plunge toward the knot of white turtlenecks holding his friend—as he watched he saw Casey swing a fist into Wolf’s drooping face, and saw blood begin to pour from Wolf’s nose.

Hands held him back. He struggled, then looked around and saw the frightened faces of the boys he picked rocks with in Far Field.

“I want him in the Box,” Gardener said as Wolf’s knees finally buckled. He looked slowly around at Jack. “Unless . . . perhaps you’d like to tell me where we’ve met before, Mr. Parker?”

Jack stood looking down at his feet, saying nothing. His eyes stung and burned with hot, hateful tears.

“The Box, then,” Gardener said. “You may feel different when he starts to vocalize, Mr. Parker.”

Gardener strode out.

5

Wolf was still screaming in the Box when Jack and the other boys were marched down to morning-chapel. Sunlight Gardener’s eyes seemed to dwell ironically on Jack’s pale, strained face.
Perhaps now, Mr. Parker?

Wolf, it’s my mother, my mother—

Wolf was still screaming when Jack and the other boys scheduled for field-work were split into two groups and marched out to the trucks. As he passed near the Box, Jack had to suppress an urge to jam his hands over his ears. Those growls, those gibbering sobs.

All at once Sonny Singer was at his shoulder.

“Reverend Gardener’s in his office waiting to take your confession right this minute, snotface,” he said. “Told me to tell you he’ll let the dummy out of the Box the minute you tell him what he wants to know.” Sonny’s voice was silky, his face dangerous.

Wolf, screaming and howling to be let out, pounding the home-riveted iron sides of the Box with a fury of blows.

Ah, Wolf, she’s my MOTHER—

“I can’t tell him what he wants to know,” Jack said. He turned suddenly toward Sonny, turning the force of whatever had come into him in the Territories upon Sonny. Sonny took two giant steps backward, his face dismayed and sickly scared. He tripped over his own feet and stumbled into the side of one of the idling trucks. If it hadn’t been there, he would have fallen down.

“All right,” Sonny said . . . the words came out in a breathy rush that was close to a whine. “All right, all right, forget it.” His thin face grew arrogant again. “Reverend Gardener told me if you said no that I should tell you that your friend’s screaming for you. Do you get it?”

“I know who he’s screaming for.”

“Get in the truck!” Pedersen said grimly, barely looking at them as he passed by . . . but when he passed Sonny, Pedersen grimaced as though he had smelled something rotten.

Jack could hear Wolf screaming even after the trucks got rolling, though the mufflers on both were little more than scallops of iron lace and the engines blatted stridently. Nor did Wolf’s screams fade. He had made some sort of connection with Wolf’s mind now, and he could hear Wolf screaming even after the work parties had reached Far Field. The understanding that these screams were only in his mind did nothing at all to improve matters.

Around lunchtime, Wolf fell silent, and Jack knew, suddenly and with no doubt at all, that Gardener had ordered him taken out of the Box before his screams and howls attracted the wrong sort of attention. After what had happened to Ferd, he wouldn’t want any attention at all focused on the Sunlight Home.

When the work parties returned that late afternoon, the door of the Box was standing open and the Box was empty. Upstairs in the room they shared, Wolf was lying on the lower bunk. He smiled wanly as Jack came in.

“How’s your head, Jack? Bruise looks a little better. Wolf!”

“Wolf, are you all right?”

“Screamed, didn’t I? Couldn’t help it.”

“Wolf, I’m sorry,” Jack said. Wolf looked strange—too white, somehow diminished.

He’s dying
, Jack thought. No, his mind corrected; Wolf had been dying ever since they had flipped into this world to escape Morgan. But now he was dying faster. Too white . . . diminished . . . but . . .

Jack felt a creeping chill.

Wolf’s bare legs and arms weren’t really bare; they were downed with a fine pelt of hair. It hadn’t been there two nights ago, he was sure of that.

He felt an urge to rush over to the window and stare out, searching for the moon, trying to make sure he hadn’t somehow misplaced about seventeen days.

“It’s not the time of the Change, Jacky,” Wolf said. His voice was dry, somehow husked-out. The voice of an invalid. “But I started to change in that dark smelly place they put me in. Wolf! I did. Because I was so mad and scared. Because I was yelling and screaming. Yelling and screaming can make the Change all by themselves, if a Wolf does it long enough.” Wolf brushed at the hair on his legs. “It’ll go away.”

