Heck would have given anything in the world just then to
be bored again.
12
Jack was sitting in the chair again, his burned and throbbing hands once more pressed against the small of his back—
Sonny had laced the strait-jacket cruelly tight and then unbuttoned Jack’s chinos and pushed them down.
“Now,” Gardener said, holding his Zippo up where Jack
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 411
A Collision of Worlds
411
could see it. “You listen to me, Jack, and listen well. I’m going to begin asking you questions again. And if you don’t answer them well and truly, then buggery is one temptation you will never have to worry about being led into again.”
Sonny Singer giggled wildly at this. That muddy, half-dead
look of lust was back in his eyes again. He stared at Jack’s face with a kind of sickly greed.
“Reverend Gardener! Reverend Gardener!” It was Casey,
and Casey sounded distressed. Jack opened his eyes again.
“Some kind of hooraw going on upstairs!”
“I don’t want to be bothered now.”
“Donny Keegan’s laughing like a loon in the kitchen!
And—”
“He said he didn’t want to be bothered now,” Sonny said.
“Didn’t you hear him?”
But Casey was too dismayed to stop. “—and it sounds like
there’s a riot going on in the common room! Yelling! Screaming! And it sounds like—”
Suddenly, Jack’s mind filled with a bellow of incredible
force and vitality:
Jacky! Where are you? Wolf! Where are you right here and now?
“—there’s a dog-pack or something loose up there!”
Gardener was looking at Casey now, eyes narrow, lips
pressed tightly together.
Gardener’s office! Downstairs! Where we were before!
DOWN-side, Jacky?
Stairs! Down-STAIRS, Wolf!
Right here and now!
That was it; Wolf was gone from his head. From upstairs,
Jack heard a thump and a scream.
“Reverend Gardener?” Casey asked. His normally flushed
face was deeply pale. “Reverend Gardener, what is it?
What—”
“Shut up!” Gardener said, and Casey recoiled as if slapped, eyes wide and hurt, considerable jowls trembling. Gardener
brushed past him and went to the safe. From it he took an outsized pistol which he stuck in his belt. For the first time, the Reverend Sunlight Gardener looked scared and baffled.
Upstairs, there was a dim shattering sound, followed by a
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 412
412
THE TALISMAN
screech. The eyes of Singer, Warwick, and Casey all turned
nervously upward—they looked like nervous bomb-shelter
occupants listening to a growing whistle above them.
Gardener looked at Jack. A grin surfaced on his face, the
corners of his mouth twitching irregularly, as if strings were attached to them, strings that were being pulled by a pup-peteer who wasn’t particularly good at his job.
“He’ll come here, won’t he?” Sunlight Gardener said. He
nodded as if Jack had answered. “He’ll come . . . but I don’t think he’ll leave.”
13
Wolf leaped. Heck Bast was able to get his right hand in its plaster cast up in front of his throat. There was a hot flash of pain, a brittle crunch, and a puff of plaster-dust as Wolf bit the cast—and what was left of the hand inside it—off. Heck
looked stupidly down at where it had been. Blood jetted from his wrist. It soaked his white turtleneck with bright, hot
warmth.
“Please,” Heck whined. “Please, please, don’t—”
Wolf spat out the hand. His head moved forward with the
speed of a striking snake. Heck felt a dim pulling sensation as Wolf tore his throat open, and then he knew no more.
14
As he bolted out of the common room, Peabody skidded in
Pedersen’s blood, went down to one knee, got up, and then ran down the first-floor hall as fast as he could go, vomiting all over himself as he went. Kids were running everywhere,
shrieking in panic. Peabody’s own panic was not quite that
complete. He remembered what he was supposed to do in ex-
treme situations—although he didn’t think anyone had ever
envisioned a situation as extreme as this; he had an idea that Reverend Gardener had been thinking in terms of a kid going bugfuck and cutting another kid up, something like that.
Beyond the parlor where new boys were brought when
they first came to the Sunlight Home was a small upstairs office used only by the thugs Gardener referred to as his “student aides.”
