The Talisman (44 page)

“I thought maybe he was in that recordin-studio thing they got, but he wasn’t. And he hadn’t gone into the chapel because there’s no direct connectin door. There’s a door to the outside from his office, but it was locked and bolted
on the inside
. So where did he go, buddy-roo?
Where did he go?
”

Jack, who knew, could only look at Rudolph numbly.

“I think he’s a devil from hell and he took some weird elevator down to report to fuckin HQ,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to help you but I can’t. There ain’t enough money in Fort Knox for me to cross the Sunlight Man. Now you get out of here. Maybe they ain’t noticed you’re missin.”

But they had, of course. As he came out through the swinging doors, Warwick stepped up behind him and clubbed Jack in the middle of the back with hands interlaced to form one gigantic fist. As he went stumbling forward through the deserted cafeteria, Casey appeared from nowhere like an evil jack-in-the-box and stuck out a foot. Jack couldn’t stop. He tripped over Casey’s foot, his own feet went out from under him, and he sprawled in a tangle of chairs. He got up, fighting back tears of rage and shame.

“You don’t want to be so slow taking in your dishes, snot-face,” Casey said. “You could get hurt.”

Warwick grinned. “Yeah. Now get on upstairs. The trucks are waiting to leave.”

4

At four the next morning he was awakened and taken down to Sunlight Gardener’s office again.

Gardener looked up from his Bible as if surprised to see him.

“Ready to confess, Jack Parker?”

“I have nothing—”

The lighter again. The flame, dancing a bare inch from the tip of his nose.

“Confess. Where have we met?” The flame danced a little closer yet. “I mean to have it out of you, Jack. Where?
Where?
”

“Saturn!”
Jack screamed. It was all he could think of.
“Uranus! Mercury! Somewhere in the asteroid belt! Io! Ganymede! Dei—”

Pain, thick and leaden and excruciating, exploded in his lower belly as Hector Bast reached between his legs with his good hand and squeezed Jack’s testes.

“There,” Heck Bast said, smiling cheerfully. “Didn’t you just have that coming, you hellbound mocker.”

Jack collapsed slowly to the floor, sobbing.

Sunlight Gardener leaned slowly down, his face patient—almost beatific. “Next time, it will be your friend down here,” Sunlight Gardener said gently. “And with him I will not hesitate. Think about it, Jack. Until tomorrow night.”

But tomorrow night, Jack decided, he and Wolf would not be here. If only the Territories were left, then the Territories it would be . . .

 . . . if he could get them back there.

25

Jack and Wolf Go to Hell

1

They had to flip from downstairs. He concentrated on that rather than on the question of whether or not they would be able to flip at all. It would be simpler to go from the room, but the miserable little cubicle he and Wolf shared was on the third floor, forty feet above the ground. Jack didn’t know how exactly the Territories geography and topography corresponded to the geography and topography of Indiana, but he wasn’t going to take a chance that could get their necks broken.

He explained to Wolf what they would do.

“You understand?”

“Yes,” Wolf said listlessly.

“Give it back to me, anyway, pal.”

“After breakfast, I go into the bathroom across from the common room. I go into the first stall. If no one notices I’m gone, you’ll come in. And we’ll go back to the Territories. Is that right, Jacky?”

“That’s it,” Jack said. He put a hand on Wolf’s shoulder and squeezed it. Wolf smiled wanly. Jack hesitated and said, “I’m sorry I got you into this. It’s all my fault.”

“No, Jack,” Wolf said kindly. “We’ll try this. Maybe . . .” A small, wistful hope seemed to glimmer briefly in Wolf’s eyes.

“Yes,” Jack said. “Maybe.”

2

Jack was too scared and excited to want breakfast, but he thought he might attract attention by not eating. So he shovelled in eggs and potatoes that tasted like sawdust, and even managed one fatty piece of bacon.

The weather had finally cleared. There had been frost the night before, and the rocks in Far Field would be like chunks of slag embedded in hardened plastic.

Plates taken out to the kitchen.

Boys allowed to go back to the common room while Sonny Singer, Hector Bast, and Andy Warwick got their day-rosters.

They sat around, looking blank. Pedersen had a fresh copy of the magazine the Gardener organization published,
The Sunlight of Jesus
. He turned the pages idly, glancing up every once in a while to look at the boys.

Wolf looked a question at Jack. Jack nodded. Wolf got up and lumbered from the room. Pedersen glanced up, saw Wolf cross the hall and go into the long, narrow bathroom across the way, and then went back to his magazine.

Jack counted to sixty, then forced himself to count to sixty again. They were the two longest minutes of his life. He was dreadfully afraid that Sonny and Heck would come back into the common room and order all the boys out to the trucks, and he wanted to get into the bathroom before that happened. But Pedersen wasn’t stupid. If Jack followed Wolf too closely, Pedersen might suspect something.

At last Jack got up and walked across the room toward the door. It seemed impossibly far away, and his heavy feet seemed to bring him no closer; it was like an optical illusion.

Pederson looked up. “Where are you going, snotface?”

