The Talisman (53 page)

“Worse?” Richard looked at him with pathetic gratitude. “Is it?”

“It is,” Jack said gravely. “Come on and lie down.”

Richard was asleep five minutes after he lay down. Jack sat in Albert the Blob’s easy chair, its seat nearly as sprung as the middle of Albert’s mattress. Richard’s pale face glowed waxily in the growing daylight.

6

Somehow the day passed, and around four o’clock, Jack fell asleep. He awoke to darkness, not knowing how long he had been out. He only knew there had been no dreams, and for that he was grateful. Richard was stirring uneasily and Jack guessed he would be up soon. He stood and stretched, wincing at the stiffness in his back. He went to the window, looked out, and stood motionless, eyes wide. His first thought was
I don’t want Richard to see this. Not if I can help it
.

O God, we’ve got to get out of here, and just as soon as we can,
Jack thought, frightened.
Even if, for whatever reasons, they’re afraid to come straight at us.

But was he really going to take Richard out of here? They didn’t think he would do it, he knew that—they were counting on his refusing to expose his friend to any more of this craziness.

Flip, Jack-O. You’ve got to flip over, and you know it. And you’ve got to take Richard with you because this place is going to hell.

I can’t. Flipping into the Territories would blow Richard’s wheels completely.

Doesn’t matter. You have to do it. It’s the best thing, anyway—maybe the only thing—because they won’t be expecting it.

“Jack?” Richard was sitting up. His face had a strange, naked look without his glasses. “Jack, is it over? Was it a dream?”

Jack sat down on the bed and put an arm around Richard’s shoulders. “No,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “It’s not over yet, Richard.”

“I think my fever’s worse,” Richard announced, pulling away from Jack. He drifted over to the window, one of the bows of his glasses pinched delicately between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He put his spectacles on and looked out. Shapes with glowing eyes roamed back and forth. He stood there for a long time, and then he did something so un-Richardlike that Jack could barely credit it. He took his glasses off again and deliberately dropped them. There was a frigid little crunch as one lens cracked. Then he stepped deliberately back on them, shattering both lenses to powder.

He picked them up, looked at them, and then tossed them unconcernedly toward Albert the Blob’s wastebasket. He missed by a wide margin. There was now something softly stubborn in Richard’s face, too—something that said
I don’t want to see any more, so I won’t see any more, and I have taken care of the problem. I have Had Enough, Forever
.

“Look at that,” he said in a flat, unsurprised voice. “I broke my glasses. I had another pair, but I broke them in gym two weeks ago. I’m almost blind without them.”

Jack knew this wasn’t true, but he was too flabbergasted to say anything. He could think of absolutely no appropriate response to the radical action Richard had just taken—it had been too much like a calculated last-ditch stand against madness.

“I think my fever’s worse too,” Richard said. “Have you got any more of those aspirin, Jack?”

Jack opened the desk drawer and wordlessly handed Richard the bottle. Richard swallowed six or eight of them, then lay down again.

7

As the night deepened, Richard, who repeatedly promised to discuss their situation, repeatedly went back on his word. He couldn’t discuss leaving, he said, couldn’t discuss
any
of this, not now, his fever had come back and it felt much, much worse, he thought it might be as high as a hundred and five, possibly a hundred and six. He said he needed to go back to sleep.

“Richard, for Christ’s sake!” Jack roared. “You’re punking out on me! Of all the things I never expected from you—”

“Don’t be silly,” Richard said, falling back onto Albert’s bed. “I’m just sick, Jack. You can’t expect me to talk about all these crazy things when I’m sick.”

“Richard, do you want me to go away and leave you?”

Richard looked back over his shoulder at Jack for a moment, blinking slowly. “You won’t,” he said, and then went back to sleep.

8

Around nine o’clock, the campus entered another of those mysterious quiet periods, and Richard, perhaps sensing that there would be less strain put on his tottering sanity now, woke up and swung his legs over the bed. Brown spots had appeared on the walls, and he stared at them until he saw Jack coming toward him.

