The Talisman (47 page)

Beyond the parlor where new boys were brought when they first came to the Sunlight Home was a small upstairs office used only by the thugs Gardener referred to as his “student aides.”

Peabody locked himself in this room, picked up the phone, and dialled an emergency number. A moment later he was talking to Franky Williams.

“Peabody, at the Sunlight Home,” he said. “You ought to get up here with as many police as you can get, Officer Williams. All hell has—”

Outside he heard a wailing shriek followed by a crash of breaking wood. There was a snarling, barking roar, and the shriek was cut off.

“—has busted loose up here,” he finished.

“What kind of hell?” Williams asked impatiently. “Lemme talk to Gardener.”

“I don’t know where the Reverend is, but he’d want you up here. There’s people dead.
Kids
dead.”

“What?”

“Just get up here with a lot of men,” Peabody said. “And a lot of guns.”

Another scream. The crash-thud of something heavy—the old highboy in the front hall, probably—being overturned.

“Machine-guns, if you can find them.”

A crystalline jangle as the big chandelier in the hall came down. Peabody cringed. It sounded like that monster was tearing the whole place apart with its bare hands.

“Hell, bring a nuke if you can,” Peabody said, beginning to blubber.

“What—”

Peabody hung up before Williams could finish. He crawled into the kneehole under the desk. Wrapped his arms around his head. And began to pray assiduously that all of this should prove to be only a dream—the worst fucking nightmare he had ever had.

15

Wolf raged along the first-floor hall between the common room and the front door, pausing only to overturn the highboy, then to leap easily up and grab the chandelier. He swung on it like Tarzan until it tore out of the ceiling and spilled diamonds of crystal all over the hallway runner.

DOWN-side. Jacky was on the DOWN-side
. Now . . . which side was that?

A boy who was no longer able to stand the agonizing tension of waiting for the thing to be gone jerked open the door of the closet where he had been hiding and bolted for the stairs. Wolf grabbed him and threw him the length of the hall. The boy struck the closed kitchen door with a bone-breaking thud and fell in a heap.

Wolf’s head swam with the intoxicating odor of fresh-spilled blood. His hair hung in bloody dreadlocks around his jaw and muzzle. He tried to hold on to thought, but it was hard—hard. He had to find Jacky very quickly now, before he lost the ability to think completely.

He raced back toward the kitchen, where he had come in, dropping to all fours again because movement was faster and easier that way . . . and suddenly, passing a closed door, he remembered. The narrow place. It had been like going down into a grave. The smell, wet and heavy in his throat—

DOWN-side. Behind that door. Right here and now!

“Wolf!”
he cried, although the boys cringing in their hiding places on the first and second floors heard only a rising, triumphant howl. He raised both of the heavily muscled battering rams that had been his arms and drove them into the door. It burst open in the middle, vomiting splinters down the stairwell. Wolf drove his way through, and yes, here was the narrow place, like a throat; here was the way to the place where the White Man had told his lies while Jack and the Weaker Wolf had to sit and listen.

Jack was down there now. Wolf could smell him.

But he also smelled the White Man . . . and gunpowder.

Careful . . .

Oh yes. Wolfs knew careful. Wolfs could run and tear and kill, but when they had to be . . . Wolfs knew careful.

He went down the stairs on all fours, silent as oiled smoke, eyes as red as brake lights.

16

Gardener was becoming steadily more nervous; to Jack he looked like a man who was entering the freakout zone. His eyes moved jerkily in a triple play, from the studio where Casey was frantically listening to Jack, and then to the closed door which gave on the hall.

Most of the noises from upstairs had stopped some time ago.

Now Sonny Singer started for the door. “I’ll go up and see what’s—”

“You’re not going anywhere! Come back here!”

Sonny winced as if Gardener had struck him.

“What the matter, Reverend Gardener?” Jack asked. “You look a little nervous.”

Sonny rocked him with a slap. “You want to watch the way you talk, snotface! You just want to watch it!”

“You look nervous, too, Sonny. And you, Warwick. And Casey in there—”

“Shut him up!”
Gardener suddenly screamed.
“Can’t you do anything? Do I have to do everything around here myself?”

Sonny slapped Jack again, much harder. Jack’s nose began to bleed, but he smiled. Wolf was very close now . . . and Wolf was being careful. Jack had begun to have a crazy hope that they might get out of this alive.

