The Talisman

26

Wolf in the Box

1

Jack was awake for quite a long time before they knew he was awake, but he became aware of who he was and what had happened and what his situation was now only by degrees—he was, in a way, like the soldier who has survived a fierce and prolonged artillery barrage. His arm throbbed where Gardener had punched the hypodermic into it. His head ached so badly that his very eyeballs seemed to pulse. He was ragingly thirsty.

He advanced a step up the ladder of awareness when he tried to touch the hurt place on his upper right arm with his left hand. He couldn’t do it. And the reason he couldn’t do it was that his arms were somehow wrapped around himself. He could smell old, mouldy canvas—it was the smell of a Boy Scout tent found in an attic after many dark years. It was only then (although he had been looking at it stupidly through his mostly lidded eyes for the last ten minutes) that he understood what he was wearing. It was a strait-jacket.

Ferd would have figured that out quicker, Jack-O, he thought, and thinking of Ferd had a focusing effect on his mind in spite of the crushing headache. He stirred a little and the bolts of pain in his head and the throb in his arm made him moan. He couldn’t help it.

Heck Bast: “He’s waking up.”

Sunlight Gardener: “No, he’s not. I gave him a shot big enough to paralyze a bull alligator. He’ll be out until nine tonight at the earliest. He’s just dreaming a little. Heck, I want you to go up and hear the boys’ confessions tonight. Tell them there will be no night chapel; I’ve got a plane to meet, and that’s just the start of what’s probably going to be a very long night. Sonny, you stay and help me do the bookwork.”

Heck: “It sure sounded like he was waking up.”

Sunlight: “Go on, Heck. And have Bobby Peabody check on Wolf.”

Sonny (snickering): “He doesn’t like it in there much, does he?”

Ah, Wolf, they put you back in the Box, Jack mourned. I’m sorry . . . my fault . . . all of this is my fault. . . .

“The hellbound rarely care much for the machinery of salvation,” Jack heard Sunlight Gardener say. “When the devils inside them start to die, they go out screaming. Go on now, Heck.”

“Yes sir, Reverend Gardener.”

Jack heard but did not see Heck as he lumbered out. He did not as yet dare to look up.

2

Stuffed into the crudely made, home-welded and home-bolted Box like a victim of premature burial in an iron coffin, Wolf had howled the day away, battering his fists bloody against the sides of the Box, kicking with his feet at the double-bolted, Dutch-oven-type door at the coffin’s foot until the jolts of pain travelling up his legs made his crotch ache. He wasn’t going to get out battering with his fists or kicking with his feet, he knew that, just as he knew they weren’t going to let him out just because he screamed to be let out. But he couldn’t help it. Wolfs hated being shut up above all things.

His screams carried through the Sunlight Home’s immediate grounds and even into the near fields. The boys who heard them glanced at each other nervously and said nothing.

“I seen him in the bathroom this morning, and he turned mean,” Roy Owdersfelt confided to Morton in a low, nervous voice.

“Was they queerin off, like Sonny said?” Morton asked.

Another Wolf-howl rose from the squat iron Box, and both boys glanced toward it.

“And how!” Roy said eagerly. “I didn’t exactly see it because I’m short, but Buster Oates was right up front and he said that big retarded boy had him a whanger the size of a Akron fire-plug. That’s what he said.”

“Jesus!” Morton said respectfully, thinking perhaps of his own substandard whanger.

Wolf howled all day, but as the sun began to go down, he stopped. The boys found the new silence ominous. They looked at one another often, and even more often, and with more unease, toward that rectangle of iron standing in the center of a bald patch in the Home’s back yard. The Box was six feet long and three feet high—except for the crude square cut in the west side and covered with heavy-gauge steel mesh, an iron coffin was exactly what it looked like. What was going on in there? they wondered. And even during confession, during which time the boys were usually held rapt, every other consideration forgotten, eyes turned toward the common room’s one window, even though that window looked on the side of the house directly opposite the Box.

What’s going on in there?

