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
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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 lit-
tle, 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
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THE TALISMAN
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 By-ronic, 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 some-
thing even worse than sodomy, however,” Gardener went on
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in his mellow, regretful voice. “Going to places better left to your elders and betters, perhaps.”
Sonny Singer and Hector Bast exchanged a startled, un-
easy 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!”
The boys surged forward on his command like trained
dogs. Jack got in one blow at Peabody, and then his hands
were grabbed and pinned.
“Led me hid imb!” Sonny cried in his new, muffled voice.
He elbowed through the crowd of goggling boys, his eyes glittering with hate. “I wand to hid imb!”
“Not now,” Gardener said. “Later, perhaps. We’ll pray on
it, won’t we, Sonny?”
“Yeah.” The glitter in Sonny’s eyes had become positively
feverish. “I’mb going to bray on id all day.”
Like a man who is finally waking up after a very long
sleep, Wolf grunted and looked around. He saw Jack being
held, saw the hypodermic needle, and peeled Pedersen’s arm
off Jack as if it had been the arm of a child. A surprisingly strong roar came from his throat.
“No! Let him GO!”
Gardener danced in toward Wolf ’s blind side with a fluid
grace that reminded Jack of Osmond turning on the carter in that muddy stableyard. The needle flashed and plunged. Wolf wheeled, bellowing as if he had been stung . . . which, in a way, was just what had happened to him. He swept a hand at
the hypo, but Gardener avoided the sweep neatly.
The boys, who had been looking on in their dazed Sunlight
Home way, now began to stampede for the door, looking
alarmed. They wanted no part of big, simple Wolf in such a
rage.
“Let him GO! Let . . . him . . . let him . . .”