The Talisman

Casey was too dismayed to stop. ‘—and it sounds like there’s a riot going on in the common room! Yelling! Screaming! And it sounds like—’
    Suddenly, Jack’s mind filled with a bellow of incredible force and vitality:
    Jacky! Where are you? Wolf! Where are you right here and now?
    ‘—there’s a dog-pack or something loose up there!’
    Gardener was looking at Casey now, eyes narrow, lips pressed tightly together.
    Gardener’s office! Downstairs! Where we were before!
    DOWN-side, Jacky?
    Stairs! DownSTAIRS, Wolf!
    Right here and now!
    That was it; Wolf was gone from his head. From upstairs, Jack heard a thump and a scream.
    ‘Reverend Gardener?’ Casey asked. His normally flushed face was deeply pale. ‘Reverend Gardener, what is it? What—’
    ‘Shut up!’ Gardener said, and Casey recoiled as if slapped, eyes wide and hurt, considerable jowls trembling. Gardener brushed past him and went to the safe. From it he took an outsized pistol which he stuck in his belt. For the first time, the Reverend Sunlight Gardener looked scared and baffled.
    Upstairs, there was a dim shattering sound, followed by a screech. The eyes of Singer, Warwick, and Casey all turned nervously upward – they looked like nervous bomb-shelter occupants listening to a growing whistle above them.
    Gardener looked at Jack. A grin surfaced on his face, the corners of his mouth twitching irregularly, as if strings were attached to them, strings that were being pulled by a puppeteer who wasn’t particularly good at his job.
    ‘He’ll come here, won’t he?’ Sunlight Gardener said. He nodded as if Jack had answered. ‘He’ll come . . . but I don’t think he’ll leave.’
    13
    Wolf leaped. Heck Bast was able to get his right hand in its plaster cast up in front of his throat. There was a hot flash of pain, a brittle crunch, and a puff of plaster-dust as Wolf bit the cast – and what was left of the hand inside it – off. Heck looked stupidly down at where it had been. Blood jetted from his wrist. It soaked his white turtleneck with bright, hot warmth.
    ‘Please,’ Heck whined. ‘Please, please, don’t—’
    Wolf spat out the hand. His head moved forward with the speed of a striking snake. Heck felt a dim pulling sensation as Wolf tore his throat open, and then he knew no more.
    14
    As he bolted out of the common room, Peabody skidded in Pedersen’s blood, went down to one knee, got up, and then ran down the first-floor hall as fast as he could go, vomiting all over himself as he went. Kids were running everywhere, shrieking in panic. Peabody’s own panic was not quite that complete. He remembered what he was supposed to do in extreme situations – although he didn’t think anyone had ever envisioned a situation as extreme as this ; he had an idea that Reverend Gardener had been thinking more in terms of a kid going bugfuck and cutting another kid up, something like that.
    Beyond the parlor where new boys were brought when they first came to the Sunlight Home was a small upstairs office used only by the thugs Gardener referred to as his ‘student aides’.
    Peabody locked himself in this room, picked up the phone, and dialled an emergency number. A moment later he was talking to Franky Williams.
    ‘Peabody, at the Sunlight Home,’ he said. ‘You ought to get up here with as many police as you can get, Officer Williams. All hell has—’
    Outside he heard a wailing shriek followed by a crash of breaking wood. There was a snarling, barking roar, and the shriek was cut off.
    ‘—has busted loose up here,’ he finished.
    ‘What kind of hell?’ Williams asked impatiently. ‘Lemme talk to Gardener.’
    ‘I don’t know where the Reverend is, but he’d want you up here. There’s people dead. Kids dead.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Just get up here with a lot of men,’ Peabody said. ‘And a lot of guns.’
    Another scream. The crash-thud of something heavy – the old highboy in the front hall, probably – being overturned.
    ‘Machine-guns, if you can find them.’
    A crystalline jangle as the big chandelier in the hall came down. Peabody cringed. It sounded like that monster was tearing the whole place apart with its bare hands.
    ‘Hell, bring a nuke if you can,’ Peabody said, beginning to blubber.
    ‘What—’
    Peabody hung up before Williams could finish. He crawled into the kneehole under the desk. Wrapped his arms around his head. And began to pray assiduously that all of this should prove to be only a