Hector Bast knew that their minds were not on confession and it exasperated him, but he was unable to bring them around because he did not know what precisely was wrong. A feeling of chilly expectation had gripped the boys in the Home. Their faces were paler than ever; their eyes glittered like the eyes of dope-fiends.

What’s going on in there?

What was going on was simple enough.

Wolf was going with the moon.

He felt it happen as the patch of sun coming in through the ventilation square began to rise higher and higher, as the quality of the light became reddish. It was too early to go with the moon; she was not fully pregnant yet and it would hurt him. Yet it would happen, as it always happened to Wolfs eventually, in season or out of it, when they were pressed too long and too hard. Wolf had held himself in check for a long time because it was what Jacky wanted. He had performed great heroisms for Jack in this world. Jack would dimly suspect some of them, yet never come close to apprehending their incredible depth and breadth.

But now he was dying, and he was going with the moon, and because the latter made the former seem more than bearable—almost holy, and surely ordained—Wolf went in relief, and in gladness. It was wonderful not to have to struggle anymore.

His mouth, suddenly deep with teeth.

3

After Heck left, there were office sounds: the soft scrape of chairs being moved, a jingle of the keys on Sunlight Gardener’s belt, a file-cabinet door running open and then closed.

“Abelson. Two hundred and forty dollars and thirty-six cents.”

Sounds of keys being punched. Peter Abelson was one of the boys on OS. Like all of the OS boys, he was bright, personable, and had no physical defects. Jack had seen him only a few times, but he thought Abelson looked like Dondi, that homeless waif with the big eyes in the comic strips.

“Clark. Sixty-two dollars and seventeen cents.”

Keys being punched. The machine rumbled as Sonny hit the TOTAL key.

“That’s a real fall-off,” Sonny remarked.

“I’ll talk to him, never fear. Now please don’t chatter at me, Sonny. Mr. Sloat arrives in Muncie at ten-fifteen and it’s a long drive. I don’t want to be late.”

“Sorry, Reverend Gardener.”

Gardener made some reply Jack didn’t even hear. At the name Sloat, a great shock had walloped him—and yet part of him was unsurprised. Part of him had known this might be in the cards. Gardener had been suspicious from the first. He had not wanted to bother his boss with trivialities, Jack figured. Or maybe he had not wanted to admit he couldn’t get the truth out of Jack without help. But at last he had called—where? East? West? Jack would have given a great lot just then to know. Had Morgan been in Los Angeles, or New 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 toward 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. “Victor’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.

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 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!

It snapped.

The door of the box creaked open on its big, clumsy homemade 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 answers 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 direction; 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 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 indeed 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.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gardener bared his teeth in a grin.

“Boys,” he said, “we’re going to get sunlight in this boy’s soul yet. Lace up his left arm again and unlace his right.”

Sunlight Gardener opened his lighter again and waited for them to do it, his thumb resting lightly on the striker wheel.

7

George Irwinson and Donny Keegan were still in the kitchen.

“Someone’s out there,” George said nervously.

Donny said nothing. He had finished peeling the potatoes and now stood by the ovens for their warmth. He didn’t know what to do next. Confession was being held just down the hall, he knew, and that’s where he wanted to be—confession was safe, and here in the kitchen he felt very, very nervous—but Rudolph hadn’t dismissed them. Best to stay right here.

“I heard someone,” George said.

Donny laughed: “Hyuck! Hyuck! Hyuck!”

“Jesus, that laugh of yours barfs me out,” George said. “I got a new Captain America funnybook under my mattress. If you take a look out there, I’ll let you read it.”

Donny shook his head and honked his donkey-laugh again.

George looked toward the door. Sounds. Scratching. That’s what it sounded like. Scratching at the door. Like a dog that wanted to be let in. A lost, homeless pup. Except what sort of lost, homeless pup scratched near the top of a door that was nearly seven feet tall?

George went to the window and looked out. He could see almost nothing in the gloom. The Box was just a darker shadow amid shadows.

George moved toward the door.

