The Talisman

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.