“Gardener set a price for letting you out,” Jack said, “but I couldn’t pay it. I wanted to, but . . . Wolf . . . my mother . . .”

His voice blurred and wavered toward tears.

“Shhh, Jacky. Wolf knows. Right here and now.” Wolf smiled his terrible wan smile again, and took Jack’s hand.

24

Jack Names the Planets

1

Another week in the Sunlight Home, praise God. The moon put on weight.

On Monday, a smiling Sunlight Gardener asked the boys to bow their heads and give thanks to God for the conversion of their brother Ferdinand Janklow. Ferd had made a soul-decision for Christ while recuperating in Parkland Hospital, Sunlight said, his smile radiant. Ferd had made a collect call to his parents and told them he wanted to be a soul-winner for the Lord, and they prayed for guidance right there over the long-distance line, and his parents had come to pick him up that very day.
Dead and buried under some frosty Indiana field . . . or over in the Territories, perhaps, where the Indiana State Patrol could never go
.

Tuesday was too coldly rainy for field-work. Most of the boys had been allowed to stay in their rooms and sleep or read, but for Jack and Wolf, the period of harassment had begun. Wolf was lugging load after load of garbage from the barn and the sheds out to the side of the road in the driving rain. Jack had been set to work cleaning toilets. He supposed that Warwick and Casey, who had assigned him this duty, thought they were giving him a really nasty job to do. It was obvious that they’d never seen the men’s room of the world-famous Oatley Tap.

Just another week at the Sunlight Home, can you say oh-yeah.

Hector Bast returned on Wednesday, his right arm in a cast up to the elbow, his big, doughy face so pallid that the pimples on it stood out like garish dots of rouge.

“Doctor says I may never get the use of it back,” Heck Bast said. “You and your numbnuts buddy have got a lot to answer for, Parker.”

“You aiming to have the same thing happen to your other hand?” Jack asked him . . . but he was afraid. It was not just a desire for revenge he saw in Heck’s eyes; it was a desire to commit murder.

“I’m not afraid of him,” Heck said. “Sonny says they took most of the mean out of him in the Box. Sonny says he’ll do anything to keep from going back in. As for you—”

Heck’s left fist flashed out. He was even clumsier with his left hand than with his right, but Jack, stunned by the big boy’s pallid rage, never saw it coming. His lips spread into a weird smile under Heck’s fist and broke open. He reeled back against the wall.

A door opened and Billy Adams looked out.

“Shut that door or I’ll see you get a helping!”
Heck screamed, and Adams, not anxious for a dose of assault and battery, complied in a hurry.

Heck started toward Jack. Jack pushed groggily away from the wall and raised his fists. Heck stopped.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Heck said. “Fighting with a guy that’s only got one good hand.” Color rushed up into his face.

Footsteps rattled on the third floor, heading toward the stairs. Heck looked at Jack. “That’s Sonny. Go on. Get out of here. We’re gonna get you, my friend. You and the dummy both. Reverend Gardener says we can, unless you tell him whatever it is he wants to know.”

Heck grinned.

“Do me a favor, snotface. Don’t tell him.”

2

They had taken
something
out of Wolf in the Box, all right, Jack thought. Six hours had passed since his hallway confrontation with Heck Bast. The bell for confession would ring soon, but for now Wolf was sleeping heavily in the bunk below him. Outside, rain continued to rattle off the sides of the Sunlight Home.

It wasn’t meanness, and Jack knew it wasn’t just the Box that had taken it. Not even just the Sunlight Home. It was this whole world. Wolf was, simply, pining for home. He had lost most of his vitality. He smiled rarely and laughed not at all. When Warwick yelled at him at lunch for eating with his fingers, Wolf cringed.

It has to be soon, Jacky. Because I’m dying. Wolf’s dying.

Heck Bast said he wasn’t afraid of Wolf, and indeed there seemed nothing left to be afraid of; it seemed that crushing Heck’s hand had been the last strong act of which Wolf was capable.

The confession bell rang.

That night, after confession and dinner and chapel, Jack and Wolf came back to their room to find both of their beds dripping wet and reeking of urine. Jack went to the door, yanked it open, and saw Sonny, Warwick, and a big lunk named Van Zandt standing in the hall, grinning.

“Guess we got the wrong room, snotface,” Sonny said. “Thought it had to be the toilet, on account of the turds we always see floating around in there.”

Van Zandt almost ruptured himself laughing at this sally.