Casey suddenly straightened up and then tore the cans off his head and flicked the intercom switch.

“Reverend Gardener! I hear sirens on the outside mikes!”

Gardener’s eyes, now too wide, skidded back to Casey.

“What? How many? How far away?”

“Sounds like a lot,” Casey said. “Not close yet. But they’re coming here. No doubt about that.”

Gardener’s nerve broke then; Jack saw it happen. The man sat, indecisive, for a moment, and then he wiped his mouth delicately with the side of his hand.

It isn’t whatever happened upstairs, not just the sirens, either. He knows that Wolf is close, too. In his own way he smells him . . . and he doesn’t like it. Wolf, we might have a chance! We just might!

Gardener handed the pistol to Sonny Singer. “I haven’t time to deal with the police, or whatever mess there might be upstairs, right now,” he said. “The important thing is Morgan Sloat. I’m going to Muncie. You and Andy are coming with me, Sonny. You keep this gun on our friend Jack here while I get the car out of the garage. When you hear the horn, come on out.”

“What about Casey?” Andy Warwick rumbled.

“Yes, yes, all right, Casey, too,” Gardener agreed at once, and Jack thought,
He’s running out on you, you stupid assholes. He’s running out on you, it’s so obvious that he might as well take out a billboard on the Sunset Strip and advertise the fact, and your brains are too blown to even know it. You’d go on sitting down here for ten years waiting to hear that horn blow, if the food and toilet paper held out that long
.

Gardener got up. Sonny Singer, his face flushed with new importance, sat down behind his desk and pointed the gun at Jack. “If his retarded friend shows up,” Gardener said, “shoot him.”

“How could
he
show up?” Sonny asked. “He’s in the Box.”

“Never mind,” Gardener said. “He’s evil, they’re both evil, it’s indubitable, it’s axiomatic, if the retard shows up, shoot him, shoot them both.”

He fumbled through the keys on his ring and selected one. “When you hear the horn,” he said. He opened the door and went out. Jack strained his ears for the sound of sirens but heard nothing.

The door closed behind Sunlight Gardener.

17

Time, stretching out.

A minute that felt like two; two that felt like ten; four that felt like an hour. The three of Gardener’s “student aides” who had been left with Jack looked like boys who had been caught in a game of Statue Tag. Sonny sat bolt-upright behind Sunlight Gardener’s desk—a place he both relished and coveted. The gun pointed steadily at Jack’s face. Warwick stood by the door to the hall. Casey sat in the brightly lighted booth with the cans on his ears again, staring blankly out through the other glass square, into the darkness of the chapel, seeing nothing, only listening.

“He’s not going to take you with him, you know,” Jack said suddenly. The sound of his voice surprised him a little. It was even and unafraid.

“Shut up, snotface,” Sonny snapped.

“Don’t hold your breath until you hear him honk that horn,” Jack said. “You’ll turn pretty blue.”

“Next thing he says, Andy, break his nose,” Sonny said.

“That’s right,” Jack said. “Break my nose, Andy. Shoot me, Sonny. The cops are coming, Gardener’s gone, and they’re going to find the three of you standing over a corpse in a strait-jacket.” He paused, and amended: “A corpse in a strait-jacket with a broken nose.”

“Hit him, Andy,” Sonny said.

Andy Warwick moved from the door to where Jack sat, strait-jacketed, his pants and underpants puddled around his ankles.

Jack turned his face openly up to Warwick’s.

“That’s right, Andy,” he said. “Hit me. I’ll hold still. Hell of a target.”

Andy Warwick balled up his fist, drew it back . . . and then hesitated. Uncertainty flickered in his eyes.

There was a digital clock on Gardener’s desk. Jack’s eyes shifted to it for a moment, and then back to Warwick’s face. “It’s been four minutes, Andy. How long does it take a guy to back a car out of the garage? Especially when he’s in a hurry?”

Sonny Singer bolted out of Sunlight Gardener’s chair, came around the desk, and charged at Jack. His narrow, secretive face was furious. His fists were balled up. He made as if to hit Jack. Warwick, who was bigger, restrained him. There was trouble on Warwick’s face now—deep trouble.

“Wait,” he said.