“I feel a lot better, Jack,” he said hastily, “but it really won’t do us any good to talk about leaving, it’s dark, and—”

“We have to leave tonight,” Jack said grimly. “All they have to do is wait us out. There’s fungus growing on the walls, and don’t tell me you don’t see
that
.”

Richard smiled with a blind tolerance that nearly drove Jack mad. He loved Richard, but he could cheerfully have pounded him through the nearest fungus-rotted wall.

At that precise moment, long, fat white bugs began to squirm into Albert the Blob’s room. They came pushing out of the brown fungoid spots on the wall as if the fungus were in some unknown way giving birth to them. They twisted and writhed half in and half out of the soft brown spots, then plopped to the floor and began squirming blindly toward the bed.

Jack had begun to wonder if Richard’s sight weren’t really a lot worse than he remembered, or if it had degenerated badly since he had last seen Richard. Now he saw that he had been right the first time. Richard could see quite well. He certainly wasn’t having any trouble picking up the gelatinous things that were coming out of the walls, anyway. He screamed and pressed against Jack, his face frantic with revulsion.

“Bugs, Jack! Oh, Jesus! Bugs! Bugs!”

“We’ll be all right—right, Richard?” Jack said. He held Richard in place with a strength he didn’t know he had. “We’ll just wait for the morning, right? No problem, right?”

They were squirming out in dozens, in hundreds, plump, waxy-white things like overgrown maggots. Some burst open when they struck the floor. The rest humped sluggishly across the floor toward them.

“Bugs, Jesus, we have to get out, we have to—”

“Thank God, this kid finally sees the light,” Jack said.

He slung his knapsack over his left arm and grabbed Richard’s elbow in his right hand. He hustled Richard to the door. White bugs squashed and splattered under their shoes. Now they were pouring out of the brown patches in a flood; an obscene, ongoing multiple birth that was happening all over Albert’s room. A stream of the white bugs fell from a patch on the ceiling and landed, squirming, on Jack’s hair and shoulders; he brushed them away as best he could and hauled the screaming, flailing Richard out the door.

I think we’re on our way,
Jack thought.
God help us, I really think we are.

9

They were in the common room again. Richard, it turned out, had even less idea of how to sneak off the Thayer campus than Jack did himself. Jack knew one thing very well: he was not going to trust that deceptive quiet and go out any of Nelson House’s Entry doors.

Looking hard to the left out of the wide common-room window, Jack could see a squat octagonal brick building.

“What’s that, Richard?”

“Huh?” Richard was looking at the gluey, sluggish torrents of mud flowing over the darkening quad.

“Little squatty brick building. You can just barely see it from here.”

“Oh. The Depot.”

“What’s a Depot?”

“The name itself doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Richard said, still looking uneasily out at the mud-drenched quad. “Like our infirmary. It’s called The Creamery because there used to be a real dairy barn and milk-bottling plant over there. Until 1910 or so there was, anyway. Tradition, Jack. It’s very important. It’s one of the reason I like Thayer.”

Richard looked forlornly out at the muddy campus again.

“One of the reasons I always did, anyway.”

“The Creamery, okay. How come The Depot?”

Richard was slowly warming to the twin ideas of Thayer and Tradition.

“This whole area of Springfield used to be a railhead,” he said. “In fact, in the old days—”

“Which old days are we talking about, Richard?”

“Oh. The eighteen-eighties. Eighteen-nineties. You see . . .”

Richard trailed off. His nearsighted eyes began moving around the common room—looking for more bugs, Jack supposed. There weren’t any . . . at least not yet. But he could already see a few brown patches beginning to form on the walls. The bugs weren’t here yet, but they would be along.

“Come on, Richard,” Jack prompted. “No one used to have to prime you to get you to run your mouth.”

Richard smiled a little. His eyes returned to Jack. “Spring-field was one of the three or four biggest American railheads during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was geographically handy to all the points of the compass.” He raised his right hand toward his face, forefinger extended to push his glasses up on his nose in a scholarly gesture, realized they were no longer there, and lowered the hand again, looking a bit embarrassed. “There were main rail routes leaving Springfield for everywhere. This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities. He made a fortune in rail shippage. Mostly to the west coast. He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west as well as east.”

