The Talisman

29

Richard at Thayer

1

At eleven o’clock the next morning an exhausted Jack Sawyer unshouldered his pack at the end of a long playing field covered with crisp brown dead grass. Far away, two men in plaid jackets and baseball caps labored with leaf-blower and rake down on the stretch of lawn surrounding the most distant group of buildings. To Jack’s left, directly behind the red-brick backside of the Thayer library, was the faculty parking lot. In the front of Thayer School a great gate opened onto a tree-lined drive which circled around a large quad crisscrossed with narrow paths. If anything stood out on the campus, it was the library—a Bauhaus steamship of glass and steel and brick.

Jack had already seen that a secondary gate opened onto another access road before the library. This ran two-thirds the length of the school and ended at the garbage Dumpsters nested in the round cul-de-sac just before the land climbed up to form the plateau of the football field.

Jack began to move across the top of the field toward the rear of the classroom buildings. When the Thayerites began to go to dining hall, he could find Richard’s room—Entry 5, Nelson House.

The dry winter grass crunched beneath his feet. Jack pulled Myles P. Kiger’s excellent coat tightly about him—the coat at least looked preppy, if Jack did not. He walked between Thayer Hall and an Upper School dormitory named Spence House, in the direction of the quad. Lazy preluncheon voices came through the Spence House windows.

2

Jack glanced toward the quad and saw an elderly man, slightly stooped and of a greenish-bronze, standing on a plinth the height of a carpenter’s bench and examining the cover of a heavy book. Elder Thayer, Jack surmised. He was dressed in the stiff collar, flowing tie, and frock coat of a New England Transcendentalist. Elder Thayer’s brass head inclined over the volume, pointed generally in the direction of the classroom buildings.

Jack took the right-angle at the end of the path. Sudden noise erupted from an upstairs window ahead—boys shouting out the syllables of a name that sounded like “Etheridge! Etheridge!” Then an irruption of wordless screams and shouts, accompanied by the sounds of heavy furniture moving across a wooden floor. “Etheridge!”

Jack heard a door closing behind his back, and looked over his shoulder to see a tall boy with dirty-blond hair rushing down the steps of Spence House. He wore a tweed sport jacket and a tie and a pair of L. L. Bean Maine hunting shoes. Only a long yellow-and-blue scarf wound several times around his neck protected him from the cold. His long face looked both haggard and arrogant, and just now was the face of a senior in a self-righteous rage. Jack pushed the hood of the loden coat over his head and moved down the path.

“I don’t want anybody to move!” the tall boy shouted up at the closed window. “You freshmen just stay put!”

Jack drifted toward the next building.

“You’re moving the chairs!” the tall boy screamed behind him. “I can hear you doing it! STOP!” Then Jack heard the furious senior call out to him.

Jack turned around, his heart beating loudly.

“Get over to Nelson House right now, whoever you are, on the double, post-haste, immediately. Or I’ll go to your house master.”

“Yes sir,” Jack said, and quickly turned away to move in the direction the prefect had pointed.

“You’re at least seven minutes late!” Etheridge screeched at him, and Jack was startled into jogging. “On the double, I said!” Jack turned the jog into a run.

When he started downhill (he hoped it was the right way; it was, anyway, the direction in which Etheridge had seemed to be looking), he saw a long black car—a limousine—just beginning to swing through the main front gates and whisper up the long drive to the quad. He thought that maybe whatever sat behind the tinted windows of the limousine was nothing so ordinary as the parent of a Thayer School sophomore.

The long black car eased forward, insolently slow.

No, Jack thought, I’m spooking myself.

Still he could not move. Jack watched the limousine pull up to the bottom of the quad and stop, its motor running. A black chauffeur with the shoulders of a running back got out of the front seat and opened the rear passenger door. An old white-haired man, a stranger, effortfully got out of the limousine’s back seat. He wore a black topcoat which revealed an immaculate white shirtfront and a solid dark tie. The man nodded to his chauffeur and began to toil across the quad in the direction of the main building. He never even looked in Jack’s direction. The chauffeur elaborately craned his neck and looked upward, as if speculating about the possibility of snow. Jack stepped backward and watched while the old man made it to the steps of Thayer Hall. The chauffeur continued his specious examination of the sky. Jack melted backward down the path until the side of the building shielded him, and then he turned around and began to trot.

