The Talisman

hoeing and raking, pushing wheelbarrows.
    ‘You two shitheads just earned me twenty bucks,’ Williams said. ‘Plus another twenty for Judge Fairchild. Ain’t that great?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SUNLIGHT HOME
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    1
    The Home looked like something made from a child’s blocks, Jack thought – it had grown randomly as more space was needed. Then he saw that the numerous windows were barred, and the sprawling building immediately seemed penal, rather than childish.
    Most of the boys in the fields had put down their tools to watch the progress of the police car.
    Franky Williams pulled up into the wide, rounded end of the drive. As soon as he had cut off his engine, a tall figure stepped through the front door and stood regarding them from the top of the steps, his hands knitted together before him. Beneath a full head of longish wavy white hair, the man’s face seemed unrealistically youthful – as if these chipped, vitally masculine features had been created or at least assisted by plastic surgery. It was the face of a man who could sell anything, anywhere, to anybody. His clothes were as white as his hair: white suit, white shoes, white shirt, and a trailing white silk scarf around his neck. As Jack and Wolf got out of the back seat, the man in white pulled a pair of dark green sunglasses from his suitpocket, put them on, and appeared to examine the two boys for a moment before smiling – long creases split his cheeks. Then he removed the sunglasses and put them back in his pocket.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well. Where would we all be without you, Officer Williams?’
    ‘Afternoon, Reverend Gardener,’ the policeman said.
    ‘Is it the usual sort of thing, or were these two bold fellows actually engaged in criminal activity?’
    ‘Vagrants,’ said the cop. Hands on hips, he squinted up at Gardener as if all that whiteness hurt his eyes. ‘Refused to give Fairchild their right names. This one, the big one,’ he said, pointing a thumb at Wolf, ‘he wouldn’t talk at all. I had to nail him in the head just to get him in the car.’
    Gardener shook his head tragically. ‘Why don’t you bring them up here so they can introduce themselves, and then we’ll take care of the various formalities. Is there any reason why the two of them should look so, ah, shall we say, “befuddled”?’
    ‘Just that I cracked that big one behind the ears.’
    ‘Ummmmm.’ Gardener stepped backward, steepling his fingers before his chest.
    As Williams prodded the boys up the steps to the long porch, Gardener cocked his head and regarded his new arrivals. Jack and Wolf reached the top of the steps and moved tentatively onto the surface of the porch. Franky Williams wiped his forehead and huffed himself up beside them. Gardener was smiling mistily, but his eyes switched back and forth between the boys. The second after something hard, cold, and familiar jumped out of his eyes at Jack, the Reverend again twitched the sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. The smile remained misty and delicate, but even wrapped as he was in a sense of false security, Jack felt frozen by that glance – because he had seen it before.
    Reverend Gardener pulled the sunglasses below the bridge of his nose and peered playfully over the tops of the frames. ‘Names? Names? Might we have some names from you two gentlemen?’
    ‘I’m Jack,’ the boy said, and then stopped – he did not want to say one more word until he had to. Reality seemed to fold and buckle about Jack for a moment: he felt that he had been jerked back into the Territories, but that now the Territories were evil and threatening, and that foul smoke, jumping flames, the screams of tortured bodies filled the air.
    A powerful hand closed over his elbow and held him upright. Instead of the foulness and smoke, Jack smelled some heavy sweet cologne, applied too liberally. A pair of melancholy gray eyes were looking directly into his.
    ‘And have you been a bad boy, Jack? Have you been a very bad boy?’
    ‘No, we were just hitching, and—’
    ‘I think you’re a trifle stoned,’ said the Reverend Gardener. ‘We’ll have to see that you get some special attention, won’t we?’ The hand released his elbow; Gardener stepped neatly away, and pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes again. ‘You do possess a last name, I imagine.’
    ‘Parker,’ Jack said.
    ‘Yesss.’ Gardener whipped the glasses off his head, executed a dancing little half-turn, and was