The Talisman

32

“Send Out Your Passenger!”

1

“Help me with this, Richard,” Jack grunted.

“I don’t want to move the bureau, Jack,” Richard said in a childish, lecturing voice. Those dark circles under his eyes were even more pronounced now than they had been in the lounge. “That’s not where it belongs.”

Out on the quad, that howl rose in the air again.

The bed was in front of the door. Richard’s room was now pulled entirely out of shape. Richard stood looking around at this, blinking. Then he went to his bed and pulled off the blankets. He handed one to Jack without speaking, then took his and spread it on the floor. He took his change and his billfold out of his pockets, and put them neatly on the bureau. Then he lay down in the middle of his blanket, folded the sides over himself and then just lay there on the floor, his glasses still on, his face a picture of silent misery.

The silence outside was thick and dreamlike, broken only by the distant growls of the big rigs on the turnpike. Nelson House itself was eerily silent.

“I don’t want to talk about what’s outside,” Richard said. “I just want that up front.”

“Okay, Richard,” Jack said soothingly. “We won’t talk about it.”

“Good night, Jack.”

“Good night, Richard.”

Richard gave him a smile that was wan, and terribly tired; yet there was enough sweet friendliness in it to both warm Jack’s heart and wrench it. “I’m still glad you came,” Richard said, “and we’ll talk about all of this in the morning. I’m sure it will make more sense then. This little fever I have will be gone then.”

Richard rolled over on his right side and closed his eyes. Five minutes later, in spite of the hard floor, he was deeply asleep.

Jack sat up for a long time, looking out into the darkness. Sometimes he could see the lights of passing cars on Springfield Avenue; at other times both the headlights and the streetlamps themselves seemed to be gone, as if the entire Thayer School kept sideslipping out of reality and hanging in limbo for a while before slipping back in again.

A wind was rising. Jack could hear it rattling the last frozen leaves from the trees on the quad; could hear it knocking the branches together like bones, could hear it shrieking coldly in the spaces between the buildings.

2

“That guy’s coming,” Jack said tensely. It was an hour or so later. “Etheridge’s Twinner.”

“Huzzzat?”

“Never mind,” Jack said. “Go back to sleep. You don’t want to see.”

But Richard was sitting up. Before his eye could fix on the slumped, somehow twisted form walking toward Nelson House, it was abducted by the campus itself. He was profoundly shocked, deeply frightened.

The ivy on the Monkson Field House, which had that morning been skeletal but still faintly green, had now gone an ugly, blighted yellow. “Sloat! Give us your passenger!”

Suddenly all Richard wanted to do was to go back to sleep—go to sleep until his flu was all gone (he had awakened deciding it must be the flu; not just a chill or fever but a real case of the flu); the flu and the fever that was giving him such horrid, twisted hallucinations. He should never have stood by that open window . . . or, earlier, allowed Jack through the window of his room. Richard thought this, and was then deeply and immediately ashamed.

3

Jack shot a quick sideways glance at Richard—but his pallid face and bulging eyes suggested to Jack that Richard was edging farther and farther into The Magical Land of Overload.

The thing out there was short. It stood on the frost-whitened grass like a troll that had crawled out from under some bridge, its long-clawed hands hanging almost to its knees. It wore an Army duffel coat with ETHERIDGE stencilled above the left pocket. The jacket hung unzipped and open. Beneath it, Jack could see a torn and rumpled Pendleton shirt. A dark stain which might have been either blood or vomit was splashed over one side. It was wearing a rumpled blue tie with tiny gold upper-case E’s woven into the rep fabric; a couple of burrs were stuck on it like grotesque tie-tacks.

Only half of this new Etheridge’s face worked right. There was dirt in its hair and leaves on its clothes.

“Sloat! Give us your passenger!”

Jack looked down at Etheridge’s freakish Twinner again. He was caught and held by its eyes, which were somehow vibrating in their sockets, like tuning forks moving rapidly in their lab-mounts. He had to work to drag his eyes away.

“Richard!” he grunted. “Don’t look in its eyes.”

Richard didn’t reply; he was staring down at the grinning troll-version of Etheridge with drugged and pallid interest.

Scared, Jack butted his friend with his shoulder.

“Oh,” Richard said. Abruptly he snatched up Jack’s hand and pressed it against his forehead. “How hot do I feel?” he demanded.

Jack pulled his hand away from Richard’s forehead, which was a bit warm but no more.

“Pretty hot,” he lied.

“I knew it,” Richard said with real relief. “I’m going to the infirmary pretty soon, Jack. I think I need an antibiotic.”

