The Talisman

“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.