The Talisman

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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?”