The Talisman (51 page)

31

Thayer Goes to Hell

1

Jack became aware of the change first and recognized what had happened; it had happened before, while Richard was out, and he was sensitized to it.

The screaming heavy metal of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Tattoo Vampire” was gone. The TV in the common room, which had been cackling out an episode of
Hogan’s Heroes
instead of the news, had fallen dormant.

Richard turned toward Jack, opening his mouth to speak.

“I don’t like it, Gridley,” Jack said first. “The native tomtoms have stopped. It’s too quiet.”

“Ha-ha,” Richard said thinly.

“Richard, can I ask you something?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Are you scared?”

Richard’s face said that he wanted more than anything to say
No, of course not—it always gets quiet around Nelson House this time of the evening
. Unfortunately, Richard was utterly incapable of telling a lie. Dear old Richard. Jack felt a wave of affection.

“Yes,” Richard said. “I’m a little scared.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“I guess so.”

“Why are we both whispering?”

Richard looked at him for a long time without saying anything. Then he started down the green corridor again.

The doors of the other rooms on the other corridor were either open or ajar. Jack smelled a very familiar odor wafting through the half-open door of Suite 4, and pushed the door all the way open with tented fingers.

“Which one of them is the pothead?” Jack asked.

“What?” Richard replied uncertainly.

Jack sniffed loudly. “Smell it?”

Richard came back and looked into the room. Both study lamps were on. There was an open history text on one desk, an issue of
Heavy Metal
on the other. Posters decorated the walls: the Costa del Sol, Frodo and Sam trudging across the cracked and smoking plains of Mordor toward Sauron’s castle, Eddie Van Halen. Earphones lay on the open issue of
Heavy Metal
, giving out little tinny squeaks of music.

“If you can get expelled for letting a friend sleep under your bed, I doubt if they just slap your wrist for smoking pot, do they?” Jack said.

“They expel you for it, of course.” Richard was looking at the joint as if mesmerized, and Jack thought he looked more shocked and bewildered than he had at any other time, even when Jack had shown him the healing burns between his fingers.

“Nelson House is empty,” Jack said.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Richard’s voice was sharp.

“It is, though.” Jack gestured down the hall. “We’re the only ones left. And you don’t get thirty-some boys out of a dorm without a sound. They didn’t just leave; they disappeared.”

“Over into the Territories, I suppose.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Maybe they’re still here, but on a slightly different level. Maybe they’re there. Maybe they’re in Cleveland. But they’re not where we are.”

“Close that door,” Richard said abruptly, and when Jack didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, Richard closed it himself.

“Do you want to put out the—”

“I don’t even want to touch it,” Richard said. “I ought to report them, you know. I ought to report them both to Mr. Haywood.”

“Would you do that?” Jack asked, fascinated.

Richard looked chagrined. “No . . . probably not,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”

“Not orderly,” Jack said.

“Yeah.” Richard’s eyes flashed at him from behind his spectacles, telling him that was exactly right, he had hit the nail on the head, and if Jack didn’t like it, he could lump it. He started down the hall again. “I want to know what’s going
on
around here,” he said, “and believe me, I’m going to find out.”

That might be a lot more hazardous to your health than marijuana, Richie-boy,
Jack thought, and followed his friend.

2

They stood in the lounge, looking out. Richard pointed toward the quad. In the last of the dying light, Jack saw a bunch of boys grouped loosely around the greenish-bronze statue of Elder Thayer.

“They’re smoking!” Richard cried angrily. “Right on the quad, they’re
smoking!
”

Jack thought immediately of the pot-smell in Richard’s hall.

“They’re smoking, all right,” he said to Richard, “and not the kind of cigarettes you get out of a cigarette machine, either.”

Richard rapped his knuckles angrily on the glass. For him, Jack saw, the weirdly deserted dorm was forgotten; the leather-jacketed, chain-smoking substitute coach was forgotten; Jack’s apparent mental aberration was forgotten. That look of outraged propriety on Richard’s face said
When a bunch of boys stand around like that, smoking joints within touching distance of the statue of the founder of this school, it’s as if someone were trying to tell me that the earth is flat, or that prime numbers may sometimes be divisible by two, or something equally ridiculous
.

