The Talisman (54 page)

Richard looked at Jack’s face and saw—even without his glasses—that Jack was telling the truth. He took Jack’s hand. “God, I’m scared,” he whispered.

“Join the club,” Jack said, and pushed him off. His feet hit the mucky lawn a second later. Richard jumped down beside him.

“We’re going to cross to The Depot,” Jack whispered. “I make it about fifty yards. We’ll go in if it’s unlocked, try to hide as well as we can on the Nelson House side of it if it isn’t. Once we’re sure no one’s seen us and the place is still quiet—”

“We go for the fence.”

“Right.” Or maybe we’ll have to flip, but never mind that just now. “The service road. I’ve got an idea that if we can get off the Thayer grounds, everything will be okay again. Once we get a quarter of a mile down the road, you may look back over your shoulder and see the lights in the dorms and the library just as usual, Richard.”

“That’d be
so
great,” Richard said with a wistfulness that was heartbreaking.

“Okay, you ready?”

“I guess so,” Richard said.

“Run to The Depot. Freeze against the wall on this side. Low, so those bushes screen you. See them?”

“Yes.”

“Okay . . . go for it!”

They broke away from Nelson House and ran for The Depot side by side.

11

They were less than halfway there, breath puffing out of their mouths in clear white vapor, feet pounding the mucky ground, when the bells in the chapel broke into a hideous, grinding jangle of sound. A howling chorus of dogs answered the bells.

They were back, all these were-prefects. Jack groped for Richard and found Richard groping for him. Their hands linked together.

Richard screamed and tried to pull him off to the left. His hand tightened down on Jack’s until the fingerbones grated together paralyzingly. A lean white wolf, a Board Chairman of Wolves, came around The Depot and was now racing toward them. That was the old man from the limousine, Jack thought. Other wolves and dogs followed . . . and then Jack realized with sick surety that some of them were not dogs; some of them were half-transformed boys, some grown men—teachers, he supposed.

“Mr Dufrey!”
Richard shrieked, pointing with his free hand (
Gee, you see pretty well for someone who’s lost his glasses, Richie-boy
, Jack thought crazily).
“Mr. Dufrey! Oh God, it’s Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey!”

So Jack got his first and only look at Thayer School’s headmaster—a tiny old man with gray hair, a big, bent nose, and the wizened, hairy body of an organ grinder’s monkey. He ran swiftly along on all fours with the dogs and the boys, a mortarboard bobbing crazily up and down on his head and somehow refusing to fall off. He grinned at Jack and Richard, and his tongue, long and lolling and stained yellow with nicotine, fell out through the middle of his grin.

“Mr. Dufrey! Oh God! Oh dear God! Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Du—”

He was yanking Jack harder and harder toward the left. Jack was bigger, but Richard was in the grip of panic. Explosions rocked the air. That foul, garbagey smell grew thicker and thicker. Jack could hear the soft
flupping
and
plupping
of mud squeezing out of the earth. The white wolf which led the pack was closing the distance and Richard was trying to pull them away from it, trying to pull them toward the fence, and that was right, but it was wrong, too, it was wrong because it was The Depot they had to get to, not the fence. That was the spot, that was the spot because this had been one of the three or four biggest American railheads, because Andrew Thayer had been the first one to see the potential in shipping west, because Andrew Thayer had seen the potential and now he, Jack Sawyer, saw the potential, as well. All of this was of course only intuition, but Jack had come to believe that, in these universal matters, his intuition was the only thing he could trust.

“Let go of your passenger, Sloat!”
Dufrey was gobbling.
“Let go of your passenger, he’s too pretty for you!”

But what’s a passenger?
Jack thought in those last few seconds, as Richard tried blindly to pull them off-course and Jack yanked him back on, toward the mixed bunch of mongrels and boys and teachers that ran behind the big white wolf, toward The Depot.
I’ll tell you what a passenger is; a passenger is one who rides. And where does a passenger begin to ride? Why, at a depot . . .

“Jack, it’ll bite!”
Richard screamed.

The wolf outran Dufrey and leaped at them, its jaws dropping open like a loaded trap. From behind them there was a thick, crunching thud as Nelson House split open like a rotten cantaloupe.

Now it was Jack who was bearing down on Richard’s fingerbones, clamping tight and tighter and tightest as the night rang with crazy bells and flared with gasoline bombs and rattled with firecrackers.

“Hold on!”
he screamed.
“Hold on, Richard, here we go!”

He had time to think:
Now the shoe is on the other foot; now it’s Richard who is the herd, who is my passenger. God help us both.