Nelson House was a three-story brick building on the other side of the quadrangle. Two windows on the ground floor showed him a dozen seniors exercising their privileges: reading while sprawled on couches, playing a desultory game of cards on a coffee table; others stared lazily at what must have been a television set parked beneath the windows.

An unseen door slammed shut a little farther up the hill, and Jack caught a glimpse of the tall blond senior, Etheridge, stalking back to his own building after dealing with the freshmen’s crimes.

Jack cut across the front of the building and a gust of cold wind smacked up against him as soon as he reached its side. And around the corner was a narrow door and a plaque (wooden this time, white with Gothic black lettering) saying ENTRY 5. A series of windows stretched down to the next corner.

And here, at the third window—relief. For here was Richard Sloat, his eyeglasses firmly hooked around his ears, his necktie knotted, his hands only slightly stained with ink, sitting erect at his desk and reading some fat book as if for dear life. He was positioned sideways to Jack, who had time to take in Richard’s dear, well-known profile before he rapped on the glass.

Richard’s head jerked up from the book. He stared wildly about him, frightened and surprised by the sudden noise.

“Richard,” Jack said softly, and was rewarded by the sight of his friend’s astonished face turning toward him. Richard looked almost moronic with surprise.

“Open the window,” Jack said, mouthing the words with exaggerated care so that his friend could read his lips.

Richard stood up from his desk, still moving with the slowness of shock. Jack mimed pushing the window up. When Richard reached the window he put his hands on the frame and looked down severely at Jack for a moment—in that short and critical glance was a judgment about Jack’s dirty face and unwashed, lank hair, his unorthodox arrival, much else. What on earth are you up to now? Finally he pushed up the window.

“Well,” Richard said. “Most people use the door.”

“Great,” Jack said, almost laughing. “When I’m like most people, I probably will, too. Stand back, okay?”

Looking very much as though he had been caught off-guard, Richard stepped a few paces back.

Jack hoisted himself up onto the sill and slid through the window head-first. “Oof.”

“Okay, hi,” Richard said. “I suppose it’s even sort of nice to see you. But I have to go to lunch pretty soon. You could take a shower, I guess. Everybody else’ll be down in the dining room.” He stopped talking, as if startled that he had said so much.

Richard, Jack saw, would require delicate handling. “Could you bring some food back for me? I’m really starving.”

“Great,” Richard said. “First you get everybody crazy, including my dad, by running away, then you break in here like a burglar, and now you want me to steal food for you. Fine, sure. Okay. Great.”

“We have a lot to talk about,” Jack said.

“If,” Richard said, leaning slightly forward with his hands in his pockets, “if you’ll start going back to New Hampshire today, or if you’ll let me call my dad and get him here to take you back, I’ll try to grab some extra food for you.”

“I’m willing to talk about anything with you, Richie-boy. Anything. I’ll talk about going back, sure.”

Richard nodded. “Where in the world have you been, anyhow?” His eyes burned beneath their thick lenses. Then a big, surprising blink. “And how in the world can you justify the way you and your mother are treating my father? Shit, Jack. I really think you ought to go back to that place in New Hampshire.”

“I will go back,” Jack said. “That’s a promise. But I have to get something first. Is there anyplace I can sit down? I’m sort of dead tired.”

Richard nodded at his bed, then—typically—flapped one hand at his desk chair, which was nearer Jack.

Doors slammed in the hallway. Loud voices passed by Richard’s door, a crowd’s shuffling feet.

“You ever read about the Sunlight Home?” Jack asked. “I was there. Two of my friends died at the Sunlight Home, and get this, Richard, the second one was a werewolf.”

Richard’s face tightened. “Well, that’s an amazing coincidence, because—”

“I really was at the Sunlight Home, Richard.”

“So I gather,” said Richard. “Okay. I’ll be back with some food in about half an hour. Then I’ll have to tell you who lives next door. But this is Seabrook Island stuff, isn’t it? Tell me the truth.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Jack let Myles P. Kiger’s coat slip off his shoulders and fold itself over the back of the chair.

“I’ll be back,” Richard said. He waved uncertainly to Jack on his way out the door.

Jack kicked off his shoes and closed his eyes.

3

The conversation to which Richard had alluded as “Seabrook Island stuff,” and which Jack remembered as well as his friend, took place in the last week of their final visit to the resort of that name.