“I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t—”

“Why don’t you ask Casey how close those sirens are getting?” Jack asked, and Warwick’s frown deepened. “You’ve been left in the lurch, don’t you know that? Do I have to draw you a picture? It’s going bad here. He knew it—he
smelled
it! He’s leaving you with a bag. From the sounds upstairs—”

Singer broke free of Warwick’s half-hearted hold and clouted Jack on the side of the face. His head rocked to one side, then came slowly back.

“—it’s a big, messy bag,” Jack finished.

“You shut up or I’ll kill you,” Sonny hissed.

The digits on the clock had changed.

“Five minutes now,” Jack said.

“Sonny,” Warwick said with a catch in his voice. “Let’s get him out of that thing.”

“No!” Sonny’s cry was wounded, furious . . . ultimately frightened.

“You know what the Rev’rend said,” Warwick said rapidly. “Before. When the TV people came. Nobody can see the strait-jackets. They wouldn’t understand. They—”

Click!
The intercom.

“Sonny! Andy!” Casey sounded panicky. “They’re closer! The sirens! Christ! What are we supposed to do?”

“Let him out
now!
” Warwick’s face was pallid, except for two red spots high on his cheekbones.

“Reverend Gardener
also
said—”

“I don’t give a fuck
what
he also said!” Warwick’s voice dropped, and now he voiced the child’s deepest fear: “We’re gonna get
caught
, Sonny! We’re gonna get
caught
!”

And Jack thought that now he could hear sirens, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

Sonny’s eyes rolled toward Jack with horrible, trapped indecision. He half-raised the gun and for one moment Jack believed Sonny was really going to shoot him.

But it was six minutes now, and still no honk from the Godhead, announcing that the
deus ex machina
was now boarding for Muncie.

“You let him loose,” Sonny said sulkily to Andy Warwick. “I don’t even want to touch him. He’s a sinner. And he’s a queer.”

Sonny retreated to the desk as Andy Warwick’s fingers fumbled with the strait-jacket’s lacings.

“You better not say anything,” he panted. “You better not say anything or I’ll kill you myself.”

Right arm free.

Left arm free.

They collapsed bonelessly into his lap. Pins and needles coming back.

Warwick hauled the hateful restraint off him, a horror of dun-colored canvas and rawhide lacings. Warwick looked at it in his hands and grimaced. He darted across the room and began to stuff it into Sunlight Gardener’s safe.

“Pull up your pants,” Sonny said. “You think I want to look at your works?”

Jack fumbled up his shorts, got the waistband of his pants, dropped them, and managed to pull them up.

Click!
The intercom.

“Sonny! Andy!” Casey’s voice, panicked. “I
hear
something!”

“Are they turning in?” Sonny almost screamed. Warwick redoubled his efforts to stuff the strait-jacket into the safe. “Are they turning in the front—”

“No! In the chapel! I can’t see nothing but I can hear something in the—”

There was an explosion of shattering glass as Wolf leaped from the darkness of the chapel and into the studio.

18

Casey’s screams as he pushed back from the control board in his wheel-footed chair were hideously amplified.

Inside the studio there was a brief storm of glass. Wolf landed four-footed on the slanted control board and half-climbed, half-slid down it, his eyes throwing a red glare. His long claws turned dials and flicked switches at random. The big reel-to-reel Sony tape recorder started to turn.

“—
COMMUNISTS!”
the voice of Sunlight Gardener bellowed. He was cranked to maximum volume, drowning out Casey’s shrieks and Warwick’s screams to shoot it, Sonny, shoot it,
shoot
it! But the voice of Gardener was not alone. In the background, like music from hell, came the mingled warble of many sirens as Casey’s mikes picked up a caravan of police cruisers turning into the Sunlight Home’s drive.

“OH, THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT’S ALL RIGHT TO LOOK AT THOSE DIRTY BOOKS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T MATTER THAT IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO PRAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T EVEN MATTER THAT THERE ARE SIXTEEN U.S. REPRESENTATIVES AND TWO U.S. GOVERNORS WHO ARE AVOWED HOMOSEXUALS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU—”

Casey’s chair rolled back against the glass wall between the studio and Sunlight Gardener’s office. His head turned, and for one moment they could all see his agonized, bulging eyes. Then Wolf leaped from the edge of the control panel. His head struck Casey’s gut . . . and plowed into it. His jaws began to open and close with the speed of a cane-cutting machine. Blood flew up and splattered the window as Casey began to convulse.