8

Jack shrieked so loud and so hard he thought that surely his throat would rupture. Now Casey had also joined them, Casey with his big swinging gut, and that was a good thing for them, because now it took three of them—Casey, Warwick, and Sonny Singer—to grapple with Jack’s arm and keep his hand applied to the flame.

When Gardener drew it away this time, there was a black, bubbling, blistered patch the size of a quarter on the side of Jack’s hand.

Gardener got up, took the envelope marked JACK PARKER from his desk, and brought it back. He brought out the guitar-pick.

“What’s this?”

“A guitar-pick,” Jack managed. His hands were burning agony.

“What is it in the Territories?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What’s this?”

“A marble. What are you, blind?”

“Is it a toy in the Territories?”

“I don’t—”

“Is it a mirror?”

“—know—”

“Is it a top that disappears when you spin it fast?”

“—what you’re—”

“YOU DO! YOU DO TOO, YOU FAGGOT HELLBOUND WHELP!”

“—talking about.”

Gardener drove a hand across Jack’s face.

He brought out the silver dollar. His eyes gleamed.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a lucky piece from my Aunt Helen.”

“What is it in the Territories?”

“Box of Rice Krispies.”

Gardener held up the lighter. “Your last chance, boy.”

“It turns into a vibraphone and plays ’Crazy Rhythm.’ ”

“Hold out his right hand again,” Gardener said.

Jack struggled, but at last they got his hand out.

9

In the oven, the turkey pies had begun to burn.

George Irwinson had been standing by the door for almost five minutes, trying to get up nerve enough to open it. That scratching noise had not been repeated.

“Well, I’ll show you there’s nothing to be afraid of, chicken-guts,” George said heartily. “When you’re strong in the Lord, there’s never any need to be afraid!”

With this grand statement, he threw open the door. A huge, shaggy, shadowy thing stood on the threshold, its eyes blazing red from deep sockets. George’s eyes tracked one paw as it rose in the windy autumn dark and whickered down. Six-inch claws gleamed in the kitchen’s light. They tore George Irwinson’s head from his neck and his head flew across the room, spraying blood, to strike the shoes of the laughing Donny Keegan, the madly laughing Donny Keegan.

Wolf leaped into the kitchen, dropping down to all fours. He passed Donny Keegan with hardly a look and ran into the hall.

10

Wolf! Wolf! Right here and now!

It was Wolf’s voice in his mind, all right, but it was deeper, richer, more commanding than Jack had ever heard it. It cut through the haze of pain in his mind like a fine Swedish knife.

He thought, Wolf is riding with the moon. The thought brought a mixture of triumph and sorrow.

Sunlight Gardener was looking upward, his eyes narrowed. In that moment he looked very much like a beast himself—a beast who has scented danger downwind.

“Reverend?” Sonny asked. Sonny was panting slightly, and the pupils of his eyes were very large. He’s been enjoying himself, Jack thought. If I start to talk, Sonny’s going to be disappointed.

“I heard something,” Gardener said. “Casey. Go and listen to the kitchen and the common room.”

“Right.” Casey took off.

Gardener looked back at Jack. “I’m going to have to leave for Muncie soon,” he said, “and when I meet Mr. Morgan, I want to be able to give him some information immediately. So you had better talk to me, Jack. Spare yourself further pain.”

Jack looked at him, hoping the jackhammer beat of his heart didn’t show either in his face or as a faster, more noticeable pulse in his neck. If Wolf was out of the Box—

Gardener held up the pick Speedy had given him in one hand, the coin Captain Farren had given him in the other. “What are they?”

“When I flip, they turn into tortoise testicles,” Jack said, and laughed wildly, hysterically.

Gardener’s face darkened with angry blood.

“Lace up his arms again,” he said to Sonny and Andy. “Lace up his arms and then pull down this hellbound bastard’s pants. Let’s see what happens when we heat up his testicles.”

11

Heck Bast was deathly bored with confession. He had heard them all before, these paltry mail-order sins. I hooked money from my mother’s purse, I used to blow joints in the schoolyard, we usta put glue in a paper bag and sniff it, I did this, I did that. Little kids’ stuff. No excitement. Nothing to take his mind off the steady drone of pain in his hand. Heck wanted to be downstairs, working on that kid Sawyer. And then they could get started on the big retard who had somehow surprised him and destroyed his good right hand. Yes, getting to work on the big retard would be a real pleasure. Preferably with a set of bolt-cutters.