Jack’s heart was full of pity for his friend, but it was also full of admiration for an attitude which must seem so reactionary and even eccentric to his school-mates. He wondered again if Richard could stand the shocks which might be on the way.

“Richard,” he said, “those boys aren’t from Thayer, are they?”

“God, you really
have
gone crazy, Jack. They’re Uppers. I recognize every last one of them. The guy wearing that stupid leather flying hat is Norrington. The one in the green sweat-pants is Buckley. I see Garson . . . Littlefield . . . the one with the scarf is Etheridge,” he finished.

“Are you
sure
it’s Etheridge?”

“Of course it’s him!”
Richard shouted. He suddenly turned the catch on the window, rammed it up, and leaned out into the cold air.

Jack pulled Richard back. “Richard, please, just listen—”

Richard didn’t want to. He turned and leaned out into the cold twilight.

“Hey!”

No, don’t attract their attention, Richard, for Christ’s sake—

“Hey, you guys! Etheridge! Norrington! Littlefield! What in the hell is going on out there?”

The talk and rough laughter broke off. The fellow who was wearing Etheridge’s scarf turned toward the sound of Richard’s voice. He tilted his head slightly to look up at them. The lights from the library and the sullen furnace afterglow of the winter sunset fell on his face. Richard’s hands flew to his mouth.

The right half of the face disclosed was actually a bit like Etheridge’s—an older Etheridge, an Etheridge who had been in a lot of places nice prep-school boys didn’t go and who had done a lot of things nice prep-school boys didn’t do. The other half was a twisted mass of scars. A glittery crescent that might have been an eye peered from a crater in the lumpy mess of flesh below the forehead. It looked like a marble that had been shoved deeply into a puddle of half-melted tallow. A single long fang hooked out of the left corner of the mouth.

It’s his Twinner,
Jack thought with utter calm certainty.
That’s Etheridge’s Twinner down there. Are they all Twinners? A Littlefield Twinner and a Norrington Twinner and a Buckley Twinner and so on and so on? That can’t be, can it?

“Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing cried. It shambled two steps toward Nelson House. The glow from the streetlights on the drive now fell directly onto its ruined face.

“Shut the window,” Richard whispered. “Shut the window. I was wrong. It sort of looks like Etheridge but it’s not, maybe it’s his older brother, maybe someone threw battery acid or something in Etheridge’s brother’s face and now he’s crazy, but it’s not Etheridge so
close the window Jack close it right n
—”

Below, the Etheridge-thing shambled yet another step toward them. It grinned. Its tongue, hideously long, fell out of its mouth like an unrolling party favor.

“Sloat!” it cried. “Give us your passenger!”

Jack and Richard both jerked around, looking at each other with strained faces.

A howl shivered in the night . . . for it
was
night now; twilight was done.

Richard looked at Jack, and for a moment Jack saw something like real hate in the other boy’s eyes—a flash of his father.
Why did you have to come here, Jack? Huh? Why did you have to bring me this mess? Why did you have to bring me all this goddam Seabrook Island stuff?

“Do you want me to go?” Jack asked softly.

For a moment that look of harried anger remained in Richard’s eyes, and then it was replaced by Richard’s old kindness.

“No,” he said, running distracted hands through his hair. “No, you’re not going anywhere. There are . . . there are wild dogs out there. Wild dogs, Jack, on the Thayer campus! I mean . . . did you see them?”

“Yeah, I saw em, Richie-boy,” Jack said softly, as Richard ran his hands through his formerly neat hair again, mussing it into ever wilder tangles. Jack’s neat and orderly friend was starting to look a little bit like Donald Duck’s amiably mad inventor cousin, Gyro Gearloose.

“Call Boynton, he’s Security, that’s what I have to do,” Richard said. “Call Boynton, or the town police, or—”

A howl rose from the trees on the far side of the quad, from the gathered shadows there—a rising, wavering howl that was really almost human. Richard looked toward it, mouth trembling in an infirm old person’s way, and then he looked pleadingly at Jack.

“Close the window, Jack, okay? I feel feverish. I think maybe I’ve gotten a chill.”

“You bet, Richard,” Jack said, and closed it, shutting the howl out as best he could.

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.”