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 413
A Collision of Worlds
413
Peabody locked himself in this room, picked up the phone,
and dialled an emergency number. A moment later he was
talking to Franky Williams.
“Peabody, at the Sunlight Home,” he said. “You ought to
get up here with as many police as you can get, Officer
Williams. All hell has—”
Outside he heard a wailing shriek followed by a crash of
breaking wood. There was a snarling, barking roar, and the
shriek was cut off.
“—has busted loose up here,” he finished.
“What kind of hell?” Williams asked impatiently. “Lemme
talk to Gardener.”
“I don’t know where the Reverend is, but he’d want you up
here. There’s people dead. Kids dead.”
“What?”
“Just get up here with a lot of men,” Peabody said. “And a
lot of guns.”
Another scream. The crash-thud of something heavy—the
old highboy in the front hall, probably—being overturned.
“Machine-guns, if you can find them.”
A crystalline jangle as the big chandelier in the hall came down. Peabody cringed. It sounded like that monster was
tearing the whole place apart with its bare hands.
“Hell, bring a nuke if you can,” Peabody said, beginning to blubber.
“What—”
Peabody hung up before Williams could finish. He crawled
into the kneehole under the desk. Wrapped his arms around
his head. And began to pray assiduously that all of this should prove to be only a dream—the worst fucking nightmare he
had ever had.
15
Wolf raged along the first-floor hall between the common
room and the front door, pausing only to overturn the high-
boy, then to leap easily up and grab the chandelier. He swung on it like Tarzan until it tore out of the ceiling and spilled diamonds of crystal all over the hallway runner.
DOWN-side. Jacky was on the DOWN-side. Now . . .
which side was that?
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 414
414
THE TALISMAN
A boy who was no longer able to stand the agonizing ten-
sion of waiting for the thing to be gone jerked open the door of the closet where he had been hiding and bolted for the
stairs. Wolf grabbed him and threw him the length of the hall.
The boy struck the closed kitchen door with a bone-breaking thud and fell in a heap.
Wolf ’s head swam with the intoxicating odor of fresh-
spilled blood. His hair hung in bloody dreadlocks around his jaw and muzzle. He tried to hold on to thought, but it was
hard—hard. He had to find Jacky very quickly now, before he lost the ability to think completely.
He raced back toward the kitchen, where he had come in,
dropping to all fours again because movement was faster and easier that way . . . and suddenly, passing a closed door, he remembered. The narrow place. It had been like going down
into a grave. The smell, wet and heavy in his throat—
DOWN-side. Behind that door. Right here and now!
“Wolf!” he cried, although the boys cringing in their hiding places on the first and second floors heard only a rising, triumphant howl. He raised both of the heavily muscled battering rams that had been his arms and drove them into the
door. It burst open in the middle, vomiting splinters down
the stairwell. Wolf drove his way through, and yes, here was the narrow place, like a throat; here was the way to the place where the White Man had told his lies while Jack and the
Weaker Wolf had to sit and listen.
Jack was down there now. Wolf could smell him.
But he also smelled the White Man . . . and gunpowder.
Careful . . .
Oh yes. Wolfs knew careful. Wolfs could run and tear and
kill, but when they had to be . . . Wolfs knew careful.
He went down the stairs on all fours, silent as oiled smoke, eyes as red as brake lights.
16
Gardener was becoming steadily more nervous; to Jack he
looked like a man who was entering the freakout zone. His
eyes moved jerkily in a triple play, from the studio where
Casey was frantically listening to Jack, and then to the closed door which gave on the hall.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:05 PM Page 415
A Collision of Worlds
415
Most of the noises from upstairs had stopped some time
ago.
Now Sonny Singer started for the door. “I’ll go up and see
what’s—”
“You’re not going anywhere! Come back here!”
Sonny winced as if Gardener had struck him.
“What the matter, Reverend Gardener?” Jack asked. “You