A boy named Vernon Skarda was currently droning away.

“. . . so me and him, we seen the keys was in her, know what I mean. So he goes, ’Let’s jump in the whore, and drive her around the block,’ he goes. But I knew it was wrong, and I said it was, so he goes, ’You ain’t nothin but a chickenshit.’ So I go, ’I ain’t no chickenshit.’ Like that. So he goes, ’Prove it, prove it.’ ’I ain’t doin no joy-ride,’ I go, so he goes . . .”

Oh dear Christ, Heck thought. His hand was really starting to yell at him, and his pain-pills were up in his room. On the far side of the room, he saw Peabody stretch his jaws in a bone-cracking yawn.

“So we went around the block, and then he goes to me, he goes—”

The door suddenly slammed inward so hard it tore off its hinges. It hit the wall, bounced, struck a boy named Tom Cassidy, drove him to the floor, and pinned him there. Something leaped into the common room—at first Heck Bast thought it was the biggest motherfucking dog he had ever seen. Boys screamed and bolted up from their chairs . . . and then froze, eyes wide and unbelieving, as the gray-black beast that was Wolf stood upright, shreds of chinos and checked shirt still clinging to him.

Vernon Skarda stared, eyes bulging, jaws hanging.

Wolf bellowed, eyes glaring around as the boys fell back from him. Pedersen made for the door. Wolf, towering so high his head almost brushed the ceiling, moved with liquid speed. He swung an arm as thick as a barn-beam. Claws tore a channel through Pedersen’s back. For a moment his spine was clearly visible—it looked like a bloody extension cord. Gore splashed the walls. Pedersen took one great, shambling step out into the hall and then collapsed.

Wolf turned back . . . and his blazing eyes fastened on Heck Bast. Heck got up suddenly on nerveless legs, staring at this shaggy, red-eyed horror. He knew who it was . . . or, at least, who it had been.

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 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 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 puppeteer 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 extreme 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.”

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 highboy, 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?

A boy who was no longer able to stand the agonizing tension 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.

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 look a little nervous.”

Sonny rocked him with a slap. “You want to watch the way you talk, snotface! You just want to watch it!”

“You look nervous, too, Sonny. And you, Warwick. And Casey in there—”

“Shut him up!” Gardener suddenly screamed. “Can’t you do anything? Do I have to do everything around here myself?”

Sonny slapped Jack again, much harder. Jack’s nose began to bleed, but he smiled. Wolf was very close now . . . and Wolf was being careful. Jack had begun to have a crazy hope that they might get out of this alive.

Casey suddenly straightened up and then tore the cans off his head and flicked the intercom switch.

“Reverend Gardener! I hear sirens on the outside mikes!”

Gardener’s eyes, now too wide, skidded back to Casey.

“What? How many? How far away?”

“Sounds like a lot,” Casey said. “Not close yet. But they’re coming here. No doubt about that.”

Gardener’s nerve broke then; Jack saw it happen. The man sat, indecisive, for a moment, and then he wiped his mouth delicately with the side of his hand.

It isn’t whatever happened upstairs, not just the sirens, either. He knows that Wolf is close, too. In his own way he smells him . . . and he doesn’t like it. Wolf, we might have a chance! We just might!

Gardener handed the pistol to Sonny Singer. “I haven’t time to deal with the police, or whatever mess there might be upstairs, right now,” he said. “The important thing is Morgan Sloat. I’m going to Muncie. You and Andy are coming with me, Sonny. You keep this gun on our friend Jack here while I get the car out of the garage. When you hear the horn, come on out.”

“What about Casey?” Andy Warwick rumbled.