“Bathroom,” Jack said. His tongue was dry. He had heard of people’s
mouths
getting dry when they were afraid, but their
tongues?

“They’ll be upstairs in a minute,” Pedersen said, nodding toward the end of the hall, where the stairs led down to the chapel, the studio, and Gardener’s office. “You better hold it and water Far Field.”

“I got to take a crap,” Jack said desperately.

Sure. And maybe you and your big stupid friend like to pull each other’s dorks a little before you start the day. Just to sort of perk yourselves up. Go sit down.

“Well, go on, then,” Pedersen said crossly. “Don’t just stand there and whine about it.”

He looked back at his magazine. Jack crossed the hall and stepped into the bathroom.

3

Wolf had picked the wrong stall—he was halfway down the line, his big, clunky workshoes unmistakable under the door. Jack pushed in. It was cramped with the two of them, and he was very aware of Wolf’s strong, clearly animal odor.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s try it.”

“Jack, I’m scared.”

Jack laughed shakily. “I’m scared, too.”

“How do we—”

“I don’t know. Give me your hands.” That seemed like a good start.

Wolf put his hairy hands—paws, almost—in Jack’s hands, and Jack felt an eerie strength flow from them into him. Wolf’s strength wasn’t gone after all, then. It had simply gone underground, as a spring will sometimes go underground in a savagely hot season.

Jack closed his eyes.

“
Want
to get back,” he said. “
Want
to get back, Wolf,
Help
me!”

“I do,” Wolf breathed. “I will if I can! Wolf!”

“Here and now.”

“Right here and now!”

Jack squeezed Wolf’s paw-hands tighter. He could smell Lysol. Somewhere he could hear a car passing. A phone rang. He thought,
I am drinking the magic juice. In my mind I’m drinking it, right here and now I’m drinking it, I can smell it, so purple and so thick and new, I can taste it, I can feel my throat closing on it
—

As the taste filled his throat, the world swayed under them, around them. Wolf cried out, “Jacky, it’s working!”

It startled him out of his fierce concentration and for a moment he became aware that it was only a trick, like trying to get to sleep by counting sheep, and the world steadied again. The smell of the Lysol flooded back. Faintly he heard someone answer the phone querulously: “Yes, hello, who is it?”

Never mind, it’s not a trick, not a trick at all—it’s magic. It’s magic and I did it before when I was little and I can do it again, Speedy said so that blind singer Snowball said so, too, THE MAGIC JUICE IS IN MY MIND—

He bore down with all his force, all his effort of will . . . and the ease with which they flipped was stupefying, as if a punch aimed at something which looked like granite hit a cleverly painted papier-mâché shell instead, so that the blow you thought would break all your knuckles instead encountered no resistance at all.

4

To Jack, with his eyes screwed tightly shut, it felt as if the floor had first crumbled under his feet . . . and then disappeared completely.

Oh shit we’re going to fall anyway,
he thought dismally.

But it wasn’t really a fall, only a minor sideslip. A moment later he and Wolf were standing firmly, not on hard bathroom tile but on dirt.

A reek of sulphur mingled with what smelled like raw sewage flooded in. It was a deathly smell, and Jack thought it meant the end of all hope.

“Jason! What’s that
smell
?” Wolf groaned. “Oh Jason that
smell
, can’t stay here, Jacky, can’t stay—”

Jack’s eyes snapped open. At the same moment Wolf let go of Jack’s hands and blundered forward, his own eyes still tightly shut. Jack saw that Wolf’s ill-fitting chinos and checked shirt had been replaced by the Oshkosh biballs in which Jack had originally seen the big herdsman. The John Lennon glasses were gone. And—

—and Wolf was blundering toward the edge of a precipice less than four feet away.

“Wolf!”
He lunged at Wolf and wrapped his arms around Wolf’s waist.
“Wolf, no!”

“Jacky, can’t stay,” Wolf moaned. “It’s a Pit, one of the Pits, Morgan made these places, oh I heard that Morgan made them, I can smell it—”

“Wolf, there’s a cliff, you’ll fall!”

Wolf’s eyes opened. His jaw dropped as he saw the smokey chasm which spread at their feet. In its deepest, cloudy depths, red fire winked like infected eyes.

“A Pit,” Wolf moaned. “Oh Jacky, it’s a Pit. Furnaces of the Black Heart down there. Black Heart at the middle of the world. Can’t stay, Jacky, it’s the worst bad there is.”

Jack’s first cold thought as he and Wolf stood at the edge of the Pit, looking down into hell, or the Black Heart at the middle of the world, was that Territories geography and Indiana geography
weren’t
the same. There was no corresponding place in the Sunlight Home to this cliff, this hideous Pit.

Four feet to the right,
Jack thought with sudden, sickening horror.
That’s all it would have taken—just four feet to the right. And if Wolf had done what I told him—

If Wolf had done just what Jack had told him, they would have flipped from that first stall. And if they had done that, they would have come into the Territories just over this cliff’s edge.

The strength ran out of his legs. He groped at Wolf again, this time for support.

Wolf held him absently, his eyes wide and glowing a steady orange. His face was a grue of dismay and fear. “It’s a Pit, Jacky.”