A bright light suddenly went on in Jack’s head, bathing all of his thoughts in its harsh glare.

“West coast?” His stomach lurched. He could not yet identify the new shape that bright light had shown him, but the word that leaped into his mind was fiery and utterly clear!

Talisman!

“
West
coast, did you say?”

“Of course I did.” Richard looked at Jack strangely. “Jack, are you going deaf?”

“No,” Jack said.
Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads
 . . . “No, I’m fine.”
He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west
 . . .

“Well, you looked damn funny for a minute.”

He was, you might say, the first one to see the potential of shipping stuff by rail to the Outposts.

Jack knew, utterly
knew
, that Springfield was still a pressure point of some kind, perhaps still a shipping point. That was, perhaps, why Morgan’s magic worked so well here.

“There were coal-piles and switching yards and roundhouses and boxcar sheds and about a billion miles of tracks and sidings,” Richard was saying. “It covered this whole area where Thayer School is now. If you dig down a few feet under this turf anywhere, you find cinders and pieces of rail and all sorts of stuff. But all that’s left now is that little building. The Depot. Of course it never was a real depot; it’s too small, anyone could see that. It was the main railyard office, where the stationmaster and the rail-boss did their respective things.”

“You know a hell of a lot about it,” Jack said, speaking almost automatically—his head was still filled with that savage new light.

“It’s part of the Thayer tradition,” Richard said simply.

“What’s it used for now?”

“There’s a little theater in there. It’s for Dramatics Club productions, but the Dramatics Club hasn’t been very active over the last couple of years.”

“Do you think it’s locked?”

“Why would anyone lock The Depot?” Richard asked. “Unless you think someone would be interested in stealing a few flats from the 1979 production of
The Fantasticks
.”

“So we could get in there?”

“I think so, yes. But why—”

Jack pointed to a door just beyond the Ping-Pong tables. “What’s in there?”

“Vending machines. And a coin-op microwave to heat up snacks and frozen dinners. Jack—”

“Come on.”

“Jack, I think my fever’s coming back again.” Richard smiled weakly. “Maybe we should just stay here for a while. We could rack out on the sofas for the night—”

“See those brown patches on the walls?” Jack said grimly, pointing.

“No, not without my glasses, of course not!”

“Well, they’re there. And in about an hour, those white bugs are going to hatch out of—”

“All right,” Richard said hastily.

10

The vending machines stank.

It looked to Jack as if all the stuff inside them had spoiled. Blue mould coated the cheese crackers and Doritos and Jax and fried pork-rinds. Sluggish creeks of melted ice cream were oozing out of the panels in the front of the Hav-a-Kone machine.

Jack pulled Richard toward the window. He looked out. From here Jack could make out The Depot quite well. Beyond it he could see the chain-link fence and the service road leading off-campus.

“We’ll be out in a few seconds,” Jack whispered back. He unlocked the window and ran it up.

This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities . . . do
you
see the possibilities, Jack-O?

He thought maybe he did.

“Are there any of those people out there?” Richard asked nervously.

“No,” Jack said, taking only the most cursory of glances. It didn’t really matter if there were or not, anymore.

One of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . 
a fortune in rail shippage . . . mostly to the west coast . . . he was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . . west . . . west . . .

A thick, mucky mixture of tidal-flat aroma and garbage stench drifted in the window. Jack threw one leg over the sill and grabbed for Richard’s hand. “Come on,” he said.

Richard drew back, his face long and miserable with fright.

“Jack . . . I don’t know . . .”

“The place is falling apart,” Jack said, “and pretty soon it’s going to be crawling with bugs as well. Now come on. Someone’s going to see me sitting here in this window and we’ll lose our chance to scurry out of here like a couple of mice.”

“I don’t understand any of this!” Richard wailed. “I don’t understand what in the goddam hell is going on here!”

“Shut up and come on,” Jack said. “Or I will leave you, Richard. Swear to God I will. I love you, but my mother is dying. I’ll leave you to fend for yourself.”