“Yes, yes, all right, Casey, too,” Gardener agreed at once, and Jack thought, He’s running out on you, you stupid assholes. He’s running out on you, it’s so obvious that he might as well take out a billboard on the Sunset Strip and advertise the fact, and your brains are too blown to even know it. You’d go on sitting down here for ten years waiting to hear that horn blow, if the food and toilet paper held out that long.

Gardener got up. Sonny Singer, his face flushed with new importance, sat down behind his desk and pointed the gun at Jack. “If his retarded friend shows up,” Gardener said, “shoot him.”

“How could he show up?” Sonny asked. “He’s in the Box.”

“Never mind,” Gardener said. “He’s evil, they’re both evil, it’s indubitable, it’s axiomatic, if the retard shows up, shoot him, shoot them both.”

He fumbled through the keys on his ring and selected one. “When you hear the horn,” he said. He opened the door and went out. Jack strained his ears for the sound of sirens but heard nothing.

The door closed behind Sunlight Gardener.

17

Time, stretching out.

A minute that felt like two; two that felt like ten; four that felt like an hour. The three of Gardener’s “student aides” who had been left with Jack looked like boys who had been caught in a game of Statue Tag. Sonny sat bolt-upright behind Sunlight Gardener’s desk—a place he both relished and coveted. The gun pointed steadily at Jack’s face. Warwick stood by the door to the hall. Casey sat in the brightly lighted booth with the cans on his ears again, staring blankly out through the other glass square, into the darkness of the chapel, seeing nothing, only listening.

“He’s not going to take you with him, you know,” Jack said suddenly. The sound of his voice surprised him a little. It was even and unafraid.

“Shut up, snotface,” Sonny snapped.

“Don’t hold your breath until you hear him honk that horn,” Jack said. “You’ll turn pretty blue.”

“Next thing he says, Andy, break his nose,” Sonny said.

“That’s right,” Jack said. “Break my nose, Andy. Shoot me, Sonny. The cops are coming, Gardener’s gone, and they’re going to find the three of you standing over a corpse in a strait-jacket.” He paused, and amended: “A corpse in a strait-jacket with a broken nose.”

“Hit him, Andy,” Sonny said.

Andy Warwick moved from the door to where Jack sat, strait-jacketed, his pants and underpants puddled around his ankles.

Jack turned his face openly up to Warwick’s.

“That’s right, Andy,” he said. “Hit me. I’ll hold still. Hell of a target.”

Andy Warwick balled up his fist, drew it back . . . and then hesitated. Uncertainty flickered in his eyes.

There was a digital clock on Gardener’s desk. Jack’s eyes shifted to it for a moment, and then back to Warwick’s face. “It’s been four minutes, Andy. How long does it take a guy to back a car out of the garage? Especially when he’s in a hurry?”

Sonny Singer bolted out of Sunlight Gardener’s chair, came around the desk, and charged at Jack. His narrow, secretive face was furious. His fists were balled up. He made as if to hit Jack. Warwick, who was bigger, restrained him. There was trouble on Warwick’s face now—deep trouble.

“Wait,” he said.

“I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t—”

“Why don’t you ask Casey how close those sirens are getting?” Jack asked, and Warwick’s frown deepened. “You’ve been left in the lurch, don’t you know that? Do I have to draw you a picture? It’s going bad here. He knew it—he smelled it! He’s leaving you with a bag. From the sounds upstairs—”

Singer broke free of Warwick’s half-hearted hold and clouted Jack on the side of the face. His head rocked to one side, then came slowly back.

“—it’s a big, messy bag,” Jack finished.

“You shut up or I’ll kill you,” Sonny hissed.

The digits on the clock had changed.

“Five minutes now,” Jack said.

“Sonny,” Warwick said with a catch in his voice. “Let’s get him out of that thing.”

“No!” Sonny’s cry was wounded, furious . . . ultimately frightened.

“You know what the Rev’rend said,” Warwick said rapidly. “Before. When the TV people came. Nobody can see the strait-jackets. They wouldn’t understand. They—”

Click! The intercom.

“Sonny! Andy!” Casey sounded panicky. “They’re closer! The sirens! Christ! What are we supposed to do?”