Jack stared at them for a long moment, and Van Zandt stopped laughing.

“Who you looking at, turd? You want your fucking nose broke off?”

Jack closed the door, looked around, and saw Wolf asleep in his wet bunk with all his clothes on. Wolf’s beard was coming back, but still his face looked pale, the skin stretched and shiny. It was an invalid’s face.

Leave him alone, then,
Jack thought wearily.
If he’s that tired, let him sleep in it
.

No. You will not leave him alone to sleep in that fouled bed. You will not!

Tiredly, Jack went to Wolf, shook him half-awake, got him off the wet, stinking mattress, and out of his biballs. They slept curled up together on the floor.

At four in the morning, the door opened and Sonny and Heck marched in. They yanked Jack up and half-carried him down to Sunlight Gardener’s basement office.

Gardener was sitting with his feet up on the corner of his desk. He was fully dressed in spite of the hour. Behind him was a picture of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee while his disciples gawped in wonder. To his right was a glass window looking into the darkened studio where Casey worked his idiot-savant wonders. There was a heavy keychain attached to one of Gardener’s belt-loops. The keys, a heavy bunch of them, lay in the palm of his hand. He played with them while he spoke.

“You haven’t given us a single confession since you got here, Jack,” Sunlight Gardener said, his tone one of mild reproof. “Confession is good for the soul. Without confession we cannot be saved. Oh, I don’t mean the idolatrous, heathenish confession of the Catholics. I mean confession before your brothers and your Saviour.”

“I’ll keep it between me and my Saviour, if it’s all the same to you,” Jack said evenly, and in spite of his fear and disorientation, he could not help relishing the expression of fury which overspread Gardener’s face.

“It’s
not
all the same to me!” Gardener screamed. Pain exploded in Jack’s kidneys. He fell to his knees.

“Watch what you say to Reverend Gardener, snotface,” Sonny said. “Some of us around here stand up for him.”

“God bless you for your trust and your love, Sonny,” Gardener said gravely, and turned his attention to Jack again.

“Get up, son.”

Jack managed to get up, holding on to the edge of Sunlight Gardener’s expensive blondewood desk.

“What’s your real name?”

“Jack Parker.”

He saw Gardener nod imperceptibly, and tried to turn, but it was a moment too late. Fresh pain exploded in his kidneys. He screamed and went down again, knocking the fading bruise on his forehead against the edge of Gardener’s desk.

“Where are you from, you lying, impudent, devil’s spawn of a boy?”

“Pennsylvania.”

Pain exploded in the meaty upper part of his left thigh. He rolled into a fetal position on the white Karastan carpet, huddled with his knees against his chest.

“Get him up.”

Sonny and Heck got him up.

Gardener reached into the pocket of his white jacket and took out a Zippo lighter. He flicked the wheel, produced a big yellow flame, and brought the flame slowly toward Jack’s face. Nine inches. He could smell the sweet, pungent reek of lighter fluid. Six inches. Now he could feel heat. Three inches. Another inch—maybe just half that—and discomfort would turn to pain. Sunlight Gardener’s eyes were hazy-happy. His lips trembled on the edge of a smile.

“Yeah!” Heck’s breath was hot, and it smelled like mouldy pepperoni. “Yeah, do it!”

“Where do I know you from?”

“I never met you before!” Jack gasped.

The flame moved closer. Jack’s eyes began to water, and he could feel his skin beginning to sear. He tried to pull his head back. Sonny Singer pushed it forward.

“Where have I met you?” Gardener rasped. The lighter’s flame danced deep in his black pupils, each deep spark a twinner of the other. “Last chance!”

Tell him, for God’s sake tell him!

“If we ever met I don’t remember it,” Jack gasped. “Maybe California—”

The Zippo clicked closed. Jack sobbed with relief.

“Take him back,” Gardener said.

They yanked Jack toward the door.

“It won’t do you any good, you know,” Sunlight Gardener said. He had turned around and appeared to be meditating on the picture of Christ walking on water. “I’ll get it out of you. If not tonight, then tomorrow night. If not tomorrow night, then the night after. Why not make it easy on yourself, Jack?”

Jack said nothing. A moment later he felt his arm twisted up to his shoulder blades. He moaned.

“Tell him!”
Sonny whispered.

And part of Jack wanted to, not because he was hurt but because—
because confession was good for the soul
.