The two families had taken joint vacations nearly every year while Phil Sawyer was alive. The summer after his death, Morgan Sloat and Lily Sawyer had tried to keep the tradition going, and booked the four of them into the vast old hotel on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, which had been the site of some of their happiest summers. The experiment had not worked.

The boys were accustomed to being in each other’s company. They were also accustomed to places like Seabrook Island. Richard Sloat and Jack Sawyer had scampered through resort hotels and down vast tanned beaches all through their childhood—but now the climate had mysteriously altered. An unexpected seriousness had entered their lives, an awkwardness.

The death of Phil Sawyer had changed the very color of the future. Jack began to feel that final summer at Seabrook that he might not want to sit in the chair behind his father’s desk—that he wanted more in his life. More what? He knew—this was one of the few things he did truly know—that this powerful “moreness” was connected to the Daydreams. When he had begun to see this in himself, he became aware of something else: that his friend Richard was not only incapable of sensing this quality of “moreness,” but that in fact he quite clearly wanted its opposite. Richard wanted less. Richard did not want anything he could not respect.

Jack and Richard had sloped off by themselves in that slow-breathing time composed at good resorts by the hours between lunch and cocktails. In fact they had not gone far—only up at the side of a pine-tree-covered hill overlooking the rear of the inn. Beneath them sparkled the water of the inn’s huge rectangular pool, through which Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer smoothly and efficiently swam length after length. At one of the tables set back from the pool sat Richard’s father, wrapped in a bulging, fuzzy terrycloth robe, flip-flops on his white feet, simultaneously eating a club sandwich and wheeling and dealing on the plug-in telephone in his other hand.

“Is this sort of stuff what you want?” he asked Richard, who was seated neatly beside his own sprawl and held—no surprise—a book. The Life of Thomas Edison.

“What I want? When I grow up, you mean?” Richard seemed a little nonplussed by the question: “It’s pretty nice, I guess. I don’t know if I want it or not.”

“Do you know what you want, Richard? You always say you want to be a research chemist,” Jack said. “Why do you say that? What does it mean?”

“It means that I want to be a research chemist.” Richard smiled.

“You know what I mean, don’t you? What’s the point of being a research chemist? Do you think that would be fun? Do you think you’ll cure cancer and save millions of people’s lives?”

Richard looked at him very openly, his eyes slightly magnified by the glasses he had begun to wear four months earlier. “I don’t think I’ll ever cure cancer, no. But that’s not even the point. The point is finding out how things work. The point is that things actually really do work in an orderly way, in spite of how it looks, and you can find out about it.”

“Order.”

“Yeah, so why are you smiling?”

Jack grinned. “You’re going to think I’m crazy. I’d like to find something that makes all this—all these rich guys chasing golfballs and yelling into telephones—that makes all this look sick.”

“It already looks sick,” Richard said, with no intention of being funny.

“Don’t you sometimes think there’s more to life than order?” He looked over at Richard’s innocent, skeptical face. “Don’t you want just a little magic, Richard?”

“You know, sometimes I think you just want chaos,” Richard said, flushing a bit. “I think you’re making fun of me. If you want magic, you completely wreck everything I believe in. In fact you wreck reality.”

“Maybe there isn’t just one reality.”

“In Alice in Wonderland, sure!” Richard was losing his temper.

He stomped off through the pines, and Jack realized for the first time that the talk released by his feelings about the Daydreams had infuriated his friend. Jack’s longer legs brought him alongside Richard in seconds. “I wasn’t making fun of you,” he said. “It’s just, I was sort of curious about why you always say you want to be a chemist.”

Richard stopped short and looked soberly up at Jack.

“Just stop driving me crazy with that kind of stuff,” Richard said. “That’s just Seabrook Island talk. It’s hard enough being one of the six or seven sane people in America without having my best friend flip out totally.”

From then on, Richard Sloat bristled at any signs of fancifulness in Jack, and immediately dismissed it as “Seabrook Island stuff.”

4

By the time Richard returned from the dining room, Jack, freshly showered and with his wet hair adhering to his scalp, was idly turning over books at Richard’s desk. Jack was wondering, as Richard swung through the door carrying a grease-stained paper napkin clearly wrapped around a substantial quantity of food, whether the conversation to come might be easier if the books on the desk were The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down instead of Organic Chemistry and Mathematical Puzzles.