“Give him to us, Sloat!”

“Let’s get the bureau in front of the window,” Jack said.

“You’re in no danger, Sloat!” Etheridge called. It grinned reassuringly—the right half of its face grinned reassuringly, anyway; the left half only continued its corpselike gape.

“How can it look so much like Etheridge?” Richard asked with unsettling, eerie calmness. “How can its voice come through the glass so clearly? What’s wrong with its face?” His voice sharpened a little and recovered some of its earlier dismay as he asked a final question, one which seemed to be at that moment the most vital question of all, at least to Richard Sloat: “Where did it get Etheridge’s tie, Jack?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. We’re back on Seabrook Island for sure, Richie-boy, and I think we’re gonna boogy till you puke.

“Give him to us, Sloat, or we’ll come in and get him!”

The Etheridge-thing showed its single fang in a ferocious cannibal’s grin.

“Send your passenger out, Sloat, he’s dead! He’s dead and if you don’t send him out soon, you’ll smell him when he starts to stink!”

“Help me move the frigging bureau!” Jack hissed.

“Yes,” Richard said. “Yes, okay. We’ll move the bureau and then I’ll lie down, and maybe later I’ll go over to the infirmary. What do you think, Jack? What do you say? Is that a good plan?” His face begged Jack to say it was a good plan.

“We’ll see,” Jack said. “First things first. The bureau. They might throw stones.”

4

Soon after, Richard began to mutter and moan in the sleep which had overtaken him again. That was bad enough; then tears began to squeeze from the corners of his eyes and that was worse.

“I can’t give him up,” Richard moaned in the weepy, bewildered voice of a five-year-old. Jack stared at him, his skin cold. “I can’t give him up, I want my daddy, please someone tell me where my daddy is, he went into the closet but he’s not in the closet now, I want my daddy, he’ll tell me what to do, please—”

A rock came crashing through the window. Jack screamed.

It boomed against the back of the bureau in front of the window. A few splinters of glass flew through the gaps to the left and right of the bureau and shattered into smaller pieces on the floor.

“Give us your passenger, Sloat!”

“Can’t,” Richard moaned, writhing inside the blanket.

“Give him to us!” another laughing, howling voice from outside screamed. “We’ll take him back to Seabrook Island, Richard! Back to Seabrook Island, where he belongs!”

Another rock. Jack ducked instinctively, although this rock also bounced off the back of the bureau. Dogs howled and yapped and snarled.

“No Seabrook Island,” Richard was muttering in his sleep. “Where’s my daddy? I want him to come out of that closet! Please, please, no Seabrook Island stuff, PLEASE—”

Then Jack was on his knees, shaking Richard as hard as he dared, telling him to wake up, it was just a dream, wake up, for Christ’s sake, wake up!

“Pleeze-pleeze-pleeze.” A hoarse, inhuman chorus of voices rose outside. The voices sounded like a chorus of manimals from Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

“Way-gup, way-gup, way-gup!” a second chorus responded.

Dogs howled.

A flurry of stones flew, knocking more glass from the window, bonking against the back of the bureau, making it rock.

“DADDY’S IN THE CLOSET!” Richard screamed. “DADDY, COME OUT, PLEASE COME OUT, I’M AFRAID!”

“Pleeze-pleeze-pleeze!”

“Way-gup, way-gup, way-gup!”

Richard’s hands waving in the air.

Stones flying, striking the bureau; soon a rock big enough to either punch straight through the cheap piece of furniture or to simply knock it over on top of them would come through the window, Jack thought.

Outside, they laughed and bellowed and chanted in their hideous troll-voices. Dogs—packs of them now, it seemed—howled and growled.

“DADEEEEEEEEE—!!” Richard screamed in a chilling, rising voice.

Jack slapped him.

Richard’s eyes jerked open. He stared up at Jack for a moment with a dreadful lack of recognition, as if the dream he’d been having had burned away his sanity. Then he pulled in a long, shaking breath and let it out in a sigh.

“Nightmare,” he said. “Part of the fever, I guess. Horrible. But I don’t remember exactly what it was!” he added sharply, as if Jack might ask him this at any moment.

“Richard, I want us to get out of this room,” Jack said.

“Out of this—?” Richard looked at Jack as though he must be crazy. “I can’t do that, Jack. I’m running a fever of . . . it must be a hundred and three at least, might be a hundred and four or five. I can’t—”

“You’ve got a degree of fever at most, Richard,” Jack said calmly. “Probably not even that—”

“I’m burning up!” Richard protested.

