The Talisman (46 page)

“The nigger, the nigger!” Gardener shrieked. “Parker, Parkus, whatever he calls himself! Where is he?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sonny! Andy!” Gardener screamed. “Unlace his left hand. Hold it out to me.”

Warwick bent over Jack’s shoulder and did something. A moment later they were peeling Jack’s hand away from the small of his back. It tingled with pins and needles, waking up. Jack tried to struggle, but it was useless. They held his hand out.

“Now spread his fingers open.”

Sonny pulled Jack’s ring finger and his pinky in one direction; Warwick pulled his pointer and middle finger in the other. A moment later, Gardener had applied the Zippo’s flame to the webbing at the base of the V they had created. The pain was exquisite, bolting up his left arm and from there seeming to fill his whole body. A sweet, charring smell drifted up. Himself. Burning. Himself.

After an eternity, Gardener pulled the Zippo back and snapped it shut. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead. He was panting.

“Devils scream before they come out,” he said. “Oh yes indeed they do. Don’t they, boys?”

“Yes, praise God,” Warwick said.

“You pounded that nail,” Sonny said.

“Oh yes, I know it. Yes indeed I do. I know the secrets of both boys and devils.” Gardener tittered, then leaned forward until his face was an inch from Jack’s. The cloying scent of cologne filled Jack’s nose. Terrible as it was, he thought it was quite a lot better than his own burning flesh. “Now, Jack. How long have you been Migrating? Where is the nigger? How much does your mother know? Who have you told? What has the nigger told you? We’ll start with those.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gardener bared his teeth in a grin.

“Boys,” he said, “we’re going to get sunlight in this boy’s soul yet. Lace up his left arm again and unlace his right.”

Sunlight Gardener opened his lighter again and waited for them to do it, his thumb resting lightly on the striker wheel.

7

George Irwinson and Donny Keegan were still in the kitchen.

“Someone’s out there,” George said nervously.

Donny said nothing. He had finished peeling the potatoes and now stood by the ovens for their warmth. He didn’t know what to do next. Confession was being held just down the hall, he knew, and that’s where he wanted to be—confession was safe, and here in the kitchen he felt very, very nervous—but Rudolph hadn’t dismissed them. Best to stay right here.

“I heard someone,” George said.

Donny laughed:
“Hyuck! Hyuck! Hyuck!”

“Jesus, that laugh of yours barfs me out,” George said. “I got a new Captain America funnybook under my mattress. If you take a look out there, I’ll let you read it.”

Donny shook his head and honked his donkey-laugh again.

George looked toward the door. Sounds. Scratching. That’s what it sounded like. Scratching at the door. Like a dog that wanted to be let in. A lost, homeless pup. Except what sort of lost, homeless pup scratched near the top of a door that was nearly seven feet tall?

George went to the window and looked out. He could see almost nothing in the gloom. The Box was just a darker shadow amid shadows.

George moved toward the door.

8

Jack shrieked so loud and so hard he thought that surely his throat would rupture. Now Casey had also joined them, Casey with his big swinging gut, and that was a good thing for them, because now it took three of them—Casey, Warwick, and Sonny Singer—to grapple with Jack’s arm and keep his hand applied to the flame.

When Gardener drew it away this time, there was a black, bubbling, blistered patch the size of a quarter on the side of Jack’s hand.

Gardener got up, took the envelope marked
JACK PARKER
from his desk, and brought it back. He brought out the guitar-pick.

“What’s this?”

“A guitar-pick,” Jack managed. His hands were burning agony.

“What is it in the Territories?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What’s this?”

“A marble. What are you, blind?”

“Is it a toy in the Territories?”

“I don’t—”

“Is it a mirror?”

“—know—”

“Is it a top that disappears when you spin it fast?”

“—what you’re—”

“YOU DO! YOU DO TOO, YOU FAGGOT HELLBOUND WHELP!”

“—talking about.”

Gardener drove a hand across Jack’s face.

He brought out the silver dollar. His eyes gleamed.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a lucky piece from my Aunt Helen.”

“What is it in the Territories?”

“Box of Rice Krispies.”

Gardener held up the lighter. “Your last chance, boy.”

“It turns into a vibraphone and plays ’Crazy Rhythm.’ ”

“Hold out his right hand again,” Gardener said.

Jack struggled, but at last they got his hand out.