“Jack, what’s happening?”
Richard shrieked.
“What are you doing? Stop it! STOP IT! STOP—”

Richard was still shrieking, but Jack no longer heard him—suddenly, triumphantly, that feeling of creeping doom cracked open like a black egg and his brain filled up with light—light and a sweet purity of air; air so pure that you could smell the radish a man pulled out of his garden half a mile away. Suddenly Jack felt as if he could simply push off and jump all the way across the quad . . . or fly, like those men with the wings strapped to their backs.

Oh, there was light and clear air replacing that foul, garbagey stench and a sensation of crossing voids of darkness, and for a moment everything in him seemed clear and full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.

So Jack Sawyer flipped into the Territories again, this time while running headlong across the degenerating Thayer campus, with the sound of cracked bells and snarling dogs filling the air.

And this time he dragged Morgan Sloat’s son Richard with him.

Interlude

Sloat in This World/Orris in the Territories (III)

Shortly after seven a.m. on the morning following Jack and Richard’s flip out from Thayer, Morgan Sloat drew up to the curb just outside the main gates of Thayer School. He parked. The space was marked with a
HANDICAPPED ONLY
sign. Sloat glanced at it indifferently, then reached into his pocket, drew out a vial of cocaine, and used some of it. In a few moments the world seemed to gain color and vitality. It was wonderful stuff. He wondered if it would grow in the Territories, and if it would be more potent over there.

Gardener himself had awakened Sloat in his Beverly Hills home at two in the morning to tell him what had happened—it had been midnight in Springfield. Gardener’s voice had been trembling. He was obviously terrified that Morgan would fly into a rage, and furious that he had missed Jack Sawyer by less than an hour.

“That boy . . . that bad, bad boy . . .”

Sloat had not flown into a rage. Indeed, he had felt extraordinary calm. He felt a sense of predestination which he suspected came from that other part of him—what he thought of as “his Orris-ness” in a half-understood pun on royalty.

“Be calm,” Sloat had soothed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Hang in there, baby.”

He had broken the connection before Gardener could say any more, and lain back on the bed. He had crossed his hands on his stomach and closed his eyes. There was a moment of weightlessness . . . just a moment . . . and then he felt a sensation of movement beneath him. He heard the creak of leather traces, the groan and thump of rough iron springs, the curses of his driver.

He had opened his eyes as Morgan of Orris.

As always, his first reaction was pure delight: this made coke seem like baby aspirin. His chest was narrower, his weight less. Morgan Sloat’s heartbeat ran anywhere from eighty-five beats a minute to a hundred and twenty when he was pissed off; Orris’s rarely went higher than sixty-five or so. Morgan Sloat’s eyesight was tested at 20/20, but Morgan of Orris nonetheless saw better. He could see and trace the course of every minute crack in the sidewall of the diligence, could marvel over the fineness of the mesh curtains which blew through the windows. Cocaine had clogged Sloat’s nose, dulling his sense of smell; Orris’s nose was totally clear and he could smell dust and earth and air with perfect fidelity—it was as if he could sense and appreciate every molecule.

Behind him he had left an empty double bed still marked with the shape of his large body. Here he was sitting on a bench seat plusher than the seat in any Rolls-Royce ever made, riding west toward the end of the Outposts, toward a place which was called Outpost Depot. Toward a man named Anders. He knew these things, knew exactly where he was, because Orris was still here, inside his head—speaking to him the way the right side of the brain may speak to the rational left during daydreams, in a low but perfectly clear voice. Sloat had spoken to Orris in this same low undervoice on the few occasions when Orris had Migrated to what Jack had come to think of as the American Territories. When one Migrated and entered the body of one’s Twinner, the result was a kind of benign possession. Sloat had read of more violent cases of possession, and although the subject did not greatly interest him, he guessed that the poor, unlucky slobs so afflicted had been taken over by mad hitchhikers from other worlds—or perhaps it was the American world itself which had driven them mad. That seemed more than possible; it had certainly done a number on poor old Orris’s head the first two or three times he had popped over, although he had been wildly excited as well as terrified.

The diligence took a mighty bounce—in the Outposts, you took the roads as you found them and thanked God they were there at all. Orris shifted in his seat and his clubfoot muttered dull pain.

“Hold on steady, God pound you,” the driver muttered up above. His whip whistled and popped. “Roll, you sons of dead whores! Roll on!”

