The Talisman Read online

  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-mache 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 t
own 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.

  Jack pistoned his right fist out, not swinging wildly in the Heck Bast style but driving strong and smooth from the elbow. His fist connected with Sonny's nose. There was an audible crunch. Jack felt a moment of satisfaction so perfect it was sublime.

  "There," Jack cried. He pulled his foot out of the john. A great grin suffused his face, and he shot a thought at Wolf just as hard as he could:

  We ain't doing that bad, Wolf--you broke one bastard's hand, and I broke one bastard's nose.

  Sonny stumbled backward, screaming, blood spouting through his fingers.

  Jack came out of the stall, his fists held up in front of him in a pretty fair imitation of John L. Sullivan. "I told you to watch out for me, Sonny. Now I'm gonna teach you to say hallelujah."

  "Heck!" Sonny screamed. "Andy! Casey! Somebody!"

  "Sonny, you sound scared," Jack said. "I don't know why--"

  And then something--something that felt like a full hod of bricks--fell on the back of his neck, driving him forward into one of the mirrors over the sinks. If it had been glass, it would have broken and cut Jack badly. But all the mirrors here were polished steel. There were to be no suicides in the Sunlight Home.

  Jack was able to get one arm up and cushion the blow a little, but he still felt woozy as he turned around and saw Heck Bast grinning at him. Heck Bast had hit him with the cast on his right hand.

  As he looked at Heck, an enormous, sickening realization suddenly dawned on Jack. It was you!

  "That hurt like hell," Heck said, holding his plastered right hand in his left, "but it was worth it, snotface." He started forward.

  It was you! It was you standing over Ferd in that other world, whipping him to death. It was you, you were the gargoyle, it was your Twinner!

  A rage so hot it was like shame swept through Jack. As Heck came in range, Jack leaned back against the sink, grasped its edge tightly in both hands, and shot both of his feet out. They caught Heck Bast squarely in the chest and sent him reeling back into the open stall. The shoe that had come back to Indiana planted in a toilet-bowl left a clear wet print on Heck's white turtleneck sweater. Heck sat down in the toilet with a splash, looking stunned. His cast clunked on porcelain.

  Others were bursting in now. Wolf was trying to get up. His hair hung in his face. Sonny was advancing on him, one hand still clapped over his squirting nose, obviously meaning to kick Wolf back down.

  "Yeah, you go ahead and touch him, Sonny," Jack said softly, and Sonny cringed away.

  Jack caught one of Wolf's arms and helped him up. He saw as if in a dream that Wolf had come back hairier than ever. It's putting him under too much stress, all of this. It's bringing on his Change and Christ this is never going to end, never . . . never. . . .

  He and Wolf backed away from the others--Warwick, Casey,
Pedersen, Peabody, Singer--and toward the rear of the bathroom. Heck was coming out of the stall Jack had kicked him into, and Jack saw something else. They had flipped from the fourth stall down the line. Heck Bast was coming out of the fifth. They had moved just far enough in that other world to come back into a different stall.

  "They was buggering each other in there!" Sonny cried, his words muffled and nasal. "The retard and the pretty boy! Warwick and me caught em with their dicks out!"

  Jack's buttocks touched cold tile. Nowhere else to run. He let go of Wolf, who slumped, dazed and pitiful, and put up his fists.

  "Come on," he said. "Who's first?"

  "You gonna take us all on?" Pedersen asked.

  "If I have to, I will," Jack said. "What are you going to do, put me in traction for Jesus? Come on!"

  A flicker of unease on Pedersen's face; a cramp of outright fear on Casey's. They stopped . . . they actually stopped. Jack felt a moment of wild, stupid hope. The boys stared at him with the unease of men looking at a mad dog which can be brought down . . . but which may bite someone badly first.

  "Stand aside, boys," a powerful, mellow voice said, and they moved aside willingly, relief lighting their faces. It was Reverend Gardener. Reverend Gardener would know how to handle this.

  He came toward the cornered boys, dressed this morning in charcoal slacks and a white satin shirt with full, almost Byronic, sleeves. In his hand he held that black hypodermic case.

  He looked at Jack and sighed. "Do you know what the Bible says about homosexuality, Jack?"

  Jack bared his teeth at him.

  Gardener nodded sadly, as if this were no more than he had expected.

  "Well, all boys are bad," he said. "It's axiomatic."

  He opened the case. The hypo glittered.

  "I think that you and your friend have been doing something even worse than sodomy, however," Gardener went on in his mellow, regretful voice. "Going to places better left to your elders and betters, perhaps."

  Sonny Singer and Hector Bast exchanged a startled, uneasy look.

  "I think that some of this evil . . . this perversity . . . has been my own fault." He took the hypo out, glanced at it, and then took out a vial. He handed the case to Warwick and filled the hypo. "I have never believed in forcing my boys to confess, but without confession there can be no decision for Christ, and with no decision for Christ, evil continues to grow. So, although I regret it deeply, I believe that the time to ask has ended and the time to demand in God's name has come. Pedersen. Peabody. Warwick. Casey. Hold them!"