It looked like the huge open-pit molybdenum mine he had visited with his mother when they had vacationed in Colorado three winters ago—they had gone to Vail to ski but one day it had been too bitterly cold for that and so they had taken a bus tour to the Continental Minerals molybdenum mine outside the little town of Sidewinder. “It looks like Gehenna to me, Jack-O,” she had said, and her face as she looked out the frost-bordered bus window had been dreamy and sad. “I wish they’d shut those places down, every one of them. They’re pulling fire and destruction out of the earth. It’s Gehenna, all right.”

Thick, choking vines of smoke rose from the depths of the Pit. Its sides were veined with thick lodes of some poisonous green metal. It was perhaps half a mile across. A road leading downward spiraled its inner circumference. Jack could see figures toiling both upward and downward upon this road.

It was a prison of some kind, just as the Sunlight Home was a prison, and these were the prisoners and their keepers. The prisoners were naked, harnessed in pairs to carts like rickshaws—carts filled with huge chunks of that green, greasy-looking ore. Their faces were drawn in rough woodcuts of pain. Their faces were blackened with soot. Their faces ran with thick red sores.

The guards toiled beside them, and Jack saw with numb dismay that they were not human; in no sense at all could they be called human. They were twisted and humped, their hands were claws, their ears pointed like Mr. Spock’s.
Why, they’re gargoyles!
he thought.
All those nightmare monsters on those cathedrals in France—Mom had a book and I thought we were going to have to see every one in the whole country but she stopped when I had a bad dream and wet the bed—did they come from here? Did somebody see them here? Somebody from the Middle Ages who flipped over, saw this place, and thought he’d had a vision of hell?

But this was no vision.

The gargoyles had whips, and over the rumble of the wheels and the sounds of rock cracking steadily under some steady, baking heat, Jack heard their pop and whistle. As he and Wolf watched, one team of men paused near the very top of the spiral road, their heads down, tendons on their necks standing out in harsh relief, their legs trembling with exhaustion.

The monstrosity who was guarding them—a twisted creature with a breechclout twisted around its legs and a patchy line of stiff hair growing from the scant flesh over the knobs of its spine—brought its whip down first on one and then on the other, howling at them in a high, screeching language that seemed to drive silver nails of pain into Jack’s head. Jack saw the same silver beads of metal that had decorated Osmond’s whip, and before he could blink, the arm of one prisoner had been torn open and the nape of the other’s neck lay in ruined flaps.

The men wailed and leaned forward even farther, their blood the deepest color in the yellowish murk. The thing screeched and gibbered and its grayish, plated right arm flexed as it whirled the whip over the slaves’ heads. With a final staggering jerk, they yanked the cart up and onto the level. One of them fell forward onto his knees, exhausted, and the forward motion of the cart knocked him sprawling. One of the wheels rolled over his back. Jack heard the sound of the downed prisoner’s spine as it broke. It sounded like a track referee’s starter-gun.

The gargoyle shrieked with rage as the cart tottered and then fell over, dumping its load onto the split, cracked, arid ground at the top of the Pit. He reached the fallen prisoner in two lunging steps and raised his whip. As he did, the dying man turned his head and looked into Jack Sawyer’s eyes.

It was Ferd Janklow.

Wolf saw, too.

They groped for each other.

And flipped back.

5

They were in a tight, closed place—a bathroom stall, in fact—and Jack could barely breathe because Wolf’s arms were wrapped around him in a crushing embrace. And one of his feet was sopping wet. He had somehow managed to flip back with one foot in a toilet-bowl. Oh, great.
Things like this never happen to Conan the Barbarian,
Jack thought dismally.

“Jack
no
, Jack
no
, the Pit, it was the Pit,
no
, Jack—”

“Quit it! Quit it, Wolf! We’re back!”

“No, no, n—”

Wolf broke off. He opened his eyes slowly.

“Back?”

“You bet, right here and now, so let go of me, you’re breaking my ribs, and besides, my foot’s stuck in the damn—”

The door between the bathroom and the hall burst open with a bang. It struck the inner tile wall with enough force to shatter the frosted-glass panel.

The stall door was torn open. Andy Warwick took one look and spoke three furious, contemptuous words:

“You fucking queers.”

He grabbed the dazed Wolf by the front of his checked shirt and pulled him out. Wolf’s pants caught on the steel hood over the toilet-paper dispenser and pulled the whole works off the wall. It went flying. The toilet-paper roll broke free and went unspooling across the floor. Warwick sent Wolf crashing into the sinks, which were just the right height to catch him in the privates. Wolf fell to the floor, holding himself.

Warwick turned to Jack, and Sonny Singer appeared at the stall door. He reached in and grabbed Jack by the front of his shirt.

“All right, you fag—” Sonny began, and that was as far as he got. Ever since he and Wolf had been dragooned into this place, Sonny Singer had been in Jack’s face. Sonny Singer with his sly dark face that wanted to look just like Sunlight Gardener’s face (and as soon as it could). Sonny Singer who had coined the charming endearment
snotface
. Sonny Singer whose idea it had undoubtedly been to piss in their beds.