Richard was staring down at the Etheridge-thing, nodding—Jack was sure of it—quite unconsciously. His face was a knotted rag of misery, his eyes bright with unshed tears. He wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, oh yes.
“Don’t you love this school, Sloat?” the Etheridge-thing bellowed up at Albert’s window.
“Yes,” Richard muttered, and gulped down a sob. “Yes, of course I love it.”
“You know what we do to little punks who don’t love this school? Give him to us! It’ll be like he was never here!”
Richard turned slowly and looked at Jack with dreadfully blank eyes.
“You decide, Richie-boy,” Jack said softly.
“He’s carrying drugs, Richard!” the Etheridge-thing called up. “Four or five different kinds! Coke, hash, angel- dust! He’s been selling all of that stuff to finance his trip west! Where do you think he got that nice coat he was wearing when he showed up on your doorstep?”
“Drugs,” Richard said with great, shuddery relief. “I knew it.”
“But you don’t believe it,” Jack said. “Drugs didn’t change your school, Richard. And the dogs—”
“Send him out, Sl . . .” the Etheridge-thing’s voice was fading, fading.
When the two boys looked down again, it was gone.
“Where did your father go, do you think?” Jack asked softly. “Where do you think he went when he didn’t come out of the closet, Richard?”
Richard turned slowly to look at him, and Richard’s face, usually so calm and intelligent and serene, now began to shiver into pieces. His chest began to hitch irregularly. Richard suddenly fell into Jack’s arms, clutching at him with a blind, panicky urgency. “It t-t-touched muh-me-eeee!” he screamed at Jack. His body trembled under Jack’s hands like a winchwire under a near-breaking strain. “It touched me, it t- touched m-me, something in there t-t-touched me AND I DON’T NUH-NUH-KNOW WHAT IT WAS!”
2
With his burning forehead pressed against Jack’s shoulder, Richard coughed out the story he had held inside him all these years. It came in hard little chunks, like deformed bullets. As he listened, Jack found himself remembering the time his own father had gone into the garage . . . and had come back two hours later, from around the block. That had been bad, but what had happened to Richard had been a lot worse. It explained Richard’s iron, no-compromise insistence on reality, the whole reality, and nothing but the reality. It explained his rejection of any sort of fantasy, even science fiction . . . and, Jack knew from his own school experience, techies like Richard usually ate and drank sf . . . as long as it was the hard stuff, that was, your basic Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven—spare us the metaphysical bullshit of the Robert Silverbergs and Barry Malzbergs, please, but we’ll read the stuff where they get all the stellar quadrants and logarithms right until it’s running out of our ears. Not Richard, though. Richard’s dislike of fantasy ran so deep that he would not pick up any novel unless it was an assignment—as a kid, he had let Jack pick out the books he read for free-choice book reports, not caring what they were, chewing them up as if they were cereal. It became a challenge to Jack to find a story—any story—which would please Richard, divert Richard, carry Richard away as good novels and stories sometimes carried Jack away . . . the good ones, he thought, were almost as good as the Daydreams, and each mapped out its own version of the Territories. But he was never able to produce any frisson, any spark, any reaction at all. Whether it was The Red Pony, Dragstrip Demon, The Catcher in the Rye, or I Am Legend, the reaction was always the same—frowning, dull-eyed concentration, followed by a frowning, dull-eyed book report that would earn either a hook or, if his English teacher was feeling particularly generous that day, a B-. Richard’s Cs in English were what kept him off the honor roll during the few marking periods when he missed it.
Jack had finished William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, feeling hot and cold and trembly all over—both exalted and frightened, most of all wishing what he always wished when the story was most particularly good—that it didn’t have to stop, that it could just roll on and on, the way that life did (only life was always so much more boring and so much more pointless than stories). He knew Richard had a book report due and so he had given him the lap-eared paperback, thinking that this must surely do it, this would turn the trick, Richard must react to the story of these lost boys and their descent into savagery. But Richard had plodded through Lord of the Flies as he had plodded through all the other novels before it, and wrote another book report which contained all the zeal and fire of a hungover pathologist’s post-mortem on a traffic accident victim. What is it with you? Jack had burst out, exasperated. What in God’s name have you got against a good story, Richard? And Richard had looked at him, flabbergasted, apparently really not understanding Jack’s anger. Well, there’s really no such thing as a good made-up story, is there? Richard had responded.
Jack had gone away that day sorely puzzled by Richard’s total rejection of make-believe, but he thought he understood better now—better than he really wanted to, perhaps. Perhaps to Richard each opening storybook cover had looked a little like an opening closet door; perhaps each bright paperback cover, illustrating people who never were as if they were perfectly real, reminded Richard of the morning when he had Had Enough, Forever.
3
Richard sees his father go into the closet in the big front bedroom, pulling the folding door shut behind him. He is five, maybe . . . or six . . . surely not as old as seven. He waits five minutes, then ten, and when his father still hasn’t come out of the closet he begins to be a little frightened. He calls. He calls
(for his pipe he calls for his bowl he calls for his)
father and when his father doesn’t answer he calls in a louder and louder voice and he goes closer and closer to the closet as he calls and finally, when fifteen minutes have gone by and his father still hasn’t come out, Richard pulls the folding door open and goes in. He goes into darkness like a cave.
And something happens.
After pushing through the rough tweeds and the smooth cottons and the occasional slick silks of his father’s coats and suits and sport jackets, the smell of cloth and mothballs and closed-up dark closet air begins to give way to another smell—a hot, fiery smell. Richard begins to blunder forward, screaming his father’s name, he thinking there must be a fire back here and his father may be burning in it, because it smells like a fire . . . and suddenly he realizes that the boards are gone under his feet, and he is standing in black dirt. Weird black insects with clustered eyes on the ends of long stalks are hopping all around his fuzzy slippers. Daddy! he screams. The coats and suits are gone, the floor is gone, but it isn’t crisp white snow underfoot; it’s stinking black dirt which is apparently the birthing ground for these unpleasant black jumping insects; this place is by no stretch of the imagination Narnia. Other screams answer Richard’s scream—screams and mad, demented laughter. Smoke drifts
