The Talisman (49 page)

28

Jack’s Dream

1

Of course he carried Wolf with him. Wolf had gone home, but a big loyal shadow rode beside Jack in all the trucks and Volkswagen vans and dusty cars pounding along the Illinois highways. This smiling ghost pierced Jack’s heart. Sometimes he could see—could almost see—Wolf’s huge hairy form bounding alongside, romping through the stripped fields. Free, Wolf beamed at him with pumpkin-colored eyes. When he jerked his eyes away, Jack felt the absence of a Wolf-hand folding itself around his. Now that he missed his friend so completely, the memory of his impatience with Wolf shamed him, brought the blood to his face. He had thought about abandoning Wolf more times than he could count. Shameful, shameful. Wolf had been . . . it took Jack a long time to take it in, but the word was
noble
. And this noble being, so out of place in this world, had died for him.

I kept my herd safe
. Jack Sawyer was the herd no longer.
I kept my herd safe
. There were times when the truckdrivers or insurance salesmen who had picked up this strange, compelling boy on the side of the road—picked him up even though the boy was road-dirty and shaggy, even though they might never have taken on a hitchhiker before in their lives—looked over and saw him blinking back tears.

Jack mourned Wolf as he sped across Illinois. He had somehow known that he would have no trouble getting rides once in that state, and it was true that often all he had to do was stick out his thumb and look an oncoming driver in the eye—instant ride. Most of the drivers did not even demand the Story. All he had to do was give some minimal explanation for travelling alone. “I’m going to see a friend in Springfield.” “I have to pick up a car and drive it back home.” “Great, great,” the drivers said—had they even heard? Jack could not tell. His mind riffled through a mile-high stack of images of Wolf splashing into a stream to rescue his Territories creatures, Wolf nosing into a fragrant box that had held a hamburger, Wolf pushing food into his shed, bursting into the recording studio, taking the bullets, melting away. . . . Jack did not want to see these things again and again, but he had to and they made his eyes burn with tears.

Not far out of Danville, a short, fiftyish man with iron-gray hair and the amused but stern expression of one who has taught fifth grade for two decades kept darting sly looks at him from behind the wheel, then finally said, “Aren’t you cold, buster? You ought to have more than that little jacket.”

“Maybe a little,” Jack said. Sunlight Gardener had thought the denim jackets warm enough for field-work right through the winter, but now the weather licked and stabbed right through its pores.

“I have a coat on the back seat,” the man said. “Take it. No, don’t even try to talk your way out of it. That coat’s yours now. Believe me, I won’t freeze.”

“But—”

“You have no choice at all in the matter. That is now your coat. Try it on.”

Jack reached over the back of the seat and dragged a heavy length of material onto his lap. At first it was shapeless, anonymous. A big patch pocket surfaced, then a toggle button. It was a loden coat, fragrant with pipe tobacco.

“My old one,” the man said. “I just keep it in the car because I don’t know what to do with it—last year, the kids gave me this goosedown thing. So you have it.”

Jack struggled into the big coat, putting it on right over the denim jacket. “Oh boy,” he said. It was like being embraced by a bear with a taste for Borkum Riff.

“Good,” the man said. “Now if you ever find yourself standing out on a cold and windy road again, you can thank Myles P. Kiger of Ogden, Illinois, for saving your skin. Your—” Myles P. Kiger looked as though he were going to say more: the word hung in the air for a second, the man was still smiling; then the smile warped into goofy embarrassment and Kiger snapped his head forward. In the gray morning light, Jack saw a mottled red pattern spread out across the man’s cheeks.

Your (something) skin?

Oh, no.

Your beautiful skin. Your touchable, kissable, adorable . . . Jack pushed his hands deep into the loden coat’s pockets and pulled the coat tightly around him. Myles P. Kiger of Ogden, Illinois, stared straight ahead.

“Ahem,” Kiger said, exactly like a man in a comic book.

“Thanks for the coat,” Jack said. “Really. I’ll be grateful to you whenever I wear it.”

“Sure, okay,” Kiger said, “forget it.” But for a second his face was oddly like poor Donny Keegan’s, back in the Sunlight Home. “There’s a place up ahead,” Kiger said. His voice was choppy, abrupt, full of phony calm. “We can get some lunch, if you like.”

