The Talisman

hell,’ Heck said, holding his plastered right hand in his left, ‘but it was worth it, snotface.’ He started forward.
    It was you! It was you standing over Ferd in that other world, whipping him to death. It was you, you were the gargoyle, it was your Twinner!
    A rage so hot it was like shame swept through Jack. As Heck came in range, Jack leaned back against the sink, grasped its edge tightly in both hands, and shot both of his feet out. They caught Heck Bast squarely in the chest and sent him reeling back into the open stall. The shoe that had come back to Indiana planted in a toilet-bowl left a clear wet print on Heck’s white turtleneck sweater. Heck sat down in the toilet with a splash, looking stunned. His cast clunked on porcelain.
    Others were bursting in now. Wolf was trying to get up. His hair hung in his face. Sonny was advancing on him, one hand still clapped over his squirting nose, obviously meaning to kick Wolf back down.
    ‘Yeah, you go ahead and touch him, Sonny,’ Jack said softly, and Sonny cringed away.
    Jack caught one of Wolf’s arms and helped him up. He saw as if in a dream that Wolf had come back hairier than ever. It’s putting him under too much stress, all of this. It’s bringing on his Change and Christ this is never going to end, never . . . never . . .
    He and Wolf backed away from the others – Warwick, Casey, Pedersen, Peabody, Singer – and toward the rear of the bathroom. Heck was coming out of the stall Jack had kicked him into, and Jack saw something else. They had flipped from the fourth stall down the line. Heck Bast was coming out of the fifth. They had moved just far enough in that other world to come back into a different stall.
    ‘They was buggering each other in there!’ Sonny cried, his words muffled and nasal. ‘The retard and the pretty boy! Warwick and me caught em with their dicks out!’
    Jack’s buttocks touched cold tile. Nowhere else to run. He let go of Wolf, who slumped, dazed and pitiful, and put up his fists.
    ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Who’s first?’
    ‘You gonna take us all on?’ Pedersen asked.
    ‘If I have to, I will,’ Jack said. ‘What are you going to do, put me in traction for Jesus? Come on!’
    A flicker of unease on Pedersen’s face; a cramp of outright fear on Casey’s. They stopped . . . they actually stopped. Jack felt a moment of wild, stupid hope. The boys stared at him with the unease of men looking at a mad dog which can be brought down . . . but which may bite someone badly first.
    ‘Stand aside, boys,’ a powerful, mellow voice said, and they moved aside willingly, relief lighting their faces. It was Reverend Gardener. Reverend Gardener would know how to handle this.
    He came toward the cornered boys, dressed this morning in charcoal slacks and a white satin shirt with full, almost Byronic, sleeves. In his hand he held that black hypodermic case.
    He looked at Jack and sighed. ‘Do you know what the Bible says about homosexuality, Jack?’
    Jack bared his teeth at him.
    Gardener nodded sadly, as if this were no more than he had expected.
    ‘Well, all boys are bad,’ he said. ‘It’s axiomatic.’
    He opened the case. The hypo glittered.
    ‘I think that you and your friend have been doing something even worse than sodomy, however,’ Gardener went on in his mellow, regretful voice. ‘Going to places better left to your elders and betters, perhaps.’
    Sonny Singer and Hector Bast exchanged a startled, uneasy look.
    ‘I think that some of this evil . . . this perversity . . . has been my own fault.’ He took the hypo out, glanced at it, and then took out a vial. He handed the case to Warwick and filled the hypo. ‘I have never believed in forcing my boys to confess, but without confession there can be no decision for Christ, and with no decision for Christ, evil continues to grow. So, although I regret it deeply, I believe that the time to ask has ended and the time to demand in God’s name has come. Pedersen. Peabody. Warwick. Casey. Hold them!’
    The boys surged forward on his command like trained dogs. Jack got in one blow at Peabody, and then his hands were grabbed and pinned.
    ‘ Led me hid imb! ’ Sonny cried in his new, muffled voice. He elbowed through the crowd of goggling boys, his eyes glittering with hate. ‘I wand to hid imb!’
    ‘Not now,’ Gardener said. ‘Later, perhaps. We’ll pray on it, won’t we, Sonny?’
    ‘Yeah.’ The glitter in Sonny’s eyes had become positively