The Talisman

It looked to Jack as if all the stuff inside them had spoiled. Blue mould coated the cheese crackers and Doritos and Jax and fried pork-rinds. Sluggish creeks of melted ice cream were oozing out of the panels in the front of the Hav-a-Kone machine.

Jack pulled Richard toward the window. He looked out. From here Jack could make out The Depot quite well. Beyond it he could see the chain-link fence and the service road leading off-campus.

“We’ll be out in a few seconds,” Jack whispered back. He unlocked the window and ran it up.

This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities . . . do you see the possibilities, Jack-O?

He thought maybe he did.

“Are there any of those people out there?” Richard asked nervously.

“No,” Jack said, taking only the most cursory of glances. It didn’t really matter if there were or not, anymore.

One of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . a fortune in rail shippage . . . mostly to the west coast . . . he was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . . west . . . west . . .

A thick, mucky mixture of tidal-flat aroma and garbage stench drifted in the window. Jack threw one leg over the sill and grabbed for Richard’s hand. “Come on,” he said.

Richard drew back, his face long and miserable with fright.

“Jack . . . I don’t know . . .”

“The place is falling apart,” Jack said, “and pretty soon it’s going to be crawling with bugs as well. Now come on. Someone’s going to see me sitting here in this window and we’ll lose our chance to scurry out of here like a couple of mice.”

“I don’t understand any of this!” Richard wailed. “I don’t understand what in the goddam hell is going on here!”

“Shut up and come on,” Jack said. “Or I will leave you, Richard. Swear to God I will. I love you, but my mother is dying. I’ll leave you to fend for yourself.”

Richard looked at Jack’s face and saw—even without his glasses—that Jack was telling the truth. He took Jack’s hand. “God, I’m scared,” he whispered.

“Join the club,” Jack said, and pushed him off. His feet hit the mucky lawn a second later. Richard jumped down beside him.

“We’re going to cross to The Depot,” Jack whispered. “I make it about fifty yards. We’ll go in if it’s unlocked, try to hide as well as we can on the Nelson House side of it if it isn’t. Once we’re sure no one’s seen us and the place is still quiet—”

“We go for the fence.”

“Right.” Or maybe we’ll have to flip, but never mind that just now. “The service road. I’ve got an idea that if we can get off the Thayer grounds, everything will be okay again. Once we get a quarter of a mile down the road, you may look back over your shoulder and see the lights in the dorms and the library just as usual, Richard.”

“That’d be so great,” Richard said with a wistfulness that was heartbreaking.

“Okay, you ready?”

“I guess so,” Richard said.

“Run to The Depot. Freeze against the wall on this side. Low, so those bushes screen you. See them?”

“Yes.”

“Okay . . . go for it!”

They broke away from Nelson House and ran for The Depot side by side.

11

They were less than halfway there, breath puffing out of their mouths in clear white vapor, feet pounding the mucky ground, when the bells in the chapel broke into a hideous, grinding jangle of sound. A howling chorus of dogs answered the bells.

They were back, all these were-prefects. Jack groped for Richard and found Richard groping for him. Their hands linked together.

Richard screamed and tried to pull him off to the left. His hand tightened down on Jack’s until the fingerbones grated together paralyzingly. A lean white wolf, a Board Chairman of Wolves, came around The Depot and was now racing toward them. That was the old man from the limousine, Jack thought. Other wolves and dogs followed . . . and then Jack realized with sick surety that some of them were not dogs; some of them were half- transformed boys, some grown men—teachers, he supposed.

“Mr Dufrey!” Richard shrieked, pointing with his free hand (Gee, you see pretty well for someone who’s lost his glasses, Richie-boy, Jack thought crazily). “Mr. Dufrey! Oh God, it’s Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Dufrey!”

So Jack got his first and only look at Thayer School’s headmaster—a tiny old man with gray hair, a big, bent nose, and the wizened, hairy body of an organ grinder’s monkey. He ran swiftly along on all fours with the dogs and the boys, a mortarboard bobbing crazily up and down on his head and somehow refusing to fall off. He grinned at Jack and Richard, and his tongue, long and lolling and stained yellow with nicotine, fell out through the middle of his grin.

“Mr. Dufrey! Oh God! Oh dear God! Mr. Dufrey! Mr. Du—”

He was yanking Jack harder and harder toward the left. Jack was bigger, but Richard was in the grip of panic. Explosions rocked the air. That foul, garbagey smell grew thicker and thicker. Jack could hear the soft flupping and plupping of mud squeezing out of the earth. The