Hampshire?
Hello, Mr. Sloat. I hope I’m not disturbing you, but the local police have brought me a boy—two boys, actually, but it’s only the intelligent one I’m concerned with. I seem to know him. Or perhaps it’s my . . . ah, my other self who knows him.
He gives his name as Jack Parker, but . . . what? Describe him? All right. . . .
And the balloon had gone up.
Please don’t chatter at me, Sonny. Mr. Sloat arrives in Muncie at ten-fifteen . . .
Time had almost run out.
I told you to get your ass home, Jack . . . too late now.
All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.
Jack raised his head a tiny bit and looked across the room.
Gardener and Sonny Singer sat together on the far side of the desk in Gardener’s basement office. Sonny was punching the
keys of an adding machine as Gardener gave him set after set of figures, each figure following the name of an Outside
Staffer, each name neatly set in alphabetical order. In front of Sunlight Gardener was a ledger, a long steel file-box, and an untidy stack of envelopes. As Gardener held one of these envelopes up to read the amount scribbled on the front, Jack
was able to see the back. There was a drawing of two happy
children, each carrying a Bible, skipping down the road to-
ward a church, hand-in-hand. Written below them was I’LL BE
A SUNBEAM FOR JESUS.
“Temkin. A hundred and six dollars even.” The envelope
went into the steel file-box with the others that had been
recorded.
“I think he’s been skimming again,” Sonny said.
“God sees the truth but waits,” Gardener said mildly. “Vic-
tor’s all right. Now shut up and let’s get this done before six.”
Sonny punched the keys.
The picture of Jesus walking on the water had been swung
outward, revealing a safe behind it. The safe was open.
Jack saw that there were other things of interest on Sunlight Gardener’s desk: two envelopes, one marked JACK PARKER and
the other PHILIP JACK WOLFE. And his good old pack.
The third thing was Sunlight Gardener’s bunch of keys.
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From the keys, Jack’s eyes moved to the locked door on the
left-hand side of the room—Gardener’s private exit to the outside, he knew. If only there was a way—
“Yellin. Sixty-two dollars and nineteen cents.”
Gardener sighed, put the last envelope into the long steel
tray, and closed his ledger. “Apparently Heck was right. I believe our dear friend Mr. Jack Parker has awakened.” He got up, came around the desk, and walked toward Jack. His mad,
hazy eyes glittered. He reached into his pocket and came out with a lighter. Jack felt a panic rise inside him at the sight of it. “Only your name isn’t really Parker at all, is it, my dear boy? Your real name is Sawyer, isn’t it? Oh yes, Sawyer. And someone with a great interest in you is going to arrive very, very soon. And we’ll have all sorts of interesting things to tell him, won’t we?”
Sunlight Gardener tittered and flicked back the Zippo’s hood, revealing the blackened wheel, the smoke-darkened wick.
“Confession is so good for the soul,” he whispered, and
struck a light.
4
Thud.
“What was that?” Rudolph asked, looking up from his
bank of double-ovens. Supper—fifteen large turkey pies—
was coming along nicely.
“What was what?” George Irwinson asked.
At the sink, where he was peeling potatoes, Donny Keegan
uttered his loud yuck-yuck of a laugh.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Irwinson said.
Donny laughed again.
Rudolph looked at him, irritated. “You gonna peel those
goddam potatoes down to nothing, you idiot?”
“Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck!”
Thud!
“There, you heard it that time, didn’t you?”
Irwinson only shook his head.
Rudolph was suddenly afraid. Those sounds were coming
from the Box—which, of course, he was supposed to believe
was a hay-drying shed. Some fat chance. That big boy was in the Box—the one they were saying had been caught in
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sodomy that morning with his friend, the one who had tried to bribe their way out only the day before. They said the big boy had shown a mean streak before Bast whopped him one . . .
and some of them were also saying that the big boy hadn’t just broken Bast’s hand; they were saying he had squeezed it to a pulp. That was a lie, of course, had to be, but—
THUD!
This time Irwinson looked around. And suddenly Rudolph
decided he needed to go to the bathroom. And that maybe he
would go all the way up to the third floor to do his business.
And not come out for two, maybe three hours. He felt the approach of black work—very black work.
THUD-THUD!
Fuck the turkey pies.
Rudolph took off his apron, tossed it on the counter over
the salt cod he had been freshening for tomorrow night’s supper, and started out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Irwinson asked. His voice was
suddenly too high. It trembled. Donny Keegan went right on
furiously peeling potatoes the size of Nerf footballs down to potatoes the size of Spalding golfballs, his dank hair hanging in his face.
THUD! THUD! THUD- THUD-THUD!
Rudolph didn’t answer Irwinson’s question, and by the
time he hit the second-floor stairs, he was nearly running. It was hard times in Indiana, work was scarce, and Sunlight
Gardener paid cash.
All the same, Rudolph had begun to wonder if the time to
look for a new job had not come, could you say get me outta here.
5
THUD!
The bolt at the top of the Box’s Dutch-oven-type door
snapped in two. For a moment there was a dark gap between
the Box and the door.
Silence for a time. Then:
THUD!
The bottom bolt creaked, bent.
THUD!
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It snapped.
The door of the box creaked open on its big, clumsy home-
made hinges. Two huge, heavily pelted feet poked out, soles up. Long claws dug into the dust.
Wolf started to work his way out.
6
Back and forth the flame went in front of Jack’s eyes; back and forth, back and forth. Sunlight Gardener looked like a
cross between a stage hypnotist and some old-time actor playing the lead in the biography of a Great Scientist on The Late Late Show. Paul Muni, maybe. It was funny—if he hadn’t been so terrified, Jack would have laughed. And maybe he
would laugh, anyway.
“Now I have a few questions for you, and you are going to
answer them,” Gardener said. “Mr. Morgan could get the an-
swers out of you himself—oh, easily, indubitably!—but I prefer not to put him to the trouble. So . . . how long have you been able to Migrate?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How long have you been able to Migrate to the Territories?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The flame came closer.
“Where’s the nigger?”
“Who?”
“The nigger, the nigger!” Gardener shrieked. “Parker,
Parkus, whatever he calls himself! Where is he?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Sonny! Andy!” Gardener screamed. “Unlace his left
hand. Hold it out to me.”
Warwick bent over Jack’s shoulder and did something. A
moment later they were peeling Jack’s hand away from the
small of his back. It tingled with pins and needles, waking up.
Jack tried to struggle, but it was useless. They held his hand out.
“Now spread his fingers open.”
Sonny pulled Jack’s ring finger and his pinky in one direc-
tion; Warwick pulled his pointer and middle finger in the
other. A moment later, Gardener had applied the Zippo’s
flame to the webbing at the base of the V they had created.
The pain was exquisite, bolting up his left arm and from there
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seeming to fill his whole body. A sweet, charring smell drifted up. Himself. Burning. Himself.
After an eternity, Gardener pulled the Zippo back and
snapped it shut. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead. He was panting.
“Devils scream before they come out,” he said. “Oh yes in-
deed they do. Don’t they, boys?”
“Yes, praise God,” Warwick said.
“You pounded that nail,” Sonny said.
“Oh yes, I know it. Yes indeed I do. I know the secrets of
both boys and devils.” Gardener tittered, then leaned forward until his face was an inch from Jack’s. The cloying scent of cologne filled Jack’s nose. Terrible as it was, he thought it was quite a lot better than his own burning flesh. “Now, Jack. How long have you been Migrating? Where is the nigger? How
much does your mother know? Who have you told? What has
the nigger told you? We’ll start with those.”