“Let him out now!” Warwick’s face was pallid, except for two red spots high on his cheekbones.

“Reverend Gardener also said—”

“I don’t give a fuck what he also said!” Warwick’s voice dropped, and now he voiced the child’s deepest fear: “We’re gonna get caught, Sonny! We’re gonna get caught!”

And Jack thought that now he could hear sirens, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

Sonny’s eyes rolled toward Jack with horrible, trapped indecision. He half-raised the gun and for one moment Jack believed Sonny was really going to shoot him.

But it was six minutes now, and still no honk from the Godhead, announcing that the deus ex machina was now boarding for Muncie.

“You let him loose,” Sonny said sulkily to Andy Warwick. “I don’t even want to touch him. He’s a sinner. And he’s a queer.”

Sonny retreated to the desk as Andy Warwick’s fingers fumbled with the strait-jacket’s lacings.

“You better not say anything,” he panted. “You better not say anything or I’ll kill you myself.”

Right arm free.

Left arm free.

They collapsed bonelessly into his lap. Pins and needles coming back.

Warwick hauled the hateful restraint off him, a horror of dun-colored canvas and rawhide lacings. Warwick looked at it in his hands and grimaced. He darted across the room and began to stuff it into Sunlight Gardener’s safe.

“Pull up your pants,” Sonny said. “You think I want to look at your works?”

Jack fumbled up his shorts, got the waistband of his pants, dropped them, and managed to pull them up.

Click! The intercom.

“Sonny! Andy!” Casey’s voice, panicked. “I hear something!”

“Are they turning in?” Sonny almost screamed. Warwick redoubled his efforts to stuff the strait-jacket into the safe. “Are they turning in the front—”

“No! In the chapel! I can’t see nothing but I can hear something in the—”

There was an explosion of shattering glass as Wolf leaped from the darkness of the chapel and into the studio.

18

Casey’s screams as he pushed back from the control board in his wheel-footed chair were hideously amplified.

Inside the studio there was a brief storm of glass. Wolf landed four-footed on the slanted control board and half-climbed, half-slid down it, his eyes throwing a red glare. His long claws turned dials and flicked switches at random. The big reel-to-reel Sony tape recorder started to turn.

“—COMMUNISTS!” the voice of Sunlight Gardener bellowed. He was cranked to maximum volume, drowning out Casey’s shrieks and Warwick’s screams to shoot it, Sonny, shoot it, shoot it! But the voice of Gardener was not alone. In the background, like music from hell, came the mingled warble of many sirens as Casey’s mikes picked up a caravan of police cruisers turning into the Sunlight Home’s drive.

“OH, THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT’S ALL RIGHT TO LOOK AT THOSE DIRTY BOOKS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T MATTER THAT IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO PRAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU IT DON’T EVEN MATTER THAT THERE ARE SIXTEEN U.S. REPRESENTATIVES AND TWO U.S. GOVERNORS WHO ARE AVOWED HOMOSEXUALS! THEY’RE GONNA TELL YOU—”

Casey’s chair rolled back against the glass wall between the studio and Sunlight Gardener’s office. His head turned, and for one moment they could all see his agonized, bulging eyes. Then Wolf leaped from the edge of the control panel. His head struck Casey’s gut . . . and plowed into it. His jaws began to open and close with the speed of a cane-cutting machine. Blood flew up and splattered the window as Casey began to convulse.

“Shoot it, Sonny, shoot the fucking thing!” Warwick whooped.

“Think I’m gonna shoot him instead,” Sonny said, looking around at Jack. He spoke with the air of a man who has finally arrived at a great conclusion. He nodded, began to grin.

“—DAY IS COMING, BOYS! OH YES, A MIGHTY DAY, AND ON THAT DAY THOSE COMMUNIST HUMANIST HELLBOUND ATHEISTS ARE GONNA FIND OUT THAT THE ROCK WILL NOT SHIELD THEM, THE DEAD TREE WILL NOT GIVE THEM SHELTER! THEY’RE GONNA, OH SAY HALLELUJAH, THEY’RE GONNA—”

Wolf, snarling and ripping.

