The Talisman (50 page)

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.”

30

Thayer Gets Weird

1

Through the window Jack could see boys in coats, hunched against the cold, crossing to and fro between the library and the rest of the school. Etheridge, the senior who had spoken to Jack that morning, bustled by, his scarf flying out behind him.

Richard took a tweed sport jacket from the narrow closet beside the bed. “Nothing is going to make me think that you should do anything but go back to New Hampshire. I have to go to basketball now, because if I don’t Coach Frazer’ll make me do ten punishment laps as soon as he comes back. Some other coach is taking our practice today, and Frazer said he’d run us into the ground if we cut out. Do you want to borrow some clean clothes? I at least have a shirt that’ll fit you—my father sent it to me from New York, and Brooks Brothers got the size wrong.”

“Let’s see it,” Jack said. His clothes had become definitely disreputable, so stiff with filth that whenever he noticed it Jack felt like Pigpen, the “Peanuts” character who lived in a mist of dirt and disapproval. Richard gave him a white button-down still in its plastic bag. “Great, thanks,” Jack said. He took it out of the bag and began removing the pins. It would almost fit.

“There’s a jacket you might try on, too,” Richard said. “The blazer hanging at the end of the closet. Try it on, okay? And you might as well use one of my ties, too. Just in case anyone comes in. Say you’re from Saint Louis Country Day, and you’re on a Newspaper Exchange. We do two or three of those a year—kids from here go there, kids from there come here, to work on the other school’s paper.” He went toward the door. “I’ll come back before dinner and see how you are.”

Two ballpoints were clipped to a plastic insert in his jacket pocket, Jack noticed, and all the buttons of the jacket were buttoned.

Nelson House grew perfectly quiet within minutes. From Richard’s window Jack saw boys seated at desks in the big library windows. Nobody moved on the paths or over the crisp brown grass. An insistent bell rang, marking the beginning of fourth period. Jack stretched his arms out and yawned. A feeling of security returned to him—a school around him, with all those familiar rituals of bells and classes and basketball practices. Maybe he would be able to stay another day; maybe he would even be able to call his mother from one of the Nelson House phones. He would certainly be able to catch up on his sleep.

Jack went to the closet and found the blazer hanging where Richard had said it would be. A tag still hung from one of the sleeves: Sloat had sent it from New York, but Richard had never worn it. Like the shirt, the blazer was one size too small for Jack and clung too tightly to his shoulders, but the cut was roomy and the sleeves allowed the white shirt cuffs to peek out half an inch.

Jack lifted a necktie from the hook just inside the closet—red, with a pattern of blue anchors. Jack slipped the tie around his neck and laboriously knotted it. Then he examined himself in the mirror and laughed out loud. Jack saw that he had made it at last. He looked at the beautiful new blazer, the club tie, his snowy shirt, his rumpled jeans. He was there. He was a preppy.

2

Richard had become, Jack saw, an admirer of John McPhee and Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould. He picked
The Panda’s Thumb
from the row of books on Richard’s shelves because he liked the title and returned to the bed.

Richard did not return from his basketball practice for what seemed an impossibly long time. Jack paced back and forth in the little room. He could not imagine what would keep Richard from returning to his room, but his imagination gave him one calamity after another.

After the fifth or sixth time Jack checked his watch, he noticed that he could see no students on the grounds.

Whatever had happened to Richard had happened to the entire school.

The afternoon died. Richard too, he thought, was dead. Perhaps all Thayer School was dead—and he was a plague-bearer, a carrier of death. He had eaten nothing all day since the chicken Richard had brought him from the dining room, but he wasn’t hungry. Jack sat in numb misery. He brought destruction wherever he went.

3

Then there were footfalls in the corridor once more.

From the floor above, Jack now dimly heard the
thud thud thud
of a bass pattern, and then again recognized it as being from a record by Blue Oyster Cult. The footsteps paused outside the door. Jack hurried to the door.

Richard stood in the doorway. Two boys with cornsilk hair and half-mast ties glanced in and kept moving down the corridor. The rock music was much more audible in the corridor.

“Where were you all afternoon?” Jack demanded.

“Well, it was sort of freaky,” Richard said. “They cancelled all the afternoon classes. Mr. Dufrey wouldn’t even let kids go back to their lockers. And then we all had to go to basketball practice, and that was even weirder.”

“Who’s Mr. Dufrey?”

Richard looked at him as if he’d just tumbled out of a bassinette. “Who’s Mr. Dufrey? He’s the headmaster. Don’t you know anything at all about this school?”

“No, but I’m getting a few ideas,” Jack said. “What was so weird about practice?”

“Remember I told you that Coach Frazer got some friend of his to handle it today? Well, he said we’d all get punishment laps if we tried to cut out, so I thought his friend would be some Al Maguire type, you know, some real hotshot. Thayer School doesn’t have a very good athletic tradition. Anyhow, I thought his replacement must be somebody really special.”

“Let me guess. The new guy didn’t look like he had anything to do with sports.”

Richard lifted his chin, startled. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t.” He gave Jack a considering look. “He smoked all the time. And his hair was really long and greasy—he didn’t look anything like a coach. He looked like somebody most coaches would like to step on, to tell you the truth. Even his eyes looked funny. I bet you he smokes pot.” Richard tugged at his sweater. “I don’t think he knew anything about basketball. He didn’t even make us practice our patterns—that’s what we usually do, after the warm-up period. We sort of ran around and threw baskets and he shouted at us. Laughing. Like kids playing basketball was the most ridiculous thing he’d seen in his whole life. You ever see a coach who thought sports was funny? Even the warm-up period was strange. He just said, ’Okay, do push-ups,’ and smoked his cigarette. No count, no cadence, everybody just doing them by themselves. After that it was ’Okay, run around a little bit.’ He looked . . . really wild. I think I’m going to complain to Coach Frazer tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t complain to him or the headmaster either,” Jack said.

“Oh, I get it,” Richard said. “Mr.
Dufrey’s
one of them. One of the Territories people.”

“Or he works for them,” Jack said.

“Don’t you see that you could fit
anything
into that pattern?
Anything
that goes wrong? It’s too easy—you could explain everything that way. That’s how craziness works. You make connections that aren’t real.”

“And see things that aren’t there.”

Richard shrugged, and despite the insouciance of the gesture, his face was miserable. “You said it.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “You remember me telling you about the building that collapsed in Angola, New York?”

“The Rainbird Towers.”

“What a memory. I think that accident was my fault.”

“Jack, you’re—”

Jack said: “Crazy, I know. Look, would anyone blow the whistle on me if we went out and watched the evening news?”

“I doubt it. Most kids are studying now, anyway. Why?”

Because I want to know what’s been happening around
here, Jack thought but did not say.
Sweet little fires, nifty little earthquakes—signs that they’re coming through. For me. For
us.

“I need a change of scenery, Richard old chum,” Jack said, and followed Richard down the watery green corridor.