The Talisman

“Richard, where the hell are you!”

Richard’s hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack shrieked.

8

“I don’t know why you had to yell like that,” Richard said later. “It was only me.”

“I’m just nervous,” Jack said wanly.

They were sitting in the third-floor room of a boy with the strangely harmonious name of Albert Humbert. Richard told him that Albert Humbert, whose nickname was Albert the Blob, was the fattest boy in school, and Jack could believe it; his room contained an amazing variety of junk food—it was the stash of a kid whose worst nightmare isn’t getting cut from the basketball team or flunking a trig test but rather waking up in the night and not being able to find a Ring-Ding or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. A lot of the stuff had been thrown around. The glass jar containing the Marshmallow Fluff had been broken, but Jack had never been very wild about Marshmallow Fluff, anyway. He also passed on the licorice whips—Albert the Blob had a whole carton of them stashed on the upper shelf of his closet. Written across one of the carton-flaps was Happy birthday, dear, from Your Loving Mom.

Some Loving Moms send cartons of licorice whips, and some Loving Dads send blazers from Brooks Brothers, Jack thought wearily, and if there’s any difference, Jason alone knows what it is.

They found enough food in the room of Albert the Blob to make a crazy sort of meal—Slim Jims, pepperoni slices, Salt ’n Vinegar potato chips. Now they were finishing up with a package of cookies. Jack had retrieved Albert’s chair from the hall and was sitting by the window. Richard was sitting on Albert’s bed.

“Well, you sure are nervous,” Richard agreed, shaking his head in refusal when Jack offered him the last cookie. “Paranoid, actually. It comes from spending the last couple of months on the road. You’ll be okay once you get home to your mother, Jack.”

“Richard,” Jack said, tossing away the empty Famous Amos bag, “let’s cut the shit. Do you see what’s going on outside on your campus?”

Richard wet his lips. “I explained that,” he said. “I have a fever. Probably none of this is happening at all, and if it is, then perfectly ordinary things are going on and my mind is twisting them, heightening them. That’s one possibility. The other is . . . well . . . drug-pushers.”

Richard sat forward on Albert the Blob’s bed.

“You haven’t been experimenting with drugs, have you, Jack? While you were on the road?” The old intelligent, incisive light had suddenly rekindled in Richard’s eyes. Here’s a possible explanation, a possible way out of this madness, his eyes said. Jack has gotten involved in some crazy drug-scam, and all these people have followed him here.

“No,” Jack said wearily. “I always used to think of you as the master of reality, Richard,” Jack said. “I never thought I’d live to see you—you!—using your brains to twist the facts.”

“Jack, that’s just a . . . a crock, and you know it!”

“Drug-wars in Springfield, Illinois?” Jack asked. “Who’s talking Seabrook Island stuff now?”

And that was when a rock suddenly crashed in through Albert Humbert’s window, spraying glass across the floor.

33

Richard in the Dark

1

Richard screamed and threw an arm up to shield his face. Glass flew.

“Send him out, Sloat!”

Jack got up. Dull fury filled him.

Richard grabbed his arm. “Jack, no! Stay away from the window!”

“Fuck that,” Jack almost snarled. “I’m tired of being talked about like I was a pizza.”

The Etheridge-thing stood across the road. It was on the sidewalk at the edge of the quad, looking up at them.

“Get out of here!” Jack shouted at it. A sudden inspiration burst in his head like a sunflare. He hesitated, then bellowed: “I order you out of here! All of you! I order you to leave in the name of my mother, the Queen!”

The Etheridge-thing flinched as if someone had used a whip to lay a stripe across its face.

Then the look of pained surprise passed and the Etheridge-thing began to grin. “She’s dead, Sawyer!” it shouted up—but Jack’s eyes had grown sharper, somehow, in his time on the road, and he saw the expression of twitchy unease under the manufactured triumph. “Queen Laura’s dead and your mother’s dead, too . . . dead back in New Hampshire . . . dead and stinking.”

“Begone!” Jack bellowed, and he thought that the Etheridge-thing flinched back in baffled fury again.

Richard had joined him at the window, pallid and distracted. “What are you two yelling about?” he asked. He looked fixedly at the grinning travesty below them and across the way. “How does Etheridge know your mother’s in New Hampshire?”

“Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing yelled up. “Where’s your tie? ”

A spasm of guilt contracted Richard’s face; his hands jerked toward the open neck of his shirt.

“We’ll let it go this time, if you send out your passenger, Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing yelled up. “If you send him out, everything can go back to the way it was! You want that, don’t you?”