The Talisman

lies repeated on that TV news show, and although the boys slinging that mud were too cowardly to show their own faces on the screen, I knew – oh-yeah! – I knew those voices. When you’ve fed a boy, when you’ve held his head tenderly against your breast when he cries for his momma in the night, why, I guess then you know his voice.
    ‘Those boys are gone now. God may forgive them – I hope He does, oh-yeah – but Sunlight Gardener is just a man.’
    He hung his head to show what a shameful admission this was. But when he raised it again, his eyes were still hot, sparkling with fury.
    ‘Sunlight Gardener cannot forgive them. So Sunlight Gardener set them out on the road again. They have been sent out into the Territories, but there they shall not be fed; there even the trees may eat them up, like beasts which walk in the night.’
    Terrified silence in the room. Behind the glass panel, even Casey looked pallid and strange.
    ‘The Book says that God sent Cain out to the East of Eden, into the land of Nod. Being cast out onto the road is like that, my boys. You have a safe haven here.’
    He surveyed them.
    ‘But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you! Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.
    ‘Remember, boys.
    ‘Remember.
    ‘Let us pray.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FERD JANKLOW
----
    1
    It took Jack less than a week to decide that a detour into the Territories was the only way they could possibly escape the Sunlight Home. He was willing to try that, but he found he would do almost anything, run any risk, if only he could avoid flipping from the Sunlight Home itself.
    There was no concrete reason for this, only the voice of his undermind whispering that what was bad here would be worse over there. This was, perhaps, a bad place in all worlds . . . like a bad spot in an apple which goes all the way to the core. Anyway, the Sunlight Home was bad enough; he had no urge to see what its Territories counterpart looked like unless he had to.
    But there might be a way.
    Wolf and Jack and the other boys not lucky enough to be on the Outside Staff – and that was most of them – spent their days in what the long-timers called Far Field. It was about a mile and half down the road, at the edge of Gardener’s property, and there the boys spent their days picking rocks. There was no other fieldwork to be done at this time of year. The last of the crops had been harvested in mid-October, but as Sunlight Gardener had pointed out each morning in Chapel Devotions, rocks were always in season.
    Sitting in the back of one of the Home’s two dilapidated farmtrucks each morning, Jack surveyed Far Field while Wolf sat beside him, head down, like a boy with a hangover. It had been a rainy fall in the midwest, and Far Field was a gluey, sticky, muddy mess. Day before yesterday one of the boys had cursed it under his breath and called it a ‘real boot-sucker’.
    Suppose we just take off? Jack thought for the fortieth time. Suppose I just yell ‘Go for it!’ at Wolf and we start busting our buns? Where? North end, where those trees are, and the rock wall. That’s where his land ends .
    There might be a fence.
    We’ll climb over it. For that matter, Wolf can throw me over it, if he has to.
    Might be barbed wire.
    Wiggle under it. Or –
    Or Wolf could tear it apart with his bare hands. Jack didn’t like to think of it, but he knew Wolf had the strength . . . and if he asked, Wolf would do it. It would rip up the big guy’s hands, but he was getting ripped up in worse ways right now.
    And then what?
    Flip, of course. That was what. If they could just get off the land that belonged to the Sunlight Home, that undervoice whispered, they would have a fighting chance all the way clear.
    And Singer and Bast (whom Jack had come to think of as the Thuggsy Twins) would not be able to use one of the trucks to run them down; the first truck to turn wheels into Far Field before the deep frosts of December would mire itself rocker-panel deep.
    It’d be a footrace, pure and simple. Got to try it. Better than trying it back there, at the Home. And –
    And it wasn’t just Wolf’s growing distress that was driving him; he was now nearly frantic about Lily, who was back in New Hampshire dying by inches while Jack said hallelujah under duress.
    Go for it. Magic juice or no magic juice. Got to try.
    But before Jack was quite ready, Ferd Janklow tried.
    Great minds run in the