The Talisman by Stephen King

Jack looked around at the dreary, indrawn, tired, blank

faces—and thought how they would light, how they would

kindle, if Sunlight Gardener strode in here—if he strode in here right here and now.

They’d do it, too, if Sunlight Gardener asked them to.

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They’d drink it, and then they’d hold me and Wolf, and they’d pour it down our throats as well. Ferd was right—they see something on my face, or in it, something that came into me in the Territories, and maybe they do love me a little . . . I guess that’s what pulled Heck Bast’s bell-rope anyway. That slob isn’t used to loving anything or anyone. So, yeah, maybe they do love me a little . . . but they love him a lot more.

They’d do it. They’re mad.

Ferd could have told him that, and, sitting there in the common room, Jack supposed that Ferd had told him.

He told Jack he had been committed to the Sunlight Home

by his parents, born-again Christians who fell down on their knees in the living room whenever anyone on The 700 Club began to say a prayer. Neither of them had understood Ferd, who was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth. They

thought Ferd must be a child of the devil—a communistic,

radical humanist changeling. When he ran away for the fourth time and was bagged by none other than Franky Williams, his parents came to the Sunlight Home—where Ferd had of

course been stashed—and fell in love with Sunlight Gardener on sight. Here was the answer to all the problems their bright, troublesome, rebellious son had caused them. Sunlight Gardener would educate their son toward the Lord. Sunlight

Gardener would show him the error of his ways. Sunlight

Gardener would take him off their hands and get him off the streets of Anderson.

“They saw that story about the Sunlight Home on Sunday

Report,” Ferd told Jack. “They sent me a postcard saying God would punish liars and false prophets in a lake of fire. I wrote them back—Rudolph in the kitchen smuggled the letter out

for me. Dolph’s a pretty good guy.” He paused. “You know

what the Ferd Janklow definition of a good guy is, Jack?”

“No.”

“One who stays bought,” Ferd said, and laughed a cynical,

hurt laugh. “Two bucks buys Dolph’s mailman services. So I

wrote them a letter and said that if God punished liars the way they said, then I hoped Sunlight Gardener could find a set of asbestos longjohns in the other world, because he was lying about what goes on here faster than a horse can trot. Everything they had on Sunday Report—the rumors about the strait-jackets and about the Box—it was all true. Oh, they

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couldn’t prove it. The guy’s a nut, Jack, but he’s a smart nut. If you ever make a mistake about that, he’ll put a real hurt on you and on Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy for good measure.”

Jack said, “Those Sunday Report guys are usually pretty good at catching people with their hands in the pork barrel. At least, that’s what my mom says.”

“Oh, he was scared. He got real shrill and shrieky. Ever see Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny? He was like that for a week before they showed up. When they finally got here he was all sweetness and reason, but the week before was a living hell. Mr. Ice Cream was shitting in his pants. That was the week he kicked Benny Woodruff down the stairs from the

third floor because he caught him with a Superman comic.

Benny was out cold for three hours, and he couldn’t quite get it straight who he was or where he was until that night.”

Ferd paused.

“He knew they were coming. Same as he always knows

when the state inspectors are going to pull a surprise inspection. He hid the strait-jackets in the attic and made believe the Box was a hay-drying shed.”

Ferd’s cynical, hurt laugh again.

“Know what my folks did, Jack? They sent Sunny Gar-

dener a Xerox of my letter to them. ‘For my own good,’ my

pop says in his next letter to me. And guess what? It’s Ferd’s turn in the Box, courtesy of my own folks!”

The hurt laugh again.

“Tell you one other thing. He wasn’t kidding at night-

chapel. The kids that talked to the Sunday Report people all disappeared—the ones he could get hold of, anyway.”

The way Ferd himself has disappeared now, Jack thought, watching Wolf brood across the room. He shivered. His hands felt very, very cold.

Your friend Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy.

Was Wolf starting to look hairier again? So soon? Surely

not. But that was coming of course—it was as relentless as

the tides.

And by the way, Jack, while we’re just sitting around here worrying about the dangers of just sitting around here, how’s your mother? How’s Darling Lil, Queen of the Bs? Losing weight? Having pain? Is she finally starting to feel it eat into her with its sharp, ratty little teeth as you sit here growing

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roots in this weird prison? Is Morgan maybe getting ready to wind up the lightning and give the cancer a hand?

He had been shocked at the idea of strait-jackets, and al-

though he had seen the Box—a big ugly iron thing which sat

in the Home’s back yard like a weird abandoned refrigera-

tor—he couldn’t believe that Gardener actually put boys in it.

Ferd had slowly convinced him, talking in a low voice as they harvested rocks in Far Field.

“He’s got a great setup here,” Ferd had said. “It’s a license to coin money. His religious shows play all over the midwest on the radio and over most of the country on cable TV and the indy stations. We’re his captive audience. We sound great on the radio and we look great on the tube—when Roy Owdersfelt isn’t milking that fucking pimple on the end of his nose, that is. He’s got Casey, his pet radio and TV producer—Casey videotapes every morning-chapel and audiotapes every night-chapel. He cuts all the sound and picture together and hypes everything until Gardener looks like Billy Graham and us

guys sound like the crowd in Yankee Stadium during the sev-

enth game of the World Series. That isn’t all Casey does, either. He’s the house genius. You see the bug in your room?

Casey set up the bugs. Everything feeds into his control

room, and the only way into that control room is through Gardener’s private office. The bugs are voice-actuated, so he

doesn’t waste any tape. Anything juicy he saves for Sunlight Gardener. I’ve heard Casey put a blue box on Gardener’s

phone so he can make long-distance phone calls free, and I

know damned well he’s spliced a line into the pay-TV cable

that goes by out front. You like the idea of Mr. Ice Cream settling back and watching a big double feature on Cinemax af-

ter a hard day of selling Jesus to the masses? I like it. This guy is as American as spinner hubcaps, Jack, and here in Indiana they love him almost as much as they love high-school basketball.”

Ferd hawked back snot, grimaced, twisted his head, and

spat into the dirt.

“You’re kidding,” Jack said.

“Ferd Janklow never kids about the Marching Morons of

the Sunlight Home,” Ferd said solemnly. “He’s rich, he

doesn’t have to declare any of it to the Internal Revenue, he’s

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got the local school board buffaloed—I mean, they’re scared to death of him; there’s this one woman who practically skitters every time she’s out here, looks like she’d like to give him the sign against the evil eye, or something—and like I said, he always seems to know when someone from the State Education Board is going to pay us a surprise visit. We clean this place from top to bottom, Bast the Bastard takes the canvas overcoats up to the attic, and the Box gets filled with hay from the barn. And when they come, we’re always in class. How

many classes you been in since you landed here in Indiana’s version of the Love Boat, Jack?”

“None,” Jack said.

“None!” Ferd agreed, delighted. He laughed his cynical,

hurt laugh again—that laugh said, Guess what I found out when I turned eight or so? I found out that I was getting a royal fucking from life, and that things weren’t going to change in a hurry. Or maybe they were never going to

change. And although it bums me out, it also has its funny side. You know what I mean, jellybean?

4

Such was the run of Jack’s thoughts when hard fingers sud-