“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:
“—there’s a dog-pack or something loose up there!”
Gardener was looking at Casey now, eyes narrow, lips pressed tightly together.
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
Beyond the parlor where new boys were brought when they first came to the Sunlight Home was a small
