The Talisman by Stephen King

again.

“Bad, Jack! Wolf! Jason! Bad! Bad, bad—”

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Doors were opening all up and down the hall. Jack could

hear the rumble of many feet dressed in blocky Sunlight

Home shoes.

He got down from the top bunk, forcing himself to move.

He felt cross-grained to reality—not awake, not really asleep, either. Moving across the mean little room to Wolf was like moving through Karo syrup instead of air.

He felt so tired now . . . so very tired.

“Wolf,” he said. “Wolf, stop it.”

“Can’t, Jacky!” Wolf sobbed. His arms were still wrapped

around his head, as if to keep it from exploding.

“You got to, Wolf. We have to go out in the hall now.”

“Can’t, Jacky,” Wolf sobbed, “it’s a bad place, bad

smells. . . .”

From the hallway, someone—Jack thought it was Heck

Bast—yelled, “Out for confession!”

“Out for confession!” someone else yelled, and they all

took up the chant: Out for confession! Out for confession! It was like some weird football cheer.

“If we’re going to get out of here with our skins on, we’ve got to stay cool.”

“Can’t, Jacky, can’t stay cool, bad. . . .”

Their door was going to open in a minute and Bast or

Sonny Singer would be there . . . maybe both. They were not

“out for confession,” whatever that was, and while newcom-

ers to the Sunlight Home might be allowed a few screw-ups

during their orientation period, Jack thought their chances for escape would be better if they blended in as completely as

they could as soon as they could. With Wolf, that wasn’t going to be easy. Christ, I’m sorry I got you into this, big guy, Jack thought. But the situation is what the situation is. And if we can’t ride it, it’s gonna ride us down. So if I’m hard with you, it’s for your own good. He added miserably to himself, I hope.

“Wolf,” he whispered, “do you want Singer to start beating

on me again?”

“No, Jack, no. . . .”

“Then you better come out in the hall with me,” Jack said.

“You have to remember that what you do is going to have a lot to do with how Singer and that guy Bast treat me. Singer

slapped me around because of your stones—”

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“Someone might slap him around,” Wolf said. His voice was low and mild, but his eyes suddenly narrowed, flared orange. For a moment Jack saw the gleam of white teeth be-

tween Wolf ’s lips—not as if Wolf had grinned, but as if his teeth had grown.

“Don’t even think of that,” Jack said grimly. “It’ll only

makes things worse.”

Wolf ’s arms fell away from his head. “Jack, I don’t

know. . . .”

“Will you try?” Jack asked. He threw another urgent

glance at the door.

“I’ll try,” Wolf whispered shakily. Tears shone in his eyes.

2

The upstairs corridor should have been bright with late-

afternoon light, but it wasn’t. It was as if some sort of filtering device had been fitted over the windows at the end of the corridor so that the boys could see out—out to where the real sunlight was—but that the light itself wasn’t allowed to enter.

It seemed to drop dead on the narrow inner sills of those high Victorian windows.

There were forty boys standing in front of twenty doors,

ten on each side. Jack and Wolf were by far the last to appear, but their lateness was not noticed. Singer, Bast, and two other boys had found someone to rag and could not be bothered

with taking attendance.

Their victim was a narrow-chested, bespectacled kid of

maybe fifteen. He was standing at a sorry approximation of

attention with his chinos puddled around his black shoes. He wore no underpants.

“Have you stopped it yet?” Singer asked.

“I—”

“Shut up!” One of the other boys with Singer and Bast yelled this last. The four of them wore blue jeans instead of chinos, and clean white turtleneck sweaters. Jack learned

soon enough that the fellow who had just shouted was War-

wick. The fat fourth was Casey.

“When we want you to talk, we’ll ask you!” Warwick

shouted now. “You still whipping your weasel, Morton?”

Morton trembled and said nothing.

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“ANSWER HIM!” Casey shrieked. He was a tubby boy

who looked a little bit like a malevolent Tweedledum.

“No,” Morton whispered.

“WHAT? SPEAK UP!” Singer yelled.

“No!” Morton moaned.

“If you can stop for a whole week, you’ll get your under-

pants back,” Singer said with the air of one conferring a great favor on an undeserving subject. “Now pull up your pants,

you little creep.”

Morton, sniffling, bent over and pulled up his trousers.

The boys went down to confession and supper.

3

Confession was held in a large bare-walled room across the

way from the dining hall. The maddening smells of baked

beans and hotdogs drifted across, and Jack could see Wolf ’s nostrils flaring rhythmically. For the first time that day the dull expression left his eyes and he began to look interested.

Jack was more wary of “confession” than he had let on to

Wolf. Lying in his upper bunk with his hands behind his head, he had seen a black something in the upper corner of the

room. He had thought for a moment or two that it was some

sort of a dead beetle, or the husk of its shell—he thought if he got closer he would perhaps see the spider’s web the thing

was caught in. It had been a bug, all right, but not the organic kind. It was a small, old-fashioned-looking microphone

gadget, screwed into the wall with an eyebolt. A cord snaked from the back of it and through a ragged hole in the plaster.

There had been no real effort to conceal it. Just part of the service, boys. Sunlight Gardener Listens Better.

After seeing the bug, after the ugly little scene with Mor-

ton in the hall, he had expected confession to be an angry, perhaps scary, adversary situation. Someone, possibly Sunlight Gardener himself, more probably Sonny Singer or Hec-

tor Bast, would try to get him to admit that he had used drugs on the road, that he had broken into places in the middle of the night and robbed while on the road, that he had spit on every sidewalk he could find while on the road, and played

with himself after a hard day on the road. If he hadn’t done any of those things, they would keep after him until he admit-

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ted them, anyway. They would try to break him. Jack thought he could hold up under such treatment, but he wasn’t sure

Wolf could.

But what was most disturbing about confession was the ea-

gerness with which the boys in the Home greeted it.

The inner cadre—the boys in the white turtlenecks—sat

down near the front of the room. Jack looked around and saw the others looking toward the open door with a sort of witless anticipation. He thought it must be supper they were anticipating—it smelled very damn good, all right, especially after all those weeks of pick-up hamburgers interspersed with large helpings of nothing at all. Then Sunlight Gardener walked

briskly in and Jack saw the expressions of anticipation change to looks of gratification. Apparently it hadn’t been dinner they had been looking forward to, after all. Morton, who had been cowering in the upper hallway with his pants puddled around his ankles only fifteen minutes ago, looked almost exalted.

The boys got to their feet. Wolf sat, nostrils flaring, looking puzzled and frightened, until Jack grabbed a fistful of shirt and pulled him up.

“Do what they do, Wolf,” he muttered.

“Sit down, boys,” Gardener said, smiling. “Sit down,

please.”

They sat. Gardener was wearing faded blue jeans over-

topped with an open-throated shirt of blinding white silk. He looked at them, smiling benignly. The boys looked back worshipfully, for the most part. Jack saw one boy—wavy brown

hair that came to a deep widow’s peak on his brow, receding chin, delicate little hands as pale as Uncle Tommy’s Delftware—turn aside and cup his mouth to hide a sneer, and he,

Jack, felt some encouragement. Apparently not everyone’s

head had been blown by whatever was going on here . . . but a lot of heads had been. Wide-open they had been blown, from the way things looked. The fellow with the great buck teeth was looking at Sunlight Gardener adoringly.

“Let us pray. Heck, will you lead us?”

Heck did. He prayed fast and mechanically. It was like lis-

tening to a Dial-a-Prayer recorded by a dyslexic. After asking God to favor them in the days and weeks ahead, to forgive