“They’re throwing stones, Richard.”

“Hallucinations can’t throw stones, Jack,” Richard said, as if explaining some simple but vital fact to a mental defective. “That’s Seabrook Island stuff. It’s—”

Another volley of rocks flew through the window.

“Send out your passenger, Sloat!”

“Come on, Richard,” Jack said, getting the other boy to his feet. He led him to the door and outside. He felt enormously sorry for Richard now—perhaps not as sorry as he had felt for Wolf . . . but he was getting there.

“No . . . sick . . . fever . . . I can’t . . .”

More rocks thudded against the bureau behind them.

Richard shrieked and clutched at Jack like a boy who is drowning.

Wild, cackling laughter from outside. Dogs howled and fought with each other.

Jack saw Richard’s white face grow whiter still, saw him sway, and got up in a hurry. But he was not quite in time to catch Richard before he collapsed in Reuel Gardener’s doorway.

5

It was a simple fainting spell, and Richard came around quickly enough when Jack pinched the delicate webbings between his thumbs and forefingers. He would not talk about what was outside—affected, in fact, not to know what Jack was talking about.

They moved cautiously down the hallway toward the stairs. At the common room Jack poked his head in and whistled. “Richard, look at this!”

Richard looked reluctantly in. The common room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cushions on the couch had been slashed open. The oil portrait of Elder Thayer on the far wall had been defaced—someone had crayoned a pair of devil’s horns poking out of his neat white hair, someone else had added a moustache under his nose, and a third had used a nail-file or similar implement to scratch a crude phallus on his crotch. The glass of the trophy case was shattered.

Jack didn’t much care for the look of drugged, unbelieving horror on Richard’s face. In some ways, elves trooping up and down the halls in glowing, unearthly platoons or dragons over the quad would have been easier for Richard to take than this constant erosion of the Thayer School he had come to know and love . . . the Thayer School Richard undoubtedly believed to be noble and good, an undisputed bulwark against a world where nothing could be counted on for long . . . not even, Jack thought, that fathers would come back out of the closets they had gone into.

“Who did this?” Richard asked angrily. “Those freaks did it,” he answered himself. “That’s who.” He looked at Jack, a great, cloudy suspicion beginning to dawn on his face. “They might be Colombians,” he said suddenly. “They might be Colombians, and this might be some sort of drug-war, Jack. Has that occurred to you?”

Jack had to throttle an urge to bellow out mad gusts of laughter. Here was an explanation which perhaps only Richard Sloat could have conceived. It was the Colombians. The cocaine range-wars had come to Thayer School in Springfield, Illinois. Elementary, my dear Watson; this problem has a seven and a half percent solution.

“I guess anything’s possible,” Jack said. “Let’s take a look upstairs.”

“What in God’s name for?”

“Well . . . maybe we’ll find someone else,” Jack said. He didn’t really believe this, but it was something to say. “Maybe someone’s hiding out up there. Someone normal like us.”

Richard looked at Jack, then back at the shambles of the common room. That look of haunted pain came back into his face again, the look that said I don’t really want to look at this, but for some reason it seems to be all I DO want to look at right now; it’s bitterly compulsive, like biting a lemon, or scratching your fingernails across a blackboard, or scraping the tines of a fork on the porcelain of a sink.

“Dope is rampant in the country,” Richard said in eerie lecture-hall tones. “I read an article on drug proliferation in The New Republic just last week. Jack, all those people out there could be doped up! They could be freebasing! They could be—”

“Come on, Richard,” Jack said quietly.

“I’m not sure I can climb the stairs,” Richard said, weakly querulous. “My fever may be too bad for me to climb stairs.”

“Well, give it the good old Thayer try,” Jack said, and continued to lead him in that direction.

6

As they reached the second-floor landing, sound bled back into the smooth, almost breathless silence that had held inside Nelson House.

Dogs snarled and barked outside—it sounded as if there were not just dozens or scores of them now, but hundreds. The bells in the chapel burst into a wild jangle of sound.

The bells were driving the mongrel dogs racing back and forth across the quad absolutely nuts. They turned on each other, rolled over and over on the grass—which was beginning to look ragged, weedy, and unkempt—and savaged anything within mouthshot. As Jack watched, one of them attacked an elm tree. Another launched itself at the statue of Elder Thayer. As its biting, snapping muzzle collided with the solid bronze, blood splashed and sprayed.

Jack turned away, sickened. “Come on, Richard,” Jack said.

Richard came willingly enough.