Sloat grinned with the pleasure of being here, even though it would only be for moments. He already knew what he needed to know; Orris’s voice had muttered it to him. The diligence would arrive at Outpost Depot—Thayer School in the other world—well before morning. It might be possible to take them there if they had lingered; if not, the Blasted Lands awaited them. It hurt and enraged him to think that Richard was now with the Sawyer brat, but if a sacrifice was demanded . . . well, Orris had lost
his
son and survived.

The only thing that had kept Jack alive this long was the maddening fact of his single nature—when the whelp flipped to a place, he was always in the analogue of the place he had left. Sloat, however, always ended up where Orris was, which might be miles away from where he needed to be . . . as was the case now. He had been lucky at the rest area, but Sawyer had been luckier.

“Your luck will run out soon enough, my little friend,” Orris said. The diligence took another terrific bounce. He grimaced, then grinned. If nothing else, the situation was simplifying itself even as the final confrontation took on wider and deeper implications.

Enough.

He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. For just a moment he felt another dull thud of pain in the deformed foot . . . and when he opened his eyes, Sloat was looking up at the ceiling of his apartment. As always, there was a moment when the extra pounds fell into him with sickening weight, when his heart reacted with a surprised double-beat and then sped up.

He had gotten to his feet then and had called West Coast Business Jet. Seventy minutes later he had been leaving LAX. The Lear’s steep and abrupt takeoff stance made him feel as it always did—it was as if a blowtorch had been strapped to his ass. They had touched down in Springfield at five-fifty central time, just as Orris would be approaching Outpost Depot in the Territories. Sloat had rented a Hertz sedan and here he was. American travel
did
have its advantages.

He got out of the car and, just as the morning bells began to ring, he walked onto the Thayer campus his own son had so lately quitted.

Everything was the essence of an early Thayer weekday morning. The chapel bells were playing a normal morning tune, something classical but not quite recognizable which sounded a bit like “Te Deum” but wasn’t. Students passed Sloat on their way to the dining hall or to morning workouts. They were perhaps a little more silent than usual, and they shared a look—pale and slightly dazed, as if they had all shared a disquieting dream.

Which, of course, they had, Sloat thought. He stopped for a moment in front of Nelson House, looking at it thoughtfully. They simply didn’t know how fundamentally unreal they all were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be. He walked around to the side and watched a maintenance man picking up broken glass that lay on the ground like trumpery diamonds. Beyond his bent back Sloat could see into the Nelson House lounge, where an unusually quiet Albert the Blob was sitting and looking blankly at a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Sloat started across toward The Depot, his thoughts turning to the first time that Orris had flipped over into this world. He found himself thinking of that time with a nostalgia that was, when one really stopped to think about it, damned near grotesque—after all, he had nearly died.
Both
of them had nearly died. But it had been in the middle fifties, and now he was in
his
middle fifties—it made all the difference in the world.

He had been coming back from the office and the sun had been going down in a Los Angeles haze of smudged purples and smokey yellows—this had been in the days before the L.A. smog had really begun to thicken up. He had been on Sunset Boulevard and looking at a billboard advertising a new Peggy Lee record when he had felt a coldness in his mind. It had been as if a wellspring had suddenly opened somewhere in his subconscious, spilling out some alien weirdness that was like . . . like . . .

(like semen)

 . . . well, he didn’t know exactly
what
it had been like. Except that it had quickly become warm, gained cognizance, and he had just had time to realize it was
he
, Orris, and then everything had turned topsy-turvy like a secret door on its gimbal—a bookcase on one side, a Chippendale dresser on the other, both fitting the ambience of the room perfectly—and it had been Orris sitting behind the wheel of a 1952 bullet-nosed Ford, Orris wearing the brown double-breasted suit and the John Penske tie, Orris who was reaching down toward his crotch, not in pain but in slightly disgusted curiosity—Orris who had, of course, never worn undershorts.

There had been a moment, he remembered, when the Ford had nearly driven up onto the sidewalk, and then Morgan Sloat—now very much the undermind—had taken over that part of the operation and Orris had been free to go along his way, goggling at everything, nearly half-mad with delight. And what remained of Morgan Sloat had also been delighted; he had been delighted the way a man is delighted when he shows a friend around his new home for the first time and finds that his friend likes it as much as he likes it himself.

Orris had cruised into a Fat Boy Drive-in, and after some fumbling with Morgan’s unfamiliar paper money, he had ordered a hamburger and french fries and a chocolate thickshake, the words coming easily out of his mouth—welling up from that undermind as water wells up from a spring. Orris’s first bite of the hamburger had been tentative . . . and then he had gobbled the rest with the speed of Wolf gobbling his first Whopper. He had crammed the fries into his mouth with one hand while dialling the radio with the other, picking up an enticing babble of bop and Perry Como and some big band and early rhythm and blues. He had sucked down the shake and then had ordered more of everything.