“I don’t have any money left,” Jack said, a statement exactly two dollars and thirty-eight cents shy of the truth.

“Don’t worry about it.” Kiger had already snapped on his turn indicator.

They drove into a windswept, nearly empty parking lot before a low gray structure that looked like a railway car. A neon sign above the central door flashed
EMPIRE DINER
. Kiger pulled up before one of the diner’s long windows and they left the car. This coat would keep him warm, Jack realized. His chest and arms seemed protected by woolen armor. Jack began to move toward the door under the flashing sign, but turned around when he realized that Kiger was still standing beside the car. The gray-haired man, only an inch or two taller than Jack, was looking at him over the car’s top.

“Say,” Kiger said.

“Look, I’d be happy to give you your coat back,” Jack said.

“No, that’s yours now. I was just thinking I’m not really hungry after all, and if I keep on going I can make pretty good time, get home a little earlier.”

“Sure,” Jack said.

“You’ll get another ride here. Easy. I promise. I wouldn’t drop you here if you were going to be stranded.”

“Fine.”

“Hold on. I said I’d get you lunch, and I will.” He put his hand in his trouser pocket, then held a bill out across the top of the car to Jack. The chill wind ruffled his hair and flattened it against his forehead. “Take it.”

“No, honest,” Jack said. “It’s okay. I have a couple dollars.”

“Get yourself a good steak,” Kiger said, and was leaning across the top of the car holding out the bill as if offering a life preserver, or reaching for one.

Jack reluctantly came forward and took the bill from Kiger’s extended fingers. It was a ten. “Thanks a lot. I mean it.”

“Here, why don’t you take the paper, too, have something to read? You know, if you have to wait a little or something.” Kiger had already opened his door, and leaned inside to pluck a folded tabloid newspaper off the back seat. “I’ve already read it.” He tossed it over to Jack.

The pockets of the loden coat were so roomy that Jack could slip the folded paper into one of them.

Myles P. Kiger stood for a moment beside his open car door, squinting at Jack. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re going to have an interesting life,” he said.

“It’s pretty interesting already,” Jack said truthfully.

Salisbury steak was five dollars and forty cents, and it came with french fries. Jack sat at the end of the counter and opened the newspaper. The story was on the second page—the day before, he had seen it on the first page of an Indiana newspaper.
ARRESTS MADE, RELATED TO SHOCK HORROR DEATHS
. Local Magistrate Ernest Fairchild and Police Officer Frank B. Williams of Cayuga, Indiana, had been charged with misuse of public monies and acceptance of bribes in the course of the investigation of the deaths of six boys at the Sunlight Gardener Scripture Home for Wayward Boys. The popular evangelist Robert “Sunlight” Gardener had apparently escaped from the grounds of the Home shortly before the arrival of the police, and while no warrants had as yet been issued for his arrest he was urgently being sought for questioning.
WAS HE ANOTHER JIM JONES
? asked a caption beneath a picture of Gardener at his most gorgeous, arms outspread, hair falling in perfect waves. Dogs had led the State Police to an area near the electrified fences where boy’s bodies had been buried without ceremony—five bodies, it appeared, most of them so decomposed that identification was not possible. They would probably be able to identify Ferd Janklow. His parents would be able to give him a real burial, all the while wondering what they had done wrong, exactly; all the while wondering just
how
their love for Jesus had condemned their brilliant, rebellious son.

When the Salisbury steak came, it tasted both salty and woolly, but Jack ate every scrap. And soaked up all the thick gravy with the Empire Diner’s underdone fries. He had just about finished his meal when a bearded trucker with a Detroit Tigers cap shoved down over long black hair, a parka that seemed to be made from wolfskins, and a thick cigar in his mouth paused beside him and asked, “You need a ride west, kid? I’m going to Decatur.” Halfway to Springfield, just like that.