Sunlight Gardener, ranting about communism and humanism, the hellbound dope-pushers who wanted to see that prayer never made it back into the public schools.

Sirens from outside; slamming car doors; someone telling someone else to take it slow, the kid had sounded scared.

“Yes, you’re the one, you made all this trouble.”

He raised the .45. The muzzle of the .45 looked as big as the mouth of the Oatley tunnel.

The glass wall between the studio and the office blew inward with a loud, coughing roar. A gray-black shaggy shape exploded into the room, its muzzle torn nearly in two by a jag of glass, its feet bleeding. It bellowed an almost human sound, and the thought came to Jack so powerfully that it sent him reeling backward:

YOU WILL NOT HARM THE HERD!

“Wolf!” he wailed. “Look out! Look out, he got a g—”

Sonny pulled the trigger of the .45 twice. The reports were defeaning in the closed space. The bullets were not aimed at Wolf; they were aimed at Jack. But they tore into Wolf instead, because at that instant he was between the two boys, in midleap. Jack saw huge, ragged, bloody holes open in Wolf’s side as the bullets exited. The paths of both slugs were deflected as they pulverized Wolf’s ribs, and neither touched Jack, although he felt one whiff past his left cheek.

“Wolf!”

Wolf’s dextrous, limber leap had turned awkward. His right shoulder rolled forward and he crashed into the wall, splattering blood and knocking down a framed photograph of Sunlight Gardener in a Shriner’s fez.

Laughing, Sonny Singer turned toward Wolf, and shot him again. He held the gun in both hands and his shoulders jerked with the recoil. Gunsmoke hung in a thick, noxious, unmoving rafter. Wolf struggled up on all fours and then rose somehow to his feet. A shattering, wounded bellow of pain and rage overtopped Sunlight Gardener’s thundering recorded voice.

Sonny shot Wolf a fourth time. The slug tore a gaping hole in his left arm. Blood and gristle flew.

JACKY! JACKY! OH JACKY, HURTS, THAT HURTS ME—

Jacky shambled forward and grabbed Gardener’s digital clock; it was simply the first thing that came to hand.

“Sonny, look out!” Warwick shouted. “Look—” Then Wolf, his entire midsection now a gory tangle of blood-matted hair, pounced on him. Warwick grappled with Wolf and for a moment they appeared almost to be dancing.

“—IN A LAKE OF FIRE FOREVER! FOR THE BIBLE SAYS—”

Jack brought the digital radio down on Sonny’s head with all the force he could muster as Sonny began to turn around. Plastic crunched. The numbers on the front of the clock began to blink randomly.

Sonny reeled around, trying to bring the gun up. Jack swung the radio in a flat, rising arc that ended at Sonny’s mouth. Sonny’s lips flew back in a great funhouse grin. There was a brittle crunch as his teeth broke. His finger jerked the trigger of the gun again. The bullet went between his feet.

He hit the wall, rebounded, and grinned at Jack from his bloody mouth. Swaying on his feet, he raised the gun.

“Hellbound—”

Wolf threw Warwick. Warwick flew through the air with the greatest of ease and struck Sonny in the back as Sonny fired. The bullet went wild, hitting one of the turning tapereels in the sound-studio and pulverizing it. The ranting, screaming voice of Sunlight Gardener ceased. A great bass hum of feedback began to rise from the speakers.

Roaring, staggering, Wolf advanced on Sonny Singer. Sonny pointed the .45 at him and pulled the trigger. There was a dry, impotent click. Sonny’s wet grin faltered.

“No,” he said mildly, and pulled the trigger again . . . and again . . . and again. As Wolf reached for him, he threw the gun and tried to run around Gardener’s big desk. The pistol bounced off Wolf’s skull, and with a final, failing burst of strength, Wolf leaped across Sunlight Gardener’s desk after Sonny, scattering everything that had been there. Sonny backed away, but Wolf was able to grab his arm.

“No!” Sonny screamed. “No, you better not, you’ll go back in the Box, I’m a big man around here, I . . . I . . . IYYYYYYYYYYYY—!”