Halfway through the second burger he—Sloat as well as Orris—began to feel sick. Suddenly the fried onions had seemed too strong, too cloying; suddenly the smell of car exhaust was everywhere. His arms had suddenly begun to itch madly. He pulled off the coat of the double-breasted suit (the second thick-shake, this one mocha, fell unheeded to one side, dribbling ice cream across the Ford’s seat) and looked at his arms. Ugly red blotches with red centers were growing there, and spreading. His stomach lurched, he leaned out the window, and even as he puked into the tray that was fixed there, he had felt Orris fleeing from him, going back into his own world. . . .

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Hmmmm?” Startled out of his reverie, Sloat looked around. A tall blond boy, obviously an upperclassman, was standing there. He was dressed prep—an impeccable blue flannel blazer worn over an open-collared shirt and a pair of faded Levi’s.

He brushed hair out of his eyes which had that same dazed, dreaming look. “I’m Etheridge, sir. I just wondered if I could help you. You looked . . . lost.”

Sloat smiled. He thought of saying—but did not—
No, that’s how you look, my friend
. Everything was all right. The Sawyer brat was still on the loose, but Sloat knew where he was going and that meant that Jacky was on a chain. It was invisible, but it was still a chain.

“Lost in the past, that’s all,” he said. “Old times. I’m not a stranger here, Mr. Etheridge, if that’s what you’re worried about. My son’s a student. Richard Sloat.”

Etheridge’s eyes grew even dreamier for a moment—puzzled, lost. Then they cleared. “Sure. Richard!” he exclaimed.

“I’ll be going up to see the headmaster in a bit. I just wanted to have a poke around first.”

“Well, I guess that’s fine.” Etheridge looked at his watch. “I have table-duty this morning, so if you’re sure you’re okay . . .”

“I’m sure.”

Etheridge gave him a nod, a rather vague smile, and started off.

Sloat watched him go, and then he surveyed the ground between Nelson House and here. Noted the broken window again. A straight shot. It was fair—more than fair—to assume that, somewhere between Nelson House and this octagonal brick building, the two boys had Migrated into the Territories. If he liked, he could follow them. Just step inside—there was no lock on the door—and disappear. Reappear wherever Orris’s body happened to be at this moment. It would be somewhere close; perhaps even, in fact, in front of the depot-keeper himself. No nonsense about Migrating to a spot which might be a hundred miles away from the point of interest in Territories geography and no way to cover the intervening distance but by wagon or, worse, what his father had called shanks’ mare.

The boys would already have gone on, in all likelihood. Into the Blasted Lands. If so, the Blasted Lands would finish them. And Sunlight Gardener’s Twinner, Osmond, would be more than capable of squeezing out all the information that Anders knew. Osmond and his horrid son. No need to Migrate at all.

Except maybe for a look-see. For the pleasure and refreshment of becoming Orris again, if only for a few seconds.

And to Make Sure, of course. His entire life, from childhood onward, had been an exercise in Making Sure.

He looked around once to assure himself that Etheridge had not lingered; then he opened the door of The Depot and went inside.

The smell was stale, dark, and incredibly nostalgic—the smell of old makeup and canvas flats. For a moment he had the crazy idea that he had done something even more incredible than Migrating; he felt that he might have travelled back through time to those undergraduate days when he and Phil Sawyer had been theater-mad college students.

Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw the unfamiliar, almost mawkish props—a plaster bust of Pallas for a production of
The Raven
, an extravagantly gilt birdcage, a bookcase full of false bindings—and remembered that he was in the Thayer School excuse for a “little theater.”

He paused for a moment, breathing deeply of the dust; he turned his eyes up to one dusty sunray falling through a small window. The light wavered and was suddenly a deeper gold, the color of lamplight. He was in the Territories. Just like that, he was in the Territories. There was a moment of almost staggering exhilaration at the speed of the change. Usually there was a pause, a sense of sideslipping from one place to another. This caesura seemed to be in direct proportion to the distance between the physical bodies of his two selves, Sloat and Orris. Once, when he had Migrated from Japan, where he was negotiating a deal with the Shaw brothers for a terrible novel about Hollywood stars menaced by a crazed ninja, the pause had gone on so long that he had feared he might be lost forever somewhere in the empty, senseless purgatory that exists between the worlds. But this time they had been close . . . so close! It was like those few times, he thought