“What was lunch?” Jack asked.

“You got lucky. Southern fried chicken—one of the few things they serve here that don’t make you sorry for the animal who died to become part of the food chain.” He handed the greasy napkin over to Jack. Four thick, richly battered sections of chicken sent up an aroma of almost unbelievable goodness and density. Jack waded in.

“How long have you been eating as though you oinked?” Richard pushed his glasses up on his nose and sat down on his narrow bed. Beneath his tweed jacket he wore a patterned brown V-neck sweater, the bottom of which had been tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

Jack had an uneasy moment, wondering if it were really possible to talk about the Territories with someone so tightly buttoned that he tucked his sweaters beneath his belts.

“The last time I ate,” he said mildly, “was yesterday, around noon. I’m a little hungry, Richard. Thanks for bringing me the chicken. It’s great. It’s the best chicken I ever ate. You’re a great guy, risking expulsion like this.”

“You think that’s a joke, do you?” Richard yanked at the sweater, frowning. “If anybody finds you in here, I probably will get expelled. So don’t get too funny. We have to figure out how we’re going to get you back to New Hampshire.”

Silence then, for a moment: an appraising look from Jack, a stern look from Richard.

“I know you want me to explain what I’m doing, Richard,” Jack said around a mouthful of chicken, “and believe me, it’s not going to be easy.”

“You don’t look the same, you know,” Richard said. “You look . . . older. But that’s not all. You’re changed.”

“I know I’ve changed. You’d be a little different, too, if you’d been with me since September.” Jack smiled, looked at scowling Richard in his good-boy clothes, and knew that he would never be able to tell Richard about his father. He simply was not capable of that. If events did it for him, so be it; but he himself did not possess the assassin’s heart required for that particular disclosure.

His friend continued to frown at Jack, clearly waiting for the story to begin.

Perhaps to stall the moment when he would have to try to convince Rational Richard of the unbelievable, Jack asked, “Is the kid in the next room quitting school? I saw his suitcases on his bed from outside.”

“Well, yes, that’s interesting,” Richard said. “I mean, interesting in the light of what you said. He is leaving—in fact, he’s already gone. Someone is supposed to come for his things, I guess. God knows what kind of a fairy tale you’ll make of this, but the kid next door was Reuel Gardener. The son of that preacher who ran that home you claim you escaped from.” Richard ignored Jack’s sudden fit of coughing. “In most senses, I should say, Reuel was anything but the normal kid next door, and probably nobody here was too sorry to see him go. Just when the story came out about kids dying at that place his father ran, he got a telegram ordering him to leave Thayer.”

Jack had gotten down the wad of chicken that had tried to choke him. “Sunlight Gardener’s son? That guy had a son? And he was here?”

“He came at the start of the term,” Richard said simply. “That’s what I was trying to tell you before.”

Suddenly Thayer School was menacing to Jack in a way that Richard could not begin to comprehend. “What was he like?”

“A sadist,” Richard said. “Sometimes I heard really peculiar noises coming out of Reuel’s room. And once I saw a dead cat on the garbage thing out in back that didn’t have any eyes or ears. When you saw him, you’d think he was the kind of person who might torture a cat. And he sort of smelled like rancid English Leather, I thought.” Richard was silent for a carefully timed moment, and then asked, “Were you really in the Sunlight Home?”

“For thirty days. It was hell, or hell’s next-door neighbor.” He inhaled, looking at Richard’s scowling but now at least half-convinced face. “This is hard for you to swallow, Richard, and I know that, but the guy with me was a werewolf. And if he hadn’t been killed while he was saving my life he’d be here right now.”

“A werewolf. Hair on the palms of his hands. Changes into a blood-thirsty monster every full moon.” Richard looked musingly around the little room.

Jack waited until Richard’s gaze returned to him. “Do you want to know what I’m doing? Do you want me to tell you why I’m hitchhiking all the way across the country?”

“I’m going to start screaming if you don’t,” Richard said.

“Well,” Jack said, “I’m trying to save my mother’s life.” As he uttered it, this sentence seemed to him filled with a wondrous clarity.

“How the hell are you going to do that?” Richard exploded. “Your mother probably has cancer. As my father has been pointing out to you, she needs doctors and science . . . and you hit the road? What are you going to use to save your mother, Jack? Magic?”