7

The second floor was a jumbled confusion of overturned furniture, shattered windows, fistfuls of stuffing, records that had apparently been thrown like Frisbees, clothes that had been tossed everywhere.

The third floor was cloudy with steam and as warmly moist as a tropical rain-forest. As they got closer to the door marked SHOWERS, the heat went up to sauna levels. The mist they had first encountered creeping down the stairs in thin tendrils grew foglike and opaque.

“Stay here,” Jack said. “Wait for me.”

“Sure, Jack,” Richard said serenely, raising his voice enough to be heard over the drumming showers. His glasses had fogged up, but he made no effort to wipe them off.

Jack pushed the door open and went in. The heat was soggy and thick. His clothes were soaked at once from sweat and the hot, foggy moisture. The tile-lined room roared and drummed with water. All twenty of the showers had been turned on, and the driving needle-spray from all twenty had been focused on a pile of sports equipment in the middle of the tiled room. The water was able to drain through this crazy pile, but only slowly, and the room was awash. Jack took off his shoes and circled the room, sliding under the showers to keep himself as dry as possible, and also to keep himself from being scalded—whoever had turned on the showers hadn’t bothered with the cold faucets, apparently. He turned all of them off, one by one. There was no reason for him to do this, no reason at all, and he scolded himself for wasting time in such a way, when he should be trying to think of a way for them to get out of here—out of Nelson House and off the Thayer School grounds—before the axe fell.

No reason for it, except that maybe Richard wasn’t the only one with a need to create order out of chaos . . . to create order and to maintain it.

He went back into the hall and Richard was gone.

“Richard?” He could feel his heartbeat picking up in his chest.

There was no answer. “Richard!”

Spilled cologne hung on the air, noxiously heavy.

“Richard, where the hell are you!”

Richard’s hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack shrieked.

8

“I don’t know why you had to yell like that,” Richard said later. “It was only me.”

“I’m just nervous,” Jack said wanly.

They were sitting in the third-floor room of a boy with the strangely harmonious name of Albert Humbert. Richard told him that Albert Humbert, whose nickname was Albert the Blob, was the fattest boy in school, and Jack could believe it; his room contained an amazing variety of junk food—it was the stash of a kid whose worst nightmare isn’t getting cut from the basketball team or flunking a trig test but rather waking up in the night and not being able to find a Ring-Ding or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. A lot of the stuff had been thrown around. The glass jar containing the Marshmallow Fluff had been broken, but Jack had never been very wild about Marshmallow Fluff, anyway. He also passed on the licorice whips—Albert the Blob had a whole carton of them stashed on the upper shelf of his closet. Written across one of the carton-flaps was Happy birthday, dear, from Your Loving Mom.

Some Loving Moms send cartons of licorice whips, and some Loving Dads send blazers from Brooks Brothers, Jack thought wearily, and if there’s any difference, Jason alone knows what it is.

They found enough food in the room of Albert the Blob to make a crazy sort of meal—Slim Jims, pepperoni slices, Salt ’n Vinegar potato chips. Now they were finishing up with a package of cookies. Jack had retrieved Albert’s chair from the hall and was sitting by the window. Richard was sitting on Albert’s bed.

“Well, you sure are nervous,” Richard agreed, shaking his head in refusal when Jack offered him the last cookie. “Paranoid, actually. It comes from spending the last couple of months on the road. You’ll be okay once you get home to your mother, Jack.”

“Richard,” Jack said, tossing away the empty Famous Amos bag, “let’s cut the shit. Do you see what’s going on outside on your campus?”

Richard wet his lips. “I explained that,” he said. “I have a fever. Probably none of this is happening at all, and if it is, then perfectly ordinary things are going on and my mind is twisting them, heightening them. That’s one possibility. The other is . . . well . . . drug-pushers.”

Richard sat forward on Albert the Blob’s bed.

“You haven’t been experimenting with drugs, have you, Jack? While you were on the road?” The old intelligent, incisive light had suddenly rekindled in Richard’s eyes. Here’s a possible explanation, a possible way out of this madness, his eyes said. Jack has gotten involved in some crazy drug-scam, and all these people have followed him here.

“No,” Jack said wearily. “I always used to think of you as the master of reality, Richard,” Jack said. “I never thought I’d live to see you—you!—using your brains to twist the facts.”

“Jack, that’s just a . . . a crock, and you know it!”

“Drug-wars in Springfield, Illinois?” Jack asked. “Who’s talking Seabrook Island stuff now?”

And that was when a rock suddenly crashed in through Albert Humbert’s window, spraying glass across the floor.