The Talisman

third floor because he caught him with a Superman comic. Benny was out cold for three hours, and he couldn’t quite get it straight who he was or where he was until that night.’
    Ferd paused.
    ‘He knew they were coming. Same as he always knows when the state inspectors are going to pull a surprise inspection. He hid the strait-jackets in the attic and made believe the Box was a hay-drying shed.’
    Ferd’s cynical, hurt laugh again.
    ‘Know what my folks did, Jack? They sent Sunny Gardener a Xerox of my letter to them. “For my own good,” my pop says in his next letter to me. And guess what? It’s Ferd’s turn in the Box, courtesy of my own folks!’
    The hurt laugh again.
    ‘Tell you one other thing. He wasn’t kidding at night-chapel. The kids that talked to the Sunday Report people all disappeared – the ones he could get hold of, anyway.’
    The way Ferd himself has disappeared now , Jack thought, watching Wolf brood across the room. He shivered. His hands felt very, very cold.
    Your friend Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy.
    Was Wolf starting to look hairier again? So soon? Surely not. But that was coming, of course – it was as relentless as the tides.
    And by the way, Jack, while we’re just sitting around here worrying about the dangers of just sitting around here, how’s your mother? How’s Darling Lil, Queen of the Bs? Losing weight? Having pain? Is she finally starting to feel it eat into her with its sharp, ratty little teeth as you sit here growing roots in this weird prison? Is Morgan maybe getting ready to wind up the lightning and give the cancer a hand?
    He had been shocked at the idea of strait-jackets, and although he had seen the Box – a big ugly iron thing which sat in the Home’s back yard like a weird abandoned refrigerator – he couldn’t believe that Gardener actually put boys in it. Ferd had slowly convinced him, talking in a low voice as they harvested rocks in Far Field.
    ‘He’s got a great setup here,’ Ferd had said. ‘It’s a license to coin money. His religious shows play all over the midwest on the radio and over most of the country on cable TV and the indy stations. We’re his captive audience. We sound great on the radio and we look great on the tube – when Roy Owdersfelt isn’t milking that fucking pimple on the end of his nose, that is. He’s got Casey, his pet radio and TV producer – Casey videotapes every morning-chapel and audiotapes every night-chapel. He cuts all the sound and picture together and hypes everything until Gardener looks like Billy Graham and us guys sound like the crowd in Yankee Stadium during the seventh game of the World Series. That isn’t all Casey does, either. He’s the house genius. You see the bug in your room? Casey set up the bugs. Everything feeds into his control room, and the only way into that control room is through Gardener’s private office. The bugs are voice-actuated, so he doesn’t waste any tape. Anything juicy he saves for Sunlight Gardener. I’ve heard Casey put a blue box on Gardener’s phone so he can make long-distance phone calls free, and I know damned well he’s spliced a line into the pay-TV cable that goes by out front. You like the idea of Mr Ice Cream settling back and watching a big double feature on Cinemax after a hard day of selling Jesus to the masses? I like it. This guy is as American as spinner hubcaps, Jack, and here in Indiana they love him almost as much as they love high-school basketball.’
    Ferd hawked back snot, grimaced, twisted his head, and spat into the dirt.
    ‘You’re kidding,’ Jack said.
    ‘Ferd Janklow never kids about the Marching Morons of the Sunlight Home,’ Ferd said solemnly. ‘He’s rich, he doesn’t have to declare any of it to the Internal Revenue, he’s got the local school board buffaloed – I mean, they’re scared to death of him; there’s this one woman who practically skitters every time she’s out here, looks like she’d like to give him the sign against the evil eye, or something – and like I said, he always seems to know when someone from the State Education Board is going to pay us a surprise visit. We clean this place from top to bottom, Bast the Bastard takes the canvas overcoats up to the attic, and the Box gets filled with hay from the barn. And when they come, we’re always in class. How many classes you been in since you landed here in Indiana’s version of the Love Boat , Jack?’
    ‘None,’ Jack said.
    ‘None!’ Ferd