9

In the oven, the turkey pies had begun to burn.

George Irwinson had been standing by the door for almost five minutes, trying to get up nerve enough to open it. That scratching noise had not been repeated.

“Well, I’ll show you there’s nothing to be afraid of, chicken-guts,” George said heartily. “When you’re strong in the Lord, there’s never any need to be afraid!”

With this grand statement, he threw open the door. A huge, shaggy, shadowy thing stood on the threshold, its eyes blazing red from deep sockets. George’s eyes tracked one paw as it rose in the windy autumn dark and whickered down. Six-inch claws gleamed in the kitchen’s light. They tore George Irwinson’s head from his neck and his head flew across the room, spraying blood, to strike the shoes of the laughing Donny Keegan, the madly laughing Donny Keegan.

Wolf leaped into the kitchen, dropping down to all fours. He passed Donny Keegan with hardly a look and ran into the hall.

10

Wolf! Wolf! Right here and now!

It was Wolf’s voice in his mind, all right, but it was deeper, richer, more commanding than Jack had ever heard it. It cut through the haze of pain in his mind like a fine Swedish knife.

He thought,
Wolf is riding with the moon
. The thought brought a mixture of triumph and sorrow.

Sunlight Gardener was looking upward, his eyes narrowed. In that moment he looked very much like a beast himself—a beast who has scented danger downwind.

“Reverend?” Sonny asked. Sonny was panting slightly, and the pupils of his eyes were very large.
He’s been enjoying himself,
Jack thought.
If I start to talk, Sonny’s going to be disappointed
.

“I heard something,” Gardener said. “Casey. Go and listen to the kitchen and the common room.”

“Right.” Casey took off.

Gardener looked back at Jack. “I’m going to have to leave for Muncie soon,” he said, “and when I meet Mr. Morgan, I want to be able to give him some information immediately. So you had better talk to me, Jack. Spare yourself further pain.”

Jack looked at him, hoping the jackhammer beat of his heart didn’t show either in his face or as a faster, more noticeable pulse in his neck. If Wolf was out of the Box—

Gardener held up the pick Speedy had given him in one hand, the coin Captain Farren had given him in the other. “What are they?”

“When I flip, they turn into tortoise testicles,” Jack said, and laughed wildly, hysterically.

Gardener’s face darkened with angry blood.

“Lace up his arms again,” he said to Sonny and Andy. “Lace up his arms and then pull down this hellbound bastard’s pants. Let’s see what happens when we heat up
his
testicles.”

11

Heck Bast was deathly bored with confession. He had heard them all before, these paltry mail-order sins.
I hooked money from my mother’s purse, I used to blow joints in the schoolyard, we usta put glue in a paper bag and sniff it, I did this, I did that
. Little kids’ stuff. No excitement. Nothing to take his mind off the steady drone of pain in his hand. Heck wanted to be downstairs, working on that kid Sawyer. And then they could get started on the big retard who had somehow surprised him and destroyed his good right hand. Yes, getting to work on the big retard would be a real pleasure. Preferably with a set of bolt-cutters.

A boy named Vernon Skarda was currently droning away.

“. . . so me and him, we seen the keys was in her, know what I mean. So he goes, ’Let’s jump in the whore, and drive her around the block,’ he goes. But I knew it was wrong, and I said it was, so he goes, ’You ain’t nothin but a chickenshit.’ So I go, ’I ain’t no chickenshit.’ Like that. So he goes, ’Prove it, prove it.’ ’I ain’t doin no joy-ride,’ I go, so he goes . . .”

Oh dear Christ,
Heck thought. His hand was really starting to yell at him, and his pain-pills were up in his room. On the far side of the room, he saw Peabody stretch his jaws in a bone-cracking yawn.

“So we went around the block, and then he goes to me, he goes—”

The door suddenly slammed inward so hard it tore off its hinges. It hit the wall, bounced, struck a boy named Tom Cassidy, drove him to the floor, and pinned him there. Something leaped into the common room—at first Heck Bast thought it was the biggest motherfucking dog he had ever seen. Boys screamed and bolted up from their chairs . . . and then froze, eyes wide and unbelieving, as the gray-black beast that was Wolf stood upright, shreds of chinos and checked shirt still clinging to him.

Vernon Skarda stared, eyes bulging, jaws hanging.