He remembered the muddy courtyard, he remembered this same man in a different envelope of skin asking who he was, he remembered thinking:
I’ll tell you anything you want to know if only you’ll stop looking at me with those freaked-out eyes of yours, sure, because I’m only a kid, and that’s what kids do, they tell, they tell everything—

Then he remembered his mother’s voice, that tough voice, asking him if he was going to spill his guts to this guy.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he said.

Gardener’s lips parted in a small, dry smile. “Take him back to his room,” he said.

3

Just another week in the Sunlight Home, can you say amen, brothers and sisters. Just another long, long week.

Jack lingered in the kitchen after the others had taken in their breakfast dishes and left. He knew perfectly well that he was risking another beating, more harassment . . . but by this time, that seemed a minor consideration. Only three hours before, Sunlight Gardener had come within an ace of burning his lips off. He had seen it in the man’s crazy eyes, and felt it in the man’s crazy heart. After something like that, the risk of a beating seemed a very minor consideration indeed.

Rudolph’s cook’s whites were as gray as the lowering November sky outside. When Jack spoke his name in a near-whisper, Rudolph turned a bloodshot, cynical gaze on him. Cheap whiskey was strong on his breath.

“You better get outta here, new fish. They’re keepin an eye on you pretty good.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

Jack glanced nervously toward the antique dishwasher, which thumped and hissed and gasped its steamy dragon’s breath at the boys loading it. They seemed not to be looking at Jack and Rudolph, but Jack knew that
seemed
was really the operant word. Tales would be carried. Oh yes. At the Sunlight Home they took away your dough, and carried tales became a kind of replacement currency.

“I need to get out of here,” Jack said. “Me and my big friend. How much would you take to look the other way while we went out that back door?”

“More than you could pay me even if you could get your hands on what they took from you when they ho’d you in here, buddy-roo,” Rudolph said. His words were hard but he looked at Jack with a bleary sort of kindness.

Yes, of course—it was all gone, everything. The guitar-pick, the silver dollar, the big croaker marble, his six dollars . . . all gone. Sealed in an envelope and held somewhere, probably in Gardener’s office downstairs. But—

“Look, I’d give you an IOU.”

Rudolph grinned. “Comin from someone in this den of thieves and dope-addicts, that’s almost funny,” he said. “Piss on your fuckin IOU, old hoss.”

Jack turned all the new force that was in him upon Rudolph. There was a way to hide that force, that new beauty—to a degree, at least—but now he let it all come out, and saw Rudolph step back from it, his face momentarily confused and amazed.

“My IOU would be good and I think you know it,” Jack said quietly. “Give me an address and I’ll mail you the cash. How much? Ferd Janklow said that for two bucks you’d mail a letter for someone. Would ten be enough to look the other way just long enough for us to take a walk?”

“Not ten, not twenty, not a hundred,” Rudolph said quietly. He now looked at the boy with a sadness that scared Jack badly. It was that look as much as anything else—maybe more—that told him just how badly he and Wolf were caught. “Yeah, I’ve done it before. Sometimes for five bucks. Sometimes, believe it or not, for free. I would have done it free for Ferdie Janklow. He was a good kid. These
fuckers
—”

Rudolph raised one water- and detergent-reddened fist and shook it toward the green-tiled wall. He saw Morton, the accused pud-puller, looking at him, and Rudolph glared horribly at him. Morton looked away in a hurry.

“Then why
not?
” Jack asked desperately.

“Because I’m scared, hoss,” Rudolph said.

“What do you mean? The night I came here, when Sonny started to give you some trouble—”

“Singer!” Rudolph flapped one hand contemptuously. “I ain’t scared of Singer, and I ain’t scared of Bast, no matter how big he is. It’s
him
I’m afraid of.”

“Gardener?”

“He’s a devil from hell,” Rudolph said. He hesitated and then added, “I’ll tell you something I never told nobody else. One week he was late givin me my pay envelope and I went downstairs to his office. Most times I don’t, I don’t like to go down there, but this time I had to . . . well, I had to see a man. I needed my money in a hurry, you know what I mean? And I seen him go down the hall and into his office, so I knew he was there. I went down and knocked on the door, and it swung open when I did, because it hadn’t completely latched. And you know what, kid?
He wasn’t there
.”

Rudolph’s voice had lowered steadily as he told this story, until Jack could barely hear the cook over the thump and wheeze of the dishwasher. At the same time, his eyes had widened like the eyes of a child reliving a scary dream.