The Talisman

27

Jack Lights Out Again

1

Time passed. Jack had no idea how much or how little. He sat with his arms wrapped around himself as if he were in the strait-jacket again, rocking back and forth, moaning, wondering if Wolf could really be gone.

He’s gone. Oh yes, he’s gone. And guess who killed him, Jack? Guess who?

At some point the feedback hum took on a rasping note. A moment later there was a high-gain crackle of static and everything shorted out—feedback hum, upstairs chatter, idling engines out front. Jack barely noticed.

Go on. Wolf said to go on.

I can’t. I can’t. I’m tired, and whatever I do is the wrong thing. People get killed—

Quit it, you self-pitying jerk! Think about your mother, Jack.

No! I’m tired. Let me be.

And the Queen.

Please, just leave me alone—

At last he heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and that roused him. He did not want to be found here. Let them take him outside, in the back yard, but not in this stinking, blood-spattered, smokey room where he had been tortured and his friend killed.

Barely thinking about what he was doing, Jack took up the envelope with JACK PARKER written across the front. He looked inside and saw the guitar-pick, the silver dollar, his beat-up wallet, the Rand McNally road atlas. He tilted the envelope and saw the marble. He stuck everything in the pack and slipped it on, feeling like a boy in a state of hypnosis.

Footfalls on the stairs, slow and cautious.

“—where’s the damn lights—”

“—funny smell, like a zoo—”

“—watch it, boys—”

Jack’s eyes happened on the steel file-tray, neatly stacked with envelopes reading I’LL BE A SUNBEAM FOR JESUS. He helped himself to two of them.

Now when they grab you coming out, they can get you for robbery as well as murder.

Didn’t matter. He was moving now for the simple sake of movement, no more than that.

The back yard appeared completely deserted. Jack stood at the top of the stairs that exited through a bulkhead and looked around, hardly able to believe it. There were voices from the front, and pulses of light, and occasional smears of static and dispatchers’ voices from police radios that had been cranked up all the way to high gain, but the back yard was empty. It made no sense. But he supposed if they were confused enough, rattled enough by what they had found inside . . .

Then a voice, muffled, less than twenty feet away on Jack’s left, said, “Christ! Do you believe this?”

Jack’s head snapped around. There, squatting on the beaten dirt like a crude Iron Age coffin, was the Box. A flashlight was moving around inside. Jack could see shoe-soles sticking out. A dim figure was crouching by the mouth of the Box, examining the door.

“Looks like this thing was ripped right off’n its hinges,” the fellow looking at the door called into the Box. “I don’t know how anyone coulda done it, though. Hinges are steel. But they’re just . . . twisted.”

“Never mind the damn hinges,” the muffled voice came back. “This goddam thing . . . they kept kids in here, Paulie! I really think they did! Kids! There’s initials on the walls . . .”

The light moved.

“. . . and Bible verses . . .”

The light moved again.

“. . . and pictures. Little pictures. Little stick-men and -women, like kids draw . . . Christ, do you think Williams knew about this?”

“Must have,” Paulie said, still examining the torn and twisted steel hinges on the Box’s door.

Paulie was bending in; his colleague was backing out. Making no special attempt at concealment, Jack walked across the open yard behind them. He went along the side of the garage and came out on the shoulder of the road. From here he had an angle on the careless jam of police cars in the Sunlight Home’s front yard. As Jack stood watching, an ambulance came tearing up the road, flashers whirling, siren warbling.

“Loved you, Wolf,” Jack muttered, and wiped an arm across his wet eyes. He set off down the road into darkness, thinking he would most likely be picked up before he got a mile west of the Sunlight Home. But three hours later he was still walking; apparently the cops had more than enough to occupy them back there.

2

There was a highway up ahead, over the next rise or the rise after that. Jack could see the orangey glow of high-intensity sodium arcs on the horizon, could hear the whine of the big rigs.

He stopped in a trash-littered ravine and washed his face and hands in the trickle of water coming out of a culvert. The water was almost paralyzing cold, but at least it silenced the throbbing in his hands for a while. The old cautions were coming back almost unbidden.

Jack stood for a moment where he was, under the dark night sky of Indiana, listening to the whine of the big trucks.

The wind, murmuring in the trees, lifted his hair. His heart was heavy with the loss of Wolf, but even that could not change how good, how very good it was to be free.

An hour later a trucker slowed for the tired, pallid boy standing in the breakdown lane with his thumb cocked. Jack climbed in.

“Where you headed, kiddo?” the trucker asked.

Jack was too tired and too sick at heart to bother with the Story—he barely remembered it, anyway. He supposed it would come back to him.

“West,” he said. “Far as you’re going.”

“That’d be Midstate.”

“Fine,” Jack said, and fell asleep.

The big Diamond Reo rolled through the chilly Indiana night; Charlie Daniels on the tape-player, it rolled west, chasing its own headlights toward Illinois.