The Talisman

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.