The Talisman

some sort of a dead beetle, or the husk of its shell – he thought if he got closer he would perhaps see the spider’s web the thing was caught in. It had been a bug, all right, but not the organic kind. It was a small, old-fashioned-looking microphone gadget, screwed into the wall with an eyebolt. A cord snaked from the back of it and through a ragged hole in the plaster. There had been no real effort to conceal it. Just part of the service, boys. Sunlight Gardener Listens Better.
    After seeing the bug, after the ugly little scene with Morton in the hall, he had expected confession to be an angry, perhaps scary, adversary situation. Someone, possibly Sunlight Gardener himself, more probably Sonny Singer or Hector Bast, would try to get him to admit that he had used drugs on the road, that he had broken into places in the middle of the night and robbed while on the road, that he had spit on every sidewalk he could find while on the road, and played with himself after a hard day on the road. If he hadn’t done any of those things, they would keep after him until he admitted them, anyway. They would try to break him. Jack thought he could hold up under such treatment, but he wasn’t sure Wolf could.
    But what was most disturbing about confession was the eagerness with which the boys in the Home greeted it.
    The inner cadre – the boys in the white turtlenecks – sat down near the front of the room. Jack looked around and saw the others looking toward the open door with a sort of witless anticipation. He thought it must be supper they were anticipating – it smelled very damn good, all right, especially after all those weeks of pick-up hamburgers interspersed with large helpings of nothing at all. Then Sunlight Gardener walked briskly in and Jack saw the expressions of anticipation change to looks of gratification. Apparently it hadn’t been dinner they had been looking forward to, after all. Morton, who had been cowering in the upper hallway with his pants puddled around his ankles only fifteen minutes ago, looked almost exalted.
    The boys got to their feet. Wolf sat, nostrils flaring, looking puzzled and frightened, until Jack grabbed a fistful of shirt and pulled him up.
    ‘Do what they do, Wolf,’ he muttered.
    ‘Sit down, boys,’ Gardener said, smiling. ‘Sit down, please.’
    They sat. Gardener was wearing faded blue jeans overtopped with an open-throated shirt of blinding white silk. He looked at them, smiling benignly. The boys looked back worshipfully, for the most part. Jack saw one boy – wavy brown hair that came to a deep widow’s peak on his brow, receding chin, delicate little hands as pale as Uncle Tommy’s Delftware – turn aside and cup his mouth to hide a sneer, and he, Jack, felt some encouragement. Apparently not everyone’s head had been blown by whatever was going on here . . . but a lot of heads had been. Wide-open they had been blown, from the way things looked. The fellow with the great buck teeth was looking at Sunlight Gardener adoringly.
    ‘Let us pray. Heck, will you lead us?’
    Heck did. He prayed fast and mechanically. It was like listening to a Dial-a-Prayer recorded by a dyslexic. After asking God to favor them in the days and weeks ahead, to forgive them their trespasses and to help them become better people, Heck Bast rapped out, ‘For Jessussakeamen,’ and sat down.
    ‘Thank you, Heck,’ Gardener said. He had taken an armless chair, had turned it around backward, and was sitting on it like a range-ridin cowpoke in a John Ford Western. He was at his most charming tonight; the sterile, self-referring craziness Jack had seen that morning was almost gone. ‘Let us have a dozen confessions, please. No more than that. Will you lead us, Andy?’
    Warwick, an expression of ludicrous piety on his face, took Heck’s place.
    ‘Thank you, Reverend Gardener,’ he said, and then looked at the boys. ‘Confession,’ he said. ‘Who will start?’
    There was a rustling stir . . . and then hands began to go up. Two . . . six . . . nine of them.
    ‘Roy Owdersfelt,’ Warwick said.
    Roy Owdersfelt, a tall boy with a pimple the size of a tumor on the end of his nose, stood up, twisting his rawboned hands in front of him. ‘I stole ten bucks from my momma’s purse last year!’ he announced in a high, screamy voice. One scabbed, grimy hand wandered up to his face, settled on the pimple, and gave it a fearful tweak. ‘I took it down to The Wizard of Odds and I turned it