Wolf twisted Sonny’s arm. There was a ripping sound, the sound of a turkey drumstick being torn from the cooked bird by an overenthusiastic child. Suddenly Sonny’s arm was in Wolf’s big front paw. Sonny staggered away, blood jetting from his shoulder. Jack saw a wet white knob of bone. He turned away and was violently sick.

For a moment the whole world swam into grayness.

19

When he looked around again, Wolf was swaying in the middle of the carnage that had been Gardener’s office. His eyes guttered pale yellow, like dying candles. Something was happening to his face, to his arms and legs—he was becoming Wolf again, Jack saw . . . and then understood fully what that meant. The old legends had lied about how only silver bullets could destroy a werewolf, but apparently about some things they did not lie. Wolf was changing back because he was dying.

“Wolf, no!” he wailed, and managed to get to his feet. He got halfway to Wolf, slipped in a puddle of blood, went to one knee, got up again. “No!”

“Jacky—” The voice was low, guttural, little more than a growl . . . but understandable.

And, incredibly, Wolf was trying to smile.

Warwick had gotten Gardener’s door open. He was backing slowly up the steps, his eyes wide and shocked.

“Go on!” Jack screamed. “Go on, get outta here!”

Andy Warwick fled like a scared rabbit.

A voice from the intercom—Franky Williams’s voice—cut through the droning buzz of feedback. It was horrified, but filled with a terrible, sickly excitement. “Christ, lookit this! Looks like somebody went bullshit with a meat-cleaver! Some of you guys check the kitchen!”

“Jacky—”

Wolf collapsed like a falling tree.

Jack knelt, turned him over. The hair was melting away from Wolf’s cheeks with the eerie speed of time-lapse photography. His eyes had gone hazel again. And to Jack he looked horribly tired.

“Jacky—” Wolf raised a bloody hand and touched Jack’s cheek. “Shoot . . . you? Did he . . .”

“No,” Jack said, cradling his friend’s head. “No, Wolf, never got me. Never did.”

“I . . .” Wolf’s eyes closed and then opened slowly again. He smiled with incredible sweetness and spoke carefully, enunciating each word, obviously needing to convey this if nothing else. “I . . . kept . . . my herd . . . safe.”

“Yes, you did,” Jack said, and his tears began to flow. They hurt. He cradled Wolf’s shaggy, tired head and wept. “You sure did, good old Wolf—”

“Good . . . good old Jacky.”

“Wolf, I’m gonna go upstairs . . . there are cops . . . an ambulance . . .”

“No!” Wolf once again seemed to rouse himself to a great effort. “Go on . . . you go on . . .”

“Not without you, Wolf!” All the lights had blurred double, treble. He held Wolf’s head in his burned hands. “Not without you, huh-uh, no way—”

“Wolf . . . doesn’t want to live in this world.” He pulled a great, shuddering breath into his broad, shattered chest and tried another smile. “Smells . . . smells too bad.”

“Wolf . . . listen, Wolf—”

Wolf took his hands gently; as he held them, Jack could feel the hair melting from Wolf’s palms. It was a ghostly, terrible sensation.

“I love you, Jacky.”

“I love you, too, Wolf,” Jack said. “Right here and now.”

Wolf smiled.

“Going back, Jacky . . . I can feel it. Going back . . .”

Suddenly Wolf’s very hands felt insubstantial in Jack’s grip.

“Wolf!” he screamed.

“Going back home . . .”

“Wolf, no!” He felt his heart stagger and wrench in his chest. It would break, oh yes, hearts could break, he felt that. “Wolf, come back, I love you!” There was a sensation of lightness in Wolf now, a feeling that he was turning into something like a milkweed pod . . . or a shimmer of illusion. A Daydream.

“. . . goodbye . . .”

Wolf was fading glass. Fading . . . fading . . .

“Wolf!”

“ . . .love you J . . .”

Wolf was gone. There was only a bloody outline on the floor where he had been.

“Oh God,” Jack moaned. “Oh God, oh God.”

He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth in the demolished office, moaning.