The Talisman

hadn’t been there, he would have fallen down.
    ‘All right,’ Sonny said . . . the words came out in a breathy rush that was close to a whine. ‘All right, all right, forget it.’ His thin face grew arrogant again. ‘Reverend Gardener told me if you said no that I should tell you that your friend’s screaming for you. Do you get it?’
    ‘I know who he’s screaming for.’
    ‘Get in the truck!’ Pedersen said, grimly, barely looking at them as he passed by . . . but when he passed Sonny, Pedersen grimaced as though he had smelled something rotten.
    Jack could hear Wolf screaming even after the trucks got rolling, though the mufflers on both were little more than scallops of iron lace and the engines blatted stridently. Nor did Wolf’s screams fade. He had made some sort of connection with Wolf’s mind now, and he could hear Wolf screaming even after the work parties had reached Far Field. The understanding that these screams were only in his mind did nothing at all to improve matters.
    Around lunchtime, Wolf fell silent, and Jack knew, suddenly and with no doubt at all, that Gardener had ordered him taken out of the Box before his screams and howls attracted the wrong sort of attention. After what had happened to Ferd, he wouldn’t want any attention at all focussed on the Sunlight Home.
    When the work parties returned that late afternoon, the door of the Box was standing open and the Box was empty. Upstairs in the room they shared, Wolf was lying on the lower bunk. He smiled wanly as Jack came in.
    ‘How’s your head, Jack? Bruise looks a little better. Wolf!’
    ‘Wolf, are you all right?’
    ‘Screamed, didn’t I? Couldn’t help it.’
    ‘Wolf, I’m sorry,’ Jack said. Wolf looked strange – too white, somehow diminished.
    He’s dying , Jack thought. No, his mind corrected; Wolf had been dying ever since they had flipped into this world to escape Morgan. But now he was dying faster. Too white . . . diminished . . . but . . .
    Jack felt a creeping chill.
    Wolf’s bare legs and arms weren’t really bare; they were downed with a fine pelt of hair. It hadn’t been there two nights ago, he was sure of that.
    He felt an urge to rush over to the window and stare out, searching for the moon, trying to make sure he hadn’t somehow misplaced about seventeen days.
    ‘It’s not the time of the Change, Jacky,’ Wolf said. His voice was dry, somehow husked-out. The voice of an invalid. ‘But I started to change in that dark smelly place they put me in. Wolf! I did. Because I was so mad and scared. Because I was yelling and screaming. Yelling and screaming can make the Change all by themselves, if a Wolf does it long enough.’ Wolf brushed at the hair on his legs. ‘It’ll go away.’
    ‘Gardener set a price for letting you out,’ Jack said, ‘but I couldn’t pay it. I wanted to, but . . . Wolf . . . my mother . . .’
    His voice blurred and wavered toward tears.
    ‘Shhh, Jacky. Wolf knows. Right here and now.’ Wolf smiled his terrible wan smile again, and took Jack’s hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JACK NAMES THE PLANETS
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    1
    Another week in the Sunlight Home, praise God. The moon put on weight.
    On Monday, a smiling Sunlight Gardener asked the boys to bow their heads and give thanks to God for the conversion of their brother Ferdinand Janklow. Ferd had made a soul-decision for Christ while recuperating in Parkland Hospital, Sunlight said, his smile radiant. Ferd had made a collect call to his parents and told them he wanted to be a soul-winner for the Lord, and they prayed for guidance right there over the long-distance line, and his parents had come to pick him up that very day. Dead and buried under some frosty Indiana field . . . or over in the Territories, perhaps, where the Indiana State Patrol could never go .
    Tuesday was too coldly rainy for field-work. Most of the boys had been allowed to stay in their rooms and sleep or read, but for Jack and Wolf, the period of harassment had begun. Wolf was lugging load after load of garbage from the barn and the sheds out to the side of the road in the driving rain. Jack had been set to work cleaning toilets. He supposed that Warwick and Casey, who had assigned him this duty, thought they were giving him a really nasty job to do. It was obvious that they’d never seen the men’s room of the world-famous Oatley Tap.
    Just another week at the Sunlight Home, can you say oh-yeah.
    Hector Bast returned on Wednesday, his right arm in a cast