Wolf bellowed, eyes glaring around as the boys fell back from him. Pedersen made for the door. Wolf, towering so high his head almost brushed the ceiling, moved with liquid speed. He swung an arm as thick as a barn-beam. Claws tore a channel through Pedersen’s back. For a moment his spine was clearly visible—it looked like a bloody extension cord. Gore splashed the walls. Pedersen took one great, shambling step out into the hall and then collapsed.

Wolf turned back . . . and his blazing eyes fastened on Heck Bast. Heck got up suddenly on nerveless legs, staring at this shaggy, red-eyed horror. He knew who it was . . . or, at least, who it had been.

Heck would have given anything in the world just then to be bored again.

12

Jack was sitting in the chair again, his burned and throbbing hands once more pressed against the small of his back—Sonny had laced the strait-jacket cruelly tight and then unbuttoned Jack’s chinos and pushed them down.

“Now,” Gardener said, holding his Zippo up where Jack could see it. “You listen to me, Jack, and listen well. I’m going to begin asking you questions again. And if you don’t answer them well and truly, then buggery is one temptation you will never have to worry about being led into again.”

Sonny Singer giggled wildly at this. That muddy, half-dead look of lust was back in his eyes again. He stared at Jack’s face with a kind of sickly greed.

“Reverend Gardener! Reverend Gardener!” It was Casey, and Casey sounded distressed. Jack opened his eyes again. “Some kind of hooraw going on upstairs!”

“I don’t want to be bothered now.”

“Donny Keegan’s laughing like a loon in the kitchen! And—”

“He said he didn’t want to be bothered now,” Sonny said. “Didn’t you hear him?”

But Casey was too dismayed to stop. “—and it sounds like there’s a riot going on in the common room! Yelling! Screaming! And it sounds like—”

Suddenly, Jack’s mind filled with a bellow of incredible force and vitality:

Jacky! Where are you? Wolf! Where are you right here and now?

“—there’s a dog-pack or something loose up there!”

Gardener was looking at Casey now, eyes narrow, lips pressed tightly together.

Gardener’s office! Downstairs! Where we were before!

DOWN-side, Jacky?

Stairs! Down-STAIRS, Wolf!

Right here and now!

That was it; Wolf was gone from his head. From upstairs, Jack heard a thump and a scream.

“Reverend Gardener?” Casey asked. His normally flushed face was deeply pale. “Reverend Gardener, what is it? What—”

“Shut up!” Gardener said, and Casey recoiled as if slapped, eyes wide and hurt, considerable jowls trembling. Gardener brushed past him and went to the safe. From it he took an outsized pistol which he stuck in his belt. For the first time, the Reverend Sunlight Gardener looked scared and baffled.

Upstairs, there was a dim shattering sound, followed by a screech. The eyes of Singer, Warwick, and Casey all turned nervously upward—they looked like nervous bomb-shelter occupants listening to a growing whistle above them.

Gardener looked at Jack. A grin surfaced on his face, the corners of his mouth twitching irregularly, as if strings were attached to them, strings that were being pulled by a puppeteer who wasn’t particularly good at his job.

“He’ll come here, won’t he?” Sunlight Gardener said. He nodded as if Jack had answered. “He’ll come . . . but I don’t think he’ll leave.”

13

Wolf leaped. Heck Bast was able to get his right hand in its plaster cast up in front of his throat. There was a hot flash of pain, a brittle crunch, and a puff of plaster-dust as Wolf bit the cast—and what was left of the hand inside it—off. Heck looked stupidly down at where it had been. Blood jetted from his wrist. It soaked his white turtleneck with bright, hot warmth.

“Please,” Heck whined. “Please, please, don’t—”

Wolf spat out the hand. His head moved forward with the speed of a striking snake. Heck felt a dim pulling sensation as Wolf tore his throat open, and then he knew no more.

14

As he bolted out of the common room, Peabody skidded in Pedersen’s blood, went down to one knee, got up, and then ran down the first-floor hall as fast as he could go, vomiting all over himself as he went. Kids were running everywhere, shrieking in panic. Peabody’s own panic was not quite that complete. He remembered what he was supposed to do in extreme situations—although he didn’t think anyone had ever envisioned a situation as extreme as
this
; he had an idea that Reverend Gardener had been thinking in terms of a kid going bugfuck and cutting another kid up, something like that.