2

That night, in a three-dollar-a-night hotel the trucker had told him about, Jack had two distinct dreams: or he later remembered these two out of many that deluged his bed, or the two were actually one long joined dream. He had locked his door, peed into the stained and cracked sink in the corner, put his knapsack under his pillow, and fallen asleep holding the big marble that in the other world was a Territories mirror. There had been a suggestion of music, an almost cinematic touch—fiery alert bebop, at a volume so low Jack could just pick out that the lead instruments were a trumpet and an alto saxophone.
Richard
, Jack drowsily thought,
tomorrow I should be seeing Richard Sloat
, and fell down the slope of the rhythm into brimming unconsciousness.

Wolf was trotting toward him across a blasted, smoking landscape. Strings of barbed wire, now and then coiling up into fantastic and careless barbed-wire intricacies, separated them. Deep trenches, too, divided the spoiled land, one of which Wolf vaulted easily before nearly tumbling into one of the ranks of wire.

—Watch out, Jack called.

Wolf caught himself before falling into the triple strands of wire. He waved one big paw to show Jack that he was unhurt, and then cautiously stepped over the wires.

Jack felt an amazing surge of happiness and relief pass through him. Wolf had not died; Wolf would join him again.

Wolf made it over the barbed wire and began trotting forward again. The land between Jack and Wolf seemed mysteriously to double in length—gray smoke hanging over the many trenches almost obscured the big shaggy figure coming forward.

—Jason! Wolf shouted. Jason! Jason!

—I’m still here, Jack shouted back.

—Can’t make it, Jason! Wolf can’t make it!

—Keep trying, Jack bawled. Damn it, don’t give up!

Wolf paused before an impenetrable tangle of wire, and through the smoke Jack saw him slip down to all fours and trot back and forth, nosing for an open place. From side to side Wolf trotted, each time going out a greater distance, with every second becoming more evidently disturbed. Finally Wolf stood up again and placed his hands on the thick tangle of wire and forced a space he could shout through. —Wolf can’t! Jason, Wolf can’t!

—I love you, Wolf, Jack shouted across the smouldering plain.

—JASON! Wolf bawled back. BE CAREFUL! They are COMING for you! There are MORE of them!

—More what, Jack wanted to shout, but could not. He knew.

Then either the whole character of the dream changed or another dream began. He was back in the ruined recording studio and office at the Sunlight Home, and the smells of gunpowder and burned flesh crowded the air. Singer’s mutilated body lay slumped on the floor, and Casey’s dead form drooped through the shattered glass panel. Jack sat on the floor cradling Wolf in his arms, and knew again that Wolf was dying. Only Wolf was not Wolf.

Jack was holding Richard Sloat’s trembling body, and it was Richard who was dying. Behind the lenses of his sensible black plastic eyeglasses, Richard’s eyes skittered aimlessly, painfully. —Oh no, oh no, Jack breathed out in horror. Richard’s arm had been shattered, and his chest was a pulp of ruined flesh and bloodstained white shirt. Fractured bones glinted whitely here and there like teeth.

—I don’t want to die, Richard said, every word a super-human effort. Jason, you should not . . . you should not have . . .

—You can’t die, too, Jack pleaded, not you, too.

Richard’s upper body lurched against Jack’s arms, and a long, liquid sound escaped Richard’s throat, and then Richard found Jack’s eyes with his own suddenly clear and quiet eyes. —Jason. The sound of the name, which was almost appropriate, hung softly in the stinking air. —You killed me, Richard breathed out, or
you killed ’e
, since his lips could not meet to form one of the letters. Richard’s eyes swam out of focus again, and his body seemed to grow instantly heavier in Jack’s arms. There was no longer life in that body. Jason DeLoessian stared up in shock—

3

—and Jack Sawyer snapped upright in the cold, unfamiliar bed of a flophouse in Decatur, Illinois, and in the yellowish murk shed by a streetlamp outside saw his breath plume out as luxuriantly as if exhaled from two mouths at once. He kept himself from screaming only by clasping his hands, his own two hands, and squeezing them together hard enough to crack a walnut. Another enormous white feather of air steamed out of his lungs.

Richard.

Wolf running across that dead world, calling out . . . what?
Jason
.

The boy’s heart executed a quick, decided leap, with the kick of a horse clearing a fence.

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.”