The Talisman

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?”