The Talisman by Stephen King

Acne burned across his cheeks and forehead. This, clearly,

was Bast.

“Well, perhaps it will come to me later,” Sunlight Gar-

dener said. “Heck, come up here and help our new arrivals at the desk, will you?”

Bast lumbered forward, scowling. He made a point of

coming up very close to Wolf before he sidestepped past him, scowling more fiercely all the while—if Wolf had opened his eyes, which he did not, he would have seen no more than the ravaged moonscape of Bast’s forehead and the mean small

eyes, like a bear’s eyes, bulging up at him from beneath crusty brows. Bast switched his gaze to Jack, muttered, “C’mon,”

and flapped a hand toward the desk.

“Registration, then take them up to the laundry for

clothes,” Gardener said in a flat voice. He smiled with

chromelike brilliance at Jack. “Jack Parker,” he said softly. “I

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wonder who you really are, Jack Parker. Bast, make sure

everything is out of his pockets.”

Bast grinned.

Sunlight Gardener drifted across the room toward an obvi-

ously impatient Franky Williams and languidly withdrew a

long leather wallet from his jacket’s inside pocket. Jack saw him begin to count money out into the policeman’s hands.

“Pay attention, snotface,” said the boy behind the desk, and Jack snapped around to face him. The boy was playing with a pencil, the smirk on his face an utterly inadequate disguise for what seemed to Jack’s keyed-up perceptions his characteristic anger—a rage that bubbled far down within him, eternally

stoked. “Can he write?”

“Jeez, I don’t think so,” Jack said.

“Then you’ll have to sign in for him.” Singer shoved two

legal-sized sheets of paper at him. “Print on the top line, write on the bottom one. Where the X’s are.” He fell back into his chair, raising the pencil to his lips, and slumped eloquently into its corner. Jack supposed that was a trick learned from the very Reverend Sunlight Gardener.

JACK PARKER, he printed, and scrawled something like that

at the bottom of the sheet. PHILIP JACK WOLF. Another scrawl, even less like his real handwriting.

“Now you’re wards of the State of Indiana, and that’s what

you’ll be for the next thirty days, unless you decide to stay longer.” Singer twitched the papers back toward himself.

“You’ll be—”

“Decide?” Jack asked. “What do you mean, decide?”

A trifle of red grew smooth beneath Singer’s cheeks. He

jerked his head to one side and seemed to smile. “I guess you don’t know that over sixty percent of our kids are here voluntarily. It’s possible, yeah. You could decide to stay here.”

Jack tried to keep his face expressionless.

Singer’s mouth twitched violently, as if a fishhook had

snagged it. “This is a pretty good place, and if I ever hear you ranking it I’ll pound the shit out of you—it’s the best place you’ve ever been in, I’m sure. I’ll tell you another thing: you got no choice. You have to respect the Sunlight Home. You

understand?”

Jack nodded his head.

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“How about him? Does he?”

Jack looked up at Wolf, who was blinking slowly and

breathing through his mouth.

“I think so.”

“All right. The two of you will be bunkmates. The day

starts at five in the morning, when we have chapel. Field-

work until seven, then breakfast in the dining hall. Back to the field until noon, when we get lunch plus Bible readings—

everybody gets a crack at this, so you better start thinking about what you’ll read. None of that sexy stuff from the Song of Songs, either, unless you want to find out what discipline means. More work after lunch.”

He looked sharply up at Jack. “Hey, don’t think that you

work for nothing at the Sunlight Home. Part of our arrange-

ment with the state is that everybody gets a fair hourly wage, which is set against the cost of keeping you here—clothes and food, electricity, heating, stuff like that. You are credited fifty cents an hour. That means that you earn five dollars a day for the hours you put in—thirty dollars a week. Sundays are spent in the Sunlight Chapel, except for the hour when we actually put on the Sunlight Gardener Gospel Hour.”

The red smoothed itself out under the surface of his skin

again, and Jack nodded in recognition, being more or less

obliged to.

