The Talisman

The boy finally located a size thirteen pair of the heavy square black lace-ups in a corner of the storeroom, and Jack got them on Wolf’s feet. Then Singer took them up another flight to the dormitory floor. Here there was no attempt to disguise the real nature of the Sunlight Home. A narrow corridor ran the entire length of the top of the house—it might have been fifty feet long. Rows of narrow doors with inset eye-level windows marched down either side of the long corridor. To Jack, the so-called dormitory looked like a prison.

Singer took them a short way up the narrow hall and paused before one of the doors. “On their first day, nobody works. You start the full schedule tomorrow. So get in here for now and look at your Bibles or something until five. I’ll come back and let you out in time for the confession period. And change into the Sunlight clothes, hey?”

“You mean you’re going to lock us in there for the next three hours?” Jack asked.

“You want me to hold your hand?” Singer exploded, his face reddening again. “Look. If you were a voluntary, I could let you walk around, get a look at the place. But since you’re a ward of the state on a referral from a local police department, you’re one step up from being a convicted criminal. Maybe in thirty days you’ll be voluntaries, if you’re lucky. In the meantime, get in your room and start acting like a human being made in God’s image instead of like an animal.” He impatiently fitted a key into the lock, swung the door open, and stood beside it. “Get in there. I got work to do.”

“What happens to all our stuff?”

Singer theatrically sighed. “You little creep, do you think we’d be interested in stealing anything you could have?”

Jack kept himself from responding.

Singer sighed again. “Okay. We keep it all for you, in a folder with your name on it. In Reverend Gardener’s office downstairs—that’s where we keep your money, too, right up until the time you get released. Okay? Get in there now before I report you for disobedience. I mean it.”

Wolf and Jack went into the little room. When Singer slammed the door, the overhead light automatically went on, revealing a windowless cubicle with a metal bunkbed, a small corner sink, and a metal chair. Nothing more. On the white Sheetrock walls yellowing tape marks showed where pictures had been put up by the room’s previous inhabitants. The lock clicked shut. Jack and Wolf turned to see Singer’s driven face in the small rectangular window. “Be good, now,” he said, grinning, and disappeared.

“No, Jacky,” Wolf said. The ceiling was no more than an inch from the top of his head. “Wolf can’t stay here.”

“You’d better sit down,” Jack said. “You want the top or the bottom bunk?”

“Huh?”

“Take the bottom one and sit down. We’re in trouble here.”

“Wolf knows, Jacky. Wolf knows. This is a bad bad place. Can’t stay.”

“Why is it a bad place? How do you know it, I mean?”

Wolf sat heavily on the lower bunk, dropped his new clothes on the floor, and idly picked up the book and two pamphlets set out there. The book was a Bible bound in some artificial fabric that looked like blue skin; the pamphlets, Jack saw by looking at those on his own bunk, were entitled The High Road to Everlasting Grace and God Loves You! “Wolf knows. You know, too, Jacky.” Wolf looked up at him, almost scowling. Then he glanced back down at the books in his hands, began turning them over, almost shuffling them. They were, Jack supposed, the first books Wolf had ever seen.

“The white man,” Wolf said, almost too softly for Jack to hear.

“White man?”

Wolf held up one of the pamphlets, its back cover showing. The whole rear cover was a black-and-white photograph of Sunlight Gardener, his beautiful hair lifting in a breeze, his arms outstretched—a man of everlasting grace, beloved of God.

“Him,” Wolf said. “He kills, Jacky. With whips. This is one of his places. No Wolf should ever be in one of his places. No Jack Sawyer, either. Never. We have to get away from here, Jacky.”

“We’ll get out,” Jack said. “I promise you. Not today, not tomorrow—we have to work it out. But soon.”

Wolf’s feet protruded far past the edge of his bunk. “Soon.”

3

Soon, he had promised, and Wolf had required the promise. Wolf was terrified. Jack could not tell if Wolf had ever seen Osmond in the Territories, but he had certainly heard of him. Osmond’s reputation in the Territories, at least among members of the Wolf family, appeared to be even worse than Morgan’s. But though both Wolf and Jack had recognized Osmond in Sunlight Gardener, Gardener had not recognized them— which brought up two possibilities. Either Gardener was just having fun with them, pretending ignorance; or he was a Twinner like Jack’s mother, profoundly connected to a Territories figure but unaware of the connection at any but the deepest level.

And if that was true, as Jack thought it was, then he and Wolf could wait for the really right moment to escape. They had time to watch, time to learn.

Jack put on the scratchy new clothes. The square black shoes seemed to weigh several pounds apiece, and to be suited to either foot. With difficulty, he persuaded Wolf to put on the Sunlight Home uniform. Then the two of them lay down. Jack heard Wolf begin to snore, and after a while, he drifted off himself. In his dreams his mother was somewhere in the dark, calling for him to help her, help her.

22

The Sermon

1

At five that afternoon, an electric bell went off in the hallway, a long, toneless blare of sound. Wolf leaped from his bunk, thudding the metal frame of the upper with the side of his head hard enough to wake up Jack, who had been dozing, with a jolt.

The bell stopped shrieking after fifteen seconds or so; Wolf went right on.