Jack’s eyes began to burn. “You got it, Richard old chum.” He raised his arm and pressed his already damp eyes into the fabric at the crook of his elbow.

“Oh hey, calm down, hey really . . .” Richard said, tugging frantically at his sweater. “Don’t cry, Jack, come on, please, I know it’s a terrible thing, I didn’t mean to . . . it was just that—” Richard had crossed the room instantly and without noise, and was now awkwardly patting Jack’s arm and shoulder.

“I’m okay,” Jack said. He lowered his arm. “It’s not some crazy fantasy, Richard, no matter how it looks to you.” He sat up straight. “My father called me Travelling Jack, and so did an old man in Arcadia Beach.” Jack hoped he was right about Richard’s sympathy opening internal doors; when he looked at Richard’s face, he saw that it was true. His friend looked worried, tender, four-square.

Jack began his story.

5

Around the two boys the life of Nelson House went on, both calm and boisterous in the manner of boarding schools, punctuated with shouts and roars and laughter. Footsteps padded past the door but did not stop. From the room above came regular thumps and an occasional drift of music Jack finally recognized as a record by Blue Oyster Cult. He began by telling Richard about the Daydreams. From the Daydreams he went to Speedy Parker. He described the voice speaking to him from the whirling funnel in the sand. And then he told Richard of how he had taken Speedy’s “magic juice” and first flipped into the Territories.

“But I think it was just cheap wine, wino wine,” Jack said. “Later, after it was all gone, I found out that I didn’t need it to flip. I could just do it by myself.”

“Okay,” Richard said noncommittally.

He tried to truly represent the Territories to Richard: the cart-track, the sight of the summer palace, the timelessness and specificity of it. Captain Farren; the dying Queen, which brought him to Twinners; Osmond. The scene at All-Hands’ Village; the Outpost Road which was the Western Road. He showed Richard his little collection of sacred objects, the guitar-pick and marble and coin. Richard merely turned these over in his fingers and gave them back without comment. Then Jack relived his wretched time in Oatley. Richard listened to Jack’s tales of Oatley silent but wide-eyed.

Jack carefully omitted Morgan Sloat and Morgan of Orris from his account of the scene at the Lewisburg rest area on I-70 in western Ohio.

Then Jack had to describe Wolf as he had first seen him, that beaming giant in Oshkosh B’Gosh bib overalls, and he felt his tears building again behind his eyes. He did actually startle Richard by weeping while he told about trying to get Wolf into cars, and confessed his impatience with his companion, fighting not to weep again, and was fine for a long time—he managed to get through the story of Wolf’s first Change without tears or a constricted throat. Then he struck trouble again. His rage kept him talking freely until he got to Ferd Janklow, and then his eyes grew hot again.

Richard said nothing for a long time. Then he stood up and fetched a clean handkerchief from a bureau drawer. Jack noisily, wetly blew his nose.

“That’s what happened,” Jack said. “Most of it, anyhow.”

“What have you been reading? What movies have you been seeing?”

“Fuck you,” Jack said. He stood up and walked across the room to get his pack, but Richard reached out and put his hand around Jack’s wrist. “I don’t think you made it all up. I don’t think you made any of it up.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. I don’t know what I do think, actually, but I’m sure you’re not telling me deliberate lies.” He dropped his hand. “I believe you were in the Sunlight Home, I believe that, all right. And I believe that you had a friend named Wolf, who died there. I’m sorry, but I cannot take the Territories seriously, and I cannot accept that your friend was a werewolf.”

“So you think I’m nuts,” Jack said.

“I think you’re in trouble. But I’m not going to call my father, and I’m not going to make you leave now. You’ll have to sleep in the bed here tonight. If we hear Mr. Haywood coming around to do bed checks, you’ll be able to hide under the bed.”

Richard had taken on a faintly executive air, and he put his hands on his hips and glanced critically around his room. “You have to get some rest. I’m sure that’s part of the problem. They worked you half to death in that horrible place, and your mind got twisted, and now you need to rest.”

“I do,” Jack admitted.

Richard rolled his eyes upward. “I have to go to intramural basketball pretty soon, but you can hide in here, and I’ll bring some more food back from the dining room later on. The important thing is, you need rest and you need to get back home.”

Jack said, “New Hampshire isn’t home.”