“If you turn out right and if you can talk like a human be-

ing, which most people can’t, then you might get a shot at

OS—Outside Staff. We’ve got two squads of OS, one that

works the streets, selling hymn sheets and flowers and Rev-

erend Gardener’s pamphlets, and the other one on duty at the airport. Anyhow, we got thirty days to turn you two scumbags around and make you see how dirty and filthy and diseased

your crummy lives were before you came here, and this is

where we start, right now exactly.”

Singer stood up, his face the color of a blazing autumn

leaf, and delicately set the tips of his fingers atop his desk.

“Empty your pockets. Right now.”

“Right here and now,” Wolf mumbled, as if by rote.

“TURN EM OUT!” Singer shouted. “I WANT TO SEE IT

ALL!”

Bast stepped up beside Wolf. Reverend Gardener, having

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seen Franky Williams to his car, drifted expressively into

Jack’s vicinity.

“Personal possessions tend to tie our boys too much to the

past, we’ve found,” Gardener purred to Jack. “Destructive.

We find this a very helpful tool.”

“EMPTY YOUR POCKETS!” Singer bawled, now nearly

in a straightforward rage.

Jack pulled from his pockets the random detritus of his

time on the road. A red handkerchief Elbert Palamountain’s

wife had given him when she’d seen him wipe his nose on his sleeve, two matchbooks, the few dollars and scattered change that was all of his money—a total of six dollars and forty-two cents—the key to room 407 of the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He closed his fingers over the three objects he intended to keep. “I guess you want my pack, too,” he said.

“Sure, you sorry little fart,” Singer ranted, “of course we want your foul backpack, but first we want whatever you’re

trying to hide. Get it out—right now.”

Reluctantly Jack took Speedy’s guitar-pick, the croaker

marble, and the big wheel of the silver dollar from his pocket and put them in the nest of the handkerchief. “They’re just good-luck stuff.”

Singer snatched up the pick. “Hey, what’s this? I mean,

what is it?”

“Fingerpick.”

“Yeah, sure.” Singer turned it over in his fingers, sniffed it.

If he had bitten it, Jack would have slugged him in the face.

“Fingerpick. You tellin me the truth?”

“A friend of mine gave it to me,” Jack said, and suddenly

felt as lonely and adrift as he ever had during these weeks of travelling. He thought of Snowball outside the shopping mall, who had looked at him with Speedy’s eyes, who in some fashion Jack did not understand had actually been Speedy Parker.

Whose name he had just adopted for his own.

“Bet he stole it,” Singer said to no one in particular, and dropped the pick back into the handkerchief beside the coin and the marble. “Now the knapsack.” When Jack had unshouldered the backpack, handed it over, Singer pawed

through it for some minutes in growing distaste and frustration. The distaste was caused by the condition of the few

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clothes Jack had left, the frustration by the reluctance of the pack to yield up any drugs.

Speedy, where are you now?

“He’s not holding,” Singer complained. “You think we

should do a skin search?”

Gardener shook his head. “Let us see what we can learn

from Mr. Wolf.”

Bast shouldered up even closer. Singer said, “Well?”

“He doesn’t have anything in his pockets,” Jack said.

“I want those pockets EMPTY! EMPTY!” Singer yelled.

“ON THE TABLE!”

Wolf tucked his chin into his chest and clamped his eyes

shut.

“You don’t have anything in your pockets, do you?” Jack

asked.

Wolf nodded once, very slowly.

“He’s holding! The dummy’s holding!” Singer crowed.

“Come on, you big dumb idiot, get the stuff out on the table.”

He clapped his hands sharply together twice. “Oh wow,

Williams never searched him! Fairchild never did! This is

incredible—they’re going to look like such morons.”

Bast shoved his face up to Wolf ’s and snarled, “If you

don’t empty your pockets onto that table in a hurry, I’m going to tear your face off.”

Jack softly said, “Do it, Wolf.”

Wolf groaned. Then he removed his balled right hand from

its overall pocket. He leaned over the desk, brought his hand forward, and opened his fingers. Three wooden matches and

two small water-polished stones, grained and straited and colorful, fell out onto the leather. When his left hand opened, two more pretty little stones rolled alongside the others.